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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 · 5 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 · 4 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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junker-town · 6 years ago

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Marshall is a volatile team for a volatile conference

Doc Holliday’s 10th Marshall squad might be his most Marshall squad yet.

Bill C’s annual preview series of every FBS team in college football continues. Catch up here!

“I tend to enjoy college football a lot more when Marshall’s good and Marshall fans are particularly chesty.”

We all have our own preferences for how the college football universe should look and feel, and I expressed one of mine in last year’s Marshall preview. I enjoy it when one of the sport’s great chip-on-shoulder programs is handing out comeuppance, and while 2018 wasn’t the greatest year for such a thing, we caught some glimpses.

We got a sustained glimpse in the Gasparilla Bowl. What might have been the best Marshall defense since 1999 sacked hometown USF’s Blake Barnett four times; forced six punts, a turnover, and a turnover on downs; and ceded the floor to a Herd offense looking better than it had all year. Freshman quarterback Isaiah Green went 17-for-25, backs Keion Davis and Brenden Knox rushed for 187 yards, and Marshall bolted to a 28-7 first-half lead before cruising, 38-20.

Marshall’s ninth win announced that the Thundering Herd had completed their rebound after a nasty 2016 stumble.

Doc Holliday has now made it nearly a decade in Huntington. Context-free, that’s a remarkable achievement in today’s FBS landscape — only 14 head coaches have served in their current position longer. But the 61-year-old former WVU linebacker, once Urban Meyer’s ace recruiter at Florida, has done so despite a high-wire act. In order to maximize physical potential, he constantly mixes transfers, JUCOs, prep schoolers, second-chancers, greyshirts, blueshirts, and whateverothercolorshirts.

Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports

Doc Holliday

Roster balance sometimes falls out of whack, and the Herd sometimes careen toward youth in certain units. They went from 24th in Def. S&P+ in 2015, to 104th in 2016 and back to 22nd by 2018. They were 99th in Off. S&P+ in 2011, climbed to 20th in 2014, then slowly slid back to 116th by 2017.

Despite the ups and downs, the Herd have almost always remained competitive. They hovered around .500 for his first few seasons, just as they had in the final seasons of his predecessor, Mark Snyder. They broke through with a spectacular 33-8 run from 2013-15, suffered an equally spectacular 3-9 reset in 2016, then started climbing again. The defense found major traction, and an offensive rebuild at least took root last fall.

Programs like FAU, FIU, and maybe Southern Miss or North Texas might have something to say, but Marshall might have the best combination of experience and potential in Conference USA this fall.

I thought the Herd might be capable of 10 wins last fall and they came up just short, but they’ll get another shot at that bar. They return Green, their two most effective runners, most of their offensive line, and most of an exciting secondary. They get FIU and Louisiana Tech at home, and while they have to travel to FAU, they’ve played as well as anyone against Lane Kiffin’s Owls over the last two years.

There are question marks, of course. Holliday has yet to finalize his staff after losing defensive coordinator Adam Fuller to Memphis, and an occasionally dominant front six/seven has known play-makers but got hit pretty hard by attrition. Plus, an offense that wasn’t quite explosive enough must now replace its two most explosive receivers in Tyre Brady and Marcel Williams.

The cocktail of talent is volatile, and there’s no guarantee that Marshall will be able to follow up on last year’s gains. But this team has Marshall-level potential and a schedule that features shots at strong mid-major programs (Boise State, Ohio, Cincinnati) before a run at the title in what might be FBS’ most balanced conference.

Offense

To turn his offense back around, Holliday brought pass-happy coordinator Tim Cramsey to Huntington a year ago. Marshall is the sixth school to employ Cramsey as its OC in this decade, and for the first time since 2015, it appears he’ll be at the same school for a second year in a row.

A short-term presence or not, he engineered at least a little improvement in 2018. And it might have been more had Green remained healthy. See if you can spot where he may have gotten hurt:

Marshall QBs, first 4 games (3-1): 55% completion rate, 12.7 yards per completion, 123.1 passer rating

Marshall QBs, next 4 games (2-2): 52% completion rate, 10.4 yards per completion, 106.0 passer rating

Marshall QBs, last 5 games (4-1): 59% completion rate, 13.4 yards per completion, 135.0 passer rating

Green was never dominant, but when he missed four games with a knee injury in the middle of the season, Wagner transfer Alex Thomson, an in-demand QB last offseason, subbed in and struggled. The Herd sank from the mid-70s in Off. S&P+ in late-September to the mid-110s by early-November.

Joe Camporeale-USA TODAY Sports

Tyler King

It was a period of discovery, however. With the passing game struggling, Cramsey leaned more heavily on the run game, and in fits and starts, it responded. Tyler King and Anthony Anderson rushed 36 times for 286 yards against ODU, then King and Davis rushed 31 times for 185 against FAU. King injured his leg and missed the last five games, so Knox carried the load (22 for 116) in a win over Charlotte, and then Knox and Anderson combined for 145 yards in a tight win over FIU.

Cramsey leaned on a four-headed running back group, which responded pretty well. Davis and Anderson are now gone, but King and Knox, the two most successful, return for their junior and sophomores seasons, respectively.

They get most of their line back, too. All-conference center Levi Brown and junior tackles Tarik Adams and Will Ulmer have combined for 85 career starts, while three others have starting experience. Plus, enormous incoming JUCO transfer Josh Ball is a former blue-chipper who started nine games at Florida State in 2017 before a suspension for dating violence. He will get a second chance in Huntington.

Photo by Mark Brown/Getty Images

Armani Levias

It’s in Cramsey’s DNA to want to throw the ball, and it’s unclear how well Marshall will do it. Green had promising moments for a freshman, but a lot of those moments were due to Tyre Brady.

The former Miami receiver caught 71 balls for 1,002 yards and averaged nearly 16 yards per catch when Green was healthy. Without Brady and slot man Marcel Williams, Marshall needs a new center of gravity in the receiving corps.

There’s still potential, and Z receiver Obi Obialo is a good starting point. He was easily the most efficient option, though he averaged just 12 yards per catch, and tight end Armani Levias was another “explosive when Green was healthy” guy — he averaged 9.6 yards per catch in those middle four games and 14.7 otherwise.

Senior Artie Henry could be ready for a starring role in the slot, but it’s unclear who might step up as the new X receiver. Junior Willie Johnson? Sophomore Naquan Renalds? A former three-star prospect like junior Jeremiah Maddox or redshirt freshman Talik Keaton?

Defense

Adam Fuller’s lone season as coordinator could barely have gone better. A longtime Holliday assistant, he got promoted to the role last year when Chuck Heater left to become Maryland’s safeties coach.

Fuller knew the personnel and the Holliday culture and thrived with a defense that was both aggressive (17th in marginal efficiency) and capable of solid big-play prevention (37th in marginal explosiveness).

The Herd were rather all-or-nothing on blitz downs — 12th in sack rate, 28th in success rate, 103rd in big-play rate — but if they were able to top you athletically, you were going to struggle. ACC teams NC State and Virginia Tech averaged 39 points per game and 6.8 yards per play against UM; everyone else: 18.7 and 4.5, respectively.

Photo by Julio Aguilar/Getty Images

Channing Hames

We’ll see what happens now that Holliday’s going outside of the family. He has brought in former Charlotte head coach Brad Lambert as a “volunteer defensive assistant” at the moment, and it appears he will become coordinator, with line coach J.C. Price as co-coordinator, once Lambert’s buyout is cleared up. Charlotte and Marshall had two of the three best run defenses in the conference (along with Southern Miss’), so maybe Lambert and Holliday will find some things in common.

Depth does take a hit in 2019, as Marshall must replace three of last year’s top six linemen and four of five linebackers. The Herd should have one of the quickest interior lines in the country — nose tackle Channing Hames and end/tackle Ty Tyler combined for 16.5 sacks and six non-sack tackles for loss. Plus, there are weapons on the edge in senior linebacker Omari Cobb (6.5 TFLs, 3.5 sacks), end Marquis Couch (8.5, 2.5), and perhaps Virginia Tech transfer Tavante Beckett.

Still, depth is perilous. Some combination of JUCO transfers (tackle Esaias Carpenter, end TJ Johnson) and recent star recruits (redshirt freshmen Darius Hodge and Arak McDuffie, incoming freshmen Dante Walker and DeShawn Page, etc.) will be asked to take on large roles if there are any injuries ... and there are always injuries.

Photo by Michael Reaves/Getty Images

Chris Jackson

If the front holds up, though, the back should thrive. Star safety Malik Gant declared for the NFL draft, but everyone else in the secondary is back, from corners Chris Jackson and Kereon Merrell (23 combined passes defensed) to safeties Nazeeh Johnson and Brandon Drayton. Plus, corner Jaylon McClain-Sapp appeared well on his way to a massive year — he had three passes defensed and a TFL in three games — before missing most of the season with injury.

Losing Fuller, Gant, and front-seven depth is reason for concern, but Marshall returns as many known play-makers as anyone in the conference.

Special Teams

Marshall loses its strongest special teams weapons and returns its weakest. The Herd were top-20 in both punt and kick return efficiency, but Marcel Williams (PR) and Keion Davis (KR) both depart.

Kicking dragged the Herd down to 88th in Special Teams S&P+. Senior-to-be Justin Rohrwasser was limited in range (14-for-16 on FGs under 40, 1-for-5 beyond), which held the Herd back in both place-kicking and kickoffs. Punter Robert Lefevre (59th in punt efficiency) is solid, though one hopes Marshall is a bit less reliant on its punter this fall.

2019 outlook

2019 Schedule & Projection Factors

Date Opponent Proj. S&P+ Rk Proj. Margin Win Probability 31-Aug VMI NR 40.8 99% 7-Sep at Boise State 24 -16.2 17% 14-Sep Ohio 82 3.2 57% 28-Sep Cincinnati 44 -5.8 37% 5-Oct at Middle Tennessee 104 5.6 63% 12-Oct Old Dominion 119 18.9 86% 19-Oct at Florida Atlantic 79 -2.4 45% 26-Oct Western Kentucky 101 9.9 72% 2-Nov at Rice 126 16.4 83% 16-Nov Louisiana Tech 86 3.8 59% 23-Nov at Charlotte 120 14.2 79% 30-Nov Florida International 88 4.6 61%

Projected S&P+ Rk 77 Proj. Off. / Def. Rk 111 / 37 Projected wins 7.6 Five-Year S&P+ Rk 0.8 (69) 2- and 5-Year Recruiting Rk 76 2018 TO Margin / Adj. TO Margin* 0 / 5.5 2018 TO Luck/Game -2.1 Returning Production (Off. / Def.) 57% (63%, 50%) 2018 Second-order wins (difference) 9.2 (-0.2)

Holliday’s 10th Marshall team will bear plenty of similarities to recent teams.

Proven play-makers: Marshall has a ton of them, from Jackson and Merrell to Hames and Tyler to King and Knox.

Massive athletic potential: Beyond the knowns, the Herd could also boast more than 20 three-star true and redshirt freshmen.

Depth issues: Marshall could be perilously young at WR, DE, DT, or LB with just a couple of injuries.

Reliance on youth: Green is still a sophomore, after all.

Marshall will be as interesting as ever in 2019. That might excite me personally, but it makes the Herd awfully hard to project. S&P+ projects them as the No. 2 overall team in the C-USA, just ahead of FAU, North Texas, Louisiana Tech, and FIU and just behind Southern Miss.

S&P+ projects four of Marshall’s conference games (plus two non-cons) to finish within a touchdown. The Thundering Herd have as good a chance as anyone in a logjam of a race, but they are only a couple of injuries or bad breaks from a mid-tier finish. Buckle up, I guess.

Team preview stats

All 2019 preview data to date.

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bublp0pr · 7 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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wolftheidioticfan · 8 years ago

Text

Teuqontu Walkthrough

Incase anyone is stuck on anything in Teuqontu, here’s a walkthrough! Puzzles in bold, general stuff is in normal text.

Tasu/Realm 1:

In the first room there is 1 box with a green vial in it, a save tentacle, an open room, and a locked door. Head into the open room.

Puzzle: Pretty self explanatory.

Push the pile of meat to the circle in the room. A dinging noise will sound, and now the locked door will be unlocked.

Head through the door and be ready for an enemy encounter, use the vial from earlier if your health is low. Saving before and after is recommended. There is one box in the room, containing a green vial.

The next room will have the leech and several Half Faces. Ignore them for now and head to the right to get 2 boxes. You will get a Brain Potion and a Sanity Potion. Head to the room left of the one the Half Faces are in and get a Pink Vial from the box, and read the notes. One should give a hint for the puzzle.

Head to the room up to visit Sasha for the first time. If you take her drink, go to the leech in the room with the Half Faces.

Now, talk to the Half Faces and read the story carefully, then talk to the one that isn’t moving to answer the puzzle questions.

Puzzle: The oldest worker is on the far right, which means that the details he gives out on the story are the ones you’ll need to complete the puzzle.

The answers are Furthest right, Tasu, Incuro, Tasu/Teuqontu.

Now you can continue through to the hall and to a grassy area, it is recommended you save (saving frequently is already recommended). Be careful as you open the boxes, as creatures run out of the grass and have the capabilities of killing Mai, giving you a game over. You will receive 2 pink vials and 1 green vial in this room.

The next room will have a half face, and another room where Sasha is found again. The next puzzle is just self explanatory by knocking on doors.

This next area is where you’ll meet Sang (the dog merchant) for the first time, as well as get some enemy encounters and a box. 1 Green vial. Fight the enemies and come back to buy from Sang. Be careful again in the next part of the path, as the creatures will again run up out of the grass. 2 Half Faces will say some numbers, remember them for the next room.

Puzzle: There are four piles of meat in this room. interact with them in this order: 4,2,3,2.

Left path has a box with a green vial, right path has Sasha and 3 boxes. 1 pink vial, 1 sanity potion, and 2 brain potions.

through the door is a boat section. Left path takes you to a box with a green vial and an enemy. Right path has nothing except an interaction with a half face. Up path is a ‘follow the leader’ game that resets showing the path after every failure. After completing it you can go to the other little path in that room and find a little secret. Heading up from the follow the leader puzzle will take you to a place with 3 buildings. Read the notes in the buildings and go back to the door with the correct code.

Puzzle: The code to the door is 73154

In the area after the coded door, you’ll see Sang again as well as an enemy. Fight the enemy, buy what you need from Sang, and save. Head into the next room.

You’ll encounter Sasha again and start a Mini Boss. Be ready. After the fight, Sasha will join your party! Go into the mouth-cave to continue on.

In this area, there are a few creatures. Don’t touch them or they will kill you. Head to the left path to do a quick puzzle where you collect eyes.

Puzzle: Here’s the locations of all the eyes.

Back in the regular room, there are two enemy encounters. It is recommended to scan one of them with Sasha’s ability. Head up to the door and interact.

Puzzle: If you have scanned a Baby Bird, you will know the HP/MP. If you did not or do not remember then the answers are 500 and 250.

Continuing on, two more boxes and Sang again. The boxes will have 2 Magenta Vials and 2 Problem Potions. Off to the right will have a note. Through the door continues on to another boat portion. 1 enemy encounter among Lali’s anger at the duo.

Back on land there’s two houses, in the one you can enter is 1 box with 2 brown potions. Another house as you continue, as well as a random note and an enemy encounter. Now, you’ll encounter another Half Face with a “quiz”. If you remember a note from earlier you’ll get it immediately.

“Puzzle”: Thursday.

Another enemy in the next section, now onto the maze.

Puzzle: You know you’re going the right way if you get an enemy before you enter the path. Getting a path wrong sends you back to the first room. The correct paths are left, up, right.

A Redhorn will give you some EXP. Buy what you need from Sang and then save. Interact with the door.

Boss fight with Lali! Be ready. After Lali you will be transferred to the Overview, Teuqontu’s little overworld bit that takes you to each realm. Head out and go to the second door to go to Bakitsi by interacting with the mirror.

Bakitsi/Realm 2:

There is one box in the first room of Bakitsi. In it is 1 purple vial. Continue forwards and have a talk with Pepper. Now you can head into town. In the town are two buildings, a box with 680 gold, and two paths. Heading to the right takes you to two buildings, the one you can enter has a box that also has 680 gold. Heading up takes you to the Inn. The left path is currently blocked by a Scaredy Cat, so the only way to go is into the Inn.

Inside is a few things to do, to the right is the food area with a little arcade game with a minigame called Jumpsville. the Half Face running the desk will give you a room, which is what Pepper wants you to do so you can talk with him in his room. You can head into Room 3 when you head upstairs and get a brown vile from the nightstand. Go to Room 4 and talk to Pepper, he will now join your party and you can go to Room 2 to sleep in the bed. This takes Mai to a quick intractable dream sequence.

After the dream sequence you can now exit the Inn and head down the path that was blocked previously. Go inside the next building and meet the next Merchant, Freebie. You can receive a free Death Paw here if you wish or get it cheaper. Buy what you need and go to the note, write down the numbers, and head to the door for an enemy encounter.

The next town has a post office you can visit, and another part of the town to the left. Continue left and keep going until you arrive to the next puzzle, where there are a bunch of piles of meat. Remember the code you wrote down near the large door.

Puzzle: Click on the meat in this order: 10,10,2,2,5,5,8,8.

Continue forth and talk to the Half Face with the blue shirt. He will tell you that you can press SHIFT to meow to scare the creatures in the hall. Head into the hall and use your meow when the creatures get too close. There’s 2 enemies and 1 box as you go through the hall. The box has 4 magenta viles.

You’ll see Freebie again. Buy what you need and talk to the Scaredy Cat. Write down the numbers he says. Continue on and talk to the next Scaredy Cat, who will complete the code you’ll need. 1 enemy in the next section of town and in the room after that is a box with 500 gold.

Puzzle: The vase will ask for a code, which is the one you wrote down from the Scaredy Cats. 456274

Now you can keep going. Buy from Freebie and definitely save here.

Mini boss time against Paranoia! Be ready. After Her mini boss, head towards the train in the next map, fight the enemy, and save again. Inside the train, head to the left near Paranoia and talk to Todd.

Boss fight with Todd! Be ready. After his fight, interact with the large blue orb to go back to the Overview. Head out and go to the third door. You can enter Aerontunel via the blue box with an X

Aerontunel/Realm 3:

Head up into the forest, 1 enemy encounter will be found in this map. Heading up you’ll find a black wiggling thing. This is a trap and will drag you down into a room. Interact with the grey string to get out. Keep heading up, and now you’ll find a place where you click on the circles to jump from place to place. Traverse this area to continue to the area of the forest with wiggling black grass. Do not interact with the grass or you will get a game over. A rat in this area gives you some numbers, write them down for the next puzzle.

Puzzle: another meat interacting puzzle, the rat in the previous room gives you the order. 4,1,2,5.

Continue after completing the puzzle. Next map has an enemy encounter. Keep going until you meet up with Todd and Paranoia again. Todd will let you go on his train to head to the town. In the town you’ll find a half face with a green shirt. This is the third merchant, Lucky Money. Don’t buy his lottery, it’s a scam. Buy what you need from him and head on down, watching the robot, Zap head to the left. Go right for a box and an interaction with the brown cat from Bakitsi’s dream sequence. The box has 1 golden potion.

Save and head left where Zap went. Be ready for a mini boss!

After the fight you can keep going to another jump section, head to the left path first and write down the numbers the blue note gives you.

Jump down to the right path and input the code to continue.

Puzzle: 9987643

Continue to the rest of town and have a quick interaction with the realm owner, Pipscrap. Time for more forest!

Puzzle: Head left and push the vase, the other vase is mirrored to the movements of the first. You’re trying to get the vase to the circle. Exiting and reentering the map resets the puzzle if you get stuck.

Now the vase blocking the right is gone, allowing you to continue. There is 1 enemy encounter here. Next puzzle is self explanatory.

Puzzle:

Click every spot where a rock has been.

There is one enemy in this area. The next area has a box with a purple vial. A rat will give you some numbers for the next meat puzzle. Continue to the next dream sequence and then head into the puzzle area.

Puzzle: The rat in the previous room gives you the order to interact with the meat. 4525

There is one enemy in the room. Lucky Money is in the next spot. Buy what you need and save. Head into the next town and play hide and seek with Zap.

Rematch against Zap!

Head down after the fight and go to the left path. A bunnetti will give you a code. Write it down.

Puzzle: The block will ask for a code. The Bunnetti gives you it. 654679.

Save, buy what you need from Lucky Money and then head down and talk to Pipscrap for a boss fight.

After the fight, go right to go back to the Overview. Head to the forth door.

You can enter Quenati by the three orbs surrounded by 3 boxes.

Quenati/4th realm:

Head into the building and then into the town. There’s 3 places to go, but the right path is blocked by a box. Head up for some buildings, head left to go into the restaurant. In the restaurant you’ll meet Sasha’s brother Nate and have a cutscene with him for a bit. Now the right path is unblocked and you can head that way.

Keep going right. You can buy from Lucky Money again here if you need anything. There is 1 enemy in the room. Keep going and interact with Pipscrap, who will join your party, and there will be a quick sequence with Mai. The box in this area has a yellow vial.

Now you’re heading towards the garden and there’s one enemy on this map. Once you reach the entrance to the garden, the Rotten Twins will stop the party and ask Mai to answer their question, he will and you can continue forwards.

On the first part of the garden there are two paths, the right continues on, the left has a box with a Golden Potion. Again there are two paths, the right has two boxes with 4 brown vials and 4 magenta vials. The Left continues onto three paths. Left has a box with a Blood Bag, right just has NPCs, and the middle continues on. Here you will meet Jari, who will be annoyed at the group.

After talking with him you can head up, grab 3 magenta vials from the box, and then head to the lab. Lucky Money will be here. Head into the lab.

You’ll encounter 1 enemy before going to the next room with 2 paths. To the right is a worker for the lab who will give you a code. Write it down so you can go to the left.

Puzzle: 468764

Now that you can go to left, talk to the dog-creature named Clyde to get him to move. Go and save before entering the room after the next one. You’ll meet Jari again.

Boss fight! Be ready.

After defeating Jari you can continue until you meet the realm owner, Cynthia. She will kick Mai and co out of her realm back into the Overview. Head to the 5th door.

You can enter Vuxatian by the small purple heart.

Vuxatian/5th realm:

Roam around and keep moving when Raff appears behind Mai. Hide in the grass when a timer appears on a map and wait for Riff to leave before continuing. In the building after that map there is a box with 4 Magenta vials and 500 gold.

Keep going until you’re brought to another dream sequence. You’ll meet Flower and then be able to continue normally.

Save before the Boss fight with Riff.

After the fight, a being known as the Watchful will take Mai and co to the Final realms’ area, letting the party know that they cannot continue with Mai and must stay in Teuqontu, since him being there was a mistake, but they were supposed to stay there. Interact with the party members if you wish, and then interact with the cat outline to go to the final realm.

Final Realm/6th Realm:

The final realm is a mix of different realm maps. The first puzzle is just guessing which meat piles are correct for the order.

Puzzle: The order is 3,5,2,6,1

Continue on, watch out for the creatures in the grass again. You’ll meet Sang and be able to buy from her again. Another puzzle where you push the meat to the circle. Next map you can walk on the water if you want. There’s a box with 4 magenta vials.

Keep going. There’s enemy encounters sometimes but they don’t really matter as you are at max level, they’re just there for fun.

Puzzle:

Go to each dot like this, or you will be teleported back to the beginning of the room.

Keep going. In the grey area is Sang, an enemy, and a Scaredy cat. Save and enter to fight Incuro for the final boss fight.

After the fight, enter the door for the ending sequence.

Now you can enter the extras room for info on the npcs. Exit the room to go back to the title screen.

Thanks for playing!

#Teuqontu (game)

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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 · 4 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

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