#AI Hugging Filter Effect

[jypsyvloggin]

How to do the Hugging Ai trend?

CapCut AI Hugging Templates: The Viral Editing Trend CapCut, a popular video editing application, offers a variety of AI-powered templates recently CapCut’s AI Hugging Templates have taken social media by storm, allowing users to create heartwarming videos where two people appear to embrace—even if they weren’t together in the original photos. This trend is particularly popular on TikTok and…

[jujubeanie]

Fvck the new character.ai filterrr :/

[aiandblockchainchronicles]

Building a Private LLM: A Comprehensive Guide

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to evolve, Large Language Models (LLMs) have become powerful tools for various applications, including customer service automation, content generation, and decision support systems. However, using publicly available LLMs often raises concerns about data security, compliance, and customization. To address these challenges, businesses are increasingly exploring the option of building their own private LLMs. In this guide, we will discuss the step-by-step process of developing a private LLM that aligns with your organizational needs while ensuring privacy, security, and efficiency.

1. Why Build a Private LLM?

Enhanced Data Privacy

Publicly available LLMs process data on external servers, which can raise security risks. A private LLM development ensures that all data remains within your organization’s infrastructure, minimizing the risk of data breaches.

Regulatory Compliance

Industries such as healthcare, finance, and legal services must comply with regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC 2. A private LLM allows organizations to maintain strict compliance by controlling data access and processing.

Domain-Specific Customization

Most general-purpose LLMs are trained on vast datasets that may not include specialized knowledge relevant to your industry. Training your own LLM on domain-specific data ensures more accurate and relevant responses.

Cost Control

Relying on third-party LLM APIs can be costly, especially for organizations that require frequent queries and data processing. Building a private LLM eliminates ongoing API costs and allows for better budget management in the long run.

2. Setting Up the Infrastructure

Compute Requirements

Training and running an LLM requires significant computing power. Organizations should invest in:

High-performance GPUs or TPUs (e.g., NVIDIA A100, H100, or Google TPU v4)

Scalable cloud-based AI infrastructure (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure)

On-premises servers for organizations prioritizing security over scalability

Storage and Data Pipelines

A large-scale LLM requires efficient data storage and management. Distributed storage solutions like Hadoop, Ceph, or cloud-based object storage (e.g., Amazon S3) can handle the vast amounts of training data needed.

Software and Frameworks

Selecting the right AI frameworks is crucial for building an effective LLM. Common frameworks include:

TensorFlow and PyTorch for deep learning model development

Hugging Face Transformers for pre-trained model fine-tuning

JAX for high-performance computing optimizations

3. Data Collection and Preprocessing

Sourcing Data

A high-quality dataset is essential for training an effective LLM. Organizations can source data from:

Internal proprietary documents, reports, and customer interactions

Open-source datasets like Wikipedia, Common Crawl, and arXiv

Synthetic data generation when real-world data is limited

Cleaning and Structuring

Raw data often contains noise, inconsistencies, or missing values. Preprocessing steps include:

Removing duplicates and irrelevant text

Standardizing formats (e.g., lowercasing, tokenization)

Filtering biased or low-quality content

Annotation and Labeling

For supervised learning, annotation tools like Prodigy, Label Studio, or Snorkel can help label datasets with relevant tags and classifications.

4. Model Selection and Training

Pretraining vs. Fine-Tuning

Pretraining from scratch: This requires extensive compute resources and massive datasets but allows for full customization.

Fine-tuning existing models: Using pre-trained models like LLaMA, Falcon, or Mistral significantly reduces training costs and time.

Training Strategy

To optimize training efficiency:

Use distributed training across multiple GPUs or TPUs

Implement mixed precision training to reduce memory consumption

Employ gradient checkpointing to manage large-scale model training

Hyperparameter Tuning

Fine-tuning hyperparameters can significantly impact model performance. Key parameters to optimize include:

Learning rate and batch size

Dropout rate to prevent overfitting

Activation functions for improving accuracy

5. Security and Privacy Measures

Federated Learning

Federated learning allows decentralized training by keeping data on local devices while only sharing model updates. This approach enhances privacy without compromising performance.

Differential Privacy

Adding noise to data during training prevents the model from memorizing and exposing sensitive information, making it more secure against attacks.

Encryption & Access Controls

Implement end-to-end encryption for data storage and model communication.

Set up role-based access controls (RBAC) to ensure that only authorized users can access the model.

6. Evaluation and Testing

Benchmarking Performance

To ensure the model meets performance expectations, evaluate it using:

Perplexity: Measures how well the model predicts text sequences

BLEU Score: Evaluates the model’s translation accuracy

ROUGE Score: Assesses text summarization capabilities

Bias & Fairness Testing

AI models can unintentionally develop biases based on their training data. Testing for fairness ensures that the model does not reinforce harmful stereotypes.

Adversarial Testing

Attackers may try to manipulate the LLM’s outputs through adversarial prompts. Running stress tests helps detect vulnerabilities and improve robustness.

7. Deployment Strategies

On-Premises vs. Cloud Deployment

On-premises: Provides full control over security and compliance but requires significant infrastructure investments.

Cloud-based: Offers scalability and lower upfront costs but may pose security risks if not properly managed.

API Integration

Deploy the LLM as an API service to enable seamless integration with existing business applications. REST and gRPC APIs are common choices for connecting AI models with enterprise software.

Latency Optimization

To improve response times, organizations can:

Use model quantization and distillation to reduce model size

Implement caching mechanisms for frequently accessed queries

8. Continuous Monitoring and Updates

Drift Detection

Model performance may degrade over time as language and business requirements evolve. Monitoring for data drift ensures timely updates and retraining.

Retraining and Fine-Tuning

Regularly updating the LLM with fresh data helps maintain accuracy and relevance. Techniques like reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) can further refine model responses.

User Feedback Loops

Implementing a feedback system allows users to report incorrect or biased outputs, enabling continuous improvement through iterative learning.

Conclusion

Building a private LLM empowers organizations with control over data privacy, customization, and compliance while reducing long-term reliance on external AI providers. Although the process requires significant investment in infrastructure, data collection, and model training, the benefits of enhanced security and domain-specific optimizations make it a worthwhile endeavor.

By following this guide, businesses can develop a robust private LLM tailored to their unique needs, ensuring scalability, efficiency, and compliance with industry regulations. As AI technology continues to advance, organizations that invest in private LLMs will be well-positioned to harness the full potential of artificial intelligence securely and effectively.

[limetimo]

This is one of my reoccuring themes dreams

I'm at home, my dogs find an animal that looks a lot like a baby goat but of not oh boy it's NOTa goat at all Holly duck. For some reason my old high school classmate is obsessed with this abomination, she's crazy okay, threatening me bodily harm if i don't let her have her 'baby', and im pretty sure she did hurt me in some of these dreams before.

this time it was a bit different; my sister was visiting. My sister is often my dreams now so that wasn't strange. But that wasn't the beginning of the dream; i was home alone, very bored, looking for a thing to do, a movie to watch. In this dream we had some alexa-type ai installed, though i needed a little remote control to authorise its actions. The remote was in the kitchen, next to my brothers headphones/airpods. I turned on the tv and asked not-Alexa to like, pick a movie for me from our downloaded collection. As the tv screen was having difficulties I looked to the ceiling. There was a rope? Stretched from side of the room to the other hanging there s but like clothing line or birthday banners. My dogs were going crazy at it, and i noticed there was something crawling inside the rope. Eventually the rope snapped and the thing appeared to be some sort of a squirrel? Max caught it in his mouth by the neck; it appeared to be something wombat-like with big, almost pregnant-like belly. it's neck wasn't snapped so i was like ey boy let's bring it outside and let it go. despite previously being the dead the night now it was a very pleasant sunny day. My sister was there now, just coming into the Garden. The Wombet thing scurried to the water pond, where it proceeded to get stuck in some sort of white sticky filter; also it was a májka the size of my whole hand. My sis and i were watching it crawl across the small pond, then the baby goat abomination (which may have been the wombat previously too?) ate it with its too-human shaped teeth. sis was like 'bro what the duck' and i was like 'yeah that's. That's something that happens sometimes oh duck the crazy girl is already here. Stay away from her okay??' Umm she also made a joking comment about the No goat looking a lot like a spider. i went down the hill following the goat abomination to meet the crazy classmate who was um i think she stained me in the neck with a syringe the size of an elbow? Whatever the effects were they didn't last long because i came to and she was hugging the fucked-up not goat crying and it a god life or whatever. My real animal goats were milking around with caution. Sis came to see what was going on i was like 'stay back' and she was like 'did [crazy classmate] ever hurt you before?' And i was like. Um. No. Couse i didnt want sis to worry too much. Crazy classmate got on her knees and folded herself the ducked up goat in emotional despair and then o woke up. It's 11PM i have to go back to sleep but in not going to like it

what does this even mean,,

i must have had a dream about this sucked up goat at least once maybe twice for me to remember it

We were friends and parted on good terms with the friend, the last time i heard she was doing ok, why is she like this when i dream of her

I had a cake with mascarpone, cheeses are said to cause more drama can that be it??

[dulcidyne]

Experiments in Diplomacy: Compiling [8/?]

There’s nothing in the Interspecies Diplomacy subsection of the Initiative handbook that covers sharing a tech lab with an angara who can kill her in her sleep. She knows, she’s read every page. Twice. (A collection of in-between vignettes from the Tempest tech lab) 

//Jaal x Ryder // Humor. Romance. SFW // Previous chapters: [1][2][3][4][5][6][7] or read on Ao3

Somewhere along the way to age seven, in Citadel docking bay 223, Se-ah Ryder decides crying, hugs, tantrums, and other public displays of emotion are things she has outgrown. Perfunctory, precise, she shuts them away as if embarrassing emotional habits can be sealed into donation boxes for young needy children in the Lower Wards like her half-melted asari dolls.

Donated or lost, the box she puts them in stays shut. She doesn’t cry when they pay their respects to her grandmother’s urn at the columbarium. Or, much later, in another docking bay, when Scott waves goodbye as he ships off for Arcturus. She doesn’t cry the first time Iraenya plays down their relationship to her colleagues, embarrassed and ashamed.  And when her mother dies, she takes a page out of her father’s book and finds a hospital supply closet and stifles her tears into her shirt collar.

It stays shut, that is, until now. Until twenty-eight uninterrupted minutes of sobbing into Jaal’s chest, followed by forty-one additional minutes of sporadic weeping interspersed with flailing grasps at composure. So, obviously, there is only one logical conclusion to make.

“Just run them again,” Se-ah hisses.

“Once again, Ryder, my scans do not detect any pathologic neurological patterns outside of baseline variation.”

She woke up to the dim ambient glow of the powered-down machine displays running through their background system scans, half-reclining in Jaal’s arms, in his cot, having cried herself to sleep in his embrace  like an infant--that alone is an abnormality. She doesn’t understand why SAM is having difficulty with the concept.

“Outside of baseline,” she pauses, the gnarled tangle that is her hair fluttering as Jaal’s snores gust over her head. It tickles her temples but she doesn’t want to dislodge the warm arm banding around her shoulders to brush it back. “Wait, SAM, does that mean you normally detect pathologic patterns?” “It exceeds my functional parameters to parse this data into a clinical diagnosis. It would be unethical to make an attempt. Dr. T’Perro would undoubtedly provide better insight.”

Maggie’s lights pulse unhurried staccato patterns from the corner. Se-ah stiffens in Jaal’s loose embrace, indignant. “ Unethical. You’re an AI integrated into my entire body. Little late to be worried about ethics isn’t it?”

“A relevant point. I additionally lack subjective expertise. My data collection is limited to two genetically similar individuals. It is therefore relatively impossible for me to extrapolate what is normal and abnormal outside of overt structural dysfunction.”

“Further,” SAM says, “I am not an inert observer. It cannot definitively quantify what impact my integration and ongoing observation and interaction has had on your baseline neurological state.”

Disquieting. Se-ah stills and attempts to parse this new revelation while Jaal’s chest rumbles against her ear like the purr of a massive but very contented kitten. It’s nice. She wishes she were still half asleep and allowed to enjoy it and not awake and mortified over her predicament. Mortified and now, thanks to SAM, horrified.

“So not only can you not tell me if my brain is broken, you’re also saying that just by being in my head, you’re changing how it works and doing so in a way that you lack the ability to detect? Like some kind of quantum observer effect?”

SAM doles out a calculated pause for her benefit. All his pauses are for her benefit as he processes information in nanoseconds, but this one feels especially so. A pity pause. Bad news pause.

“Correct.”

“Great,” she mutters, “I’m Schroedinger’s basketcase.”

“My scans do detect significant decreases to harmful neurological metabolites and reduced cortisol levels...likely the product of sufficient rest.”

So that’s what it is. No creaking limbs, phantom aches or raw fatigue scraping the inside of her eyelids raw. A loose, shivery sensation clings like mist in her chest. It feels like a lungful of the air on Mr. Orleal, saturated in starlight and the ozone tingle of the eezo deposits under the lake.

Melatonin has nothing on Jaal. Lexi would be thrilled. Happiness flutters against her ribs. She hides her smile against the vast sloping ridge of Jaal’s alien chest even though there’s no one else there to see how foolish it looks. A familiar scent tickles her nose and she sniffles back a sneeze. He smells warm and herbal, like grapefruit orchards and Earth sunsets--carnelian, blush,and gold-- if Earth sunsets prickled in her sinuses like wasabi.

As far as smiles go, this one caught on the precipice of a sneeze, feels the stupidest.

“Pathfinder, if you have a moment, I would like to discuss some of the data I obtained earlier…”

The tentative flutter of joy in her chest curls inwards on itself, recoiling. She screws up her face, tipping her head back over Jaal’s arm, his r ofjinn bunching up against the tiny hairs at the nape of her neck.

“SAM, I don’t want to waste all this beautiful mental clarity on parsing out my emotional breakdown.”

It’s not fair and she regrets saying it. He provides more than his share of explanations for her and this is supposed to be a reciprocal relationship after all.

“That classification is interesting, Pathfinder. Noradrenaline phasic signalling was decreased, indicating the absence of a stress response. You rate the subjective experience, however, as a negative one?”

Half the words don’t even sound familiar. Despite being the daughter of a neuroscientist, she picked up precious little on the subject. Latching on to what she understands, she attempts an answer.

“No. Not negative. The opposite, I guess?”

“I see.”

She absurdly pictures SAM fitting the L of his imaginary thumb and pointer finger to his imaginary chin in a gesture of academic interest. Her father used to do that, unwittingly providing Scott with ample ammo for his ‘Alec Ryder, mad scientist’ impressions.

“This supports my observations of the intense activity within the mesolimbic circuit--”

Se-ah winces. “You know, it’s pretty weird to hear all the gory details.”

“I do not comprehend the discomfort.” SAM states, an echo of her father’s scientific fascination faint in the synthetic voice modulation. Her own imagination, she’s sure. “Your emotions are best described as the limited interpretation of this signalling process.”

For some indefinable reason, she bristles.

“Maybe technically, but...it was this amazing, overwhelming experience and it didn’t feel limited . It felt...immense. Bigger than anything. Like I couldn’t possibly keep it in without bursting and then I did burst and apparently that looks like a lot of crying.”

Ugly crying. There was a not-small-amount of snot involved.

“It’s more than mesolimbic circuits,” she persists, words coming faster and her voice tightening,  “Sometimes things are more than their physical, observable state. When I’m on a summit, what I experience isn’t just snow and stars and rocks...it's…well I wouldn’t bother with it if that was all I got out of it. Look, I don’t think I could ever explain it in a way you’d be able to understand.”

The channel goes silent, longer than the normal exaggerated pauses SAM inserts into his responses. The silence is deafening on the heels of her tirade. As if he’s...affronted.

“Thank you Ryder.” SAM says at last. Clipped and professional. Is it her imagination or is it too professional? If there were such a thing? “I will attempt an analysis with this feedback in mind.”

Se-ah nods, unnecessarily given that it is SAM, her heart sinking. Who knows what havoc a peeved AI could wreck in her brain, apparently without either of them any the wiser? And if she can’t explain it to SAM she doesn’t know how she’s supposed to explain what happened to Jaal. Not that she didn’t try before, during all the sobbing, but it was impossible to get anything out that wasn’t ‘I’m fine, I just...’ before dissolving into tears again. He didn’t press her for more.

But maybe now that she isn’t an emotional wreck, he might. Whether she has answers is less certain.

‘Sorry, SAM says you overloaded my mesolimbic circuit and that it’s all very scientific and reasonable and I’m not crazy. Or I might be. Have you heard the human folk tale about the cat?”

Awful. The shivering sensation in her chest unfurls again and spreads out into her fingers. She furrows them into the crease of Jaal’s side and the cot, letting his warmth soothe the trembling overtaking her frame. His arm wraps tighter reflexively. This is the sort of moment she wants to soak in, slow, like sunlight filtering through leaves stippling ancient Morse-code patterns over her face. Eyes closed, she inhales and vague memories sift warm impressions on the backs of her eyelids.

Hands, scarred and calloused and massive sweeping soft, reassuring circles against her back. His chin on the top of her head, her face tucked into the graceful sweep of his neck where a crook would be on hers. A low thrum: his voice, unintelligable, but soothing. A musical hum buzzes through the air.

Se-ah sighs and blinks her eyes open to glance up. He’s still deep asleep, snoring away. A hazy, contented smile gathers at the corners of his mouth and makes him look, for all the universe, like someone having a pleasant dream.

Despite spending the vast majority of her waking moments on the ship in his makeshift bedroom, she’s never seen him this way. The quiet of the ship is unsettling, he claims. Unlike his naps on the NOMAD, the only sleep she sees him take on the ship is fitful, almost violent--covers twisting, his hands clutching, face grimacing, the names of the lost wrenching out of him as he jolts awake. But even the sleep he snatches on the NOMAD doesn’t look this peaceful. It takes him quick and fast, like something joyless and inevitable. She grimaces. Like death.  

Studying his lidded eyes, she shifts on the cot to lean her weight more on his chest and tip her head back, peering up at the sweeping planes of his cheekbones, the point of his chin, and the fine ridge of his brow. He’s beautiful. All angara are, to her eye-- all grace and noble carved profiles like ancient Athame sculptures given color, life, and a Romanesque bone structure. But Jaal’s beauty is sharper, more defined than anything out of asari or human antiquity. War and grief etch his face in a landscape of visible and invisible scars, throwing the softness that remains, obstinate and miraculous, in high relief. The softness is all she sees now.  It is the face of a man who dreams, hopes, composes poems and perfumes, and is always seeking, searching, finding bits of wonder. If it weren’t for the kett, this might always be his face and Andromeda would be a place where it would fit. The dreamer. The tinkerer. The explorer.

But the kett stole that place away from him. War is spare. Merciless. There is little room for anything else but soldiers. Se-ah bites the inside of her lip, hard. Jaal is the first to insist he isn’t much of a soldier.

She doesn’t realize the snoring stops until he, without bothering to open his eyes, asks, “Yes, Ryder?”

Chagrined and surprised over how close she’s gotten, she immediately jolts away. “You’ve been awake? How long?” The slant of his smile changes but his eyes stay closed, “Long enough. Were you under the impression that you were being discreet?”

Fair point.

“So why didn’t you say something?” “I was trying to sleep. Speaking seemed counterproductive.”

“Uh huh. To your eavesdropping, maybe.”

Jaal doesn’t look at her, on account of the fact that he’d yet to bother opening his eyes, but the resigned set of his shoulders conveys a beleaguered expression that comes with an air of ‘No, I don’t think I’ll even bother ’. It’s one he wears around Liam with regularity. “Please do not attempt to explain that one. If I cannot sleep I’d much rather occupy my mind elsewhere.”

He makes a point of settling further into the cot, the large divot his body forms in the fabric deepening. Maybe he’s trying to free up the arm underneath her she realizes, belatedly. Renewed mortification crowds up her neck and she coughs to clear her throat. “Oh, then I should...leave you to that then,” she says, cheeks burning as she draws back against the gravitational pull of his weight on the cot, narrowly avoiding toppling on top of him.

“Stay.” At last Jaal blinks open his eyelids, a slow reveal of vivid blue. He looks at her, uncharacteristically uncertain, before saying, simply, “If...you’d like. You could join me.”

She hesitates. “Join you--elsewhere?”

“No, just here.”

Somehow he feels...closer. Not physically. It’s as if the gap in the universe between them has vanished overnight. She’s no longer on the precipice, her thoughts and feelings a faint, distorted comm. She’s there , a few bare centimeters in front of him and he’s looking at her as if he can see every detail of her with absolute clarity. It’s dreamer’s look with a tinkerer’s focus and his eyes are luminous, twin helium nebulae lit from within with something like wonder. She mistook it for morbid fascination once. This time she knows better. He smiles as if he might laugh. Fond. Unbearably so. Her chest hurts to look at it.

“No idioms, nothing else. Just this. Right now.” The words linger, rippling against her skin in gentle, rumbling waves. Jaal crooks his pinned arm and brushes back the fluttering snarl of her hair.

A quiet bubble settles around the tiny cot, enclosing them within the warm, sunset smell of him. It feels safe. Like home. She doesn’t know the last time she felt those things. Not since-- It should be strange to find them here, an entire galaxy away, with an alien who openly spoke about killing her after they’d just met.

Jaal’s huff of a laugh skips across the quiet like a smooth stone on a lake surface. Something about it tells her he’s picked up on the precise turn of her thoughts--too perceptive by half. “You know, you are remarkably expressive. Almost angaran.”

She tucks her face into the slope of his neck and pulls a scowl, even though it isn’t an insult. The memory of her tragic poker loss to Gil is still all too fresh and she feels a little too raw, a little too exposed with nowhere to hide her vulnerabilities. Instead of answering, she buries a noncommittal sound into his bare skin.

He laughs again, rueful and soft. “It was a clumsy effort, but it was intended as a compliment. We are a vocal people. More than words and expressions. In addition to combative and deliberate communication uses, our bioelectrics have subtle subconscious patterns and pulses. I believe your hanar are similar, in the visible electromagnetic spectrum. It is difficult to suppress. Few have scrupulous reasons to try.”

His fused fingers twine into her hair. It seems a point of endless fascination for him. Even in the Milky Way, hair is something of a novelty.

“The emotions of those around us pervade all our senses. It saturates our lives. My first days on this ship were so...disorienting. I felt the absence keenly, like a limb lost in battle.”

Her scowl vanishes and she looks up to meet his eyes again. Of course, she’d suspected his trouble adjusting, but never knew the full extent. He kept so much hidden then. “It must have made it that much more difficult, deciding if you could trust us.”

Jaal laughs. It sounds pained. “Very. I learned to look harder, with time. There is a beauty in subtlety. Underappreciated among my people, but I’ve grown quite fond of it. Humans were easier. And then, there was you.”

“About as subtle as a flaming ship crashing on your planet?”

Genuine mirth threads into his laughter, his eyes tracing over her upturned face. “Yes. An apt comparison. Vivid, exciting… deeply alarming to some.”

She brightens and his smile deepens. The hand at her temple curls against her skin to brush a soft line over her cheek with the backs of his knuckles.

“It made trusting you more easy than wise, considering the risk.”

“I’m sure Evfra disapproved,” she says.

“Of course. Evfra is a cautious strategist. He despaired of me.”

Jaal leans his cheek against her head, looking off towards the dim ambient glow of the machines running through their downtime routines.

“My caution was always a feeble force and your face...says such beautiful things. I didn’t understand why you struggled  so desperately to hide them away.” He adds, blunt as ever, “Not... well, of course . But with an extraordinary amount of effort. I imagine it was exhausting. Inexpressibly painful. My heart ached just to see it.”

The corners of her eyes begin to prickle. Machine lights catch on the dust motes, adrift on the flickering electrostatic currents weaving around and between them, setting each pinpoint aglow like rippling eddies of distant stars.

“I thought the same about you, you know. Before we rescued the Moshae.”

Caution shackling his expressions and the strategic withdrawals into clipped one-word answers calculated to give as little away as possible. She’s more glad than she can say to have earned his trust and the chance to see his genuine self without the fetters of fear and uncertainty. He said getting to know her would be a gift and that is how knowing him better feels--like the best gift she didn’t even know to ask for.

He nods. “Yes. I wept for joy that she was safe and for the wrenching horror of what we learned that day but also I wept for my freedom from my own fears. Escaping them was...liberating despite my grief. Cathartic. I think perhaps you felt something of that same freedom. Earlier, when you cried.”

Catharsis. Freedom-- but from what? She wasn’t on a diplomatic mission with alien intruders. She was just-- her . A touch-starved awkward hugger with a trigger-happy mesolimbic circuit. But, that feels insufficient as far as explanations go. Instead, she remembers Scott crying, wailing, hands fisting over his eyes. It’s gone. I have to find it. People are looking. Mom ignores them and kneels despite the crowd, attempting to soothe him. Alec Ryder’s stonefaced expression fractures into a grimace. Pained. He turns away. His hand presses down on her own small shoulder and squeezes. It feels like pride. She forces her chin to stop quivering. She won’t cry. Nothing will ever be okay and everything is wrong but she is Alec Ryder’s daughter and she is old enough to do that much.

A tear slips into her hairline and Jaal’s thumb rubs it away. Breath held, she reaches up between them to capture his hand in her own. His eyes are full of reflected stars, twin galaxies pulling her into their inexorable spin. At the point of her outstretched fingernail is a pinprick of light, fanning off, faintly luminous, refracting off her tears.Se-ah pauses, taken aback, blinking away the moisture collecting on her lashes. It’s not a trick of the light. Her fingertips are actually glowing. And, she realizes, the air is...humming.

“SAM, are we about to fry anything with this corona discharge?” she asks. All at once the air changes, the charged dust motes around them still and the lights on her fingertips flicker out. It smells and feels like a storm just swept out of the tech lab.

“Appropriate precautions have already been taken to accommodate non-combat angaran electromagnetic field manipulation, Pathfinder. Ozone levels are also within acceptable limits.”

Jaal coughs and looks away, suddenly awkward.  “Ahh...as I was saying, it requires some concentration to suppress.”

“Can you stop? Concentrating that is? It’s not as if--well, SAM said it wouldn’t hurt anything.”

Now that she’s paying better attention, she can feel the tingling pressure building and shifting around them. The hairs stand up on her arms. The air smells bright and clean. Light collects on her fingertips again. Faint, but visible. Se-ah laughs, delighted, and slowly bends her fingers, watching the blue flicker and reappear. Ionized plasma balancing on the edge of an electromagnetic field pierced by the short point of her nail. Hardly seemed subtle in her book. Little about him was.

“We call this St. Elmo’s Fire,” she tells him. “It was considered a good omen by ancient human voyagers.”

“Ah. I’m your good omen then?”

“Well, we haven’t crashed once since you got here.”

He brings his free palm to hers, one fused, two separate for her five. She adds, sincerely, “It’s beautiful. Does this happen to you a lot? I’ve never noticed before.”

“No. This is...it’s more. It is special. Explaining would be difficult. Clumsy. I cannot do it justice.”

Hands pressed together, his palm dwarfing hers, a swell of emotion courses through her and a stubborn tear traces down her cheek. She laughs and a sniffle turns it into a tremulous, hiccuping burst of happiness.

“Is there a word for it in Shelesh?”

“No,” he says simply. “There is just this.”

Churning waves of electrons are crashing against her fingertips, caught in the lunar pull of him. Everything dissolves in the watery film of tears and she’s floating, falling, swept by tidal forces into an endless depth of variegated blue. There can be no words, in Shelesh or any other language. But she knows anyway. Floating in an electron sea of his design, palms pressed, wrapped in his embrace--she knows exactly what he is saying.

[fourdaysofrain]

‘Tis The Season (For Hot Chocolate)

Summary: Peter visits Tony in his cabin over winter break.

(You’re probably gonna see a million of these today, but this is my @irondadsecretsanta for @theoceanphoenixhasrisen! Hope you like it, buddy!)

Read on AO3

The crunch of gravel under the Uber’s tires jolted Peter from his stupor. He hadn’t been sleeping, but he hadn’t been entirely awake. The last thing he remembered was the rush of buildings outside the window, but now there was only a smattering of trees. He shook his shoulders to loosen them up and adjusted the seat belt strapped across his chest. 

Leaving the city always made him nervous. Suburbia was just a little too wild for Spider-Man. Thankfully Tony’s cabin still had the sounds of the woods and water filtering through the windows, but still. It’s hard to sleep with all that silence. 

“Have a good nap?” the driver asked from the front seat. 

“Yeah.” Peter had completely forgotten about him. “Yeah, yeah, thanks.”

As if spurred by Peter’s response, the driver continued to speak. “Gonna be quite a storm, eh?”

“Yeah, maybe.” Peter looked out the car window to see a few snowflakes falling down. Nothing was sticking yet.

The driver’s wide green eyes flicked to Peter’s through the rear-view mirror. “It’s the Blip causin’ it, you know. Everyone coming back all at once like that, it’s bound to cause some damage.”

Peter nodded as politely as he could. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t heard before; it was basically all New York could talk about recently. How would the Blip affect the climate? Apparently, the few winters during the Blip were the coldest on record. As with the rest of the doubts about its long-term effects, they could only wait and see. 

He was happy to get some form of solace from the sight of Tony’s cabin. 

“Can you pull over here, please?” He motioned to the side of the gravel road. Hopefully Tony wouldn’t mind bringing a stranger this close to his house. They were still outside of FRI’s sphere of influence, at least.

The frosty gravel noisily crackled as the Uber parked on the side of the road. “Need any help with your bags?” the driver asked as they both walked out towards the trunk. He popped it open and Peter grabbed his small suitcase and backpack easily.

“I’ll be good, thanks.” Peter looked to the cabin and back to the driver. “Happy holidays, man!”

The driver nodded and got back into the driver’s seat. “Have a good one!”

The car drove away and left Peter standing alone about 500 feet from the cabin with his suitcase at his feet. It felt strangely symbolic in some way. The moment was broken by him lunging for his phone to give a rating and tip to his driver. 

Peter sighed and started walking the rest of the way to the cabin. It was well worth the cold, he convinced himself. Tony still thought that he was stuck on campus for another couple of days. The only people in on it were May and Pepper. This surprise trip had been Pepper’s idea, actually. She was on a week-long trip to Europe to meet with some big-wig investors and had been worried Tony would be too lonely with just himself and Morgan at the cabin. May agreed, and now Peter was surprising Tony with a night spent at the cabin and an invitation to his and May’s apartment for the next couple of days. 

He finally spotted the gnarled old tree that marked FRIDAY’s border. He jogged over and shuffled his feet a bit before speaking. He always felt weird talking to FRI at the cabin. It was too rustic looking to house an AI, but yet, she was ever-present as always. 

“Hey, FRI.” He chewed his lip and hoped no one was watching him talk to a tree. ”I’m trying to surprise Mr. Stark, so can you promise to not tell him I’m here?”

He waited for a few beats, but there was no response from the AI. He frowned. Normally she gave some sort of response, even though she didn’t have any speakers set up outside the cabin. A text on his phone, or something. 

“Wrong tree!” came a voice from his right. He swung his head over and saw Tony smiling next to a pile of half-chopped firewood. He was walking over much too calmly to be surprised. 

“No, it’s the uh...” Peter looked over to the tree and counted the branches. “Isn’t it the big dead one with four branches?”

Tony finally reached him and pulled him into a hug. “Nice to see you, kid.”

“Yeah, nice to see you too.” Peter broke the hug and glared warmly at Tony. ”But you’re supposed to be surprised!”

“FRIDAY used to be in this tree with four branches-- you’re right about that.” Tony points at the tree Peter just finished talking to and then pointed to where the gravel road bends through the trees to reach the main road behind them. “But you’ve been gone since August. I got bored. Now she monitors everyone who comes off the main road and can be talked to from anywhere on the property. By the time you get back from next semester, I’m hoping she can talk back, too.”

Peter sighed. Surprising a billionaire super-engineer was impossible. He’d have to put some of his MIT skills to use next year if he wanted to succeed. 

“So you saw the Uber, then,” he said. 

Tony hummed in affirmation. “I’m honestly offended you didn’t use Happy. I’m deeply offended on his behalf.” “I swung as far as I could, but had to Uber the rest of the way.” He adjusted his backpack’s straps. “And Happy can’t keep a secret to save his life.”

Tony snorted and looked away to the pile of firewood. “Morgan’s still taking her afternoon nap.” He looks back to Peter with an eyebrow quirked up competitively. “Ever used an ax?”

Peter, as it turned out, was very good at chopping firewood. It took him a while to get over the whole not-needing-to-hold-himself-back thing, but once he did, the log slices were being split with one quick chop. 

“You’re catching up, Pete,” Tony said from his own pile, a few yards away. 

Peter wiped sweat from his brow and his eyes lit up with an idea. He threw the ax to the side and picked up a log on its own. It didn’t feel too sturdy. 

“I could probably just…” He trailed off as he tossed the log between his hands. 

After a moment’s hesitation, he grabbed it firmly near the center of its cut-off end and pulled. The crack of splitting wood filled the grassy area. Peter examined the split: it was a little rougher than if he had used the ax, but it was much more efficient. It didn’t need to be a pretty cut, they were going to burn it all anyways. He threw the sloppy halves onto the top of his pile. 

He looked over to Tony, mouth open and ready to brag, but stopped when he saw the expression on his face. 

Tony was staring at Peter’s hands with his eyes slightly wide and nostrils flared. He flexed the palm of his right hand a few times, which caused his thumb and little finger to move jerkily. It was an awkward remnant from his time spent in the suit that looked especially strange with his prosthetic. 

“You okay, Tony?” Peter cautiously asked. He walked over towards him to… do something helpful, he hoped. Maybe start by taking the ax away from him. But before he could reach him, Tony blinked and it was like a switch had been flipped. He was back to how he was a few seconds ago.

“I’m doing perfect, kid.” Tony set down his ax and clapped his hands together. “How about we head in, Mo’s probably gonna be up soon.” He motioned between the two piles of wood. “Loser with enhanced strength takes in the wood. We’ll only need a few pieces for tonight. I’ll get your bags.”

Peter grabbed an armful of firewood and lightly jogged to catch up with Tony on the way back to the cabin. Tony seemed to be back to normal, but there was a tenseness in his shoulders that betrayed the easy smile on his face. 

“You sure you’re good, Mr. Stark?” Tony gave a short dry chuckle and looked away.

“Remember when you were young and easy to lie to?” Tony sighed as he peered at Peter through the corner of his eye. “I think back on that time fondly. You’d believe anything I told you.”

Peter jutted his chin out. “You never lied to me.”

“‘Course not,” Tony quipped. He turned to Peter with a grin. “I never had to.”

Peter rolled his eyes as the two stepped on the porch of the cabin. He dropped the wood noisily in the corner and took a second to appreciate the view. The sun had already mostly set, making the woods a comfortably eerie backdrop. Although it was barely 5pm, the sky was quickly darkening. There was a thin layer of snow on the ground-- Peter guessed that it had finally started to stick sometime in the past half hour or so. The snow was falling lazily from the clouds above. 

“I assume you expect me to get you dinner, then?” 

Tony’s soft voice took Peter out of his reverie. He coughed awkwardly before responding. “Uh, yeah, if you don’t mind. You know how I get when it’s cold.”

“And by that, you mean your whole…” Tony paused to point vaguely at Peter. “Storing energy for hibernation thing.”

Peter crossed his arms with a huff. “Geez, you sleep through one week of high school and it’s all anyone ever talks about.”

Tony laughed and gripped Peter’s shoulder with his good hand. “You’ll get it when you’ve got kids of your own.” He quickly cleared his throat. “I’m gonna go wake up the princess, you find a takeout menu in the junk drawer.”

Peter hummed as Tony went inside. He took in the outdoors for another second before following him into the cabin.

“You’re a traitor, FRI,” he greeted as he walked to the kitchen.

It only took a second for her voice to come online. “Welcome back, Peter.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he muttered as he opened the junk drawer and rummaged for an appealing take out menu.

Navigating Tony’s cabin was second nature to Peter. He knew it as intimately as he knew May’s apartment. Simply being inside it was a comfort after the months he spent in an unfamiliar dorm. 

He picked out a menu and it wasn’t long before him, Tony, and Morgan were squished onto the couch with a plate of food each and gently debating which movie to watch.

“We watched Coco in Spanish class when it came out back in 2017-- it’s great and Morgan needs to see it,” Peter offered. 

“I can’t watch another musical, kid,” Tony complained. 

“I wanna watch Frozen 3 again!” Morgan argued. 

Eventually, they agreed with Morgan and promised each other to stop being such pushovers by the time she realized how easy it would be to take advantage of them. 

Tony and Peter were both beginning to doze on either side of Morgan as the movie ended. Peter jerked awake when Morgan shook his shoulder.

“Are you sleeping?” she asked.

He stole a glance at Tony sitting on the opposite side of the couch, whose eyes were closed with his mouth was open in an unflattering circle. As great as it was to see Tony having restful sleep, Peter knew he would be complaining about his back all day tomorrow if he slept on the couch. 

Peter looked back to Morgan. “I’m not, but I think your dad is. Why don’t you go upstairs and I’ll wake him up for you?”

Morgan nodded and ran upstairs, leaving Peter alone with Tony, who looked like he was just about to start snoring. He leaned over and held a hand halfway to his shoulder before pulling it back and electing to just use his voice.

“The movie’s over,” he whispered. Tony responded with a heavy exhale that started to rumble in his chest. Peter raised his voice. “Tony, wake up!”

Tony sharply cleared his throat and blinked open his eyes. “Was just resting my eyes,” he said with a voice heavy with sleep. 

“Morgan’s up in her bedroom already,” he said, deciding not to refute Tony’s point. “You should say goodnight to her, I’m gonna go bring my stuff to the guest room.”

Tony groaned as he stretched his back and stood up. “How many times do you have to stay over before I convince you it’s not a guest room? You’re the only one who I let use it, kid.”

Oh, that’s nice, Peter thought. And then, He should really invite more people over.

“Okay, then uh-- I’ll just take these to my room, then.” He grabbed his bags from where they were resting against the wall. “By the way, I’m going back to May’s in the morning and she wanted me to invite you and Morgan until Pepper gets back.”

(He decides not to mention how he pestered May about inviting them for the week leading up to this trip.)

Tony followed Peter to the stairs. “Is there enough room?”

“Yeah, we think.” Peter rubbed the back of his neck, suddenly nervous. “I’m gonna take the couch, Morgan can take my room, and then May said she can share her room with you.”

Seeing the look on Tony’s face, Peter backtracked. “Or, I mean, I can spend the night at Ned’s so you don’t have to share a bed with May. Or you can like, just stay here.”

“Kid, relax,” Tony said through a chuckle. Peter was starting to revert back to his anxious 14-year-old style of rambling. “I’d love to. If May’s okay with it, I am too. ‘Sides, the little miss always loves seeing her aunt.”

Peter smiled back at Tony as he went to open the door to the guest room. Tony watched as his hand hesitated at the doorknob. He suddenly felt very emotional. Maybe it was just how Tony was standing in his pajamas, looking at him with a casual smile, but he felt loved. Being in Tony’s orbit meant you never felt ignored. Sometimes it meant you couldn’t go patrolling whenever you wanted or you had to put up with nonsensical texts sent annoyingly early in the morning when he stays up all night, but most of the time it was this: seeing Tony when he’s vulnerable. There’s something to be said about seeing the universe’s savior when he’s just a person. When he’s tinkering on your newest suit after you visit him with one-too-many stab wounds. When he’s smiling at one of your jokes over a crowded dinner table. Or right now, when he’s about to read a bedtime story to his daughter but he’s still making sure you’re comfortable. 

“Do you need a bedtime story too?” 

“No, I was just…” Peter shifted his weight between his feet. “Y’know, thanks for everything.”

Tony’s lips slowly stretched into a smile. “Of course, kid. It’s what I do.” He opened up the door to Morgan’s room. “Night, Pete.”

“Night, Mr. Stark.”

Peter finally entered the guest room, his room, and dropped his bags on the rug. May made fun of him for packing so much for an overnight trip, but he never knew what to expect. His backpack was filled with homework he had to do before the next term started. He had been so sure he’d have the will to do it while he was packing it, but now he just wanted to sleep. He begrudgingly took out his mechanical engineering textbook and started to read. 

He woke up with his face resting somewhere between kinematics and thermodynamics. He groaned and checked the time. It was after 3am. He groaned. While his bed was still calling to him, he felt compelled to go down to the kitchen. 

When he got there, he saw Tony fiddling with the coffee maker. He looked a bit deranged, like a bear trying to get into a trash can. 

“Hey, man.” Peter jumped up to sit on the counter across from him. 

Tony jumped at his voice and turned around. When he saw Peter, he deflated. “Mornin’, kid.”

“Coffee machine not working?” Peter asked, nodding at the array of red lights on the appliance. 

Tony sniffed. “I don’t want to talk about it. It’s a touchy subject right now.”

“Cool, cool.” Peter looked from the machine to Tony’s empty mug when an idea came to him. “Hey, do you wanna make hot chocolate?”

“There’s probably some mix in the pantry somewhere. Feel free to rummage,” Tony said as he waved a hand nonchalantly. 

Peter kicked off the counter and started searching. It took him a few minutes to find everything he needed. He laid out a few packets of hot chocolate mix, milk, two mugs, and candy canes on the counter. He was even able to find some peppermint extract in the pantry, which was probably leftover from holiday baking. Tony just leaned against the counter and watched as he flitted from cabinet to cabinet. 

“Isn’t peppermint a spider repellent?” he asked as Peter filled the two mugs with milk and put them in the microwave. Peter turned and saw him looking at the small bottle. 

Peter grabbed two spoons as the microwave hummed. “Yeah, I think May read that on Pinterest a while back.” A beat. “Wait, is that why you didn’t let me eat any of your candy canes last year?”

Tony’s silence spoke volumes. 

“Wow,” Peter said. “I don’t know whether to be honored or offended. Not all spiders are the same.” He took the now steaming mugs out of the microwave and stirred in a generous amount of hot chocolate powder. “I’m still good with all the same things, by the way. May and I tested all of the ‘natural spider repellents’ on me when she read the article.” He screwed his face up as he continued to stir. ”I didn’t like lemon, but I didn’t like that before either.”

“Duly noted.” Tony walks to look over Peter’s shoulder as he works. “So what’s with all this then?”

Peter debated not telling him. It would be easy to just make up some story about how some Buzzfeed video showed a new and exciting way to make hot chocolate, or something like that. But Tony would probably be able to see through it easily. He could read him like a book. Sometimes it sucked, but honestly, it was nice for someone who he’s not related to care about him enough to be able to know when something was up. 

He took the spoons out of the mugs and set them in the sink, carefully not making eye contact with Tony. 

“Ben and I used to make hot chocolate in the winter.” He motioned to the remainder of the ingredients on the counter. ”He taught me how to make it like this.”

Tony nodded. “Good man.”

“He was,” Peter said softly. And then, a little stronger, “He was. You should have met him.” 

“I would have loved that.” Tony cleared his throat to reset the atmosphere. “Should I leave the room, or am I allowed in on the secret?”

Peter debated that for a moment, then got embarrassed for making such a big deal out of it, then chided himself for acting like it didn’t matter. Sure, it was a simple adjustment to the norm that Tony could easily guess. He was sure there were a million families that made hot chocolate the exact same way. But it was one of the few sacred things that Ben left behind. One of the very few Parker family secrets, left for the one of the very few remaining Parkers. 

“Pete?”

Peter looked up to Tony from where he had been staring at the still-swirling hot chocolate. He smiled nervously.

“Sorry, just uh… thinking.” He picked up the bottle of peppermint extract and shook it in his hand. He didn’t mind adding a third person to their ritual. “Yeah, I’ll show you how it’s done.”

Tony’s face softened minutely. Even though Peter didn’t let on to how personal this was, he seemed to understand. 

That was the good thing about Tony: Peter didn’t need to say everything he felt for the message to get across. 

“So,” Peter started, rolling up his sleeves. He wasn’t going to do anything messy, but it felt like the professional thing to do. “You start by making hot chocolate normally, which we’ve done.”

Tony grabbed one of the mugs and stood right next to Peter and his mug. “Got it.”

“Then, you add a few drops of peppermint extract and stir it with a candy cane.” Peter passed the bottle and a candy cane to Tony once he’s done.

Tony repeated what he did and looked at him expectantly.

“And then,” Peter said in a low voice. “And then, you’re done. Sorry, that was--”

He was cut off by a hand on his shoulder. “I dig it, kid. Keepin’ it simple.”

They shared a smile. 

Tony nodded his head towards the kitchen table and they both took a seat. They sat without speaking for a moment, just enjoying being in the same room after Peter’s term at college. Eventually, Tony broke the silence. 

“You reminded me of Cap earlier,” he stated matter-of-factly. “It surprised me, is all. I sometimes forget that you’re…” He waved a hand at him vaguely. “Enhanced.”  He finished by averting his eyes and taking a sip of his hot chocolate. 

Peter looked down at his hands and flexed them. “Sorry.”

“No. Lord, no.” Peter looked up and saw Tony leaning over the table to make eye contact with him. “I’m not saying that to make you... “ He leaned back in his chair and put a hand over his face. “I’m trying to have a moment with you.”

Peter raised his eyebrows at him.

“I care about you,” he said simply.

“So you’ve said.” 

Tony’s lips quirked at that. “It’s surprising to how much you’ve grown. I mean, for God’s sake, do you remember our first Christmas together?”

Peter took a sip of his hot chocolate and sent his mind back. He had shown up to the Avenger’s tower with a rumpled present and an awkward grin the day after Christmas. Tony, although he hadn’t expected him to show up, welcomed him in and led him to the living room where him and Rhodey were drinking mulled wine. By the end of the night, he had ordered a few packages to be sent to Peter’s apartment in the morning. 

“Yeah, it was really cool.”

“You’ve gotten a lot stronger since then. More confident. Not to say that you couldn’t pull apart some wood back then.” Tony made a face. “I-- Lord. I’m terrible at this.”

Peter didn’t deny that.

“What I’m trying to say,” Tony said, “is that I’m proud of you. Sometimes it just surprises me when you prove how capable you are. I don’t have to worry about you anymore, it’s nice.” He scratched his eyebrow. ”Of course, I still worry, but I know I don’t have to.”

Something soft and warm bloomed in Peter’s chest. 

“Thanks, Tony.” His voice came out a little fragiler than normal. He cleared his throat. “I uh-- I get what you’re saying. It means a lot.”

Tony grabbed his now-empty mug and walked around the table to clap Peter on the shoulder. “Anytime, kid.” He took Peter’s empty mug too and went to the sink to rinse them out. “That hot chocolate was great, you’ll have to come over and make it more often!” he called behind him. 

“Yeah, for sure,” Peter responded. He stood up and stretched. “Anyways, we should get to bed. I want to leave for May’s before noon so we can have lunch together.”

Tony turned around to look at him directly. “Kid, have you not looked outside?”

Peter shook his head and Tony pointed his chin to a nearby window. Wow. There was at least a foot of snow on the ground and it was still coming down heavily from the gray clouds above. No way they were driving home now. He said as much to Tony. 

“Looks like you’re going to be spending more than just the night here.”

Peter shrugged. 

There were worse places to be. 

Tag List:  @ironfamjam @addi-is-amazing @mysterio-is-a-little-bitch @wellplacedbanana @night0seven @unfathomable-universe​ @bibbidi-bobbity-booyah @spideynamu

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How to Do the Flying Trend?

How to Do the Flying Trend Using Kling AI The Flying Trend has been taking over social media, and if you want to try it out yourself, you’re in the right place! Whether you’re on Instagram, TikTok, or Snapchat, you can create a fun flying effect using Kling AI. Follow this step-by-step guide to get started! Step-by-Step Guide to the Flying Trend Step 1: Open Safari or Chrome Open your Safari…

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An Overview About Digital Makreting

Let’s talk about Digital Marketing Basics well it’s one of the main objects to growing your business in fastest way on all over on the Internet. Meanwhile everybody is very active on the internet to fulfill their requirement . There are so many online platforms having millions of online users to responding to all content creating on any social platform such are Facebook , Google , YouTube  & Many More to get attention From users to your website.

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Was Sie nicht wissen Spiele Zum Runterladen und andere können Age of Empires 2

AoE II: Definitive Edition game Review

Attractive, good, mature strategy game is looking for a player! Despite the twenty years of which comprise happened, the new Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition still manages to deliver a wonderful experience.

The Age of Empires series is a real grandfather of the real-time strategy genre – this been around for over two decades. A while ago, we followed a remaster of the former job, named Definitive Edition and it became... positively, it was what it was, let's effect this on which. Let's answer I hugged it with the entire the weaknesses. And fully seriously, I did not think the changes will be so general in the remaster with the following part, the opus magnum of the RTS genre produced by the Company Studio. Really, I wasn't actually very considering this mission. Meanwhile, exactly what I saw within the original cycle from the game exceeded the wildest expectations. Age of Empires II Definitive Edition, despite their archaisms, comes out ahead and turns big things with the upcoming fourth installment.

Dance Macabre

That really isn't once the second position was renovated and announced – we've already held the HD Edition. Apparently, though, Microsoft wants to become George Lucas, who's forever boost the Celebrity Wars, and while in the case of the cotton Jedi grasp, the method doesn't necessarily win fan approval, you can in fact happened content about how things turn out with the discussed strategy. AoE2DE is better than something we've seen in this series so far. It's so good it doesn't have any major cons. A slight forced, aren't they? Fit, this is the opportunity of acclaimed dinosaurs sent to a burial family, the slogan which remains "Within our coffins people search more living." But really. Finding problem with a twenty-year old game is really defeat a quiet horse. Especially while this game comes with major development, and the skeleton may still party with many individual computers.

Visual pleasures in 4K

I won't beat about the bush. The above heading is a bit provocative, but the mostly real. Imagine that you have the appropriate hardware (I see most of you don't have to imagine that at all, but I needed to help), you launch Age of Empires II Definitive Edition in 4K, and your judgments are decorated with a world of little characters running about the place, that is strong as razor and has tremendous textures weighting 16 GB and prime specifically for this event. Truth be declared, I've only realized this world for a dozen frames per second, so it probably doesn't count (I ended up participating in 1080p). In any case, the people from Forgotten Empires went to great lengths to make sure players are left here amazement if they only have the proper rig.

And this not necessarily the "omg-next-gen-so-much!" type of awe, but rather "Dang, that's what a twenty-years-old game can look like?" They placed just about everything that could be fixed. From the exterior in the nature to tattoos and lives of units. The level developments are choosing to the vision, especially when you can now focus popular using the mouse wheel. Looking at a prospect full of warriors rendered in suits who offer virtual damage to each other never happened so exciting.

Collapsing buildings look very impressive – they disintegrate to parts and watch every brick falling upon a pile of debris. I've never find bored of enjoying collapsing castles and it sounds that I won't believe it because pointless activity for a while. It's mind-blowing!

Game designers have managed, among other things, to make sure that players won't have any problems with identifying specific buildings. Already at this stage, each building looks somewhat different, making it easier to get a perception of what's really going on in this prevailing chaos – in the fight or through the fast expansion of your city or village.

More resolutions and client interface

In addition to aesthetic and graphical marvels, it was and important to adjust the old-school user interface with a slightly newer product. In we mean a pure and modern UI which is better matched toward their objective.

In the selection there is a new solution to size the client interface, which is a good idea for newcomers, who are not still familiar with the in-game hotkeys. Expanding the icons allows that you find a better understanding of their functions; representing a trade, professionals can get rid of the main interface almost completely. By the way, concerning the keyboard shortcuts – now anyone not merely have the risk to modify key bindings, but also to create separate profiles, which will definitely be welcomed in those who use their own power systems. Also, it is possible to immediately select all troops or developing of a given type on the plan also near erase them with just one click of the significant.

On the top block of UI you can check exactly how lots of folks we can recruit or we go out of conscious quarters. A different and extremely valuable star can indicate us the way many residents are unemployed. By pressing on it, the game leads us to every single of which (one in single) also were able to assign them a task.

There is too a new feature – queuing of tasks, thanks to which it is possible to plan the next actions of a hand unit in advance. Many buildings in structure or technologies that are now being developed are displayed at the top from the panel. This allows you to quickly understand the current state.

Select army feature has been increased. Not just you can see exactly how many thing you have marked, but you can also make sure that workers will not be built into a massive knot of elite soldiers. It helps a lot! Especially when you have to quickly respond to the unexpected circumstances.

One of the coolest development is the opportunity to restore a farm once this flows out of stocks. Just confirm this alternative then anyone no longer have to worry about the supply of food. It seems so funny that nobody have come ahead with such an idea two decades since. It was a really annoying issue.

We've was given the informed AI in the HD edition with the game, playing with the Definitive Edition the synthetic intelligence organization includes gone through some key polishing. I got the idea that the AI-controlled enemy doesn't focus a lot on working one activity when another, but rather acts in a new spread out and hostile approach. Employees are not directed to perform only one activity when another in order to increase into the next time. However, it doesn't imply that the redesigned AI is slower than the old one. This endeavor to help rest the budget and prioritizes tasks in a greater way. During the individual battles, the game allows one to choose that AI scripts should supply with specific civilizations – whether they should use those from the first type, the HD side or the latest form from the game. I push you to conduct your own experiments with the original AI order. That can be a quite addictive and amazing activity.

Another large new feature is the possibility of giving demands to allies when performing 2vs2 scenarios. The number of available draft is overwhelming (around a hundred and up) and they worry problems like as – demand for point of any point form of units, sending a specific type of troops in the ground, requesting support in an attack, request the ally to focus on a certain type of production or even design of the fence on selected location. You will need to invest a lot of time if you want figure it all out. Most importantly, the system seems to be working very decently.

Other significant novelty is the beginning of any new level of difficulty. Despite their name, Great difficulty doesn't make the action to difficult. It is instead a surface trick, designed to balance the levels available in the game, so that they are not as mixed so previously. So, the Acute difficulty level is very similar to the Difficult one, known in the previous edition with the game. Each direction, a challenge shall remain a challenge.

Revamped multiplayer

Speaking of problems. With DE, you can get position in problem which consist in getting certain objectives as suddenly as possible – for example, advance to the next era. New adepts of the line should give the time to survey the basics of game mechanics, if they expect to help fight against a real opponent in the multiplayer duel. The standard tutorial, which is also a Scottish struggle critical of the British, turns out as a complete joke. By no means it will make a person designed for a multiplayer battle.

Just before we turn on to more depth about multiplayer mode, I should explain that this entire element of the game was entirely redesigned. No more peer-to-peer connections. Instead, game designers have put together multiplayer servers that must provide a much smoother and lag-less experience. At least unlike which gets gone on to me in our gameplay experience.

The style and efficiency of multiplayer’s lobby has been modified. Now we can develop personal and password-protected game sessions. Among the new story there is a possibility to watch multiplayer sessions of people as a witness (there could be almost any number of people watching). The new map selector gets that easier to filter them before make your own sets. At last, the revised matchmaking system should enable a better diversity of rivals due to the more explicit research criteria. This would entail much more time, than I did after the game's release, to get to see all these novelties and innovative solutions i always have described above. Despite which, I have to acknowledge in which everything I've tested worked perfectly.

A multicultural game

The ownership of Definitive Edition helps to create something more than simply updated graphics, interface, AI and restored multiplayer. The creators have managed to gather all expansion sets – including all worlds which showed up in both add-on. Moreover, they have created some further content. Thanks to that, twenty-four works are awaiting anyone from the record person mode! In other words, it's hundreds of times of enjoyment! Four new cultures have happened put into those previously living in the average style and many add-ons. Also, several ones have collected unique campaigns. Despite the fact that game designers have decided to take an easy method with based the armies might off new states in cavalry, we should be grateful to they've broadened the previously diversified band of worlds.

For the new we can carry out the role of Lithuanians (unfortunately, that people was denied of unique campaign). And, you can performance when Tatars, Bulgarians and Cumans. The last are well-known from Kingdom Come: Deliverance. I've played all new wars also from what I've seen so far, many different nations become a little threw in assessment to their opponents. Or I'm a worn principal then a talented strategist? I'm kidding, but I wouldn't be surprised when the new people were effectively balanced in a piece that may be launched in the nearest future (especially in the perspective of multiplayer matches).

A grin walking dead

I'm aware of the fact I include managed to see also suggest all the Hier finden Sie weitere Informationen variations within association on the new. I simply faith to I've noticed most of them, and have suitably described them on this review. Age of Empires II Definitive Edition is a great solution with the admirers of approach genre. It was successfully restored and renewed by Forgotten Empires and most certainly it won't go unnoticed – at least with supporters that enjoy this type of activity and are not frightened of adult game mechanics. It looks like a living (walking over?) corpse that's still relatively attractive with survived fixed in great conditions. So, this going to live for at least several times more. I talk about this with a lot of sympathy because I love how nicely it was preserved. And, I hope to it's a promising sign before the announcement on the four chapter of the collection that’s awaited in many home-grown tactical leaders.

[coolmohnishahluwalia]

The internet of indulgence

India's luxury consumers are getting bored of monotonous, age-old user experiences. Brands are conjuring up exclusivity through AI/AR-VR to hyper-personalized and add that bit of 'magic'

A smattering of pastel houses rises above an inky ocean, peeking from beyond the French windows. I take a seat into the car’s expansive backseat, as instructed, and with the flick of a finger, the seat in front of me has zoomed forward and bent over, adding extra legroom—and a surprise. A plate from the seatback folds out, much like an airplane table, revealing a cushioned footrest. Here, at the rear of the Audi A8L, I have a plush, on-demand foot massager, complete with heating controls.

As I sink into the seat, though, I remember a slight technicality—I can’t actually get that message. The truth is that beyond those French windows aren’t the oasis of blue, but rain pelting down a raucous Mumbai road. For a few minutes, though, I was ‘in’ the car somewhere in France, not on a regular leather chair at a store, and could physically walk around the car to get a sense of its size, or of how it looks in the metallic Navarra Blue versus the muted Impala Beige.

The A8L has been late in coming to India, so the Audi team has devised a high-tech sales experience to keep up the buzz and speed up the pre-order process. It’s snazzy and elaborate, and locally built. Rather effective too.

I’ve played with virtual reality (VR) headsets before and was a bit skeptical putting these on; yet, I had to stop myself from reaching out to pat the seat leather, the color of which I had just changed to an elegant burgundy. I could see each stitch detailing and feel the manufactured luxury of the car, without it being even on the same continent as me. It felt like I could do pretty much everything but drive it.

“Digital customer-centric initiatives are a key focus area for Audi in India,” says Balbir Singh Dhillon, head of Audi India. “In today’s connected world, we want our customers to experience every detail of the car in miniature or actual size from the comfort of their home or office environment; this is possible through virtual and augmented reality (AR). Through these new-age solutions, a customer can experience what the brand truly stands for: Vorsprung Durch Technik, or ‘progress through technology’.”

Audi’s VR experience—which is supplemented with an augmented reality set up on an iPad as well—as part of a new era of luxury business driven by high-end technology. For the discerning set of high net-worth individuals in India, brands are working to engage touchpoints that offer next-level convenience and tell unique stories. The eventual goal is to tailor every touchpoint for each customer. A lot of this process is driven by technology and artificial intelligence (AI), and then built upon to lend that clutter-breaking wow, factor.

“Over the past few years, the quality of data available has significantly improved,” says Manishi Sanwal, managing partner of data analytics firm Voiceback Technologies, who has previously worked in leadership roles at LVMH in India and China. “While social media lets you analyze behavioral trends, a massive increase in computing power has made it possible to correlate sales with customer behavior. Technology can accurately forecast buying decisions today, resulting in less inventory, quick and early monitoring of trends and more customer focus. This leads to higher customer satisfaction and stronger brand loyalty.”

It’s not all smoke and mirrors though. While there is the added incentive to gain eyeballs, the visual tech also plays a utilitarian role.

For instance, StyleDotMe, a Delhi-based fashion-tech the startup introduced an augmented reality setup for the jewelry industry a year-and-a-half ago. Called MirrAR, the patented platform lets customers virtually ‘try on’ different pieces of jewelry at a store or kiosk, much like a Snapchat filter, eliminating the need for inventory at all chain stores and speeding up the customer trial process. the mirror now works with 77 jewelers in 23 Indian cities, including Tanishq, Amrapali, PC Jewellers, and Kalyan Jewelers. They recently did ‘zero-inventory’ kiosks for Tanishq at Delhi and Bengaluru airports, where flyers could browse through the brand’s collection, see how it looked on them, and generate leads.

“Jewellery is a particularly conservative industry, where most jewelers are the third or fourth generation in the family,” says Meghna Saraogi, founder and CEO, StyleDotMe. “It’s tough to change their mindsets. The deal-breaker for us was an association we did with the Jaipur Jewellery Show early on, where we set up an experience zone through different domes. Customers move across the domes and, at eye level, see themselves in different jewelers’ inventories, without physically having to put anything on. After the show, about 30 jewelers paid us upfront.”

Saraogi recalls how one lady asked around to know who had built the zone, and finally found and hugged her. “She was so emotional, saying she never thought she would get a chance to see herself in such jewelry, but with this product, she finally had,” she says.

the mirror uses various data points to make the jewelry life-like, including the height of the pieces and the quality of the diamonds used. The idea is to depict a piece exactly as it is, including its level of shine. Jewelers can add an unlimited number of images to their virtual inventory, and customers simply swipe and click to try them on. If they’re interested in a certain piece, it can be arranged to view physically.

“Jewellers typically show catalogs or pictures on their phones or iPads, and we realized that even a brand like Tanishq can’t have the same inventory at all its stores,” says Saraogi. “It’s so capital intensive; for jewelry retailers, the biggest cost isn’t real estate, but the cost of transporting and securely storing inventory. We wanted to build something that would work seamlessly and solve a real pain point. Many other existing AR products worked on static images, or instruction-based technology, where a voice asks you to look at a certain angle, turn right or left, which a lot of customers don’t like.”

the mirror also allows jewelers to create computer-aided design (CAD) versions of jewelry sets for customers to try on, which can then be built-in the real world based on feedback. “This closes the gap between real and virtual, as jewelers only have to manufacture the sets they know will sell, preventing wastage of both time and resources,” she adds.

According to Saraogi, an average customer tries on 20 to 25 pieces when using MirrAR, versus three to five with physical trials. “So our product is helping jewelers show 5x more SKUs (stock keeping unit) than they would have,” she says. “About 50 percent of people we surveyed say they feel awkward or tired after trying on five physical pieces at a store.”

StyleDotMe is working on launching similar AR solutions for beauty and sunglasses market by the end of the year and say the products are also helping jewelers penetrate newer markets.

“Initially, we targeted the big-brand jewelers who had multiple stores in Tier-1 and Tier-2 cities,” says Saraogi. “We were zapped to see the sort of demand we’re getting from Tier-3 and Tier-4 towns, where smaller jewelry stores take pride in being the first ones to launch such technology in their towns. They want to be projected as tech-savvy, progressive. We’re in places like Kota, Rajkot, Akola, and it’s amazing to see how people are responding there.”

StyleDotMe recently raised ₹2 crore in funding from Indian Angel Network and angel investors, in a bridge round led by Ambarish Raghuvanshi, former CFO, Info Edge, which runs various consumer internet portals. These funds will be used to bolster operations and set up a B2C web and mobile app, where customers can try on jewelry from various brands from their homes, and place orders on the StyleDotMe platform too. The company claims that its number of clients has grown by 40 percent quarter-on-quarter over the past year.

Jewelry isn’t the only traditional industry that technology is disrupting; it is also spawning a new buzzy vertical in real an estate called PropTech, still at a nascent stage in India.

In the luxury property domain, the challenges for the money-rich, time-poor clients are obvious—HNIs are by and large busy people, who may invest in multiple properties and may not have the time to visit each site they might consider. Brochures and websites can give a limited view. But using AR or VR, buyers can be ‘immersed’ in their projects in the next dimension, and take a walk around not just the property, but also its street, surroundings and so on. Interior projects can be monitored without site visits, and updates visualized in real-time.

“Real estate, especially in India, has been slow to adopt technology, but this is rapidly changing,” says Abhay Kumar, head–marketing, JLL India, a real estate consultancy. “Now, technology is the top investment area for many real-estate players—developers know that they can’t keep doing business as they used to. It’s no surprise that a lot of startups who were earlier working on algorithms for IT players are now building solutions for real estate.”

JLL has partnered with the government’s Invest India mission to launch a PropTech accelerator, and claims to have received 1,500-plus registrations for the first round. Kumar says AR and VR sales experiences are far more effective than brochures and miniature 3D models, helping cut down the transaction process—but even more in demand will be the use of AI, machine learning and the Internet of Things (IoT) in this sector.

“From an occupier perspective, this segment has a far more direct use case, something you will interact with every day,” he says. “We’re seeing Alexa and Siri at all kinds of homes today, but in the luxury segment, things are taken a step further with automation.”

Using IoT-enabled devices, residents can not only map water wastage and energy efficiency in real-time, but also control their home temperature, book parking slots, make sure the lift has arrived even before they reach the lobby, and so on. Luxury developers are investing in cloud-based visitor management solutions at projects too. “This is not something we are seeing in the middle segment, but the luxury segment has definitely started implementing it,” Kumar adds. “Think of the convenience and experience, and also the data insights you can draw using these, from both a buyer and seller perspective. These are no longer technologies of the future.”

Elementary, dear Watson

Tech giant IBM has been working extensively in building what it calls ‘cognitive fashion’. In 2017, it partnered with two major Indian fashion houses to stretch the limits of fashion tech, with the use of IBM Watson, its AI-enabled tool.

With fashion designers Falguni and Shane Peacock, IBM Watson worked to project the future of fashion. Using the Watson visual recognition API, the team scanned 600,000 publicly available

fashion images from 2006 to 2017, from the world’s four biggest fashion weeks—London, Paris, Milan and New York. Similarly, they processed more than 5,000 major Bollywood outfits and studied data from 3,000 Bollywood movie posters across the decades from the 70s to the noughties. IBM provided them with tools to identify color, pattern and silhouette trends, and Watson could use AI to analyze thousands of patterns and create entirely unique ones for the future-collection, showcased at a fashion show to a standing ovation.

“We were lucky to have been the first few to work with AI, and it has opened up a lot of ideas on what we can do with technology,” says Falguni. “For example, if I was working on a purple dress, I could scan through the archives to see all the purple dresses showcased earlier so that I know mine is entirely new. This is one way in which designers and AI can work together… I wouldn’t say AI will take over the designer’s job, but it can make their lives dramatically easier.”

“Watson let us travel back and forth in time and space at an unbelievable speed, letting us study vast amounts of data for both broad trends, as well as an understanding of the more obscure data, too,” adds Shane. “We’re looking forward to extending Watson to other parts of the creative process because the future of cognitive couture is looking fabulous.”

IBM also partnered with couturier Gaurav Gupta for a high-tech art-meets-fashion project: The world’s first AI sari. Powered by IoT, the white sculpted sari-gown had an LED light panel running across it, and the lights would change colors based on different personalities. The sari-gown featured as a live exhibit at the Vogue Women of the Year awards, worn by actor and the event’s emcee, Archie Panjabi.

Using Watson’s personality insights API, the sari’s LED lights would change color for each of the night’s awardees—a color assigned after Watson conducted a detailed study of the person’s social media handles. Watson analyzed social media activity using seven parameters, including effectiveness in organizing thoughts, open-mindedness and originality, confidence and problem solving, action orientation, conscientiousness, openness to possibilities and alternatives and social energy. Each of these traits was mapped to a color most associated with them. So, if Aishwarya Rai Bachchan was red, Shah Rukh Khan was gold. The gown was also used as an interactive art installation, where visitors could plug in their own Twitter handles and have the garment analyze their profiles and change to a color assigned to them.

“What the experience taught me is that the future of design development is definitely technology,” says Gupta. “If I have a mood for love—say neon blue—it could come up with a million print ideas that can be customized in milliseconds. Any human developing that would take days, months. I’m toying with the idea of adding Watson to my design team; it will add a different dimension to my design.”

Brainpower

Imagine knowing what every customer is going to buy before they walk into a store.

A powerful line from a Deloitte report titled ‘Digital transformation–the ultimate challenge for the fashion industry’ pretty much sums it up. The report advocates digital transformation across fashion business functions and stresses the urgency and momentum to ‘re-imagine, reshape and retool for an era in which traditional boundaries are broken’.

Data is the new oil, but few companies know just how to use it. The report says ‘digital clienteling’, or leveraging user information at the convergence of big data analytics, IoT and data science, will help brands better tailor their sales information and products to customers, improving conversion rates and revenues. “A misaligned or generic digital offering may actually widen the digital divide and even pose a threat to brand and reputation,” it says.

A few startups are seeing great interest in solving this problem for luxury brands. Vue.ai, for instance, formed in 2016, works on personalization, product digitization and increases the speed at which you can take a product online, for the fashion industry. It also helps analyze data to increase personalizations, which should eventually lead to conversions. The startup is based between Chennai and San Francisco, and services markets including the US, Europe, Latin America, Japan and the Middle East. Its clients include luxury fashion e-store Pernia’s Pop Up Shop, and it claims to have grown its revenue 3x over the last year. Vue.ai and its parent company, Mad Street Den, raised a Series B round of $17 million in April.

“This year, we’ve broken into India, and it’s become a pull market for us,” says Ashwini Ashokan, founder, and CEO, Vue.ai. “It’s interesting to see how the Indian customer is changing and driving this demand. You’re beginning to see the pull towards aggregation and storytelling. I can safely say that the era of the Flipkart-Myntra discounting driving the market is over.”

Ashokan says about 10 to 15 percent of their total business now comes from India. “This is the year of luxury,” she adds. “Indians are now associating heavily with the value of a brand, between both beauty and fashion. Technology cannot create that demand, but it can create an order of magnitude growth. That’s where we’re focussed—how to send a customer the right thing at the right time.”

To explain, if you go on an eCommerce webpage, it is working quietly to understand you in real-time. Are you looking at pink lehengas? Are you looking at pink lehengas with full sleeves? Or are you not looking at pink lehengas at all, but a particular type of embroidery, which led you to your first two clicks that happened to be on pink. “Every single click is specific to you,” says Ashokan. “If a brand knows who they are producing for, it can influence production based on that, and stop wasteful creation. A lot of products get dumped because there’s no demand. When you’re spending that kind of money, you want each detail to be perfect, and brands must understand that.”

Similarly, London-based BeautyMatchingEngine (BME), run by its Indian-origin founder Nidhima Kohli, says India accounts for its third-largest volume of users. BME, an offshoot of its predecessor MyBeautyMatches, is a new AI-powered product for the beauty industry, which can help companies make hyper-personalized product recommendations to users.

“The beauty industry is behind many others on innovation, but it’s good with PR. It’s tough to make beauty recommendations, because each person might react to it differently,” says Kohli. “For example, we are both Indian, but we live in different climate conditions, we are of different ages and may have different concerns. What works for me will not work for you. Our product takes into account all these factors before filtering down them to recommendations.”

BME also analyses patterns—it noticed, for instance, that a a lot of people buying shampoo for hair fall and dandruff also had acne concerns. “This is data the company can use, and we also help them explain to customers why a particular product is being recommended to them,” she adds.

“Consumers are well-educated now in the beauty market, and companies are beginning to see that gimmicky experiences don’t generate revenue. Every touchpoint needs to count.”

“Ninety percent of people still think that personalization is segmentation,” says Ashokan of Vue.ai. “It’s 2019, that doesn’t work anymore. You can’t tell me that I am just like all these other people.” #MohnishRANotes

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