#they just stuck new things into existing unchanged content and added a little bit more and reused the base game

[goldentigerfestival]

i will never not find it hilarious that they completely forgot to animate patty at the very end of the final cutscene in the last three frames of the whole group

and the dub didn't even give her voiced lines when everyone was shouting they so the localization forgot about her too

[the-blind-assassin-12]

Luckenbach, Texas

A/N: Back at it with the Play The Hand You’re Dealt event, this time with Ryan Brenner, and darn did it feel good to write him again. This one actually felt really good to write. It takes place pretty far on down the road for you and Ryan so you have a lot to get through before you get here, but this is a little look at where you’re headed together. Also, 4th of July is just fun. All of it. 

(if you want to know more about Luckenbach, Texas, population 3, click here.) 

Word Count: 1,856

Prompt from: @thesumofmychoices - Ryan, fluff, Ryan’s POV & Celebration or Holiday (omg that’s a crazy story about your dog!) 

Ryan stopped a few feet from where you sat, watching as you talked animatedly to Georgie and Layla. Her hair’s gettin’... he felt his cheeks lift as his lips parted in a smile. The humidity had wreaked havoc on your curls, pulling frizzy tendrils out from the braid around the crown of your head. You raked your fingertips over it in a halfhearted attempt to corral the strays, but let your arms drop back to your lap as you laughed, hair completely unchanged. No use. He knew it just as well as you did. Condensation ran down the plastic cups Ryan carried, pooling between his fingers and dripping onto the dry, brown dirt, but he stayed rooted in place for a beat or two longer as you threw your head back in another laugh, giving Georgie a playful shove. Get ‘im. 

Grin widening, he laughed to himself and resumed walking toward the three of you. Georgie slung his arms one at a time around you and Layla drawing you both into a tight hug. Layla flipped her long yellow hair over her shoulder before rising on her toes to plant a kiss to Georgie’s round cheek, burnt bright red from the day in the sun, his bowler nearly toppling from his head as she took him by surprise. They’re havin’ fun. Sweat licked at the back of his neck where the unruly ends of his hair stuck out from beneath the canvas hat he wore, but the warmth in his chest had nothing to do with the summer heat. Looking around, he saw that the same was true of everyone gathered - music and laughter filled the night as the mouthwatering smells of sugary confections and grilled meats wafted from the snack stand attached to the general store. I’m glad we did this.

The sky was just starting to fade from blue to purple, lightening a shade before the thick, black night came to swallow it up. Fireflies hovered in patterns and formations through the warm air, their bioluminescent signals adding to the golden glow of the lights strung across the square. The pluck of guitar and banjo strings from the stage to the left mixed with the boot stomps emanating from the open doors of the dance hall as people gathered in clusters or strolled here and there. Flags, banners, pinwheels and bunting decorated the stage and various small buildings, stars and stripes in bold Americana colors. Kids darted by hopped up on funnel cakes and clutching sparklers, their eyes wide in awe of the flickering pyrotechnics that their parents only let them play with this one night of the year. He stepped to the side to avoid a collision with a sticky-fingered boy, a popsicle in each hand and his sister chasing after him. Woah. Taking care not to slosh the contents of the cups he carried onto the troublemakers’ heads, he trained his eyes on the level of liquid as it splashed in small waves and finally steadied back out. 

“That was a close one, Brenner.” 

He looked up in time to see your fingers curling around one of the cups that he held, just below his own. Your pointer finger slid over his pinky to trace the lines that were inked between his knuckles, teeth digging into the corner of your fire-engine red bottom lip as you gave him a crooked smile that made the sparklers and fireflies seem dim. Handing you your beverage he bit back a groan, letting it out as a throaty laugh instead. Tease. “Yeah, but did you see that save?”

You scrunched your nose at him as you smiled and reached up to push a sweaty clump of his hair back behind his ears. Ryan tilted his head into your touch, eyes falling closed as your fingertips grazed the bottom of his earlobe, but opening again as your hand fell down to clasp his empty one. “I did. That was some fancy footwork there, I’m impressed.” Your laugh brightened your eyes as it tumbled from your open mouth, your thin fingers squeezing his rough palm. “You been holdin’ out on me, Ryan?” You shifted your eyes and took a sip of your beer.

Never have, never will. It was no secret that while music and rhythm seemed to flow in his veins, Ryan Brenner was not a very good dancer. “Nah,” he shook his head, and slowly, so that you had plenty of time to react, lifted your joined hands to turn you under his arm. Your surprised gasp of his name hit him in the chest as a few drops of cold beer splashed onto his forearm and soaked into the hem of his white tee. You leaned into him and he felt the last shakes of your laughter leave your lungs. He dropped your hand so he could press his to the small of your back, fingers grazing your skin under the bottom of your navy blue tank top. I love this woman. “You know I save all my best moves for you, Junebug.” He kissed your forehead, the wispy little rebellious frizz along your hairline tickling his lips. 

Humming contentedly, you wrapped your free arm around his waist and looked up at him, chin tucked into the crook of his shoulder. “Yeah, you do.” You licked your lips as he took a swig from the red cup. “I’m lucky like that.”   

Ryan’s fingers flexed to push you even closer to his side, but before he could continue the pointless conversation of which of you were luckier, Georgie called over, his raucous tone cutting through the ambient sound easily. “Hey you two comin’ back anytime soon or you just gonna stand there all night?” 

He looked up to see his friend waving his arm from the rock wall surrounding the big Cedar Elm where the four of you had been sitting enjoying the music after your set. You laughed again, turning your face into his chest before meeting his eyes once more. Ryan trailed his fingers up your back until his palm reached the center of your shoulder blades. He took a deep breath through his nose, inhaling the scent of your floral shampoo mixed with dirt, sweat, and the sweet coconut smell of the sunscreen you’d slathered on all day. Still got a tan though, and I see some new freckles. His cheek twitched to the side pulling his lips along with it, and he leaned in to drag the tip of his nose over the bridge of yours and down to the crest of your cheek where the sun had painted new speckles on your skin. He kissed them, and you smiled under the bristles of his beard as he dropped his lips down to capture yours. Love her so damn much. 

Three and a half years had gone by, but it hadn’t taken Ryan that long to realize that you were right for him in a million ways that he hadn’t even considered. You’d taught him how to stand still and spend more time thinking about where he was now instead of where he was headed next. But you’d also showed him how easily you could pick up and head back to the road when it was time, how you’d completely accepted his wandering ways. He’d let you into every part of his life, all the secrets that he kept close to his heart like the treasures that you knew he kept hidden safely in a zippered inner pocket of his big canvas coat that he wore in the winter time- an arrowhead, a clover, others things he’d collected that no one else knew existed aside from the people who he’d gotten the items from. A penny, a guitar pick, an old zippo lighter. You’d fit into his family as though you’d been there all along, both on the road and back home; in that zippered pocket, and at Aunt Holly’s table. 

She fits here, too. He’d had the thought earlier in the night, standing between you and Georgie on the small wooden stage. The three of you had played a set of eight songs together while Layla joined the small crowd that lingered nearby- mostly songs that he’d been playing for years, ones that he’d played with Cowboy and Virginia, way back before he’d even met the bright eyed button nosed fiddler to his left. But then you’d also played the song that you’d helped him write back on your apartment floor in front of the fireplace, and it felt just as right as the other songs. Ryan and Georgie hadn’t been back to Luckenbach for the Fourth of July festival in the nearly five years since Cowboy had been gone. It felt right to come back this year with you, with Georgie bringing Layla. Next year Ginny and Henry’ll come too, he’ll be old enough, he’ll get a kick outta the tractor parade in town. The thought of the six of you being there together lightened his heart.  

“Brenner? You hear me or-” Georgie called again as Ryan finally broke the kiss, eyes locked on yours as he brought his hand up, fingers tracing the freckles he’d just kissed. 

“Keep your pants on, Georgie,” Ryan called, tearing his eyes from you to turn towards the other man. “I’m kissin’ my girl an’ takin’ my time.” He’d lowered his voice, no longer shouting for the entertainment of everyone around, speaking only for you to hear. Dipping his head back down, he caught another quick kiss, enjoying the way you sighed into it and how you gathered a fistful of his tee. Never gets old, never will. 

“Ryan,” slightly out of breath, you whispered his name through a grin that only got brighter as the sky darkened. Shaking your head you asked, “What was that for?” 

Ryan swallowed and narrowed his eyes. It hadn’t taken him three and a half years to know that you were it for him, but it was moments like this that reinforced that fact; moments that made him sure that you were all he wanted, all he’d ever want. He blinked and lowered his hand from your face, reaching for your free hand. Smiling, he took another swing of his beer. “Nothin’,” he tugged your hand and started walking back towards Georgie and Layla as a guitarist wearing a harmonica neckstrap stepped up to take the mic next. “Let’s get over there’n rescue Layla.” You laughed and Ryan pressed his lips together to try to keep from joining you. “Poor girl, he’s probably talkin’ her ear off or somethin’, you know how he-” 

You cut him off, rising to your toes to kiss him quickly. “I love you, Ryan.”

There weren’t any fireworks planned in Luckenbach. Might be able to see ‘em from Fredricksburg if it’s a clear night, Georgie had explained to you and Layla earlier in the day. It was the Fourth of July, but it was also just another night in the heart of Texas. It was a night of music and festive celebration, good food, good people and good feelings. Who needs fireworks?

.

.

.

@something-tofightfor @its-my-little-dumpster-fire @suchatinyinfinity @lexxierave @thesumofmychoices @songtoyou @traeumerinwitzhelden @gollyderek @obscurilicious @malionnes @with1love1anu @beautifuldesastre​ @luminex3​ 

if you would like to be added or removed from the tags, please let me know! (and if you have let me know and I haven’t changed it please tell me again because I am a well intentioned albeit forgetful fool)  Thanks for reading! 

[nancygduarteus]

The People Who Eat the Same Meal Every Day

Vern Loomis, a retired structural draftsman in West Bloomfield, Michigan, had a standard office lunch: a peanut-butter sandwich, with various fruit, vegetable, and dessert accompaniments. He ate this, he estimates, nearly every workday for about 25 years.

His meal underwent slight modifications over time—jelly was added to the sandwich in the final five or so years—but its foundation remained the same. The meal was easy to prepare, cheap, and tasty. “And if you happen to be eating at your desk … it was something that was not too drippy,” he told me, so long as one applied the jelly a bit conservatively.

Last year, Loomis retired from his job but not his lunch, which he still eats three or four days a week (now with sliced bananas instead of jelly). “I never stopped liking it,” he says. “I still do.”

Loomis may be uncommonly dedicated to his lunchtime ritual, but many share his proclivity for routine. One of the few existing surveys of people’s eating habits estimated that about 17 percent of British people had eaten the same lunch every day for two years; another indicated that a third of Brits ate the same lunch daily. But it’s hard to say for sure how common this really is, since these surveys tend to have been conducted by food purveyors, who might be inclined to exaggerate the ruts that diners are stuck in (and then try to sell them a way out). Still, loyalists who stick to a single meal for months or years—they are out there.

[Read: The problems home cooking can’t solve]

Some of them are public figures whose monotonous diets have been revealed in interviews—they are college-football coaches, fitness-chain CEOs, TV personalities, fashion designers, dead philosophers, Anderson Cooper. Depending on the context, eating the same thing every day can come off as a moderately charming quirk, an indictment of one’s lack of creativity, or a signal of professional focus and drive.

Whatever the symbolism, these people’s behavior is not doing them harm. Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition and food studies at New York University and the author of several books about nutrition and the food industry, says the consequences of eating the same lunch every day depend on the contents of that lunch and of the day’s other meals. “If your daily lunch contains a variety of healthful foods,” she says, “relax and enjoy it.”

So there is nothing wrong with this habit. In fact, there are many things right with it. I spoke with about half a dozen people who, at one time or another, have eaten the same thing for lunch every day. Together, their stories form a defense of a practice that is often written off as uninspired.

Many of the people I talked with emphasized the stress-reducing benefits of eating the same thing each day. Amanda Respers, a 32-year-old software developer in Newport News, Virginia, once ate a variation on the same home-brought salad (a lettuce, a protein, and a dressing) at work for about a year. She liked the simplicity of the formula, but the streak ended when she and her now-husband, who has more of an appetite for variety, moved in together six years ago. Would she still be eating the salad every day if she hadn’t met him? “Oh heck yeah,” she told me. “It would’ve saved so much time.”

Sharilyn Neidhardt, a photo editor in New York City, once found solace in regularity. About a decade ago, she switched jobs, and her new one stressed her out. “There were phones ringing constantly and there were people yelling all the time,” she recalls. One thing that Neidhardt found soothed her and gave her a measure of control over her day: She picked up a spicy noodle dish called tantanmen from the same ramen restaurant every lunch break. She did this for “a minimum of six months,” after which she got tired of the meal (and its cost) and, perhaps more important, settled into the new job.

Eating the same thing over and over can also simplify the decisions people make about what they put into their bodies. Currie Lee, a 28-year-old resident of Los Angeles who works in retail, has some food allergies, and keeping her lunch unchanged “makes it easy” to eat around them. For about six months, at her previous job, she brought overnight oats every day; her current go-to is a turkey sandwich with hummus, avocado, arugula, and cheese, on gluten-free bread.

Lee’s eating habits are not just a function of her allergies, though. She likes that eating the same thing makes grocery shopping simpler, brings consistency to her sometimes chaotic schedule, and made it less likely she’d spend the money at the “$12-salad place” near her previous office. Besides, she really likes the things she brings. “I’m not eating, like, a PB&J every day,” she says. “I try to make it taste good and interesting.” (I did not tell Vern Loomis what Lee apparently thinks of his lunch.)

Chloe Cota, a computer engineer in New York City, does not have as strict a lunchtime regimen as others described in this story, but she has noticed that when her company brings in catered lunch, she always picks a salad when it’s available. She came to think of this default selection as reducing her “cognitive overhead”—a way of not expending mental energy on something that wasn’t a high priority for her.

“Lunch variety doesn't really matter to me,” she says. “I would be perfectly happy to eat the same Caesar salad or peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich every day.” Similarly, she has devised a standard “work uniform” (one of her many pairs of black leggings, plus a T-shirt), which helps streamline her morning routine. She says she took inspiration from tech moguls such as Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, who essentially automated their own daily attire decisions in the name of reducing cognitive overhead.

The salad station, Cota says, is also an opportunity for her to practice “mindful eating,” something she started doing as part of her recovery from an eating disorder she developed in high school. She says it helps to know that the foods available to her in that moment are ones she knows she likes, which “short-circuits that whole negative space in my brain where I might get back into those disordered behaviors.”

For some people, the repetition in their daily food preparation is in the meals they make for other people. Ambreia Meadows-Fernandez, a 26-year-old writer in Cheyenne, Wyoming, cooks the same meal—“a meat and rice,” sometimes with some vegetables—for her 3-year-old son most nights of the week. “It made it simple in a way that there was less stress about what to give him,” she says. He usually gets a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich for lunch, and doesn’t seem to mind the lack of variety.

Of course, most people around the world who eat the same thing every day aren’t doing so voluntarily. “I would say most people most of the time have little choice in their staple,” says Paul Freedman, a historian at Yale and the author of Ten Restaurants That Changed America. “If they live in a rice culture, they will have rice for every meal; ditto potatoes.” The cooking fat used—say, butter or ghee—generally remains the same as well.

The variety, Freedman says, usually comes from “relishes,” the food-anthropology term for flavor-adding ingredients such as spices, vegetables, and modest amounts of meat (like bacon). “This staple + fat + relish combination is what dominated eating in traditional peasant cultures,” he wrote in an email.

When I asked Krishnendu Ray, a food-studies scholar at NYU, about dietary variety, he said: “Newness or difference from the norm is a very urban, almost postmodern, quest. It is recent. It is class-based.” So, when accounting for the totality of human experience, it is the variety-seekers—not the same-lunchers—who are the unusual ones.

I should reveal that my interest in this subject is not purely philosophical. Nearly every workday for the past five or so years, sometime during the 1 o’clock hour, I have assembled a more or less identical plate of food: Bean-and-cheese soft tacos (topped with greens, salt, pepper, and hot sauce), with baby carrots, tempeh, and some fruit on the side. And almost invariably, I see the same colleague in our communal kitchen, who asks with delight, “Joe, what are you having for lunch today?” The types of bean and cheese rotate, as does the fruit—which depends on the season—but I do not inform my co-worker of these variations when I laugh off her very clever and funny question.

The people I talked with recounted similar experiences of having co-workers harmlessly joke about their meals, like “How was that sandwich today, Vern? Did you use crunchy or plain?” Currie Lee’s former colleagues, aware that she adored horses, found her regular meal particularly amusing, saying things like “Oh, there’s Currie with her oats.”

Lee thought these comments were just regular workplace small talk. But perhaps there is more to them, and eating the same thing each day reveals something deeper about who people are, or at least perceived to be. Amanda Respers, the yearlong eater of salads, says that “we bring a little bit of home when we eat lunch at work,” and naturally people’s outside-of-work identities are a subject of interest. What does eating the same thing each day say, then? “No offense, but it gives the impression that you’re a little bit boring,” she says.

Personally, I think Respers is on to something, though I’d draw a slightly different conclusion. The daily rituals of office life are characterized by their monotony and roteness, and bringing a different lunch each day is a sunny, inspired attempt to combat all the repetition. I do genuinely appreciate the optimism of those attempts. But in my mind, eating the same thing for lunch each day represents a sober reckoning with the fundamental sameness of office life. It seems like an honest admission that life will have some drudgery in it—so accept that and find joy elsewhere instead of forcing a little bit of novelty into a Tupperware and dragging it along on your commute.

But I am probably overthinking this. Ultimately, I am partial to Vern Loomis’s analysis of what prompted his co-workers to poke fun at his peanut-butter sandwich: “Maybe [they did so] just out of good humor, or maybe guilt that they’re not eating as healthy—that they’re eating a greasy burger or something—or going out and spending $15 for a lunch when mine only cost 80 cents.”

“Jealousy,” he concluded. “I think it’s jealousy.”

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/03/eating-the-same-thing-lunch-meal/584347/?utm_source=feed

[ionecoffman]

The People Who Eat the Same Meal Every Day

Vern Loomis, a retired structural draftsman in West Bloomfield, Michigan, had a standard office lunch: a peanut-butter sandwich, with various fruit, vegetable, and dessert accompaniments. He ate this, he estimates, nearly every workday for about 25 years.

His meal underwent slight modifications over time—jelly was added to the sandwich in the final five or so years—but its foundation remained the same. The meal was easy to prepare, cheap, and tasty. “And if you happen to be eating at your desk … it was something that was not too drippy,” he told me, so long as one applied the jelly a bit conservatively.

Last year, Loomis retired from his job but not his lunch, which he still eats three or four days a week (now with sliced bananas instead of jelly). “I never stopped liking it,” he says. “I still do.”

Loomis may be uncommonly dedicated to his lunchtime ritual, but many share his proclivity for routine. One of the few existing surveys of people’s eating habits estimated that about 17 percent of British people had eaten the same lunch every day for two years; another indicated that a third of Brits ate the same lunch daily. But it’s hard to say for sure how common this really is, since these surveys tend to have been conducted by food purveyors, who might be inclined to exaggerate the ruts that diners are stuck in (and then try to sell them a way out). Still, loyalists who stick to a single meal for months or years—they are out there.

[Read: The problems home cooking can’t solve]

Some of them are public figures whose monotonous diets have been revealed in interviews—they are college-football coaches, fitness-chain CEOs, TV personalities, fashion designers, dead philosophers, Anderson Cooper. Depending on the context, eating the same thing every day can come off as a moderately charming quirk, an indictment of one’s lack of creativity, or a signal of professional focus and drive.

Whatever the symbolism, these people’s behavior is not doing them harm. Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition and food studies at New York University and the author of several books about nutrition and the food industry, says the consequences of eating the same lunch every day depend on the contents of that lunch and of the day’s other meals. “If your daily lunch contains a variety of healthful foods,” she says, “relax and enjoy it.”

So there is nothing wrong with this habit. In fact, there are many things right with it. I spoke with about half a dozen people who, at one time or another, have eaten the same thing for lunch every day. Together, their stories form a defense of a practice that is often written off as uninspired.

Many of the people I talked with emphasized the stress-reducing benefits of eating the same thing each day. Amanda Respers, a 32-year-old software developer in Newport News, Virginia, once ate a variation on the same home-brought salad (a lettuce, a protein, and a dressing) at work for about a year. She liked the simplicity of the formula, but the streak ended when she and her now-husband, who has more of an appetite for variety, moved in together six years ago. Would she still be eating the salad every day if she hadn’t met him? “Oh heck yeah,” she told me. “It would’ve saved so much time.”

Sharilyn Neidhardt, a photo editor in New York City, once found solace in regularity. About a decade ago, she switched jobs, and her new one stressed her out. “There were phones ringing constantly and there were people yelling all the time,” she recalls. One thing that Neidhardt found soothed her and gave her a measure of control over her day: She picked up a spicy noodle dish called tantanmen from the same ramen restaurant every lunch break. She did this for “a minimum of six months,” after which she got tired of the meal (and its cost) and, perhaps more important, settled into the new job.

Eating the same thing over and over can also simplify the decisions people make about what they put into their bodies. Currie Lee, a 28-year-old resident of Los Angeles who works in retail, has some food allergies, and keeping her lunch unchanged “makes it easy” to eat around them. For about six months, at her previous job, she brought overnight oats every day; her current go-to is a turkey sandwich with hummus, avocado, arugula, and cheese, on gluten-free bread.

Lee’s eating habits are not just a function of her allergies, though. She likes that eating the same thing makes grocery shopping simpler, brings consistency to her sometimes chaotic schedule, and made it less likely she’d spend the money at the “$12-salad place” near her previous office. Besides, she really likes the things she brings. “I’m not eating, like, a PB&J every day,” she says. “I try to make it taste good and interesting.” (I did not tell Vern Loomis what Lee apparently thinks of his lunch.)

Chloe Cota, a computer engineer in New York City, does not have as strict a lunchtime regimen as others described in this story, but she has noticed that when her company brings in catered lunch, she always picks a salad when it’s available. She came to think of this default selection as reducing her “cognitive overhead”—a way of not expending mental energy on something that wasn’t a high priority for her.

“Lunch variety doesn't really matter to me,” she says. “I would be perfectly happy to eat the same Caesar salad or peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich every day.” Similarly, she has devised a standard “work uniform” (one of her many pairs of black leggings, plus a T-shirt), which helps streamline her morning routine. She says she took inspiration from tech moguls such as Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, who essentially automated their own daily attire decisions in the name of reducing cognitive overhead.

The salad station, Cota says, is also an opportunity for her to practice “mindful eating,” something she started doing as part of her recovery from an eating disorder she developed in high school. She says it helps to know that the foods available to her in that moment are ones she knows she likes, which “short-circuits that whole negative space in my brain where I might get back into those disordered behaviors.”

For some people, the repetition in their daily food preparation is in the meals they make for other people. Ambreia Meadows-Fernandez, a 26-year-old writer in Cheyenne, Wyoming, cooks the same meal—“a meat and rice,” sometimes with some vegetables—for her 3-year-old son most nights of the week. “It made it simple in a way that there was less stress about what to give him,” she says. He usually gets a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich for lunch, and doesn’t seem to mind the lack of variety.

Of course, most people around the world who eat the same thing every day aren’t doing so voluntarily. “I would say most people most of the time have little choice in their staple,” says Paul Freedman, a historian at Yale and the author of Ten Restaurants That Changed America. “If they live in a rice culture, they will have rice for every meal; ditto potatoes.” The cooking fat used—say, butter or ghee—generally remains the same as well.

The variety, Freedman says, usually comes from “relishes,” the food-anthropology term for flavor-adding ingredients such as spices, vegetables, and modest amounts of meat (like bacon). “This staple + fat + relish combination is what dominated eating in traditional peasant cultures,” he wrote in an email.

When I asked Krishnendu Ray, a food-studies scholar at NYU, about dietary variety, he said: “Newness or difference from the norm is a very urban, almost postmodern, quest. It is recent. It is class-based.” So, when accounting for the totality of human experience, it is the variety-seekers—not the same-lunchers—who are the unusual ones.

I should reveal that my interest in this subject is not purely philosophical. Nearly every workday for the past five or so years, sometime during the 1 o’clock hour, I have assembled a more or less identical plate of food: Bean-and-cheese soft tacos (topped with greens, salt, pepper, and hot sauce), with baby carrots, tempeh, and some fruit on the side. And almost invariably, I see the same colleague in our communal kitchen, who asks with delight, “Joe, what are you having for lunch today?” The types of bean and cheese rotate, as does the fruit—which depends on the season—but I do not inform my co-worker of these variations when I laugh off her very clever and funny question.

The people I talked with recounted similar experiences of having co-workers harmlessly joke about their meals, like “How was that sandwich today, Vern? Did you use crunchy or plain?” Currie Lee’s former colleagues, aware that she adored horses, found her regular meal particularly amusing, saying things like “Oh, there’s Currie with her oats.”

Lee thought these comments were just regular workplace small talk. But perhaps there is more to them, and eating the same thing each day reveals something deeper about who people are, or at least perceived to be. Amanda Respers, the yearlong eater of salads, says that “we bring a little bit of home when we eat lunch at work,” and naturally people’s outside-of-work identities are a subject of interest. What does eating the same thing each day say, then? “No offense, but it gives the impression that you’re a little bit boring,” she says.

Personally, I think Respers is on to something, though I’d draw a slightly different conclusion. The daily rituals of office life are characterized by their monotony and roteness, and bringing a different lunch each day is a sunny, inspired attempt to combat all the repetition. I do genuinely appreciate the optimism of those attempts. But in my mind, eating the same thing for lunch each day represents a sober reckoning with the fundamental sameness of office life. It seems like an honest admission that life will have some drudgery in it—so accept that and find joy elsewhere instead of forcing a little bit of novelty into a Tupperware and dragging it along on your commute.

But I am probably overthinking this. Ultimately, I am partial to Vern Loomis’s analysis of what prompted his co-workers to poke fun at his peanut-butter sandwich: “Maybe [they did so] just out of good humor, or maybe guilt that they’re not eating as healthy—that they’re eating a greasy burger or something—or going out and spending $15 for a lunch when mine only cost 80 cents.”

“Jealousy,” he concluded. “I think it’s jealousy.”

Article source here:The Atlantic

[gta-5-cheats]

Sony Xperia XZ1 Review

New Post has been published on http://secondcovers.com/sony-xperia-xz1-review/

Sony Xperia XZ1 Review

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Sony releases two flagship smartphones every year, and though that might seem like an oddity, it’s not very different from what several other Android OEMs do. Samsung releases Galaxy S and Galaxy Note flagships roughly six months apart, and LG’s been doing something similar with the G series and the V series.

Both Samsung and LG, however, try and cater to different audiences with their two flagship ranges. Samsung’s Galaxy S series is clearly meant for a mainstream users, while the Note range with its S-Pen stylus and bigger screens targets professionals focussed on productivity. Similarly, while LG’s G series is the flag-bearer of its smartphone range, the V series has recently been used as an opportunity to experiment with different designs and form factors.

Sony doesn’t seem to have any such philosophy, and its second-half offerings can at best be considered incremental upgrades to each year’s ‘main’ flagship, with minimal changes. It’s no surprise then that the Xperia XZ1 looks virtually identical to the Xperia XZs from the front. This time, however, Sony has done enough to ensure that the Xperia XZ1 feels like a bit of a refresh over its predecessor, even though it lacks the narrow bezels and 16:9 display that became a popular trend in 2017.

First up is an all-new metal body that gives the Xperia XZ1 a definite leg up over the other members of its family. We especially liked the matte finish on our black unit – the only colour option available in India – which gives the phone a classy, understated look and feel. However, it still feels very ‘boxy’, and maybe rounded corners could ha addressed this.

Long-time Sony users will also note that the button layout on the right has been changed and the volume rocker is now above the power button. What’s unchanged is that the power button still houses the fingerprint sensor, which works quite well. You also still get a dedicated camera button towards the bottom of the right edge.

Sony has made some changes at the back. While the camera module is still in the top-left corner, the dual-LED flash is now to its right instead of just below as it was on the Xperia XZs. The Xperia XZ1 retains the USB Type-C port, and to the relief of many, the 3.5mm headphone jack as well.

  Overall, despite these minor changes, it’s clear that the Xperia design language has been showing its age for a while now, and is badly in need of a major revamp. Sony executives have indicated we could get it soon, but as of today this phone looks dated compared to what other manufacturers are putting out there.

The Sony Xperia XZ1 has the same 5.2-inch display seen on the Xperia XZs but the new panel borrows a feature from the bigger, more expensive Xperia XZ Premium. The screen resolution is still full-HD so you don’t get 4K – which would be overkill for a screen of this size in any case – but the Xperia XZ1 does support HDR. If you watch a lot of videos on your smartphone and can find the right content – services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, in addition to YouTube, have a small but growing collection of HDR videos – this can improve the experience.

The difference is especially noticeable when you watch an HDR video on a panel that doesn’t support HDR side by side with a smartphone like the Xperia XZ1. While HDR by itself is not reason enough to change your smartphone – unlike a high-end TV, where you’d likely want HDR support – it’s definitely a nice bonus.

Like other Sony smartphones, the Xperia XZ1 lets you pick from three modes that impact the colour gamut and contrast ratio used to display on-screen content. The Standard mode that is selected by default offers fairly neutral colours. You can opt for the Professional mode to use the sRGB colour gamut for a more accurate, though muted colour appearance, or the Super-vivid mode, which makes the colours appear brighter, but to us this looked really over-the-top and unnatural.

The panel on the Xperia XZ1 has excellent viewing angles and gets sufficiently bright without being overly reflective – we didn’t have any issues when using the phone outdoors in direct sunlight. Gorilla Glass 5 is included as well.

  Sony Xperia XZ1 specifications, performance, and battery life

The Sony Xperia XZ1 is powered by the Snapdragon 835 SoC – the standard for nearly all Android flagships of this generation, and the only major change in specifications compared to the Xperia XZs. There’s 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, of which around 54.5GB is available for your use out of the box. You can add up to 256GB of storage using a microSD card, though that means you will have to give up on the second SIM. 4G and VoLTE are supported, though LTE can be active on only one SIM at any given time.

As you’d expect from a phone of this class, we did not experience any issues in terms of day-to-day performance, and benchmark numbers for the Xperia XZ1 were similar to what we’ve seen with other Snapdragon 835-powered phones. Thankfully, the phone does not suffer from the heating issues that plagued the Xperia XZs and the Xperia XZ while recording 4K video or running other processor-intensive tasks. The phone is rated to be IP65/ 68 water- and dust-resistant.

The Xperia XZ1 features stereo speakers that sound good, but had us wishing they were a little bit louder. Like many other Sony phones, this model also supports a bunch of features for audiophiles, such as High-Resolution audio, LDAC-enhanced Bluetooth, aptX, and more.

Sony is pushing the 3D scanning capabilities of this smartphone as one of its headline features. Using only the primary camera – no dual camera setup here – the preloaded 3D Creator app lets you scan various types of objects: Face, Head, Freeform, and Food; each with a different preset mode of its own within the app. The idea is to let you grab 3D models of different kinds of objects, and then print them from your smartphone if you have access to a 3D printer, which obviously isn’t the case for most people.

You can also use them as 3D avatars on social media, or as AR effects within the Camera app. In practice though, the first step itself is extremely hard, and despite the hand-holding by the app in the form of tutorials – we found 3D scanning to be a big chore. Results were unreliable if we strayed even a little bit from what we were expected to do, which we did all the time thanks to the complexity involved. We asked a couple of other colleagues to test the feature out, and they came back reporting similar experiences.

The Xperia XZ1 insists on restarting every time you fiddle with your SIMs, a problem that’s existed with Sony phones for quite a while now. We realise this bothers people like us who swap SIMs constantly a whole lot more than regular folks, but, just like the design, this is an area where Sony seems to be stuck in the past.

The Xperia XZ1 has a 2700 mAh battery and we had no trouble going through an entire day with a bit of juice still left at the end. In our HD video loop battery test, the phone lasted 10 hours and 40 minutes before shutting down, which is in line with what you’d expect from a battery of this size. The Xperia XZ1 comes with the Sony UCH12 charger that supports the Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0 as well as MediaTek Pump Express 2.0 standards for fast-charging compatible devices. In our testing, the charger topped up the Xperia XZ1’s battery from 0 to 42 percent in 30 minutes, and to 72 percent in another 30 minutes.

  Sony Xperia XZ1 software

The Sony Xperia XZ1 was the first smartphone to ship with Android 8.0 out of the box, even before Google’s Pixel 2 duo. Under the hood, the Android Oreo update brings some major changes such as better controls over what apps can do in the background, but there are some new user-facing features as well. You get Google Play Protect, which is designed to scan your device in the background and help keep it safe. While Android Nougat added support for multi-window view – which brought split-screen and ‘floating apps’ to your smartphone – Android Oreo brings native support for the picture-in-picture (PIP) mode, which is designed to be seamless.

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If an app supports PIP mode – and not a whole lot of them seem to do that right now – you just need to press the home button, and the app will then pop out and remain visible on your home screen, or floating above other apps at all times. For example, if you are navigating to some place using Google Maps and just press the home button, it will remain visible in a small window that stays on top no matter what app you launch; even full-screen apps like games.

This is super convenient for the most part – though we found the overlay on games a step too far – and a welcome change from manually triggering multi-window support to run apps side by side, which is rarely useful on phones with regular-sized screens. Most apps, however, don’t support this mode yet – you can go to Settings -> Apps & Notifications -> Advanced -> Special access -> Picture-in-picture on your phone to see which installed apps have PIP support.

Only a handful of apps that ship with the Sony Xperia XZ1 support PIP, and the only one that we found useful in a meaningful way is the one we mentioned before – Google Maps. Google Duo supports PIP, but YouTube treats PIP as background playback, which means only YouTube Red subscribers can use it right now. Bundled apps like Google Photos and Sony’s Video don’t support this at all, so if you want the ability to watch videos in a little pop-up window while you do other things, you will need to download a third-party app like VLC, which has has the option to enable PIP buried in the settings.

There are a few notifications-related improvements as well, including support for badges. When an app has new notifications, a tiny dot appears on top of the app’s icon; developers can customise which notifications show up as badges. Users can long-press an app icon to glance at the notifications associated with a badge in supported launchers. Notifications snoozing lets you dismiss individual notifications for a preset duration – they will show up again once the time is up.

Android Orea’s picture-in-picture mode (left), Autofill framework (centre), and notification badges (right) in action.

  The other new feature you might find useful is the addition of the System-wide Autofill framework. This lets your apps use data from your Google account, for example, to autofill personal details, usernames, and passwords you have saved in the browser. Apps can also save passwords to your Google account, so the next time you visit the corresponding website, you won’t need to enter your credentials manually. The Sony Xperia XZ1 comes with SwiftKey as the pre-installed keyboard, though you can of course switch to another if you prefer.

The Best New Features of Android Oreo

The phone utilises Project Treble, Google’s initiative to make it easier and faster for OEMs to roll out software updates, and in the couple of months that we spent with the Xperia XZ1, we noticed that Sony was pretty prompt in terms of pushing out monthly security updates. Apps like AVG Protection (an antivirus app that runs in the background by default) and games like Midnight Pool and Modern Combat 5 are pre-installed on the smartphone and cannot be uninstalled (but can be disabled).

Sony Xperia XZ1 cameras

The primary camera on the Xperia XZ1 uses Sony’s 19-megapixel Exmor RS for Mobile memory-stacked sensor with a a f/2.0 25mm wide-angle G Lens. You get the same Super Slow Motion mode that we first saw on the Xperia XZ Premium where the camera captures video at 960fps for 0.184 seconds, which becomes 5.9 seconds of footage. The camera also packs Predictive Capture, which promises to detect and “capture motion and smiles before you even click”; 5-axis image stabilisation; and 4K video recording.

All this combines to give images that look quite good on the phone’s display, especially when there’s plenty of light. Zoom in to full size and you’ll notice that the images have some amount of noise and lack the details that other flagship phones can capture, though most users will be fairly happy with the Xperia XZ1’s results. Unsurprisingly, noise proved to be a bigger problem in low-light conditions, and image quality fell well short of the performance we have seen from the leading smartphone cameras.

Tap to see full-sized Sony Xperia XZ1 camera samples

  However, given the Sony Xperia XZ1’s pricing, it’d be unfair to expect it to compete favourably with the likes of the iPhone 8 and Google Pixel 2, which cost a whole lot more (the latter when it’s not being discounted). Overall, the camera you get on the Xperia XZ1 is fairly in line with the price you pay, with performance better than that of OnePlus 5T and Mi Mix 2 which cost a fair bit less, but lesser than what you get from the more expensive flagships.

Super Slow Motion mode is a nice feature for the Sony Xperia XZ1 to boast about on paper, but the resulting 720p video looks extremely grainy – even on the phone’s screen – and we wouldn’t really want to use it anywhere. On the other hand, we quite liked the results from Predictive Capture, a feature that automatically saves the moments just before you press the shutter key, taking some pressure off you when trying to capture the ‘perfect’ shot. You can later go and see all the shots associated with a particular photo, and keep only the one(s) you like. We imagine this will be particularly useful when you are taking pictures of pets or kids, or at sporting events with fast-moving action.

As you can see from the sample shot below, if it wasn’t for Predictive Capture – which is a setting in the Camera app that’s turned on by default – we would’ve ended up with an unusable image. However, unlike Apple’s Live Photos there doesn’t seem to be a way to force Predictive Capture off or on, and it seemed to kick in on occasions when we didn’t expect it – like when capturing frames with no moving objects – and didn’t when we were trying to shoot moving traffic, for example, which might limit its utility.

If it wasn’t for Predictive Capture, all we would’ve got is the shot on the bottom-right.

  The rear flash on the Xperia XZ1 isn’t very powerful but the display-powered front ‘fill flash’ does a satisfactory job when you are taking selfies. Speaking of the front camera, the resultant images are good enough for use on Facebook even though the colours appear a bit washed out. You do get the option to wave your hand while looking at the front camera in order to trigger the shutter, which can be useful in certain situations.

4K video recording and 5-axis image stabilisation on the rear camera work satisfactorily. The Camera app is the same that we’ve seen on other Sony phones, with the option of diving into a full Manual mode if needed.

Verdict There’s a lot to like about the Sony Xperia XZ1 – it has a good display with HDR support, excellent performance, decent battery life, a camera that’s good enough for many people, and Android Oreo backed by what has so far been a decent record of regular updates. What this phone really lacks is a standout feature – like the cameras on the Pixel 2 series or the design/ display of Samsung’s flagships – that could help it grab attention in an extremely crowded market. As we’ve said several times now, the Xperia design language is crying out for a refresh, and one hopes for Sony’s sake that it arrives at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next month.

If you aren’t put off by the design – and to be fair to the Xperia XZ1, the metal finish is definitely an improvement over its predecessors – you could buy this Rs. 44,990 phone and be fairly happy with it. Alternatively, you could consider the Nokia 8, which costs a fair bit less than the Xperia XZ1 but offers similar performance and stock Android as well as better battery life. Though it lacks HDR support, the Nokia 8’s display offers deeper blacks and is one of the best LCD panels out there. You would, however, miss out on IP65/ 68 water- and dust-resistance and have to settle for a camera that’s a tiny bit inferior.

More importantly, with February nearly here, a new wave of flagships is just around the corner – possibly a successor to the Xperia XZ1 as well – and you might want to wait and see what’s in store. If patience is not your thing, some of the best phones of 2017 are available at significant discounts compared to their launch prices, and one of them might fit your requirements.

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