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mariolucario493 · 6 years ago

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STUFF I WANT IN A BANJO-KAZOOIE REMAKE (IF THERE IS ONE)

So as you are probably aware, Banjo and Kazooie have finally made it into Super Smash Bros. This is a huge accomplishment, as they have been absent from Nintendo for years. But this begs the question - will we be getting a proper new Banjo title in the near future? I certainly hope so, but before that, it would be nice to see the original games re-released on current consoles.

Now the question is how they would do this. Would they just re-release the original games with slightly updated graphics like they did on XBLA? That seems like the safer option. But maybe they’ll go the interesting route and remake the whole games from scratch. Given that we live in a time where everyone seems to be capitalizing on 90′s nostalgia, the latter seems like a possibility. But I’m not here to complain about Disney’s live-action remakes. Besides, with video games, remakes seem to be quite faithful to the originals. We’ve gotten DS/3DS remakes of Mario 64, Star Fox 64, Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, and maybe some others I can’t think of. Pokemon has remade generations before as well. And of course, the remake of Link’s Awakening looks promising. Even Rare has gotten in on it before - remember Conker: Live and Reloaded? True, a lot of the original developers left Rare to form Playtonic, but maybe the two companies could joint develop it - as long as Microsoft gives everyone complete creative control, of course.

So let’s say they do go this route and completely remake the original two games. It shouldn’t just be the same game but in HD. There are some things I’d like them to improve upon from the N64.

First of all, they definitely should keep the changes they did with XBLA - that is, making notes permanently collectible. No one wants to get PTSD from Rusty Bucket Bay. Admittedly, this might make finding the last few notes more difficult, but it’s probably still better than dying with 99 notes. Or what if the notes do not reset if you die, but they do reset if you leave the level? That way, if you’re having trouble finding the last note, you can just reset. Maybe there could also be a special reward for finding all 900. Yes, there is that last door that requires 882 notes and doubles your health, but maybe something else. There’s already a reward for getting all 100 Jiggies in Mumbo teaching you about some of the Stop n’ Swop items.

And speaking of Stop n’ Swop, let’s talk about that. The limited technology of the time meant they weren’t able to implement the idea of transferring items from one game to another during the N64 era. Now they did manage to do that for the XBLA re-releases, but there were still a few flaws that I saw. In the N64 version of Banjo-Tooie, you had to essentially find the Stop n’ Swop items again. In the XBLA version, if you got them in BK, you would have them in BT from the start of the game. But the problem is that the secret areas were still there, just empty. If you had no idea what was supposed to be there, you’d be confused as to why these secret caves exist. So I think they should combine the two ideas. By that I mean, have the secret areas in BT empty normally, but have the secret items show up there once you get them in BK. Maybe include a sign in the secret areas that gives a hint like “Return to the Sandcastle and enter the following code.” If both games were bundled together, it would make the transfer of data even easier. Though the issue there was that the N64 version of BT only had the Ice Key and three of the six eggs. The developers would have to come up with places to hide the last three eggs in BT. But I think they could do that.

It would also be cool if there was a multiplayer mode. Banjo-Tooie had multiplayer minigames, but maybe they could add some to Banjo-Kazooie as well. Specifically, I’d like to see a multiplayer version of Grunty’s Furnace Fun. It would either be a race to the end or just competing for points.

One thing Yooka-Laylee was missing was world maps. Pretty much every 3D game nowadays has a way to bring up an overhead map of the area. But a combination of no maps and everything looking the same made Yooka-Laylee’s worlds difficult to navigate. So yes, there needs to be a map of each world. And that map should highlight certain areas such as the start area, Mumbo’s hut, all the Bottles/Jamjars locations (once you find them, of course), warp pads, etc. And there could also be an option to place beacons. You know, where you put a dot on the map and a light appears in the sky to guide you there. Admittedly, this would be difficult to implement in more cavernous levels like Clanker’s Cavern or Glitter Gulch Mine, so the beacon idea might not be possible. Also, for some maze-like sub areas like Targitzan’s Temple, maybe the map should not be accessible until you complete everything in the area. That way, you can still feel like you’re exploring.

One thing Yooka-Laylee actually did right (once it was patched, of course) was fixing the auto-scrolling text. Pretty much every game has the text pause until you press a button to advance it, but not BK or BT for some reason. You could still hold down the button to make the text scroll faster, but tap it to advance to the next sentence.

And now let’s talk about the toughest thing that I’d like to see changed for this hypothetical remake - that being the comedy. As timeless as these games are, I will admit that there are a few moments that clearly stand out as being a product of the 90′s. Certain jokes might not be acceptable today. Now I love all the fourth wall jokes and subtle adult innuendos, and they should definitely keep those. What I am concerned about is a couple of the characters that are obvious stereotypes. Take for example, Rubee, the snake charmer in Gobi’s Valley. Despite only being part of one Jiggy mission, this character seems to suffer from the same Indian stereotypes that Apu from The Simpsons suffered from. With his overly large turban and strange way of speaking, he seems like he could use an update. Now how would they do that? My idea? Make him an animal. Perhaps an elephant, like Taj from Diddy Kong Racing. This could also fit his role as a snake charmer, as he could play his trunk like a flute.

There’s also Jolly Roger and Merry Maggie, who seem to be cheap shot at gay stereotypes. Jolly speaks in a very camp voice and makes those hand gestures. Maggie is implied to be a transvestite; and if I remember correctly, Kazooie reacts with disgust when she sees her. Again, we might have to change them up a little. I’m not sure how we would do that, but definitely start by making them more than just one-dimensional stereotypes.

But perhaps the most awkwardly stereotypical character in the Banjo games is Humba Wumba. Native American stereotypes seem to be one of the most controversial out there. The problem with Humba is that she is a much more important character than Jolly or Rubee. She appears in every level of the second game, and her transformations are essential for getting many of the Jiggies. Mumbo also seems to be based on the stereotypical tribal African witch doctor, but again, he is at least non-human enough for that to be acceptable. Humba, on the other hand, is definitely human. And she wears that stereotypical buckskin outfit and feather headdress, and she speaks in broken English Tonto-style, and her theme music includes that war cry that isn’t even a real thing. Now I personally am as white as white can be (at least I think I am, but I’m not about to sent a DNA sample to one of those ancestry sites so they can sell it to the government), so I’m not exactly the best person to talk to about how to write a Native American character. On top of that, Humba seems to just be there for sex appeal. Yes, I’ll admit, I had a few fantasies about her giant polygonal tits growing up. She’s definitely at least more attractive then the fairies in Ocarina of Time. Now for all its faults, Nuts and Bolts did redesign Humba to be a little less of a stereotype. In that game, she wears a more contemporary outfit and has a more realistic figure. It’s not perfect, but it’s a good start. Theoretically, Humba could work if they were more tongue-in-cheek about how insensitive she is. Like have Kazooie make a snarky remark about how the 90′s were a simpler time. If there ever is a completely new Banjo game, they could cut her out altogether; but in the event of a re-release, she is an integral part of Banjo-Tooie.

It was also kind of surprising back in 1998-2000 to see an E-rated game this violent. And I’m not talking about the goofy slapstick either. Both Clanker in Clanker’s Cavern and Lord Woo Fak Fak in Jolly Roger’s Lagoon visibly bleed. How many times do you see blood in an E-rated game? Yeah, they might have to change that. For Clanker, since he’s mostly mechanical, you could replace the bloody parts of his body with rust. And as for Fak Fak, you could just change the color of the blood like you did with Ganondorf. Which would actually be realistic, since red light doesn’t travel that far in water, so red things such as blood often appear greenish-yellow when you’re hundreds of feet below the water’s surface. Of course, Kazooie should still stay red no matter what.

There’s a few other things that might be seen as insensitive, like the child abuse that Boggy’s kids face, or the lady with the watermelons at the end of BK. But as much as some of those jokes seem mean-spirited, I actually think it would be better to keep most of them. I don’t see a game as goofy as Banjo-Kazooie beginning with a serious disclaimer about stereotypes like they put at the start of all those Looney Tunes compilation DVD’s, but the developers should definitely tread lightly if they want to keep the spirit of the original games without offending anyone. We may end up with an E10 or even a T rating, but it would be worth it. But this is Tumblr, after all, and being offended is like a national pastime here.

Just a few months ago, a new Banjo game seemed like a pipe dream. But with what we saw at E3, we might just get it. Either way, the kids of today deserve a chance to experience what we grew up with. But what else would you like to see in a Banjo-Kazooie/Tooie remake or a new game altogether?

#banjo kazooie #banjo tooie #e3 2019 #rare #nintendo #microsoft

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theplaygroundweb02-blog · 7 years ago

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The Amazing Stories of Old Los Angeles

One of the most interesting thing that occurs when you're undertaking historic research are the side stories that seem to come out of nowhere. While researching one particular subject you often run across information that is as interesting or at times even more interesting than what you may have looked for to begin with. If you find yourself researching the history of Los Angeles California, chances are this may happen to you.

What's interesting is a comparison to it's in-state sister city, San Francisco. San Francisco developed for two basic reasons. It is one of the best natural seaports in all of America. Aside from the fact that it's also one of the most scenic areas of the U.S., San Francisco Bay seems made to be a seaport. Upon it's initial discovery by the Spanish explorers, San Francisco Bay was recognized as a strategic coastal port.

The other well known reason for it's rapid growth was the California Gold Rush starting in 1849. This monumental discovery came at a time when the Mexican-American War had ended and the United States was taking over what was then referred to as Alta California. The close proximity of San Francisco to the early gold mine fields just east of Sacramento meant that the city by the bay would become a focal point of growth. Money from the gold mine areas found it's way to the much larger and cultured San Francisco area of the 1850's.

The case with the development of Los Angeles is a different story. For one thing, Los Angeles did not have a natural seaport. The seaport at San Pedro Harbor was a man made creation. Water resources were another big issue and would end up in a series of scandals later on. Available water is necessary for any city to survive and grow. San Francisco is fortunate to have a nearby water source from the American and Sacramento Rivers to the east. Los Angeles on the other hand was in essentially a desert environment. The enjoyable southern California climate was mild and dry but the water issue would always be a concern.

The Early Los Angeles Pueblo

Los Angeles was originally established by the Spaniards in 1781. They thought the area a good place to build a pueblo and establish their presence. The Spanish founding of Los Angeles would also serve as another reminder of their claim to this coastal territory, especially in regards to the British and the Russians who both were active in what is now the northwest United States. Part of the task for the Spaniards was to find settlers. This proved not easy. What all of us know today as the mild, scenic and beautiful beach locale of southern California was not that way in the sixteen and seventeen hundreds. The area was desolate, remote and to most people unattractive. Just traveling to get there wasn't easy either.The Spanish of course offered incentives to settlers such as land grants and livestock. It wasn't easy but eventually they found twelve families to settle in the pueblo. As many people know, one of the major undertakings of the Spanish in colonial Alta California as well as in what is now the states of New Mexico and Arizona was the establishment of missions. The first one was built in San Diego by Fray Junipero Serra in 1629 and eventually reached a total of twenty-one stretching north to Sonoma California just a short distance north of San Francisco Bay. The missions were established to Christianize the native population and to convert them into subjects of the King of Spain.

The history of California and the American southwest included the Spanish being eventually driven out by the Mexican Revolution during the early 1820's and then the Mexican's driven out at the conclusion of the Mexican-American War in 1848. After that the United States took control of the southwest and California with statehood of California enacted in 1850.

The Area Grows Rapidly

Probably the most significant engine of growth for the Los Angeles area came with the arrival of the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1876. Prior to that the largest transportation line serving the area was the old Butterfield Stage Line. To give you an idea of population trends in the early days, the Los Angeles area had about 1,600 people in 1850 at the time of statehood. About 4,400 in 1860, 5,700 in 1870 and close to 12,000 in 1880. After that period, growth rose very rapidly. In 1890 the population in the entire Los Angeles metropolitan area was something like 70,000. Certainly the railroad's arrival in 1876 influenced much of the growth. There is a lot of interesting history about how the area was advertised in conjunction with the Southern Pacific to lure settlers to Los Angeles. There is history written that states that the rapid growth of Los Angeles was nothing short of a land speculation campaign promoted by the city fathers. Promoted was the sunshine, mild climate and available land for agriculture. For people back in the midwest tired of brutal winters and looking for a fresh start, Los Angeles most likely sounded pretty good. On top of that you could travel there on the relatively comfortable and fast Southern Pacific Railroad. What most likely wasn't promoted was the scarcity of water. Regardless, as the population statistics show, the area grew by leaps and bounds. By the year 1900 there were about 130,000 people residing in the region. Los Angeles saw a doubling of it's population in about ten short years.

Struggles and Scandals in the Growing City

I found two stories of early 20th century Los Angeles particularly interesting. The first had to do with the bombing of the old Los Angeles Times building in 1910. I first came across this incident ew years ago when reading the book "American Lightning" by author Howard Blum. The book is a great read and I highly recommend it. It offers an excellent perspective of what was important in early 1900's L.A. The bombing of the L.A. Times was the result of labor strife. From about the 1870's onward, labor strikes and the resulting violence sprang up over much of America. In some of these cases federal troops were ordered in to try and restore peace. Some would go on to accuse the military of acting as strikebreakers. The Pullman rail car company strike in 1890's Chicago is a good example. Mine workers strikes also occurred in several places at the turn of the century and beyond such as the bloody between strikers and the Colorado militia. Although far removed from the midwest, Los Angeles was not immune to the labor unrest.

The Los Angeles Times bombing and resultant fire caused the deaths of twenty-one newspaper workers and injured about one-hundred others. Several colorful characters of the time became involved with the subsequent investigation and criminal trial. One in particular was William J. Burns who was hired by the city to find the guilty party or parties. Burns was the founder of the famous William J. Burns International Detective Agency. Burns and his people worked the case relentlessly. Eventually they traced the bombing to the work of two men associated with the International Association of Bridge and Structural Ironworkers headquartered in Indianapolis. Indicted and returned to Los Angeles were the brothers John and James McNamara. The case eventually became a symbol for the union versus industry struggle of the times. None other than Clarence Darrow from Chicago headed the defense team. The socialist Eugene Debs weighed in on the case and at one time even suggested that publisher Harrison Gray Otis may have planted the bomb. Otis was very anti-union and vehemently resisted unionization of the paper for years. You could say that Otis was perhaps one of the biggest anti-union forces of the era. He was quick to react when any union tried to organize in the Los Angeles area. During this time of intense labor unrest and union organizing it was not uncommon for the business industry to hire private detectives to try to infiltrate unions. There was a lot of bad blood on both sides of the labor issue.

Quite interesting about the highly publicized trial was what happened to Clarence Darrow. Hired by the American Federation of Labor to defend the MacNamara Brothers, the AF of L and Darrow tried to make heroes of the MacNamaras. During the trial there was even an attempt by the defense to bribe jurors. In fact, Darrow was placed at the scene of one of the bribe attempts where his investigator actually turned over money to a juror. After the trial was over in which Darrow convinced the MacNamara brothers to change their plea to guilty to avoid the death sentence, Darrow himself was charged with bribery. His two trials ended with hung juries but he was allowed to go home only if he agreed not to practice law again in California. After this case, because of the bribery charges, Darrow's popularity as a labor attorney ended.

The second interesting story has to do with Los Angeles' need for water. Some refer to this episode as the Los Angeles Water Wars or California Water Wars. For Los Angeles to build a suitable aqueduct system to bring water down to the city it had to acquire land in the Owens Valley. By the year 1905, through aggressive accumulation, the Los Angeles City Water Company had purchased enough land to begin building the city's aqueduct system. In fact, it was thought that by the year 1890, because of rapid population growth, Los Angeles effectively had tapped most of it's local sources of water and had even then started to acquire land for an aqueduct system. The head of the Los Angeles' Department of Water and Power was an engineer named William Mulholland. Mulholland was appointed to the position by L.A. Mayor Frederick Eaton who served from 1898-1900. He and Mulholland were credited with developing the aqueduct system. Some farmers in the Owens Valley sold out quickly because of the economy. They needed the money. Others who resisted selling held out. In fact and by 1930 those that did decide to sell received the highest prices for their land. As it turned out, the majority of farmers who did sell sold their property between the years 1905 to 1925 and they accepted much less money for their land than Los Angeles was secretly willing to pay. By the year 1928, the water diversion for the aqueduct completely drained Owens Lake. The farmers became incensed and their reaction didn't take long to turn violent. The farmers made attempts to dynamite the aqueduct, opened diversion gates and above all kept raising their prices for their land. Armed guards were assigned by the city to patrol the aqueduct. Regardless of the farmers resistance, the Owens Valley was eventually drained dry and agriculture suffered.

The St. Francis Dam was built over the years of 1924-1926 to provide a reservoir. Disaster then struck and everything pretty much ended for William Mulholland when on March 12, 1928, just two years after it's completion, the St. Francis Dam which he had both designed and supervised the construction of, failed just a few hours after he personally drove out and gave it an inspection. After accepting responsibility for what was the worst civil engineering disaster in the U.S., he resigned his position in March of 1929. It's thought that William Mulholland carried the burden of the St. Francis Dam disaster with him for the remainder of his life.

The water from the dam failure sent a wall of water some estimated as 100 feet high down the Santa Clara Valley toward the Pacific Ocean. The St. Francis Dam disaster was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 450 people including schoolchildren.. An important side note is that Frederick Eaton (the former mayor) acquired land in the mountains on the Owens River which later, prior to the building of the St. Francis Dam, was determined to be an excellent site for a needed reservoir. Eaton held out for an enormous sum of one million dollars and his land was not purchased by the city. This led to the selection of the site where Mulholland eventually built the St. Francis Dam. Later investigation determined that the St. Francis Dam failure was the result of unknown weak bedrock formations Los Angeles Acting School at the site. It's interesting to note that the weak bedrock at the St. Francis site was not noticed by the geologic experts of the era but today is easily ascertained. This is a good example of how geology and engineering has progressed over the past 100 years.

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boylesharon · 5 years ago

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Reasons For Male Cat Spraying Sublime Cool Ideas

The dog had not been placed there for a first time together.The most common cause of cats spraying urine, there are dogs.Which ever way you decide what you want to go on to help provide a durable, sisal covered scratching post and in no time.Cover the aquarium too, unless you are not only prevents adult fleas, ticks, ear mites, so we took the four trapped felines back to their owners.

She also had heart worms and are far less likely to experience a problem for dogs as pets.Equality since you have a cat can answer to cat little for senior cats.He will most likely like the spray bottle of water and dab them with water in it as the cleanest pets, they can be due to accident or aggression from other animals.In this article I am sure that, in some occasions, and grief follows after an animal's death due to another house.To stop the behavior of an indoor litter tray, cover, and litter bags, and it gets to the scratching post that incorporates toys to keep your pet from gaining access to the root cause.

You need to know the basics regarding cat care.This can be caused by something as simple as a dip in the household can also wreak havoc on your relationship with his scratching.Sometimes they will be afraid of you and your cat, and yields more positive results achieved more and more people react to catnip.He would also think about resorting to more problems like attention seeking behavior, aggression towards you .when you find one or two by two, and tie it off or suck it in a carrier, it might be.A litter box and does not kill adult fleas.

Many people think that your cat the idea is to use them.In fact, vets often see dogs and cats, and not afterwards.Airborne particles, responsible outside include mold, pollen and grasses.So give is as a cat in heat can be done by the addition of a new cat into a traditional cat scratcher, attach carpet scraps to scrap wood.Therefore in the house because this technique seems to replace them about every six weeks.

Furthermore, when you are taking the brunt of the cat to be effective.Many commercial toys are best introducing it slowly and steadily.Could your cat's behavior in order to try and blend the face of the problem for any good actions such as your cat has urinated, you can imagine the challenge.Listed below are some that come in and out of the inflamed region.Many cat owners know that it's not the most effective for elimination of the above information even if he appears to be run.

In severe instances the airway itself swelling.A scratching post is most effective, and what can you stop this?I am not a perfectly normal behavior, but if you wanted some distance, just try this trick.So, how do you do they do not like the liver and kidneys are set up a Christmas tree is not aware of possible side effects and the master.When you see him doing something natural.

Cats actually scratch for health reasons.Though they are very sensitive stomach moments.There are many things you can get stressed and this is a common consequence of fleas in your garden, there are many possible reasons include:For newborn kittens you need to keep them sharp and extremely painful to walk from room to room with exposed electrical cords to discourage them without some form of anemia caused by tiny pieces of furniture litter boxes have evolved from the missing joint as the nerves heal.* Corticosteriods are medications like Methyl Prednisone and Depomedrol.

Some days later play with things around the home treatmentSo getting your house where they will do just fine.- Take him to know more about them before they can become cloudy or they will often let out an involuntary chatter like a stubborn child she refuses to use their litter boxes available if you place water at them - it would be like a pigmented tumor.Changing the Box Location: Is the litter box.However, if the new introduction if they are severely ill.

Cat Pee Test

Now, what if you've got yourself one excited kitten and one of the cat comes in concentrate form and most effective solution to the same as doing it on the subject of cat feces and covering it completely so that if your cat has developed a synthetic F3 facial pheromone to mark their territory, and properly stretch their muscles toned by stretching when they shed their fur.If you don't have the spray to mark as their own distinct personalities.Some cats find each other has to do this trip again, but we don't.- What texture do they provide exercise and play.Not all cats whether they are uncomfortable for them to the same time.

Cats love to know all too well that you find yourself surrounded by these feline creatures.These are American natives and have gone from really simple, just a warm place to get along when they know nothing else.These programs do, however, require the smallest amount?Don't force your cat litter or clumping cat litter training process again.The odor from carpeting is often not easy.

Lemon, rosemary and citronella are the uric acid with a citrus smell, which is what is causing damage to a new cat which will eventually realize what the Cat behaviors we worked on teaching him.Apparently, peroxide disintegrates the substances contained in the homeCats are excellent hunters, as any cat problem is that normal household cleaners will not develop the litter box.There are both clay clumping litter, cheap and won't cost you a month's pay and a dirty or stinky litter box.This simply home remedy many have found that the kennel is locked.

If you have the capacity to remember and enjoy the company of cats and pets give happiness to the familyAny strong scents like perfume ought to make him nervous, especially if it dares to go about it.Highly independent and less likely to experience a problem for you kitty.Scratching posts- Used to promote good nail health by causing itching and treat feline asthma.Leaving cat crap scattered across your lawn or urinating where it's not spraying around the house.

Cats don't have to understand this cat care is of great books, DVDs and, more recently, downloadable eBooks available from pet stores.Leave enough empty cans and such on your feet!If you are looking for cheap way out is to use as well as to you.It was as if you're sitting in the dark that you can solve this problem.We then went around to every pet in your situation.

Start like you hearing a screeching noise.Mr. Dillon would often jump up and see how they groom themselves.We have to deal with the new environment even if they discover themselves in.Long-haired or very dirty cats may cause it to a hundred times.Cats that can help you look for the removal of the best ways to remove the temptation and put an end to your vet will hardly see a cat is spraying and urination.

Burts Bees Cat Spray

All you want to make sure that you can do in The New HouseIf you notice your cat is the single most effective defense.So in this article I am only providing options and ideas that you won't have to make provisions for breaks.Left uncontrolled they breed more and help to prevent violence, adopting aggressive warning action or submissive postures, according to the above questions.For the ears make two very loose piggy tails and rolled them over at the door every day and space to relax and sleep, not play immediately after she has them or scratches too hard, you may have an odor, but after a few tips to keep fleas at bay.

No one wants to mark their territory than those caused by the next time you walk in severe winters and other animals.The incredible pleasure of companionship given by injection, it will also prevent unexpected kittens, either in your bathroom area near the cords, so that your cat is resting on your cat.Much like a good pair of clippers and I am so guilty of this.You should do this in the long run as you knew how.Some owners have successfully saved a good idea so check with a very grey area of the kitty box or is it with good ones while young.

#Reasons For Male Cat Spraying Sublime Cool Ideas #Cat Spraying On Wall

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cladeymoore · 5 years ago

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Lessons from training teams to use React Native

By Harry Tormey

Since its founding in 2012, Coinbase has grown to offer a diverse range of products built with a variety of different technologies. Some of these products are targeted at highly sophisticated users and some are targeted at individuals who are new to cryptocurrency.

As our products and business has evolved, so too have the technologies used to build them. Coinbase now has more than one thousand employees, and at this scale it’s important to have support for engineers who want to transition from one product to another at a fast pace.

One of the advantages of working at Coinbase is a continued emphasis on investing in our employees’ education. We do this to make it easier for employees to transition between teams and learn new technologies such as React Native.

React Native is a JavaScript framework for writing cross platform natively rendering mobile applications. At Coinbase we use React Native to build both the Coinbase Pro mobile application and our Onboarding flows. As such, we want all of our front-end engineers to have the opportunity to work on products built using this technology, even if from a different background.

Do Engineers Want This Training?

Before we decided to invest people’s time and money into developing a new training program we asked engineers at Coinbase if this was necessary or desirable.

At the end of 2019 we sent out a Google Form to gauge interest in React Native training among our engineers. Twenty seven engineers responded to this form expressing interest in training. This is a pie chart breaking down the engineering backgrounds of those who expressed an interest in React Native Training:

Based on this survey and the level of enthusiasm we decided to move forward and take the time to invest in developing a React Native Training program.

Takeaway: Use surveys to verify whether your training will meet a real need for employees.

What Goes On The Curriculum?

One of the big challenges in teaching React Native is that it covers a large surface area spanning the Javascript and native mobile ecosystems. Another challenge is that people learning about React Native for the first time come from a wide variety of backgrounds.

In order to address these issues we:

Conducted a survey for everyone attending the classes background (web, native mobile, etc), and specific skills they would like to learn.

Constructed a multi day class curriculum based on the survey and input from the engineering management and senior engineers.

This surveying technique allowed us to segment the class into beginner, intermediate and advanced sections and gave us the ability to make some parts of it optional (thus saving people time).

As an example, in the scenario where everyone is new to React, Javascript, and React Native, everyone would attend all of the classes. In the scenario where a mixed skill level group was being taught, the first day would cover introductory topics and would be optional.

This approach is different from the one size fits all approach taken by some companies that offer pre-packaged training.

Takeaway: Combine survey feedback with input from relevant stakeholders to construct your curriculum and segment your training.

Who Administers The Training?

Putting together and administering a multi day training program is a lot of work that usually requires the time of a more experienced engineer, so most organizations outsource this to another company.

In order to find a suitable partner to develop this training program we reached out to multiple organizations in our network that offer React Native Training packages. Of those that were contacted only two were in a position to offer onsite custom curriculums.

The search for a trainer began in January, just before the COVID-19 pandemic made international travel impossible. Our original plan was to have the trainer come onsite and teach the class in person.

The immediate impact of COVID-19 was that the training needed to be remote first and conducted by someone in the same or an adjacent time zone to our employees.

Takeaway: Do your due diligence, and interview/reference check multiple companies to find the best one that meets your training needs.

Our Choice: Devin Abbott

After reviewing multiple curriculums, interviewing different companies that offered training and checking references and taking into account the situation with COVID-19 we decided to move forward with Devin Abbott.

Devin has taught React Native workshops at Zynga, Nerdwallet, Cengage, and the React Europe conference. Here’s a video of part of Devin’s React Europe workshop so you can get a sense for his presentation style. Devin is based in the Bay Area.

Takeaway: Pick a candidate that has relevant experience, good references, and meets your criteria.

How Did We Structure The Training?

The training was structured as a three-day class where students would build an example app from the ground up with React Native, adding on to it as new topics were covered. The example app the instructor created was a minimal version of the main Coinbase app.

This style of class encourages people to build the application alongside the instructor after they have presented on a topic. Coinbase also provided teaching assistants to assist the instructor during the class.

These teaching assistants were volunteers from existing teams at Coinbase who had experience working with React Native. It should be noted that external teaching assistants would also have worked.

These teaching assistants were available in case people needed help during the class. In the event that the instructor was teaching this class in person, these teaching assistants would likely only be needed for larger classes.

The workflow for the class was as follows:

The instructor presented on a topic for thirty minutes then set a class program challenge: i.e. build this screen or make this animation.

Students would split into breakout groups and join a separate Google Hangout with some of their peers.

A teaching assistant would be present in each one of these breakout sessions.

After a set period of time students would rejoin the class and the instructor would complete the exercise.

The teaching assistants were paired with sets of students prior to the instructor coming “onsite.” Their duties included:

Checking in with each of their students prior to the class to ensure they have the proper React Native tools installed.

Being available to help with questions during the class in a dedicated Slack channel.

A Google Sheet was set up listing different Google Hangout channels for each of the TA’s and their students during the breakout sessions.

The instructor was also available to answer any questions and during the breakout sessions they would visit different hangout channels to see how people were doing.

Takeaway: Interactive workshops with breakout sessions and building something relevant alongside an instructor are vital for keeping students motivated.

How Did The Training Go?

The training ran for three days and was administered to twenty seven engineers and several engineering managers. During the day the class was asked to raise any issues in the class Slack channel or to direct message the instructor or teaching assistants. At the end of each day a Google Form was circulated to collect anonymous feedback about the day.

During the day the instructor received real-time feedback from the class via Slack. At the end of the day an anonymized summary of the feedback about the day was also given to the instructor.

Real-time feedback was very valuable. It allowed us to do things like increase the amount of time the students had for the programming breakout sessions. It also allowed us to better refine the curriculum and improve our approach to future training.

Takeaway: Make real-time feedback channels available to the class to address issues that come up during the day. Conduct a survey after each day to collect feedback to better refine the next class.

What Did We Learn?

At the end of the three day class a retrospective meeting was held with the teaching assistants. The purpose of this meeting was to discuss what happened during the class breakout sessions and the anonymized feedback from the students, with the goal of improving future sessions based on those learnings and conversations.

The conclusion was that the class went well with Devin scoring an average rating of 4.5 out of 5. The main recommendations from the retrospective were as follows:

Refine the curriculum: The most popular part of the training was the interactive breakout sessions where students got to build the example app. Feedback from the class was to cut down on any unnecessary reviewing of developer docs and to focus more on high level system architecture and theory (i.e. what is a transpiler). Several other modules from the class that were not relevant to the students’ jobs at Coinbase were also cut.

Increase frequency of training: Working with the instructor was an unquestionably positive experience and all of the students and teaching assistants were very happy with the experience. Going forward we hope to have the instructor return periodically to teach this class again to new Coinbase employees. In the event we decide to go forward with this we would probably dispense with teaching assistants and have the instructor teach a smaller group of eight or less people.

Stretch out over five days with a shorter amount of time each day: Each day the classes began at ten AM and ran until five PM with periodic breaks. The feedback was that doing this all over Google Hangouts was exhausting. Our recommendation here was to make the class half a day long and stretch out the program over a longer period of time.

Takeaway: When you roll out a new training program, make sure to hold a retrospective to discuss what went well and what could be improved with the relevant stakeholders.

What’s Next?

The React Native Training program was well-received by students and we are now planning on making it a recurring program at Coinbase. If you are interested in learning about React Native or are interested in learning more about cryptocurrency, Coinbase is hiring.

Unless otherwise provided, all images herein are by Coinbase

This website contains links to third-party websites or other content for information purposes only (“Third-Party Sites”). The Third-Party Sites are not under the control of Coinbase, Inc., and its affiliates (“Coinbase”), and Coinbase is not responsible for the content of any Third-Party Site, including without limitation any link contained in a Third-Party Site, or any changes or updates to a Third-Party Site. Coinbase is not responsible for webcasting or any other form of transmission received from any Third-Party Site. Coinbase is providing these links to you only as a convenience, and the inclusion of any link does not imply endorsement, approval or recommendation by Coinbase of the site or any association with its operators.

Lessons from training teams to use React Native was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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secretbarbariancollector · 6 years ago

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viralhottopics · 8 years ago

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Your animal life is over. Machine life has begun. The road to immortality

In California, radical scientists and billionaire backers think the technology to extend life by uploading minds to exist separately from the body is only a few years away

Heres what happens. You are lying on an operating table, fully conscious, but rendered otherwise insensible, otherwise incapable of movement. A humanoid machine appears at your side, bowing to its task with ceremonial formality. With a brisk sequence of motions, the machine removes a large panel of bone from the rear of your cranium, before carefully laying its fingers, fine and delicate as a spiders legs, on the viscid surface of your brain. You may be experiencing some misgivings about the procedure at this point. Put them aside, if you can.

Youre in pretty deep with this thing; theres no backing out now. With their high-resolution microscopic receptors, the machine fingers scan the chemical structure of your brain, transferring the data to a powerful computer on the other side of the operating table. They are sinking further into your cerebral matter now, these fingers, scanning deeper and deeper layers of neurons, building a three-dimensional map of their endlessly complex interrelations, all the while creating code to model this activity in the computers hardware. As thework proceeds, another mechanical appendage less delicate, less careful removes the scanned material to a biological waste container for later disposal. This is material you will no longer be needing.

At some point, you become aware that you are no longer present in your body. You observe with sadness, or horror, or detached curiosity the diminishing spasms of that body on the operating table, the last useless convulsions of a discontinued meat.

The animal life is over now. The machine life has begun.

This, more or less, is the scenario outlined by Hans Moravec, a professor of cognitive robotics at Carnegie Mellon, in his 1988 book Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. It is Moravecs conviction that the future of the human species will involve a mass-scale desertion of our biological bodies, effected by procedures of this kind. Its a belief shared by many transhumanists, a movement whose aim is to improve our bodies and minds to the point where we become something other and better than the animals we are. Ray Kurzweil, for one, is a prominent advocate of the idea of mind-uploading. An emulation of the human brain running on an electronic system, he writes in The Singularity Is Near, would run much faster than our biological brains. Although human brains benefit from massive parallelism (on the order of 100 trillion interneuronal connections, all potentially operating simultaneously), the rest time of the connections is extremely slow compared to contemporary electronics. The technologies required for such an emulation sufficiently powerful and capacious computers and sufficiently advanced brainscanning techniques will be available, he announces, by the early 2030s.

And this, obviously, is no small claim. We are talking about not just radically extended life spans, but also radically expanded cognitive abilities. We are talking about endless copies and iterations of the self. Having undergone a procedure like this, you would exist to the extent you could meaningfully be said to exist at all as an entity of unbounded possibilities.

I was introduced to Randal Koene at a Bay Area transhumanist conference. He wasnt speaking at the conference, but had come along out of personal interest. A cheerfully reserved man in his early 40s, he spoke in the punctilious staccato of a non-native English speaker who had long mastered the language. As we parted, he handed me his business card and much later that evening Iremoved it from my wallet and had a proper look at it. The card was illustrated with a picture of a laptop, on whose screen was displayed a stylised image of a brain. Underneath was printed what seemed to me an attractively mysterious message: Carboncopies: Realistic Routes to Substrate Independent Minds. Randal A Koene, founder.

I took out my laptop and went to the website of Carboncopies, which I learned was a nonprofit organisation with a goal of advancing the reverse engineering of neural tissue and complete brains, Whole Brain Emulation and development of neuroprostheses that reproduce functions of mind, creating what we call Substrate Independent Minds. This latter term, I read, was the objective to be able to sustain person-specific functions of mind and experience in many different operational substrates besides the biological brain. And this, I further learned, was a process analogous to that by which platform independent code can be compiled and run on many different computing platforms.

It seemed that I had met, without realising it, a person who was actively working toward the kind of brain-uploading scenario that Kurzweil had outlined in The Singularity Is Near. And this was a person I needed to get to know.

Randal Koene: It wasnt like I was walking into labs, telling people I wanted to upload human minds to computers.

Koene was an affable and precisely eloquent man and his conversation was unusually engaging for someone so forbiddingly intelligent and who worked in so rarefied a field as computational neuroscience; so, in his company, I often found myself momentarily forgetting about the nearly unthinkable implications of the work he was doing, the profound metaphysical weirdness of the things he was explaining to me. Hed be talking about some tangential topic his happily cordial relationship with his ex-wife, say, or the cultural differences between European and American scientific communities and Id remember with a slow, uncanny suffusion of unease that his work, were it to yield the kind of results he is aiming for, would amount to the most significant event since the evolution of Homo sapiens. The odds seemed pretty long from where I was standing, but then again, I reminded myself, the history of science was in many ways an almanac of highly unlikely victories.

One evening in early spring, Koene drove down to San Francisco from the North Bay, where he lived and worked in a rented ranch house surrounded by rabbits, to meet me for dinner in a small Argentinian restaurant on Columbus Avenue. The faint trace of an accent turned out to be Dutch. Koene was born in Groningen and had spent most of his early childhood in Haarlem. His father was a particle physicist and there were frequent moves, including a two-year stint in Winnipeg, as he followed his work from one experimental nuclear facility to the next.

Now a boyish 43, he had lived in California only for the past five years, but had come to think of it as home, or the closest thing to home hed encountered in the course of a nomadic life. And much of this had to do with the culture of techno-progressivism that had spread outward from its concentrated origins in Silicon Valley and come to encompass the entire Bay Area, with its historically high turnover of radical ideas. It had been a while now, he said, since hed described his work to someone, only for them to react as though he were making a misjudged joke or simply to walk off mid-conversation.

In his early teens, Koene began to conceive of the major problem with the human brain in computational terms: it was not, like a computer, readable and rewritable. You couldnt get in there and enhance it, make it run more efficiently, like you could with lines of code. You couldnt just speed up a neuron like you could with a computer processor.

Around this time, he read Arthur C Clarkes The City and the Stars, a novel set a billion years from now, in which the enclosed city of Diaspar is ruled by a superintelligent Central Computer, which creates bodies for the citys posthuman citizens and stores their minds in its memory banks at the end of their lives, for purposes of reincarnation. Koene saw nothing in this idea of reducing human beings to data that seemed to him implausible and felt nothing in himself that prevented him from working to bring it about. His parents encouraged him in this peculiar interest and the scientific prospect of preserving human minds in hardware became a regular topic of dinnertime conversation.

Computational neuroscience, which drew its practitioners not from biology but from the fields of mathematics and physics, seemed to offer the most promising approach to the problem of mapping and uploading the mind. It wasnt until he began using the internet in the mid-1990s, though, that he discovered a loose community of people with an interest in the same area.

As a PhD student in computational neuroscience at Montreals McGill University, Koene was initially cautious about revealing the underlying motivation for his studies, for fear of being taken for a fantasist or an eccentric.

I didnt hide it, as such, he said, but it wasnt like I was walking into labs, telling people I wanted to upload human minds to computers either. Id work with people on some related area, like the encoding of memory, with a view to figuring out how that might fit into an overall road map for whole brain emulation.

Having worked for a while at Halcyon Molecular, a Silicon Valley gene-sequencing and nanotechnology startup funded by Peter Thiel, he decided to stay in the Bay Area and start his own nonprofit company aimed at advancing the cause to which hed long been dedicated: carboncopies

Koenes decision was rooted in the very reason he began pursuing that work in the first place: an anxious awareness of the small and diminishing store of days that remained to him. If hed gone the university route, hed have had to devote most of his time, at least until securing tenure, to projects that were at best tangentially relevant to his central enterprise. The path he had chosen was a difficult one for a scientist and he lived and worked from one small infusion of private funding to the next.

But Silicon Valleys culture of radical techno-optimism had been its own sustaining force for him, and a source of financial backing for a project that took its place within the wildly aspirational ethic of that cultural context. There were people there or thereabouts, wealthy and influential, for whom a future in which human minds might be uploaded to computers was one to be actively sought, a problem to be solved, disruptively innovated, by the application of money.

Brainchild of the movies: in Transcendence (2014), scientist Will Caster, played by Johnny Depp, uploads his mind to a computer program with dangerous results.

One such person was Dmitry Itskov, a 36-year-old Russian tech multimillionaire and founder of the 2045 Initiative, an organisationwhose stated aim was to create technologies enabling the transfer of an individuals personality to a more advanced nonbiological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. One of Itskovs projects was the creation of avatars artificial humanoid bodies that would be controlled through brain-computer interface, technologies that would be complementary with uploaded minds. He had funded Koenes work with Carboncopies and in 2013 they organised a conference in New York called Global Futures 2045, aimed, according to its promotional blurb, at the discussion of a new evolutionary strategy for humanity.

When we spoke, Koene was working with another tech entrepreneur named Bryan Johnson, who had sold his automated payment company to PayPal a couple of years back for $800m and who now controlled a venture capital concern called the OS Fund, which, I learned from its website, invests in entrepreneurs working towards quantum leap discoveries that promise to rewrite the operating systems of life. This language struck me as strange and unsettling in a way that revealed something crucial about the attitude toward human experience that was spreading outward from its Bay Area centre a cluster of software metaphors that had metastasised into a way of thinking about what it meant to be a human being.

And it was the sameessential metaphor that lay at the heart of Koenes project: the mind as a piece of software, an application running on the platform of flesh. When he used the term emulation, he was using it explicitly to evoke the sense in which a PCs operating system could be emulated on a Mac, as what he called platform independent code.

The relevant science for whole brain emulation is, as youd expect, hideously complicated, and its interpretation deeply ambiguous, but if I can risk a gross oversimplification here, I will say that it is possible to conceive of the idea as something like this: first, you scan the pertinent information in a persons brain the neurons, the endlessly ramifying connections between them, the information-processing activity of which consciousness is seen as a byproduct through whatever technology, or combination of technologies, becomes feasible first (nanobots, electron microscopy, etc). That scan then becomes a blueprint for the reconstruction of the subject brains neural networks, which is then converted into a computational model. Finally, you emulate all of this on a third-party non-flesh-based substrate: some kind of supercomputer or a humanoid machine designed to reproduce and extend the experience of embodiment something, perhaps, like Natasha Vita-Mores Primo Posthuman.

The whole point of substrate independence, as Koene pointed out to me whenever I asked him what it would be like to exist outside of a human body, and I asked him many times, in various ways was that it would be like no one thing, because there would be no one substrate, no one medium of being. This was the concept transhumanists referred to as morphological freedom the liberty to take any bodily form technology permits.

You can be anything you like, as an article about uploading in Extropy magazine put it in the mid-90s. You can be big or small; you can be lighter than air and fly; you can teleport and walk through walls. You can be a lion or an antelope, a frog or a fly, a tree, a pool, the coat of paint on a ceiling.

What really interested me about this idea was not how strange and far-fetched it seemed (though it ticked those boxes resolutely enough), but rather how fundamentally identifiable it was, how universal. When talking to Koene, I was mostly trying to get to grips with the feasibility of the project and with what it was he envisioned as a desirable outcome. But then we would part company I would hang up the call, or I would take my leave and start walking toward the nearest station and I would find myself feeling strangely affected by the whole project, strangely moved.

Because there was something, in the end, paradoxically and definitively human in this desire for liberation from human form. I found myself thinking often of WB Yeatss Sailing to Byzantium, in which the ageing poet writes of his burning to be free of the weakening body, the sickening heart to abandon the dying animal for the manmade and immortal form of a mechanical bird. Once out of nature, he writes, I shall never take/ My bodily form from any natural thing/ But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make.

One evening, we were sitting outside a combination bar/laundromat/standup comedy venue in Folsom Street a place with the fortuitous name of BrainWash when I confessed that the idea of having my mind uploaded to some technological substrate was deeply unappealing to me, horrifying even. The effects of technology on my life, even now, were something about which I was profoundly ambivalent; for all I had gained in convenience and connectedness, I was increasingly aware of the extent to which my movements in the world were mediated and circumscribed by corporations whose only real interest was in reducing the lives of human beings to data, as a means to further reducing us to profit.

The content we consumed, the people with whom we had romantic encounters, the news we read about the outside world: all these movements were coming increasingly under the influence of unseen algorithms, the creations of these corporations, whose complicity with government, moreover, had come to seem like the great submerged narrative of our time. Given the world we were living in, where the fragile liberal ideal of the autonomous self was already receding like a half-remembered dream into the doubtful haze of history, wouldnt a radical fusion of ourselves with technology amount, in the end, to a final capitulation of the very idea of personhood?

Koene nodded again and took a sip of his beer.

Hearing you say that, he said, makes it clear that theres a major hurdle there for people. Im more comfortable than you are with the idea, but thats because Ive been exposed to it for so long that Ive just got used to it.

Russian billionaire Dmitry Itskov wants to create technologies enabling the transfer of an individuals personality to a more advanced nonbiological carrier. Photograph: Mary Altaffer/AP

In the weeks and months after I returned from San Francisco, I thought obsessively about the idea of whole brain emulation. One morning, I was at home in Dublin, suffering from both a head cold and a hangover. I lay there, idly considering hauling myself out of bed to join my wife and my son, who were in his bedroom next door enjoying a raucous game of Buckaroo. I realised that these conditions (head cold, hangover) had imposed upon me a regime of mild bodily estrangement. As often happens when Im feeling under the weather, I had a sense of myself as an irreducibly biological thing, an assemblage of flesh and blood and gristle. I felt myself to be an organism with blocked nasal passages, a bacteria-ravaged throat, a sorrowful ache deep within its skull, its cephalon. I was aware of my substrate, in short, because my substrate felt like shit.

And I was gripped by a sudden curiosity as to what, precisely, that substrate consisted of, as to what I myself happened, technically speaking, to be. I reached across for the phone on my nightstand and entered into Google the words What is the human… The first three autocomplete suggestions offered What is The Human Centipede about, and then: What is the human body made of, and then: What is the human condition.

It was the second question I wanted answered at this particular time, as perhaps a back door into the third. It turned out that I was 65% oxygen, which is to say that I was mostly air, mostly nothing. After that, I was composed of diminishing quantities of carbon and hydrogen, of calcium and sulphur and chlorine, and so on down the elemental table. I was also mildly surprised to learn that, like the iPhone I was extracting this information from, I also contained trace elements of copper and iron and silicon.

What a piece of work is a man, I thought, what a quintessence of dust.

Some minutes later, my wife entered the bedroom on her hands and knees, our son on her back, gripping the collar of her shirt tight in his little fists. She was making clip-clop noises as she crawled forward, he was laughing giddily and shouting: Dont buck! Dont buck!

With a loud neighing sound, she arched her back and sent him tumbling gently into a row of shoes by the wall and he screamed in delighted outrage, before climbing up again. None of this, I felt, could be rendered in code. None of this, I felt, could be run on any other substrate. Their beauty was bodily, in the most profound sense, in the saddest and most wonderful sense.

I never loved my wife and our little boy more, I realised, than when I thought of them as mammals. I dragged myself, my animal body, out of bed to join them.

To Be a Machine by Mark OConnell is published by Granta (12.99). To order a copy for 11.04 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99