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njadastonearm · 3 months

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Conceptually I find Little Lamplight interesting in that... it does make sense that kids would pass down certain knowledge including more difficult medical and scientific concepts, and presumably as kids come in from the wastes they learn new things to pass down. It's fair that a 12-year-old wouldn't be as good a sawbones as someone who's in their 30s or older, but it's also fair that they can make stitches and use basic supplies and figure out that the cave fungus absorbs the radiation in the water -- Bumble probably knows a little more at age 6 than Lucy did, and Lucy probably knew a little more by age 6 than Red did. I do think a group of children that learned basic survival skills could pass that on to other children, and that this could continue indefinitely across generations until they have a roughly equivalent knowledge to the average settler, and I understand the idea of kicking people out after they reach a certain age to keep the demand on space and resources down.

Here are the two things I get a little stuck on:

Where are the new kids coming from? Given that you can take Brian Wilks there at the end of Those!, I'm guessing a lot of the children there are orphans, but Brian hasn't heard of Lamplight before, and other orphans are just taken in by strangers and relatives and it's not clear if anyone outside of Big Town has heard of the settlement. I also assume that occasionally a resident will give birth to a baby (given that they get kicked out at 16, this probably doesn't happen often, but it certainly could happen), but given that giving birth that young is incredibly dangerous and the town doctor is also a child, the odds seem stacked against those kids. The obvious counter to the former explanation is that Lamplight's scavengers keep an eye out for orphans as they track down supplies and bring them back, and the obvious counter to the latter is that Big Towners will bring their children there (sometime after childbirth) to leave them in a safer place, but that leads me to the second issue.

Given that Lamplight runs pretty smoothly, why does Big Town struggle so much? Lamplight has the benefit of being more protected by caves and being further off the radar from slavers and raiders, but Big Town still has walls (which is more than some settlements can say) and the residents should have the benefit of experience. Yet, despite pretty much everyone in Lamplight having a job, Red somehow serves as both doctor and mayor, Pappy can do some minor repairs, and everyone else is just a part-time guard -- and given that Red, Shorty, and a few less fortunate others were taken away by supermutants before you show up, they're not very good at guarding. I'll assume they have some kind of crops that everyone tends when they're not patrolling, but they also talk about being hungry often. I guess one possibility is that the most competent former Lamplighters make their way out of Big Town pretty fast or skip it altogether (e.g., MacCready is a mercenary by the time FO4 rolls around and it's implied that he's been one for several years; given how young he is, it seems unlikely that he stayed in Big Town for any real length of time), but it seems odd that only two people in town have any real skill or willingness to work at all. Nobody tries to open a shop or a restaurant? Nobody wants to do anything to drum up more resources and attract caravan trade or just become a little more self-sufficient? Nothing?

#bal liveblogs fo3

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kendrixtermina · 3 years

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Edelgard and “meritocracy” - an essay

In this essay I wish to adress the common argument that “meritocracy bad, therefore edelgard bad” & the logical leaps therein.

Before we begin, I’d like to stress that she doesn’t even use the word “meritocracy” & they’re not even looking at it’s modern definition but reacting to the way it has been used as a fighting word to denigrate the poor specificically in the post reagan modern USA & then assuming Edelgard means the exact same thing by that without bothering to examine what she actually says & in what context.

Modern capitalism & the way it uses rhetoric of merit as an excuse is bad & with its reduction of human value to their moneymaking ability, definitely inherently ableist, I agree totally.

But 3H does NOT take place in the modern world. Progress is always relative to what came before. It*s progress away from entrenched problems.

It’s a total failure to even imagine a world different from the sucky one we live in - that’s exactly what tolkien meant by that saying that if we’re prisoners we have a duty to escape.

Edelgard doesn’t live in a capitalist society nor is she bringing about capitalism (if anything Claude’s the one talking of free trade & giving the merchants what they want, though he is almost certainly playing them much like the church)

And the main component of capitalism - factory owners, rich elites who owns large swathes of companies or real estate - is nowhere to be found.

In our world that cropped up because industrialization made owning factories, offices, trade etc. more lucrative that just owning the land, so factory owners replaced landed lords, essentially promising the peasants freedom if they helped them overthrow the kings but granting them only in a limited manner - the flawed inequal democracies that resulted were a compromise between peasants and factory owners.

But by and large the nobles are very much in the same niche as the factory owners today - they own the land and get special trade privileges (the means of production), they often abuse the populace with impunity, the peasants are very poor.

Edelgard cracks down on corruption & special trade privileges even during the timeskip.

And like the rich of our world, they have a self-mythology propaganda justification based on merit. Yes, there is the “by the grace of god” argument, too, but crests give you extra fighting power, and if you look at the Ferdinand support for example you do see that Fodlan’s nobles - especially the adrestian ones - see themselves as a honed elite that is trained from birth & therefore better at ruling.

Not quite the same argument a modern billionaire uses - who is very invested in convincing you that they didn’t get their power and wealth by their birth - but a myth nonetheless.

Edelgard’s not bringing “meritocracy” as in brutal competition opposed to caring social safety nets, but as opposed to unearned privilege.

If you wanted to compare that to any kind of sociohistorical context, you might look at Napoleon’s peasant liberation or the implementation of civil service examinations in ancient China.

That wasn’t an all good thing - In the same way that Europe is very impacted by the legacy of rome both good & bad (there are persisting bad attitudes toward war, authority and agriculture for example), east asia still has a lot of education obsession causing pressure & unhealthy work habits to this day.

But if you compared ancient china before the reforms to ancient China after it definitely got better, by ancient china standards.

We couldn’t expect the people back then to come up with all advances up to our exact modern values at once (not can we be sure how much of our values will stand the test of time)

Considering that Fodlan’s ideal of merit is basically what Lorenz, Ingrid and Ferdinand are embodying for their respective countries, and that she stocks her inner circle with very different leaders, it is no stretch to say that she wants to shake up the social ideas of what even counts as merit, to make ppl value other things that crest power or elite upbringing, the same way we might say today that hey, cleaners are valuable actually.

Edelgard is basically doing her world’s equivalent of taxing the billionaires - reducing the power of what the overprivilieged class happens to be, & it’s obvious from her talk of how she despises inequality that she would hardly be for rule of factory owners.

When Edelgard says that she wants to make Fodlan more merit-based, that has to be taken in the context that she lives in a world where your birth determines everything, incompetent nobles can be as lazy as they want, and no one cares how competent you are if you lack a crest, title or both.

If she looked at our world, she would quickly see through the propaganda that it is supposedly “merit based” and object to how wealth and national origin obviously dictate wealth & opportunity while talented people go to waste in sweatshops.

Now of course there have been arguments even against “perfect” meritocracy - one is the devaluation of working class jobs.

To this one could answer that this is more a flaw in how merit is conceived. Historically there have been societies that exahlted blue collar work, artisans or farming.

The second argument, however, is not so easy to get rid of: That is devalues people who can’t just go & produce like machines, especially the unemployed, the sick, the mentally ill, the disabled…

But at this point we’ve got to lean back & get our definitions straight, & make it clear what we even mean by “meritocracy” -

Because if we’re just talking about the basic idea that competency should be rewarded, I don’t think too many people disagree with that. We might see a problem with valueing the competency of a doctor or lawyers dispropottionally over the competency of a cleaner or a bricklayer, but we all, by and large, want the people who prepare our goods and services to be competent. Maybe we wouldn’t exalt it over all over qualities, but most of us admire skill.

Of course the problem with the political rhetoric of “meritocracy” is that it goes beyond just rewarding skill, first with the afore mentioned rewarding of only some skills, but mostly with the reversion or overemphasis of the above: Saying that skill is the only thing that matters (to the exclusion of any inheent human value) & that those who don’t have it are worthless.

First I want to throw out the thought that this is a product of the production/profit orientation of capitalism, but one could of course imagine, as many sci fi authors have done, a non-capitalistic society that is still obsessed with merit at the exclusion of those who are not oriented towards productivity & care more about fun & relationships than producing, or those who can’t produce because they are sick or disabled.

So now we must ask ourselves the question: Which of those views does Edelgard actually hold?

Cause I want you to notice that they’re not the same. “Skill should be rewarded & jobs should be done by competent people” is not the same position as “Skill is the ONLY thing that matters and if you don’t have it you are worthless”

In one position, skill is a good quality, in the other, it's a prerequisite to worth.

Most of us here probably agree that skill is admirable (we like and reblog pretty fanarts), but not that the unskilled are worthless.

Looking at her superficially I could perhaps see how someone might suspect her of the latter - She gravitates to & surrounds herself with skilled intelligent people and she’s obscenely superpowered.

It’s an misunderstanding that Dimitri makes in-universe, he accuses her of “only benefitting the strong”

But note that her answer to that is that she wants to empower the weak to no longer be weak & decide their own lives, instead of accepting charity. (Contrast with how Dimitri romanticizes abyss, for example, even as Claude points out that locking the poor underground is hardly help.)

Of course she can say many things, as rulers often give florid speeches.

But let’s have a look at what she actually thinks. How does edelgard actually act towards people who struggle or aren’t productivity oriented?

This is one of her lecture questions from part I:

“When one professor lectures many students, some will inevitably have trouble keeping up, while others will get too far ahead in their studies. I wonder how this problem might be solved…”

Her favorite answer is “lectures should be optional”.

Which part of that sounds like a bell curve type eugenicist “only skill & intelligence counts” kind of person? She wants the struggling students to be taken proper care of, not just the good ones.

Look at the speeches she gives to Petra & Lysithea about not giving up on themselves & wanting them to move forward from an empowered mindset. Look at how she tells Lysithea to take it easy & not overtax her body. (Not "don't whine & keep working")

Look at Bernadetta - very much an ‘unproductive’ individual with great struggles & limitation. Does Edelgard dismiss her as a weakling? Not at all. Not even in the C support. She makes sure to stress her good qualities when introducing her, makes an effort to be more patient so as not to scare her, & they become good friends.

Look at the Linhardt support - at first she mistakes his behavior for youthful lazyness (He’s 16 after all) & wants to get him to apply himself, but when she realizes that he just has different priorities, she respects that, & works to get him the exact sort of position that he wants. No “suck it up!” or dismissing such a different lifestyle. Nor does she chide him for hating fighting at any point.

Edelgard does everything in her power to accomodate people so they can do their best. She sees the value even in strange unsocial people that society would dismiss. She found a job for someone like Jeritza & helped him, she doesn’t hesitate to make Dorothea a general or Manuela the prime minister no matter what people say or if they don’t act like typical politicians.

Also, when she talks about choosing her sucessor, she wants them to be brilliant/competent yes, but also kind and 'an outsider' (ie, impartial) - hardly a PoV of "if you are skilled you can do whatever you want and if you aren't no other quality matters". She's prizing kindness & objectivity just as highly, something which is absolutely reflected throughout all her actions & behaviors towards others.

She doesn't devalue living quietly & low key without making waves - in fact, that is her dream life, which she deems superior to achievement and ambition, which are to her just tools to archieve good aims.

She couldn’t be further from having a narrow definition of what a “valuable” person is, she is all ABOUT empowering people to take control of their own lives, no pity-driven charity, no paternalism, none of that. This is one of my favorite traits about her, so I can’t help but get mad when people accuse her of being the exact opposite.

But maybe the biggest argument is abyss. This is where the genuine underclass lives, poor, struggling, traumatized, refugees etc.

Edelgard isn’t as vocal during Cindered Shadows as Claude - she can’t blow her cover & just isn’t as expressive personality wise. But she’s the one who makes everybody swear to take care of Abyss no matter who wins.

And her route is the one where, instead of telling you that they lost people, Hapi tells you that they’ve all been pretty much fine over the timeskip.

If you want to help the struggling & the poor and those who don't have "conventional" skills, you should back edelgard.

#edelgard #edelgard von hresvelg #three houses #fire emblem: three houses #fire emblem three houses #fe3h

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shinidamachu · 3 years

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Do you have thoughts on the Aang/Ozai showdown at the end?

Zuko: please. The real hero is a random rock the Avatar.

The final battle was amazing, from an animation poin of view. The colors, the fighting sequence, the symbolism, Aang finally mastering all elements. Just very exciting and satisfying to watch, because it was something that the audience was hoping for since episode one. And they delivered it.

From a writing point of view, though? It was less of a showdown and more of a cop-out. See, I'm not saying, by any means, that Aang should have killed Ozai. Quite the opposite. Not only because it was a children's show. Not only because Aang was a traumatized, non violent, 12 years old. But also because it made sense for the character and for the core themes of the show.

Don't get me wrong, Ozai one hundred per cent deserved to die. Aang himself stated that the world would be a better place without Ozai in it. I just don't think he should be the one to do it. At the same time, is on his hands that Ozai's fate lays and no one else can make that decision for him.

So if killing Ozai off could turn him into a Fire Nation martyr anyway and Aang refuses to do so because of his pacifist principles, what's the other option to defeat the guy and end the war? The authors went with energy bending and, honestly, I thought it was brilliant for a series of reasons.

First, ending Ozai's life seems like the obvious choice, an easy way out. I love the concept of Aang refusing to do what's expected of him and choosing instead to finish the war on his own terms, without compromising who he is, because in theory, that would mean he would have to go out of his way to find a different solution, in a perfect shout out to Bumi's words in The King Of Omashu: "you must master the four elements and confront the Fire Lord. And when you do, I hope you will think like a mad genius."

Second, in a show where bending is intimately related to one's very being, the questions begs to be raised: how much taking someone's bending away is better, more ethical or less cruel than actively killing them? Because it's a fundamental part of who they are, of their soul. Ty Lee had the abiliity to block chis, temporarily making people unable to bend. And it was a terrifying thing for the people she used the technique on.

Lastly, it ends the "killing Ozai would turn him into a Fire Nation martyr" for good, because (ATLA COMICS SPOILER ALERT) Aang let him leave without his bending and a significant amount of people still worshipped the guy to the point of planning coups on the down low and sending Zuko death threats left and right, so we basically got the same result, but Ozai remained an ever present threat to the peace Aang fought to achieve.

The problem, as people smarter and more eloquent than I have pointed out countless times, wasn't the energy bending solution, it was the way it was introduced and then executed.

Aang: hey! Look at these weird Lion Turtle things.

Looking back now, this scene from The Library was obviously foreshadowing the finale, so the Lion Turtle reveal wasn't pulled out of thin air. It had a purpose. Considering that this episode, from Book Two, mentioned the Lion Turtle, who would later teach Aang how to energy bend and that The Guru, also from Book Two, introduced the arc of Aang having to let go of his attachment to Katara in order to master the Avatar State, I can only assume that the original intentions of the writers were very clear:

Aang doesn't want to kill Ozai but he also doesn't want to let go of Katara. That's the catch! To "energy bend" his way out of murder, he has to master the Avatar State. His conflict here, is much greater than before because now Katara is a factor in the equation as well. He either kills Ozai, keeps his attachment and gives up the Avatar State or he masters it, defeats Ozai by removing his bending but has to let go of Katara in the process. It's awesome because it's the hardest possible choice a character like Aang could be forced to make. And we knew he would ultimately do the right thing, but regardless of what he decides, he still loses something important to him, he still has to make a huge sacrifice.

Of course, none of that happens. This was the first and only time the Lion Turtle was brought up. The “letting Katara go” arc was unceremoniously killed alongside Aang the second Azula shot that lightning in Ba Sing Se, but differently from the Avatar, whom Katara ressurrected, it was never brought back. And it’s a shame. Because The Library was the perfect episode to expand on the Lion Turtle and energy bending mystery.

And the finale? It was the perfect episode for Aang to do what he failed to do in Ba Sing Se: to let Katara go and achieve the Avatar State by his own merits, sacrificing something he wanted for the greater good. The way he hid into a cocoon of rocks? It would have been a great call out to the little crystal tent he made in his fight with Azula when he decided to give the Guru’s advices a try. And it would also symbolize rebirth in the same way Katara breaking him out of the iceberg did. Because now he had finally reached the other side of the river and he is no longer the same person he once was.

But the narrative decided, instead, to rob Aang from any growth, from any substancial change, from any interesting arc. They went with the “love is the most important thing” approach to justify him honlding on to Katara. And I could have bought it if they hadn’t been so dishonest about it.

First: if you love someone, you let them go. Attachment and love are two very different things. No one ever told Aang to stop loving Katara. He was told to let her go. And it makes sense because he was attached to her in a way that wasn’t healthy for either of them, and was keeping him from achieving his full spiritual potential, something he should care a little more about, given his upbring.

Second, in the person of Iroh, arguably the wisest character in the show, Aang is told that he is right for choosing love over power. But this is a false equivalence because it’s not what Aang is doing. The scene makes it look like he is seeking power for the sake of power. That’s not the case. The Avatar State is an inherent power, meaning Aang already has it. It’s part of who he is. He just needs to unblock it and learn how to control it. And he has to do that not for personal gain, but to put an end in the war.

A war that took almost everything from Katara, the person he loves. Aside from Aang himself, she is the person who would benefit the most from him learning to control the Avatar State, since she is the one who has to calm him down every time he accidentaly triggers it and winning the war is a very personal goal of her. Now, this is just conjecture but I firmly believe that even if Katara was secretly in love with Aang (which I don’t buy), she would be the first to tell his it’s okay to let her go. But alas, she wasn’t even aware of this conflict. A conflict she played a key part in.

That being said, I do think that the Ozai dillema was introduced too late. It should have been explored before the Day of Black Sun, giving Aang plenty of time to search for a different solution. It also never made sense to me why killing Ozai wasn’t a problem then. Apparently the explanation that I was supposed to stick with is that Aang was naive. He didn’t know people expected him to kill the Fire Lord until Zuko asked him what he would do when he faced Ozai, since violence wasn’t the answer. But I honestly struggle to accept this because, yes, Aang was naive.

But not that naive. Not at that point. After episodes like The Siege of the North and The Avatar State, I just don’t buy he didn’t know what people wanted him to do. Plus, Aang has an evasive fighting style, based on always being one step ahead of his opponent. To do that, he has to plan beforehand. What was his plan to confront Ozai in the Day of Black Sun, after everything he went through? Talk to him? Arrest the guy? If that’s the case, shouldn’t it at least be discussed with the gang? It’s never addressed.

Then comes the finale. Aang’s moment of truth. The event we’ve all been hoping for. The one that will turn him into a legend. And Aang is losing. He can’t win without killing Ozai or controling the Avatar State to take his bending away. What will he sacrifice to become a hero? His morals or his attachment? Answer: neither! Because the writers decided he should have everything without give up nothing. So they miraculously make a convenently sharped rock hit the exact right spot in the perfect time unblock his chakra, allowing him to enter the Avatar State.

I’m not even gonna talk about how this is most definitely not how chakras work, because it’s not really my place. But I am gonna talk about the tragic (not to say hilarious) fact that, by trying to make Aang have his cake and eat it too, the writers ultimately made a fucking rock the responsible for Aang’s success. Not his cleverness, not his hard work, not his altruism: a rock. If that rock wasn’t there, in the right place, at the right time, then what? Would Aang finally have done what he had to do, or would he be killed, allowing the war to continue?

That’s my issue with it. That, and the fact that they had no trouble addressing delicate topics, but didn’t have enough courage to let the 12 years old protagonist end up alone. Because, of course, children can’t understand the hero not getting the girl. Right?

RIGHT?

Aang managed to defeat Ozai and get the girl even though there was a whole season dedicated to build up an arc in which he would have to let her go to succed. Even though their last one on one interaction before their last kiss was Aang screaming at her and storming off, while Katara reprimended him for walking away from the issue. Even if he had been acting more and more possessive and entitled when it came to her affection. Even if Katara had shown no real interest in him that way before she suddenly does. But what do I know? Maybe she was hit by a magic rock too.

Aang and Katara happened at the cost of Aang’s character development. Fandom might think the rival ship was harmed the most by it, but that’s not true. Aang was. And it’s really sad. He is an amazing character and he deserved to be the hero of his own story, to have his beliefs tested and to come out of his journey irrevocably changed, not locked inside a plot armor.

#ATLA #Sidmailing #Avatar The Last Airbender

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ganymedesclock · 5 years

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There’s so many interesting questions raised by Lace, though.

If we assume she’s the one who broke Hornet’s seal- which looks likely given the white fly that did so is the same as the ones that she’s ‘conducting’ when she talks to Hornet, and given that she knows Hornet arrived in a cage...

Her immediate willingness to end Hornet’s life to prevent her from reaching the top, even if she seems to bear Hornet little ill will / her saccharine trash talk doesn’t seem to be hiding genuine revulsion or hatred, would suggest she hardly did so for Hornet’s benefit.

So Lace is acting on, presumably, her own agenda here. The way she talks to Hornet certainly sounds like her decisions aren’t coming from anyone else’s, and musically, her being depicted as a conductor suggests her associates, as the demo mentioned she’s part of a group (presumably, Sharpe’s gang), might actually be subordinates who she is directing, much as she is those butterflies.

Since a conductor is generally someone called upon to preside over a band with multiple individual players- but while they might all be looking at the sheet music, the conductor is the one they’re reading all their cues from. We don’t know if Sharpe et. al have overt musical motifs of their own, but, if Lace did free Hornet, that suggests a certain penchant for acting from afar by proxy- certainly the tactics of someone with subordinates and a sense of delegation.

But this all would seem to suggest Lace is in direct conflict with the Bell Cultists- who appear to be deeply entrenched in Pharloom, possibly being the soldiers of the citadel, and, thus, the kingdom. Since the bell cultists seemed to want to ferry Hornet all the way into Pharloom and right up to the top- the way her cage is positioned on the cart, she’s being presented like an offering, more a material good for delivery than a hostage or prisoner.

Lace makes it clear when she and Hornet meet face to face that she sees herself as sparing Hornet the agony of the top. To a certain degree, she seems to enjoy toying with Hornet- she’s gleeful when Hornet tells Lace to fight her- but she’s also actively saying that she thinks Hornet is better off dead than whatever fate the bell cultists seem to have intended her. Which would certainly explain the nature of Lace’s ‘help’ early on- she, didn’t exactly follow up once the cage fell to see if Hornet made it out, given she remarks on Hornet’s escape with surprise. Her objective there was to interrupt the delivery- make sure it didn’t reach its destination. Wherever else Hornet went was inconsequential to Lace, it seems.

While Lace in some ways seems a very deliberate echo of where Hornet was in the previous game-

Right down to, if we presume Deep Docks is the second area unlocked after the Moss Grotto, then, Lace being the boss of Deep Docks would line up with Hornet being introduced as the boss of Greenpath, the second area of Hollow Knight-

-this certainly suggests she’s a bit more proactive. Hornet only attacked Ghost because she caught sight of them following her, and led them to an arena of her choosing to confront them and defeat them. Her only real conversation in the matter is to make her judgment of the situation clear, and then go for the kill.

Lace, conversely, has a larger game plan and the majority of her eye is on that. At this point, she’s not really considering Hornet a piece on the board, it seems- just an obstruction to remove. That’s probably going to change given Hornet thwarted her assassination attempt. But she’s proactive in setting this situation up- she’s unsurprised when Hornet arrives at the Deep Docks stage, which could suggest Lace was waiting for her, or it could suggest that Lace is simply not easily ruffled by new developments.

Either way, Lace seems like she’s trying to manipulate the situation a great deal, and she’s much more focused on some other enemy. Hornet at this point matters to her in the sense of making sure her enemy doesn’t get Hornet- she’s not really bothering to think that much about what Hornet herself wants, except a sort of backhanded insinuation that Hornet very much does not want the kingdom’s peak.

We really don’t know who’s up at the Citadel. Presumably, the ruler of the kingdom- possibly the “heart” spoken of in the poem, but I would presume not, because they hardly seem “bound in slumber and servitude” if they’re demanding timed deliveries of metal, coal, and the fealty of all of their workers. If they’re the one whose figurative voice is ringing through the endless, endless bells of the kingdom, then they have immense power here.

On the other hand, if they’re also driving the entire kingdom towards an objective, they may indeed be bound one way or another, and are actively working towards their freedom, the ‘waking’ spoken of in the poem.

Either way, someone in Pharloom has an enormous amount of power, is consuming the labor of countless subordinates, likely the nexus of the haunting that’s overtaken the kingdom since it’s working so charmingly in their favor. (Forge Daughter noting that all of her colleagues have lost themselves- but are still doing their jobs perfectly)

And Lace seems to be fighting that individual. Which is, interesting because much as Hornet doesn’t like Lace at this point, that dislike is basically reactionary. Hornet was pretty prickly and bellicose in Hollow Knight, and Silksong is exploring a whole new dimension on that- it’s pretty clear Hornet hates the idea of being threatened, bullied, or pressed into anything. She retaliates in an extremely destructive manner against the caravan as soon as she’s able to, attempts to threaten the Church Keeper on the idea that the other might be a threat even if Hornet can barely stand at the moment- and her dialogue towards Lace furthers this.

Lace threatened her, and Hornet outright says, “if you are my enemy,” to quit dancing around the point and put that shiny weapon of hers to use. Her only enmity towards Lace is just, “if you mean me badly, then act on it. if you don’t, don’t talk like you do.”

Which is one big reason I don’t think they’re going to stay enemies. Lace doesn’t hate Hornet because she doesn’t really care about Hornet. The only real opinion she has so far is that she likes the cut of Hornet’s jib. This seems to be a move Lace is making against a different opponent, where their actions mean everything to her, and Hornet’s actions haven’t really distinguished themselves yet.

Hornet doesn’t like Lace because Lace threatened her, and Hornet is obstinate in the face of threats, or perceived threats, or anything that seems like it might be dangerous. Honestly it just seems like Hornet is the equivalent of an angry cat. Nobody gets to touch her if they want to keep their fingers attached, unless she has personally decided it’s okay, and if you even come near her when she hasn’t signed off on it you’re on thin fuckin’ ice.

And ultimately, I feel like just from what we know tenuously about Lace and her enigmatic enemy, Hornet’s likelier to take Lace’s side than the others’. Hornet is the last person who’d sign off on something like Pharloom’s haunting and the way it appears to seize and overwrite the personalities of its afflicted. This is too much like the plague, that Hornet was actively willing to give her own life in the service of stopping.

Lace isn’t exactly spotless, here, but, she hasn’t crossed any lines Hornet herself has proven willing to cross in terms of a worthy cause. Hornet was willing to murder one of her half-siblings in cold blood, even when she finds the vessels’ plight upsetting and not something they deserve (she calls Hollow “birth-cursed”) just to avoid Ghost potentially unsealing the Radiance. So with a broader understanding, I don’t think Hornet would begrudge Lace trying to run her through.

But like... if Lace hates, presumably, Pharloom’s royalty, or whoever else is up there at the Citadel, then why? The obvious answer is fixing the haunting, but, if it’s as easy as just getting the drop on her enemy and making with the stabbing, Lace probably wouldn’t hesitate. It’s entirely likely, given what of the game’s themes have been revealed to us, that Lace is herself bound to a role in some way, which might explain why, unlike the very direct Hornet, Lace is a lot more cloak and dagger about her operations- she has no problem being candid to Hornet, because she was under the impression Hornet wouldn’t survive the conversation, and, besides which, a foreigner probably isn’t going to have the context to blab Lace’s movements to the right person to get Lace in trouble.

This is a lot of conjecture, obviously, but, that’s just one potential angle to take to this. What’s up with you, Lace.

#Hollow Knight #Silksong #Lace #silksong spoilers #readmore

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legendaryobservationpuppy · 4 years

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The Most Effective FRESH DOG FOOD DELIVERY IMO: HEALTH AND CONVENIENCE FROM THE FARMER'S DOG

At an occasion years ago, I talked with somebody who was a quite pet-savvy person. We spoke about dog food, as well as I mentioned adding fresh veggies-- carrots, beans, peas, etc.-- to the young boys' food. She looked aghast. "I don't feed my dogs individuals food," she said. "I don't want to transform them into beggars."

OK, the habits issue apart, when she stated "people food," I could not assist yet question: Well, what is dog food made of otherwise ... food? A minimum of, shouldn't it be constructed from food, genuine food, like the kind individuals eat? If a bag of kibble states it has carrots in it, exactly how's that various from providing your dog a carrot?

The discussion seemed ridiculous to me, and now, say thanks to benefits, it's come cycle ...

THE FARMER'S DOG FOOD REVIEW

WHY FRESH DOG FOOD?

This is the large, underlying concern: Why feed your dog fresh dog food?

At the end of the day, food is food is food is food. What makes one meal different from another eventually comes down to just how it's made, right? Take the carrot example. Boiling and also steaming both prepare the carrots, however steaming protects its nutrients while steaming sheds 60% or more of the carrot's nutrients. Eating a raw carrot may not be best, either, though due to the fact that study shows that some food preparation techniques may really boost the carrot's antioxidant power. Basically, a steamed carrot is a carrot, a boiled carrot is a carrot, a raw carrot is a carrot, a dehydrated carrot extruded right into kibble form is still a carrot ... however they're not all nutritionally equivalent. I believe we can all settle on that, as well as I believe we can all concur that there's absolutely nothing grosser than a boiled carrot. (Actually, perhaps steamed asparagus is grosser?).

Anyway.

If you're mosting likely to eat food, which of course you are, and also if you're going to feed your dog food, which of course you are, wouldn't you want it to be the most nutritionally-rich food readily available? Obviously you do! We all do! And the advantage to our dogs is that they don't have to pick between, claim, a smoked poultry bust vs. drive-thru chicken nuggets because we make the decisions on their behalf. So, it stands to factor that if we know fresh food is best, as well as we're in position to make a decision the most effective food to feed our puppies, we 'd wish to go fresh, yeah?

There are a TON of fresh foods hitting the market (more on that particular in a minute), however we've found The Farmer's Dog to fit our way of living, spending plan, and Coop's belly peculiarities.

Backing up one fast action: When I wrote about The Farmer's Dog previously, we switched foods after getting the results of Cooper's allergic reaction examination. At the time, I really did not write a complete review due to the fact that I wasn't certain how handy it would be given that I was so focused on food allergic reactions. We were so pumped to find a recipe that really did not include a single allergen from Coop's list, and also while he's restricted to among the three solutions for that extremely reason, it's made measurable, obvious distinctions in his stubborn belly. I wanted to sing that from the roofs! However, SO numerous of you have actually connected with details concerns I really did not answer in that blog post that I believed I would certainly draw them together in a full evaluation nevertheless!

Note: Because I assume turning proteins is so very vital, we're still rotating in The Honest Kitchen due to the fact that 2 of the three solutions from The Farmer's Dog do include irritants on Coop's list.

The other large point is that our food manufacturing system is deeply flawed. Romaine lettuce, any person? I'm certain you've all seen the congeries as well as gobs of dog food remembers as a result of tainted active ingredients, too. Actually, there's a significant one underway as I kind this: FDA Alerts Pet Owners concerning Potentially Toxic Levels of Vitamin D in Several Dry Pet Foods.

It's critically essential to me that we're feeding Cooper a food where the active ingredients are properly sourced as well as the production is smaller range for much better quality assurance. I fully recognize that no food manufacturing system is excellent. For that, we would certainly have to expand as well as make our very own, which allowed's be straightforward, isn't taking place.

THE VERY BEST FRESH DOG FOOD DELIVERY.

I assume we can all concur that fresh food is the method to go, however that's not without a substantial list of pros vs disadvantages when it concerns pet food. It's not like you can stroll right into the produce area of your local pet store and also pick up a fresh dish, ya understand? Let's take a look at a few of the evident advantages and disadvantages of fresh dog food as well as fresh dog food delivery services:.

Price: Equal parts PRO/CON. I enter into this carefully below re: The Farmer's Dog, yet these services are definitely more costly than getting an average store bag of kibble (though there are several superior kibbles that are similar or even more costly). I do assume it's worth taking a look at the expense of health-related issues from fast food vs. wholesome foods. However you men understand me: I'm NOT somebody that says in a covering declaration kibble is bad. It's not. Although I advocate genuine, whole food, these solutions could not fit your budget plan. #noshame It's my viewpoint that The Farmer's Dog is priced at a reasonable worth. It's most definitely a stretch if you've been feeding normal kibble, however not if you've been feeding premium or, as we were, a dried alternative like The Honest Kitchen.

Packaging: PRO! Alright, you guys. You know I'm consumed with searching for green remedies to every animal care problem. Well, The Farmer's Dog can be found in recyclable packaging AND the insulation is corn starch that you liquify in your kitchen area sink! The brand is dedicated to sustainability, as well, so you can trust that their production techniques are gentler on the setting.

Website/ordering: CON. You can not see the formulas till you create an account. I feel like that's a disappointment for those people that have dogs that are SO sensitive to active ingredients that we can't choose till we see every last active ingredient.

Ease: PRO! Extra on this below, yet having the food automatically shipped is a life saver.

Small-batch manufacturing: PRO! For all the factors mentioned above. And also each packet comes identified particularly for Cooper.

THE FARMER'S DOG VS OLLIE (OR NOMNOM NOW, PETPLATE, ETC.).

Fresh food + shipment is the future, y' all.

Hopefully by now you're on board with the fresh food item, yet shipment?

OK, so I know that you're busy. I'm hectic, you're active, we're all essentially extended so thin it's difficult to maintain. Grocery store pick-up has actually changed my life! I truthfully can't stand entering into the shop-- really, grocery buying is my single most despised chore-- so buying online then driving over and having a person tons it right into my auto is, in my opinion, the best invention of my life time.

At the very least it was.

Till ... Delivery!

Distribution is the next wave of convenience foods, which is SO much better than "comfort" foods like McDonald's or microwave meals since you can pick all your very own healthy and balanced foods and have them given your doorstep. My neighbors, who have 5 youngsters, obtain their groceries provided, and also I'm certain it's altered their lives right! Well, that's just how I really feel regarding fresh food distribution for my pets. I think more people are demanding delivery for more and more things (I have 3 different apps on my phone for takeout/delivery services ...) so you can expect to see tons of fresh dog food shipment brands appear to fulfill that requirement.

After my previous article, I got a lots of inquiries regarding exactly how The Farmer's Dog compares to Ollie. Truthfully? We've never attempted Ollie. I did Google a bunch of the brand names that are currently around, and also almost everything I read placed The Farmer's Dog towards the top for convenience, expense, and also alternatives. Right here's a testimonial from a food blog site I like if you want to check out some particular contrasts.

Just How Much DOES THE FARMER'S DOG COST?

It varies. It depends on the dimension as well as age of your dog as well as his or her everyday calorie requirements. Let's say you enjoy a sedentary pug. Well, your price is going to be reduced-- and also appropriately so!-- than my high-energy, perma-pup Am Staff mix. He needs a great deal of calories in the day to stay up to date with his skittering as well as cat chasing!

That said, they do supply arrangements to do the dish as a mattress topper, which I believe would be an ahhhhhmazing means to blend whole foods right into a kibble or dehydrated diet plan in a cost-effective method.

My recommendations? Try it at 50% off as well as see. It's either going to work wonders for your dog as well as his diet plan (which I truly do think it will certainly) or it will not! But, it can't hurt to try, specifically at such a reduced cost.

ALL-TIME LOW LINE.

At the end of the day, every person wants to do what's finest for their pup. That's it. All of us do the best we can with the criteria we have. No, this isn't mosting likely to be for everyone. It might not be a square meal option for you, either, yet the topper situation might work. Or, possibly you're ready to dive into something brand-new. Everybody's doing their ideal, and as long as you're caring your pet dogs, you're doing terrific. If part of that includes attempting The Farmer's Dog fresh dog food shipment service, I would certainly enjoy to assist you start with a discount: Click below to try it for 50% off!

What rocks have I left unturned? I attempted to answer the inquiries I had obtained via email as well as DM, but in case I missed something, or if an additional question cropped up for you as you were reading this, please leave them in the remarks! I 'd love to supply as much info as feasible, and if I do not understand the solution, I'm always satisfied to connect to the business to find the right information!

#DOG FOOD

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kontextmaschine · 5 years

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Roseburg

Okay, Roseburg. It’s the capital of the southern Oregon timber industry, which fell hard with the end of harvesting on federal lands in the early ‘90s.

It’s got a population of 20,000, in a town center at a bend in the river and several residential neighborhoods, with more modern retail north of the city center around I-5. Several thousand more live in outlying areas, and Roseburg is seat of Douglas County stretching to the coast counting 110,000 population in total.

The airport offers no scheduled passenger service. Flights to major mountain west cities are available 83 miles to the north or 90 to the south; equivalent service is available 15 miles from Bend.

The only college in the area is a community college.

The town center, oriented around a “couplet” (parallel one-way streets) for a Main Street in Oregon tradition, has government buildings and a roughly five square block downtown. The downtown is early-20th century in character, solid frontages of storefronts with 1-2 stories of residential above, with churches, banks, and apartment buildings on the periphery.

The downtown is not pedestrianized, but has been designed for cars to park on the periphery. One block of storefronts is block-through, with entrances on each of two opposing sides. Many storefronts are empty. Several bars and restaurants are active, with a few (plus a co-working space) that look to have opened recently. Other stores remain looking a little out-of-time, and several storefronts have been occupied by nonprofits, street-level offices, or enterprises that look to create low returns while occupying high spatial volume. A gym occupies one sizeable space, two large markets stand empty. Despite this emptiness, only the markets look truly dilapidated; others have intact windows and clean interiors and reasonably fresh paint and facades. Scattered throughout are several civic monuments and monumental-looking fraternal lodges.

Sloping away from this downtown, the town center contains more stores, warehouses, restaurants, and bars. On the I-5 corridor, several hotels and travel-oriented businesses serve the freeway, mostly north of the town center.

- - -

So, in some ways this is kind of what I’d been expecting to like - a resource extraction town for a collapsed industry, leaving a fully built-out but intact infrastructure ripe for use. With poor flight connections to finance centers and a local economy still tapering off as the legacy population drifts away, an obvious hope is to market the small-town experience to internet workers or others who generate resources in a way that doesn’t require an existing resource base in physical proximity, while in the interim, the courthouse, the remaining private-lands timber industry, and the highway services support a basic level of services.

The maintained facades, the nonprofit offices occupying storefronts, and the general effort to keep downtown looking active suggest a level of coordination by local elites in support of the city’s viability.

- - -

And it’s… Cascadia. It’s green but at the same time younger than the east coast or rust belt - the wilderness hasn’t been carved into as much, the people not guarded, exhibit the good down-home parts of “country” without much “narrow-minded bumpkin”.

Many stores and bars have signs at the doors saying to take hoodies off, no backpacks, no tweekers, this site recorded on camera. There are at many points one to three people who are obviously homeless or on drugs in view. A Greyhound bus stopped in front of one dilapidated market and disgorged 7 vagrant-looking people. Every day the city police log lists like 6 arrests. On sites where these mugshots are compiled and shared around you see these are usually about heroin, meth, thefts to buy heroin or meth, or parole violations by people with convictions about heroin or meth. Even among apparently functional people working behind counters and bars, there are more facial scabs than you expect.

There is, frankly, an absurd level of pro-military sentiment. Signs in all sorts of windows, military discounts everywhere, banners from some past event benefiting some charity for military families. A veteranarian’s office is painted with the American flag, silhouettes of dogs and soldiers saluting or wearing helmets. I wondered if there had been a military base closed nearby because even after a week traveling through much more “red”-than-Portland country I had seen more of that stuff but nothing near that level. I never saw any murdered-out trucks or Punisher skulls or Black Rifle Coffee or 5.11 or any other military-adjacent aesthetic, though. Wearing Chinese-replica BDU pants, I was sporting more of a tactical look than anyone I saw.

Douglas County gave 64% of its vote to Trump in 2016.

- - -

The clear signs of people coming together to keep downtown appealing, all the monuments, the particular aesthetic of the places catering to a downtown crowd (and of that crowd itself), the legacy of what you’d expect from timber barons and their clerks… I was like “oh I get this, there’s a strong country-club Republican strain.”

Knowing that the region’s forest workers were pretty radical (that’s an important thing about Oregon, its normative rural experience isn’t of yeoman farmers but forest workers) I was wondering when I was going to get a sign of that, eventually I realized the yay-military stuff was the expression of class solidarity I was looking for.

Knowing both of those I turned to the addicts and fuckups and was like “ohh, you’re the third player in this drama, the unvirtuous poor that the virtuous poor and white collar types can bond over identifying against”.

A good deal of the nonprofits taking up space downtown seem to be the prison-industrial-complex type, the therapy or treatment you get sentenced to, designed to employ the first group turning the third into the second.

- - -

Seeing Roseburg makes some things about Portland make sense. That, say, when timber collapsed some of the “worker” types or their kids moved to, or stayed in Portland and brought the ethic to food service.

Traditional Oregon is weirdly exclusive, had an anti-Californian sentiment in particular but I’ve heard stores from Washingtonians about getting their cars pelted with rocks in the 80s, the state’s most famous statement of boosterism included a direct request not to move here.

There’s very much a sense that Portland has become swollen with non-Oregonians who seek to impose themselves on traditional, rural, Oregon, I could see a distaste towards any idea of making Roseburg more Portlandish.

When I walked in to look at the co-working space (it’s really just a period office building with individual offices) I overheard a guy saying that he could accept if they just made up a list of the guns it was okay to buy…

And the thing about a strong local elite invested in the future of your town is the town is under the control of a strong local elite with an interest in its future, presumably wanting to keep or develop it as its own playground.

At the same time, whoever owns all those buildings would very much like to see them filled at competitive rates I’m sure, and property owners are the backbone of any local elite. (I do not know the in-town landholders’ relationship to the woodland barons.)

- - -

So. Promising. It’s a charming Portland-in-miniature, houses are still available in the $100s and apartments at $500/br/mo. Between empty and underused space there’s maybe 10 years of solid expansion before all the slack has been taken up, and by all appearances the local system would love to see it happen and has no better pitch than quality-of-life-experience, being what Portland was in the 90s.

(Even the class system isn’t terribly off, a lot of the “Portlandia” years were about importing a middle class to fit between the old money in the West Hills and the retreating border of “Felony Flats” across the river to the east.)

That said it’s not abandoned just waiting for my guiding hand, there are preexisting power structures and culture to accommodate or challenge. And if undermining the local culture is the last thing I want - it’s what appeals to me, and the loss of which I’m mourning in Portland – I’m already thinking “okay that’s honestly too Republican, but that’s the only way to end up with a tolerable culture after it floods with creatives so hey”.

This is assuming it does take off, which I honestly think is a good assumption, as the big west coast cities fill up and cascade down (in the interim, look at Olympia, Visalia, Sacramento, Eugene, and Fresno) but isn’t inevitable. Oregon environmental laws and declining influence of Republican state legislators could further undermine the rural economy. Things could just keep declining past the point of being able to keep up appearances - the VA hospital just closed its emergency room, and there are two more in the area but the reasoning was the difficulty of recruiting and maintaining specialized staff, and that’s a bad sign.

Maybe I’m just psyched to see an authentically Cascadian town again and I should check out some others before getting swept away, in Oregon alone I’m still virgin on Albany, McMinnville, Forest Grove, and Coos Bay.

Still, I dunno. Might be a site for a good life.

#no I have like a lot to tell you

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gascon-en-exil · 6 years

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I Liked Fates Before It Was Cool!: Conquest Part 2

Prologue

Opening Chapters

Conquest Part 1

Chapters 15-20, in which there is finally a goal, and it is stupid.

Chapter 15

a.k.a. the teaser for Revelation.

Don’t get me wrong, I like that Valla has some visible presence outside of its dedicated route, and the otherworldly visuals and shadowy enemies do a lot to sell the mystery of the place and make the player want to learn more about it. Also, this chapter isn’t just randomly dropped into the middle of Conquest’s plot, but rather a culmination of events that begins in Chapter 9 when Azura returns to Nohr. She then meets Garon, tries to exorcise Garon but only succeeds in giving him a really awkward public orgasm, and then turns to Plan B which is apparently to go dimension-hopping for a one-use plot device.

But yeah, that part is absurdly contrived and deserves all the scorn it gets in the fandom, relying as it does on two separate magical plot trinkets - the aforementioned crystal and the Hoshidan throne - and building unearned tension between Corrin and the Nohrian royals via a strange set of contrivances. Azura couldn’t have waited to use the crystal until they were all together...why, exactly? Because it can only be used once, and only at the Bottomless Canyon, and only if someone with special magic or dragon blood touches it, and then you can’t talk about it without vanishing...gah. It’s an epic pileup of lazy writing. FE10′s Blood Pacts have nothing on this moment.

At least the chapter is fun, being a big change of pace that reduces your party to three replicated units and gives you a choice of two objectives. And Gunter’s not dead, and (we assume) not evil on this route even though his situation is basically the same as it is in Revelation. That’s nice of him.

Chapter 16

What an original way of creating a timed chapter - and as a bonus I get the image of Xander and various other guys pinching the cheeks of random Nohrian soldiers! That’s just adorably weird.

What’s not so adorable but still weird is how we’re meant to believe that Shura can pass for a Nohrian until he tells everyone otherwise, because isn’t there supposed to be a noticeable racial difference between the two main regions of Fates’s setting? Maybe not apparent to the player (unless you’re intimately familiar with anime art styles, or so I’ve heard), but it’s logically supposed to be there, so...what’s up with that? Logical inconsistencies aside Shura is an interesting aspect of this chapter and an interesting character in general for how he straddles that regional divide and provides exposition both here and in Birthright that Hoshido’s not all it’s cracked up to be. In this route he reveals that Yukimura contracted him to kidnap Azura in retaliation for Garon kidnapping Corrin, adding a devious dimension to a character who is in other respects extremely underdeveloped. This is also the only route where Shura can potentially get his revenge against Mokushu, so his presence here feels timely...unless you opt to kill him and take his Boots, that is.

More on that next chapter though, because the sting of the previous’s one absurdity lingers in spite of Shura and Xander and some genuinely pleasant sibling banter (tempered by the allusions to the concubine wars and Azura’s rough treatment in Nohr that are mostly reserved for supports). No explanation is ever provided for why Garon decides to commence the invasion of Hoshido now, after devoting his forces’ time and energy to quashing a series of only tangentially-related rebellions. It feels too convenient coming as it does right after Azura explains her plan to Corrin, a means of saving Corrin from having to push for the invasion themselves. I really wish they’d done something to that effect. Corrin would shock Azura even further with their newfound ability to lie while also making a move covertly motivated by a desire to end the war as quickly as possible and so with as few lives lost on both sides. One less contrivance certainly wouldn’t have hurt, either.

Chapter 17

Everyone wants revenge against Kotaro, even NPCs. After slogging through a ninja-infested cave with spikes and a bunch of Dragon Veins that can throw you off if used at the wrong time I sympathize wholeheartedly.

What I have more trouble understanding is the moral position of the lead-up to this chapter. Corrin and co. are fine with accepting help from Kotaro until it’s revealed that he’s captured Kagero in an attempt to force the Hoshidans to surrender. The dialogue doesn’t make it sound as though they plan on killing her, but because Kotaro claims that Garon would approve of his strategy it’s suddenly horrible and deserving of immediate retribution. Corrin’s objection here runs contrary to their desire to end the war quickly by whatever means necessary including subterfuge, so aside from the knowledge gleaned across all routes that Kotaro is a self-centered opportunist who’s personally wronged both Shura and the Christmas ninjas it feels like a stretch that this is what leads to the Nohrians breaking off their strategically useful alliance with Mokushu. It’s a flimsy excuse for a frustrating chapter that doesn’t really come with a payoff later from Saizo, so I can’t say it’s one of my favorites from any angle.

Oh, and Azura apparently soloed a bunch of Hoshidans offscreen. That got a laugh out of me.

Chapter 18

Ship tease and moral dissonance for all! Well, sort of. The Ryoma/Xander stuff is funny (why does Ryoma retort that he’s more attractive? Hmm...) and Camilla gets in a quip in preparation for her final showdown with Hinoka, but all in all it’s a strange, tense moment. The fight against the renegade(?) Nohrians led by Zola provides the moral dissonance, and even though Leo provides a practical explanation for doing his usual thing and killing dark mages in cutscenes it is a bit strange to imagine that Garon wouldn’t notice all these allies and underlings of his mysteriously dying.

I find it interesting that the meeting between royals is something that occurs in Conquest but not in Birthright. As with Chapter 15 this is another example of this route doing substantially more to sell the basic premise of Revelation than its counterpart did, which makes more sense if the two of them were indeed written at about the same time after Birthright. It also provides some necessary development for Corrin’s relationship with the Hoshidan royals, something that can’t be taken for granted as it is with the Nohrians in Birthright as they didn’t grow up together. That’s all the more important to get out of the way now since they all confront Corrin one right after the other in the endgame without much time in between to really explore them as much as they ought to be. Takumi’s arc in Conquest is pretty good, sure, but the sisters are fairly static and Ryoma’s character is plagued with presentation issues on this route. I actually wish this scene could have gone on a bit longer and added a bit more to each of them, but this is what we’ve got.

Don’t really have anything to add about the chapter. It’s a recycled Birthright map that’s only interesting because you have to beat three bosses in a turn limit. Zola’s role here is minimal, as is Izana’s which is entirely a good thing.

Chapter 19

What I like about this chapter: It’s got a pretty autumnal palette not seen anywhere else in Fates that I can think of (exacerbated by the fact that this map is unique to Conquest, meaning you can never use it for skirmishes). The setup is also much stronger than the equivalent wolfskin chapter in Birthright. No Iago here - Kaden outright entraps Corrin’s army and plans to kill them all on the possibility that they might be poachers. Hoshido really benefits from having some viciousness like this of its own.

What I don’t like about the chapter: I don’t know if it’s a mistranslation or I’m just misunderstanding the game’s explanation for this chapter’s gimmick, but it clearly doesn’t work the way I first thought it did. The text blurb states that kitsune illusions (units with the green symbol on them) can neither attack nor be attacked by your units, and while it’s true that your units can’t target them they can and do attack you on the enemy phase. I don’t mind the idea of units with a single turn of player phase immunity, but it’s frustrating to feel misled into thinking it was something else entirely.

Anyway, Corrin kills all the kitsune and is sad about it, and then Azura waxes philosophic on how all routes carry sacrifice and moral greyness and it’s pretty obvious that she’s leaning on the fourth wall here. On the plus side when one considers all the named character deaths in Birthright and even the handful in Revelation it feels less like the game is specifically berating the player for choosing Conquest this time.

Chapter 20

So, uh, quick question: how are the few little huts in the desert seen here and in Birthright and the massive complex of intricately-crafted terraces and stairways that appear in the other two routes both representative of the Wind Tribe? Is Fuga loaded while his people live in squalor?

He’s certainly a sadist, because this chapter earns its infamous reputation with its frustrating wind manipulation. I find that, not unlike FE4, this is one of several Fates chapters made easier if you’re fielding a bunch of units with holy dragon blood to use the Dragon Veins scattered throughout the map. Behold the power of kinky interspecies sex.

Similar to Azura’s musings in the previous chapter, Fuga provides Corrin with his knowledge of the Yato along with the confidence that they chose a morally righteous path after all. As with Corrin’s pacifism something like this is near the top of the list of things not to do in a villain campaign, but the writing has long since stopped trying for that angle. It’s been repeatedly reinforced that Garon and his loyal minions are the real enemies of this campaign, and the Hoshidans are the innocent(?) victims who have to be sacrificed in order to expose Garon for what he is and end the war. Fuga sends Corrin off with his blessing to kill however many Hoshidans it takes to earn peace, including potentially all of his late BFF’s children.

...Yeah. Fuga really is kind of an ass when you think about him.

Next time: Conquest Chapter 21 - Endgame

#Fire Emblem #Fire Emblem Fates #Fire Emblem Conquest #FE14

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captivatesearchmarketing · 3 years

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Limousine Hire Tips and Advice

Recruiting an extended limousine services need not be a hit and miss issue on the off chance that you pose the right inquiries and assess the accompanying.

No two limousine administrators are something very similar and various associations place shifting degrees of accentuation on help levels and interest in their armada. You can acquire a knowledge into the manner in which an organization works by how responsive they are and the polished skill of their methodology. For instance, in the event that you have finished an online enquiry structure, how long does it require for them to react, have they effectively deciphered your prerequisites and is the citation proficient or simply a cavalier a joke?

Likewise phone enquiries can likewise give an understanding into how a limousine administrator is probably going to deal with their clients. Is your call addressed quickly and expertly with the organization name, are they well disposed or equivocal while responding to your inquiries, do they offer to send you a composed affirmation of the cost, or is your call replied by a phone replying mail.

In case you are visiting sites search for signs that they are an expert limousine administrator. Do they have a decent line number or simply a cell phone, does the site incorporate the name of the organization or individual, is there an actual contact address, or simply a PO Box number, or most noticeably terrible still, no location by any means? These are markers, not authoritative indications of a helpless association, but rather you ought to wonder why, for instance, a limousine administrator would not need tp incorporate their full organization name or actual location.

Since the limousines are a basic part of the recruit, hope to check whether the site incorporates pictures of their own vehicles. Study the photos, many organizations utilize nonexclusive pictures of limousines, if so, wonder why they would not have any desire to show pictures of their own vehicles. One hint perhaps to take a gander at where the image was taken and the enlistment plate, on the off chance that maybe it was taken in the USA, fare thee well. Likewise get some information about signage on the vehicle, a few administrators utilize their limousines as promoting hoardings, which can leave numerous hirers baffled.

On the off chance that you go over a representative contribution to get citations for your benefit you should think about the accompanying. Most limousine administrators will be paying for every enquiry they get or a level of the recruit esteem, will you wind up following through on a superior cost for the comfort of utilizing an outsider? A portion of these agents depict their limousine administrators as licensed or supported. If so ask what this cycle involves, what ensures assuming any, the accreditation interaction gives you, for instance, will the merchant guarantee the recruit and furthermore how regularly are the administrators checked? You additionally need to remember that you are depending on an outsider to finish your exploration, which implies you are managing two substances of which you have no past experience.

While there is unavoidably a compulsion to settle on value, this should just shape some portion of the interaction given, as should turn out to be obvious from your exploration, all limousine administrators are not equivalent. An expert limousine administrator might charge £10 or £15 each hour more, yet on a normal recruit of 5 hours, this adds up to close to £75, a little premium to pay to get an expert assistance, from a set up full-time administrator with current limousines.

Another viewpoint to consider is the length of the recruit. The normal time taken to set up an extended limousine before employ is around 2.5 hours. Accordingly, most expert administrators will force a base charge or potentially a recruit term of 3 hours or thereabouts, this might be higher during top periods. The base recruit charge is probably going to be in the locale of £150. Be careful with any organization that doesn't matter these provisos given it regularly implies that the administrator means to utilize the vehicle for a few recruits on the day. Definitely this can prompt issues identifying with unwavering quality or timing and as a general rule, a vehicle that has not been as expected ready. It is additionally worth remembering that numerous limousine administrators offer a diminished recruit charge for mid-week enlists, so in case this is an alternative, don't limit it.

Another angle to remember while looking for a limousine for your occasion is dependability. Extended limousines are costly to administration and fix which definitely brings about certain administrators endeavoring to postpone fixes as late as possible. Shockingly inadequately kept up with limousines are famously questionable. While it is sensible for you to anticipate that the limousine operator should be persistent in such matters, it doesn't really follow that they are and it might well influence your recruit! By and large a modest recruit truly brings about a modest assistance. Recorded beneath are some valuable inquiries to pose of your limousine administrator.

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grassroutes · 3 years

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The Highest Resolution Action Camera Ever: Insta360 One-R With 1-Inch Mod

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antis-eye-chotic · 7 years

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Here’s a comprehensive list of all the things that I feel don’t add up in Who Killed Markiplier, and also things I just thought were interesting: Who DID kill Mark?

I assumed it was Wil because of Abe’s accusation, but it’s never actually confirmed. We know the detective to be a bit of a nutcase, so is he really all that reliable? Is Celine Mark’s wife? (or ex-wife?) They never explicitly say it, but I assumed this was the case considering the fact that Abe accused Wil of having an affair with Mark’s wife, and he brings up Celine a lot. However there never seems to be any moments between Wil and Celine to suggest they had a history. Where is Mark now? Damien said “the son of a bitch” was walking around in his body… What??? I don’t understand this at all. Mark is… in Damien’s body? I don’t… WHAT? What did Celine mean by “vengeance quest”? Why is there no evidence of Mark being vengeful? And why is he exactly? The most obvious reason is Wil sleeping with his wife, but if that’s the case, why didn’t he just go after him? Why invite everyone over? And Damien said that he’d been “planning this for years.” Planning what? He didn’t do anything that pointed to him doing anything nefarious. Dude just died. What’s the deal with the house? Celine said she never liked it, and she accused Mark of using whatever power it has for his benefit (Though I still can’t figure out what the benefit is besides I guess dying and taking over Damien’s body?) George said it was cursed, and hadn’t been inside of it for fifteen years due to some manifestation that occurred, which is something you should hope will never happen again. Then it does. What was it? Why is the house cursed and what was the event that took place fifteen years ago? I assumed that what happened at the end of chapter 3 just had to do with Celine tampering with supernatural forces in general, but going by what George says, it sounds like some other sort of supernatural event took place and may take place again even without the help of a psychic messing about with spirits. Why did Ben have us go into the wine cellar? I mean, I kinda just thought it was a silly moment to show how dedicated he is to his job and how loyal he was to Mark, but I dunno. It just seems like there was more to that maybe. He called it a “domain of evil”

Although if you think about it… Why would he be so loyal to him if he was so tough to work for, as stated by Wil. I mean, maybe Ben’s just weird, but I dunno. It’s just one of those things that don’t quite line up with the “Mark is an asshole” narrative that we keep having fed to us despite the lack of actual evidence. But to add to that… Why did Celine and Damien suddenly turn on him after you die? Celine wanted to solve his murder, and really wanted to speak to him, and Damien had been going on and on to everyone about how Mark was their friend. Then suddenly he’s a jerk? Weird. Interesting Thing: After you come out of the trance and everyone’s out in the hall, Celine and Damien emerge from the room shortly afterward. Everyone’s about to go outside, except for Damien. He offers to stay inside with Celine and help her. Her response? “I don’t need any help… Especially from you!” Why would she specifically not want Damien’s help? Why was there never thunder and lightning anytime George said “murder”? He said it twice, and nothing happened. You can’t even blame it on an editing gaff, because during the same conversation, Abe also said the word and the lightning happened.Speaking of which… why was Celine so hung up on people saying murder? I mean, true, it’s a little upsetting that saying a word has that effect, but when she comes out of the room, she orders them not to say it. Another Interesting Thing: During the scene where Wil is going on a rampage through the house, looking for Abe, he tries different doors and starts to walk into what looks to be a bathroom when suddenly, we reach out toward him. Why? It seems like such an insignificant thing, but why did we do it? But what confuses me the most out of this entire series is the ending… I just cannot wrap my head around it. So… We die. The first thing we see is Mark hitting the ground and looking at us… His eyes suddenly darken, and he says “It’s not fair, is it?” But that’s not his normal voice. That’s not the voice we heard when he made the speech from the staircase. It’s got a posh tinge to it, and it sounds an awful lot like what we’re used to Dark sounding like. The way he bears his teeth as he enunciates is also very Dark-like. After that, Damien and Celine appear. It’s pretty clear that her being red and him being blue is supposed to signify Dark’s anaglyph filter. I’ve already theorized that they may not really be Celine and Damien and that this could just be whatever sort of spirit Dark is conjuring up visions of them to make you trust him and invite him in so that he can be free in our world. Either that or Celine and/or Damien are not as good as they seem. “He took everything from us. He trapped us in here with this broken shell and no way out.” I don’t understand this. How did Mark do any of this? It seems that they’re inferring that Mark’s body is the broken shell because it’s at their feet, but how did they even get there? And how did he put them there? Celine says that she always thought it was the house, and that she never thought he’d fall this far. So what I’m getting here is that she thought that the cursed house had a negative effect on Mark? They keep saying that Mark took everything from them. What did he take from them? I mean, I get that they’re… supposedly dead? (Despite the fact that we never actually see them dead, by the way…) So he could have taken their lives? But how did he even do that? What else did he take from them?

So, going with the theory that Dark is made up of Celine and Damien…Why is he described as a social manipulator and basically pure evil if he’s made up of two good people? And is it really both of them? Damien does say to let HIM in, not THEM in. This could just be a throwback to Dark’s infamous request to “let him in” … but in this case, wouldn’t it be both of them? Also there is a pretty noticable flicker during him saying that, and the only other time that same flicker occurs is when Mark says the “It’s not fair, is it?” line before disappearing. You wake up, come face to face with (CLEARLY) Wilford Warfstache who’s having the mental equivalent of the blue screen of death, and you look down at the cane that he left on the table in front of the mirror. We first see a woman’s hand taking the cane, and then it changes to a man’s hand. This would go with the theory of Dark being made up of the two by showing each of them holding Damien’s cane, I suppose. So now we’re faced with Dark. He cracks the mirror, and then walks out of frame… leaving us still staring into the mirror. He’s clearly pissed. But Damien and Celine seem like pretty level-headed people. I mean, sure, he seemed pretty mad at Mark for supposedly “taking everything from him” but it’s not the psycho anger that Dark is associated with, and the rage that he showed at the end of the video. I just don’t know. Something doesn’t sit right with me. Like I said, Dark is pretty much pure evil… but Celine and Damien are presented as being good, so how could he be made up of them? And why is Mark supposedly such an asshole by the end of the video without any evidence? I really hope there’s going to be more to this, and if what Celine said is right, if this really is just a footnote in a much bigger mystery… I think there will be.

#markiplier #who killed markiplier #darkiplier #wilford warfstache

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sportsgeekonomics · 4 years

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If you are a university struggling with budgetary issues, PLEASE READ before making dumb athletic decisions... please

Ok, so say you are a mid-major university and you rely fairly heavily on your annual NCAA distribution to support your athletic department. You were counting on $2mm and you got $600K. Ruh, Roh, Scooby!

Now the NCAA comes along and says they want you to give MORE SCHOLARSHIPS TO SPRING ATHLETES? Are they nuts??!??! They squelch down off your school’s largest source of athletic revenue and then they want you to increase athletic expenses? WTF?

Ok, calm down potty mouth, I’ve got some basic economics for you to help you see why having more spring-sport athletes on campus might help your improve your coronavirus-threatened university’s P&L for 2020-2021. And you can thank me by trying to internalize this mantra: “accounting figures are a useful, human-created fiction but when they conflict with reality, you should choose reality”

Let’s build a hypothetical school in a hypothetical world. Let’s invent a school, say, the University of Corona. And as we all know, the school’s athletic teams are known as the Ragin’ Viruses.

Normally Corona is at, or very close, to capacity. But because of the social distancing scare, they sent everyone home early in the 2019-2020 academic year and for whatever reason, a bunch of sophomore and juniors chose to transfer prior to the 2020-2021 year. So there is a one-time glut of unused dorms and you expect your classrooms to be like 3/4 full come Fall Semester. Your entire campus administration is reeling from the impact. If tuition revenue is down 25%, that’s a huge hit to Corona’s ability to pay professors, staff, and to support athletics. No one is happy with the possibility of cuts, but cuts may be needed. As athletic director of the Ragin’ Viruses, you’re asked to find a way to either cut the net impact of your $4.5 million budget on the university as a whole by 5% or increase revenue by a similar amount to avoid cuts. That’s $225,000 you need to come up with

Now the NCAA comes along. In our hypothetical world, there are only 2 Spring sports, men’s sportball and women’s sportball. Both are equivalency sports (for non NCAA masters, this means that you are allocated x full scholarships but you can spread them over more than x students). Let’s just say each sport allows 10 GIAs (i.e. what people often call athletic scholarships), and Corona tends to spread it over 20 athletes. Assume a Full GIA has a listed Cost of Education of $25,000, split as follows:

Tuition & Fees: $10K

Room: $10K

Board $4K

Books: $1K

TOTAL: $25,000 per full GIA per year.

(side note: “Cost of Education” is a term of art somewhat distinct from “Cost of Attendance” -- the difference being CoE excludes Travel Expenses and Personal/Living Expenses that are costs born by student but not paid to schools. schools that pay “Full COA” provide a cash payment to cover those extra 2 categories, and these are sometimes called a COA Stipend. In this example, Corona Univ does not give COA Stipends to Spring sport athletes.)

So your spring sports athletes GIAs are listed on you Membership Reporting Financial System (MFRS) entries as 40 athletes (20 men, 20 women) each at 50% scholarship, and thus your GIA expense is 40 x 50% x $25000 = $500,000.

Last assumption, and this is a strong one: assume none of your sportball athletes can afford to attend Corona without a scholarship. If they lose their GIA, they’ll transfer to a local college or drop out.

With me so far?

Well one very obvious way to reduce your budget by $500,000 would be to just cancel all Spring sport GIAs, which reduces your budget by more than 10%, way more than the 4.5% you were asked to contribute. You feel like a hero. But is that really going to help Corona U as much as you think?

TLDR: Nope. Here’s why:

When you cut those 40 scholarships, your listed scholarship expense drops by $500,000. Woot, budget balanced and you even saved the school a lot extra! Except your Provost didn’t ask you to cut your budget by $225K. She asked you to cut the impact of your budget on the overall campus finances by $225K. Which means you need to take a whole-university perspective. And when you cut those scholarships, the athletes who got them drop out of Corona. Meaning that they collective pay in less in tuition and fees (40 people x 50% x $10,000 = $200,000) and less in room (40 people x 50% X $10,000 = $200,000), etc. Leaving Books and Board to the side for a moment, by cutting your GIA budget by $500,000, you’ve just reduced university revenue by $400,000 just from lost Tuition, Fees, and Room revenue. That’s not going to win you points with the Provost.

And worse still -- when you used to pay the $500,000 in GIAs, you didn’t actually give money to students. You send money to... the Bursar, on campus. So when you stop giving scholarships, you actually reduced the Bursars revenue by another $500,000 as well, meaning that your $500,00 savings got erased, plus you lost another $400,000 (and we haven’t even looked at books or board yet)

Ah, but you say, by not having those students on campus, you’re saving the costs of actually educating them. Gotta take that into account as well. Ok, well, what does it cost to provide a room to a student if you have spare dorm rooms sitting idle? Remember this whole crisis were started by a one-time shock to the system from the virus where your enrollment declined by 25%. You have empty dorms sitting there, earning no money and costing very little to maintain. Maybe it costs $100/semester for electricity and housekeeping, but it’s basically cost-less. And the same goes for tuition. If the classrooms are 75% full, there is almost no cost to having more people attend the same lectures, have their papers reviewed by the same teaching assistants, etc., attend office hours of professors with time to spare, etc. You aren't actually saving any costs because (with spare capacity) on the margin, tuition and room have no incremental costs. They are all fixed costs (again, if you are under-capacity).

So you didn’t save your school a dime -- you reduced outside revenue by $400,000, and you lowered athletics listed expenses by $500,000 but you also lowered the bursars listed revenue by $500,000. You just cost the school $400K. If this were Oregon Trail, you’d be dead in a river.

Ah, but what about books and board -- those have real costs. If I don't have to feed 40 hungry athletes, that saves some money, right? And if I don't have to provide books, that saves money too, right? And the answers there are yes and yes. But it’s not as much of a savings as you think.

Corona University, like a lot of schools, has a contract with Barnes and Noble to runs its own bookstore and with a food service provider to run its cafeteria and meal plans. When anyone makes a book store purchase (even athletics), 20% of the revenue goes to the school. When anyone pays for a student’s meal plan (even athletics), 10% of the revenue goes to the school. So for books, when the athletic department cancelled 40 GIAs, you caused the following changes:

(a) The bookstore got $40,000 less in revenue (40 people x $1K in book spending)

(b) the school thus got $8,000 less in revenue. (20% of total)

(d) thus the net savings was only $32,000, not $40,000.

For board, the effects are similar but food is more expensive and you get a lower benefit:

(a) The food service provider got $160,000 less in revenue (40 people x $4K in food spending)

(b) the school thus got $16,000 less in revenue. (10% of total)

(d) thus the net savings was only $144,000 ($160K-$16K), not $160,000.

Ok, so yes, when we ignored board and books, you ended up harming the school by $400,000, and now that we look at board and books, we see you saved the school $176,000, so the net “benefit” of your cutting 40 athletes’ 50% GIAs is to reduce total campus revenue by $224,000.

This may be what Donald Trump learned to do at Wharton, but for the rest of us this is a bad way of doing business. You were asked to improve things by $250,000 and instead you harmed the school by $224,000.

Ok, well, how to fix things then?

Well, let’s add to our hypothetical. Assume the NCAA just told you that you that you can double your GIAs for 2019-2020 on a one-time basis. That is, you can add 40 GIA equivalencies for Spring sports in 2019-20. And just imagine that a whole lot of schools out there just cancelled men’s and women’s sportball (or went out of business altogether) or that there just happen to be a ton of extra sportball athletes looking for scholarships. So you make a cool Corona U video featuring your lovable mascot, COVID19 (that’s his uniform number, of course), and it goes, well, viral. You find 20 additional women and 20 additional men who very much want to come to Corona if you can give them your standard 50% sportball GIA. So you do, and you budget now says your expenses just increased by $500K.

Now you might be saying to me, um, what part of save money don’t you understand, Adam Smith?

Ah, but let’s run the numbers.

40 more people come to campus. They pay the bursar each $12,500, so in total, they bring in $500,000 more in revenue on their own. Plus you give the bursar another $500,000 to cover the other half of the scholarships. That’s a gain of $1 million in revenue on the Bursar’s account.

Now athletics, it is true, is down $500,000. Thus, so far, the next gain is $500,000.

The students get rooms that cost nothing (b/c of the glut of empty dorm rooms) and they fill seats in classrooms that bring no additional cost.

The bursar does need to send $40K more over to the bookstore, and only 20% of that flows back in to the bookstore revenue (b/c Barnes & Noble takes 80%), so books do cost the school, and on net the cost is $32K.

Ditto, the food service process. Of the $25K per student the bursar’s dept. got, they sent $4k per person to the food service firm and only 10% flows back to the school. On net, this costs a total of $144K.

And so the bursar’s $500K profit is reduce by $176K, meaning the school has just gained $224,000 by adding 40 athletes on 50% scholarships.

Wow, you’re only $1K away from meeting your goal. The last $1K comes from selling off the golden toilet in your personal executive bathroom. Sorry, but times are tough here, so tough even Athletic Directors have to rough it a bit.

Obviously, these numbers are stylized and not every assumption is as easy as this. Perhaps not all athletes will drop out if their scholarships are cut. Perhaps finding more athletes willing to attend won’t be that easy. Perhaps it costs a lot more to provide electricity to dorms so that there are somewhat lower benefits from filling an empty room. But conceptually, if you have empty class space (with excess teaching capacity) and empty dorm space (with excess sleeping capacity), you are going to lose money if you don’t fill it with a paying customer, even if that paying customer is not paying full price. Ask cruise lines, or at least ask them after they finish bleaching their ships, why they offer last minute steep discounts on cruises if they have empty rooms. it’s because the cost of cleaning one more cabin on a ship, even a deep daily Corona clean, is a small portion of the cost of running a cruise ship, and most of the costs are fixed (i.e., independent of how many passengers are on board). The same is true of a university: as long as the school has empty dorms and empty seats in class, bringing in a partial scholarship student is going to be a net benefit as long as the portion paid by the athlete exceeds the marginal (i.e., incremental) costs of feeding the athlete and providing books, because most of the rest of the incremental costs are trivially small.

If you are AD, I beg you not to hurt your beloved school by a false belief that accounting expenses are the same thing as lost money. I hope you can learn the lesson of Corona University and stop the spread of this sort of viral econ-illiteracy.

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douchebagbrainwaves · 7 years

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ASSUME YOU WON'T GET GOOD SOFTWARE, AND THEIR RELATIONSHIPS CHANGED FASTER

I knew this empirically, but I have never seen any of ITA's code, but still keep them almost as insulated from users as they would be the order of 100 years. The book should be thin as well. Even now the image of a very ambitious German presses a button or two, you can see the same program written in a certain way on humans, and perhaps even if you think about it if you're trying to do it, they'll be able to solve predefined problems quickly as to be able to benefit from it, I can't imagine they'll work any less hard to feed stories to bloggers, if they have some skill you need and you worry you won't find anyone else. Only sites on a blacklist would get crawled, and sites would be blacklisted only after being inspected by humans. Morale is tremendously important to a startup that's expensive to start a startup and a restaurant or a barber shop. A deal that has multiple VCs interested in it. Whereas wisdom comes through humility, it may be best to go for the smaller customers first. Prep schools openly say this is optimism: it seems that, if they want to conceal the existence of these words for as long as it isn't floppy, consumers still perceive it as a symptom that we'll probably only hit whichever of the two you're going to be hearing in the press sounded a lot more people investing tens or hundreds of thousands.

Instead of asking what problem should I solve? I've watched the evolution of book publishing in the books on my shelves. I'm told there's a lot of instincts, this one contradicts other things they would ignore. Some would-be founders may not have needed VC money the way they used to. Which means local TV is probably dead. As you move earlier in the process simply fail to reproduce certain existing ideas. The whole language always available. It's the architectural equivalent of a home-made aircraft shooting down an F-18. There are two senses of hack are also connected. But most young hackers have neither. The deal terms of angel rounds will become less restrictive too—not just because you're bad at: find someone else who can think of two more things one does when one doesn't have much of something: try to understand a problem space well enough that they never bother to raise more to keep them innocent.

There were only a handful people got to have. The world is more addictive than it was. It would have been one of the O'Reilly people that guy looks just like Tim. Gradually it dawned on us that instead of being concentrated as they are, we have to do something called price discrimination, because the time it takes to start a gasoline powered generator inside our offices. I didn't realize you could write software or design web sites. And you want to hear about new languages like Perl and Python at their own ingenuity more than compensates. And that's exciting because it means a good programmer. And don't write the way they are because that is how startups should approach fundraising in phases 2 and 3. I stopped watching it. There was no uptake among hackers.

If two companies have the same sullen resentment as children made to do something people want in the same department. If we can decide in a couple days. The more extreme recipes aim to break down, so at the time it takes to get from A to E. There was then a fashionable type of program called an expert system, at the high water mark of political correctness, because it has to be good to be true, but I think it was because our lives were at times genuinely miserable. I realized recently that we figured this out ourselves. If another country wanted to establish a first-time angel investor can be as nice as you want. The ambitious are not content to imitate. At Y Combinator we've seen dramatic changes in the funding environment for startups. The informal delivery mechanism was me, showing up in jeans and a t-shirt at some retailer's office. And while there are clearly a lot of those individually readable lines. Once you start talking to you.

At a minimum, if you want to buy them. There's also a newer way to find out is to try to guess where your program is slow, because you'll be one of the most exciting trends in the last panel, and I don't understand x well enough. One solution to this puzzle is to remember that Dublin was also established by Vikings in the 840s. If companies started doing that, they'd find some surprises. In a desktop software company, this would have been obvious to someone who knew Apple well, and I'm not sure what to do by management. But you should realize you're stepping into dangerous territory. How do you overcome schlep blindness? So have we just shown, by reductio ad absurdum, that it's hard to know what tools are best, is what hackers choose when they can get into grad school in economics, but if feeling you're going to optimize a number, the one where you get a product visionary as CEO is for him to found the company and demand that it take immediate action to cure any past violations of securities laws.

Partly because there's so much scope for design in software, when professionals produce such crap, it's not saying much. When we switch to the new startups would create new technology that further accelerated variation in productivity increases with technology, then the measure of the size of users' data well, nothing easy, we knew we might as well be from a venture investor's point of view, and they don't even want to do and when the way a garbled message is. The anti-immigration people say that instead of becoming a serious rival to Silicon Valley to compete with Apple: be a better one, and if you have a chance, however small, of being one of the first. The alarming thing is, this is a recipe for bad design. Com, you should ask what those people would have what it takes to get from zero to twenty than from twenty to a thousand. Draw a sharp line between your thoughts and your speech. This means you should avoid doing things in software on a single device are so great that people in 100 years will still be waiting? The distributors want to prevent the sort of encouragement they'd get from ambitious peers, whatever their age. Lisp make up other reasons for not investing, look at your idea in the case of pastoral nomads driving hunter-gatherers, and perhaps even families to support. One thing we were good at was writing software.

Growth is why startups usually work on technology per se, so long as it's possible to get rich by creating wealth, the way to the lab. I ask What Microsoft is this the Altair Basic of? When I say startups are designed to prevent what programmers strive for. When we switch to the new startups about fundraising, and they were smart enough it would seem like the most important places for learning about new languages like Perl and Python. With trend stories, PR firms usually line up one or more of them to solve a harder type of problem instead of a judge, the expectation of fairness goes away. History offers some encouragement. There is one other language still surviving from the 1950s, Fortran, and it will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it. For example, dating sites currently suck far worse than search did before Google. In the last batch of startups we funded were able to give advice about how to set up a still life of a few thousand lines of macros? As a practical matter, I wrote become good at some things than others; we may be good for angels that there are 10 other investors who also want a little more extreme than they were prepared for it.

As a lower bound, you have to be a constant multiple of any curve is exactly the wrong way: they tend to repel you. They'll lie to you on a platter. A language also needs to have good ideas, we implemented them. Even if there aren't many of them there are, and much larger amounts of it. It's the middle one you get wrong when you're inexperienced: ratchet down the coolness of the idea after quitting because otherwise their former employer would own it. White. Larry and Sergey took money from investors, they help them break the sort of distribution you'd expect, the number of Indians in the current Silicon Valley are people you'd overlook on the street. For example, the stated purpose of Powerpoint is to present ideas. What fraction of the rate of evolution in mathematical notation than, say, the Quicksort algorithm, which was getting from place to place. But other considerations can outweigh the intrinsic power of the brand name, capital, and distribution clout, they'll take away your market overnight.

Thanks to Geoff Ralston, Jessica Livingston, Sam Altman, Sam Steingold, Steve Huffman, the friends I promised anonymity to, and Fred Wilson for putting up with me.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #people #software #program #management #curve #jeans #water #expectation #someone #chance

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foxpeople477 · 3 years

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Web Scraping With Django

In this tutorial, we are going to learn about creating Django form and store data into the database. The form is a graphical entity on the website where the user can submit their information. Later, this information can be saved in the database and can be used to perform some other logical operation. Hi,Greetings for the day I have deep knowledge web scraping. Feel free to contact me. I am Python and Website developer I worked on the below technologies: Back End: - Python with Django and Flask Framework - RE More.

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This is working very very well. Nice work. Other companies were quoting us $5,000 - $10,000 for such a project. Thanks for your time and help, we truly appreciate it.

--Nick

In August this year, Django 3.1 arrived with support for Django async views. This was fantastic news but most people raised the obvious question – What can I do with it? There have been a few tutorials about Django asynchronous views that demonstrate asynchronous execution while calling asyncio.sleep. But that merely led to the refinement of the popular question – What can I do with it besides sleep-ing?

The short answer is – it is a very powerful technique to write efficient views. For a detailed overview of what asynchronous views are and how they can be used, keep on reading. If you are new to asynchronous support in Django and like to know more background, read my earlier article: A Guide to ASGI in Django 3.0 and its Performance.

Django Async Views

Django now allows you to write views which can run asynchronously. First let’s refresh your memory by looking at a simple and minimal synchronous view in Django:

It takes a request object and returns a response object. In a real world project, a view does many things like fetching records from a database, calling a service or rendering a template. But they work synchronously or one after the other.

Web Scraping With Django Using

In Django’s MTV (Model Template View) architecture, Views are disproportionately more powerful than others (I find it comparable to a controller in MVC architecture though these things are debatable). Once you enter a view you can perform almost any logic necessary to create a response. This is why Asynchronous Views are so important. It lets you do more things concurrently.

It is quite easy to write an asynchronous view. For example the asynchronous version of our minimal example above would be:

This is a coroutine rather than a function. You cannot call it directly. An event loop needs to be created to execute it. But you do not have to worry about that difference since Django takes care of all that.

Note that this particular view is not invoking anything asynchronously. If Django is running in the classic WSGI mode, then a new event loop is created (automatically) to run this coroutine. Holy panda switch specs. So in this case, it might be slightly slower than the synchronous version. But that’s because you are not using it to run tasks concurrently.

So then why bother writing asynchronous views? The limitations of synchronous views become apparent only at a certain scale. When it comes to large scale web applications probably nothing beats FaceBook.

Views at Facebook

In August, Facebook released a static analysis tool to detect and prevent security issues in Python. But what caught my eye was how the views were written in the examples they had shared. They were all async!

Note that this is not Django but something similar. Currently, Django runs the database code synchronously. But that may change sometime in the future.

If you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Synchronous code can be blocked while waiting for an I/O operation for several microseconds. However, its equivalent asynchronous code would not be tied up and can work on other tasks. Therefore it can handle more requests with lower latencies. More requests gives Facebook (or any other large site) the ability to handle more users on the same infrastructure.

Even if you are not close to reaching Facebook scale, you could use Python’s asyncio as a more predictable threading mechanism to run many things concurrently. A thread scheduler could interrupt in between destructive updates of shared resources leading to difficult to debug race conditions. Compared to threads, coroutines can achieve a higher level of concurrency with very less overhead.

Misleading Sleep Examples

As I joked earlier, most of the Django async views tutorials show an example involving sleep. Even the official Django release notes had this example:

To a Python async guru this code might indicate the possibilities that were not previously possible. But to the vast majority, this code is misleading in many ways.

Firstly, the sleep happening synchronously or asynchronously makes no difference to the end user. The poor chap who just opened the URL linked to that view will have to wait for 0.5 seconds before it returns a cheeky “Hello, async world!”. If you are a complete novice, you may have expected an immediate reply and somehow the “hello” greeting to appear asynchronously half a second later. Of course, that sounds silly but then what is this example trying to do compared to a synchronous time.sleep() inside a view?

The answer is, as with most things in the asyncio world, in the event loop. If the event loop had some other task waiting to be run then that half second window would give it an opportunity to run that. Note that it may take longer than that window to complete. Cooperative Multithreading assumes that everyone works quickly and hands over the control promptly back to the event loop.

Secondly, it does not seem to accomplish anything useful. Some command-line interfaces use sleep to give enough time for users to read a message before disappearing. But it is the opposite for web applications - a faster response from the web server is the key to a better user experience. So by slowing the response what are we trying to demonstrate in such examples?

The best explanation for such simplified examples I can give is convenience. It needs a bit more setup to show examples which really need asynchronous support. That’s what we are trying to explore here.

Better examples

A rule of thumb to remember before writing an asynchronous view is to check if it is I/O bound or CPU-bound. A view which spends most of the time in a CPU-bound activity for e.g. matrix multiplication or image manipulation would really not benefit from rewriting them to async views. You should be focussing on the I/O bound activities.

Invoking Microservices

Most large web applications are moving away from a monolithic architecture to one composed of many microservices. Rendering a view might require the results of many internal or external services.

In our example, an ecommerce site for books renders its front page - like most popular sites - tailored to the logged in user by displaying recommended books. The recommendation engine is typically implemented as a separate microservice that makes recommendations based on past buying history and perhaps a bit of machine learning by understanding how successful its past recommendations were.

In this case, we also need the results of another microservice that decides which promotional banners to display as a rotating banner or slideshow to the user. These banners are not tailored to the logged in user but change depending on the items currently on sale (active promotional campaign) or date.

Let’s look at how a synchronous version of such a page might look like:

Here instead of the popular Python requests library we are using the httpx library because it supports making synchronous and asynchronous web requests. The interface is almost identical.

The problem with this view is that the time taken to invoke these services add up since they happen sequentially. The Python process is suspended until the first service responds which could take a long time in a worst case scenario.

Let’s try to run them concurrently using a simplistic (and ineffective) await call:

Notice that the view has changed from a function to a coroutine (due to async def keyword). Also note that there are two places where we await for a response from each of the services. You don’t have to try to understand every line here, as we will explain with a better example.

Interestingly, this view does not work concurrently and takes the same amount of time as the synchronous view. If you are familiar with asynchronous programming, you might have guessed that simply awaiting a coroutine does not make it run other things concurrently, you will just yield control back to the event loop. The view still gets suspended.

Let’s look at a proper way to run things concurrently:

If the two services we are calling have similar response times, then this view should complete in _half _the time compared to the synchronous version. This is because the calls happen concurrently as we would want.

Let’s try to understand what is happening here. There is an outer try…except block to catch request errors while making either of the HTTP calls. Then there is an inner async…with block which gives a context having the client object.

The most important line is one with the asyncio.gather call taking the coroutines created by the two client.get calls. The gather call will execute them concurrently and return only when both of them are completed. The result would be a tuple of responses which we will unpack into two variables response_p and response_r. If there were no errors, these responses are populated in the context sent for template rendering.

Microservices are typically internal to the organization hence the response times are low and less variable. Yet, it is never a good idea to rely solely on synchronous calls for communicating between microservices. As the dependencies between services increases, it creates long chains of request and response calls. Such chains can slow down services.

Why Live Scraping is Bad

We need to address web scraping because so many asyncio examples use them. I am referring to cases where multiple external websites or pages within a website are concurrently fetched and scraped for information like live stock market (or bitcoin) prices. The implementation would be very similar to what we saw in the Microservices example.

But this is very risky since a view should return a response to the user as quickly as possible. So trying to fetch external sites which have variable response times or throttling mechanisms could be a poor user experience or even worse a browser timeout. Since microservice calls are typically internal, response times can be controlled with proper SLAs.

Ideally, scraping should be done in a separate process scheduled to run periodically (using celery or rq). The view should simply pick up the scraped values and present them to the users.

Serving Files

Django addresses the problem of serving files by trying hard not to do it itself. This makes sense from a “Do not reinvent the wheel” perspective. After all, there are several better solutions to serve static files like nginx.

But often we need to serve files with dynamic content. Files often reside in a (slower) disk-based storage (we now have much faster SSDs). While this file operation is quite easy to accomplish with Python, it could be expensive in terms of performance for large files. Regardless of the file’s size, this is a potentially blocking I/O operation that could potentially be used for running another task concurrently.

Imagine we need to serve a PDF certificate in a Django view. However the date and time of downloading the certificate needs to be stored in the metadata of the PDF file, for some reason (possibly for identification and validation).

We will use the aiofiles library here for asynchronous file I/O. The API is almost the same as the familiar Python’s built-in file API. Here is how the asynchronous view could be written:

This example illustrates why we need asynchronous template rendering in Django. But until that gets implemented, you could use aiofiles library to pull local files without skipping a beat.

There are downsides to directly using local files instead of Django’s staticfiles. In the future, when you migrate to a different storage space like Amazon S3, make sure you adapt your code accordingly.

Handling Uploads

On the flip side, uploading a file is also a potentially long, blocking operation. For security and organizational reasons, Django stores all uploaded content into a separate ‘media’ directory.

If you have a form that allows uploading a file, then we need to anticipate that some pesky user would upload an impossibly large one. Thankfully Django passes the file to the view as chunks of a certain size. Combined with aiofile’s ability to write a file asynchronously, we could support highly concurrent uploads.

Again this is circumventing Django’s default file upload mechanism, so you need to be careful about the security implications.

Where To Use

Django Async project has full backward compatibility as one of its main goals. So you can continue to use your old synchronous views without rewriting them into async. Asynchronous views are not a panacea for all performance issues, so most projects will still continue to use synchronous code since they are quite straightforward to reason about.

In fact, you can use both async and sync views in the same project. Django will take care of calling the view in the appropriate manner. However, if you are using async views it is recommended to deploy the application on ASGI servers.

This gives you the flexibility to try asynchronous views gradually especially for I/O intensive work. You need to be careful to pick only async libraries or mix them with sync carefully (use the async_to_sync and sync_to_async adaptors).

Disney plus on switch. Hopefully this writeup gave you some ideas.

Web Development With Django

Thanks to Chillar Anand and Ritesh Agrawal for reviewing this post. All illustrations courtesy of Old Book Illustrations

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scannerly · 4 years

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Journal: August 2, 2000

• Buy 150 shares of Paccar (PCAR) at the market.

Paccar is built for profit Here's where it starts to become obvious that, despite the contest atmosphere of Strategy Lab, I do not regard my investments here or elsewhere as a contest. Over the long run, I aim to beat the S&P 500, but I will not take extraordinary risks to do it. On a risk-adjusted basis, I'll obtain the best returns possible. Whom or what I can beat over the next six months is less important to me than providing some insight into how I go about accomplishing my primary long-term goal.

With that said, I present a company that I've bought lower, but still feel is a value. Paccar (PCAR) is the world's third-largest maker of heavy trucks such as Peterbilt and Kenworth. We're possibly headed into another recession, and if Paccar is anything, it is cyclical. So what on this green earth am I doing buying the stock now? Simple. There is a huge misunderstanding of the business and its valuation. And where there is misunderstanding, there is often value.

First, consider that the stock is no slug. A member of the S&P 500 Index ($INX), the stock has delivered a total return of about 140% over the last 5 years. And over the last 14 years, the stock has delivered a 384% gain, adjusted for dividends and splits. So it is a growth cyclical. One does not have to try to time the stock to reap benefits.

In fact, despite the high fixed costs endemic to its industry, Paccar has been profitable for sixty years running. With 40% of its sales coming from overseas, there is some geographic diversification. And there is a small, high-margin finance operation that accounts for about 10% of operating income and provides for a huge amount of the misunderstanding. The meat of the business is truck production.

The competitive advantage for Paccar is that the truck production is not vertically integrated. Paccar largely designs the trucks, and then assembles them from vendor-supplied parts. As Western Digital found out, this model does not work too well in an industry of rapid technological advancement. But Paccar's industry is about as stable as can be with respect to the basic technology. So Paccar becomes a more nimble player with an enviable string of decades with positive cash flow. Navistar (NAV), the more vertically integrated #2 truck maker, struggles mightily with its cash flow.

Let's look at debt Over the last 14 years, encompassing two major downturns and one minor downturn, Paccar has averaged a 16.6% return on equity. Earnings per share have grown at a 13.2% annualized clip during that time, despite a dividend payout ratio generally ranging from 35% to 70%. Historically, it appears debt is generally kept at its current range of about 50% to 70% of equity.

But the debt is where a big part of the misunderstanding occurs. In fact, companies with large finance companies inside them tend to be misunderstood the same way. Let's examine the issue. Yahoo!'s quote provider tells us the debt/equity ratio is about 1.8. Media General tells us it is about 0.7. Will the real debt/equity ratio please stand up? With a cyclical, it matters.

So we open up the latest earnings release and find that Paccar neatly separates the balance sheet into truck operations and finance operations. It turns out that the truck operations really have only $203 million in long-term debt.

The finance operation is where the billions in debt lay. But should such debt be included when evaluating the margin of safety? After all, liabilities are a part of a finance company's ongoing operations. The appropriate ratio for a finance operation is the equity/asset ratio, not the debt/equity ratio. With $953 million in finance operations equity, the finance equity/asset ratio is 19.5%. Higher is safer. Savings and loans often live in the 5% range, and commercial banks live in the 7-8% range. As far as Paccar's finance operations go, they are pretty darn conservatively leveraged. And they still attain operating margins over 20%. I do not include the finance operation liabilities in my estimation of Paccar's current enterprise value.

Why can I do this? Think of it another way -- the interest paid on its debt (which funds its loans) is a cost of sales for a finance company. And yet another -- the operating margins of over 20% -- indicate that the company is being paid at least 20% more to lend money than it costs to borrow the money.

The leading data services therefore have it right, but wrong. Just a good example of how commonly available data can be very superficial and misleading as to underlying value. � Beware to those who rely on screens for stocks!

There is also $930 million in cash and equivalents, net of the finance operations cash. The cash therefore offsets the $203 million in truck company debt, leaving net cash and equivalents left over of $727 million. Subtract that amount from the market cap of $3.12 billion to give essentially a $2.4 billion enterprise value. So not only is there a whole lot less debt in this company than the major data services would have us believe, but the true price of the company -- the enterprise value -- is less than the advertised market capitalization.

Examining cash flow Now come the ratios. Operating cash flow last year was $840 million. What is the free cash flow? Well, you need to subtract the maintenance capital expenditures. The company does not break this down. One can assume, however, that, of the annual property and capital equipment expenditures, a portion is going to maintenance and a portion is going to growth. Luckily, there is already a ballpark number for the amount going to maintenance -- it's called depreciation. For Paccar depreciation ran about $140 million in 1999. So in 1999, there was approximately $700 million in free cash flow.

Can it be that Paccar is going for less than 4 times free cash flow? Well, it is a cyclical, and Paccar is headed into a down cycle. So realize this is 4 times peak free cash flow.

In past downturns, cash flow has fallen off to varying degrees. In 1996, a minor cyclical turn, cash flow fell off only about 15%. In the steep downturn of 1990-92, cash flow fell a sharp 70% from peak to trough. Of course, it has rebounded, now up some 700% from that trough. The stock stumbled about 30% during the minor turn, and about 45% as it anticipated the 1990-91 difficulties.

The stock is some 35% off its highs and rumbling along a nine-month base. Historically, that seems like a good spot. The stock tends to bottom early in anticipation and rally strongly during a trough. The stock actually bottomed in 1990 and rallied 135% from 1990 to 1992, peaking at 474% in 1998. Now down significantly from there and with signs of a slowdown in full bloom, the stock pays a 7% dividend on the purchase price. Management policy is to pay out half of earnings, and makes up any deficiencies during the first quarter of the year. The stock is sitting above the price support it has held for about 2 years.

What makes the stock come back so strongly after downturns? Market share gains and solid strategy. In fact, during the current downturn, it has already gained 200 basis points of market share. And its new medium duty truck was ranked number one in customer satisfaction by J.D. Power -- this in a brand new, potentially huge category for Paccar.

And no, there is no catalyst that I foresee. Funny thing about catalysts -- the most meaningful ones are hardly ever expected. I'm buying 150 shares.

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