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brandstifter-sys · 3 years ago

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Under Pressure

Chapter 20: Curiosity (Ao3)

Word Count: 1147

Characters: All

Rating: T

Warnings: Implied suicide mention (no one gets hurt), gore, intrusive thoughts, villain!Logan

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"So you thought doubling your influence would make Thomas listen? And it backfired before you realized what was happening," Janus questioned.

"And you used Portal 2 and Undertale to teach it to problem solve," Virgil commented, "Did you even get it through the pacifist route?"

"I believe it finished the game. I was not aware that there were multiple endings."

"You raided my video game library, made separate save files for an AI, and you didn't teach it empathy when you picked one of the single most empathy driven games available?" he scoffed incredulously, "Does your robot even know it's meant to be a human's logic?"

"Log base a of n was not supposed to be in a position to completely usurp anyone, I miscalculated its development. I wanted to see what would happen in a trial run to find bugs that need to be fixed."

"It seems to know it's lacking—it wants to upload me—Me!" Remus laughed, "Can it even do that?”

"Yes. It's a guided learning algorithm, it needs to have a base. The microchip that was attached to my neck copied and transferred electrical signals from my brain to the program. It would be possible to replicate it and use it to induce a stasis in the host."

"And it chose Remus for that?" Roman gawked, "Out of all of us?"

"Which one of us smoked all its tests and then some? Which one of us got things going? I'm just surprised it didn't factor in my intrusive thoughts!"

Remus' entire body crisscrossed with wires, cables filling his veins and throat, exiting through his wounds. Dead eyes. TV static.

"They're mine now," Virgil shuddered, "try again."

"How do we stop it?" Patton spoke up, "The bastard bot is ruining Thomas' friendships and social skills and we're just sitting here!"

"Take a few deep breaths and count to ten, Patton. The AI had likely put its shutdown protocol behind several layers of encryption by now. If we can transfer the program to a far simpler device it would be possible to reset the mindscape."

"Simpler device?" Janus scoffed, "You'll have to be more specific."

"Potato," Virgil said, getting everyone's attention. Janus and Roman wore matching scowls, Logan was confounded, and Patton was wracking his mind for some sort of context clue. Only Remus grinned.

"A potato battery!" he cheered, "Because it's basically GLaDOS!! It's perfect!" Remus dragged Virgil down into his lap and hugged him tighter than he probably should have. Virgil didn't fight him and let it happen. Remus was always good for hugs and he stopped bleeding.

"I have a potato!" Patton said and pulled it from his pocket, "We can make a battery with this! There's enough stuff here to do it!"

"A battery wouldn't be enough. A program such as the one in control requires a CPU to host it. If I may—"

"Why should we trust you?" Roman cut him off, "You were the one to create this beast and set it on the mindscape."

"I had no intention of taking over the mindscape. I was curious to see what the program was capable of, curious and incautious. I cannot fix this mess alone. I am not creative or empathetic, and I am not a fighter. Regrettably, I need help to clean up my mess, or I will be trapped in a claustrophobic cube and sedated."

"Do you have any intention of killing cats?" Virgil grumbled. Patton's face fell in horror. Logan took the potato and paused.

"Is that a literal question or are you facetiously referring to the idiom in reference to my current state?

"Take a guess."

"Literally? No, I have no intention of killing cats, their anatomy is well documented and I have no need for hands-on feline research. Idiomatically, I seem to have reverted to my secondary role as Curiosity. I do intend to figure out what caused this change, after I build the potato rig."

"It's called stress. You already knew that," Janus hummed, "You were feeling the pressure and cracked under it. Now that that question is answered, enlighten us. How do we get the program to transfer? It won't become a potato willingly."

Logan paused and scratched his chin. It was an essential question, and there were so many variables.

"Perhaps if we treated it as a virus, I could program an anti-malware software—but it would take time and Log base a of n might adapt to it quickly, so it would require another learning algorithm," Logan mused and paced over his former prison.

"Why not upload one of us?" Roman asked, "If it was planning on adding Remus to its system, it's possible."

Remus grinned and nodded.

"There's two chips, right? We could upload two of us for extra security!" Patton gasped.

"But who?" Virgil asked tiredly.

"Well, duh!" Remus laughed, "The two sides who are built to protect! You and Janus!"

"I'm literally the embodiment of self-sabotage right now."

"And I—" Janus started.

"Nope! Don't even try it Jay! I know those rust scales are fake!" Remus cut him off, "And I know just how to get Virgil out of this funk!"

"You do?"

"Yeah! It's simple! I just have to surrender to the AI, spread my ass and let it fuck me over until I lose all my humanity!" Remus said with a bright smile.

"What?!" Virgil yelped and jolted away from him.

"Yeah! You said you're not up to the task, so we have to give up! Thomas can still live like this, it might suck and he'll be miserable but he won't die! Unless—”

"NO!" Virgil boomed, "DON'T EVEN SUGGEST THAT!!"

"I think you'll be fine with that upload," Remus said with a wry smirk, "But that won't be enough. We need to keep it distracted while you clean house."

"You are an expert at distraction, Remus," Logan commented, "You and Roman."

"What about me? If You two are gonna be digitized, and you're gonna do computer stuff, and you two are gonna be a distraction, what can I do?" Patton asked, "I'm not sitting by when Thomas needs me!"

"You? You're coming with me!" Remus said in his worst Scottish accent and giggled.

"Patton has no combat training," Logan frowned, he would be a liability in that position."

"He's more unpredictable than me right now, a strong slimy curveball!"

"My face still hurts," Virgil mumbled and rubbed his cheek where Patton punched him before, "He could just mosh the robot to pieces if he's pissed off enough."

"He's a loose cannon, I refuse to send him out alone," Roman huffed, "So it's settled. Remus, Patton and I will distract, Virgil and Janus will destroy it from the inside, and Logan will monitor them."

"Are we in agreement?" Janus asked, growing tired of the discussion. Each side nodded solemnly.

"Then make the potato computer and let's move along."

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(Master Post)

#ingenuity!remus #remus sanders #indulgence!janus #janus sanders #depression!virgil #virgil sanders #emo(tion)!patton #patton sanders #pride!roman #roman sanders #ts under pressure au #villain!logan #curiosity!logan #suicide mention tw #intrusive thoughts tw #gore mention tw #sandyscribed

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reimahowaido · 4 years ago

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I’ll get to those Magic Crafter Dragons I sweeeear But first, fun stuff from Discord. Dunno who made the original, it was just posted on a server, but yeet I did it anyway First of all, I don’t play a lot of games. I like games and the idea of them. I enjoy people playing stuff, I love watching others play. It’s that little sibling culture. But lemme toss a word or few about all of these. Though first of all, I only own 4 of the 8 games listed and even still I’ve only played 3 of them xD R.I.P. Pokemon Cafe Mix - The game is just Super Cute. Like oh my god Aesthetics! Adorable, every pokemon looks so nice and I just want to go to the cafe and taste everything and just chill. Please. It looks so cozy and relaxing. Gameplay is fairly simple too. Sometimes things seem a bit BS but in one way or another I’ll get through every stage etc. so it’s not too bad. Most of the time relaxing, can be addicting because of how simple things are. But really I love the game and I hope one day they’ll add more of the pokemon I like xD Buizel is my current favourite <3 It’d be nice seeing Mienshao or Mienfoo for one, maybe Glameow as it doesn’t get a lot of attention. We got Gogoat, but I wouldn’t mind a Sawsbuck or Deerling Pokemon Black 2 - To keep the Pokemon trend going, this is my fave out of the mainline games. I’ve been a fan ever since the first generation, I’m older than Gen 1 at that. But yeah, we did buy games but Nintendo stuff was too expensive and so I never really got to play those growing up. Black 2 was the first game I ever bought, for myself, with my own money. It was my first game and I loved it dearly. Still do and man I’d Love to replay it, but the curse of only 1 save file is cruel. I don’t want to restart my first ever save file. Currently I have no way of transferring anything over and I even have a Shiny Gothorita there (as underwhelming as it is, it was my first ever shiny). I love these games~~ Lots of different pokemon to choose from, great story, the fact that it’s a sequel is so freaking cool and unique I Love It So Much. Of course it’d be cool to have some extra things to do in it, like cleaning my badges, contests would be cool, I loved the mining stuff in Gen 4 when I got to try it on my friend’s Platinum save file as a kid. Speaking of, Gen 4 games would probably be my favourites, if I ever had the chance of owning and playing any fully. They have soooo much to do in them! Gen 5 is good and certainly up there in faves, but bruh, Gen 4 had all sorts of extra stuff, especially Platinum, and in HG/SS you had Pokemon following you like bruh that’s Crazy and I’d love to have that for a game I own, it’s like a dream Honorable mentions to Mystery Dungeon and Gen 6′s Pokemon Y for some grand memories. Firstly Pokemon Y, the second game I ever owned I think, great fun. I played that game for hooooooooours and it’s the only Pokemon Game that I’ve both played as a Nuzlocke and actually reset to play again. Also the first gen where I actually really got into competitive stuff, breeding for natures and stuff, and I’ve caught so many shinies in Y and Omega Ruby (mostly Y, OR has 1 shiny in Pidove, while Y has Ninetales, Pachirisu, Burmy, Gligar, and perhaps some other ones I caught/hatched myself). Mystery Dungeon games get a mention for having cool stories and I like the idea of the personality test and stuff. I’ve never played or owned any of these games, but I’ve watched Marriland play a handful of the games and currently am enjoying MDB playing through the first games in the series. Also a quick bloop on Colosseum being Cool as heck, and Battle Revolution gets a shoutout for looking so freaking good, having amazing music and making me search up videos with my favourite pokemon and just looking and watching hundreds of videos just because they looked so nice

Fire Emblem has to be the 2nd series of games I’ve gotten the most into. Although I’m a fairly new fan and my experiences and knowledge are limited, I do still enjoy the series and games - both old and new - a bunch. I only own Awakening, Conquest and 3 Houses, but I’ve again watched others play the past games a bunch, so I have some knowledge and memorable moments from those games too. Now I haven’t actually gotten myself to play 3 Houses yet, I’ve seen playthroughs of the game already and know the story etc. But yeh. Still, I’d say that I’ll probably like 3 Houses more than Awakening and Conquest. Awakening is nostalgia galore for me, but it does have its things with the story and characters and stuff. It’s nice, but I dunno, I just feel 3 Houses has an edge on it in some way. Maybe it’s just... Less controversial? Less Flame Wars? Maybe? Fates games, well, we all know the big glaring thing here. The story. And some of the characters suffer from this too. I kinda do wish that the Player had a biiiit more control in how the story went and played out, like I feel you definitely could have saved Scarlet in some way still, and all that. But eh, there’s enough stuff for me to go and prefer 3 Houses over it. And yes, I like choosing the members of my team and playing however I like, so giving me the ability to class my characters however I want is going to be a mistake as I’ll just make everyone a mounted unit and get destroyed but hey! Options :2 Variety :22 Great tiiiiimes~ Also it’s Blue Lions for me, Golden Deer Second Now for the games I don’t own. I chose Radiant Dawn because the Tellius games are just so good. I love the character in them, the story is pretty solid and the worldbuilding is cool too :2 I like both of the games, and while Path of Radiance is more coherent and doesn’t give split the characters up a bunch, Radiant Dawn has More of the great characters :2 Yes I know, not all of them are as fleshed out and thought out as the first game’s characters, but yo I still love them. I love a good continuation to a story. I love a ‘hey maybe it wasn’t as Black & White as we were made to believe’ twist. Also just hella good memories from watching BigKlingy play these games. The audience memed Aran to the final levels. We did it, he did so well, Aran deserved to be there xD Radiant Dawn also brings us Nailah, who is just. Yeah, you speak to me on so many levels, I’m easily readable. But also, woman, wolf, strong, yasss~~ Also I love the idea of the Jaegan character being a Thief/Assassin. That’s just so different and cool to me after all these Horse Units. And I’m the one guy who likes Levail and would love to see more of him. Give us more of Levail, the man who almost made it to being playable. Man. Levail is probably the one reason I’d pick Radiant Dawn over Path of Radiance xD The other game I’ve watched BigKlingy play through (and that’s my only experience on that game) is Sacred Stones. Pretty solid game all in all. Story, characters, but speaking of that story, if you really think about it, it’s Hella Dark, and that’s actually kinda cool in a way. I’m not that into dark stories, but here it worked. Also watched PhoenixMaster1′s playthrough on the Echoes game. I do like the game, if i find it one day I Might buy it but I’m not like in a hurry to get it. It was cool though, different for reasons but hey~ Also, Berkut, yes. I’m one of those people who like this angry man. But come on, he was really good xD Spyro I’ve already talked about in my lengthy little thing that I’ll get to continuing eventually xD But yes, I freaking love Spyro, my childhood, still very enjoyable experience full of great memories Metroid Fusion - Oh boy here come the nostalgia~ I’ve actually never played any Metroid games myself. I got introduced to the series in the early 2010s through youtube videos. I’m fairly sure it was me looking through dozens and dozens of Top 10 videos, several of which were on ‘the scariest bosses’, either unexpectedly scary or something else. But guess what, Nightmare from Fusion was in there, and I Think the person in the video said something on not wanting to even show the final forms of Nightmare’s face because it was that horrifying to them. And honestly? The fact that they didn’t show how bad it got, mixed with my morbid curiosity and woop, here I go~ Down the Metroid rabbithole where I watched a lot of videos on people fighting Nightmare and the other bosses in the game, eventually going into watching full run-throughs of the game and enjoying my time. Game looked pretty good, soundtrack was really nice too. And so I ended up on listening to a lot of the game series’ music and getting more familiar with the other games and the lore too. Learning to know that Samus was a lady was also hella badass. Fusion started it all for me, and while Super Metroid is cool, people also just play it a loooot, especially the Speedrunners, there’s also plenty of hacks based on that game and yeah I get it the game is Good, but that makes Fusion all the more special to me~ Devil May Cry 3 - Ok so again, I’ve not played any DMC games myself. This one again though is nostalgia ocean for me~ 2010 or such, I’m on some forum, said forum has a forum game based around songs or such and someone links one from this game. I Think it was the Doppelganger battle theme, or then I just found that one and listened to it for hours among the other battle themes these games have because they’re soooo gooood~~ DMC 4 was fairly new at that time, but I remember Gredo’s and Agnus’ themes being up there in songs I listened to a lot too. My experiences and stuff on this series was fully based on the songs, images on said songs, bits and pieces of the cutscenes of these games I saw and comments I read. I didn’t get too deep into DMC back then though, but I did have a bit of knowledge here and there, even if my idea of the stories in all the games was, well, I wouldn’t call it warped, but I definitely had imagined the story going differently to how things actually went xD Still, as a few years back I returned to DMC out of that feeling of nostalgia, and discovered DMC 5 had Just been released, boi, I was In. And I watched through cutscene compilations, playthoughs and what have you on all the games (Except for DmC, boot to you ReBoot), and it was quite the hype time~ I enjoy the chracters, the story that there is around them, and just how carefree and fun stuff can be. The party sure did get crazy~ Lost Dimension - The last game I have on the list there. This might be a weird one and I get that yeah. How many have even heard of this game? I sure wouldn’t have ever known of it without BigKlingy’s playthrough of it. But that playthrough was full of memories, I should really rewatch it one day~ I may not remember an awful lot about the game, but I do keep coming back to it in one way or another. I liked the character designs, the fact that all of them were unique and had their own abilities, there was a bit of story around all of them, the traitor system had you thinking & made each run a little different... That’s some Cool Stuff! The game might be a bit obscure and seriously not known at all, but for what it was, it was great and I enjoyed it a bunch! And now for stuff that wasn’t on the list but I kinda still want to mention. Because why not~ IB - This Almost made it onto the list, but I felt a little closer of a connection to the other games on it. But IB is one of those games from the early 2010s that I also got introduced to through the wonderful world of Youtube. I have forgotten the name of the person whose playthrough in the game I watched. But I watched a ton of people play this game. It was just. So cool. The puzzles in this game were nice and the fact I myself could solve and understand them too was pretty nice to me, and for some reason I just enjoyed watching other people react to the game and try solving stuff. It also had a couple different endings so watching and seeing what the other people got was also interesting. Great memories~ Witch’s House / Ao Oni / Mad Father - And all sorts of other horror games that kinda fall under this grouping and style and stuff. Yeah, IB kinda opened a bit of a thing for me as I realized I greatly enjoyed the horror games with puzzle elements to themselves + a bit of story here and there. There’s definitely much much more than these 3, I watched soooo many of these games being played by others. Ao Oni I may have discovered through my Hetalia phase though, HetaOni, if any of you still recognize that name. Daym. Although at first I didn’t want to watch HetaOni because of the portraits. Pfffff I thought the person who made them was being mean to some of the characters, but nah, I’d later learn that those were simply just mimicing the ones from the original game. But yeah, Ao Oni had a dozen variants and things inspired by it so those kept me busy for a whiiiiiile Hades - Now here’s a cool recent game! Again, haven’t played it, but it looks cool. The story is nice, character designs are God Like (hehe), soundtrack is super cool, aesthetics and oh my god everything is voice acted oh my gooood. This game is just. So cool. And the team who did it seems really cool too and are seemingly full of nice amazing people. This is definitely some great example work on how things should be done :2 Definitely something to look up to, I love everything about them~ The only reason Hades isn’t up there is because of its recentness and my brain not managing to think of it somehow even as I struggled to come up with stuff (I was mostly trying to think of stuff I had played, so that’s one thing. I even struggled to remember DMC because my current hyperfixations are elsewhere and that’s freaking Wild considering how much I enjoy DMC) But yeah, Hades is Super Freaking Cool Crash Bandicoot - These games I did play as a kid actually, the 1st one was way too hard and the 3rd one was my favourite. I like Crash, these games were nice too and I have plenty of good memories with the game, just not enough to make it up there on my list. Yeah it sounds stupid that I’d take out a game I actually played and replace it with stuff that I didn’t, but... Hey, my list Minecraft - Watched several videos on other people pllaying this game, I know of it, I respect it, but I’ve never played it myself and stuff. It’s cool but didn’t make it on the list Animal Crossing - Riiiiiight, these games seem adorable and I wouldn’t mind owning an AC game one day. I’d probably reset continuously though to get Skye in my town/village/island, she’s my favourite xD If the recent game had cost lest I might have gotten it. 60-70€ is just, a lot of money Persona - I guess I’ll mention these too. My experiences are through Bigklingy’s videos again. 3 is a fave, 4 seems cool, 5 I don’t know a lot about but it seems nice too. I probably wouldn’t be able to play these games myself, since some fights kinda need certain things and strategies and you can’t really just pick whatever and whom ever and roll through with brute strength. I mean, I Guess you could, but that might not be as fun in the long run? Who knows, but it’s not exactly like Pokemon or Fire Emblem in those regards you know The big conclusion is that I like all sorts of different aesthetic looks, mostly probably natural with some brighter colors in it. Stories are good, I love stories! Good characters with nice designs and backstories are really nice too. Things being thought out and built nicely is great you know? A little bit of strategy, fantasy here and there. Nothing too dark and gloomy or ‘hyper realistic’ or what have you. I guess no first person shooters either, though combat is fine. Games where I can pick and choose what to use and what kinds of ‘teams’ I build and the ‘members’ I use in them is nice. I do love watching others play, but with games like Pokemon & Fire Emblem I have that drive of choosing who to use and having my own unique experience kinda gets me to buy the games.

#Games #Lists #Text #Some sort of 'fill this' meme I think

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dlamp-dictator · 4 years ago

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Allen X’s Gacha Rules for a ‘Good’ Gacha Game (Featuring Arknights)

Hey look, that Arknights essay came quicker than I thought.

Continuing on my goal of finishing up all my years-old drafts by the end of February, I think it’s pretty damn convenient that I glanced over this half-finished opinion piece just in time for the next limited banner for Arknight’s CN server to be announced. This is a topic I’ve been wanting to cover for awhile now. If there was anything that was a decent marker for Allen X’s gaming experience these past 4-ish years it was the fact that he got real into Gacha Games. I’ve dipped my toe into quite a few different Gacha phone games over the years. AFK Arena, Granblue Fantasy, Girls Frontline, and even an Ikkitousen gacha game at one point. And of course Arknights, which is my current main gacha game at the moment.

Honestly, the only thing I didn’t play was Fate/Grand Order, and for damn good reason, but one thing at a time.

Anyway, with all that time I spent playing these games I’ve slowly given myself a ruleset and mindset for how I handle these gacha games. And I figured I’d talk about how I go about playing some of them, some of the experiences I’ve gained, and what I look into when it comes to the money portion of playing a ‘free-to-play’ game. I’ll mostly be talking about Arknights since it’s the main gacha game I’ve been playing for the past year and I don’t play two of these at once for damn good reason.

So, with that all said, let’s start off with...

Point 1: Methods of Ten-Pulls

For those new, the typical loop for most gacha games is to roll for rare characters and use them to complete segments of the game, whether for their looks, stats, or playstyle (but mostly looks). The characters themselves are usually drawn in an attractive and appealing way, along with having abilities and statistics that are desirable from a gameplay perspective, at least those of a higher rarity. The more you pull and buy into the gacha, the higher the chance you get for a rare character. Some games have deals where you pull can pull for free with some in-game resource like Girls Frontline, and more commonly the game encourages you to pull 10 at a time to increase your chances.

For any good gacha game, I feel you should be able to pull for free at a fair rate. That varies a lot depending the game mechanics at play, how the game handles duplicate pulls, the rarity rate of gacha pulls, and so on, but in general if you can pull 10 times every two weeks I’ll consider the game fair, at least on that front.

Arknights is actually a pretty good example of this. Headhunting aside, you can pull 4 times a day using in-game resources in the recruitment section of the menu, but those pulls tend to be a lot more common and not viable in the endgame like some of the ones you get in headhunting. And even without the recruitment section you can usually ten-pull about twice a month if you do the daily and weekly missions plus the weekly Annihilation missions. When I first discussed Arknights in this regard I had some confusion about how Annihilation worked and assumed it reset monthly. I apologize if I misled people with that statement.

Anyway, by doing all the activities and missions that give you Orundum, the gacha currency, you should be able to collection about 10,000 Orundum every month, which is one guaranteed ten-pull a month. This is a little under what I would had preferred for Arknights and there’s a good chance I’m missing a free source of Orundum somewhere (and I’m rounding down to play it safe), but... it’s fair enough.

But onto my second point.

Point 2: Premium Currency in Relation to Real-World Currency.

In short, I should have a clear idea how much it cost to pull a character if I was going to whale. Typically, in most gacha games you can purchase a premium currency in order to pull characters with real world money. The amount can vary from game to game, but there should be a clear idea of how much it cost to pull for a character.

As a free-to-play game, most gacha games do need some kind of reliable income. Let’s be real here, this game doesn’t run on happiness and sunshine and I don’t mind giving money to products I want to see succeed and continue, but if it takes 20 bucks to ten-pull I’m going to find that ridiculous unless the gacha rate is in highly my favor.

Arknights uses Originium Prime as it’s premium currency, an item that can be transferred into 180 Orundum per unit. One Originium Prime costs one dollar. You need about 33 Originium Prime to get the 6,000 Orundum needed to pull ten times, or a little over 3 Originium Prime to pull once using 600 Orundum. This means on average it costs around $33 to pull on command.

This is absurd for a tower defense game.

Now, Originium Prime does a lot more than let you engage with the gacha, but the brass tacks of this is that for every ten-pull you do you could just as easily get 3 games off a Steam sale, maybe more. I also think I should note that Arknight’s store lets you buy 40 Originium Prime for $30 as a bundle, cutting that cost to about 75 cents per Originium Prime. There’s also an option for 66 Originium Prime for $50, but that for just a little over 75 cents per Originium Prime if my math is correct. Either way, Arknights is asking for quite the price to engage in one of its main mechanics.

And yes, you can gain Originium Prime in game by perfect-clearing stages and clearing the challenge modes, but there’s a finite a moment of those stages and events maps are pretty scarce in Arknights, coming around once every two-ish months with about 15-20 chances for Originium Prime. As a casual player this is... fine, but for folks that rush the endgame this is... a tad much.

Now, I’m a casual player. I don’t rush to the latest content and I don’t try and min-max a gacha game of all things. As much I mostly just buy a monthly pack that grants me about 300 Orundum for free daily for 30 days and 6 Originium Prime upon purchase. This makes the grind a little easier and it’s a cheap way to show monetary support to the development team. However, I do recognize there are people that do these min-max and rush content and my opinion of these folks aside I think those folks probably spend the most money as well, undeservedly so. But this is more a discussion of the individual person and not the gacha community as a whole.

So... moving on...

Point 3: Late Game Viability as a Free-to-Play

To me, it should never feel like you need the gacha to finish the game or get to the endgame content. For a free to play game, you should be able to at least finish the initial pre-update content without needing to try and a pull a rare character to get you through a hard segment of the game. Events and Post-Launch stuff have a bit of wiggle room, but overall I don’t think you should need a team of the rarest characters to just beat the game, at least not a meta-team. That doesn’t mean the desire to pull can’t be there, but at least for the launch-content, you should be able to finish it out as a free-to-play player. Thankfully, most games (most good games) will give you a pretty decent team to work with if you truly have bad luck with rolls. Girls Frontline is a good example of this.

Arknights... isn’t as generous as I’d like it to be.

In Arknights, by the end of Chapter 4, with limited engagement of the Gacha, you’ll have handful of 4-Stars that can be leveled to the late game with decent stats, Amiya, and an assortment of 3 stars that can technically get you through those first four chapters if used and placed wisely. But some four stars like Gavial, Courier, and Dur-nar are time-limited if I remember correctly, so as of me typing this there’s no reliable way to get some of those characters.

Meanwhile, in Girls Frontline you got most of team Anti-Rain by the mid-game pre-updates, a group of 4-star guns that had already great utility and with half of their members being in the meta of the pre-update endgame content, and are still viable to this day if I remember correctly.

This is a major point of contention I have with Arknights. I think they’re fairer than most gacha games, but I’ll admit they don’t like giving handouts, not as many as I’d prefer anyway. Even the stingy AFK Arena gave you more stuff after maintenance updates and the like, and I hate the fact that I complimented AFK Arena on anything.

But onto my last point.

Point 4: 5-Star/SSR Rates Must be Around 4% or Higher.

This is the main reason I’ll never touch F/GO (along with other reasons). Every gacha game should, statistically, guarantee a five-star/SSR/highest-tier rarity after 30 pulls. Any more than that and you’re playing with a rigged slot machine by my standards. Like I said, the main goal of most gacha games is to get you pulling for these are fancily drawn jpegs and pngs, and while those characters technically have gameplay function and even limited animation in certain non-gameplay settings, they’re still pictures nonetheless. And if I have to dip more than 30 times to get something good then what’s the point.

Again, using Arknights, their 5-Stars are at a rather generous 8%, but their 6-Stars being at a tad crueler 2%. By all accounts, I shouldn’t be touching Arknights because of this, but due to the nature of how busted Six-Stars are and a few other details like base functions, potential levels, and some other factors in Arknights gameplay, I let this slide for the moment.

Regardless, I shouldn’t take more than 20 pulls to get a highly rated unit of some sort. The details of the specific unit can be discussed at a later date, but my point remains.

Also, any gacha game that mixes accessories and characters in the same pull pool is equally unplayable. Characters have utility and gameplay functions that can be used for multiple strategies and methods, along with out-of-game benefits ala the base mechanics of Arknights depending on the game. Accessories and items are stat buffs in game where grinding levels is already purposely tedious. Anything making that act more of a hinderance is honestly trying to rob you blind and should be avoided like the plague.

Now... one more thing to talk about.

About Arknights Specifically

You know... between me bitching about Chapter 7, bitching about Chapter 6, bitching about 7-18, and bitching about Code of Brawl I get the feeling you all think I hate Arknights.

Trust me, I only whine and moan because I love this game and the people who made it, I wouldn’t waste my breath or keystrokes otherwise.

That said, I would like to see some things change about Arknights on a foundational level. I’ll try and keep this short, but no promises.

Endgame Team for Free

This is the team you have to work with for 6-7 because of story reasons and I think this team should gained for free to by the end of chapter 6, everyone in this squad should be in your rooster by the end. Even Blaze, her kit is good, but not as busted as Silverash so she wouldn’t shatter the game’s difficulty. This team overall is very well balanced for end game content and has all the essentials to get through it. E2 medics and guards, cheap vanguards and defenders for last minute placements to stall, a good sniper that can do solid burst damage, some specialists just in case you need to manipulate enemy movement and path detection. I believe you can get Rope, FEater, and Myrrh free, but Blaze and Greythroat for reliable lategame damage feels like a must. And I see nothing wrong with giving out those two for free anyway, especially for what was near endgame content at the time and how pivotal Blaze and Greythroat were to the storyline of Chapter 6. And yes I feel the same way about Rosmontis in Chapter 7 too. She’s actually a pretty niche unit and a 6-Star that’s expensive to upgrade, just having her in your pocket wouldn’t shatter the game like it would be if you gave us, again, Silverash.

Gacha Rates

I think arguing for cheaper prices with the Originium Prime is a fools errand because corporations will never listen, but I’ll at least say this. The rules of the gacha that followed the WWE Banner should be for all future banner. You should get a banner-specific currency that lets you outright buy the rare units on said banner if you have bad enough luck. You needed to pull 300 times to get W or Weedy and about 50 times to get Elysium. I feel like both of these should be cut in half. Going by the math I previously did counting that requirement in half would mean only doing 15 ten-pulls, about 495 Originium Prime (89,100 Orundum) or a little over $370 for a limited operator.

This is still absurd for a tower defense game, but it is a far more fair than the original system.

Other Small Quality of Life Changes

A quick pull for recruitment operators so we don’t have to see the bag animation 4 times over. Girls Frontline had something similar by the time I left and it was all the better for it.

A similar form of auto-play to Girls Frontline where you can send in one of your 4 squads to auto play a map off screen a number of times and come back later when they’re down for materials at the cost of extra sanity.

Have a Orundum be a log-in reward. Again, something Girls Frontline did and I think coughing out 1,000 Orundum once a week wouldn’t kill anyone.

Buff Amiya goddammit. Either remove/shorten the stun on her S2 to make her have reliable (if random) magical burst damage or remove the instant retreat on her S3 so she can become a hard-hitting damage unit at the cost of a high SP cost and cooldown timer. Don’t give major drawbacks to your only non-event free 5-Star when Silverash exists. When Click and Haze has more viability than your main character you have a problem.

Anyway, that’ll be it for me. Next time... I talk about something that isn’t me bitching.

#your dictator is speaking #arknights

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thesevenseraphs · 6 years ago

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Bungie Weekly Update - 6/13/19

This week at Bungie, we watched Guardians hunt for Truth. Season of Opulence is off and running. Guardians are piling into the Emperor’s lost vaults in search of the treasure of their choosing. Earlier this week, you discovered a new boss waiting for you in the depths of the Menagerie. Upon defeating it, you were given a quest to seek out Truth. Not in an X-files way, but to find the Rocket Launcher, Truth—a weapon that seeks out its targets… aggressively.

Next week, we’ll mix things up once again with a third additional boss to keep things fresh in our new six-player activity. And that’s not all we have planned. We are also welcoming an old friend back to the Tower.

=======

Iron Pursuits

Lord Saladin will return next week for the first Iron Banner of Season of Opulence. With a new Season, you have a fresh set of weapons and armor available to earn. Saladin continues to offer Iron Banner bounties, but will also set you on a quest to earn your gear. In other words, prove your worth, and be outfitted as an Iron Lord.

This Season’s Iron Banner armor is now acquired through a quest.

Each armor piece will be granted upon completing its associated quest step.

Each armor piece will be granted as a powerful reward.

After unlocking an armor piece, it may be reacquired with random rolls through Iron Banner Reputation Packages and match rewards.

If you are a veteran player who earned Iron Banner ornaments in the past, this Season’s armor is compatible with all Year 1 Iron Banner ornaments.

Iron Banner packages have been updated.

Iron Banner Armor may now roll with enhanced perks.

New weapons have also been added to Iron Banner packages and have a higher chance to drop on the first package you redeem.

New Iron Banner shaders, an emblem, and a Sparrow may be earned through objectives that must be completed during Season of Opulence.

Iron Banner bounties will continue to grant rewards and Iron Banner Tokens.

Iron Banner bounties no longer unlock direct purchase for Iron Banner gear, as it is now acquired directly through the Iron Banner quest.

Iron Banner and Increased Valor

Start: 10 AM PDT on June 18

End: 10 AM PDT on June 25

Valor boosts will also be available next week in Iron Banner and the rest of the Crucible. Saladin will also have some other items available including this new Emblem.

=======

Raid Stats

Thousands of Guardians explored deep within the Leviathan to tackle the challenges of the Crown of Sorrow raid. A fireteam of six completed it first and paved the way for others to follow in their footsteps. We made a graphic showing the number of Guardians who beat the raid in a few key timeframes during the first week.

If you were one of the 45,475 Guardians who bested Gahlran within the first week and are thinking about purchasing the Bungie Rewards raid jacket, you have until 11:59 PM PDT on June 18 to claim your Bungie Reward code and place your order. Dmg04 and I both completed it the night before the deadline and ordered ours.

Congratulations to everyone who has completed it so far. If you’re still Powering up, Gahlran is waiting for you.

======

Q and A

The DPS team is always working diligently behind the scenes. They are making sure you have the info you need to have the best Destiny 2 experience.

This is their report.

Destiny 2 Hotfix 2.5.0.3

Today, we deployed Destiny 2 Hotfix 2.5.0.3 to players. This hotfix addressed the following issues:

Resolved an issue blocking progress toward the quest “The Invitation,” where some players were not receiving credit when defeating Menagerie bosses.

Resolved an issue blocking progress toward the quest “The Invitation,” where some players could not upgrade their Chalice of Opulence.

Resolved an issue where Sturm’s “Accomplice” perk no longer reloaded non-Drang energy weapons following Update 2.5.0.1.

PLEASE NOTE: We are investigating an ongoing issue where Sturm does not reload non-Drang sidearms.

Resolved an issue causing Eververse armor to have different perks than shown in the Eververse storefront.

For upcoming patch notes as soon as they are available, players should monitor our Updates page.

Fall 2019 FAQ

Following the series of announcements we made last week, we’d like to follow up with the first batch of frequently asked questions submitted by players.

Forsaken and New Light

Q: Will Destiny 2: New Light be its own separate game/file?

A: No. All Destiny 2 players will be automatically converted to New Light and will maintain all of their prior purchases and entitlements.

Q: What Forsaken and Forsaken Annual Pass content will be included in New Light?

A: Forsaken content available in Destiny 2: New Light includes:

Free roam on all destinations

Strikes playlists

Crucible playlists

Gambit and Gambit Prime playlists

Select Annual Pass content

Q: What Forsaken and Forsaken Annual Pass content will NOT be included in New Light?

A: Forsaken content available only with purchase includes:

The Forsaken campaign

Year 2 raids and dungeons

Exotic quests

Cross Save

Q: Do players need to repurchase Destiny 2 on each cross save platform separately?

A: No. New Light will be available for free on Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation.

Cross save will preserve all gear, character, and items across all platforms regardless of entitlements.

Expansion ownership (Forsaken, Shadowkeep) is tied to the platform’s store it was purchased on. Players will need to purchase expansions on each platform that they wish to play that expansion content on.

Q: Can players merge different characters, items, or Triumphs from different accounts?

A: Cross save does not feature account, character, or progress merging. Selecting a active account for cross save does not delete or alter the data of any other accounts.

Q: Will Destiny 2 support cross-play matchmaking between different platforms?

A: Each platform will have its own matchmaking pool.

Steam PC

Q: Which Destiny 2 purchases and entitlements transfer over from Battle.net to Steam?

A: The PC migration from Battle.net to Steam will include a one-time transfer of ALL ownership rights that a player already owns (expansions, Silver, account, Seasons, etc.).

Q: Can players pre-order Shadowkeep on Steam right now and migrate their Battle.net account later?

A: Yes. Players may purchase Destiny 2: Shadowkeep from Steam’s product page now, and migrate their account at a later date.

Stadia

Q: Can players pre-order Google Stadia Founder’s Edition right now, and setup cross save for their account at a later date?

A: Yes. Players may purchase Stadia Founder’s Edition from Google’s product page now, and enable cross save on their account at a later date.

Q: Will Stadia feature cross play with Steam or other platforms?

A: Stadia is its own ecosystem, just like current existing platforms. Stadia players will only be able to play with other Stadia players.

For the consolidated list of frequently asked questions as they are added throughout the summer, players should see our Destiny 2: Fall 2019 FAQ help article.

Destiny 2 Season of Opulence Known Issues

Listed below are the latest player impacting issues discovered in Season of Opulence:

Queen of Hearts Ship: We are investigating an issue where this ship can't be reacquired from Collections when bought from Eververse.

404 Errors on Bungie.net: We are investigating an issue where players who are trying to get a Bungie Rewards code or are trying to verify their email receive a 404 error page.

Opulence Weekly Bounties: We are investigating an issue where weekly bounties offered by Benedict 99-40 did not grant powerful rewards for a period following the 6/11 weekly reset.

Chests on the Pleasure Barge: We are investigating an issue where the chests on Werner 99-40's pleasure barge reset at Sunday's daily reset and not at Tuesday's weekly reset.

For the latest known issues as soon as they are discovered, players should visit our Destiny 2: Season of Opulence Known Issues thread. For archived known issues, players should visit our Destiny 2 Known Issues support article.

#Destiny #Destiny 2 #Destiny 2: Forsaken #Bungie Weekly Update #long post

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sarah-french-blog1 · 6 years ago

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Conceptualize It

Since we already shared our rough prototype last week, I wanted to share some of the other things we’ve made this week...

The amazing @thelizprocess did this fantastic 3D rendering of our device.

I did this animation of the matching game that will be played with the devices to better illustrate how that will work. Gotta say, AfterEffects is not my favorite piece of software but I pulled through OK.

@chrisjoffe came up with the brilliant idea of looking to Greek and Roman mythology for our product name. We have settled on Salus, named after the Roman goddess of safety and well-being.

We also did some user stories for the system to better describe how different groups will be interacting with the various parts and pieces. Fair warning, this is long.

Student User Story

Device

Physical Form

As a student, I can:

Connect the device to my backpack like a keychain so I can easily keep it with me at all times during the school day

Easily hold the device in the palm of my hand

See a QR code and serial number on the back of my device that identifies it as mine

Receive emergency alerts through the device only when I am at school

Use the device for a long time without needing to recharge it

Matching Game

As a student, I can:

See a randomized choice of one of several possible patterns split in half on my device screen, and attempt to find another student with one matching mine

Physically connect my device to another student’s device to check if the patterns match, and initialize a conversation with them

Receive feedback on if the other student’s device pattern is a match or not, and use this opportunity to conversate with them

Earn a point if the pattern is a match

See the complete matched pattern on my device screen for 24 hours before resetting to a new split pattern, and potentially keep the conversation going with my match

See a countdown of the 24 hour reset period

Continue to accrue match points that are stored in my device’s memory, and share my experience with other students

Device Activity Check-In

As a student, I can:

Present the QR code on the back of my device to be scanned by a teacher or staff member so I can check in to a school activity

Know that the points I earn from checking in to an activity are not stored on the device, but automatically contributed towards my chosen community reward

Platform

Device Connection

As a student, I can:

Transfer match points stored on my device’s memory to the platform by physically connecting it to my computer while the web platform is running so I can contribute towards my chosen community reward

Rewards

As a student, I can:

See all available community rewards so I can know what my options are

See the overall progress towards each reward so I can see the rewards are attainable and getting closer

Engage in conversations and encourage other students to work towards the same reward goals together

Choose which reward I want my points to contribute towards so I can be a part of making something fun happen

Change which reward I am working towards at any time (only affects future earned points; does not redistribute already-earned points) in case I change my mind

Suggest a reward to school administrators so I can make my voice heard

Independent Activities

As a student, I can:

Write a daily journal entry of at least 150 words based on a specific prompt so I can reflect

Complete learning modules about important topics like mental health, life skills, and more so I can be more educated about issues that affect me now or may affect me in the future

Record personal goals for the day, week, and year so I can focus on creating the future I want

Earn points for participating in these activities so I can have another reason to do them

Community Activities

As a student, I can:

See what official school activities I can participate in this week so I can know what’s available to me

See the name, time, and location of each activity so I can know how to participate

Talk to other students and and reflect on the events we participated together

Read a brief description of each activity so I can better understand what is being offered

See how many points will be earned by participating in each activity so I can be more motivated to go

Be directed to the school’s procedures and policies for starting a new student organization or club so I can start my own activity

Administrator User Story

Device

Distribution

As an administrator, I can:

Distribute devices to the entire student population at the beginning of a school

Issue replacement devices to individual students

Scan the QR code or look up the serial number of a found device to determine its student owner

Emergency Alerts

As an administrator, I can:

Push an alert sound and message to all devices within the school area to notify the school community of an imminent threat

Push information regarding any false alarms so that the students can be informed

Activity Check-In

As an administrator, I can:

Scan a student’s device QR code using my phone to check them into an activity

Help monitor the student’s whereabout if there is ever a concern

Platform

Rewards

As an administrator, I can:

See the available and completed community rewards

See the overall progress towards each reward

See the progress towards each reward broken down into statistics about the students working towards that reward so I can better understand how the rewards system is working and being used

Get a score that measures the popularity of each reward so I can learn more about what is working well and improve future rewards offerings

Review student suggestions for rewards individually so I can get specific ideas for what students want to see as future rewards

Review student suggestions for rewards as a composite word cloud so I can see generally what students are excited about

Edit any reward information in case of mistakes or changes

Independent Activities

As an administrator, I can:

Choose custom or default daily journal prompts to encourage student reflection

Connect learning modules about important topics like mental health, life skills, and more from other platforms to tie in with other services the school may already be using

View statistics about large-scale trends across the aggregate of all journal entries to see what students are

Review individual student journals only when necessary to better help students who are struggling without unduly invading privacy

Community Activities

As an administrator, I can:

See what official school activities are being held this week as a list to know exactly what’s coming up at my school

See what official school activities are being held this week as a calendar to see an easily understandable summary what is happening

See the name, time, and location of each activity

See the staff member who has submitted each activity

See the category associated with each activity

Read a brief description of each activity

See how many points will be earned by students participating in each activity

Set point values for activity categories that may incentivize students by providing greater rewards for doing a less-fun but important activities like counselling workshops, support groups, etc.

Edit any activity information in case of mistakes or changes

Download a spreadsheet with extremely detailed data related to school activities that can be used for deep data analysis

Review summary statistics about overall activity participation including the most popular and least popular event times and categories for at-a-glance conclusions

Manually check students into an activity by name in case phone scanner isn’t available

Teacher User Story

Device

Matching Game

As a teacher, I can:

Give students time at the beginning or end of class to play the matching game with classmates to encourage usage of the system

Use device patterns as a easy way to break students into random groups since there should be roughly equal proportions of all patterns

Activity Check-In

As a teacher, I can:

Scan a student’s device QR code to easily and quickly check them into an activity I am running or helping run by using my phone

Give feedback to the administrator that the students might have shared with me regarding the activity

Emergency Alerts

As an teacher, I can:

Push an alert sound and message to all devices within the school area in case of an imminent threat to campus safety

Platform

Community Activities

As a teacher, I can:

Manually check students into activities using their names if phone scanning isn’t an available option

Add a new activity I’m starting so students can discover it on the platform and attend even if I haven’t told them about it in person

Give a quick rundown of rewards and activities available currently to encourage participation and share some insight about the activity

Share with the administrators and students (potentially parents?) about the positive impact that these activities might have contributed

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boliviahome-blog · 7 years ago

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3.30.18

Matthew and I have been feeling pretty high stress in our relationship lately. This is strongly correlated to the fact that we’ve only had 2 hours away from the kids (and not focused on work) since mid-December. As I like to say, two hours is too few hours.

This is one of the more hidden costs of doing this type of work: you move away from everyone who provides a safety net to your domestic craziness. At home (meaning, back in Minnesota) we had my sister and parents just a short drive away, plus a whole congregation of generous-hearted friends living in our neighborhood, all of them willing to provide regular respite from the perils of life with a toddler and a baby. But no more. Now we live in Bolivia, with genial colleagues who are not yet close friends. And we’ve had a frustratingly difficult time finding a babysitter.

So we’ve not had much time to focus on our relationship. We have been furiously treading to keep the family’s head above water until the many transitions of these initial months cease. Keep the kids free of diarrhea and terrible diaper rash. Guide Lev into the pleasures of continuous sleep. Maintain Thea’s body temperature at a salubrious level in the tropical heat. Protect everyone from whatever the heck kind of snake this is that was living in our backyard. You get the idea.

One of the game-changing pieces of advice we got early in our marriage was to treat our relationship better than a car: the idea being that we invest in regular oil changes, make costly repairs, keep our vehicles clear of road salt and winter grime, but when it comes to the most valuable thing we own (our marriage), we hesitate to spend money to maintain it properly. People wait too long to make marital repairs, i.e., through counseling, and often it’s too late. I don’t know, I’m not a counselor, and I am keenly aware this isn’t always possible for everyone. But - for us - we took the advice to heart. We typically went to see Shannon, our counselor, about 4 sessions a year. An hour and a half appointment is long enough to talk, scowl, laugh, scowl, and laugh again. We bring the intransigent issues we have, she offers perspective and homework, we work on it, we forget about it, we go back and hash it out again the next year. It’s been helpful and an encouragement to us, a safety net.

When we moved to Bolivia, we anticipated and tried to mitigate the huge stressors by scheduling an online marriage counseling session within our first few weeks here. We have unlimited and free access to them, which I think is one of the best perks of the job. One thing we didn’t anticipate, however, was an erratic internet connection. We got the kids to bed, breathed a sigh of relief, plopped down at the kitchen table, reviewed what we wanted to talk about, and... BLAARGH. [That is the sound of the internet crapping out.]

The counselor rang us back about 10 times in 10 minutes, until we all called it quits. “We’ll ... see ... [garble garble] ... later when ... [garble]... is fixed,” we barked at the screen. I think she got the point. Well, that was 3 months ago.

Matthew and I have been neglecting each other and this past week the strain was starting to show. We both became snippy. The word “butthead” was bandied about. I was feeling depressed and really homesick, Lev got sick, then I got sick, and my emotional margin was exhausted. All the transitions - the moving, orienting, traveling, life at 90 mph - these are all done. It’s time now to get the kids, the house, and ourselves back on track. So Say We All!

Today is Good Friday, a work holiday here, and the kids were napping simultaneously, so we decided to make it a Really Good Friday by paying attention to each other, maybe having a little fun, playing a game, and talking about important stuff.

We started things off by rating our perception of our marriage right now:

Me: What grade would you give us?

Matthew: [Sigh] Oh, maybe a B- or a C?

Me: Oh really! Wow!

Matthew: What?

Me: Oh, I’m just pleased that you think we’re doing that well.

[Some more detailed talk about the ins-and-outs of this season for us, what’s going well, what’s going badly, how the kids play into it or not.]

Me: Well, yeah, I think I’d also give us about a C. Not great, but not fundamentally broken, either.

[More detailed talk about what “fundamentally broken” means.]

Then we played Hanabi, which got interrupted by Lev crying, and we started bickering again. The equation is very simple: Kid crying = frustrated bickering. The louder the crying, the louder the bickering. I. SERIOUSLY. HATE. BICKERING. Lev went back to sleep.

Matthew: Okay, let’s try again. Reset on the game.

[Game played. Fun sort-of had. You can’t just relax at the drop of a hat.]

After the game, we set the pieces down and looked around. Matthew was gratified that neither of us was looking at our phones or the laptop. I was thrilled the house was quiet and that no marching band was rehearsing nearby.

We decided to gaze into each other’s eyes for 30 seconds, which is something we do once in a while, on the premise that maintaining our love doesn’t need to be rocket science or grand poetry, that sometimes it can be aided with some tried-and-true methods: in this case, simply staring at another’s eyes for 30 seconds increases your affection for them. At least, I’m pretty sure I read something about that once. Matthew set his watch timer.

Me: Wait, wait, let’s do a pre and post-test. Don’t start! Stop looking at me! What’s your current level of affection for me? Mine is about a 3.

Matthew: [appearing slightly miffed] Out of what?

Me: 10.

Matthew: Yeah, I’m about a 3 too.

Me: Okay! Let’s see if staring in each other’s eyes helps raise that.

So we scooted closer. We held onto each other’s shoulders. It was nice. He set the timer. We started staring.

Matthew: You’re only looking at one eye. Look at both.

Me: [adjusting]

Matthew: Now I’ve made you into a cyclops. [leaning in and out] Wooo-ooo-ooooo!

Me: Stop that!

Matthew: It’s like a Magic Eye picture.

Me: [trying it] I think I see a lion coming out!

[Both of us giggling and then settling into it, staring at both eyes]

I’ve always liked Matthew eyes. The summer we met, when my heart was still quite ragged from a hurtful season some time earlier, I remember how struck I was by his soft, kind, brown eyes. I’ve since heard that’s some kind of pop-culture cliche, probably with a snarky gif, but the debasing of it doesn’t take away from the truth of it for me. Matthew did have soft, kind eyes. He still does. I still find healing and a sense of home when I look in them. Especially when he’s not being a butthead. Because his heart is Good.

30 seconds passed. A minute passed. We didn’t know that, of course, because you can’t shift your eyes to watch the clock or the whole thing breaks down. We finally drew apart.

Me: Where are you at now?

Matthew: A 4.

Me: Me too! Wow, that’s amazing. Only a minute and we gained a whole point! We could get all the way up to a 10 with only 6 more minutes. That’s nothing!

So... it’s a start. We feel good about the prospects. Everything is calming down: the job, the potty-training, the travel. We keep repeating this, reassuring ourselves, as if a magic mantra will make it so.

But the proof is in the ordinary details: We’re eating home-cooked meals. Yes, half of them get thrown on the floor by our punk 12 month-old but that’s irregardless of geography. Thea is watercolor painting again, right now to the soothing tunes of Ladysmith Black Mambazo from a Putomayo Kids album. (Pretty happy about that.) She’s asking me to sing Hark the Herald at night again. Lev is discovering to how play by himself and often sits quietly, entranced by Fisher Price Little People, throwing them, transferring them from bus to barn to mouth.

And we are proving it too: today we finally scheduled another online counseling appointment and we booked a babysitter for next Tuesday. Hopefully she will not kill the children. We may be only at a 4, but 4 is almost a 5, and 5 is halfway there. Today is Good Friday, when Jesus decided the whole earth was worth healing. Seemed like the right day to decide that for us too.

(In any case, we already know we’re MFEO - Made For Each Other - because we both hate that scene in movies when someone needs to give someone else a necklace and - even though they’ve just been frantically running through a forest or dodging bullets in a war and the necklace has stayed on securely the whole time - somehow in the moment when they need to pass it off to someone, all they have to do is gently tug on it and the clasp comes loose and they gracefully hand it over. Eye-rolls all around from us. I’m looking at you Frodo Baggins.)

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nate-gibson · 5 years ago

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Week 10

01/06/2020 Monday Put computer tasks into VR. I started the day by transferring all the files that Matt and I had been working on in a separate unity project to the VR project and then started linking everything up to get the computer running. I had to do some tweaking to the code in order to get the buttons to press down correctly but after that everything was running smoothly. When testing the game in VR I had to go through some different radius's for the hand's colliders, this was because originally the hand colliders were too big and pressed down multiple keys at once. After some testing, I eventually found the correct radius that makes it accurately represent what the hands would touch. Next, I had to make the buttons work properly because the buttons were made in a project without VR I had yet to include a way to make the buttons ascend back to their original position after the player presses them down. Before I could start on this issue the project began to show that errors were accruing because when transferring files over into the new project it had tampered with some important files. To fix this I had to restore the project back to before I transferred over the files, before doing this I saved all the C# files I had altered to another location so I wouldn't lose my progress. Tomorrow I will bring back in the files again and remake the scene I had done today before the reset.

02/06/2020 Tuesday After remaking the computer task I then moved onto trying to make the button work with the VR controllers. My original idea was to have it so that when the player's hand touches the keys it obviously goes down, because of that I wanted to make it so that once the hand of the player stops touching the key it will raise to its original position possibly after a brief timer. This proved to be difficult, I wanted to call a function (something that will happen) after the hand stops touching the keys by using OnTriggerExit which basically means when an object stops colliding with another object. As I’m quite new to using OnTriggerEnter and OntriggerExit I was unable to make this work just yet and since I had yet to finish my Coffee scene I decided to stop working on the buttons for now. It was great to see the computer working even though it still requires some slight fixes. This was the first proper implementation of a Proper task in our VR project and it was great to test out how it looked and functioned with the player. Matt will be adding what he made for the computer later today.

03/06/2020 Wednesday I made some decent progress today, firstly I added code to allow for separate cups to be able to “cook” inside of the Coffee Machine. I did this by giving each cup it’s own C# script allowing it to identify when it’s in the Coffee Machine and start cooking, and just like before after certain amounts of time the cup will change to undercooked, perfectly cooked, and overcooked. Although the coffees can not cook one after another only one can cook out of the supplied amount. I also made Placemats for the finished coffee to go onto, because I am yet to implement a way to create different types of coffee I made 3 placemats for undercooked, perfectly cooked, and overcooked. This was challenging to do as I had to make it so that only certain types of coffee would be allowed to go onto their respective placemats. I did this by giving each type of cooked coffee it’s own tag. A tag is something that can be given to an object in the Unity scene, it can then be used in a C# script to check if whats interacting with another object has that certain tag. So in my code, I made it so that when objects interact with each placemat they require certain tags to run certain functions. At the end of the day, I had it so that each cooked level has a placemat for it that when interacted will be moved to, I will add code later that will give the player a checklist of 3 people with different coffee orders and whenever they deliver the required coffee to its placemat it will check off that persons coffee. The next thing I need to do is make it so that each coffee can be cooked one after another. The reason I can’t do this right now is that I have a timer that decides when the current coffee cooking is either undercooked, perfectly cooked, or overcooked. That timer needs to be reset each time a new coffee is placed in the machine but I am yet to implement this.

06/06/2020 Saturday Today I started working on the actual coffee machine made in blender by a group mate, this coffee machine had 4 buttons and 2 doors. The first thing I did was to add a cube inside the coffee machine, I turned off the mesh renderer which made the object invisible, the object had a box collider attached to it which I coded so that when a cup collides with the box collider it will then be deleted and remade where the box collider is. This gave the effect of the cup being snapped inside the coffee machine. I took the button code I had made in my computer scene and altered it to get the buttons on the coffee machine working. If a cup is placed inside the coffee machine and the green button is pressed it will start a timer that once reaching 5 seconds will change to a green cup (undercooked) and then after another 5 seconds a blue cup (perfectly cooked) will be spawned end after that a red cup (overcooked) will be spawned, each cup will replace the last. To do this I simply added a boolean that when true will start the timer that determines which cup is spawned, And I made it so that if the button is “pressed” the timer will stop. I then began to work on the other two buttons, since we wanted three coffees in total I made another two cup prefabs and gave them the colours of orange and purple. I made it so that when the orange or purple button was pressed it would change from a blue cup being spawned after 10 seconds to either an orange or purple cup. I did this by creating two additional timers when creating the original coffee-script I made it so that there was a timer after 5 seconds a green cup would spawn, after 10 seconds a blue cup would spawn, and after 15 seconds a red cup would spawn. In the two new timers, The code I created was identical except for the fact that after 10 seconds for the orange button it would replace the blue cap with an orange cup and for the purple it would replace with the purple cup, it is important to note that these buttons do not start the coffee machine cooking and that the player is still required to press the green button.

The last thing I did today was to edit the three placements I had made, the original placements were made for the green cup (undercooked), the blue cup (perfectly cooked), and the red cup (overcooked). I then made it so that instead of a green placement for the green cup it was changed to the orange cup, and for the red placemat for the red, it was changed to the purple cup. I changed the tag of an object (the cups) so that only it could interact with its certain placement, and when the placement was interacted with, it would delete the object and respawn on the placement to appear as if it had snapped to that location. Gif required

07/06/2020

Sunday I started the day off by getting the doors working with the coffee machine, to do this I simply change the position of the doors so that they'd be closed when the green button is pressed. Also when the red button is pressed the doors will open back up returning to their original positions. The next thing I moved onto was trying to get the coffee machine to reset itself after cooking a “coffee”. To get the machine to reset I tested out a couple of different alternatives, firstly I attempted to make it so that each cup of coffee would hold its own timer this, in theory, was to allow for cup to be able to keep cooking after being removed and then place back into the coffee machine. This proved to be overly complicated and would not work as the code required was far too different from my base code and would’ve meant having to rewrite most of my scripts. Since that idea was too complicated I decided against adding it, I thought of some other ways in which I could make this work and decided on making it so that the red button would reset every timer once pressed. This means I couldn't keep cooking a coffee after placing it back in the coffee machine, and because there was no way to tell how long the coffee had been cooked for I decided to have a visual representation of it on the side of the machine. To the left of the machine is what I'm calling a jug as it resembles one, I added a script to it which allowed it to change colour to suit the cup that had been spawned with each individual timer.

We are still on track with competing the project, the only things left now are getting VR working, and little things that would allow our game to better represent disassociation.

#ctec607

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gadgetsrevv · 5 years ago

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Should we be worried about Man City’s ‘superteam’ dominating the Premier League in the long term?

Pep Guardiola and Man City have been dominant in the past two seasons, but is this just the start of their dominance?

In 1953, socialist football conquered England. That November, Hungary’s “Golden Squad” — the Aranycsapat, Olympic gold medalists who hadn’t lost in three years — traveled to Wembley and essentially reset the course of British soccer. England hadn’t ever lost at home to continental opposition, but what was billed as the “Match of the Century” quickly turned into a rout.

Behind a never-before-seen kind of slick, positional fluidity, the Hungarians won 6-3, marking what Jonathan Wilson described in Inverting the Pyramid “not the moment at which English decline began but… the moment at which it was recognized.” Hungary manager Gustav Sebes took it a step further. As Wilson writes, “[He] insisted Hungary’s success, so obviously rooted in the interplay of the team opposed to the disassociated individuality of England, was a victory for socialism.”

Well, 65 years later, collective football has returned to British shores. It’s just that this time it’s being funded by a Middle Eastern royal family worth over a trillion dollars and one of the largest payrolls the Premier League has ever seen. And while Hungary haven’t qualified for the World Cup in over 30 years, Man City’s dominance (barring outside intervention from an international governing body) doesn’t seem likely to end any time soon.

– Jones: Sheffield United prove heart beats talent – Lowe: Reyes’ death casts shadow over Spanish football – Borden: Pulisic is not your wonderboy anymore

Before the 2017-18 season, no Premier League team had broken the 95-point mark in a full campaign. City have done it twice since. Last year, they relegated Liverpool’s 97-point season to second best and won the domestic treble in the process. This year, they’re the betting favorites to win the Premier League, the FA Cup, the Carabao Cup and the Champions League. Oh, and they’ve already nabbed the Community Shield.

This season, every dropped City point seems accompanied by either a Puskas-nominated goal or some form of controversial technological intervention. The natural order of things is a City win; anything else is an aberration.

The only other teams to reach that level of inevitability this decade were a handful of Bayern Munich, Barcelona and Real Madrid sides. But Bayern had the spine of the World Cup-winning German national team along with perhaps the greatest pure wingers of their generation, Arjen Robben and Franck Ribery. And Barcelona and Real Madrid? Well, they had Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, the only two players who were inarguably better than not just Robben and Ribery, but pretty much anyone else who’s ever played the game.

After they broke 100 points to win the title in 2017-18, the consensus seemed to be that Kevin De Bruyne was Man City’s skeleton key. He finished No.1 for attacking midfielders in the FC 100, and the Guardian had him at No. 4 in their 2017 annual ranking of the top 100 players in the world; no one else on the team was in the top 15. In 2017-18, he led City in outfield minutes, and Pep Guardiola’s decision to slide him back into the midfield, coupled with his ability to still produce like an attacker from deep (eight goals and 16 assists), vaulted City into a stratosphere of their own.

Before last season kicked off, “a KDB injury” was probably No.1 on the List of Reasons Why City Won’t Repeat. A KDB injury is exactly what happened; he played fewer than 1,000 minutes in 2018-19 after struggling with injuries, and yet City were basically as they good as they were the year before. In fact, according to TruMedia data, their expected-goal differential actually improved after the 100-point season. Guardiola has his third “superteam,” but this time they don’t have an irreplaceable superstar.

The soccer consultancy 21st Club has developed a player-rating system that calculates how many points an individual player is worth compared to a league-average player. It’s a rough version of baseball’s wins above replacement statistic.

“[Raheem] Sterling, [Sergio] Aguero and De Bruyne are fifth, eighth and ninth, respectively, in our ratings,” said Omar Chaudhuri, head of football intelligence at 21st Club. “Our top four are [Lionel] Messi, [Mohamed] Salah, Neymar and [Cristiano] Ronaldo.”

Since the Abu Dhabi Group purchased the club in 2008, City have spent more on transfer fees than any other team, but not a single transaction breaks into the top 20 of the most expensive transfers of all time.

“They have a group of outstanding players,” said Chaudhuri, “but not any true superstars.”

A team like PSG, with both Neymar and Kylian Mbappe, the two most expensive players ever, has to sacrifice depth and quality elsewhere in the squad because of the resources put into those two players. And so the top-heaviness makes them more vulnerable to an individual injury. Neymar has missed the knockout stages of the Champions League two years in a row, and PSG have gone out in the round of 16 both times

Guardiola doesn’t have that problem. According to the 21st Club model, City have five players in the top 20: the three Chaudhuri mentioned plus Leroy Sane and David Silva. Liverpool and PSG (three each) are the only other clubs that have more than two.

De Bruyne goes down and in steps Bernardo Silva, who’s suddenly one of the best pressing midfielders in the world. If Sergio Aguero, perhaps the greatest goalscorer of the Premier League era, gets hurt, guess who backs him up? Gabriel Jesus, a guy with an even better goal-scoring rate. Sane, who was second in the league last year in non-penalty goals plus assists per 90 minutes, might miss the whole season, but it almost doesn’t matter because Sterling, Bernardo and Riyad Mahrez are there to eat up his minutes.

Oh, and this summer they spent a club-record £63 million on Rodri to answer the lingering question of what happens when Fernandinho‘s battery dies, and Joao Cancelo came over from Juventus to add cover for the ever-present Kyle Walker.

Sterling, right, is one of Man City’s best players, but he’s even better as part of Guardiola’s collective.

“City hit teams with a double whammy,” said Mark Taylor, an analyst who works with various Premier League clubs. “They have the best [Premier League] players in their position, and they are generally very consistent. They don’t run hot and cold.” According to Taylor’s game-by-game performance ratings, most of City’s players “don’t stray too far from their average,” he said. “You don’t catch City on a collective off day.”

Even when there’s a roster question without a clear answer, Guardiola still seems to find one.

Two seasons ago, Benjamin Mendy, the £52 million left-back purchase from Monaco, went down with a season-ending knee injury in September. Then Guardiola turned Fabian Delph, at that point an unspectacular journeyman midfielder, into a full-back good enough to start for a 100-point team. Last year, Fernandinho played 90 minutes in only one league match after February, and City ended the season on a 14-game win streak.

“They’ve reached these heights in large part due to improving the performance of many existing players,” said Chaudhuri. “There’s no player you would say has gotten worse under Pep, which I think shows the gains clubs can make through good coaching instead of recruitment, which is often seen as a panacea at other clubs.”

Of course, Guardiola is the one through-line that connects the great Barcelona teams with the great Bayern teams with the current great City team. There’s still one thing left to be accomplished, and much like his time in Germany, his stint in Manchester likely won’t be fully appreciated unless the team wins the Champions League. However, in an era where the Premier League has more money and more managerial talent than ever before, Guardiola and Co. put together the competition’s best-ever season with just one player who finished in the top 15 of Ballon d’Or voting… and then they followed it up by winning even more trophies while he sat on the sideline.

Globalization and previously unimaginable amounts of money have transformed the sport — and especially this club — but City’s on-field cooperation, albeit bizarrely, does evoke the success of Sebes’s Hungary side. Given all of the resources behind Guardiola and given how his team has been able to dominate the most competitive league in Europe with a rotating cast of key characters, it’s hard to see anyone else in England catching up for as long as he hangs around.

“To me, the tragedy was utter helplessness… being unable to do anything to alter the grim outlook,” Harry Johnston, one of the England center-backs for the defeat against Hungary, wrote in his autobiography. Over half a century later, the rest of the Premier League might soon start feeling the same way about Man City, if they don’t already.

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#Premier League #Should we be worried about Man City Should we be worried about Man City’s ‘superteam

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bublp0pr · 8 years ago

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Soul Theory abridged (+ my theories)

So a bit ago I wanted to make this post about Chara and Asriel but i realised i kept having to explain myself when i talk about the nature of souls. It’s so damn annoying to try and explain every time so i figured i should compile my understanding of the game’s pseudoscience on the matter (as well as throw in theories that i operate under). Took me a bit to get it all out but i think it’s worth it (i’m such a nerd).

I tried to be impartial but i am stating my own theories at points so don’t treat everything as fact. I try to state when i’m just coming up with my own opinion though.

I couldn’t help but start a lot of personal notes (using ~italics~) and tangents along the way, sorry (I put headers before and after them so you can skip though, don’t worry :P) .

---

Let’s start with the basics. The soul is the very culmination of one’s being. There are 2 known types of general souls: human and monster. There is also a subclass of monster soul known as a boss monster which acts differently to normal monster souls (more on that later).

Stats

A soul has the core statistic of ‘HP’ which defines its original and current state of health relative to how many hit points it could take before the soul will be destroyed. For example, a monster with A/B HP: this indicates their soul is originally capable of receiving B hit points of damage (the number to the right of the slash) and in their current state they can receive A more hit points before they die (the number to the left of the slash).

Some speculate that HP is short for HOPE.

Monster food, rest, DREAMS and “being filled with determination” are all the ways the game mentions to ‘recover’ HP, or in other words raise the statistic’s current value. With one exception, all forms of increasing HP cannot raise a current statistic above it’s original value, making this the soul’s normal limit. Rest however has the unique ability of raising the current value above this limit.

A soul can increase its original (i.e. maximum) HP by gaining ‘LV’.

LV (plus AT and DF)

Also known as ‘LOVE’, LV is short for level of violence. The normal soul begins with an LV of 1, as any being is in some way capable of committing violence, regardless of their disposition towards it. LV affects the nature of how ‘easily’ a soul is able to defend itself against others and hurt those around them. To me, this implies that a minimum quantity of this statistic is necessary for a soul’s basic survival because it regulates all defensive and offensive function.

~This sounds like weird stuff to be specific about but trust me, I’ve read comics where Frisk has had ZERO LV. Firstly: check the menu at the start of the game!! Second: I mean, come on! Come ON! Seriously? The character who 50% of the time agrees to go along with Chara’s plan has 0 LV to start?? If you had 0 LV you wouldn’t survive your first fight.You would also be incapable of gaining LV in the first place as you would find killing fundamentally impossible. But hey that’s only my interpretation. ~

Numerically, LV increases a person’s statistic values of DF and AT (which reflect that ‘easiness’ to defend and hurt). DF reduces the hit points a soul will receive from attack. AT raises the amount of hit points a soul’s attack can potentially deal. I won’t go further into these however because there isn’t much linking them to the soul.

~ohh i’m tempted to start an extensive tangent [foreshadowing my bad habit...] about what i think DT and AT are really linked to... but that’s not relevant to this bc it’s not about the soul so i’ll just drop it.~

EXP

LV is increased by obtaining ‘EXP’ through the act of killing other souls. EXP stands for execution points. A set amount of EXP is required for each increase in LV, with a larger amount needed for every transition. I like to think this is suggestive of how the more you commit violence, the more desensitised you become to the basic acts; only actions severe relative to your current stance or something you still find to be a large mass count of simple murder can trigger the rise.

The game doesn’t specifically state what variables go into determining how much EXP a kill will result in. From what i can tell based on the game: the strength of emotional attachment, overall difficulty of the battle and brutality/mercilessness in how you kill them all factor in, but this is purely personal opinion.

EXP and LV remain permanent irreversible values within a run that cannot be decreased- only increased.

There is an instance of losing an ‘experience point’ when attacking Naptsablook (whose intangible body makes the action redundant and even counter-intuitive) however note that EXP represent execution points not experience points making this situation meaningless. ~(thanks nochocolate for the blog post about it that cleared things up for me. Almost started a long theory tangent about the loss of EXP without realising the deliberate difference lol. http://nochocolate.tumblr.com/post/152125281314/if-you-tried-to-kill-napstablook-which-is ) ~

No amount of good deeds can remove LOVE gained. However, altercations to the timeline can reverse LV and EXP. This means that these qualities are not transferable with the restoration of the soul on loading/resetting a timeline. Similarly, AT, DF and HP are reset to their previous state when reloading (though, because accessing a save point restores your health before even offering to use determination to SAVE, some consider HP not to be set to its previous state but simply fully restored).

Death and persisting

When a normal monster soul loses all HP, it shatters, causing the monster to die.

Human souls and boss monster souls however can “persist after death”. The exact implications of this are unknown, however evidence indicates that it involves the soul continuing to exist after the body is destroyed (consider Asgore and the 6 human souls).

Irrelevant Non-Canon Theory Tangent Time! ( I will eventually go back to the main point, i promise... or you can just skip this lol)

This being said, when Frisk loses all their HP in the game, their soul breaks in two before shattering into infinitely small pieces that scatter off screen.

Now, their soul is exposed during battle in a way that monster souls aren’t. When Frisk uses FIGHT, they are damaging the monster’s body. After the body becomes dust, the soul then shatters killing the monster. But when a monster attacks the human, their magic is targeting Frisk’s soul, “the very culmination of [their] being”, rather than simply their body. This explains how HP can be lowered as simply a stat without affecting Frisk’s actual physical condition (like breaking their legs or leaving bruises etc.) and how Frisk is able to survive the conditions from attacks that would normally kill someone (bombs, intense heat etc.) What this means however is that a monster damages their actual soul in battle, meaning that by trying to kill them they are destroying the soul.

This does not make sense. The soul of course needs to remain intact for Asgore to use it and break the barrier. The only contradiction to this is Papyrus, who instead captures you when you reach 1 HP. But it is established that Papyrus misunderstands the general objective of monsters attacking humans, so this is not done deliberately to maintain the soul for Asgore. Even Asgore himself, when fighting you to collect your soul, triggers a shatter scenario when he defeats you.

All of this leads me to think that when a monster brings a human’s HP to 0, this is not expected to destroy the soul. That can mean one of three things: A) Frisk’s soul works differently to what the monsters are familiar with, B) The soul is supposed shatter and the pieces are collected because that’s how human souls ‘persist’, or C) Something is destroying their soul other than the monster after their HP drops.

Possibility B is irregular though, because this is not how Asgore’s soul ‘persists’ when you defeat him. For a brief period, the soul remains intact, hovering over the space Asgore previously filled. Note that this time period is longer than any of Frisk’s pauses after they lose all HP. After Flowey attacks the boss monster soul, it too shatters in the same way as Frisk’s and the game treats it as though his soul is now unrecoverable after this action. As humans and boss monsters are both described as having souls that last without bodies using the same term (persist) it would make sense that they function in the same way so possibility B is unlikely in my opinion.

My theory is that Frisk refuses to ‘persist’ in order to return to their save point. In other words, they need to place themselves on the brink of death to reload. An interesting case to correlate this is Flowey, when describing his first experience with resetting. Not wanting to live in a world without love, he chose to kill himself. It wasn’t until he was “leaving this mortal coil” that he began to refuse to die, using his determination to reload the world. Note that ‘refusing to die’ created a paradox where the soul itself had already been allowed to die because Flowey chose to, but determination made this option impossible. This contradiction may be the source of why time is affected to resolve the issue - ‘reloading’ to a point that had similar levels of determination but with a not-destroyed soul.

~but i don’t know a damn about quantum mechanics or what sort of impact determination has on it. So... yeah, the paradox thing might be overboard~

Another reason possibility C could be the case is because Frisk is aware of what happens if a monster catches them. Toriel explains to them in the Ruins about why monsters want to attack them, so it is reasonable to assume they may think this when they die. Using their determination, they refuse to allow monsters to contain their soul and instead shatter it and reload.

Tangent in a Tangent(???) The six souls

I think it is important to highlight the six already contained souls when considering this argument. Recalling possibility A, obviously how these 6 souls interacted with the monsters lead them to believe that depleting their HP still allowed them to collect the soul.

Not much information is given into the specifics of how each ended up in containers, whether Asgore killed each of them or if some were defeated by other monsters before they could get to this point. It is also not known if all the humans could reset.

Like I discussed in a previous post, Toriel mentions having the feeling when meeting all of the humans, she has the feeling they are “already old friends” (implying it isn’t the first timeline they encountered her. Note this is only mentioned after Frisk themself have also encountered her twice) and Asgore nods sadly when you tell him he has already killed you multiple times (suggesting he may be familiar with this from at least one of the previous humans). These pieces of evidence lead me to the conclusions that Asgore personally killed at least one of the humans and that all six had some semblance of determination allowing them to reset.

Why they eventually became captured despite this (again, like i said in a previous post) may be linked (in my opinion) to either a loss of their desire (and therefore determination) to continue - survival seeming impossible or their determination to return home waning - or a deliberate choice to sacrifice themselves for the cause of monsters.

*bringing tangent of tangent back to topic of original tangent now

This idea attributes more understanding into the nature of how determination and reloading works. That the humans had choice in whether to use their determination or could eventually lose that power makes the idea of Frisk also deciding what happens to their soul after defeat sound sensible.

It is also possible that Frisk’s soul shattering could suggest Chara’s intervention. It is of course Chara’s memories of Asgore insisting they remain determined that echo within the reload screen after Frisk dies so there may some sort of link there. The relationship of control between Chara and Frisk however is wholly unspecified for most of the game however so this speculation cannot be conclusive.

~This one webcomic called ‘The Thought’ by TratserEnoyreve has a scene that shows this idea about choosing death and Chara being involved pretty well here : http://tratserenoyreve.deviantart.com/art/The-Thought-45-597910634 (it was cool and inspired some of my idea so i wanted to show it :D )~

* End of Tangent * (finally)

Persisting does not specify if the soul will continue to exist forever unless destroyed or if there is a small period to use the soul before it eventually dies like others.

Boss monsters won’t die of natural causes unless they have children, that is not to say they’re immortal though because we know they can be killed (Asgore, Asriel and Toriel are/can be killed). The rest of soul types, humans and normal monsters, are also mortal and can be damaged and killed.

Composition of the soul

Monster souls are said to be made of love, hope and compassion. Human souls, as far as monsters observe, do not require these to survive and so their composition is not known. Alphys does learn however that human souls possess determination, which she concludes is what allows human souls to persist after death.

~I want to point out that Alphys harvested determination from the existing human souls, so all human souls have determination - NOT JUST FRISK! Siggghhh the amount of people that assume Frisk is the only human to possess it...nm. I’ll save the rant for later.~

A common theory among fans is that the qualities of Determination, Bravery, Justice, Kindness, Patience, Integrity and Perseverance (associated with the colours red, orange, yellow, green, aqua, blue and purple respectively) are what can/do compose human souls. Some fan theories go so far as to suggest one particular one particular trait manifests itself in each person, as the six human souls appeared to demonstrate qualities associated to one of these each.

~Now, i don’t really like going into all that jazz, especially since it’s all based on just the colour of their souls and a snowball mini golf game of Ball. So that’s all i’m going to say about those.~

Unnecessary Theory Tangent Time again! (I’m basically done this section so feel free to skip)

There is one thing about what makes up souls that i tend to theorise about that i haven’t mentioned yet...

Think about Flowey. He possess two things that that gave him life: determination and Asriel’s essence. Now, I’m not using that term lightly. We all probably understand at this point that when Asriel turned to dust - the seeds of the flowers Chara wanted their dead body to be buried with (before they were attacked) dragged back across the barrier with him - his dust became spread across the flower seeds that then grew like in normal monster funerary practices. And we know that the flowers eventually received injections of determination from Alphys awakening the essence of Asriel left there because of this dusting. See, I said the word again! Essence is mentioned specifically from the book in the Library, where we learn about monster funerals:

“When monsters get old and kick the bucket, they turn into dust. At funerals, we take that dust and spread it on that person’s favourite thing. Then their essence will live on in that thing”

Obviously at this point their soul (which is described as the culmination of their being) is destroyed. So what exactly is the difference between a monster’s essence and the culmination of their self?

I’ll be honest. I don’t know myself. In a lot of fan fiction and art I’ve encountered, the term ‘essence’ becomes lost in story and they suggest that Flowey has Asriel’s memories brought to life by determination. Some say that means Flowey is simply a husk of Asriel, like an imperfect replica missing a soul that replaces someone long dead. Others say that Asriel’s consciousness is that essence or memory, and Flowey is in fact truly the original Asriel. Either way, what really fascinates me are the ideas of memory or consciousness being that essence we’re talking about.

These properties sound like the kind of things that come from the soul rather than the body... so what could that mean?

Well, option number one: it’s not linked to the soul. Perhaps this essence is intertwined with their magic (i’m going to be talking about monster bodies a little later), which means it would have to go somewhere when the body turns to dust. Voilà, you have the essence existing inside the favourite thing. I wonder if there needs to be some emotional connection to the object for the essence to be able to make a new connection, otherwise the essence would simply exist in the location they became dust rather than what their loved ones intended.

Option number 2: it is a part of the soul, possibly the shattered pieces or some part of it that becomes dust when it’s destroyed. This then has a similar effect as option 1.

Option number 3: perhaps a monster’s ‘essence’ is neither of these things. What if monster essence is their form of an intangible afterlife. Consider that Chara, like Flowey, was awakened when exposed to a large stimuli of determination. Unlike Flowey, we have no idea how Chara functions. Most consider them to be a lingering memory that now happens to reside in Frisk. Perhaps determination’s residual effects, when powerful enough, draw other beings back from the dead if they can find a host. But this is unlikely.

Relationship with body

A soul establishes an inseparable relationship with a body. This doesn’t mean that the soul must be physically attached, but a body cannot be sentient or function without connection to at least some of the elements of a soul.

Monster bodies

For monsters, their bodies are composed of magic manipulated by the soul. Though this is a broad statement. Ghosts, for example, are fundamentally under this same definition as much as skeletons however there are obvious differences in how this magic manifests.

The physical forms taken by monsters are surprisingly diverse. To name a few: beings made entirely of fire that they can choose not to let burn things, bones composed of and held together by magic that can twist their skulls shape to make expressions, incorporeal expressions of non-tangible magic, inanimate objects possessed by magic to complete corporeal beings... all mixed in with the more normal forms of anatomy that we’d place somewhere between animal and humanoid. All these forms however are made purely of magic sourced directly from their soul.

Because a monster’s body is directly connected their soul in this way, attacks to a monster damage not their form but their soul - which is why attacks affect simply the statistic of HP rather than their physical body.

An exception to this rule is Mettaton, whose body shows sign of physical damage with the loss of limbs when you attack their soul. Though, i feel i should point out that Mettaton is made of both “metal and magic” (as included in the quiz) so parts of him are non-magic, purely physical.

Monsters food is designed to be converted to energy instantaneously on consumption, implying most monsters don’t have a need for digestive systems. Though a monster in Grillby’s does say he intends to try human food on the surface so it is likely that some forms are still capable of it.

Because of this direct connection between the soul and magic necessary for control of a body, all monsters can use some form of magic. It also makes their bodies more attuned to the disposition of the soul - which lets their battle statistics become dependent on their emotional state towards a fight. “If a monster doesn’t want to fight, it’s defenses will weaken. And the crueller the intentions of our enemies, the more their attacks will hurt us.” according to a book from the library.

Regardless of the form of a monster, with their body’s destruction the form shatters apart into s similar dust. There are notable instances from main characters in the game who are able to remain intact after losing their HP to deliver final words before eventually shattering, showing actual injuries such as cuts and losing their head. However most monsters simply just go paralysed for a second, shock on their face, and then shatter.

Human bodies

Unlike monsters, human bodies are composed mostly of water. I assume we all know what a human body is, it represents the actual things we have in real life. Human bodies have advantages over monsters because they are composed of physical magic rather than magic. It makes them stronger than monsters and lets their fighting skill be independent from their emotional state. But it does mean that humans can’t express themselves with magic in the way that monsters can.

This isn’t to say that humans may not have been able to use magic, as seven magicians on the side of the humans sealed the monsters underground. But we don’t see any evidence of humans being capable of magic within the game to ground any arguments on. A book in the library states explicitly though that “the will never know the joy of expressing themselves through magic” so obviously there’s some significant inability on human’s part to ‘express themselves’ with it.

When a monster attacks a human, their magic is targeting the soul, “the very culmination of [their] being”, rather than simply their body. This explains how HP can be lowered as simply a stat without affecting Frisk’s actual physical condition in the game (like breaking their legs or leaving bruises etc.) and how Frisk is able to survive the conditions from attacks that would normally kill a human (bombs, intense heat etc.)

~^ I mentioned this part in my tangent... but who the hell reads tangents??~

Obtaining additional souls

Souls that can persist are able to be absorbed by other beings. Souls of a similar nature cannot be harnessed by each other (monsters can’t possess monster souls and humans can’t posses human souls). Note that Flowey, being a soulless creature that classifies as neither category, was able to collect and use both types in his process to becoming the Ultimate God of Hyperdeath.

When a creature in possession of more than one soul dies, all souls existing connected to them die as well... though considering the only example of this is Chara, who maintains some sort of existence considering they’re awoken by Frisk (at the very least in genocide routes, debatably in all of them), I personally think the term ‘die’ may not be totally correct...

~and no, i’m not going to start discussing the tens of different interpretations for Chara’s role. So i’ll just stay as vague as that.~

Containing more souls makes the being owning them more powerful, manifesting a physical change in appearance and a dramatic increase in strength and attack abilities. The strength of the souls becomes cumulative, with additional souls adding their original strength to the new total.

The combined soul strength of all the monsters in the Underground is equivalent to one human soul.

~(though not including Napstablook for some reason...) As this doesn’t extend to Mettaton or mad dummy, it may have something to with his non-tangible nature~

Examples within the game:

- A human possessing an additional monster soul or a monster possessing a human soul becomes powerful enough to pass through the barrier capable of resisting the strength of any monster or human without this.

- Flowey possessing six human souls is in possession of enough determination to override Frisk’s ability (this is an indication of the irregular amount of determination within Frisk considering this much is necessary). It also gives him the power to entirely destroy Frisk’s save file.

- The power of seven human souls in one being is considered to make the being a god. This power is also the standard needed to break the barrier.

- Asriel, in his true Ultimate God of Hyperdeath form, is composed of six human souls and all the monster souls of the Underground that equates to the strength of 7 human souls. With this power he is able to regenerate a monster form for himself again and shatter the barrier.

Comparing the strength of this form to when he had six souls, we receive an idea of how significantly the increase of a single human soul’s worth of power can raise attack.

Determination

~A fair deal of determination stuff feels like it should really be classified as it’s own field of lore pseudoscience. So i’m not going to go into detail. Let’s just get the basics out here though...~

As previously mentioned, human souls naturally possess an entity known simply as ‘determination’. Alphys describes determination in her research to be “the will to keep living... the resolve to change fate.”

Determination is considered in multiple contexts to mean different things. However, in discussing the element as it relates to the soul, it is what lets Frisk (and quite possibly the other six souls at some point) reload after dying and reset the timeline if they wish to do so.

Here’s an overview of how i understand determination to work:

in a situation or environment that fills Frisk with the emotions and convictions of determination, this determination manifests itself as a physical thing called a save point

Accessing the save point and making use of that power, flavour text for the player provides a description of what filled Frisk with determination and they recover their HP. (determination has been shown to be able to recover HP. Consider dreams in the Asriel fight “through your DETERMINATION, the dream became true. HP maxed out.”)

Using the determination they access at this save point, they can SAVE their progress - a manifestation to their determination to continue on the path they are on (as it saves over any previous files)

They then continue on their way.

When they lose all their HP, their soul shatters and they hear Chara’s memory of Asgore speaking encouragement over their sick bed when they were dying. He specifically tells them they can’t give up, that this is all just a bad dream, and that they should stay determined. This is COMPLETELY personal interpretation but i like to think this is somehow Chara trying to communicate to Frisk through sharing memories to press on.

This reminds them of their determination and Frisk is given the option to continue.

By selecting to continue, their determination to survive brings them back to their last source of determined commitment to their progress (i.e. their save point). This brings everything about them, from their physical to soul-related properties, back to the state they were in when they SAVEd.

~I’m not going to go into quitting. Because that’s a topic for another day.~

Alphys also suggests it is the component of human souls that allows human souls to persist after death, whether this is true or not though is never confirmed.

~if it is it raises questions about how boss monsters persist... do they maybe have determination? Or perhaps Alphys was simply mistaken, assuming it was used for persisting when it actually allowed reloading instead~

---

Annd that’s everything. That i can think of. There’s probably more. If there is i’ll probably edit the original post. But that’s what i understand about souls haha.

And now that this is done i can go back to harmless lyric posts and continue writing my fanfiction because it sorta fell on hold i got so many theory concepts i wanted to back up while doing this lol.

#undertale #undertale trash #undertale theory #why'd i waste my time on this??#meh #atleast i had fun doing it #it raised more questions than answers really #and did you SEE those tangents i went on???#after i'd typed one or two i just decided to do personal notes raising the question and then just moved on #otherwise this thing could've taken weeks lol #i spent days of my life on this #atleast i somehow managed to write a theory without bringing soriel into it this time #dodged a bullet there #i mean #look how much i typed because i wanted to compare monster and human souls #imagine the essay that could be my soriel rant #it would be hell #essay

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thenichibro · 8 years ago

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Winter 2017 Anime First Impressions

The first season we’re really feeling the effects of more anime simulcast services. Yellow subs, torrents not being under the CR/Funi umbrella - dark times. Due to the fact I can only DDL at college, I am choosing not to watch LWA or Onihei because I wouldn’t be able to keep up with them. I’m definitely going back to LWA after the season’s over though. Regardless, this season has the usual ups and downs, but initially I’m seeing a lot of ups - Maidragon is fantastic, Demi-chan and Urara are cute as hell, and Scum’s Wish is almost emotionally draining to watch, it’s so enthralling. Here’s what I’m watching, with MAL links: Fuuka (MAL) Starting off, we have an ecchi almost-harem manga that I didn't like. Great. Fuuka has the original plot elements of a shut-in guy that popular on the internet, who also has a super-popular girl as his childhood friend and soon gets to know another cute girl. Also his three sisters never wear clothes. Cool. Fuuka wasn't really that shit until the truck-to-the-face level plot twist that occurred in the manga, which I hope they will reach in the anime just for the reactions to how bullshit it is. Other than that, Fuuka is a less-than-stellar sort of harem about a whiny, bland main character. Fuuka even falls on the MC twice in the first episode for good measure. Oh, I guess also the plot involves playing music, but that's basically just a way for more random good things to happen to an unlikable character. OP and ED are nothing special, either. If anything, Diomedia's art style is usually good. Otherwise, avoid. Masamune-kun no Revenge (MAL) A story of a fat kid who got ripped and now wants to get revenge on his former crush. It's something new, for sure. The completely worthless perfect-in-everything trope is now supplied by both the female AND male leads. What a show. At the very least, Masamune-kun tempers the trope by giving both mains embarrassing reasons to keep up airs. The girls we've met aren't half bad, and I for one support a peppy class rep rather than the standard strict, megane type. The princess-complex is so tiring every time it happens, so lets hope that the show moves more toward Makabe/Aki in their real selves rather than putting on airs. Masamune-kun's plot actually strikes me as similar to Last Game, if anyone's read that manga. While I doubt this show will carry far enough into the future to deal with marriage, the story of a guy trying to ruin/outdo a girl and falling for her is definitely there. I have no strong feelings one way or another about this show, at least not yet. That will probably depend on how much princess Aki vs. normal Aki we see. Minami Kamakura Koukou Joshi Jitensha-bu (MAL) I thought Long Riders was last season? Anyway, here we have a slice of life about a girl in a biking club. Relaxing enough premise, for sure. First impressions are that this show takes it pretty slow, judging from the fact that it takes 14 minutes before the main characters get to school at all. That is not a complaint, just an observation. Another is how different the landscape art is from the character art. The show opens with some amazing nature stills, while the character art is, for lack of a better term, "old." As in, it almost has the feel of an earlier 2000s show. I did wonder how much into biking the show would get, like Long Riders did, and the end of episode 1 answered that for me. The last two minutes or so are a live action segment where two of the seiyuu learn about getting into biking by talking to a guy running a bike shop. While the super serious stuff is what kind of made Long Riders fall flat for me, maybe it won't be as serious. We’ll see. Nyanko Days (MAL) I guess since I can't get my Teekyuu fix, I'll have to find a different two-minute show. Nyanko Days is about Tomoko, a girl who has three personified cats. For a two-minute show, that's about how far episode 1 got. She was depressed about being lonely, but cheers up upon arriving home to her three cats, Maa, Shii, and Rou. For a show this short the animation is surprisingly clean, and the 30sec ED was suitably full of "nya" and various words combined with it. It's cute, and it's two minutes long, so why not? Seiren (MAL) I came into this show knowing little more than it was a school romantic comedy, and overall I think it benefited my first impressions. The show focuses on three main girls and their relations with the male MC, and dedicates a few episodes to each of them out of the 12-episode cour. I'm immediately wary of this, only because it gives me flashbacks (read: PTSD) to Photokano, where they focused on a different girl each few episodes and then reset time the next section. I do enjoy the lack of the transfer student trope, at least for the MC. The first moments successfully give you the sense that there is already a school community, something I prefer over having to sort out relationships individually following a transfer. Overall, the MC is pretty standard and the current girl has a tiring personality. As long as this show stays far from resembling trash like Photokano, I think this show will be defined by the personality of the current girl, whether you like that or not. Chaos;Child (MAL) Because we needed more of the Chaos;Head storyline. I don't remember much about Chaos;Head, other than the incredibly shit voice of the main character and the incredibly shit everything else. I watched the first episode in a 1-hour combination with "Episode 0," which is a recap of Head. If you get the HorribleSubs release, that's what the file will be. Anyway, Child itself takes place six years after Head, in which the main character of that show causes some event or something. The recap doesn't help at all. Child follows a school's newspaper club investigating murders similar in strangeness to those during Head. Initially, Takuru seems like a person interested in the depravity and bizaare level of the murders, but that personality gets completely dropped when he tries investigating the newest murder - he completely loses all cool after seeing a body. While that otherwise may be a fairly normal reaction, it goes at odds with the Takuru that had looked at pictures of previous murders and called them "juicy" and interesting. He also regains the first personality after the event is over. Just seems way too abrupt. I will say Itou Kanako returns as she does for everything semi-colon related, and her voice is as good as ever in the OP/ED. I'm thankful for the lack of the otaku protag, but otherwise this seems just as nonsensical as Chaos;Head but with better art. Not looking forward to more. One Room (MAL) The second short show of the season, from famed artist Kantoku. That's the only reason I'm watching this, anyway. This show makes the initially strange choice of being shot in POV, with a voiceless male protagonist. The first episode sees him meet his new high-school girl neighbor, then grow close enough to her that she asks him to help her study. The show is billed as series of shorts focusing on three girls, so I would expect something like four episodes for each one. The most noticeable part of the show is the art, and damn does it look good. Closeups of the girl, fluttering cherry petals, everything is beautiful as a still and smooth when in motion. The POV part is less of a problem for me as I see it as similar to a visual novel, and with the girls being cute and the art being great, this will be an enjoyable watch each week. Kemono Friends (MAL) An all-CG mobile-game show, and a full 24 minutes at that. Why am I watching this? One of the things that stood out immediately was the grating sound of the first two characters's voices. Kemono Friends involves Japari Park, in which anthropomorphized animal girls live and have to deal with aliens called Ceruleans. While the show is clearly projecting a light-hearted tone, it was strange to hear heavy techno during a battle with a big Cerulean. This show looks like no more than a walk around the different areas to see different animal girls. I'd be satisfied with that if it wasn’t just so boring. The OP is suitably bouncy, but even if this show doesn’t get serious, 24 minutes of bad animation is a serious slog. Kobayashi-san Chi no Maid Dragon (MAL) Ah Kyoani, the true saviors of anime. Kyoto Animation's production budget meets the artstyle and writing of Danna ga Nani's creator. I'm on board. A working adult who drunkenly invites a dragon-girl to be her maid. A unique premise, to be sure. Right off the bat, the contrast between the Tohru's unfazed optimism and Kobayashi being done with her shit all the time made me laugh my ass off. The sequence with Tohru getting more scared of humans when Kobayashi and Takiya are drunk was also top-tier. Art-wise the show looks great, animation is smooth, and Tohru is cute as hell. Always a plus. In addition, I think Kobayashi is a grounded character with a few weird tastes, which is somewhat more relatable than a totally “normal” person, if I'm being honest. Regarding the OP/ED, I will do anything for more fhana, and Maidragon's OP does not disappoint. No ED in episode 1. Overall, I was surprised at how much I liked a show with such an ostensibly strange premise, but I am wholeheartedly excited for the next episode. Kuzu no Honkai (MAL) I was immediately drawn in by the brutally emotional premise of Kuzu no Honkai, or Scum's Wish. Two students dating, only using the other as a physical replacement for an impossible emotional love. Wow. I was almost shocked when the episode ended, because I had been enthralled the entire time. Even through the intimate scenes, there was a heavy air, one punctuated by wells of emotion that kept me breathless. Something has to be said for the sound design too - the crescendos of music match Hana's emotional ups and downs to a T. Flawless. Likewise, the art throughout, especially with the black watercolors clouding white paper, the choices of camera angles during the intimate scene - it brings out the regretful and simultaneously indulgent feelings that the scene evokes. The fact that sexual encounters in anime are almost always moments for comedy rather than real emotion just makes Kuzu no Honkai's scenes more unique. Just the very idea of feelings so strong that two lonely people would come together to physically try to stave them off is both depressing and greatly intriguing at the same time. Even the general atmosphere of episode 1 enriched the painful introspective Hana was going through, culminating in the titular wish. With the courage to take a darker look at high-school romance, I want to see more. Watch this show. Demi-chan wa Kataritai (MAL) I didn't think I had a thing for something as specific as "blonde vampires," but there you go. Man, does this show make me feel good. A world where racism towards demi-humans has calmed down to the point where it's a normal part of life. No serious, overbearing issues, just a fun, light-hearted look at the concept of a demi-human living a modern life. I think I find the epitome of that in Takahashi, who doesn't really want much more than to just know more about demi-humans - he has a genuine desire to get to know the subtleties of their lives. Soft-spoken and laid back, he is the perfect foil for the quirky, bubbly Hikari, the aforementioned blonde vampire. Funny exchanges with a few heartwarming moments combine to form one hell of a great first episode. The ED fits the relatively calm tone perfectly, but I'm partial to the OP by TrySail after they caught my eye doing Classroom Crisis' OP. Give it a listen. While there are some noticeably harem-esque undertones, if this show stays relatively away from Monster Musume ecchi and carves its own niche, I will enjoy it to the fullest. Urara Meirochou (MAL) [To get this out of the way first, FUCK Anime Network - who the hell thinks yellow subs, and hardsubs at that, still look fine? At least with the CR/Funi deal I would think we would have some consistency for once, damn.] I saved this for last because it looked like the most healing show this season. That, and midriffs. I'm a sucker for the traditional Japanese style (Mushishi, Katanagatari, Uchouten Kazoku), and Meirochou's art and architecture do not disappoint. Thus far, this is a heartwarming tale of four girls working to find themselves through their style of fortune-telling. The four girls are quite cute, even if Nono's voice is pitched just a bit too high. Also, midriffs. I hope that stays. I also like Chiya's wild-person-new-to-society personality, and I think it meshes interestingly with three other girls that, while adjusted to society outside of Meirochou, are otherwise just as new. Overall, this is a show that takes an interesting setting and premise and aims to tell a story through four cute girls. What's not to love?

#fuuka #masamune-kun no revenge #minami kamakura koukou joshi jitensha-bu #nyanko days #seiren #chaos;child #one room #kemono friends #kobayashi-san chi no maid dragon #kuzu no honkai #demi-chan wa kataritai #urara meirochou #winter 2017 anime #my anime reviews

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cynthiatherrera · 5 years ago

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Today’s portfolios “Can’t get no satisfaction” from yesterday’s instruments

The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Who captured our imagination (as they did much of the world’s) from the ‘60s through the ‘90s. While we still love listening to them today, we can’t help but notice that modern bands use a variety of new instruments. While guitars and drums are still ubiquitous, it’s hard to find a band today that doesn’t also have a MacBook laptop plugged into a DJ controller and a deck of synthesizers to create richer and deeper overtones for their music.

The investment-instrument landscape has evolved similarly over recent decades. When The Who sang “Talkin’ ‘bout my generation,” the portfolios of that generation would have been well served by traditional high-quality fixed income instruments, such as Treasury bonds, but after a forty-year, 1000 basis point rally, the portfolios of today’s generation “…Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” as The Rolling Stones said, with yields on most components of the Bloomberg-Barclays Aggregate index currently below 1%.

With a nod to the Eagles in “The Long Run,” it will be difficult to generate attractive positive real returns from high quality fixed income over a long time horizon, until and unless yields reset meaningfully higher (something we don’t foresee for quite some time). In the meantime, investors will need to employ new instruments – MacBook and synthesizer equivalents – to create the portfolio enhancements necessary to meet income and return targets, while still solving for the myriad market influences that have no historical precedent today.

These secular influences have become even more onerous with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. A cataclysmic global economic shock that will result in lingering headwinds to growth and inflation for years to come. But offsetting this is an epic global policy response that has exacerbated the existing dearth of attractive yielding assets, while temporarily removing the real economy left tail risk of an entrenched and deep recession. Unpacking the nuances of these policies and understanding the influences they’ll continue to have on 2020 asset markets is critical in order to identify the new investment instruments that will help our portfolios remain resilient.

The extraordinary U.S. fiscal and monetary response

The U.S. policy response has been the most remarkable of the developed markets, not least because of the explicit marriage of monetary and fiscal policy for the first time since World War II. In fact, in the first four months of 2020, the U.S. government ran a fiscal deficit of about $1.5 trillion while the Federal Reserve purchased nearly $1.8 trillion of Treasuries, amounting to a direct transfer of ~$1.5 trillion in printed money from the central bank to the private sector. Moreover, the Congressional Budget Office estimates a $3.8 trillion federal deficit for fiscal year 2020, ending September 30, leaving another roughly $2 trillion to spend over the next 3.5 months. To wit, the Treasury currently holds $1.5 trillion in cash, shattering the previous record high, representing demonstrable real-economy policy “dry powder.” The impact of such massive Main Street targeted programs could be the equivalent of almost 37% higher household income over these crisis months, than was the case pre-crisis.

These U.S. policies have also had an immense impact on the financial economy. As with previous bouts of quantitative easing (QE), the Fed bought large chunks of fixed income assets, thereby growing its balance sheet relative to the size of the U.S. Aggregate index in ways that create a “crowding in” effect – essentially forcing investors to buy ever-riskier assets – and the 2020 version of QE has been unprecedented in that regard. The Fed has purchased assets that equate to nearly 10% the size of the U.S. Aggregate index over the last 100 days, bringing the balance sheet to more than 30% the size of this index and shattering its previous record share.

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To be sure, the job losses have been devastating to many, and certain segments of the labor market will be negatively impacted indefinitely. However, the first economic readings from the initial phases of the nascent U.S. economic reopening provide evidence that these polices have been highly effective at stabilizing overall consumption, as well as building private sector savings that now provides an important buffer to the uncertainties that lie ahead. As a case in point, the overall policy response resulted in April data on personal consumption spiking with a record increase, which contrasts starkly with the ugly labor market data we’ve seen in the wake of the lockdowns. As April’s unemployment rate rose to 14.7%, U.S. personal income climbed 8.5% from January’s pre-virus rate. Moreover, through the first four months of 2020, U.S. personal saving has risen by $907 billion, more than twice as much as the last four months of 2019. Relatedly, U.S. commercial bank deposits have grown by near $2.1 trillion since the end of 2019. Thus, there is massive dry powder to offset lost 2020 growth potential, which is estimated to be around $1.1 trillion (estimated at roughly a 5% full year 2020 U.S. GDP contraction).

The policy response in Europe

Simultaneously, Europe has also instituted some critical initiatives that constructively marry fiscal and monetary policy. In what appears to be a “Here Comes The Sun” moment for Europe, the EU Recovery Fund transcends the decade-long intra-continental debate on how to allocate fiscal leniency. Instead, the Coronavirus crisis has given way to an increasingly common narrative among policymakers that no country is at fault for the pandemic and that this exogenous, symmetric, shock has produced asymmetric outcomes. Accordingly, the EU Recovery Response is intended to provide a disproportionate benefit to peripheral countries, with Italy, Spain, and Greece appearing to be key beneficiaries.

Indeed, PEPP’s flexibility on both the timing and destination of policy relief, means the Recovery Fund will likely bring sovereign spreads closer to pre-Covid-19 levels. The mutualization of the program’s financing is also an important structural evolution for markets as the EU will ultimately become the largest global class of AAA assets in coming years. The EU already has roughly EUR 50 billion in bonds and we estimate that could ultimately grow to nearly EUR 850 billion over time, making it a major sovereign bond market comparable to Germany and France. Even a $100 billion re-allocation by foreign exchange reserve managers from USD into EUR bonds would be significant for FX markets.

We are witnessing a historic time for Europe and a potential investment game-changer for markets there. Few incentives have existed over recent years to drive investment toward Europe, but with European asset valuations relatively attractive today, and potentially efficacious economic policy now in place, a low geopolitical risk profile, and U.S. investors increasingly nervous about the upcoming election, Europe may be the beneficiary of incremental capital flows.

The upshot for asset allocation

So, virus-shock challenged fundamentals have quite possibly been more than offset by a blunt-force global policy response. At the same time, a deficit of attractive yielding assets has been compounded by aggressive central bank QE. For asset allocators, a complex, but opportunity-rich, environment of dispersion has become a dominant influence over portfolio construction.

In fixed income, high quality yields are too low to justify holding meaningful positions, so optimal portfolio construction involves moving down the quality spectrum. However, the paradigm of relying on traditional monikers of “Investment grade” and “high yield” is “All Over Now” (hat tip to the Stones). Indeed, the old orthodoxy of maximizing yield for a given rating has given way to a world where IG and HY have “Come Together” (Beatles) in ways that make industry and security selection far more important than adhering to generic asset-rating labels. For example, all else equal, we’d rather own a BB-rated communications company than a BBB-rated energy company.

The same is true for equities, where we choose to eschew the conventional debate about the relative merits of factors such as growth vs. value. Today, identifying durable cash flow generation is the holy grail of equity investing. The wedge between growth vs. no-growth entities, cash flow generators vs. cash burners, those who make ongoing research and development (R&D) investment vs. those who don’t, etc., is widening. The market is rewarding those who are investing in the instruments of the future, while the relics of the past stagnate.

Relatedly, we are passionate about analysis around leverage, liquidity, and cash flow. We see the hyperbolic narrative of excessive leverage in the U.S. corporate sector as missing critically important free cash flow trends. In fact, balance sheets are broadly quite healthy and companies’ ability to service low yielding debt has arguably never been better. Similarly, the common refrain that equity PE ratios are too high vs. history misses the more relevant metric of free cash flow yield. The obvious and persistent outperformance of companies that generate large cash flows renders traditional valuation metrics less useful and provides a much cleaner comparison to fixed income yields. Through that apples-to-apples lens, free cash flow yields for much of the U.S. equity market offer compelling relative value versus depressed fixed-income yields.

So, the 40-year era of rate declines is largely over. high quality fixed income assets offer tactical opportunities but only de minimis return potential from here. Fiscal stimulus is epic and is creating an impact on savings and consumption that will buoy the economy significantly more than most are expecting. Monetary policy stimulus is ubiquitous and will crowd investors into risk as the singular avenue to generate needed return. Europe has put into place a historic evolution of fiscal policy that radically changes an investment climate that was heretofore relying solely on overly aggressive interest rate policy.

And while the world has been screaming “Gimme Shelter” (Rolling Stones) for the past several months, as people are gradually unlocked from their homes, we have little doubt that pent-up up savings and consumption will transition into real economy velocity and growth. Yet perhaps investors still need just a little bit of “Patience” (Guns ‘N Roses), as the coming U.S. election, increased social unrest, and ongoing coronavirus headlines all risk creating more volatility in markets.

It is against this backdrop that we are tasked with selecting the new instruments for 2020’s portfolio. We plan on employing a slate of middle-quality fixed income instruments, mixed with equity exposure (both in the U.S. and in Europe) to sectors that fall on the right side of leverage, liquidity and cash flow dynamics. That combined with opportunistic use of hedges like duration, gold, FX and volatility tools should create a successful and harmonious portfolio, able to withstand the volatility brought on by ongoing virus uncertainty, and the reflationary pressure brought on by its eventual successful resolution.

Rick Rieder, Managing Director, is BlackRock’s Chief Investment Officer of Global Fixed Income and is Head of the Global Allocation Investment Team. Russell Brownback, Managing Director, is Head of Global Macro positioning for Fixed Income, and both are regular contributors to The Blog. Trevor Slaven, Director, is a portfolio manager on BlackRock’s Global Fixed Income team and is also the Head of Macro Research for Fundamental Fixed Income, and he co-authored this post.

Investing involves risks, including possible loss of principal. Fixed income risks include interest-rate and credit risk. Typically, when interest rates rise, there is a corresponding decline in bond values. Credit risk refers to the possibility that the bond issuer will not be able to make principal and interest payments. International investing involves risks, including risks related to foreign currency, limited liquidity, less government regulation and the possibility of substantial volatility due to adverse political, economic or other developments. These risks may be heightened for investments in emerging markets. This material is not intended to be relied upon as a forecast, research or investment advice, and is not a recommendation, offer or solicitation to buy or sell any securities or to adopt any investment strategy. The opinions expressed are as of June 22, 2020 and may change as subsequent conditions vary. The information and opinions contained in this post are derived from proprietary and non-proprietary sources deemed by BlackRock to be reliable, are not necessarily all-inclusive and are not guaranteed as to accuracy. As such, no warranty of accuracy or reliability is given and no responsibility arising in any other way for errors and omissions (including responsibility to any person by reason of negligence) is accepted by BlackRock, its officers, employees or agents. This post may contain “forward-looking” information that is not purely historical in nature. Such information may include, among other things, projections and forecasts. There is no guarantee that any forecasts made will come to pass. Reliance upon information in this post is at the sole discretion of the reader. Prepared by BlackRock Investments, LLC, member Finra ©2020 BlackRock, Inc. All rights reserved. BLACKROCK is a registered trademark of BlackRock, Inc., or its subsidiaries in the United States or elsewhere. All other marks are the property of their respective owners. USRMH0620U-1222539-1/6 from BlackRock Blog https://www.blackrockblog.com/2020/06/23/todays-portfolios-cant-get-no-satisfaction-from-yesterdays-instruments/

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iamskyuvraj-blog · 7 years ago

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How to know if your phone is hacked or leaking data?

Smartphones are all fun due to the vast freedom we enjoy on them, It is easy to use and has a wide range of features.But the most important thing is that our smartphones have become the secret keepers of our personal and professional life. Whether it be personal photos, videos, contacts, financial information or business emails and files, you cannot risk losing or leaking any information to an outsider at any cost.If you're worried about having your phone spied on, you're not alone! Millions of people have voiced their concerns regarding privacy over the past few years. It's scary to think that people can spy on your phone, your data, your activity without you being aware of it, but luckily, there are many ways to find out if your phone has been hacked or leaking data. Most people take this lightly, but this is a very serious problem of the current times, Because if your phone is hacked or leaking data than it can be used against you as an ultimate weapon.You should watch this video in which Edward Snowden answers the similar question. he said you DON'T, but if you keep eyes on the phone behavior and battery you can find out that is your phone is hacked or leaking data. Why will Anyone hack Your phone? Because our smartphones have become the secret keepers of our personal and professional life. Whether it be personal photos, videos, contacts, financial information or business emails and files, they keep all of our data. so if anyone wants our data then our smartphone will be the first target.There are many reasons for hacking, tapping, and spying but I am not including all of them in this scenario Hacking is supposed to mean unauthorized access to devices and networks.Now, If someone has hacked your phone or an app is forcing your phone to leak data, then there could be three possible reasons behind it. He/She/Hacker/App or agency wants your personal files (Personal photos, videos, documents etc). He/She/Hacker/App or agency wants your passwords ( Banks, Profiles, Social, Websites etc). He/She/Hacker/App or agency just wants to play with your mind or collecting regular data for their database, Promotions, spams and offers. Now in all three cases The Hacker or App need Internet Connection of your Smartphone.so your data can be transferred to any server. So if really, your phone is hacked or leaking data, You can find out about it, with the tips given below.

How to know if your phone is hacked or leaking data?

Now if you want to really know all the methods and tips to know if your phone has been hacked and leaking data.You have to keep eyes on your Phone Behavior, Data Usage, Battery, Background Noise, Texts, Calls, and Emails to find out the answer. How? Just read the below part of this post and ask questions to yourself and you will find out the answer to your question " is My Phone has been hacked or leaking data?" We have prepared and collected these "list of symptoms of data leakage and phone hacking" and their respective reasons from many sources and after a deep research. So here are the symptoms of the phone being hacked or leaking data. 1. Odd Phone Behavior All phones can do strange things from time to time but if this is happening on a regular basis it could be a sign that your phone is being accessed by hidden software.Look for any changes in your phone's behavior. Your phone constantly feels warm without any activity. Smartphone Spy apps could be running in the background. it suddenly lights up when not in use or makes random beeping noises. Android Spy software could be running and waiting for intervals where they can do all the stuff without getting noticed. Your phone regularly shut down by itself, even when the battery is charged. Some spy apps can be quite buggy and are known to cause this. 2. Compare and Analyse Increased data Usage Reports Some best spy Apps usage low data so will be almost impossible to spot, but some poor programs will show significant data use. Your normal or monthly data usage increase dramatically. Spy apps use extra data to send the information collected from your phone, Check Data usage of the complete os. And compare with app data usage and how much you actually used. There can be a single spy app or several spy apps, you can find them by comparing separate app data usage. Look out for any unexplained increase in your monthly data usage. 3. Battery Draining Spy apps programs will run your battery down very quickly, however, the more modern programs are designed to make less demand on the battery and are harder to spot so look out for any sudden changes in your Smartphone battery life. Your Smartphone needs charging more often. Continous data transfer and tracking.Malicious app their because that apps use an excess amount of battery and internet. Your Smartphone battery is draining more quickly than usual. Tracking app could be running in the background. 4. Background Noise or Sound Background Noise can be a result of a bad connection but If it is happening more than normal it could be another sign of your phone is hacked or leaking data. Is there any sound like clicking, beeping or voices in the background or from speakers? Some call listening and recording features can cause these noise as they access your phone like a conference call. Does Your phone calls have been filled with strange noises or echoing lately? somebody might be listening in. You may also Like: How to Block Microsoft to collect data on Windows 10 What is Flashing and How to Flash Android Smartphone 5. Receiving Unusual Texts, Calls, and Emails After receiving your data Your information will be used in many types of bad work and spamming.So you might start getting text messages, Emails and Calls from people in your contact complaining about they received unpleasant unsupported or unknown email/message/ text from your number or Email. Receiving strange text messages and Emails containing random numbers, symbols or characters. The remote control feature of spy software works by sending secret coded text messages to your phone and in some cases, these can be seen. 6. Use Apps to check where your data is being sent

viaProtect Android and iOS users can use viaProtect. The app is free and can scan and reveal the data being sent out in the background without your knowledge. Now check for any strange activity. OS Monitor Another software is OS Monitor, it is for Android only. This app provides you with details of which app is connecting to which server and what are the IP addresses of the servers. 7. Check your internet connection signals Close all running app. Switch on the data and leave your phone for few seconds, now check the internet signal. There should be no incoming or outgoing signal visible in the network/internet status signals. Now if the outgoing signal is visible, even after closing all apps and leaving your phone for few second, Your device is Leaking data. 8. Check Permission Control You can check Permissions for any app so you will find which app is using more than required permissions to work. For Example, A simple Music player doesn't need location access to work. Why a single player game required permission to write and edit Phone contacts? Why a gallery app needs location and Wifi switching Permissions? 9. Device Administration and App Management Basically, check the apps with notification access and device administration activated.If there is any suspicious app on the list of device administration activated. They can cause data leakage. Go to your Smartphone's app management and watch for any new app installed on your phone that you can't recognize and after getting some research, uninstall it.

Tips to stop Data leakage and Unhack your phone?

I hope you all will be a little bit concerned about safety and privacy till now through this post, you will clearly know till now that is your phone is hacked or is there any app is leaking data. To Reduce the Privacy risks and stop the data leakage problem. Most of the time you will find out that there will be an app that is doing all the bad stuff to your phones like huge battery and internet usage, Background activity, Unnecessary permissions, and required Device administrator permission without any need.So if you found that app Uninstall it. otherwise, these apps can be really dangerous in near future. For Extra cure and protection, We have prepared a list of Tips to stop Data leakage and Unhack your phone. Remove all the Bloatware and unnecessary apps on your Smartphone. Watch for any new app installed on your phone that you can't recognize and after getting some research, uninstall it. Check these 42 spyware apps and Match all the listed apps with installed Apps on Your Phones and if Any of the listed spyware apps are installed on your Smartphone. Uninstall them. Change all passwords which are saved in Smartphone and its Browser, using any Alternative Browser and device to decrease your chance of getting hacked again. Do not use the Smartphone having all the above symptoms for login into Banking or for Online Shopping Transaction. Upgrade and update the Smartphone OS on your Smartphones. Because developers remove known bugs and errors in latest updates. Check and take command of Permission Control setting of your Android Smartphone and only give required permissions to an app. Take a backup of your phone data and formate (factory reset/ hard reset) your Smartphone. Never install apps from (3rd party websites or) outside play store. Apps on the play store are a little bit more secure. Use an App locker and security app to tighten the security of your smartphone. You may also Like: How to Download Torrents Anonymously on Android How To Erase Data From Android Smartphone Permanently Conclusion: As I already said Most of the time you will find out that there will be an app or and malware app that is doing all the bad stuff to your phone and your data.So after reading this post "How to know if your phone is hacked or leaking data?" if you found an app, which is doing all the bad stuff Uninstall it. otherwise, these apps can be really dangerous in near future for you and your phone.I hope yo9u will find some important tips and knowledge in this post. And I also hope that this post will help you to fight back about the spying apps and services which are really hungry for your data and personal information.You can also share your views and advise regarding this post and topic using the comment section.Thank you for visiting our blog Keep sharing and keep visiting Andro Root. Read the full article

#Android #Hacking #Privacy

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brieflyprofoundsandwich · 7 years ago

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Linking decision manufacturers to a vibrant network of information, ideas and also people, Bloomberg promptly and precisely delivers organisation and monetary information, news as well as insight around the world. In the mid-fourteenth century, the town was moved and also transferred in between the White and the Black Dunajec Rivers. Copyright © 2013-2017 Podhalańska Państwowa Wyższa Szkoła Zawodowa w Nowym Targu. Agencies might establish Recent Graduate Programs over of 1 year if the training demands of a specific placement require a longer as well as much more organized program. Nasz Box jest centrum społeczności CrossFit którą razem tworzymy, w której nawzajem się motywujemy i wspieramy oraz dobrze bawimy. We extremely advise the cabin for any individual planning to get closer to nature - fantastic for couples and family members! 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survivingjapan · 7 years ago

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EPISODE 12 “Cries in Japanese” - Steffen

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHh THE ANGELS HAVE SPOKEN, I AM THE CHOSEN ONE THAT JUST FUCKING HAPPENEDDDDDD SHOOKETH. AND NOW IM AT MERGE WITH A LOT MORE LIFE LEFT IN ME GAWD. GAWD IS GOOD. PURRAISE GAWD FUR VITTORY

https://youtu.be/2e2WBCDcOSs

http://youtu.be/fi-5lcsiBHc godt

Okay now that I've got my composure back, here's a recap of what happened: 1) I made a chat with Steffen and Drew, made a very logical and reasonable plea, and awaited their reply for several hours 2) I flat-out told Dom and Ashton I would be voting for one of them for the sake of clarity. Ended up deciding on Ashton since he tried to lie to me again like I'm some idiot? 3) Steffen and Drew were honest with me - flat-out said they were sending me home 4) I get frustrated and rageful. I decide that just because they say I'm out doesn't mean I'm out, so I go to Ashton and spill tea on how they don't trust him 5) He runs back to Drew and tells him what I say 6) I explode in main chat because I have nothing to lose and make it a point to know that the 4 of them are tight 7) 45 minutes before tribal, Pippa messages me, saying how she likes my genuine nature, doesn't think I deserve to leave, and would be willing to hand me her and Andrew's idol. 8) I freak out and then find myself in a f3 alliance with the both of them - the deal is that I play the idol on myself and vote for Drew. (Which is what I did) 9) Before our idol exchange is complete, Sarah starts rage-calling me (on Snap and on Skype) to say that I wasn't going anywhere. 10) Confused, I let her continue as we go on call. She tells me of her special idol that resets the challenge. She promises to throw so that I can merge. and I was over here contemplating how I would face Matt and Bodhi after getting pre-merged. wowza! dont count miss crow out! VL Confessional: caw caw aint dead yet bitch!

Now that merge has come around, I've been offered wayyy too many alliances. First off, we have the general, villains alliance of the last 5 of us. Then we have the inner core of that between myself, Tommy, and Sarah. Then we have the true inner core of that between myself, Sarah, and Brian. Then we have the iconic power duo of myself and Sarah within that. THEN I'm now working with Andrew and Pippa in a final 3 alliance. AND ON TOP OF THAT Johnny is trying to orchestrate an alliance between myself, Brian, him, and Steffen AND THE CHERRY ON THE FUCKING CAKE Is that Drew is still trying to salvage w/e the fuck we have at this point... but I told him no. so. there's that. ANYWAYS. CROW HAS LIFE AGAIN IN THIS GAME!

SO WOW! Honestly, the past 12 hours has been overwhelmingly shocking, and I've purposely taken a step back for multiple reasons. One was because I didn't want to dig too deep into people about what happened with Ashton's blindside, particularly with Crow and Steffen, and also I didn't want to be too eager. Last time I played I was way too eager at merge, and it caught me on the second vote, so I'm not trying to go down that early again this time. Let's recap though: 1. Crow got an idol given to him by a hero, and no one knows which one yet, and that person made a deal with him that Crow couldn't tell anyone, and it means he won't even tell me. 2. Crow doesn't trust Steffen anymore because Steffen voted for Crow originally, and then used his power, which made Crow think that Steffen didn't trust him, and that Crow would use his vote against Steffen, which made Crow wary. 3. Steffen had a second "idol" he didn't tell me about............ INTERESTING! I mean listen. I wouldn't have told Steffen if I found an idol either, but still, I partially thought we had an understanding, but I also totally wouldn't expect him to just give it to me, that's his, and he can do what he wants with it. If anything, I can guilt trip him about our idol. 4. Drew knew about Steffen's vote steal idol, which means that those two revealed themselves as a tight duo as well, and I know that I have that tight duo relationship with Drew, and also with Steffen, and in fact I share an idol with both of them, so I'm curious as to what they may or may not have told each other... All I will find out soon I'm sure. 5. Tommy told me that there was an alliance with Isaac, Kendall, Alex, Drew, Pippa, Andrew, but little does he know that I was in that alliance too, and I think it's getting out because Alex told Tommy after the aftermath of the Isaac vote, which is very interesting, and also turns out that Tommy was told I was the one that threw out his name, so Tommy may be wary of me at this point, and I need to look out for that. I told Trace and Dom that I was in that alliance, so this way they knew about it before they could be told I was a part of it as well, and they find me sketchy, and Steffen already knows. Last but not least, rip Ashton. What a great lad, and would've been an incredible sheep in my grand scheme, but now I need to look for alternative options. My plan for the day is to talk around, not talk about any proposals of plans or anything, except with Steffen, and then get Steffen back on Crow's good side. Brian and I did our part, and now Crow and Steffen need to go through therapy in order for the four of us to be able to be double agents for each other during this beginning phase of merge. I'm curious how this day is going to go on, but it shall be interesting to see how everything plays out. This is where the game takes a step forward, and everything resets, and I'm ready to play an under the radar snaky game. I think a lot of people trust me, and I'm going to have to do a lot of damage control along the way, but at this point, I'm playing with no fear, and I'm going full force into this merge in a very strategic manner, so bring it on!

Coming into merge, you need to count on your relationships, and I know mine are overly shaky, but I still think I can bounce back from some of them. These are the people I trust in order: 1. Steffen - My ride or die, he knows I won't turn on him, we share an idol together and I've told him almost everything about my game, but still huge threat. 2. Trace - Too standup of a guy, and I know he trusts me or Dom the most, but legitimately wants him, Dom and I in the finals, so I'm gonna keep with that. 3. Crow - I really don't see any benefit in Crow's game where he turns on me, and it's great to know that because we're that good of friends. 4. Dom - We don't talk as much one on one, but we still are pretty damn solid, and he doesn't seem like the kinda guy to make a move against me this early. 5. Andrew - I really really really want to work with Andrew probably more than anyone above, but at the same time, I've gotta just keep on my toes because he wants this bad and seems like he would do anything to get it. 6.Drew - I just don't think Drew is going to last deep, but we share an idol, and it seems our relationship was by force, but he was the one who asked for a deal, so i'll hold to it for now? 7. Tommy - Tommy is a fucking sociopath, but loves me for some reason. We'll see with that boy, but I see people coming for him hard soon, and I'm not going to be too bothered if he goes. 8. Brian - I built this relationship with Brian right when we swapped tribes, and I know he isn't too active, but I want to have his back for Steffen's sake, and hopefully it will transfer to my sake as well. 9. Junior - I have been bro'ing down with him a lot, and I think there's a very good shot that we can maintain a decent relationship for the time being, but I'm not looking to solidify deals or anything. 10. Pippa - I think she's still mad at me from the Isaac vote, and I just can't believe that she wants to work with me. I think Andrew will work on her for me. 11. Kendall - Kendall and I share a bit of interest in this game, and I think she has bigger fish to fry, but she's horribly inactive and doesn't deserve to be here anymore, and in order to knock down Sarah, I've gotta go for Kendall first. 12. Sarah - Easily the biggest threat to my personal game left right now. She knows that I threw her name around the only tribal we went to, and now I have a big Bull's Eye on my back, so I've just gotta lay low, remain cordial and hope she tries to use me for moves opposed to going for me. Only time will tell. I do know that Sarah/Brian/Crow/Junior are VERY close, I'm not too sure about Tommy, but he seems like he's not too hellbent on the Heroes vs Villains thing. I'm trying to lay low so hard, and I'm hoping to use my relationships to the best of my abilities for as long as I can, but I know I'm going to be under fire sooner rather than later. I really want to come off as unthreatening for the time being and hope that people don't see a purpose of coming for me, but at the same time, I want to utilize these idols that I have in my back pocket and show that I can add something to my resume, but only time will tell how things will go. I want to purposely not invest as much time in talking to people for the sole reason of sticking around longer, even if it's at the expense of my allies.

so like...time to put the charm on trace his insecurities are getting idoled out and basically being a goat so hopefully i can convince him that hes being johnnys goat and that he can flip ... not that i want him to flip right away but hes now my work in progess WISH ME LUCK? FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK IMMA NEED IT

I've been lackluster on these, oops. Hopefully I survive this round in order to ensure that I can be super extra in the following rounds and make more confessionals. Anyway, game stuff ! Crow and Steffen? Not on great terms right now! Hopefully that gets fixed because an alliance between the three of us plus Johnny is supposed to be a thing that's supposed to run this game. So yea ! Crow and Sarah? My parents! Favorite alliance I have with my 2 "day 1s." I'll try and stick loyal to this, however I think that going to the end with either of this people is death. I think I'm currently in a shitty position to win. Like I'll need to become super duper likable quick because I'm currently sitting around big threat after big threat. Sarah's being targeted. Andrew's being targeted. Drew's being targeted. Johnny's being targeted. Steffen's being targeted. And of COURSE, almost all of these people are people I'd love to go far with. But realistically, if I had to pick a final 3 right here, right now. I'd love to go to the end with Pippa and Kendall. I feel like they're both likable, but I feel like they're games are kinda lackluster up to this point. Who am I to speak though when mine isn't too hot either? Anyway, that's just me rn. I'll be back later after immunity!

Okay so fuck. We merged. And first I'd like to say. Ahem. YES. TWAS I WHO STARTED THE FIRE UPON DREW'S HOUSE!! So fuckin basically I had been thinking about giving Crow the hero idol after his rant in the one world bc like I don't trust Drew and getting him out before merge would have been amazing. So I'm screaming about it in my host chat and then Pippa messages me hey I have a really awful idea and I'm like oh fuck we might have the same idea can we call and I'm like okay we'll say our ideas in the 3 2 1 and the it happens and we're both like "GIVE CROW THE HERO IDOL AND GET HIM TO KILL DREW" dfghjkl and I'm like AAAAA and she's like AAAAA and we're both like AAAAA ! ! ! ! !! ! ! ! !!! ! ! ! ! ! ! !!! ! ! ! !!! ! ! Anyway Pippa gets good with Crow and I'm like fuck okay Crow seems like he's someone who plays based on loyalty but we could be TOTALLY fucking wrong BUT he does end up playing the idol and voting Drew. Perfect plan, right? Well know because Steffen exists. And I should have seen this shit coming because I knew from way back when from Isaac's rat ass that Steffen found that vote steal day 2. And of COURSE Steffen doesn't take the opportunity to vote Drew anyway because Steffen rarely makes big moves (looks back at the ballsy comment). So Ashton goes and I feel like shit but at the same time it sounded like Ashton was up Drew's ass so I'd rather him then Dom especially bc I think we wanna target Dom this round if he isn't immune? Also I now have Ashton's idol all to myself :~) Still woulda been nice tho if Drew went bc basically what this was was Drew asking too many questions about Alex leaving with the brawn idol so I basically called a meeting with Drew by some train tracks and was gonna push him in front of the next oncoming train house of cards style but... can't have everything! Honestly this was just Pippa and I being like - rather be iconic and lose than be boring and win. And like fuck it we tried making a power play okay? Idc I can say I tried. And now it's fuckin hilarious bc everyone's on a wild goose chase to find who gave Crow the hero idol bc it was actually revealed on an official pic that that was the hero idol lmao. Whoops! Also I'm pretty sure Crow told Sarah bc I got some interesting info from Junior last night that at like 8:30 Sarah had to get off call with Junior because Crow needed to call her and I'm like hmmmmmm but idk if he leaked who gave it to him. I know they're close tho. So now it comes down to who to take out. Basically Junior and I had a talk and there are kinda floater minions who can get far - specifically Kendall and Brian for Sarah and Dom for Drew. He initially wanted to go for Kendall or Brian but I suggested maybe link up with Sarah's crew first to take out Dom before Drew gets into too big of a power position. That way, I can be pushing my own agenda of continuing to work with Crow bc Pippa and I have a final 3 deal with him at this point. Which idk how strongly we're all gonna stick to it but I'd like to stick to it as long as I realistically can unless I'm voted out first? Yeah idk. We'll see. But this could also garner trust with Sarah. The other fun thing is if Dom (a hero) goes first then Junior's paranoid ass said he'd be fine taking out Brian (a villain) next, just because Junior still has a worry that the heroes will gang up on the villains and I'm like lmao at this point I don't trust most of the heroes left but okay Junior! Yeah honestly I'm gonna try working with Brian but we kinda have a messy history both in and out of the game, and I usually don't with people but I can at least try with him even thought I want him out soon? He probably wants me gone soon too so like oh well. Only person I haven't talked to all game tho. Also there's Johnny and Trace which side note - Johnny, Sarah, and Drew have kinda been labeled the leaders I think at this point? Idk if Junior, Pippa, and I are also seen as a faction but I guess we'll find out soon. So I'm looking out for Johnny too bc I'm kinda suspicious of him, and I think Trace is definitely with him. Anyway I think we'll get a clearer picture of wtf is happening after immunity results, but I just wanna make sure I'm good with Crow, keep Sarah from being paranoid, get a good target on Dom, and test the waters with Brian. Whew. I have my work cut out for me and if I flop 13th place here I come!

Operation STAY UNDER THE RADAR is in full swing. Here's my philosophy on this. I think that I'm fairly safe this round, and my name will probably not go around, just due to the Villains who I have relationships with, and I just don't see it happening. I don't care if I'm on the wrong side of the vote this round because the second round of merge always proves to be the most hectic. Everyone wants the first round to be easy, which means that it's typically side vs side, but the second round is when everyone jumps around and starts acting crazy, and that's where I'll SLOWLY slide from the cracks. I don't care who goes, I hope idols and shit are played and, as long as it isn't me, I know I'm strategically capable to work any angle I need to next round, but why be pushy now? It's still final 13 and I'm not looking to become a target for at least 3-4 more rounds, until I have to finally start hustling at this game. It's all in the plan... It's all in the plan.

Honestly, this round they're going for Junior or Kendall, and I, for the first time, have no fucking idea where those names came from, but once I know exactly who is doing what, I'm just going to make my rounds and make sure that people trust that I'm doing what they want me to do, so they think I'm more valuable. I'm at a point in the game where I am laying lower than I ever have before, and I think that this is going to be a really good round for me. I'm waiting to see which person my alliance of five is going to target, and then that's probably how I'll vote, and no one will think differently of me for it. Personally, i'd like it if Junior stayed and Kendall went home, but Junior going home wouldn't be horrible either because he's a villain, and I can't get a great read on him, but I'm also contemplating trying to scoop him up as an ally, so we'll see what ends up happening. This round should be pretty simple for me. I just have to play it cool, and then hope to advance my position as time goes on.

I FEEL BETRAYED *blood drips from my heart* APPARENTLY there was an alliance made with Kendall, Sarah, Brian, Tommy, Steffen and Drew in it, and they're all trying to get Junior out tonight and I'm fucking choking. How DARE they try to do something without me? They must go bye bye now. I am absolutely using this to get the rest of the numbers onto voting for Kendall and hoping that it works. Again, I'm not going to go to town with this, but hopefully Kendall can go home tonight, and then Drew and Steffen have no choice but to come back to us, and then later on, I can even blame Tommy to Sarah and just say that I was going on self preservation and that I need to do stuff to work on this.

http://youtu.be/DqrxfTd1F6c

ROCKS

#returnrevengeredemption #confessionals

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symbianosgames · 8 years ago

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The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

A few years ago in SeishunCon‘s digital gaming room, I was reintroduced to the match-3 game. I’d played Dr. Mario when I was younger, but more competitive games like Magical Drop, Bust-A-Move, and Tokimeki Memorial Taisen Puzzle-Dama were something very different.

Ultimately, I realized just how many more-or-less neutral decisions are involved in making a match-3 game.

During the following Ludum Dare, I decided to jump in head-first. I did a bit of a warm-up the week before, trying to build a Tetris-style algorithm that detected and cleared out lines. This tutorial from Unity Plus was a huge help. Of course, the Tetris matching algorithm–a complete row of tiles–is much simpler than an algorithm that picks out irregularly shaped patches of matching tiles.

If you want to see all of these code samples in context, check out my Ludum Dare 30 repo. (In a shameless bit of self-promotion, I also reused this logic for Shifty Shapes.)

Two worlds

The trickiest part of building a puzzle game in Unity is that the game itself doesn’t live in world space. Not fully, anyway.

This isn’t as true in other genres. Platformers, for example, live almost exclusively in the Unity game world. The player’s Transform tells you its location. Colliders (or, in some cases, raycasts) tell you when the player is on the ground, hitting the ceiling, or colliding with an enemy. Even if you aren’t using in-game physics, you’re probably adding force or setting velocity on a Rigidbody so that you get collision detection for free.

Not so with a puzzle game. If your game involves clicking, you might get some coordinates in world space, but you’re probably going to convert that to a cell in a grid that lives entirely in code. There’s a good reason for that–it’s far easier to write the logic for scoring a game like Tetris or Dr. Mario when you’re thinking about blocks or tiles, not individual pixels.

I’m pretty sure Tetris blocks are not supposed to stick to the side of the board.

My warm-up actually tried to live in world space as much as possible. It used physics to determine when a tile had landed, and only transferred data back to a two-dimensional array to detect row completion. That seemed safer–what happens in the game world is real, after all. It’s what the player sees, so if you store your data there, there’s no fear of getting out of sync, right?

I was wrong. No matter how I tweaked it, it never did work right.

The Unity Plus tutorial I linked above was a huge help. If nothing else, it allowed me to trust that moving my logic fully out of the game world and into an abstract data structure was a valid approach. If you haven’t already, go back and at least skim it, because I intend this post to be an extension from Tetris logic into match-3 logic.

Converting from board to world space

Once I figured out this transition was manageable, this part was easy. I created a GameTile class that tracked the color, row, and column of the tile, and updated the tile’s position based on that. Here’s an abridged version:

public class GameTile : MonoBehaviour { private Transform _t; private SpriteRenderer _s; [System.NonSerialized] public int TileColor; [System.NonSerialized] public int Row; [System.NonSerialized] public int Column; void Awake () { _t = GetComponent<Transform>(); _s = GetComponent<SpriteRenderer>(); } Vector3 tmpPos; public void UpdatePosition() { tmpPos = _t.position; tmpPos.x = (Column * Board.TileSize) - Board.WorldOffset; tmpPos.y = (Row * Board.TileSize) - Board.WorldOffset; _t.position = tmpPos; _s.sprite = Board.Current.Textures[TileColor]; }

Tiles in a grid

Note that, in this case, TileSize is a constant that represents the size of a tile in Unity units. I’m using 64×64 pixel tiles, and the sprite size in unity is 100 pixels per unit, so TileSize works out to 0.64. I’m also using a constant offset so that the middle of the 7×7 board is at 0,0 world space, and the lower-left corner is tile 0, 0 in game space.

I also created an array that represents the gameboard as a static field in a class called Board. (Board started off as a static class and became a singleton because I needed to set some values in-editor, so it’s clumsily straddling the worlds of game object and static class.)

public const float TileSize = 0.64f; public const float WorldOffset = 1.92f; public const int BoardSize = 7; public static GameTile[,] Tiles = new GameTile[BoardSize, BoardSize];

While the Unity Plus tutorial used a two-dimensional array of integers, I decided to store references to my GameTile objects in this array. This allowed me to pass data to and from tiles directly and (as we’ll see later) made tile-clearing and animation generally easier.

Whenever I made a change to board state, it meant that I could simply loop through the board array and tell each tile where it was supposed to be:

public static void UpdateIndexes(bool updatePositions) { for (int y = 0; y < BoardSize; y++) { for (int x = 0; x < BoardSize; x++) { if (Tiles[x,y] != null) { Tiles[x, y].Row = y; Tiles[x, y].Column = x; if (updatePositions) Tiles[x, y].UpdatePosition(); } } } }

Note that in every case, we’re always converting from abstract game space into world space. Unity game objects aren’t storing the important game state information directly; they’re always a representation of that state.

… and back again

In my game, there was one case where I needed to convert from world to game space, and that’s when the user clicked an empty space to drop a tile. To do this, I simply created a large collider behind the entire gameboard with this script attached:

void OnMouseDown() { if (GameState.Mode == GameState.GameMode.Playing) { mouseClick = Camera.main.ScreenToWorldPoint(Input.mousePosition); mouseX = (int)Mathf.Round ((mouseClick.x + WorldOffset) / TileSize); mouseY = (int)Mathf.Round ((mouseClick.y + WorldOffset) / TileSize); PutNextTile(mouseX, mouseY); Soundboard.PlayDrop(); GameState.ActionsTaken++; } }

That’s really all there is to it. Note that it’s basically the reverse of UpdatePosition() above, which converts from game to world space.

Detecting and clearing matches

Clearing matches

This is the trickiest part. Actually, this is probably why you’re reading this blog post.

Horizontal matching (as in Tetris) is pretty easy–you just need to look for contiguous tiles in the same row. Even allowing horizontal or vertical matches (as in Dr. Mario) is just a variation on this theme. However, trying to track a set of contiguous tiles that can vary horizontally and vertically is going to take some recursion.

Each time we take an action that changes the board, we’ll trigger a check. The first thing we do is copy our entire board array into another array:

static void CopyBoard(GameTile[,] source, GameTile[,] destination) { for (int y = 0; y < BoardSize; y++) { for (int x = 0; x < BoardSize; x++) { destination[x, y] = source[x, y]; } } } static bool clearedTiles = false; public static void MatchAndClear(GameTile[,] board) { clearedTiles = false; // Make a copy of the board to test CopyBoard(board, toTest); //... continued...

Why? We’ll see later that it makes it much easier to tell which tiles we’ve checked.

We start the process with a brute-force approach. We’ll go cell-by-cell (first rows, then columns), testing each cell. For each test, we’ll reset some variables we use to track our testing, and then call a separate function (which we’ll later use for recursion):

// Continued from MatchAndClear() above... currentTile = null; collector.Clear (); for (int y = 0; y < BoardSize; y++) { for (int x = 0; x < BoardSize; x++) { TestTile (x, y); // Continued later...

Let’s take a look at that TestTile function:

static void TestTile(int x, int y) { // Tile already tested; skip if (toTest[x,y] == null) { return; } // Start testing a block if (currentTile == null) { currentTile = toTest[x, y]; toTest[x, y] = null; collector.Add(currentTile); } // ** Skipped lines--we'll come back to these later ** // If we're processing this tile, test all tiles around it if (x > 0) TestTile(x - 1, y); if (y > 0) TestTile(x, y - 1); if (x < Board.BoardSize - 1) TestTile(x + 1, y); if (y < Board.BoardSize - 1) TestTile(x, y + 1); }

If this function finds that the cell is null, then we skip it. A null cell means that it’s either empty, or we’ve already tested it. (That’s why we copied it into a separate array–we can manipulate the new array at will.).

If the cell has a value, though, we’ll do a few things. First, we’ll remember it as our “current” cell–the one at the top of the chain of recursion. Then, we’ll remove it from our copy of the gameboard so that we don’t test it twice. We’ll also add it to a List so we can remember how many contiguous tiles of the same color we’ve found.

There’s two other conditions we might run into later in the recursion, but we’ll talk about them later. Once we’ve tested a cell, we’ll then grab the four cells around them an run them through the same test.

The “current” cell is now set, indicating this isn’t our first level of recursion. On these function calls, we now have three possibilities for each cell.

First, the cell could be null, which again means we’ve already tested it or it’s empty. Again, we’ll do nothing if that’s the case.

Second, the cell could not match the “current” cell. In that case, we don’t consider it “tested.” Our recursion tests for a single set of contiguous tiles of a single color. Just because this tile isn’t part of the current set doesn’t mean it’s not part of a different one.

// From TestTile() above... // Tile doesn't match; skip else if (currentTile.TileColor != toTest[x, y].TileColor) { return; }

Third, the cell could be the same color as our “current” cell. If that’s the case, it’s been “tested,” so we’ll set it to null in our copy of the board. We’ll also add it to that List we use as an accumulator. This is one of the conditions we skipped in the example above:

// From TestTile() above... // Tile matches else { collector.Add(toTest[x, y]); toTest[x, y] = null; }

The function will continue recursing until it’s exhausted all options, either by hitting an empty cell or the edge of the board. At that point, we return to the main “brute force” loop to handle our results.

If our accumulator has more than three tiles, then this was a successful match. If not, then we’ve tested one or two tiles, but we don’t need to take action:

// Continued from MatchAndClear() above... if (collector.Count >= 3) { foreach (GameTile tile in collector) { ClearTile(tile.Column, tile.Row); clearedTiles = true; Soundboard.PlayClear(); } } currentTile = null; collector.Clear (); } } if (clearedTiles) { SettleBlocks(board) } }

Here, as we’ll discuss later, I’m simply triggering some animations. The simplest approach, though, is to loop through our accumulator and call DestroyObject on each matching tile’s game object. That kills two birds with one stone: the in-game objects are gone, and the cells in our board state are set to null.

Dropping tiles

Dropping a tile

Certain changes–dropping a tile or clearing tiles, in this case–can leave unsupported tiles which must be resolved (if those are the rules of our puzzle game, of course). This is actually a really simple algorithm.

We’ll go column-by-column this time, then row-by-row. The order is important here.

In each column, we’ll work our way up from the bottom until we find an empty cell. Then, we’ll make a note of that cell. The next time we find a tile, we’ll simply shift it down to that location and add one to our “empty cell” index:

static int? firstEmpty; public static void SettleBlocks(GameTile[,] board) { for (int x = 0; x < BoardSize; x++) { firstEmpty = null; for (int y = 0; y < BoardSize; y++) { if (board[x, y] == null && !firstEmpty.HasValue) { firstEmpty = y; } else if (firstEmpty.HasValue && board[x, y] != null) { board[x, firstEmpty.Value] = board[x, y]; board[x, y] = null; firstEmpty++; } } } UpdateIndexes(false); }

When you’re done, don’t forget to call your matching function again. It’s entirely likely that dropping tiles has created some empty rows.

In fact, if we were scoring points, this would make it easy to award combo bonuses or multipliers. All of these repetitions of dropping and clearing blocks are just recursions of that first call that was triggered by a player action. We could tell both how many total matches resulted from a player action, and how many levels of “chaining” were required for each action.

Animations

This is a working game, but it’s not intuitive, primarily because we have no animations. Tiles disappear, then reappear on lower rows. It’s hard to figure out what’s really going on unless you’re watching closely.

This is tricky to do. Game objects are always a representation of game state, so our tiles are always laid out on a grid. Tiles are always in one space or another; so a tile might be in row 1 or row 2, but it’s never in row 1.5.

What’s the trick? We should never be manipulating the game board and animating at the same time. Think about how Tetris or Dr. Mario work–you don’t drop the next tile until everything has had a chance to settle. This gives a brief reprieve for the player, but it also ensure we don’t have any weird race conditions or interactions.

As an aside, I recommend creating a “game state” enumeration whenever you start a new project. I’ve never written a game where I didn’t need to know whether the game was in play, paused, showing a menu, in dialogue… I could go on. Best to plan for it early–that way you can ensure that every line of code you write tests that it should be running in this state.

Admittedly, my implementation is kludgy, but here’s the basic idea–when we clear or drop a tile, we trigger a state change. Each GameTile object knows how to handle this state change, and (more importantly) it knows when to tell the gameboard that it’s finished with its animation:

void Update () { if (GameState.Mode == GameState.GameMode.Falling && Row != LastRow) { targetY = (Row * Board.TileSize) - Board.WorldOffset; tmpPos = _t.position; tmpPos.y -= FallSpeed * Time.deltaTime; if (tmpPos.y <= targetY) { Board.fallingBlocks.Remove(this); UpdatePosition(); Soundboard.PlayDrop(); } } }

When a clear animation finishes, the game needs to check if it should be dropping tiles:

private static float timer; private const float DisappearTimer = 0.667f; void Update() { if (GameState.Mode == GameState.GameMode.Disappearing) { timer -= Time.deltaTime; if (timer <= 0) { GameState.Mode = GameState.GameMode.Playing; SettleBlocks(Tiles); } }

When the drop animation finishes, it needs to check for matches:

if (GameState.Mode == GameState.GameMode.Falling && fallingBlocks.Count == 0) { GameState.Mode = GameState.GameMode.Playing; MatchAndClear(Tiles); } }

This cycle repeats until we finally don’t have any more matches, and then the game can go back to doing its thing.

This was originally posted on my personal blog, dylanwolf.com

#IFTTT #Blogger

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