#you are combining a number of things from a finite range of potentials in a range of ways which are also finite

[mctreeleth]

I have neither read or watched One Piece, but I did extensively cite Norms-Based Intellectual Property Systems: The Case of French Chefs (Fauchart & von Hippel, 2008) while writing my honours thesis, in which they state that "recipes are not a form of innovation that is effectively covered by law-based IP systems." Piracy, as a crime, is an act which breaks a law, and as Fauchart and von Hippel demonstrate, recipes are not legally protected, and therefore copying them does not constitute piracy. Sure, Mr Black Leg might struggle to get a job in one of our universe's Michelin-starred French restaurants, given that he has violated the accepted norms of that particular in-group, but - again - I have not read One Piece, so I don't know if ship cooks in that universe have a strong enough community to employ norms-based alternatives to legal IP protections in the same way they do in ours.

New wave of piracy

[fluidsf]

A Polar Visions / Polar Visions Amplitude review of -

Francisco López - a bunch of stuff (1980-2020)

Release date - July 2020

Reviewed format - Francisco López self-released (under the Nowhere Worldwide banner) USB business card, as kindly sent to me as a review copy by Francisco López

Note - you can purchase this release in digital format directly from Francisco López' Bandcamp page here: https://franciscolopez.bandcamp.com/album/a-bunch-of-stuff-1980-2020-40-years-of-sonogenic-composition

Welcome to the first review on Fluid Sonic Fluctuations review in 2021! Today I’m discussing Francisco López’s very large multi-part anniversary compilation a bunch of stuff (1980-2020) which was self-released by Francisco both as a neat USB business card and later reissued as download through Bandcamp in 2020. With this compilation Francisco is celebrating the 40 years he’s been creating immersive sonic compositions in the experimental and underground music scene, practicing his own coined way of sonogenic composition. a bunch of stuff (1980-2020) presents an excellent thematic overview of Francisco López’ discography through a large number of excerpts from his ever-growing universe of untitled compositions as well as titled pieces. The excerpts are organised into 15 parts which Francisco has tagged with his own invented genre names, which both point at his own personal sound philosophy but also have a subtle comic touch to them. Besides the excerpts, Francisco has also included several full-length (as well as almost full-length) as well as rare, unreleased and at the time of the original release still unreleased compositions making the compilations a great mixture of both showcase and rarities compilation. Whilst Francisco’s full-length compositions are often quite expansive in length making them suitable for a full-on immersion in the sonic universe created, the way every chronologically ordered part of a bunch of stuff (1980-2020) flows makes for a different yet equally intriguing and immersive listening experience with creative usage of both fades and hard cuts connecting the tracks together making every part that the full 12 hours worth of listening this compilation consists of a very rewarding listening experience. Francisco’s philosophy on both listening itself as well as his way of composing always originates first and foremost from the experience of listening in a very immersive sense which goes beyond source recognition or surface-level emotions but is very much settled in immersion within the sound world itself leaving the often cathartic, subconscious effects to the listeners themselves to feel and thereby completing the composition. Francisco himself reminds us of his philosophy but also shares some new insights on 40 years of sonogenic compositions in this mini-interview I did with him over email:

Orlando Laman - Over the last 40 years you've released a large number of your compositions, the selection on a bunch of stuff (1980-2020) is organized using your own invented genres. Regarding bringing together selections of compositions as collections through series (like recently, Two Head Snake) or by listeners themselves discovering certain connections between releases, how do you view your full collection of works as a whole, especially in the way all this shaped sonic matter is forming a sonic universe completed by the listener?

Francisco López - Well, as a whole I guess I see it as my way of having a more meaningful and richer interaction with the world. Not through representation (as in canonical so-called 'field recordings') but rather through penetration into sonic matter and its ontology.

OL - From listening to your compositions and interviews with you it's clear that most of the time you create compositions without planning things ahead, creating a system or trying to execute creative ideas through manipulated sound matter. It's a matter of composition that is both improvisatory based on the sounds themselves yet also very refined and perfectionist, which makes the compositions feel very natural but also unpredictable in captivating ways.

FL - This is what I call 'sonogenic composition', i.e., a practice of creative work with sound (and listening) in which sound themselves lead the way; not merely as 'samples' of elements to be placed in a pre-existing structure / grid / idea, but a generators of structure, pace, dynamics, texture and anything else imaginable in a sonic work. That's why I dislike the term 'manipulation'; in this context, I'd rather use 'evolution', which describes more reliably what takes place in this process.

OL -The results are more important than the tools used, however one thing that intrigued me is your manipulation and usage of low to sub-bass frequency layers of sound within many of your compositions, even those from the early 1980s, with low to sub-bass frequency sounds being an area of sonic matter that falls somewhere between the audible and felt area of sound and its direction being hard for humans to discern, how do you view this field of sonic matter relating to your compositions? Is it an area of the spectrum which you intuitively often accentuate in compositions or is this area one which you've gotten used to working with overtime to fully utilize the audible (and inaudible) spectrum of sound we can hear from sub-bass to very high frequencies?

FL - I like rich music, in all imaginable senses. That naturally includes the frequency spectrum, both audible and sensible (we do a lot of our hearing haptically in the low and sub-low ranges). As I've learned to compose largely through an intensive and extensive listening interaction with the world, those low frequencies are a 'natural' part of my sonic palette.

OL - a bunch of stuff(1980-2020) features excerpts which are often quite a bit shorter than your full compositions and releases, your full releases often feature long single compositions or a collection of shorter compositions making up one full "untitled" album release, besides these you've also released a few released a few albums which span several hour up til a full day worth of listening. In the compilation context and with the albums featuring shorter compositions the whole listening experience flows in an intriguing manner at times, with some pieces having a hard cut at the end rather than a fade-out or silence, this can have the effect at times of sudden realization of the composition's finite state within the album. Additionally, releases that span multiple hours can have the effect of the listener's listening mode moving from a focussed listening to a state in between listening and the sounds seeping into the subconscious of the listener creating certain emotions or triggering memories, What is your approach in selecting compositions for the albums and compilation releases, taking into account the listener experience? And further zooming in on time disappearing from our perception as we're fully focussed on the sounds, especially when listening to your multi-hour releases, is there a difference in terms of creating these extended-length releases to your other albums and compilation, relating to the listening experience you present?

FL - I like to be compositionally free to work with time. Traditional limitations like the length of a record or a radio show shouldn't limit our adventures in creative listening. To me, mega-long compositions (i.e., 24-hour or longer, like some of my pieces) generate micro-worlds of sonic experience that suggest a different kind of listening -one that gets closer to a form of 'inhabiting sound', which is tremendously suggestive. Different people will approach such extensions in varied ways, but I believe they always generate an unusual and fruitful potential for a very different, interesting and appealing experience of sonic matter as space and as time.

Many thanks to Francisco López for sending over the physical release as well as answering these questions and sharing such inspiring insights. Before we dive into the analyses of the separate parts as well as thoughts on my favourites tracks on this compilation I’ll mention what you can expect from the physical version of a bunch of stuff (1980-2020). Like most of Francisco’s releases the focus is all on the music and immersive sonic experience itself, so the USB business card itself features quite minimalistic design combined with a lovely photo of fire however. The content of the USB business card itself is a liner notes PDF file as well as the full compilation with 15 folders making up all the parts. Every folder contains the tracks as lossless 16-bit/44.1kHz CD quality files. While the best listening experience of Francisco Lopez’ work is by going into the compositions with a fully clear mind without knowing in advance what to expect in terms of a description or listings of sources used, the liner notes file does list the sound sources for some some of the tracks although Francisco isn’t getting specific about what these exactly consist of so beside the credits and tracklist parts not spoiling anything these source details are still staying cryptic enough to not reveal the workings behind the magic of Francisco’s compositions. Let’s now dive into a bunch of stuff (1980-2020).

a bunch of stuff (1980-2020) starts with first part All In. All In features a collection of pieces that mix various compositional approaches López takes together, with the All In being appropriate as “maximalist” pieces in terms of density of the sound matter or layering. In terms of sound matter I spotted bird and cicadas but there are also some “hidden” melodies in some of these pieces, either through certain resonances within the sound layers used or as series of tones that peek through the textures. López’ signature very low sub bass frequencies (also mentioned in my mini-interview and subtle glitches also appear within these pieces. In my favourite track 2012 - With_In [excerpt] López brings us an eerie tapestry of mysterious swirling resonant wheezing sound that flutters left and right, makes percussive shifting clicks to the left and right side and appears as this cloud of shaky sonic matter we are floating in ourselves. The perspective shifts from within (no pun intended) the sound matter to looking at this matter from a distance but the general experience is definitely very much grounded within the sound itself. The aforementioned hidden melodies appear in this piece too, in the form of hollow resonant diffuse tones that add this mysterious ambience of uncertainty to the emotional situation that might arise from our being in this environment. Whilst quick shifts do occur in some of Francisco’s compositions, the gradual continuous nature of this piece definitely helps the subtle shifting of focus within the layers of sounds as well letting the sonic matter work onto your mind in a certain meditative state. Delusional Cinematic follows, which features chopped up, at times quite abrasive collage like compositions of various sound matter including environmental sounds, movie sounds and music fragments. At times the compositions are stylistically comparable to Noise in their uncompromising more harsher edged nature. The pieces also feature rather clever transitions making for listening experiences that are as captivating as films or TV series themselves but in this case the imagery is purely mind-created.The strengths of my favourite track 2017 - untitled #360 [excerpt] are both in the silent brooding atmosphere of the composition within this longer 10:27 minutes excerpt and the way it progresses from one situation to the other. Starting from this eerie minimalist situation featuring quite a lot of shifting, rustling and clicking high pitched sonic matter there is something quite eerie about the idle space in between the sounds which creates a bit of a vacuum effect within the space and the at times wildly varying spectra and panning of the sounds themselves makes for quite some disjointed bits and pieces being scattered around this space as well, feels quite like being in a medieval village whilst sounds appear and disappear out of nowhere. In its second phase the piece moves into a battlefield of wild low frequency laden combat, helicopter whirling, a lot of (gun)shots and a further brooding mass of low frequency rumbling following up the first phase’s more resonant metallic waves of lower pitched sound. The transition from the battle to the dive underwater in which the battle can still be heard but in a more muffled state is one of my favourite aspects from this piece as it does add such a natural flow to the aural narrative this conjures up in my mind. I’d say this piece does mix Francisco’s more purely textural qualities with an inspired sense of rapid-cut composition making this one of his pieces which you can listen to through filtering and diving into its layers as well as letting your mind make up its own story through the progression from phase to phase within the composition. The next part Drone World features Drone pieces in the sense of especially hypnotic high frequency streams of sound, rhythmic sounding environmental sound matter as well as low bass frequencies and resonances. My favourite piece on this part is 1992 - Hypogeion [excerpt]. The piece is noticeably quite a bit louder than the other compositions before it on this part and whilst Francisco is clearly not trying to make a composition in a traditional manner this piece stylistically does remind me of 90’s Tribal Ambient, albeit in a more improvised manner. Featuring an array of highly resonant and bassy mallet tones as well as reverberant tribal style percussion the except of this piece showcases a particularly intense part of the composition moving into a more laid-back sustained phase. Somewhere in between mysterious factory and Egyptian pyramid sonics it features some excellent mixtures of dense tonal layers blending into each other with the overtones creating diffuse and at times dissonant interactions of sound. The percussive elements are quite high pitched throughout with quite some crystal like sounds flowing throughout the sonic space like grains of silver but overall the layers of sound flow much more like rippling shuddering waves that are often shifting from interlocking to interfering creating that always captivating element of mystery within Francisco López’ compositions. Afterwards in the Lo-Fi Broad-Band Tape Noiselationism part we have Noise oriented pieces made up of collages of sound matter of an Industrial and more organic nature as well as AM radio sourced sounds in compositions that feature some sweet droning and rhythmic sub bass frequencies. The pieces are more minimalist in terms of composition but equally captivating and showcase the more extreme side of López oldest works. My favourite track 1983 - untitled (1983) [excerpt] features most of the aforementioned elements. It’s a raw, lo-fi composition made up of various layers of electronic signals broadcast over shortwave radio with its beginning being the most recognisable in terms of source. However as always with Francisco’s compositions, the immersive experience is much more important than trying to further analyze what the actual sounds are and in this case it’s a particularly physical listening experience. The sound is grainy and often artefact laden, filled with hiss and sharp frequencies and in this fragment there is some kind of pattern of tones recognisable within its first half, as a whole however it sounds more like flying through an electric interference laden sky in which bits of metal are swirling around you in this cloud of disturbance and interference. Unlike some of the other 1980s composition excerpts on this compilation however this piece features a few hard cuts and changes to different clouds of fragile sound. Whilst being a continuous stream of hissy sound matter the piece eventually breaks up into shards of sharp irregular shaped sound movements until the fade-out. It’s definitely quite noisy in a way but I feel it’s also quite organic as all of Francisco’s works are, the sounds flow as freely as nature does and never feel artificial compared to what generally is considered as natural sounds. Following part Medium With No Message moves through various types of recording and playback medium based compositions both analogue and digital but actually does recall a lot of the crackling sounds and resonances from Francisco’s environmental sound matter based works as well. There is some recognisable glitch work in the last piece however but this again sounds more crystalline like than the at times clinical sounding works by other Glitch oriented artists. When we look at my favourite piece on this part 2002 - untitled #128 we find a piece that is minimalist in terms of its textural density. Quite like a breeze of wind subtly increasing in intensity, crackles, ticks, pops and other little grains of sound matter gradually build up a subtle rustling cloud of sound accompanied by mysterious tonal elements. Just like the diffuse spectrum of a light shower combined with how you can sense a lot of details in these sounds within quieter environments this piece offers a lot of depth, ever-changing bits of sounds within the subtly intertwined layers as the fluid qualities of the sound grip your ears and mind in a both intriguing and enjoyable manner. In the following part Mutated Locations we can find pieces based on environmental sound matter which are evolved into repeating rhythms, strange resonances as well as eerie and metallic layers of sound. The first few pieces carry Francisco’s darker Industrial like sonic approach to composition whilst pieces later on within the track list have a lighter (cleaner) sound and utilise the sub bass frequencies in a more intense manner as well as featuring less audible techniques of evolving sound matter. Whilst Francisco’s compositions aren’t really dark, I do often get a pretty eerie feeling from some pieces which I do like a lot and the more directly hitting approach of some of the compositions works better than the forced subtlety that some other sound artists would try to keep within their compositions. In my favourite track on this part, 2014 - untitled #321 [excerpt] we have a rather gripping flow of events. Just like the other tracks surrounding this one there’s quite a lot of depth in this piece and the imagery conjured up in my mind by this composition also particularly feels like looking at this sonic environment from above. As I felt this piece, it’s like a mass of clattering and shifting sounds as well as rather high pitched details quickly increasing in intensity as the layers demand more and more attention culminating into some particularly spooking train whistle like tones which keep hanging in the air at the end of this except until fade-out. The whole track feels quite like exploring one of these areas in which unused train carriages are stored, some of which rusting and degrading away until we’re suddenly transported to a used railway in which a brownish grey transport train is just about heading our way. Then on the following part Nice Noise we indeed have a collection of Noise styled compositions by Francisco which ranges from early metallic sound matter collages forming streams of layered Noise to more glitchy and granulated sounds in later tracks, cleaner hissy sounds with the last track blending these elements together in a similar way like pieces on the All In part. This last track, 2020 - untitled #380 [except] is also my favourite piece from this part. With Francisco combining various approaches from the 4 decades he is active by now within this piece he also created a very captivating mysterious sonic environment within this piece which is less abstract than other pieces but makes for a very unique listening experience with its combination of environmental sounds and brooding hypnotic tones. It’s quite like this dream about a cold dark forest you find yourself in which is “breathing” as one entity, with the animals providing soundtracks to this process of breathing through the hissy and hollow sounds they produce, the strange low thumps at the end, further thicken the surreal plot of this sonic story. Non-Representational Environmental Sound Matter is the part that follows and is in a way similar to Mutated Locations in terms of selection but inverts the compositional approach by showcasing Francisco’s environmental sound matter pieces with less extreme evolution within the sound matter itself but instead use some great layering, unpredictable structures and amplification creating immersive listening experiences in which some sounds are still recognizable at times but form elements within newly composed environments that are like the title says different from just reality. The excerpts on this part are also longer and feature more gradual progressions within which makes for more meditative like listening experiences as you shift your focus through the various layers within. My favourite piece in here is 2011 - Hyper-Rainforest [except]. It’s the longest excerpt Francisco has taken from any piece on this compilation but it’s also especially good that he’s selected a long part of it in the editing process as it’s a rather subtly enveloping composition. There’s a lot of sonic details of the rainforest you can pick up in this one, especially the many different animals within the rainforest, but also various other natural environmental sounds. One of the best things about the way this piece is composed however is the combination of shifting layers with an almost narrative like progression of sonic situations and directions, but all the while staying within the same sonic universe, giving us the ability to travel without moving, but in a different sense. I found it particularly enjoyable to shift through listening modes, at times spotting certain sounds, at other times taking in the effect of the entities within the sound matter and letting the fabric of each of this work on mind as well as sense of depth in the sonic space through listening. Indeed through the shifting layers you also start to sense the location of certain sounds within the depth of the piece as at times having a strangely reverberating acoustic distance to them whilst still sounding as being in the same sonic universe making for a quite magical listen. The progression of the piece towards the rain shower which abruptly ends into a sudden quiet section of soft chirping sounds adds a radio play like narrative element to the piece too as Francisco provides a bit of a frame for the behaviour of all sonic elements within the piece as certain changes that appear within this environment. It heightens the immersion too as not only do the changes make your part of the sonic universe, but they also point towards the deeper subconscious effects of streams of full spectrum sound matter like rain and the many layers of diffusion hidden around the centre of it. In the following part Sonic Seeds and Mega-Evolution Francisco utilises sonic seeds, which sound similar in approach to grains of sound to sculpt mostly unrecognisable sound matter into richly resonant, metallic and often glitchy forms. This part starts with an amalgamation of layers of sonic matter, after which the pieces grow ever more rhythmic and at times recognisably melodic in a way. The results of this sonic approach are somewhat similar to some pieces in the Nice Noise part but in this case the compositions are showcasing more of Francisco’s abstract Glitch like works, differing from his compositions grounded in environmental sonic matter but still bearing some similarities with the organic sound matter in terms of crackling clicks and the usage of high frequency sound. My favourite piece on this part is 2020 - untitled #383 [excerpt] and this one is a particularly glitchy composition. Following a nice gradual progression throughout this excerpt, the composition builds from a cloud of metallic crackles to a final section of glowing droning tones. All throughout we can dive into the various layers of clicky and mostly pointy sound matter that make up the framework of sonic actions that make up this composition feeling somewhere between machinery rhythms and liquid organic matter. The buzzing glitched “bass” tones make for a great ground of the framework, driving the composition forward with quite rumbling low frequencies which when combined with the glowing tones of the final section make for a quite intriguing combination of abstracted rhythmic sound and glowing diffuse sound combined within the same sonic universe. It does remind me a bit of Autechre as well in terms of approach, although in a less chaotic and more organic manner. Afterwards in the part Soundtracks With No Real Subservience we can listen to a selection of soundtrack pieces by Francisco, composed for various films, including art films and documentary. Moving from intense Noise like compositions towards less abrasive compositions featuring concrete and environmental sound matter, Francisco works with sounds within a more narrative type of fashion with the pace of the compositions being quicker and having more of an emotional edge to them. There’s also some more division in sections audible within these pieces as well as the darker qualities of environmental sound matter. In my favourite piece 2016 - Anima Ardens [excerpt] we are presented with another intriguing situation as the piece combines quite peaceful organic sound matter with layers of metallic clangs as well as a brooding diffuse tonal cloud hanging in the air. Quite like finding a mysterious wooden house which is also used as a metal workshop the juxtaposition also makes it feel quite like roaming around in the forest at night. The sharp swirls and clicking sounds, combined with the hollow tones and clangs instantly conjure up quite some magical imagery as these elements start to blend into each other as well as change or fade out whilst remaining a continuous flow of sound keeping its grip on you within the sonic universe. Next part The Ultra-Quiet, Not Conceptual features some of Francisco's quietest pieces. Indeed these are excerpts from his pieces that feature quite a lot of very quiet sound matter and silence moving from a hollow resonant flow of sound to soft rustling and clicks to some surprisingly intense sections of sub-bass frequencies in later pieces within this part. These sub-bass frequency section do also feature in my favourite piece on this part, 2013 - untitled #309 [excerpt] and in this case they’re accompanied by muffled mysterious drones that fade into soft-focus out of the silence. Like most pieces on this parts it’s a very subtle listening experience best listened to on good speakers, including a subwoofer or headphones with a good bass response to properly hear the subtle sonics Francisco builds up in her creep out of their corners. Afterwards on the next part VirtuAural Machines Francisco zooms in on his machinery based pieces. The part features a mixture of approaches to the sonic experience of machinery itself moving from relatively rough softly saturated Industrial like pieces to the usage of percussive mechanical elements to create hypnotic sonic framework as well as eerie sonic universes made up of huge halls filled with heavy clangs of equipment, siren like diffuse, distant tones and pointy and hissy sonics blending together into enveloping streams of sound around us. Whilst some of the sources on this part are at times recognisable in a way, there’s a lot of enjoyment to be had once again by the strange textural qualities of the sound matter as these entities in themselves have a particular enjoyable quality within them here, which is helped by the often spacious panning within the compositions. Favourite piece 1990 - Fango de Euriptéridos [excerpt] utilises the aforementioned spacious panning rather well and also amplifies another aspect of machinery in that it’s based a lot around shimmering tonal resonances reverberating through a large spaces rather than emphasising the (harsh) hissing and repetitive elements of machinery. It features various types of sonic actions but the general sonic focus is on this warm glowing mass of resonance that vibrates in certain ways as well, creating shifting droning tones that seem to make the floor vibrate as well. A quite “temple” like approach to an Industrial sonic universe. Following part Within The Noosphere features a rather different kind of compositions by Francisco in that most of these pieces are built up out of many layers of other music, which are evolved in various manners. Moving from pretty intense tape collages to tumbling Plunderphonics Metal barrages to the rather amusing wailing stretched tones of the old song sampled of a vinyl recorded on the last track it’s Francisco’s compositional work at its most structurally and sonically disruptive. Favourite piece 1994 - Concert for 300 Magnetic Tapes [excerpt] feels quite like a mountain landscape built out of many types of sonic matter. Most matter used within this piece is quite noisy, quirky and quite explosive too but the general fuzzy and crumbling nature of all these bits combined does still conjured up this curious imagery of a mountain landscape made up of sonic material. Recognisably musical and human sounds are at times still audible in between the cracks of the mass of sound, but in a subtle way. The following part Xeno-Instruments features a selection of Francisco’s “acoustic” pieces, in the sense that some of the compositions do feature acoustic musical instruments, at times without much audible post-production. The results are quite mysterious as can be expected from Francisco’s approach, feeling quite like the sound of the earth crust being broken open, sharp clouds of buzzing sonics, thundering percussion rhythms and wooden rumbles travelling through the room. Indeed most of the time it’s not even audible that there are actual acoustic instruments used, which is definitely the quality of Francisco’s work in that he consistently keeps evolving the sonic universes he conjures up and can find richness, “alien” new elements as well as captivating details though any method of composition and with any sound matter he finds making for a very solid but still diverse body of work. The aforementioned wooden rumbles feature in my favourite piece 2011 - untitled #275 [excerpt]. Built up out of rhythmic elements, low rumbles as well as diffused spooky tones the piece progresses in a subtle and deep manner. There’s this great metallic bell like clang that creates regular accents in the first half of this excerpt filling the room with rich resonance periodically. The rhythmically moving wooden elements form irregular patterns that do follow a certain scheme of sections in terms of there appearance and are spiky but also somewhat dampened in nature. Strangely reverberating tones almost form a diffuse melody in the second half which then moves into a brooding cloud of tonal sonic matter. It’s the kind of piece that feels somewhere in between your room starting to create its own sonic universe as well as the sonic picture of an abandoned wooden windmill’s mechanical sounds of past activity. Final part Yes, Humans features compositions that all feature recognisable human sounds or traces of these in various manners moving from amusing locally recorded environmental sound matter to layered children’s choir recordings and a further direction of ever more evolved and abstract sound matter culminating in one of Francisco's most recent compositions (from the last few years) on the final track. This final part quite nicely compiles Francisco's approaches in a way, as radio play like recordings moving in the ever more mysterious abstract and at times cinematic sonics of Francisco’s later works. My favourite track here is the rather short but sweet 1992 - Sofia [excerpt]. In nature is more straight-forward than other pieces on this part but I do find the juxtaposition and sounds themselves within this piece rather nice. It starts with a TV recording of some kind of Soviet TV commercial which sounds all cosy and sweet but afterwards cuts to this Russian Orthodox(?) church in which can hear chants. I especially do like this combination as the commercial seems to recall the memories of the Soviet Union in perhaps a bit overly rosy manner while the church sounds totally loose from anything that might conjure up bad memories and sounds much more peaceful in a way. The way you can hear Francisco walking around the church as well as all kinds of extra noises including a loud cough, footsteps and muffled talking adds to the amusing nature of this piece. The lo-fi nature of the recording also makes the chants themselves feel more like a cloud of tonal sonic matter as syllables get a bit drowned out in the recording. Francisco López’ a bunch of stuff (1980-2020) is an excellent compilation showcasing a great selection of Francisco’s rich discography of compositions which by now reach over 40 years. Full of immersive, uncompromising sonics this compilation is a rewarding listen for anyone who wants to get into Francisco’s music and wants to have a curated overview of his discography to get started diving into his full-length and shorter releases. There’s also some great material in this compilation for fans of Francisco who already have multiple of his releases as the rarer material and recent pieces offer some further sonic enjoyment and the compilation’s selection and sequencing also offers a new more mixtape style manner to enjoy Francisco’s compositions. It’s a recommended compilation for anyone who wants to get into Francisco López as well as fans of Noise, Sound Art, Tape based experimental music, Glitch as well as a uniquely personal approach to sound matter based experimental music, sonogenic composition. Definitely check this out.

You can order a copy of the physical USB business card edition here: https://www.blackhole.la/webshop/francisco-lpez-a-bunch-of-stuff-1980-2020?fbclid=IwAR3pcZfCIT-3Y7BR2M7AjTuph_3TWUm2ZHFjwmuNadir21X_imHnv9ODiZk

[tinycartridge]

Approaching Infinity ⊟

[Guest writer Caroline Delbert brings us a fully unexpected article that manages to be both philosophical exploration and interview-based journalism, at the same time. I couldn’t be happier to share this piece! Find more from Caroline at her Twitter and Medium. -jc]

We live in a golden age of computing power. Our games are filled with giant procgen worlds and RNGs and thousands of ticking background variables. The math is surpassing human ability far faster than we can grasp, and we’ve, I think correctly, put it to work making the grass in Stardew Valley so fun to swoosh through with a sword. But the idea of infinity horrifies people more than almost anything else and remains as confusing and terrifying as ever. As our games get closer to endlessly detailed, I chose four designers who’ve worked on four of my favorite games of the last few years, all with totally different ways of using space, time, and more to give the feeling of an infinite playspace. I’ve also been spelunking the idea of infinity itself and why it makes us feel so uncomfortable and intrigued.

We Contain Multitudes

What is infinity? We aren’t born with an understanding of the idea of something that never ends. Psychology researcher Ruma Falk put together existing studies about infinity. “[C]hildren of ages 8-9 and on seem to understand that numbers do not end, but it takes quite a few more years to fully conceive, not only the infinity of numbers, but also the infinite difference between the set of numbers and any finite set.” You could spend your entire life counting out loud and get to 2 billion. But in calculus, which is all about approaching infinity, a billion is rounded down to zero. An average 2019 computer could count to a billion in about two seconds, depending on the code you wrote. That’s how tiny a billion still is. Falk calls the distance between our human billions and the idea of infinity an “abyssal gap.”

When I talked with Immortal Rogue developer Kyle Barrett about this project, he mentioned Jorge Luis Borges’s famous short story “The Library of Babel.” Borges imagined an infinite-seeming library of books filled with random combinations of letters and punctuation. He sets out 25 total characters and 410 pages. I averaged a few lines from David Foster Wallace’s primer on infinity, Everything and More, which had 57.5 characters per line. For just two lines of, say, 50 characters each, there are over six googol possible versions: that’s a 6 with 100 zeroes after it, for just two lines of a book of 410 pages. The largest math Excel let me do was for about four lines total, which became 3 with 300 zeroes after it.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett has spent decades writing about how humans think about problems and ideas. His 2013 book Intuition Pumps is filled with helpful analogies, including a spin on the Library of Babel. “Since it is estimated that there are only 10040 particles in the region of the universe we can observe, the Library of Babel is not remotely a physically possible object,” Dennett explained. But despite containing far more books than the possible volume of our entire region of space, that number of books is still a real number, not infinite! The takeaway from all this, and then I swear I’ll stop talking about math, is that nothing we can measure in real life is truly infinite. Infinity is a pure concept reserved for mathematicians and philosophers.

Playing with Time: Immortal Rogue

In Kyle Barrett’s 2019 mobile game Immortal Rogue, you begin in prehistory and fight your way through progressive eras in chunks of 100 years. But time is a flat circle, and eventually your progress is bombed back into preagricultural oblivion. The mechanics of Barrett’s game are fun and satisfying and I can’t recommend Immortal Rogue strongly enough, but the framework of endless time is what got my attention.

“It’s not really infinite,” Barrett explained. “It’s a matrix that loops every time you reach the end of it. There’s an x-axis that’s based on time, basically—it goes from agricultural to pre-industrial to the industrial era to the computational era and space age, so time based on human technological development, and if you get too far into the space era you’re gonna destroy the world and go back to the preagricultural era. Then there’s a y-axis that is based on authoritarian control in the world, so at the bottom you have anarchy, at the top you have fascism, and if you go too far into fascism you’ll get anarchy because people will rebel.”

I said I wouldn’t talk about math again, but Barrett brought it up this time. A matrix is just a grid. The Matrix is something else, but if you’ve ever done a “Sally has a blue hat and wasn’t born in March”-style logic puzzle, you’ve used a matrix. There’s also a proper math definition of a matrix and a whole field of operations we do to those matrices, collectively called abstract algebra.

Barrett’s matrix of time and authority determines the overall feel of the levels, but each one is procedurally generated after that. His day job is in mainstream game development, and he originally shopped the idea for Immortal Rogue as the system to power an AAA game. “You can imagine any AAA game with that kind of variety in environment would cost just too much money to make,” Barrett says. “It was a game concept that I had pitched to studios earlier as a sort of introduction piece—not necessarily to make the game, because I know that doesn’t happen, but as far as getting into the industry.”

The way Barrett combined his basic variables means Immortal Rogue does feel endless. My longest life so far is 800 years, and Barrett says a complete cycle in which you beat the game can take anywhere from 1,000 to 4,000 years. I’d love to tell you I believe I’ll beat the game at some point and see that full cycle. I’ll keep trying, at least.

Immortality and Endless Time

Would you want to live forever? This is one of the major philosophical questions that underpins western thought and especially the Christian form of the afterlife. Heaven and hell are each presented as an eternity, but again we run into Dr. Ruma Falk’s findings about how humans conceive of an infinite period of time. “One does not get closer to infinity by advancing the counting sequence because there is no way to approach infinity. Nowhere does the very big merge into the infinite.” If the lifetime of the planet Earth were condensed to one year, humans have lived for less than 30 minutes. We balk at the length of lives of record-setting elders who were born just a few years after the 19th century: imagine living that entire time and then living it again and again for literally forever. Our earthly understanding of time, and how our earthly brains process information, just isn’t compatible with thinking about living forever.

For many people, God or another higher power is the only way that infinity can make sense. In turn, a much longer afterlife helps to also make sense of how tiny and fleeting our earthly lives can feel. In the potentially infinite scale of time, our lives are the meager billions. They round down to zero, and it definitely feels that way sometimes. Falk cites 17th century mathematician Blaise Pascal, himself a late-in-life convert to Christianity and the trope namer of Pascal’s Wager. During Pascal’s lifetime, infinity was still a scandalous idea and a wedge issue for mathematicians and theologians. “When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified,” Pascal wrote. “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.”

In her memoir Living with a Wild God, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich describes grappling with the same problems as an isolated teenager in the 1950s. “I didn’t think much about the future when I was a child—who does?” she writes. “But to the extent that I did imagine a future, it held an ever-widening range for my explorations—more hills and valleys, shorelines and dunes. […] The idea that there might be a limit to my explorations, a natural cutoff in the form of death, was slow to dawn on me.”

Randomizing Infinity: Alphabear & Alphabear 2

Game designer Pat Kemp worked on both 2015’s Alphabear and 2018’s Alphabear 2 at Spry Fox. Both have the same core word game, a fresh take on the classic Bookworm where you have to spell words from rapidly deteriorating letter tiles. Unlike in Scrabble and its knockoffs, rare letters don’t have higher point values. And into the mix you throw dozens of different collectible bears, each with a total score multiplier and a specific boost like a bonus for 5-letter words or preventing all Xs and Zs. Both games are free to play with in-app purchases. In Alphabear 2, Spry Fox took the mechanic of the first game and added a linear story, multiple difficulty levels, and a host of other features. Playing the game feels like getting an upgrade at the rental-car place and realizing you have heated side mirrors. I didn’t ask for them, but I love them and now I need them. But why did the second Alphabear get so much bigger?

“I hope this answer isn’t disappointing to you, but the first Alphabear, although it’s a lovely game we’re very proud of and was critically well received and we got lots of features and good reviews, wasn’t much of a financial success for us,” Kemp told me. So Spry Fox went into development of Alphabear 2 with goals to convert more users into purchasers and more purchasers into multiple-purchasers. “The decision-making around making it into a world, and a linear campaign, and building out all the different features […] was creating this rich, interwoven progression system that players can feel invested in and value. Basically how you monetize a free-to-play game is, people play your game for weeks and months and come to really value things in the game.”

In the first Alphabear, each chapter had a set of collectible bears that quickly eclipsed the power of the previous chapter’s bears. “And you would almost never go back and use bears from earlier chapters, just because of the way it was set up,” Kemp says. “So you had this weird ‘disposable’ feel to bears. It was cool when you unlocked them, but the game was telling you, ‘You’re done with that bear, here’s some new bears.’” Now, the bears accumulate over time as one big group, and you can continue to level them up as high as you want, but your progress is paced by how quickly you regenerate in-game energy in the form of honey.

After a certain chapter in the Normal campaign, players can begin again on Hard mode, and then after a later chapter, they can begin Master mode. I don’t know the full length of the basic campaign, but I’m probably 100 levels in and somewhere in chapter 9 on Normal mode. The scope of the whole thing including all three difficulties is staggering, and the game had been out for just seven months when I talked with Kemp. “Have people finished the amount of content you’ve made so far?” I asked. “We know of at least one person who’s completed the master-level campaign,” he said. When I said I was surprised, Kemp said, “Every game developer I know has this experience where they’re surprised by some small portion of their fanbase that is just so into it that it defies all expectations.”

In this case, the fastest player ended up lapping the development team. “It was so far off that we had planned to build whatever happened when you did that later on,” Kemp said. “They sent us a picture of their screen of the campaign board, and all it was was just a black screen, because it was trying to load the next campaign board, which doesn’t exist. We were like, ‘Oh my god, we didn’t even put anything in there, and it looks kinda like you’re in purgatory or something.’” Spry Fox plans to replace the Sopranos non-ending.

Purgatory or Something

Earlier this year, I talked with my friend Tristan about his existential dread. He’s pretty fresh out of college and still figuring it all out. “I was going to write about games,” he said, “and as I entered my last year or so, I was going to write about movies. I don’t know if I’m still going to do that, so that’s a large part of the dread. Not knowing what I was actually doing.” Humans can’t conceive of infinity using numbers, but we can use our pessimistic imaginations. Our set of plausible options is no match for what we dream or panic about.

Christian existentialist Søren Kierkegaard wrote about dread and fear of the unknown in his 1844 book The Concept of Anxiety, where the Danish word angest could be translated as “anxiety” or “dread”. Using the story of Adam and Eve, Kierkegaard posits that anxiety dates back to a fraction of a second after original sin. “The terror here is simply anxiety,” Kierkegaard writes, “since Adam has not understood what was said.” In other words, like a pet in trouble, Adam didn’t know what was being told to him, but he understood it was bad from the tone of voice.

“Anxiety can be compared with dizziness,” Kierkegaard goes on. “He whose eye happens to look into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason? It is just as much his own eye as the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down.” Those who think about Dr. Ruma Falk’s “abyssal gap” between the finite and infinity may be dizzy forever with the uncertainty of what they’re pondering. “A persistent pursuit of the infinite may bring the individual to a blind alley, both emotionally and intellectually,” Falk writes. His analogy isn’t an accident. A blind alley is like another famous philosophical idea, Schrodinger’s cat: without shining a light, we can never know if the alley is empty or full, terrible or fine. And we can never shine that light.

Infinite Reality: Telling Lies & Her Story

At 2018’s E3 conference, Sam Barlow appeared on a panel about the future of narrative. “People will write to me and say, ‘I haven’t played a game in twenty years, and I played Her Story,’” Barlow said. “Or ‘My daughter installed it on my iPhone for me.’” It makes sense: Her Story’s core mechanic is as simple as a YouTube search, and the game is set in 1994, with a Windows 3.1 aesthetic to match. The game also fits with Barlow’s career arc. His 1999 XYZZY-winning interactive fiction Aisle gives players just one chance to type any command before reaching one of the game’s dozens of endings, placing players in a finite setting that even feels claustrophobic, but setting before them seemingly limitless possibilities. He was a natural fit to lead two Silent Hill games after that, and he views Her Story as the surprisingly successful “one chance” he had to make a successful indie game.

“This is something I’ve pitched so many times to publishers, with the rationale that in every other medium, crime fiction, police procedurals, murder mysteries, detective stories—if you have a TV channel and a film company, you’re gonna have a few stories in that world because it consistently works,” Barlow told me. “Games publishers were never into the idea. They felt like the things that sold in video games were power fantasies and superhero stories.” Barlow chose to home in on the interrogation room both as a convenient single setting and the place where his interest in crime stories was naturally drawn. “I wasn’t trying to do the police chases and locations and all those elements which would be expensive, but also, I was zooming in on the dialogue and the interactions and the human side of it,” he said, citing the groundbreaking ‘90s show Homicide: Life on the Street and its Emmy-winning bottle episode “Three Men and Adena.”

“I did a ton of research, reading the interrogation manuals for detectives, academic studies and pieces about the psychology of the interview room, a ton of crime books, movies with notable interrogation scenes and police interviews. This was slightly ahead of the true crime wave that we’ve had since, so I was discovering there’s so much footage online of real-life interviews and interrogations that has been released or leaked,” Barlow told me. “One day, as these things do, I woke up and went for a walk, and my subconscious—which is far cleverer than I am—put all the pieces and all the research I’d been doing together. [T]he detective’s sat at a computer, and there’s always the twist where they stay up all night sat at the computer and then they find that one little bit of information or the one piece of evidence that will break the case.”

Her Story is made of hundreds of discrete video clips, divided into main character Hannah Smith’s answers to an unseen detective’s questions. For his upcoming game Telling Lies, Barlow brought the setting forward into the Skype era and is introducing new mechanical twists to match. “To some extent Her Story was about giving you the writer’s perspective into a story, and here it’s giving you some of that editing room insight, where you spend so much time with the footage, choosing whether to cut out on this frame or that frame,” Barlow said. Instead of separate clips, Telling Lies gives you long, uncut videos that show both sides of a Skype call that you can scrub through—meaning drag the progress bar searching for highlights. “Not only are you coming at these stories in a nonlinear way, but also within a given scene you might end up watching it backwards.”

The text side of searching has also evolved. Because the videos aren’t separated into clips, searching for a specific word drops you into a video at that exact place. “Those conversations are split into two parts, so you can only see one side of a conversation at a time. You have the full seven minutes in front of you and you get dropped in to the point where someone says the word [or] phrase you've searched for,” Barlow said. “So early on, if you search for the word ‘love,’ you get dropped into a moment when Kerry [Bishé’s] character says, ‘Love you!’ and hangs up.”

Including Her Story and now Telling Lies in a group of very big-feeling games runs into a funny obstacle, because they’re both made of a very finite number of minutes of video. Her Story even has Steam achievements linked with what percentage of the total clips you’ve discovered and watched. “Something like 20% of people 100%-ed it. For most games you’re lucky if 20% of people finish the game. It had a display that showed you all the clips you hadn’t seen—that was an incentive and somewhat maddening if you could see there were clips you hadn’t seen. My approach with Telling Lies was to make it so big and huge and messy and colorful that it would feel less like something you could 100%, because I really wanted people to lose themselves in just the joy of exploring these characters’ lives.”

Just Out of Reach

Even with the incentive to find all the clips, in Her Story I found myself revisiting clips I’d already seen as I tried to find new keywords or listen for clues, and I maxed out just past the 75% achievement. The rest eluded me. With Telling Lies, this one kind of mystery will be removed, and that’s a blow against infinitude. In the perfect world of pure mathematics, having one more item just out of reach is one of the fundamental ways we can make proofs of infinite ideas. This structured approach also helps us turn the overwhelming idea of infinity into, at least right now, the one step in front of us. It’s infinity in the form of a child asking a parent for just five more minutes of sleep, then asking for five more, for eternity.

In Daniel Dennett’s book Intuition Pumps he uses this idea as an illustration for why infinity just can’t exist in real life. If every animal evolved from another animal, then there are infinity animals stretching back into infinity long ago, always with one preceding. We know that’s just not true. On the other hand, a study of how children process infinity showed that knowing the names of some large numbers made children think those were the largest numbers. Learning named ideas pushed out the very idea of having unnamed ideas, which makes sense given how large and robust our language brains are. Being strong, clear communicators has shaped our brains and the societies we form as humans. If we all became existentially troubled abstraction peddlers, I don’t think that would necessarily be a step forward.

To consider infinity with a finite mind is a paradox, and as Dr. Ruma Falk explains, “Mathematicians and philosophers are often no less addicted to resolving these paradoxes than some adolescents are to experiencing the limits of existence.” Like the Library of Babel, an infinite world is made mostly of incoherent and random nonsense, compared with a human mind that can only remember its own history in cohesive story form. My friend Martin has a rich life and a beautiful family, and he told me, “My personal greatest fear is probably losing my mind. The idea of being unable to make sense of the world is horrifying.” In fact, studies show that we’re more able to tune out conversations we can overhear both sides of than those where we can hear just one side—this is how deep our need for clear narratives runs, and it’s why we’re not made for an infinite world.

Infinite Liminal: Sunless Sea & Cultist Simulator

In February of 2019, Alexis Kennedy addressed something that had grown beyond his reach, and his post was the catalyst for what eventually became this essay. On the Weather Factory blog, where the developer typically shares updates to 2018’s Cultist Simulator, Kennedy described an alternate reality game (ARG) called Enigma that he’s built into his work—not just Cultist Simulator but 2015’s Sunless Sea and even 2009’s Fallen London. In the Enigma post, he sums up the appeal this mystery seems to have to fans: “If you’re working through things and looking for meaning in your life, then all the hidden meanings in this project may look like they add up to something more important than they actually do.”

I love Kennedy’s work—if we’re friends, you’ve probably heard me talk about it—and while I’ve never mistaken him for a guru, his games have affected and stayed with me more than anything else I’ve ever played. He’s gifted with language, stuffing his work with plausible and evocative neologisms or uncommon historical terms. But his more powerful gift lies in what he chooses to reveal and how long you must wait for it. I’ve thought often of something my friend Diana said nearly twenty years ago, about traveling with other people and seeing their luggage: “They wonder what I’m taking, but I wonder what they’re leaving behind.” I constantly wonder what Alexis Kennedy is leaving behind.

“Gamers tend to be—to borrow a phrase of Mike Laidlaw's—more like dogs than cats in the way they consume content. If the core loop is even moderately compelling, they'll gorge on content and rush through it,” Kennedy told me via email. “As soon as players are doing that, they'll skim text, and if they're going to skim text, text had better not be your A feature. I constantly skim quest text in games, and I'm a narrative junkie. So pacing is a way of saying: hold on, appreciate this, take your time with it.” In both Fallen London and Sunless Sea, one variable shuffles what day it is, so you receive different flavor text or events even when you’re repeating actions or storylines. “I don't think I ever quite recovered from the initial terror, back in 2009, of seeing players consume Fallen London content literally ten times as fast as I expected,” Kennedy says.

Like Sam Barlow, Kennedy reached for inspiration outside of what’s traditionally in the purview of a video game. I asked how he chooses end goals in games with such wide-open mechanics—Cultist Simulator is even more open than Sunless Sea in some ways. “I come at those stopping points from two directions. One is 'what sort of emotions and experiences are we aiming for?' The other is 'what sort of activities would a character in a novel, not just in a game, do in this setting?' So in Sunless Sea, we want people to be thinking about loneliness and survival and discovery, and we also want people to be aiming for the kind of things they'd aim for in Moby-Dick or Voyage of the Dawn Treader or HMS Surprise.” The only ending I’ve reached in Sunless Sea is the most basic one, where you amass some money and retire. In Cultist Simulator, I’ve managed to live a normal working life and then retire, which is considered a minor victory. And still, the game wonders what I’m taking, while I wonder what it’s leaving behind.

Pure Abstraction

“The study of infinity stretches human abstract thinking to some of its loftiest possibilities,” Dr. Ruma Falk writes. “By definition, it calls for modes of reasoning that transcend concrete representation.” What I’ve found most interesting as I researched this piece and talked with these gifted game designers is how thoughtfully they’d constructed gameplay loops that continue to feel fresh and challenging. The games themselves couldn’t be more different in terms of genre or lack thereof, revenue models, or mechanics, but all feel large and immersive inside to an extent that I instinctively ignored whatever seams I might end up seeing.

I asked each designer to share a game that felt infinite to them as players. Sam Barlow answered the question before I even asked it, though. He described wanting Telling Lies to feel like a huge place to explore. “My only go-to reference, which is somewhat ambitious, is the way I felt when I was playing Zelda: Breath of the Wild and the way that Nintendo made me feel, where I could just go off and explore in any direction and I could let my curiosity guide me and I would always enjoy myself. I would always find something interesting.” He called this kind of freedom a form of magic. “To some extent, Her Story was me trying to get some of the magic and—again, this wasn’t a conscious thing—some of the magic of the old text parser games.”

Pat Kemp also chose Breath of the Wild. “The world feels huge and dense in a kind of unusual way even amongst all the other open-world AAA experiences that are out there. There’s this big mountain and you climb up it, and on the way up you encounter two or three little unique-feeling things, and you make your way down and encounter a bunch of other little things, and they’re all handmade little surprises. It feels like the world is just brimming with delightful little nuggets of story or interesting challenges or encounters. It’s really a remarkable achievement and it’s also one of those things where, as a game developer, I can recognize what a monumental task it must have been to create that world,” Kemp said. “Every inch of it feels handcrafted by someone who cares about that itch, which is just incredibly daunting. It must have been so expensive to do.”

Alexis Kennedy chose Elite: Dangerous, and I enjoyed how his answer mirrored how I feel about his games, where some amount of suggestion makes it easy and fun to project the rest with your imagination. “I put a hundred-plus hours into Elite: Dangerous because I so enjoyed the sense of jumping through galactic-size simulated space. I knew perfectly well that the procgen systems were largely identical in all meaningful ways, I knew the space between star systems isn't simulated and you're just jumping between skyboxed instances, but I've spent 47 years learning how space works IRL and I still carry over those assumptions if the sense of resource cost lets me.  I need to feel like I'm working to cross the space and have something that will run out or need balancing.”

Kyle Barrett pointed out that, infamously now, No Man’s Sky sold itself as an infinite game. “The game definitely feels infinite. It also has the effect of what infinity would feel like, which is empty after a while. It teaches people that lesson,” Barrett says. It brought back to mind something he told me before about deciding how much to procedurally generate within Immortal Rogue: “If it’s pure random, I think it normally fails. That’s something designers find pretty quick. So it’s like, what’s the right amount of random and what’s the skeleton that can make the random meaningful?” He mentioned Dwarf Fortress as a game with infinite-feeling possibilities, and Minecraft as something that marries the two. “It feels infinite in scope and the amount of possibility feels infinite, which is why it’s probably one of the best games ever,” he said.

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom,” Kierkegaard wrote. “Freedom now looks down into its own possibility and then grabs hold of finiteness to support itself.” The games we love might feel infinite, but we only hang around in them long enough to realize this because of the hard work of building structures and feedback loops that make games fun to play. We study infinite math from the security of offices with comfortable temperatures and lighting. As Alexis Kennedy put it, “So it is a design choice, but there's a reason I made that one design choice rather than a million others.”

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NieR: Automata (Deep Dive)

I have never played a game quite like Nier Automata. The 36 hours I clocked into its deeply intricate and visceral mechanical world is not one that will leave me soon. It’s not the greatest game I have ever played, but by far one of the most memorable video game experiences, I’ve ever strained my fingers against. Here’s my Deep Dive into my experience with Nier Automata.

Let’s deconstruct Nier on a surface level before we sink into the nuances of the game. Nier is a high-speed combat action-RPG exclusive to the PlayStation 4. You take control of androids tasked with combating against the machine menace that plagues a vacant planet earth. Developed by Platinum Games, masters of combat, and published by Square Enix, a company I worship despite how many times they mistreat me.

The combat of Nier is something to behold, and differs in style based on which of the three playable characters you are controlling 2B, 9S, or A2. Your character is not the only thing to consider in Nier’s combat, in the height of a fight there are numerous layers to juggle. Light vs heavy attacks and the combo combinations, dodging, switching between your customizable weapon sets, the actions and abilities of your pod companion robot such as changing their type of ammo, and special ability known as a pod program. Learning to properly switch between all of these on the fly to best suit your need for that battle is all a part of fighting in Nier. Though the game makes it easy to execute all these elements as all are associated with a single button press. Intelligently the game gives you the option to choose between either pre-set control schemes, or to fully button-map your controller in a custom control scheme. This is much needed for how much button pressing is done mid-fight, and how potentially tired your fingers can get, you want a control scheme that is as comfortable as possible. I mainly kept control scheme A as my configuration, except that I swapped Pod Program with Ammo fire. So, that the Pod program was R1 and firing was mapped to L2. With how much firing you need to do in combat for me it was more comfortable to hold down a trigger versus a bumper.

Fighting is incredibly fast-paced and flashy. Intense metal on metal action as you slash your way through waves of machines, with sparks and bolts of light jumping off every attack. Each combination of the four types of weapons (Small swords, heavy swords, spears, and combat bracers) along with their position as ether the heavy or light attack have create different attack combinations. A Small sword and a heavy sword weapon set will have different combos then if you have two small swords equipped. If you have two different weapon types equipped, the combos will change depending on which is set as the light or heavy attack. Though combos are certainly finite there is a good amount of variety, and as you play through the game and upgrade the weapons and extend their combos, new life is breathed into familiar button combinations. Even without this watching the characters flip, spin, and strike never got old for the whole playthrough.

Where Automata separates itself from others in its genre are in the common elements of weapons and stats. Instead of how in most rpgs you acquire new weapons by simply progressing through the story and reaching a new location that sells weapons, provided you have the funds to purchase said weapons. In Nier this is not the case; though there are of course several weapon venders within the game; in terms of weapon strength they don’t vary much, and never restock what they have later on in the game. Some vendors even offer you weaker weapons then those that you initially encountered. Obtaining stronger weapons comes down to the player choosing to explore the environments for chests and the occasional hidden pedestal to find the truly worthy weapons. The upgrade adds deep value to even your starter gear, older weapons can become more useful by gaining a better ability or being stronger in the long run. Constantly breathing new life into weapons so it never feels like your carrying around junk waiting to be sold.

Though Nier is the same like all other RPGs in that enemies are a certain EXP value and defeating them adds to your experience leading to you leveling up, and leveling up increases your base health, attack, and defense, but the similarities stop there. For instead of equipping armor and gear to enhance your stats, since you control androids and they are a form of technology, you equip plug-in chips. These chips that can be bought and found not only enhance attack, defense, movement speed, and base health, but enhance your combat ability. Chips that can make 9S hack faster, or cause a glittering shock wave to fly out of every attack of your weapon, or one that adds a Bayonetta’s Witch time-like ability that slows down time briefly if you can dodge at the exact right time. These chips help make your version of the characters distinctly your own since there are tens of categories of chips each with varying power levels that can be increased by fusing chips of the same functionality together.

The characters in Nier have some differences gameplay but not too many. A2 and 2B play identically with light and heavy attacks and fast paced action. Slight differences being 2B’s ability to occasional do an execution move on smaller enemies. While A2 has a longer dodge range that becomes a short glide if held down, and the ability to taunt enemies by holding down the light attack. The distinctness between them ends there as they play virtually the exact same. 9S plays very differently as his attacks are slightly slower, as well as lacks a heavy attack. Instead he gains the ability to hack by holding down the heavy attack button. This activates a hacking minigame that upon completion will either destroy, or cause major damage to an enemy. With smaller enemies giving you the option to occasionally control them and use them against their machine allies.

Initially when you finish 2B’s section of gameplay and start 9S’ the experience drags. Your combat is severely limited as you now have only one weapon and only one attack button that functions slower. Adding on to this that since 2B and 9S spend a considerable amount of time together, you are experiencing not only a lot of the same dialogue but a lot of the same cut scenes again for the second time. With only little tidbits of different story occurring in the moments where they were separated to give the story greater context. But its these minor contextual elements that show the true strength of Nier Automata’s story and how its presented.

At the begging of playing 9S, his campaign combat wise does seem a bit lack luster, but as you progress through the game your weapons advance some more variety gets added. And when you reach later elements of the story and combat gets harder and enemy numbers become intense, having the ability to hack enemies to make up for his limited combat abilities is a welcome skill. Without it later elements of the game would become more tedious and long winded, challenge without purpose.

I was never that perturbed by his lack of combat skills, for he is a scanner unit, while the other characters are combat units. Within the first minutes of 9S’ introduction he mentions how fighting “isn’t really his thing”. And even if you are very down on 9S first play through on a gameplay stance the story elements that are just thrown in front of you without warning entice you to keep going to see more and learn more. Tiny tidbits of context, and seeing the same elements again open you to a grander story. One that makes you realize that some things in the first playthrough that were brought up were never fleshed out or explained. Further enticing you down the rabbit hole the game continues to dig.

From the second playthrough the game’s story begins to unfold like a flower slowly revealing more and more on its own. And it shows great respect to the player by presenting the story elements beat by beat, but forcing the player to piece it all together in their own mind to really figure out the deeper meaning of everything that is going on.  By the end of the 3rd segment of the game where an important choice must be made in order to access the final few endings of the game, choosing and repeating the choice gives a huge payoff in finally piecing together on your own, the significance of things even way back in the first playthrough that were secretly important or relevant in the end.

But its more than just the presentation of the story itself but how it tackles these topics that also leave huge impacts on me. The game covers ideas such as existence, purpose, humanity, reality, perception, family, and consciousness. Not only does the game cover them in a way that isn’t pretentious or shallow, but in ways that are still emotionally impactful, insightful, and even inspiring. Nier Automata leaves the player to think about their own concepts of these topics, all while understanding it’s still a game and meant to be fun. One of my favorite moments comes at the end of Ending B, where an anime style preview for section C occurs, with a literal preview of the cut scenes you will watch comes up. Like a trailer for the game you are already playing and for what you are about to do. That is brilliant. Such an over the top and self-indulgently dramatic moment for the game to include, but it’s more than just surface value, the drama serves a dual purpose.  Not only to literally preview and poke fun at the game’s obvious anime inspirations, but also to show the emphasis of the second half of the game. A visual warning to the player saying “Get ready. The surface has only been scratched, get ready for the real story.” Such intelligent and purposeful imagery.

Nier Automata is an intense nihilistically hopeful, and all around beautiful video game that is a ride all the way till the 5th credits. Slight curveballs are constantly thrown at you that subvert your expectation of what “should” happen next in a video game. It challenges the player to take a deep look at the story being presented in front of them in order to understand, and ultimately figure out what the game means to them. And to me, that is art at its most pure form, giving the viewer a piece of itself that they use to amplify their own perception of reality, life, and the world.

Glory to mankind.

Thank you Nier Automata

[dmsonline]

Improve Engineering Value

Extract the Most from Engineering Simulations

https://youtu.be/am7TMrPSH-M     Everyone wishes that engineering consultants were free, which just can’t happen.  Short of that, DMS aims to provide the best value out of each engineering project.  As the consultant, I hate to see projects where my client tried to save a few dollars, and in the process lost the chance to double or triple the value of their project.  When you pay for engineering, would you prefer to get three answers instead of just one.  Today we discuss four engineering tasks where you can maximize your value.  Extract every last drop of knowledge from your engineering project.

1.0 3D Model

Many clients show incredulity about paying for a digital 3D model of their ship . . . until they see the first images.  With this, we can show bridge layout, cabin spaces, and exterior shots of the ship, all rendered with believable detail.  You experience the look and feel of your vessel after only committing a fraction of the final build cost.  It sits there in clear digital detail on your screen.  Spin around and fly through to see each angle and detail.  3D models generate the wow factor and energize everyone to finish the project. But a 3D model extends beyond mere aesthetic uses.  It becomes the central linchpin when designing a new ship.  As ships become more complex, 2D drawings fail to capture all the interactions.  A 3D model allows us to quickly examine multiple angles and check between interferences of different systems.  We can explore all the structural connections. (Figure 1‑1) We may even submit the 3D model to some class societies as part of the drawing package, saving 15-25% on drafting time.

Figure 1-1: Example of 3D Modeled Tug for ABS Review   To truly maximize your value, combine the 3D model with finite element analysis (FEA) or computational fluid dynamics (CFD).  The first stage of those projects requires development of a 3D model.  With a little foresight, the engineer can combine two models into one and really maximize the value.

2.0 Computational Fluid Dynamics

Many clients first imagine a laundry list of conditions to test in their CFD project.  But after discovering the cost for CFD, they quickly shrink that list down to just one or two cases.  (One case = one speed, wave direction, etc.)  True, CFD is not cheap.  But don’t assume that skimping on cases reduces the cost significantly.  Between 50-80% of the cost in a CFD project resides with constructing the CFD model.  A typical model construction consists of several tasks: Create 3D geometry Create initial mesh Setup simulation physics Debug simulation and create stable first run Perform mesh independence study Convergence checks (Identify correct mesh settings) By the time a CFD model begins the prescribed production runs, the CFD engineer already ran the model five to seven times for validation and debugging.  This development effort is necessary to ensure a reliable and accurate CFD model; otherwise you just have colorful garbage.  Reducing your scope of work can’t reduce these initial costs. Rather than reducing cost, maximize the value of your analysis.  Invest in more CFD cases to investigate further details.  Don’t have a large budget?  DMS can provide several options to reduce the cost of each run.  The costs behind a production CFD run involve more than just computer time: Labor time: run and debug simulation Cost of computing resources Labor time for post processing raw data into human readable results Labor time to comment and incorporate results into final report To maximize your value here, focus on reducing the last two elements from each CFD case.  Maybe your only need one measurement from the raw data of each CFD case.  That requires far less labor than generating five pictures, 3 graphs, and six numbers from each run. Another alternative: add five supplemental cases that are not essential to the project, and specify that the engineer does not need to comment on them in the final report.  Look for opportunities to maximize the knowledge from your CFD project and minimize labor cost.

3.0 Damage Stability Analysis

Damage stability analysis requires an engineer to examine the vessel in various damaged conditions and check that it still complies with stability regulations.  This ensures the vessel has suitable survivability, even with the hull punctured.  The downside is the labor intensity for this type of analysis.  The only way to be sure about safety in a damaged condition is to check every scenario of damaged tanks and compartments.  Don’t try to save money by reducing the number of cases or limiting the analysis to damage on only one side of the vessel.

Figure 3-1: Example of a Damage Case   The real labor originates from constructing the damage stability model.  Stability analysis requires a model of the vessel.  Most of these are proprietary models, and we can’t just import the geometry from another program like Rhino 3D.  To make matters worse, normal stability models don’t typically include the internal compartmentation (all the bits that we need to damage for a damage stability analysis).  For a complicated vessel, this may require modeling 50 - 150 individual compartments.  And then the engineer develops the different damage cases, often a manual operation. But after developing the stability model, the analysis process accelerates.  Most stability software includes automation options to rapidly iterate through all the damage cases. Most of the options for damage stability get stipulated by regulations, and you don’t have any options to reduce engineering costs.  Even worse, if the analysis gets abridged, the engineer can not report any definitive conclusions.  Cutting back does not help.  Instead, can we get anything more from this beyond regulatory compliance?  Dive deeper and expose the rationale behind the results. Ask for Maximum VCG curves from each damage case.  Expose the weak points on your vessel.  This may even uncover options to improve performance.  Perhaps your ship was limited by a single bad damage case.  Some small changes could improve everything.  Adding a few small tanks below decks may vastly expand the cargo capacity above deck.  Tackled creatively, damage stability analysis becomes an opportunity for growth.

4.0 Fatigue FEA

Finite element analysis (FEA) for fatigue holds great potential:  both to improve vessel life and to incur a high engineering cost.  Fatigue FEA really involves two analyses combined. Use FEA to determine the stress range at various critical points in the structure. Perform fatigue analysis to determine the expected life of each point. Unfortunately, the ocean makes things complicated.  Most of the stress cycles on a ship derive from either machinery vibrations or ocean waves.  The ocean waves generate a wide array of stress ranges.  To reduce engineering costs here, focus on the type of fatigue analysis.  Full spectral fatigue requires a detailed history of the vessel operating region and records of the weather.  We need to reproduce the various wave spectra for the life of the vessel and predict fatigue performance for all those cases.  Very labor intensive. A simpler option is the simplified fatigue assessment.  Rather than generate each wave from past history, this creates an assumed distribution of waves based on a few critical numbers.  Same results, a little less accuracy, with a lot less labor.  This method doesn’t work for all case situations, but it makes a great cost saver when applicable. Maybe you don’t need every point analyzed.  A typical fatigue FEA identifies dozens of potential fatigue sites.  But some are more important than others.  Work with the engineer to select only a few sites for full fatigue life predictions.  The remaining sites just get noted for inspections.  This focuses the maintenance and still improves your efficiency.  But at a lower engineering cost, and everyone wins.

5.0 Conclusion

We all want to feel good about paying for engineering analysis.  Sometimes the best answer drives us to maximize value, rather than minimize cost.  Engineering is not a commodity; some tasks have minimum costs to ensure safety and reliable results.  In those cases, you do better to go beyond basic safety and search for enhancements.  Many times, the key to satisfactory engineering projects lies in asking for more, not less.

6.0 References

American Bureau of Shipping, "ABS and Crowley Pilot Validates 3D Modeling Techniques to Meet Class Requirements," American Bureau of Shipping, 2018 23 Aug. . Available: https://ww2.eagle.org/en/news/press-room/abs-and-crowley-pilot-validates-3d-techniques-to-meet-class-requirements.html. . VesselView, "Vessel View - 3D Animation Studio - Yacht 3D Trailer," YouTube, 10 Oct. 2011. . Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Os9zYb18QoU. . Wikipedia Authors, "CFD Simulation Showing Vorticity Isosurfaces Behind Propeller," Wikimedia Commons, 22 May 2011. . Available: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CFD_simulation_showing_vorticity_isosurfaces_behind_propeller.png. . Vard Marine, "Finite Element Analysis," Vard Marine, 2018. . Available: https://vardmarine.com/vessel-design-process/advanced-analysis/fea/. .         Read the full article

[solarpunks]

#003 “Use biological solutions before technological” — Interview with Jesse Grimes — Pt2

Part 2 of our interview with Jesse Grimes, who’s one of our favourite Youtubers. He is currently running a gofundme to take him to the The Ecological Landscaper Immersion program (details below).

In Part 1 we talked Permaculture, Ant Village at Wheaton Labs and Standing Rock.

In Part 2 we talk Technology, bikes and the future! 

This post is mirrored on our medium here if you prefer. (it looks nicer)

Bikes

SPS! From your videos it seems that bikes and BMX played a big role in your life growing up. When did you start riding and how has it influenced you as a person?

I’ve been riding BMX since I was 5 years old. I lived right next to the first ABA race track in the country in Chandler, Arizona, and my dad started bringing me there. My bike was stolen, so I stopped riding for a while, but I got back into it in a big way when I was 12 and moved to Southern California. All through high school I rode BMX, and pretty much all my friends came from riding. I really think it kept me away from drugs and alcohol during my teen years. I had a social group that was organized around doing something active and positive, instead of around partying, we got our thrills through learning new tricks and discovering new spots to ride. To this day, riding BMX has given me a community that I can connect right into no matter where I go. I can just roll up to the skatepark or a set of jumps and instantly make friends with other riders.

BMX Road Trip, the #IdahoSkateparkTour, and Building a Better Bike Park

SPS! I’m not into BMX / trials biking myself, but I have a bunch of friends who are. They’re the sort of people that love spending their spare time digging up dirt in the woods not minding the rain is there a little bit of that in you?

Most definitely, I have been doing that since I was a kid. Creating dirt jumps is one of my favorite art forms. It’s like large scale, interactive, ceramic sculpture. Of course, the main motivation is the experience of doing the jumps once they are finished, but anyone who has a passion for creating jumps or trails will put their own artistic touch into the way the lips are shaped, or how the line twists through the woods. There’s also a community aspect to it, getting together with a group of friends and working long hours to create something that you all can enjoy.

SPS! You’ve talked passionately about the idea of combining permaculture with bike parks and really want to make it happen. Could you tell us a bit more about your vision for the Permaculture Bike Park?

Once I started learning more about water harvesting earthworks through permaculture, it changed the way I looked at building dirt jumps. Anyone who is an experienced trail builder thinks about drainage, but through permaculture eyes I started thinking about how all that water could be directed towards growing plants, to help mitigate the environmental damage that is caused by all that digging. Having trees around the jumps also happens to make the riding more enjoyable. Public bike parks are becoming more and more common, and I think that is a very good thing, given all the positive impacts that riding BMX can have a on a child’s life.

The sport of BMX is a gateway to a lifelong love of cycling. Talk to anyone who is riding a road or mountain bike in their 30s, and most of the time you find out that they started on a BMX bike as a kid. So, I think building more bike parks and providing the youth with a welcoming invitation to the sport of BMX is a great way to ensure that more people will be riding bikes in the future. I’ve been to a lot of public bike parks in my travels, and unfortunately, most of them are quite poorly built, and nearly all of them just look like bare dirt lots. Knowing what I do about building jumps, along with my knowledge in permaculture, I see a huge opportunity to create a much better bike park. To start with, permaculture design can be used to organize the cycling community around getting the parks built, to help make those connections and create those positive relationships that are necessary when working with public agencies to even get the idea of a bike park off the ground. When it finally gets to the point of designing and building the park, permaculture design can be utilized to take a more holistic view of how the visitors will interact with the park, and how the park itself will interact with the community around it. Another very important aspect, is making connections in the local cycling community and providing resources to trusted individuals to ensure that the jumps and riding surfaces continue to be well maintained. I’ve seen too many bike parks that are damaged to the point of being unsafe, because there was never any maintenance program set in place. By using permaculture design, we can better ensure that the park will actually be useful, fun, and safe for the riders, as well as a benefit for the neighborhoods around it. Instead of some forgotten mounds in a dirt lot, we could build a beautiful forest garden that is a draw for both cyclists and the general public. On top of the parks being a great place for children to gain a love of cycling, it would also be an incredible opportunity to educate the public about how permaculture can be used to create abundance out of damaged landscapes. I think that well beyond the possibilities of the permaculture bike park, there is a huge potential to improve the design and operation of public parks and public space as a whole.

The Future

SPS! Permaculture is a big part of Solarpunk and is certainly a real world origin point for it’s aesthetic. In your experience, what do people in the permaculture community think about new technologies?

I think there is quite a wide range of opinions on the subject. There is certainly an element that is trying to move away from technology as much as possible, but there are also those who fully embrace it, and everything in between. One of the principles of permaculture is to use biological solutions before technological. So for example, you would use a constructed wetland to treat and clean your grey water instead of some mechanical means of filtration. The biological solutions are almost always easier, cheaper, and more effective, plus by adding another biological element into a system, you are increasing the diversity, and therefore the resiliency of that system. However, that doesn’t mean technology is out of the question. There is a tremendous amount of work to be done to reverse the damage that our technological society has caused, and ironically some of that same technology is the best and quickest way to start doing that work. An excavator can be used to mine the tar sands, but it can also be used to create water harvesting earthworks that will improve the hydrology of a site for thousands of years. So, I think it is important when considering a new technology to look at the problem it is trying to solve, and strongly consider whether nature has already come up with a solution to that problem. Also, what are the inputs required to create that technology, and what are the outputs of using it? Can we partner with biology to find a solution to that same problem that requires a much lower input of energy and materials, while providing a number of beneficial outputs that might not be produced by a purely technological solution? There are certainly situations in which the best solution in technological, but I also feel that on a planet with finite resources, there is a real danger to the idea that all of our problems will eventually be solved through technological innovation. Technological systems almost always require outside inputs to continue functioning, and inevitably have a finite life span, while biological systems become more resilient with time, utilize the inexhaustible resource of sunlight as their primary input, and have existed on this planet for billions of years.

SPS! In his essay ‘Political Dimensions of Solarpunk’ Andrew Dana Hudson proposed the slogan “Move quietly and plant things” as a counterpoint to silicon valley’s “move fast and break things”. What do you think technology’s role will be in the abundant future we are all hoping for and what does it need to do differently from today?

An early vision of the solarpunk aesthetic, by Imperial Boy. Via MissOlivaLouise

I think technology has a huge role to play in helping us understand the problems we are faced with, as well as in helping us do the work necessary to transform our world in preparation for that abundant future. However, once we have built a world where all the necessities of life are provided by an abundant biological system right outside our front door, I think that many of the technologies we see as indispensable today will simply fade into obscurity. Why would everyone want their own electric car when they don’t have a need to drive every day? Would we need complicated medical equipment when everybody’s food is so nutritious and of such high quality that hardly anyone gets sick anymore? Technology is incredible when it comes to helping us communicate and gather information, and because of this I think it will continue to play a huge role in our social and intellectual lives. The problems come about when we try to use technology to deal with the biological problems of being an animal living within an ecological system. Nature has long ago perfected ways in which to feed us, clothe us, shelter us, and give us clean water and clean air. Somewhere along the line we decided that it was better to use technology to do these things, and so we started ignoring the importance of the ecological systems that were supporting us. We can’t continue to do this and hope to have a positive future.

SPS! Our Tumblr’s tagline is “At once a vision of the future, a thoughtful provocation, and an achievable lifestyle. In progress…” Do you think if everything humanity need to do, gets done, is there reason to be optimistic about the future?

Optimism is the only option in my opinion. It is certainly important to take a critical look at our situation and identify challenges, but only so much that we are aware and understand them clearly. If we focus on the challenges we will be more reluctant to act, and action is desperately needed in our world right now. A phrase that has been repeating in my mind for quite some time now is, “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.” To me, it means that we could sit around all day and find flaws in our designs, or in our plans for improving our situation, but we can’t let that stop us from doing the work necessary to at least move us a little bit closer to our goals. Even if we do a lot of work for very little improvement, we are still better off than if we did nothing, and we are in a better position to start from the next time. The problems facing us are so numerous and so massive, that it is easy to get discouraged and start thinking that the abundant, equitable, and peaceful society we would like to live in is so far away that it becomes impossible to reach. We have to remain optimistic that we have the power to improve our society as a whole by making small improvements in our own lives. We all have to find some way in which we can contribute and just get to work, even if we make mistakes along the way. All of these small hopeful acts will build on top of one another until one day we look around and see that although the world is not perfect, it is much, much better off than it once was.

Send Jesse to the ELI

The first time I ever heard the word permaculture was back in 2011, during a short introductory workshop. That day, a whole new world of ideas opened up to me, an entirely different way of looking at the people and environments around me. I saw that permaculture held the tools to create a better future, the possibility to teach us how to live on this Earth in a way that benefits not only ourselves and our communities, but all the rest of the natural world as well, all of our relatives here on this planet that is our home. My life was changed forever by this moment, and since then I have dedicated my life to learning more about permaculture and sharing this knowledge with others, in the hopes that they might have a similar life changing moment and join in the work of creating a positive future for humanity and the planet.

In the time since then, I have taken two permaculture design courses and various other workshops, gained experience and skills through many hours of volunteer work at permaculture farms and natural building projects, and dove head first into the world of permaculture homesteading by joining the Ant Village community at Wheaton Labs in Montana. Throughout all of this I have pursued my mission of sharing permaculture with the world by talking with people and hosting small workshops, but primarily by creating videos about my experiences and sharing them on the One Heart Fire Youtube channel. I have also started to build a right livelihood by doing permaculture design projects and installations for friends and family, turning my knowledge and energy into real soil, water, and permanent food sources for my clients.

The Ecological Landscaper Immersion Course: http://www.permacultureskillscenter.org/copy-of-ecological-landscaper-immer

Jesse’s GoFundMe Campaign: https://www.gofundme.com/sendjessetotheeli

Jesse’s Youtube Channel: Search “Oneheartfire” or https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpTOy6AFv_Qqr9J8n50f71Q

Jesse’s Patreon, which supports the youtube channel: https://www.patreon.com/jessegrimes

In Part 1 we talked Permaculture, Ant Village at Wheaton Labs and Standing Rock.

[kathleenseiber]

Genome ‘atlas’ pinpoints driver mutations that cancers share

Researchers have completed the most comprehensive study of whole cancer genomes to date.

The work significantly improves our fundamental understanding of cancer and signposts new directions for its diagnosis and treatment, the researchers report.

For the new analysis in the journal Nature, more than 700 researchers examined more than 2,600 samples from 38 cancer types. The cancers range from common ones like colorectal and breast cancers to rare cancer types including pancreatic and brain cancers.

This analysis has enabled researchers to create the first complete atlas of genomes to compare the cancers and find the common mutations between them.

The Pan Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes or the Pan-Cancer Project (PCAWG) created the atlas. PCAWG is a collaboration between groups from the International Cancer Genome Consortium who agreed to put thousands of sets of patient genome data together and reanalyze these samples using cloud computing.

The mutations have all been combined into a sort of catalogue. The catalogue, which is already available online, allows doctors and researchers from all over the world to look things up, consult with, and find information about the cancer of a given patient.

Mapping driver mutations

“Most previous major studies have focused on the protein coding 2% of the genome. We have studied and analyzed the whole genome, and our analyses of mutations that are affecting cancer genes have enabled us to genetically explain 95% of the cancer occurrences we have studied by means of mutations,” says coauthor Joachim Weischenfeldt, associate professor at the Biotech Research & Innovation Centre at the University of Copenhagen and the Finsen Laboratory at Rigshospitalet.

“So, if you know which mutations have caused cancer, the so-called driver mutations, you will be able to better tailor a treatment with the most suitable drugs or design new drugs against the cancer. Precision medicine is completely dependent on the mapping of driver mutations in each cancer, in relation to diagnosis, prognosis, and improved treatment,” says coauthor Jakob Skou Pedersen, a professor at the Bioinformatics Research Centre and in the clinical medicine department at Aarhus University and Aarhus University Hospital.

Researchers found on average any given tumor has four to five key mutations—changes to the genetic blueprint—that are responsible for driving that disease. Those mutations can vary a great deal for each cancer type.

Previously researchers were aware of one or two drivers. Researchers say understanding that number and realizing the complexity in each patient is an important step in working out where else to look when diagnosing cancer patients.

“It is quite surprising that almost all of them have the same number of driver mutations. However, it is consistent with theories that a cancerous tumor needs to change a certain number of mechanisms in the cell before things start to go wrong,” says Pedersen.

This atlas provides a solid foundation for understanding which genes and which pathways may be damaged in each cancer type, says Sean Grimmond, chair in cancer medicine at the University of Melbourne.

“This research will help identify what types of genetic test are needed for each cancer type—filling in potential existing gaps that we did not even know were there,” Grimmond says. “It demonstrates better than ever before how similar damage can cause cancer in different tissues—implications mean that for example a breast cancer drug could be effectively used to treat an esophageal cancer.”

The atlas also identifies patterns of damage across various cancer types, which provides insight for challenging cancers where the tissue of origin is unknown.

“If we don’t understand where a cancer comes from, we can’t even rely on traditional clinical approaches to treatment,” Grimmond says.

Untangling the cancer genome for better treatment

Having a harmonized dataset enables international researchers to learn from one cancer treatment and applies those findings to another using a cloud computing portal.

The researchers say further research with much larger datasets is required to move precision medicine toward becoming a reality.

“This work is helping to answer a long-standing medical difficulty, why two patients with what appear to be the same cancer can have very different outcomes to the same drug treatment,” says Peter Campbell, member of the Pan-Cancer Project steering committee and head of cancer, aging, and somatic mutation at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the UK.

“We show that the reasons for these different behaviors are written in the DNA. The genome of each patient’s cancer is unique, but there are a finite set of recurring patterns, so with large enough studies we can identify all these patterns to optimize diagnosis and treatment,” Campbell says.

“Cancer is a genetic disease, and the type of mutations is often more important than where the cancer originates in the body. This means that we need to think of cancer not just as a tissue-specific disease, but rather look at it based on genetics and the mutations it has,” says Weischenfeldt.

“For example, we may have a type of breast cancer and prostate cancer where the driver mutations are similar. This means that the patient with prostate cancer may benefit from the same treatment as the one you would give the breast cancer patient, because the two types share an important driver mutation.”

Source: University of Melbourne, University of Copenhagen

The post Genome ‘atlas’ pinpoints driver mutations that cancers share appeared first on Futurity.

Genome ‘atlas’ pinpoints driver mutations that cancers share published first on https://triviaqaweb.weebly.com/

[jamesrobertdeal]

What are the treatments for blood sepsis? And is there a point of no return?

Ada Drinkwater, BS Psychology & Sociology, MCC & UCA (1982)

Answered 14h ago

I read this elsewhere several days ago. Of course it’s not mainstream but some health providers have been using IV vitamin C successfully for years for many things including cancer. It has a long history of being good at neutralizing toxins. http://healthimpactnews.com/2018….

http://healthimpactnews.com/2018/mega-vitamin-c-iv-therapy-being-used-to-cure-sepsis-and-flu-infections-while-mainstream-medicine-opposes-it/

Mega Vitamin C IV Therapy Being Used to Cure Sepsis and Flu Infections While Mainstream Medicine Opposes It

Posted By AdminOK On February 13, 2018 @ 2:05 pm In Alternative Health,Headline | No Comments

[1]

by Paul Fassa Health Impact News

There’s a doctor in Virginia who is trying to promote IV mega-dose vitamin C for intensive care units (ICU) by lecturing to ICU doctors throughout the nation. Dr. Paul Marik was the head of the Norfolk General Hospital’s ICU.

In January of 2016, out of desperation, he decided to try IV mega-dose vitamin C on a middle-aged woman dying from septic shock in his unit.

His IV “cocktail” consisted of vitamin C, thiamine (vitamin B1), and hydrocortisone. Her turn-around and recovery were so unexpectedly rapid and complete that he continued using that cocktail for sepsis victims with a very high success rate.

Dr. Marik’s successful adventure out of the medical standard of care box was detailed in an earlier Health Impact News article [2].

Sepsis is a toxic blood condition that leads to septic shock, which shuts down organs and kills at a rate of over 800 per day. It’s accepted that any type of infection could create sepsis if the immune system overreacts and creates a cytokine storm [3].

Septic shock is a common occurrence in ICUs, but can occur elsewhere and from different triggers. The mortality rate of septic shock victims is around 50 percent, but the numbers are more surprising. According to IV vitamin C advocate, Dr. Alpha “Berry” Fowler, an ICU head in another hospital, sepsis cases result in septic shock and 826 deaths per day in the USA.

Medical Resistance to Using Vitamin C for Sepsis or Anything Else

As usual, there’s resistance to Dr. Marik’s proselytizing for IV mega-dose vitamin C use on septic shock victims and Dr. Fowler’s research efforts to prove its efficacy and safety, ranging from conservative and official to disrespectful and vitriolic.

The latter is aimed at lay people to confuse them or make them fearful. But the resistance that is more damaging comes from the former, conservative and original. That seemingly innocuous resistance is based on the need for more research and trials on an obviously safe agent that has proved itself clinically many times.

Vitamin C as ascorbic acid administered intravenously is proven safe and there have been many clinical successes in addition to the sepsis successes reported earlier in this article. But double blind testing will only deny benefits to those who are unknowingly placed in the placebo control group among septic shock patients who may die as a result.

That’s unethical when there are already several clinical case studies proving safety and efficacy of some who could benefit. And there is no interest from groups with deep pockets to fund the lengthy process and final payment for approval from the FDA. Meanwhile, more die from septic shock or so-called flu-related deaths.

One of the very few MDs who courageously applied Dr. Marik’s cocktails for sepsis to ICU patients successfully was compelled to quit when hospital surgeons raised concerns over using hydrocortisone. The surgeons were concerned that it would interfere with healing.

After researching and writing several articles on mega-dose IV vitamin C, it’s obvious to me that the cocktail could do well without hydrocortisone, even the vitamin C alone could perform with the same efficacy and safety.

As Dr. Frederick Keller [4]claimed after being shunned by colleagues when he presented his case files of children cured of polio with his vitamin C injections circa 1950,

“Some physicians would stand by and see their patient die rather than use ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) because, in their finite minds, it exists only as a vitamin.”

Sepsis is Often Misdiagnosed as Flu

The symptoms are similar, high fever, chills, aching body, and unusually weak. It makes one wonder how many “flu deaths” are simply patients with flu-like symptoms dying from septic shock.

Dr. Greg Martin, a critical-care physician at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, calls sepsis “the great masquerader” because it’s prone to fooling doctors into believing it is the flu. He added,

“Sepsis is, unfortunately, common. When you look at the numbers, it’s the third most common death in the United States.” (Source) [5]

Flu Shots Are Another Source of Sepsis and Flu-Related Deaths

There’s another source of cytokine storms that mainstream media and mainstream medicine prefers to ignore or deny – vaccinations.

And it’s become increasingly obvious to those willing to look and think that there is an increasing number of deaths considered from the flu among those who had only recently received their flu shots. (Source) [6]

A study published in 2010, “Relative trends in hospitalizations and mortality among infants by the number of vaccine doses and age, based on the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), 1990–2010” shows a correlation to pediatric vaccinations and hospitalizations and deaths. (Source) [7]

Vaccine-Induced Cytokine Storms

As mentioned earlier, it’s accepted that any type of infection could create sepsis if the immune system overreacts and creates a cytokine storm. What is being strongly implied by this writer is that there is the potential of sepsis or septic shock from vaccine-induced cytokine storms, which are usually the source of vaccine-induced injuries and deaths.

There have been several episodes reported that are associated with vaccine-induced cytokine storms or simply vaccine toxin overloads that overwhelm the immune system and cause death from septic shock. Vaccine-induced cytokine storms or cascades often initiate sepsis. (Source [8].)

Ironically, the flip side is that any infection, including viral flu infections, can create a cytokine cascade. However, when we see so many deaths from the flu after a flu vaccination, it seems the flu shots are more capable of creating cytokine storms than the wild flu virus.

Another plausible factor could be the fact that live viruses are used for flu shots with toxic adjuvants that act as boosters to antibody responses. But antibodies are only one part of the immune system. Much of the immune system is bypassed by injections. The combination of adjuvants and live viruses can deliver a highly potent flu infection.

Whenever patients with flu-like symptoms die, their vaccination records are not disclosed. It’s only when a relative discloses to news sources that the flu vaccination to death timeline is disclosed. (Source) [9]

Another statistical arrangement is recording deaths from pneumonia as a complication of the flu or other causes as complications from the flu. Viral pneumonia, for example, is not necessarily a consequence of influenza. One can experience pneumonia without experiencing the flu.

According to the U.S. National Vital Statistics System, annual flu deaths in 2010 amounted to just 500 per year, not 36,000. Yet the CDC has a slideshow for its employees to use high numbers of flu cases and deaths to create fear and urge the populace to get vaccinated with the flu shot of the year. (Source [10].)

Furthermore, the CDC’s Nancy Cox, chief of its influenza branch, admitted:

“… that most cases of flu-like illnesses – about 80% – in fact are caused by “many other pathogens.” (Source) [11] [emphasis added]

CDC Lies and Fear-Mongering to Increase Flu Vaccine Sales

[12]

Actual text from the CDC website [13] regarding flu deaths.

This year’s flu season has been promoted as one of the worst ever. Deaths, especially those of children, are reported in mainstream media outlets.

This raises the natural skepticism from those of us who do not trust the CDC and its mainstream media mouthpiece. Broadcasting exaggerated fears sells vaccines and Tamiflu [14], both ineffective and toxic.

The CDC is in the vaccine business. It has ownership in “vaccine-related patents.” [15]

An internal CDC slide show meant to train staff members on how to sell more flu vaccines was exposed by journalist Lawrence Soloman as the “Recipe that fosters influenza vaccine interest and demand.” The CDC training slides promote the following “talking points” to create demand for flu shots and Tamiflu:

“Medical experts and public health authorities [should] publicly state concern and alarm with and predict dire outcome predictions.”

“Significant media interest and attention … in terms that motivate behavior such as ‘very severe,’ ‘more severe than last or past years,’ and ‘deadly’.”

“Visible/tangible examples of the seriousness of the illness with pictures of children, families of those affected.

Fostering “the perception that many people are susceptible to a bad case of influenza” to motivate vaccinations.

Photos and video clips of happy folks getting vaccinations to reinforce the idea. (Source) [16]

The CDC official annual death toll from influenza is 36,000 in the USA. But they’re flexible, often claiming to be even higher. According to Anne Suchacht, acting CDC Director, the 2018 flu season is on target to become worse than the 2008-2009 Swine flu which killed 12,469. Not sure how many of those were among the 36,000, but this number is not close to 36,000. (Source) [17]

Most flu cases that are reported are not from any type of influenza strain. Folks with some flu-like symptoms consider they have the flu or the doctors they visit diagnose them with the flu. All this is particularly highlighted during the “flu season.”

But only around 15 percent of specimen swabs from reported flu cases contained an actual influenza virus. Using statistics from the CDC that aren’t publicized, Dr. Sherri Tenpenny put together an interesting chart that spans two decades with the comparisons of flu cases reported and actual flu viruses being isolated. You can view it here [18].

In the following short video, Dr. Peter Doshi, Ph.D., from Johns Hopkins, explains how flu shots and the flu itself are greatly exaggerated and he doesn’t get flu shots at all.

Conclusion: High Dose Vitamin C is Effective and Safe for Influenza and Sepsis

The flu season fears are smoke and mirror propaganda barrages to create enough fear or doubt to produce flu shot recipients, which don’t really protect from a not as dangerous as advertised flu, but often create the flu or worse, sepsis. Sepsis is often superficially diagnosed as the flu. But the flu itself is rarely ever dangerous by itself, and much less dangerous than sepsis.

So there seems to be a self-perpetuating cycle of flu shot promotion that creates more flu-like symptoms, with flu shot recipients shedding a flu virus morphed and more virulent to contaminate others, all of which are promoted as flu cases and deaths to promote more flu shots.

Tamiflu for prevention or curing the flu is dangerous, expensive, and ineffective. (Source) [19]

There are other more effective natural solutions you can discover here [20] and here [21].

It’s wise to stay out of that loop and nurture your immune system with good whole foods, moderate exercise, and sunshine exposure or vitamin D3 supplementation. If you come down with the flu or any flu-like illness, high amounts of vitamin C taken orally every couple of hours will help most get over it quickly.

Liposomal vitamin C [22] products are even better. Any complications from the flu, including sepsis, are easily, safely handled with IV mega-dose vitamin C or liposomal vitamin C which replicates IV vitamin C’s clinical efficacy for viral infections at much lower doses.

See Also:

Vitamin C Cures Disease but Doctors and Pharmaceutical Companies Do Not Want You to Know This [23]

Vitamin C Treatment of Whooping Cough – Where Vaccines and Antibiotics Have Failed [24]

Recent Hospital Sepsis Study Supports the Case for Mega-Dose Vitamin C Therapy [2]

More Research on Vitamin C [25]

Say NO to Mandatory Vaccines T-Shirt

[26]

100% Pre-shrunk Cotton Order here! [26]

Make a Statement for Health Freedom!

Big Pharma and government health authorities are trying to pass laws mandating vaccines for all children, and even adults.

Show your opposition to forced vaccinations and support the cause of Vaccine Impact [27], part of the Health Impact News network [28].

Order here! [26]

[30]

Leaving a lucrative career as a nephrologist (kidney doctor), Dr. Suzanne Humphries is now free to actually help cure people. In this autobiography she explains why good doctors are constrained within the current corrupt medical system from practicing real, ethical medicine. FREE Shipping Available! Order here [30].

Medical Doctors Opposed to Forced Vaccinations – Should Their Views be Silenced?

[31]

eBook – Available for immediate download.

One of the biggest myths being propagated in the compliant mainstream media today is that doctors are either pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine, and that the anti-vaccine doctors are all “quacks.”

However, nothing could be further from the truth in the vaccine debate. Doctors are not unified at all on their positions regarding “the science” of vaccines, nor are they unified in the position of removing informed consent to a medical procedure like vaccines.

The two most extreme positions are those doctors who are 100% against vaccines and do not administer them at all, and those doctors that believe that ALL vaccines are safe and effective for ALL people, ALL the time, by force if necessary.

Very few doctors fall into either of these two extremist positions, and yet it is the extreme pro-vaccine position that is presented by the U.S. Government and mainstream media as being the dominant position of the medical field.

In between these two extreme views, however, is where the vast majority of doctors practicing today would probably categorize their position. Many doctors who consider themselves “pro-vaccine,” for example, do not believe that every single vaccine is appropriate for every single individual.

Many doctors recommend a “delayed” vaccine schedule for some patients, and not always the recommended one-size-fits-all CDC childhood schedule. Other doctors choose to recommend vaccines based on the actual science and merit of each vaccine, recommending some, while determining that others are not worth the risk for children, such as the suspect seasonal flu shot.

These doctors who do not hold extreme positions would be opposed to government-mandated vaccinations and the removal of all parental exemptions.

In this eBook, I am going to summarize the many doctors today who do not take the most extremist pro-vaccine position, which is probably not held by very many doctors at all, in spite of what the pharmaceutical industry, the federal government, and the mainstream media would like the public to believe.

Read:

Medical Doctors Opposed to Forced Vaccinations – Should Their Views be Silenced?

on your mobile device!

$0.99

[31]

Sincerely,

James Robert Deal , Attorney & Broker James PO Box 2276 Lynnwood WA 98036 Law Office Line: 425-771-1110 Broker Line: 425-774-6611 Cell and Text Line: 425-670-1405 KW Everett Office Line: 425-212-2007 Fax: 425-776-8081 Candidate for US Senate JamesRobertDeal.org/Platform Paypal.me/jamesrobertdeal WashingtonAttorneyBroker.com WashingtonAttorneyBroker.com/Helping-Brokers Cell phone real estate app: app.kw.com/KW2V4HP64/ Desktop real estate app: jamesrobertdeal.kw.com Mortgage-Modification-Attorney.com Fluoride-Class-Action.com/Safewater JamesRobertDeal.org/Smart-Meters JamesRobertDeal.org/Attorneys-Viewpoint-Vaccinations JamesRobertDeal.org/Door-To-Door-Transit WhatToServeAGoddess.com/Music-By-Jimmie-Deal

intravenous vitamin C – works for many diseases What are the treatments for blood sepsis? And is there a point of no return? Ada Drinkwater…

[topicprinter]

(the same article with medium formatting https://blog.refineri.co.uk/how-to-price-a-new-service-product-dcbfbccf00cf - I really suggest reading this one on blog format because of the references to little charts on the side, but it should work here as well)Life is a little bit harder for the ones on the front-lines. If you are someone who is innovating on new stuff rather than imitating or refining existing ones, you’ll have more decisions on your hands, with much less information to make them. And unfortunately, one of the hardest of these critical decisions is, you’ve guessed it, settling on a price for your service or product. Doing this when entering a traditional market with established competitors might be relatively easy, especially if you are a stable player with well-defined practices. But what if you are trying to create a market instead of entering one? What if competitive pricing is out of the question? What’s left to help you decide what to charge people then?Some people would say pricing is more art than science and that is true in a way. But it doesn’t mean it’s impossible to make it more sciency. Over the course of this article, that’s what we’ll try to do. By asking ourselves a few questions that will increasingly narrow our ranges, we will create a simplified pricing model together. Hopefully, by the end of it, there will be much less space for artistic license.A Simple Pricing ModelIt is the empty canvas with the grey background on the side. Yes, it’s a little too simple for the moment, but I heard good things about virtues of starting things and adding stuff to it should be easy enough. For starters, we can look for some hard boundaries for the values that we’re after. Limits that don’t make any sense to go beyond in any case. It would be a sensible starting point for our model, and calculating those should be quite simple with questions that have objective answers. From there, we could complicate things by getting more subjective as much as we wish.Upper LimitThis is the reddish border that we shouldn’t cross. The one that would make people go “Screw that!” when we do. Some people approach this with profit margins in mind. That’s almost always a bad idea because people’s impression of a product and its costs to you mostly do not correlate. You can charge as much as your customers willing to pay and to have a meaningful sense of how much that is you need to ask yourself these two questions:How much money are you saving them? Selling anything, including ideas, most of the time is about the value proposition. You should know your product and what kind of benefits it provides better than anyone. Try to translate all that value into currency, so that it’s clear as day to anyone who considers buying. How much you are going to save on their operational costs, how much more efficient they are going to be, and how it will affect their bottom line in total? In the end, if a service costing you a thousand dollars to provide, helps your customers more than a million with their finances, you’ll see that you could easily charge a million, and people would prefer to pay you that than not.How much worth they are putting on the need: Sometimes the service you provide doesn’t save money but satiates needs like hunger, entertainment, social status, or combination of those. Research time, if that’s the case. You need to know your target market a little bit better. Try to find out how much money they are willing to spend on services that satisfy the same needs. Social status is a tricky one here because it could rise with your price. More you charge for a diamond, more dopamine for the people that have it weirdly.That was easy. Unless you were considering giving money to your customers, we just limited the infinite possible answers to a finite set. That’s good!Lower LimitNow if only we knew where our lower border is standing too. That greenish one that we should definitely cross on average throughout our financial plan. The one that would make our investors go “Screw that!” when we don’t. For that, we have two fundamental questions to answer once again.What’s cost of your product to you? Sounds simple right? Although unfortunately, this isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. Of course, we have the initial costs to create the thing. But then we also have the ongoing costs, and the cost of goods sold that’s dependant on each sale for every kind of product. So your total costs depend on how long a game you’re playing in your financial plans. Decisions, decisions.How big is your target market?: This one is straightforward though. How many customers are there that could buy your product? Do you have something niche on your hands, or are your going for mass appeal? The problems you solve could only exist for five companies in the world in total, but you could also be targeting every hungry student in your neighbourhood. Whatever the case, find the approximate number of your potential customers.Divide the former answer with the latter, and voila, we now have our lower limit. Yes, cost of goods sold will make this a little bit more complicated than a simple division, but let’s keep it simple. On average we can’t go lower than this or we’d, sadly, go bankrupt.Going over some examples should make this more palpable: There are 50 or so AAA game studios in the world. So a graphics engine targeting those has to be priced around $1.000.000 like CryEngine used to do to be profitable. On the other hand, a business intelligence software targeting enterprise companies, which there are 50 thousand of them, usually charges around $20.000. At the other end of the spectrum, Netflix, which has a possible customer base of around 500 million people, could get away with charging as low as $5 a month, even though the cost of operating it is probably higher than all of them.Before going further, obviously, if your lower limit is higher than your upper limit, well, don’t do this. Bad venture. Sad. You’d be bankrupt. Not feasible.Price is a Time FunctionThis might be unexpected, but what we’re trying to decide on is a function, not a constant. We have to be aware that price is something dynamic that is changing with time. It could and probably should differ along various phases of projected timeline for your product. So to correctly reflect this in our chart, let’s put some axes on it. Yes, those bold borders that we just outlined could change over time as well, but we’ll neglect that for the clarity of our chart.Now finally, to chart a meaningful pricing line between these boundaries, we need to go over the factors that could affect the wanted y-axis at specific points in time.Pricing FactorsThere are many, sometimes conflicting, reasons that can guide you in directions regarding price. These might affect you differently in different phases of your product. I’m going to list four specific questions that should help you find out some of those. Depending on the circumstances of your venture and properties of your product, you’ll have to identify your situation and plot your price accordingly.Will the market penetration be easy? Do you have the resources to create market dominance immediately? Maybe you’ve already established necessities such as the supply-chain structure or marketing channels to get your product into the hands of your customers. If this is the case, you’ll have the opportunity to start with a steep pricing point. But maybe, customer habits are working against you, and you need brand awareness, customer trust, or even user content until you’re there. If you’re expecting hardship penetrating the market, lowering your price is one of the most effective tools in your boxHow long can you sustain a loss? How much cash you have, how much investment can you find, and how much time you have until you need to settle your debts? Lots of big players today operated at a loss (some still do) for years and survived with investments. A little loss today with a lower price point today might mean lots of revenue down the road.Are you a risk seeker or risk-averse? Not everything is about your product; some things are about just you. How ambitious are you and how close can you get to the edge until you’re growing at a rate that satisfies you? If you want to outpace everyone by continually undercutting your opponents’ prices until they’re no more, so you’ll finally show the world that Jeff Bezos evil laugh you’ve been practising every night, why not go lower?How high is the barrier to entry? Some companies have some awesome trade secrets and avoidable patents. Some managed to create an impenetrable unethical monopoly, so they have some time until their competitors emerge. They are the ones that can get away with charging high prices much longer than others. But if your big successful idea was selling potato chips in a cup, and now the wolves are coming for your profits at full force, you may have to cut your prices at some point sadly.So it’s done! After we apply these factors, we finally have our completed pricing chart. Looks simple enough. Now, let’s give examples of two types of products or services that could follow different paths, so everything makes a little bit more sense.Pricing ExamplesOur first product is a dazzler. It’s from a company with so many resources that it was even on the evening news when it debuted. It caught the eyes of its customers who have no idea of its costs and charged a high price for a long time. Or it was something like a VR headset, which had high initial R&D costs, but its enthusiastic early adopters were willing to pay for that anyway. But over time, as its competitors emerged sniffing the money, and as its on-going costs are going down, it has gone cheaper and cheaper.The second product is a late bloomer. This one had to start low until its value proposition reached its potential because it depends on customer-generated content. Or it could be that its business model has raised some eyebrows and they need to put some known brands in their customer portfolio to get going. Maybe it was even a free service in the early days, though at some point, everything went right and customers start flocking to it by themselves. Consequently, they raised their prices bit by bit. This could be that free club membership so hip now that you need to put some good money to get in.Don’t be afraid to start low because of retention problems. You could always raise prices only with just your new customers as your base grows. In an exponential growth curve, they will continuously be the bulk of your total sales.Other FactorsI know I said the chart is completed. But there are a few more important details that I’d like to mention that could help you get this right before I wrap up.LocalizationIf the primary factor in your price is the worth your customers are putting in, and not your costs, almost always localise the price because that worth will fluctuate with their buying power.SegmentationSimilarly, customers in the same locale could also have different reactions to your price based on their segments. That might be the reason Windows Ultimate and Home editions have such varying price points, even though they are more or less the same.Don’t be afraid to change your plansBe on the constant lookout because circumstances change. Even if they don’t, you could always try different price spikes to gauge your customer’s response. Who knows maybe you could find something that works better for you.Wrapping upThere are other monetisation methods to go through. Also, pricing is tightly coupled with marketing, so promotions and the way you disclose your prices are relevant subjects too. But I’m feeling like we have covered the basics on this article, and I really hope this works for you as a concise introduction to the topic. Cheers!

[flauntpage]

Let Us Marvel at Ben Simmons

Between the revelation of the Process incarnate (Joel Embiid) during the 2016-2017 NBA season, and the excitement of knowing Danny Ainge gift wrapped the Sixers a generational guard talent (Markelle Fultz) in this past NBA draft, it is easy to understand why some of the national buzz surrounding Ben Simmons has died down. And while Philadelphia hasn’t forgotten about the 6’11” point-forward, getting lost in the haze of gobbling up three potential superstars encourages fans to focus on the whole rather than the individual – and rightfully so! This Sixers collection of talent projects to do big things. But what exactly will Ben Simmons’ contributions be? And how dominant can he be?

Let me be forward about something here – the risk of being accused of a hot take fallacy withstanding: Ben Simmons’ ceiling is just as high as that of Joel Embiid. There is a confidence level behind that statement that rivals the confidence level I have in saying the sky is blue and Taylor Swift’s new single is offensive to anybody possessing a functional pair of ears. Simmons has all of the tools needed to be an elite facilitator. His height gives him vision that few initiators possess, his court awareness gives him the ability to distribute dimes from anywhere in the half-court, and his reputation as a pass-first ball-handler will inspire others around him to work for better looks. But you likely already knew this. What’s been forgotten – er, overlooked – is Simmons’ all-around game, and specifically his potential as a scorer.

Universally, the knock on Simmons is that he has a weak jumper. Many even suspect that he may shoot with the wrong hand.

Sidebar: Ben has been called left-handed, and even ambidextrous. In reality, it’s possible he’s truly right-handed, and is just forcing himself to play left-handed. Check out this clip, where he could have gone to his left and taken on fewer defenders, yet chooses his “off” hand and challenges three players, finishing a tough layup with the right:

I’m not cherry picking here, either. This happens often. Would you EVER go to your off-hand if you didn’t have to? Keep the masturbation jokes to yourself.

I will be the first to admit that Simmons’ jumper is questionable. But it’s not broken, by any means. Outside of possibly using the wrong hand… one major flaw I noticed early in Ben’s career is that his body sort sways to his right when he shoots, rather than going forward. The result is that he overcompensates in his release by pushing the ball left and rimming out. Watching his training after he became a Sixer, including his pickup games against 5’11” white Aussies, he seems to have corrected this. We can only know for sure when it’s gametime; however, it is certainly a fixable flaw regardless. Another issue with his mechanics is that he sometimes is too early in getting the ball over his head. Now, if you watch a pure shooter like Klay Thompson, you’ll see that the basketball is between his knees when he starts his jumper. This allows Klay to power the shot with his legs as he jumps and guide it with his hands. Conversely, when Simmons already has the ball at its apex before he’s even jumped, it forces him to propel the shot with his arms, not allowing for his hands to just guide the ball. He’s a flinger, if you will; he doesn’t shoot in one fluid motion. This is again cause for influencing the ball to one side rather than straight, and thus rimming out. These are fixable mechanics, something that would surely be harped on during an entire season on the bench. One can expect the jumper Simmons utilizes in 2017 to be vastly improved from the version we saw at LSU in 2015-2016.

There is this notion floating around out there that Ben Simmons cannot shoot the three. I detest that. Simmons took only three total shots from behind the arc in his lone year at LSU, which is about 747 less than the sample size needed to make any finite conclusion about a player’s shooting ability from deep. You know who else took hardly any 3PTs in college? Joel Embiid, who shot 5, to be exact. And what did he do this past season? Converted 3PTs at a 36.7% clip, nearly a full percentage point above league average. The point is that no one has any clue – okay, they have a measly three clues – what kind of 3PT efficiency to expect from Simmons; and to suggest a 21-year-old kid cannot develop his shot to at least prove the need to be guarded from deep, is quite simply ludicrous.

So if Ben wasn’t shooting threes, and if his jump shot was flawed, how did he amass 19.2 PPG at LSU? Take a look at his shot chart, per Draft Express:

One could infer concern from the chart regarding the low concentration of shots outside of six-feet from the rim. However, we now know, thanks to modern basketball analytics, that the least desirable shots in basketball are mid-range to deep-range 2PTs. (Unless, of course, you’re Chris Paul and convert at an abnormal rate.) I cannot stress this enough: it is a good thing that Simmons does not settle for mid-range shots, as well as a demonstration of his basketball IQ. It’s a wonderful habit to have the mindset to get to the rim at all costs. And just look at those numbers when Ben is close to the rim; he’s as skilled at scoring in the paint as any prospect we’ve seen come out of the draft in recent years. (Except for maybe, uhm.. Markelle Fultz.) Simmons demonstrates an ability to score at will. And he does it in a multitude of ways.

You want to play off Simmons and challenge him to shoot? Cool, see two points later after Ben blows past a defender with a full head of steam, a 7’0” wingspan and a mature touch around the basket. Thought you might put a power forward on Ben to mitigate his size? Have fun watching Kevin Love try to keep up with the man holding the record for the fastest ¾ court sprint in the history of the NBA draft combine. Trying a shooting guard on Simmons, I see? Oh but you forgot, he’s skilled in the post and comfortable with his back to the basket. Shooting guards defending in the post? Not so much. Don’t double team him, don’t you dare even think about it; he will find the open man.

Two areas where Simmons will dominate most is 1) in transition, where Ben himself has stated repeatedly that he thrives and enjoys being “creative”, and 2) in the high post. By now, you have heard or seen Simmons’ success in transition, so I would like to focus on the high post. This is where Simmons gets to make everyone around him better. Take a look at this PNR play involving Boris Diaw and Rudy Gobert:

Get used to that sort of setup, because you’re going to see it a lot. Except with Simmons, a more skilled player than Diaw in terms of getting to the rim, and Embiid, a more offensively polished center than Gobert. Just imagine any center/forward combination in the league trying to stop Simmons and Embiid from that position on the court. Now imagine an opposing wing crashing in to help, while Covington, Redick or Fultz stands wide open in the corner. It. Isn’t. Fair. At that point, Simmons just decides how he wants to hurt the opposition. Does he want to put the basketball through the hoop himself, let Embiid jump into outer space and slam it through, or give Fultz the opportunity to hit a dagger from 3PT land? In Summer League, we saw Simmons in this very situation at the high post and he proved he can even use his jumper to punish teams who decide to sag off and constrict the paint against cutters: 

The lingering threat of Simmons’ ability to find teammates seemingly with his eyes closed only reinforces his ability to score. Many players pass when they can’t find a path to score. Ben Simmons scores when he can’t find a path to pass. He’s able to routinely catch defenders flat-footed, because they are so focused on obstructing his passing lanes that they forget that he has the length to be at the rim in two steps.

So we’re amazingly less than two months from the start of the NBA season. Though there is much optimism, there are also many unknowns surrounding the Sixers. How good can they be this year? Will Embiid stay healthy? Does Markelle Fultz get upset playing off-ball and deferring to Simmons? Is Brett Brown as good of an in-game coach as he is at player development? But here’s what I know:

Ben Simmons’ only major flaw is his jump shot

He is only 21 years old

He had an entire year to focus on refining his jump shot

He is going to be a phenomenal basketball player, who has likely already fixed (to a degree) his only major flaw

Sit back and enjoy these next six or so weeks. Maybe watch a couple of Sixers replays from the Process years. Remember how it feels to be stuck to the couch, uninspired by what you are seeing. Because come October 18, you’ll be jumping off it every couple of times down the court, as Ben Simmons completes jaw-droppingly beautiful passes and scores in ways that make you say, “Damn, what can’t this guy do?”

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