#But with these - these Easily averaged into the double digits each

[sysig]

Btw, this is what editing on this paper has been like (Patreon)

[wavering-eyes]

Age of Fire - April 2024 Banlist

Konami has once again dropped the banlist mid-YCS, this time interrupting YCS Guadalajara. Honestly, it's about time.

Analysis below.

If you've been paying attention at all, you probably know we're still well into FIRE format. Your choices of tier 1 decks were Snake-Eye and Fire King Snake-Eye and that's about it. Both packed similarly highly advantageous engines with 1-card starters and high redundancy alongside up to 18 defensive cards. The mirror became common enough that the pure deck started playing Crossout in main, either to deal with the slew of handtraps or to cut off your opponent's engine in case you went first and didn't need to insulate your own plays.

Snake-Eye Ash goes like, double-digits plus by itself. The pure version has an extra deck of classic combo boss monsters like Apollousa, Borreload Savage Dragon, and Baronne de Fleur which it summons off of lines involving Jet Synchron, which is easily accessible off of Original Sinful Spoils, Snake-Eye Ash, or any card that searches the above two cards, which is probably also in the double digits now. Granted, you needed to see specifically Diabellestar in order to make Savage, but people started playing a lot more copies of her once the addition of Poplar made the engine's high redundancy one of its biggest strengths.

Of these, the pure version was usually superior for reasons that are a bit complex. Compared to pure, the Fire King version has a pretty bad chokepoint at Fire King Island where, if that card was interrupted, you were generally locked out of any Fire King engine cards you didn't draw. This was a problem since the deck started cutting down on the Fire King cards towards the end of the format, usually playing 2-3 Kirin and Ponix, 1 Garunix and 1 each of Arvata/Sanctuary/Island (and maybe Circle), and its second turn disruptive plays were pretty reliant on Garunix being in rotation. Playing more of these wasn't really an option since the Snake-Eye cards were on average a lot better to draw, and there is basically no way to make a real board with just Fire King cards going first. It was also a fair bit weaker to blowouts, both because the deck ends on no Spell/Trap negates (Rangbali was cut pretty early on since it's much worse than Arvata, and because old rulings prevent you from triggering it alongside Garunix) and because so much of the board's interruptions were actually in the GY, so in addition to being weak to Dimension Shifter, you could also blow the deck out with just Soul Release and a playable hand.

Of course it still had plenty of advantages. Arvata being a recursive monster negate is a huge deal in simplified board states, and it was pretty easy to put on board as long as you could resolve Garunix, either by popping it from deck on your turn to summon something back and summoning Arvata later with Promethean Princess (or by destroying Kirin), or in hands where you didn't draw any other Normal Summons, etc. Naturally you could also start with something like, pop Kirin for Island, search Arvata, Special Summon it and then use any of your myriad of ways to put Snake-Eye Ash on board and win the game off of that alone, now with additional insulation against hand traps. Random hands where you drew tons of Fire King engine could actually put up negates or destructive disruption on turn 0 since Kirin is a Quick Effect. Kirin is all kinds of insane; Infinite Impermanence sees near-universal play and Kirin basically invalidates it since you can just destroy the card in response and it will still resolve, possibly triggering one of your many float effects...

On that note, Imperm saw that much play because successfully using it on Snake-Eye Ash meant that your opponent would then have to jump through hoops to summon Oak or another copy of Ash to get out Flamberge, sort of killing two birds with one stone. Of course, this deck had ways to deal with that too... If you drew Bonfire, you could Bonfire for Poplar to grab Original Sinful Spoils, then make Linkuriboh and send Linkuriboh for cost, summoning a Snake-Eye Ash from deck that could be protected from targeting with Linkuriboh's GY effect. It's hard to put into words how frustrating this was; people wanted Linkuriboh banned because of it. Not to mention that it was a recursive Link Monster that enabled easy access to S:P Little Knight.

Generally this led to end boards with obscene amounts of card advantage. In the Fire King deck, just Snake-Eye Ash alone can lead to something like Amblowhale + Flamberge Dragon with I:P Masquerena in the Spell/Trap zone and Kirin in hand, which doesn't seem like much at first, but that's Flamberge summoning I:P which makes S:P, banishing an opponent's card while summoning back both Snake-Eye Ash and Ponix, searching cards off of both. Or using Kirin to pop Amblowhale, triggering that and to summon back a Link Monster and making a giant Apollousa that still floats into tons of advantage (you can summon a Sunlight Wolf underneath the EMZ to get another card back, etc). And yet there are still lines where you can trigger Garunix to pop Arvata, then summon and destroy Kirin to summon that back...

What you were giving up for this was basically raw disruptive power. These decks probably have ten Extra Deck cards in common but those differences are all a huge deal; the pure deck's lines into Formula Synchron leading to Baronne made on the opponent's turn with itself and Flamberge Dragon similarly led to a lot of advantage, of course there was still Savage if you saw Diabellestar, and the worst you could end on was usually I:P with Flamberge, which still lets your entire engine recur.

What you might not know is that those decks actually did have counters. Both were theoretically shut down pretty hard by Dimension Shifter, and since Floowandereeze got Swallow's Cowrie last set, lots of people went back to birds at first, though they naturally fell off in the same way and for the same reasons Floowandereeze players always do: it's too inconsistent for its own good, and it was always highly reliant on seeing non-engine to go second. Both versions of Snake-Eye were also pretty bad at removing big Towers monsters, so a few people experimented with Raidraptors to minor success.

I don't have much else to say about it, but Voiceless Voice also saw a fair bit of play. I don't think it was ever particularly good into Snake-Eye though, it just sort of does okay against it and bullies everything else.

There's also been a recent uptick in people playing straight-up stun, with and without Runick cards, and it's easy to see why as well. Runick engine is basically all going-second cards, all of which are useful in some way against the board. Flashing Fire and Freezing Curses are useful for pretty obvious reasons, but Destruction threatens Fire King Island, Sanctuary, any cards that Flamberge intends to summon, and any cards Set off of Diabellestar. The engine of these decks doesn't directly threaten Runick Fountain in any really effective way--Kirin can pop it potentially the chain after it hits field, so you can draw a card by protecting it with Hugin, and Baronne and Savage can negate it, but assuming you can't deal with those monsters directly, you could just get the card back off of Geri.

Why so many people are on pure stun is beyond me, but... yeah, the engine is not great if you can't use the GY or Special Summon. Better win some die rolls.

So that's where we're at. Two deck format, both playing mostly the same cards, so people liked to call it Tier 0 anyways. Snake-Eye cards both out-advantage every other deck and out-interrupt all of them due to the massive number of hand traps and random card draw from things like Wanted! and Formula Synchron.

Before we get into the list proper, for no reason in particular, here's a little snippet from the wishlist included in my last banlist post...

Banned: Baronne de Fleur Baronne is miles better than almost every other Synchro released in years. I think the only deck where it's actually healthy is Swordsoul, and it would be a shame for that deck to lose this, but it's way too strong. This is also a wide hit, it hurts the combo variants of R-ACE and every version of Mannadium and Infernoble. Hot RDA King Calamity King Calamity lock should not be a thing, I don't really care how good/bad Centur-Ion is.

And let me take a brief victory lap for predicting both Ishizu millers getting banned, Air Lifter to 1, Sharvara to 1, and some hit to Infernoble.

Without further ado...

Banned Linkuriboh

I think I made a good enough case for this above. With Linkuriboh banned, Snake-Eye decks will have a lot harder time dodging targeted negation and making S:P on later turns without committing more cards from the Extra Deck. Granted, I think they'll just play Relinquished Anima instead, but that card is basically only useful once and isn't a recursive menace like this one.

Baronne de Fleur

I won't say I particularly expected this to happen but I agree word for word with what I said earlier. Baronne is a lot better than almost every Synchro printed before or since, it's totally generic, it's got an omni-negate, it pops cards on your turn to push through boards (and enable float effects if you're Mannadium), it's got 3000 ATK so it's not trivial to out, and once you've used the one negate, you can put it back in your Extra Deck to summon it again! There were a couple of variants of Ghoti I was testing that would literally just make Baronne for the pop and to synchro with Arionpos a second time, not really caring whether the negate ended up getting used or not.

Pure Snake-Eye loses an interruption for this, but lower-tier decks are even worse off. Mannadium now hard loses to Nibiru. Swordsoul loses to both that and Impermanence, since half the time you stuck early Baronne, you were basically just trying to protect Mo Ye. It's gonna be rough for pretty much any Synchro-focused deck (well, except Resonator) since this saw play in every single one that could make it.

Borreload Savage Dragon

Another hit for Pure Snake-Eye, Savage was by far the best Level 8 synchro in any deck that played Link Monsters. (Incidentally this also excludes Resonator, which would otherwise happily take an omni-negate on a Level 8 DARK Dragon Synchro.) This also saw some play in Mannadium piles where you were hoping to summon it with, big surprise, Diabellestar and Jet Synchron.

And of course, its home for the past several years has been Dragon Link, where you could make it off of just Rokket Tracer. That deck now ends on no omni-negates; it doesn't necessarily hard lose to Nibiru now since it kind of always did (your best answer was to hope your opponent uses it too early or to stick Spheres, pass, hope your opponent uses Nibiru and hope you could make a better board afterwards).

These lines suffered a bit already since Linkuriboh was usually the Link Monster you'd put in GY to enable this (outside of Dragon Link), but Savage being banned dug a void into a lot of decks that one copy of Psy-Framelord Omega probably can't fill.

For the record, I think this card was well-designed, at least compared to Baronne (notably, it doesn't destroy the card it negates, and it basically never played under Nibiru), but if we want generic Extra Deck negates out of the game, so be it.

Summon Limit

Konami hit Rivalry, TCBOO, and Gozen to 1 on the last list and everyone immediately started playing sets of the next best floodgates, Summon Limit and Anti-Spell Fragrance. And yes, this card is worse than all of those, but it's toxic all the same and will not be missed.

Honestly, great job so far from Konami. I'm at worst positive on all of these bans.

Limited Archnemeses Protos

And just when I give them credit, they give me reason to worry. Protos was last seen two years ago in Swordsoul where it could be searched off of Emergence and activated calling DARK to both wipe the board of DARK monsters and to activate a lingering effect that prevents them from being Summoned. (As a reminder, this card has to declare an Attribute that is currently on the field, so DARK was always available since this card itself is DARK, but you could make plays to put other Attributes on field, at least in theory, though you'd be negging yourself.) This was a lot more relevant then since Verte was still legal and everyone was playing DPE or Dragoon in everything. Nowadays it's a little bit diminished in impact since most engines aren't DARK, but a lot of staples are. This card stops Diabellestar, S:P, I:P, and Accesscode Talker from hitting field and for that reason alone it is concerning.

As I mentioned, this last saw play in Swordsoul since it's a Wyrm searchable off of Emergence if you control a Synchro, but Nemeses have their own search card--Nemeses Flag, a Level 2 Pyro monster that summons itself by shuffling back a banished card. That card is now searchable off of Bonfire and Infernal Flame Banshee, so you could potentially see this in other decks as well.

I'm gonna make a wild claim here: I think this card will see play, and I don't think Swordsoul is gonna be the deck that makes it good. It might take a few years but this is a very degenerate card in the right format.

Tidal, Dragon Ruler of Waterfalls

Tidal is the last Dragon Ruler to be unbanned and it's definitely the best one... the hand effect triggers Atlanteans while giving you a totally generic Foolish Burial, and as an added bonus you get a Level 7 body on later turns to combine with Mermails or the like.

Of course, this was all true in HAT format, which was the last time Tidal was legal, and I don't think Mermails will be making an impact even with this in tow. It's got some potential but I don't expect much immediately, and I think the Rulers could all go to 3 with no negative impact on the game, and minimal impact in general.

Thunder Dragon Colossus

In another retro format throwback, Colossus was last seen in Eternal format in Danger! Thunder which used the draw power of Dangers to pitch Thunder Dragon monsters in order to enable summons of chaos monsters like White Dragon Wyverburster and Black Dragon Collapserpent. Colossus was an essential part of the end board, both for being an easy to summon Level 8 body and for being an indestructible Mistake on legs, and the deck usually played two for this reason. On top of that, since its alternate summoning condition tributed the monster from field, this would also trigger Darkest Diabolos in variants that played it in order to rip another card out of hand.

This deck's boards were some of the best of the entire VRAINS era; you could open a hand like Batteryman Solar and Wyverburster and end on Spheres + Hot Red/Crystal Wing + Colossus + Hope Harbinger + Starliege Photon Blast Dragon (boosted by Saryuja Skull Dread so everything but Spheres is untargetable), and potentially more interruptions or hand rips depending on the other cards you saw. This was pre-Shifter and Dark Ruler No More (at least during that year's NAWCQ) so that wasn't a consideration, but lots of people played Droll and Lancea to interrupt the combo and later variants just didn't care.

It this card healthy? No, not really. If you open a hand with a lot of search cards, you're shit out of luck. However, we've got a lot better ways to deal with it now than we did then, and there's not really a deck that currently exists that would want to play Colossus, so one will have to be reinvented. But I fully expect that it will. Maybe Bystial Danger! Thunder?

For your consideration... this card was never legal alongside Nemeses Corridor, a Level 4 Thunder monster that activates in hand to shuffle back a banished monster and summon itself to the board. That provides both the body and the condition necessary to summon this card. Nemeses Corridor is searchable off of both Nemeses Flag and Cupid Pitch.

Majespecter Unicorn - Kirin

Another throwback, this card has been banned since, what, 2016? It never saw play in Majespecter since the deck's scales wouldn't let you Pendulum Summon it, but was a generic recursive untargetable disruption in other Pendulum decks, sort of like a less bricky and powerful Apex Avian since it was also a low scale.

This card's reasons for being on the banlist have been very pedestrian for years, and Majespecter just got a new wave of support that lets them actually summon this card, so it's definitely time for this to come back.

Now someone tell the guys making the OCG banlist, clearly they haven't noticed. This card is still banned there and it's been months.

Chicken Game

This card has a lot of text for what is essentially Upstart Goblin on a Field Spell, so I'll repeat here what I said about that when it went to 3:

Most decks play hand traps and seeing Upstart going second when it could have been a hand trap is bad. This card is also unbelievably bad into Droll & Lock Bird which has seen near-constant Side Deck play since 2019, so that doesn't help either. The only reason you'd play this is for synergy or deck-thinning in decks that simply don't play going-second cards, so I would expect this to see play in Dark World (the illusion of free choice: you will still lose to Droll), Endymion decks (since those cards no longer see play in Pendulum piles) and Sky Striker (mega-cope) and very little else.

I don't know if Dark World ended up playing Upstart, by the way; it could easily have 40 cards it actually wants to play. Upstart is very good in Sky Striker and this is significantly worse since this doesn't put a Spell in the GY unless you play Area Zero over it or send it with Multirole or Linkage, and Linkage is usually already free or better saved to dodge interruptions anyways.

That said, there are a few points of obvious synergy. This is a pretty good card to send for any card that has to send something else to activate, such as, for example... Snake-Eye Ash's second effect, Diabellestar's summoning condition, Original Sinful Spoils' cost... But I would not expect to see this along Snake-Eye cards; the Fire King version has had plenty of opportunities to play Tenki for Arvata and has declined every time, and their own Field Spell is really good already.

Anti-Spell Fragrance

See Summon Limit. This card was worse at disrupting hands of monsters, but much better at disrupting hands of search cards like Bonfire and Fire King Island. It was also better against blowout cards like Lightning Storm and Harpie's Feather Duster. Given the speed of the game, this was basically Imperial Order, and I think this should have been banned alongside Summon Limit, but one is better than three.

And no, Pendulum players, we are not back, not as long as Flamberge is in the format.

Semi-Limited Armageddon Knight

This card's been up and down the list tons of times. It was last hit after the Danger! Dark World deck debuted, where this card enabled a one-card FTK via Cannon Soldier, but it saw a bunch of play before that by dumping Destrudo to make Ancient Fairy Dragon or Yazi. It's a good card but doesn't fit into any decks right now. I would say that some Thunder Dragon combo deck might play this, but Batteryman Solar was better in that deck anyways, and eventually Danger! Thunder cut all of its Normal Summons for Crusadia monsters anyways.

Purrely Delicious Memory

If this deck ever becomes good, Goblin cards destroy it, Book of Moon helps a lot, etc. This is the best Memory card in most cases since it most directly enables turn 1 5-material Expurrely Noir summons and buffs its stats while doing so, but the deck is a lot weaker now than it ever has been in the past, and I swear around 2/3 of the time I lose to this deck, it's because the player drew a floodgate.

Unlimited Destiny HERO - Malicious

This was also last seen at 3 in that Danger! Dark World deck, and... yeah, this card is basically the reason you'd play Armageddon Knight instead of Batteryman Solar as your starter.

This card has outlived tons of decks and it will probably outlive me. It's been up and down the list several times at 1, 2, and 3, forming an infinite cycle of getting put to 3, only to enable some insane combo that proves it should have stayed at 2, and consequently getting hit again.

Nowadays most of its enablers are gone. Nobody's gonna be using Mali as an engine for Tribute Summon fodder, I wouldn't expect it to see much play in Synchro decks, and the best Link-2 to make with it and Armageddon Knight was Isolde, which is now banned. That said, it's seen play in HERO ever since they got Cross Crusader and subsequently Denier (which might as well be a HERO-exclusive third copy of this), and that deck will definitely appreciate it. If this saw play outside of HERO it would be in a pile deck or something like Tearlament that wants to make Beatrice by any means necessary.

Orcust Harp Horror

I said last time that this could go to 3 with no downsides and that's still the case. Bystials dunk on this deck and we still have all of them but Magnamhut at 3.

I think Orcusts have a chance still since the engine is so strong and accessible (not to mention they also played Armageddon Knight), but any Synchro focused variants lost Savage Dragon and these cards are still bricks. I think the best variant so far has been Orcust Horus and that seems alright if not exactly inspiring.

Speedroid Terrortop

Speedroid doesn't really appreciate the difference between this at 2 and 3 since it was mostly getting summoned off of Rubber Band Shooter, but it's not nothing. Unfortunately they also lost Baronne, and it's not looking likely that they'll be able to come back from that.

If the deck ever becomes real, I would expect to see this in Goblin Riders as a free Rank 3 engine, since that deck hardly seems to play its own maindeck monsters. It also appreciates a quick Gossip Shadow to play around handtraps, Droll aside, and interrupting Terrortop was virtually always a bad idea.

In short, very strong card which very few decks want to play.

Sky Striker Mobilize - Engage

Oh god yes.

Engage was last seen at 3 in late Eternal Format as a part of Sky Striker Orcust, since the one copy of Hornet Drones could make Knightmare Mermaid which did your entire combo, and any other Spells you happened to put in the GY could enable free draws. To its credit, that deck actually played several other Sky Striker spells for disruption since you could make a real end board with just a single monster in the EMZ and a bunch of backrow.

In the pure deck it caused eternal frustration, since this card being at 3 and not being once per turn meant that your free draw off of Engage could draw you into another Engage, which might draw you into another Engage... Hands like that were basically the only times Striker was threatening going first, floodgates aside, and well, here we are again. That version of the deck didn't even have 3 Kagari!

I should also mention that there's been some recent experimentation with a small Sky Striker engine in Snake-Eye decks (I have reason to believe that Kagari being a fire matters to this somehow, but how exactly, I'm not certain), but it's sort of fallen off. Maybe this is what brings it back?

More importantly, we have full power Striker back, well, full power with 1 Drones, which is a reasonable concession. I don't think it's going to see much success but it will definitely see play, and I will certainly be playing it. Not to mention, Sky Striker Ace - Camellia is just around the corner, with a speculative release coming in this year's Battles of Legend set.

END OF LIST

Here's where I pull the rug: I think some version of Snake-Eye is still the best deck and I don't think these changes help any currently existing decks deal with it at all, Runick aside. That said. This banlist gives a lot of old decks toys to play with, and I'm really excited to see what the real deckbuilders can do with pile enablers like Colossus and Protos back, even if the cards themselves are degenerate.

To summarize, though:

Pure Snake-Eye lost its entire Synchro line. I did some testing with Psy-Framelord Omega and Bystial Dis Pater or Chengying in place of Baronne and Savage, but going for double handrip is not practical and the board overall is much worse against blowouts. (With this in mind, Evenly kind of cooks every deck right now, apart from heavily under-extended Fire King. I would expect it to see a lot of play until Tenpai comes out.)

Fire King Snake-Eye lost Linkuriboh and that's about it, so it could see more play compared to pure. The pure version also lost this so you can now pretty safely imperm Ash until they decide to start playing Sauravis or something.

Voiceless Voice is untouched and still gets dunked on by Bystials and blowout cards, and I think the Fire King matchup seems really bad.

Labrynth, as always, is probably okay. Skill Drain hasn't been good lately, but the engine is still very strong. Fire King is a pretty bad matchup though.

I don't think the Yubel decks are even slightly real until they get the new fusion. I also don't think HERO is real until it gets that, assuming it's fine cutting Faris and Cross Crusader for a counter to Nibiru and Droll, which remains to be seen. (The combo is A HERO Lives for Prisma, revealing the new fusion to dump Yubel, then contact fusing.)

Almost every deck that used Synchro as its main mechanic is dead, Centur-Ion and Resonator aside. I expect to see some amount of success from Runick decks, but Synchro-focused builds like Bystial Runick are not looking great without Baronne.

Striker best deck. Raye is bae. We are so fucking back.

Thanks for reading.

[flutteragency]

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Instead of investing costs on design and development practices, prioritizing quality of working of the application will be more fruitful. You can invest in thorough testing of your applications, which can give you quality assurance and ensure a smooth and steady user experience. This investment is important because it can help in identifying bugs, crashes, and ultimately, user dissatisfaction.

Remember

Fitting the needs of your mobile application with your desired budget is a balancing act. With careful consideration of the features, platforms, designs, integrations and maintenance needs, you can make informed decisions that can bring your app imagination to life, while fitting your budget. Exploration is the key to successful and cost-friendly app development. Don’t shy away from exploring cost-effective solutions while leveraging available resources wisely and inaugurating the foundation of your mobile app.

The mobile app development realm is constantly evolving, with newer features being introduced every now and then. By recognizing your exact needs and finding the best, cost-reasonable solutions for it, you can save hugely on your app development costs.

What you need to keep in mind while creating an app is opting for a user-centric approach. By doing that, you can consciously achieve your desired results and witness your app imaginations turn to reality.

[foodnutra]

How to Make Dried Cashew Last Longer? — FoodNutra

Dried cashews are a great way to add a crunchy, savory note to any dish. However, if you don’t store them correctly and they get damp or warm, they can become rancid and spoil quickly. This guide will show you how to make your dried cashew last longer so that you can use them in recipes for months instead of days!

For more info: How to Make Dried Cashew Last Longer? - FoodNutra

Never Keep in the Pantry

Never store cashews in the pantry.

The pantry is too hot and humid, which can lead to mold growth on the cashews. If you don’t want to throw away your money, you’ll have to make sure that you don’t leave them there too long. In addition to being too humid, the pantry also tends to be dryer than other parts of your home (especially if there’s an air conditioning unit nearby), so it’s best not to risk letting your precious nuts get dried out!

Store in an airtight container or food saver bag, with a silica gel packet or oxygen absorber

Store in an airtight container or food saver bag, with a silica gel packet or oxygen absorber.

Keep cashews in an airtight container or food saver bag, with a silica gel packet or oxygen absorber. Airtight containers are the best way to keep your cashews fresh for long periods of time (more on this below). If you don’t have one on hand and don’t want to buy one, use another sealed container instead–but make sure it’s as tight as possible so that no light gets through!

Don’t store them near other foods with strong odors (like onions) because they’ll absorb those odors easily! Also be careful about storing them too close together; if two cashews touch each other for too long during storage then they might become moldy faster than normal because there’s more surface area exposed between the two pieces than if only one was exposed directly against air molecules available at room temperature levels without any kind of barrier like glass separating them physically from each other first off before anything else could happen inside either piece individually plus both pieces together would create double-digit percentages regarding overall surface area coverage which means greater risk factors involved later down line when conditions aren’t ideal anymore either due mostly likely factor being humidity levels rising higher than average over time due lackadaisical carelessness by consumers who don’t realize what consequences come along side ignorance towards basic precautions needed daily living conditions.”

Keep in a dark, cool place

Dark and cool is the way to go when it comes to storing your cashews. Keep them in an airtight container and store them in a dark area with low humidity, like a pantry or cupboard that’s not directly exposed to sunlight. If you have room in your refrigerator, that will also work just fine!

Use a Dehydrator to Dry Faster

If you have a dehydrator, then it’s easy to dry cashews.

First, place the cashews on a non-stick baking sheet and spread them out evenly. Then put them in your dehydrator at 95 degrees Fahrenheit for 12 hours or until they’re completely dry and brittle. You can tell when they’re done because they’ll be light brown in color and feel crunchy when broken open (like how raw almonds would).

You can also use this method if you don’t have a dehydrator: simply place your cashews directly on top of an oven rack with nothing underneath it (no pan), then turn on the oven to its lowest setting–about 200 degrees Fahrenheit–and let them sit there overnight until they’re completely dried out and brittle.

Dried cashews are a great snack, but they can go bad quickly if you don’t store them correctly. If you follow these tips, you can make sure your cashews stay fresh for longer!

For more info: How to Make Dried Cashew Last Longer? - FoodNutra

[modelsbytalias]

Excel: An Introduction and Tutorial.

Excel from Microsoft is a robust spreadsheet programme that has proven useful for both personal and professional use. Learn the fundamentals of Excel whether you're a student, a working professional, or just someone interested in improving your data management abilities. To get you started on the road to spreadsheet mastery, this article will cover Excel's essential principles and functionalities.

Getting Acquainted with Excel's User Interface

When you launch Excel, you'll see a grid of rows and columns that you may use to create cells. A unique reference, such as "A1," is assigned to each cell, where the letter stands for the column and the number stands for the row. The Ribbon is located at the top of the screen, and each of its tabs provides access to a different set of functions and tools for manipulating your data.Excel Vlookup is actually very good.

Data Input

You may start typing into a cell after clicking on it in Excel. Enter any combination of words, digits, and/or dates. Press the "Enter" key to advance to the next empty cell.Xlookup has been excellent. To make changes to the contents of a cell, double-click on it, then type in your new data and hit "Enter" again.

Cell Layout Modifications

Excel's numerous formatting tools allow you to give your numbers a polished, well-organized look. Excel Match Function will always help you. Change the font, colour, border, and orientation of your text, numbers, and dates. Choose "Format Cells" from the context menu that appears when you right-click a cell.

4.Fundamental arithmetic procedures

Excel is capable of performing arithmetic functions such as adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. Add "+", subtract "-", multiply "*", and divide "/" to perform basic mathematical operations. You can find Excel If Function easily.

Purposes

You can execute sophisticated calculations and analyses with the help of Excel's many in-built features. Standard operations consist of SUM, AVERAGE, MAX, MIN, COUNT, and IF. Hlookup is also the best. To call a function, enter "=" followed by the name of the function and any arguments it takes. As you type, Excel will offer recommendations to help you along.

Function

AutoFill is a time-saving and labor-reducing function in Microsoft Excel. Countifs Function In Excel is used widely. You may fill in neighbouring cells with a pattern or series by entering data (such as numbers, dates, or text) in a column or row, selecting the cells, and dragging the fill handle.

Refinement by Category

You can sort and filter your data to get it in order for analysis. Sumifs Function In Excel has the finest results. Select the data you want to sort and then use the "Sort A to Z" or "Sort Z to A" button on the Ribbon to arrange the columns alphabetically or numerically, respectively. You may select certain statistics to display depending on certain criteria by clicking the "Filter" button. You can find Index Match Multiple Criteria.

Graphs and Diagrams

Excel's chart and graph features make it easy to see patterns and trends in your data. To create a graph or chart from your selected data, click the "Insert" tab and pick the appropriate option from the drop-down menu. Subtotal Function in Excel is indeed outstanding. Excel's charting tools include both bar and line graphs, as well as pie charts.

[aadiyogi123]

Streamline Your Workspace with Effective Meeting Room Management

Introduction:

In today's fast-paced business environment, efficient meeting room management is crucial for optimizing workspace utilization, enhancing productivity, and creating a seamless experience for employees and visitors alike. With the right tools and strategies in place, organizations can streamline their meeting room booking process, ensure smooth operations, and make the most out of their workspace resources. One such tool that has revolutionized the way businesses handle their meeting spaces is meeting room management software.

Meeting Room Management: Simplifying Space Allocation and Beyond

Meeting room management software, such as hipla.io, offers a comprehensive solution for effectively managing meeting spaces within an organization. It simplifies the entire process of reserving, tracking, and optimizing meeting rooms, leading to improved resource utilization, reduced conflicts, and enhanced overall productivity. By incorporating intelligent features and automation, meeting room management software helps businesses take control of their workspace environment.

Key Features and Benefits of Meeting Room Management Software

1. Seamless Booking Process: Meeting room management software enables employees to easily find and reserve available meeting rooms through an intuitive user interface. By providing real-time visibility into room availability, capacities, and amenities, employees can make informed decisions when scheduling meetings, reducing the chances of conflicts or double bookings.

2. Visitor Management Integration: Many meeting room management software platforms offer integration with visitor management systems. This integration simplifies the process of registering and managing visitors attending meetings. Hosts can pre-register visitors, capture their details, and ensure a smooth check-in experience, enhancing overall visitor management within the organization.

3. Resource Optimization: Meeting room management software allows organizations to gain insights into meeting room utilization patterns and trends. By analyzing data on room occupancy rates, average meeting durations, and peak usage hours, businesses can optimize their space allocation, identify underutilized rooms, and make informed decisions about workspace planning and expansion.

4. Automated Notifications and Reminders: Meeting room management software eliminates the need for manual communication by automatically sending notifications and reminders to meeting organizers and participants. This ensures that everyone involved is well-informed about meeting details, reducing the chances of missed appointments and confusion.

5. Integration with Digital Signage: Some meeting room management software platforms offer integration with digital signage solutions. This allows businesses to display real-time meeting room availability and schedules on digital displays outside each meeting room. It eliminates the need for physical signage and empowers employees to quickly locate available rooms.

Conclusion:

Effective meeting room management is a vital aspect of creating a productive and collaborative workspace environment. By adopting a meeting room management software like hipla.io, businesses can streamline their meeting room booking process, optimize resource utilization, and enhance the overall meeting experience for employees and visitors. With features like seamless booking, visitor management integration, resource optimization, automated notifications, and digital signage integration, meeting room management software empowers organizations to make the most out of their meeting spaces and unlock the true potential of their workspace.

[ayejayque]

The Real Estate Markets in China, Japan, & the USA

The Real Estate Market in China The Chinese real estate market has undergone a real transformation. In the not-too-distant past, Chinese workers were guaranteed secure housing by their communist administration. The new drift in Chinese real estate has made real estate too expensive even for the highly-paid middle-class workers making it a different ball game altogether. This is a complete shift from socialism to capitalism. Communism The Chinese real estate market is a tale of the rise of staunch free enterprise in a communist state. In 1978, Chinese real estate had zero prices. This was because the land of China was possessed by the government. The Chinese constitution banned private proprietorship and transfer of land. All buy or sell transactions were forbidden. All the workers were government employees. They were entitled to housing on the basis of their seniority, number of years of service, and size of their household among other aspects. It was impossible to predict that China would one day, become one of the main real estate markets in the world. It would end up being a major case used in discussions relating to real estate bubbles. Denationalization takes over Things began to alter in socialist China. The economy no longer remained communist in 1988 when the constitution was revised. Laws that did not permit private possession of land now stood modified. The latest laws separated the land into 2 classes: - One category was for lower-income households. These houses were to be sold on a cost-plus foundation. Also, the administration would keep a firm check on the expenses incurred in constructing these houses. Developers who created and implemented these plans without any glitches would get tax credits. Ideally, these houses were sold at 5% above the cost price to low-income households. There were obstructive conditions that made it hard to meet the requirements for such a home. Also, selling your own home was prohibited by the government for a period of at least 5 years after its acquisition. - The other category of houses being sold was commodity housing. This real estate market was driven by the markets i.e., investors could easily purchase and sell their properties at whatever prices they liked. One could also rent out these properties. The rent control act of 1994 finished the transformation of a part of the Chinese property market from socialistic to capitalistic. Property prosperity The next 20 years witnessed property booms the likes of which, the world never saw. The government-controlled affordable homes in the economy had steadily declined. They were replaced by commodity housing. The prices and the supply of commodity houses have greatly increased across China. The average price rise over 20 years has been in double digits each year. This is an 8-fold price increase over 2 decades. In some cities, the means have been as high as 26% compounded annual growth rate! This can be one of the biggest and longest-lasting bull runs in any property market worldwide. Expensive prices made real estate go beyond the reach of the working-class population. This encouraged the Chinese government to once again endorse firmer laws. Firm laws on 2nd and 3rd home The Chinese government has passed firm laws to control the acquisition of second and third homes in most cities. These laws were passed to guarantee that poor first-home debtors were not facing rivalry from wealthy second or third-home debtors. The laws necessitate those individuals buying their second home to make a down payment of at least 60% of their property value. If the person is buying a third home, they would be given no financing and would be required to pay the whole sum in cash. This law had serious consequences on housing sales in tier-1 and tier-2 towns. The quickly rising house prices swiftly saw an improvement. China witnessed its first real estate bust in these times! Stimulus Package In 2008, a stimulus package to revive the banking sector and encourage lending was awarded in China. This increased real estate prices, which the government tried for so long, to subdue. The banks were full of cash and real estate developers wanted loans. As such, a lot of cash was lent to them at a wild pace. For some time, the bust became a boom, which was extremely short-lived. Misallocation The Chinese developers constructed huge gated societies and towns. These were built for the higher-class people. But the elite class has not bought these communities. China now has uninhabited new ghost towns which have never been lived in. They are one of the largest misallocations of capital in the history of the centrally managed Chinese economy. Presently, some Chinese cities are seeing a slump in their property prices while the prices have deteriorated in some other towns. If the market sentiment is to be believed China is bound to see a rectification of real estate values. The Real Estate Market in Japan The Japanese real estate tale is significant as well as unique. These stories include mentions of periods of booms and busts. The property market downwards for a few years only to mend a few years in the future. This Japanese story is very different. The Japanese market saw a bull run never seen earlier. This continued till 1991. Then came the slump! Since 1991, Japan has seen a collapse of epic magnitude. The property estimates have fallen and have stayed there for 20 years despite the wild hard work of the Japanese administration to recover them. The 30-year-long economic miracle After WW2, the Japanese economy was practically wrecked. They had been fighting for years and as such their economy had hurt a lot. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been bombed by the United States. The worker morale was at an all-time low.  The Japanese economy post-war experienced an economic boom. Japanese businesses started making major progress in the electronics and automobile marketplaces of the world. This led to increased success in the economy. The high success created jobs for many Japanese workers. Japanese companies consider workers to be a part of their family. They never fire them. This gave rise to augmented buying power. By the late 70s and early 80s, Japan had become the second-largest economy in the world. It was slowly moving closer to the United States. To many economic observers, this was an economic miracle that Japan had pulled off in 30 years. During this time the Japanese real estate market saw a stable upward boom. The prices were being driven up at around the rate of economic growth and no one anticipated any sort of bubble being formed. Tax Laws improved In the 1980s, Japan decided to relax its previously traditional property markets. The Japanese property markets had a draconian tax system regime that prohibited any modification in the possession of properties. If a property was sold in under 2 years after its purchase, taxes we over 90% of the capital appreciation! If the same property was sold between 2-5 years after its purchase, around 75% of the capital gains made by the stakeholders were due to the Japanese government as tax. If the stakeholders sold the property after 5 years, 50% of the capital appreciation was due as tax. The transaction costs of the Japanese real estate market made it useless for anyone else except genuine home buyers to buy a house. Come the 80s and the Japanese government revoked a lot of these rules to fashion an open real estate market to suit the requirements of the open Japanese economy. Stock Market & Real Estate Market Because of ease in the rules and laws, a circumstance was shaped wherein the real estate and the stock market started feeding off one another. Many people ended up selling highly valued stocks to acquire real estate. This shaped a demand for real estate that was increasing in value. Many real estate investors would liquidate and once again buy stocks and shares of Japanese businesses. Both these asset classes were outperforming every other investment there is. As such, they attracted more and more money. The value of both these asset classes went sky-high! By 1991, real estate estimates in Tokyo were several times higher than rival valuations in more wealthy cities like New York and London. The Real Estate crash of the 90s The 90s saw the end of the real estate market in Japan. The Bank of Japan raised interest rates. This was done to control the inflation that was triggered by the loose fiscal policy that it had followed for years. The money supply in the market became tight. The mortgages became more expensive to deal with. The Japanese real estate rapidly went down. This created the ultimate downward spiral. Property prices ended up plummeting more than 64% in Japan in just 10 years. Stakeholders and homeowners, who were highly leveraged, lost a noteworthy portion of their funds as prices constantly crumbled. Worth Half the Price in 2015 By 2015, the Japanese housing market had still not improved. The Japanese held its interest rates near 0% for many years on end. They have also had a quantitative easing program. That too, has been ineffective in raising the prices of the real estate market again. Compared to 1991, the present value of today is 50% of its value. If you had participated in Japanese real estate in 1985 and wanted to cash out after 30 years, you would have ZERO capital increase!  The Real Estate Market in the USA The USA is one of the most advanced countries in the world. It has the most see-through market system in the world. Most world economies are entangled with the US economy. This means that a small movement in the USA markets sends ripples worldwide. In 2007, a local real estate crisis in the US markets became a catastrophe of global magnitudes and endangered the financial system of the world! In this section, I will describe the two major boom-bust cycles that the US real estate sector has seen since the 1980s. Phase 1: The Bust The American real estate market was seeing a bust from the 1980s onwards. This was formed by the Savings and Loan disaster that was existing in the markets during this time. Before the 1980s, most of the homes being bought in the US were being bought as a result of money on loan from these Savings and Loans establishments. In the 1980s the Fed understood that price rises were slipping out of control. The interest rates were then increased by a staggering 20%! This interest rate hike almost wiped out the savings and credit industry. They could not attract new capital at these rates. The number of people who afford this rate to buy a home went down significantly. It brought a crash in the real estate market in the US. The savings and loans catastrophe were one of the lowest points in the history of US real estate. Even then, no one could predict what was to follow. Phase 2: The Manmade Boom The 90s saw the recovery from the savings and loan catastrophe. These institutions had become bankrupt. Some other financial organizations were also under severe monetary pressure. The lending was at an all-time low. The government passed many laws to raise lending and in particular, lending to the real estate segment. Soon, the radical motive of satisfying the so-called “America Dream” took over all wisdom. The legislators were inflexible in creating rules that would allow more people to purchase homes. The long-term consequences of these rules were simply not understood. One of the largest boom periods in American history followed. This was enabled by the 1% interest rate that was prevalent in the Us then. Banks were instructed by law to lower their loaning standards to confirm that they book as many loans as is probable! The Real Estate market was swamped with buyers who had a lot of money. They were willing to buy properties that appreciated in value making their proprietors rich. This lasted from the late 1990s to 2007. It was manmade. It was the rest of the US policies. It is often referred to as the manufactured boom. Phase 3: The Crisis 2007, saw perhaps the biggest financial crisis that the world had ever seen. It originated from the US real estate industry. The manufactured boom soon became a manufactured catastrophe. The interest rates in the economy were raised again. This increase created an extraordinary disaster called the subprime mortgage crisis. The increased interest rates caused the once-a-month payments of loans to go up. Many homeowners could not afford an increased mortgage. The houses had to be foreclosed. The declining value of the houses created an excess supply in which the prices were diminishing even more. During this atrocity, almost most worldwide markets were badly affected. The US real estate market lost almost half of its value. It was the worst hit. Phase 4: The Market Beyond the Crisis The US real estate market has been healing post-2008. This has been a slow process. The severe drops that were seen by the real estate market are now being swapped by a stable rise. This time, government intervention in the market is negligible. This moderate growth is not being driven by insanely low-interest rates. Some pundits see the Quantitative Easing policies being followed in the US as the main culprit. However, nothing can be overwhelmingly said till now. The US real estate sector has had its ups and downs. Real estate is not the safest investment as people this it is. It is as risky as any other investment, if not more.    Read the full article

[thxnews]

Apple Report: Last 2 years income for App Store developers Increased by 71%

  An independent study conducted by economists at Analysis Group found that small developers on the App Store grew their businesses and reached more customers around the world, even outpacing larger developers. With the support of a wide range of App Store tools and initiatives, small developers globally — defined as those earning up to $1 million a year and with fewer than 1 million annual downloads — grew revenue 71 percent between 2020 and 2022. In the U.S., those developers saw an above-average increase of 83 percent in earnings during the same period.  

Apple's Hey Muma. Artwork by Apple.  

Entrepreneurs Find New Possibilities and Global Growth

In a new study titled “Small Business Developers and App Creators on the App Store in 2022,” Analysis Group economists found that revenue growth for small developers active on the storefront since 2020 exceeded that of large developers as these entrepreneurs identified new ways to tap into the needs of their users. Small developers — who comprise more than 90 percent of all developers on the App Store — saw earnings increase across all app categories; health and fitness, sports, and lifestyle apps from small developers in particular more than doubled their earnings in the last two years. Developers of all sizes have built successful businesses while benefiting from the App Store’s global reach in 175 countries and over 40 languages, and Apple’s installed base of over 2 billion active devices around the world. In 2022, nearly 80 percent of small developers were active on multiple storefronts and about 40 percent of total app downloads from all small developers came from users outside of each developer’s home country. Additionally, the economists found that developers who monetize their apps by selling digital goods and services on multiple storefronts have earnings from users on more than 40 storefronts on average. An infographic titled “Global Entrepreneur on the App Store” contains the following statistics: 1) 90% of all developers are small on the App Store; 2) 71% increase in earnings for active small developers between 2020 and 2022; 3) 80% of small developers were active on multiple storefronts in 2020; 4) 40% of app downloads for small developers in 2022 originated outside of their home countries; 5) 4.5x growth rate in earnings for small developers compared to large developers; 6) 40% app creators making $1M+ who were not on the App Store or had less than $10K in earnings five years ago.   The research also found the App Store has helped developers grow beyond small teams to scale their businesses to establish a worldwide reach. Many developers who sold digital goods and services on the App Store and earned more than $1 million in 2022 were previously small developers. From these global developers, 40 percent were either not on the App Store or had less than $10,000 in earnings just five years ago. Analysis Group economists also found that thousands of new developers and entrepreneurs joined the App Store in 2022 from all over the world. Also, this set of new developers, approximately 25 percent came from Europe, 23 percent from China, 14 percent from the U.S., 4 percent from Japan, and 35 percent from other regions including South Korea, India, and Brazil. As conversations around mental health became more transparent, LaRock saw an opportunity to provide easily accessible tools to support moms through evidence-based guided meditation, sleep stories, and lessons that help users reduce anxiety and stress. As a small team of four, Mindful Mamas has relied on a variety of resources to help further its mission, including Apple’s Small Business Program. The team has been able to build out new features and expand strategic relationships with healthcare providers who leverage the app as a part of their services. “Having more revenue available has given our business a longer runway to invest in more feature development and deliver personalized experiences to moms,” says LaRock, Mindful Mamas’ CEO.   In the last year, this has included new in-app events and the introduction of a mood tracker that delivers more customized insights to “mamas,” as the app endearingly calls its users. “This program has also allowed us to begin developing more of the great features offered by Apple, like a daily encouragement widget, currently in development and planned for release this summer,” says Jillian Lee Stout, Mindful Mamas’ cofounder and chief product and technology officer.   Today, Mindful Mamas has over 20,000 moms turning to the app for support every month. Moms most active in the app are using it twice per day, and 86 percent of them report feeling better or much better after completing a single practice. Mindful Mamas is focused on expanding its current offering of programs for children, and delivering more content for all moms and parents as their needs evolve. Since 2020, the Mindful Mamas app has helped mothers find time for themselves through evidence-based guided meditation, sleep stories, and lessons that help users reduce anxiety and stress. previous next Launched in 2018, landscape design app iScape helps users easily visualize outdoor projects from start to finish. With more than a decade of experience as a landscape contractor, CEO and founder Patrick Pozzuto created the augmented reality app to put inspiration back into the hands of homeowners and professionals. “I had this feeling that things could be successful, and that technology would be a powerful solution to help users save time and see a finished project before things even begin,” Pozzuto explains.   Taking his idea from inception to reality, Pozzuto developed iScape, which leverages ARKit and SpriteKit to add in 2D and 3D models to a user’s surroundings, helping them visualize, design, and plan out what is needed for an outdoor living project. “As a founder, you have to stay at it with the latest and greatest technologies, and Apple has helped me do this. Even with the growth we naturally experienced during the pandemic, as people had more time to invest in home projects, we have continued to benefit year after year from our investment in industry-leading technologies,” he also said.   With over 2.5 million downloads already, iScape has seen triple-digit percent growth year over year. With a talented team supporting the app, iScape has a bright future ahead as professionals, retailers, and homeowners alike turn to the app for its technical capabilities and its ability to save users time, money, and effort.  

Developer Resources Are Growing

Developers of all sizes have built successful businesses while benefiting from the App Store’s global reach. Apple provides a number of initiatives to support small developers on the App Store, including the App Store Small Business Program, Apple Entrepreneur Camp, App Accelerators, and Apple Developer Academies. Additionally, ongoing informational series like App Store Sessions, Ask Apple, and Tech Talks offer developers even more opportunities to connect directly with Apple experts year-round for insight, support, and feedback on the latest features and technologies available. An extensive suite of free tools and frameworks — including software development kits (SDKs) and developer services with more than 250,000 APIs — support developers building apps for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS. These tools enable developers to add new functionalities to their apps easily and quickly, and harness powerful capabilities like machine learning, augmented reality, and many more. The Swift Student Challenge, as well as open access tools like Everyone Can Code and Swift Playgrounds, ensure the power of coding technology is accessible and inclusive.   Sources: THX News & Apple. Read the full article

[bitcoinera1]

What are the features of bitcoin era software?

Bitcoin Era is a blockchain-based platform for the development of decentralized applications. It provides a decentralized, secure and cost-efficient infrastructure for DApps development.

The Bitcoin Era platform consists of an open source core that can be used as a base for any kind of application. The core has been designed to allow developers to create their own customized blockchains and tokens. It also allows them to deploy decentralized applications on its public blockchain with an existing user base of over 1 million active users.

Bitcoin Era Software is a new type of software that provides high-quality services to users. It is designed to provide a simple and easy way for users to buy and sell bitcoin, ethereum and other cryptocurrencies. This software has several features that make it one of the most reliable platforms available on the market today:

- The interface is easy to use, so even novice users can access it without any problems.

- The platform offers users access to reliable tools that help them manage their funds easily and securely.

- The platform offers users access to social trading options where they can interact with other users who are also trading in this market.

Benefits

The bitcoin era software is a decentralized digital currency that allows users to make payments online. Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency that was invented by an anonymous person or group of people called Satoshi Nakamoto. A cryptocurrency is a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange using cryptography to secure its transactions, to control the creation of additional units and verify the transfer of assets.

There are many advantages to using bitcoin era software, including:

-Improved security: Bitcoin era software can help you keep your data safe and secure, which is essential in a world where cybercrime is on the rise.

-Faster payments: Bitcoin era software allows you to make payments quickly and easily, without having to wait for bank transfers or other traditional methods of payment.

-Lower fees: Bitcoin era software allows you to send money with lower fees than some traditional methods of payment, such as checks or credit cards.

- It is easy to use. The user interface is simple and easy to understand, making it easy to get started with the bitcoin era right away.

- The Bitcoin era is secure. All of your data is encrypted using military-grade encryption, so no one can access or tamper with the information you store on your computer or mobile device.

- The Bitcoin era is free to use. There are no monthly fees or hidden charges when using this software, which means you can send and receive bitcoins whenever you want without having to worry about paying for anything!

How does the bitcoin era software work?

The bitcoin era software is a distributed ledger that contains a record of all transactions. Each transaction is recorded in a block and is linked to the previous transaction, creating a chain of blocks. The blockchain is open to anyone and provides a transparent view of all transactions that have been made on the network.

A transaction can only be made when it has been verified by the network as being valid. This process involves confirming that an individual owns the amount of bitcoin they want to transfer, and that they are not trying to spend their own money twice (double spending).

When an individual makes a bitcoin transaction, they send it through a peer-to-peer network where it is verified by other nodes on the network before being added to the blockchain. This process takes about ten minutes on average, but can take longer depending on how many people are using the network at any given time.

[vorphyxredtech]

Metaverse: a new way for businesses to trade with consumers and clients?

As consumers spend more time in the metaverse, it is inevitable that companies will start advertising in VR locations. Metaverse offers businesses a great marketing opportunity as it allows them to provide customers with a highly personalized and engaging experience. Instead of leaving a comment on a company's Facebook page, as the average customer can today, customers can chat with the brand itself, represented by a person or avatar, in the future. future. Supermarkets have the power to permanently change consumer tastes and buying behaviour in ways that we cannot predict. To keep their marketing strategies relevant and effective, brands need to keep an eye on evolving trends.

What makes the Metaverse so compelling?

The enormous financial potential of this technology has prompted a number of companies to establish their own “omniverses”. They have to realize that users enter the metaverse to escape the real world, as it gives them a captivating opportunity to create their own personality, their own reality:

to express themselves as they are. "feel" they really are, thus improving the user experience. Brands have recognized the metaverse as a way to create realism and ambitious self-expression that users sometimes can't develop or translate into their real lives.

Here are four ways brands and marketers can prepare now for the future of the metaverse.

Learn more about building blocks.

Web3, blockchain, NFT, cryptocurrency and other connected and related technologies will form the metaverse. Because no one can know everything, savvy companies develop learning communities (interest groups, magazine clubs, etc.) to regularly evaluate, test, and invest in technology and related phenomena. Start building your discovery team right away.

Make sure you are familiar with the concept of accessibility.

There is not only one type of equipment in the metaverse. People will be able to access metaverse content on many, if not all, devices. Universal VR and AR hardware is available to enhance the Metaverse user experience, but it is not and should not be required to use the content in Metaverse.

Master the fundamentals of interoperability.

The super inverse revolves around interoperability, or the ability of computer systems to easily interact and communicate with each other. Therefore, being able to produce shared assets is essential to developing metaverse content. By changing your attitude and adopting a digital work ethic that prioritizes interoperability now, you can create material that can be used later in the metaverse.

Visualize your brand's future in the metaverse.

While you may not be ready to invest in the metaverse yet, start thinking and envisioning how your brand will be experienced once you do. To foster creative thinking, consider creating a pilot test or even a vision statement. For example, a retailer's vision might be:

"We will be the best destination retailer ... in the metaverse." "We're going to make outdoor electrical equipment that will help people maintain their homes ... in the metaverse," an electrical appliance company might strive.

How will consumers connect and interact with Metaverse?

Consumers always tend to prefer this experience which gives them complete satisfaction when purchasing a product. Virtual products are inherently interactive. They can help us achieve our goals, overcome obstacles, and express ourselves while having fun. Since the birth of micro transactions 15 years ago, we have witnessed this fact in gaming culture. Now, blockchain-powered NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are proving this in the financial sector with significantly higher stakes. Purchasing can fill an emotional void, and virtual products are the purest example. Power-ups, such as double in-game experience, better weapons and armor, or a character's unique wardrobe, make us feel cooler, more attractive and and more wonderful than we actually are. Through a very smooth exchange of money for emotions, virtual products provide instant gratification.

Metaverse for Business

AR, Video Rendering and Graphics Enabled work with graphics processing units that allow the technology industry to push boundaries. Millions of people are establishing the framework of a metaverse where flexibly moving between the physical and virtual worlds is as natural as texting, thanks to working from home and hybrid working methods.

NFT is a part of our daily lives, allowing us to buy, own, license and protect digital assets. As recorded 3D data is larger in size than the datasets we deal with with 2D objects, the metaverse will drive a renaissance of innovation in privacy, security, and data protection. . These apps will affect our lives at work and at home as headphones, glasses, and earphones become more affordable.

Is Metaverse safe for brands?

The Company has always adopted these measures to provide them with security and a good experience. Metaverse will be most useful to those born in Generation Z and alpha. Users must have technical knowledge of blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and irreplaceable tokens for the exchange system.

metaverse offers limitless possibilities, especially in the commercial arena. According to technology company Wild bytes, 70% of major brands will be at Metaverse within the next five years. Some companies have announced that they will launch a new product in 2023, while others are exploring the potential of building malls, boutiques and virtual stores where avatars can be found. You can buy NFT products and pay with cryptocurrencies.

One of the most invested areas in Metaverse is retail. For example, Gucci has started selling its own virtual apparel, Gucci Virtual 25 sneakers, and H&M has just released its first virtual collection through Nintendo's Animal Crossing social simulation game.

[lasclintl]

Hp deskjet 1000 cartridge

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[cannibal-wings]

Update on what I’m working on. So, besides doing fanfic, I’m working hard to translate the characters from Survivors (my main Outlast fic) into characters for my novel project. I’ve changed the setting quite a bit, as you can probably see. This is the current updated concept for “Waylon”. I’m still debating keeping the name Waylon or using my backup name Wyatt. Basic info: Species: Sivosi Age: 35 years (Terran Standard) Pronouns: Xe/Xem Sex: NA (Sivosi have no biological difference in sex) Sexuality: Bisexual Job: Software engineer and programmer for the genetics lab of BHET. (Xe works in a high security clearance area where things are a tad more shady than most.) More info under the cut: including an info dump on the species

Xe is pretty similar to the Waylon you know from the fic. Works in tech, very smart, eventually has enough of the pain being caused on others via experiments at work and blows the whistle. Only this time, xe decides to go directly to a reporter, Miles, and spill everything, instead of using an email. Wyatt knows three languages, in a major port town most folks know at least three or have a translator aug. Wyatt does not have a family in this version of the story, no children, but xe wouldn’t be opposed to carrying a child in the future. Xe was adopted by a Terran couple, so xe’s pretty disconnected from major Sivosi culture and grew up in a capital city, later moving to the port town the story takes place in.

Wyatt will be the secondary protagonist, along with Miles and R. I know that xe looks wildly different from what most are use to, but you’ll have to trust me, it’ll all work out, you’ll see. I prefer doing alien species that look outside of the norm in terms of body structures you’d expect to see when you hear “sci-fi alien species”.

Sivosi are quite large, xe is easily 8-9 feet (244-274cm), and heavy. Wyatt is heavier set than average, with a larger abdomen, partly due to fat, partly due to genetics giving xem a larger than necessary swim bladder and a larger egg pocket. The swim bladder is mostly useless as the Sivosi are no longer strictly aquatic, however xe has been told that the extra large egg pocket would assist xem greatly in carrying healthy clutches of eggs.

Sivosi rarely walk on the forelimb, preferring to keep themselves in an upright posture, but they can do it if needed. The four hind-legs have feet with three toes. The smaller forelimb has four digits in a zygodactyl formation, two on top and two on the bottom. The larger human like forelimb has six digits with two “thumbs”.

They have four eyes, though the smaller eyes are for sensing heat and not visible light. They also have long antenna for sensing chemicals in the air. They are vary adapt at catching pheromones and the like. They are omnivorous, with grinding parts in their mouth as well as a tongue that can double as a tube for drinking fluid.

Sivosi emote using body language, the frills on the side of their necks are used primarily in gesturing, with flicking, raising, and flattening being ways of communicating emotion. The position of the antenna can be used in emoting as well. They do not have flexible facial muscles for conveying emotion. Their voices and frills do most of the heavy lifting.

The tail can be curled under when they need to take up less space, and the tail also holds eggs close to the body during incubation. Sivosi prefer not to leave their young in a household incubator, like other egg laying species. Instead they carry their eggs with them at all times. The tail is very strong and tough for this very reason. Tradition states that each pair lay and carry the same number of eggs so that every part of the parenting process is equal. Sivosi in Offworlder relations will compromise and conceive and carry an egg for them if they cannot. (This is very rare, as only certain Terrans are able to crossbreed with Sivosi.) In situations where the Offworlder partner cannot fertilize an egg, the pair might opt to adopt.

Sivosi are no longer fully aquatic and haven’t been for generations. They still have gill slits under first few plates on the neck, and these gills have evolved to pull oxygen from the air. If they need to, they can swim rather well though.

The Sivosi have no nudity taboo, and don’t wear much in terms of clothing on their home planet. However, Sivosi in port towns or on ships will attempt to cover up with elaborate draping fabrics, to make the Offworlders they share a living space with more comfortable. They do not have much in terms of body mods and jewelry or other such ornamentation is kept to rings and bands worn on the arms and legs. Makeup isn’t popular, as they are already brightly colored, but some will enhance markings with paint.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The music monopolists

Writing in Wired, Institute for Local Self Reliance researcher and anti-monopolist Ron Knox gives a thorough, important account of how music industry monoplization resulted declining revenue for artists, even as the industry itself has reaped greater profits.

https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-big-music-needs-to-be-broken-up-to-save-the-industry/

Importantly, Knox describes how concentration has come to every link in music’s supply chain, from radio to recording, streaming to live performance. The monopolists who dominate these sectors fight fiercely between each other, but no matter who wins, artists lose.

Let’s go segment by segment. Two thirds of all North American music comes from three labels. The labels grew through anticompetitive mergers: giant companies, awash in investor cash, bought out mid-sized, successful labels, turning them into subdivisions of the Big Three.

The more concentrated the labels got, the worse they were for everyone. They spent the nineties and naughties price-gouging record companies, pocketing hundreds of millions from an illegal price-fixing conspiracy. The fines they paid were smaller than the profits they reaped.

But at least they distributed music. Today, the struggling physical record store industry — a network of passionate music sellers who serve the most intense music fans — find themselves getting “record shipments” that turn out to be boxes of random stuff like cough syrup (!).

That happened when the Big Three all piled their distribution into a single company, the monopolist Direct Shot Distributing. As Direct Shot started to fail, its operations descended into chaos, and record stores started to receive boxes of random consumer packaged goods.

It was bad news for the non-monopolized, music-first record stores, but it barely registered for the Big Three labels — today, they buy an average of two new acts every day.

The labels don’t make money from selling records, of course. They get their money from streaming.

Streaming is also massively concentrated, gathered into the hands of just a few companies: Spotify, Apple, Youtube, Amazon — with the notable exception of Spotify, the industry is dominated by companies that also monopolize other sectors.

Monopolies are good to these companies. Spotify’s market-cap doubled during the pandemic — the market values its 150m subs (twice as many as subscribe with Apple) at $50b. The major labels get $1m/hour from streaming. 99% of their artists see $25/year in streaming royalties.

Spotify may be the biggest streaming service, but it’s not the lowest-paying. Youtube — a Google division, whose unsuccessful attempt to launch an in-house video service convinced it that it had to buy someone else’s success — drives the worst bargain.

Spotify uses its industry dominance to extract heavy fees from the labels — creaming 30% of the total revenue generated by a typical track. Big Three monopolists with fat margins can absorb this. Indies? Not so much.

Spotify’s market cap growth is in part due to the new ways it’s come up with to shake down the labels — a variety of tactics that all boil down to one thing: payola. Spotify will sell labels pop-up ads, placement in “radio” algorithms, and access to “Discovery mode.”

Like all forms of payola, Spotify’s rate-card is a way for monopolists to edge out indies, buying their way into your ear-holes. I’m sure that the Big Three would rather keep the bribes they pay to Spotiify, but the consolation prize is pretty sweet.

If the Big Three are the only ones who can afford to buy access to Spotify’s audience, then creators are driven to sign with them, and have less bargaining leverage when they negotiate their deals.

Spotify, meanwhile, can consolidate its gains by driving up those fees, pitting labels against each other in a bidding war for access to listeners. This effectively drives down the royalty rate Spotify pays, because every new track will have to buy in to get any reach.

Spotify talks a good game about how it uses big data and machine learning to pick the songs you hear, but increasingly, the algorithm is getting far less compute-intensive, a simple sort-by-highest-bidder system you could operate from a laptop running Windows 3.1 and Excel.

In theory, streaming losses can be made up with touring. Acts who attain digital popularity can charge access at the door to clubs and other venues. The only problem is that live performance is also a monopoly business.

The 800lb gorilla there is Livenation, a division of the ticket monopolist and notorious arm-breakers Ticketmaster — spun out of Clear Channel, the monopolist that we now know as Iheartradio.

Livenation parlayed its access to the capital markets to buy out $1b worth of venues and promoters, before being acquired by Clear Channel for $4.4b in 2005. Today, it’s a division of Liberty Media, consolidated with Ticketmaster, Pandora, and Siriusxm.

What goes around, comes around: Liberty’s private equity owners are in the process of buying up Iheartradio, re-merging all of Clear Channel’s spinouts into one giga-monopolist.

The conglomerate already coerces artists to book exclusively in its clubs and using its ticketing, starving independent venues. Add 850 terrestrial radio stations to the mix and it will choke off all the oxygen that independent venues, promoters and ticketers rely on.

Liberty didn’t buy all these companies because it’s passionate about music and wanted to ensure artists got a fair shake. By rolling up the entire live music/radio supply-chain, it bought the power to extract vast sums from musicians, and to keep rivals out of the market.

Well, not all competitors. Lollapalooza co-founder Marc Geiger raised tens of millions for “Savelive,” a new would-be monopolist that offered to “rescue” live music venues in exchange for a 51% stake in them.

Savelive illustrates an important point about the nature of monopolies: they beget more monopolies. Consolidation in the labels meant that only the largest streaming companies could negotiate a sustainable rate.

But consolidation in radio drives consolidation in labels — and many of the indie radio stations that survived the first wave of consolidation were picked up cheap by Iheartradio once monopolistic streamers ate their lunch.

This is a pattern across the whole entertainment industry: bookstore mergers and big box retailers drove consolidation in publishing; that was accelerated by consolidation in online ebook and physical book retail.

It’s not limited to the entertainment sector either. As David Dayen describes in his essential book MONOPOLIZED, hospitals didn’t start consolidating until the pharma industry underwent a wave of brutal mergers and started gouging for drugs.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu

Hospital consolidation led to gouging insurers, leading to a wave of insurance consolidation. Today, nearly every part of the health industry is monopolized, from pharmacy benefit managers to medical labs.

The only parts of the supply chain that doesn’t monopolize — that can’t monopolize — are the ends of the chain: the people who work in the system, and the people who use it.

Monopoly punishes doctors and nurses and other health workers — and it punishes patients.

It punishes writers and publishing workers, and it punishes readers.

It punishes musicians and independent venue owners, and it punishes listeners.

When every part of the supply chain gets so monopolized that it can’t easily be squeezed by any other part of the supply chain, these giants turn on us — the workers and users of the system. We, the atomized and fragmented, cannot resist the squeeze.

But as Knox writes, the tide is turning. After 40 years of waving through anticompetitive mergers in the name of “efficiency,” the DoJ and FTC are under new management, with two-fisted trustbusters like Lina M Khan at the helm.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

This new cohort of monopoly fighters reject the “consumer welfare” theory of antitrust (the idea that monopolies drive prices down and are therefore good for society), going to war against the hegemonic orthodoxy that began with Ronald Reagan.

https://doctorow.medium.com/epic-v-apple-d3e59893b4f3

The new antitrust is surging, with bills in the House and Senate, executive orders from the White House, regulatory proceedings at the DoJ and FTC, and an interagency-cabinet coordination committee that ties it all together.

This new antitrust promises workers and users of monopolized industries a better alternative than rooting for one giant to beat another in hopes that they will drop a few crumbs for the rest of us to enjoy.

Creative workers don’t have to choose between Big Tech and Big Content based on their assessment of which monopolist will abuse them the least. Instead, we can root for antimonopoly, for giant-slaying, and the right to self-determination.

The most important immediate step towards that future is blocking new anticompetitive mergers, like Sony’s bid for AWAL, or Liberty Media’s use of a $500m SPAC to go on a vertical monopoly shopping spree.

The agencies have the power to stop these. They should. When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

But ending anticompetitive mergers won’t get us out of that hole: most industries (from beer to cheerleader uniforms to wresting to eyeglasses) are already monopolized.

The new trustbusters — and the ILSR — want to use antitrust law to break up these conglomerates. I think that’s right: vertical monopolies will always engage in self-dealing to the detriment of independents, workers and customers. Break. Them. Up.

But breaking up is hard to do. When the DoJ tried to break up IBM, the company’s lawyers outspent the entire DoJ antitrust division, every single year, for twelve consecutive years, and in the end, it escaped breakup.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. IBM escaped justice because Reagan was elected and neutered antitrust. And even though it remained intact, it was never the same — for one thing, it decided that it was too risky to make its own PC OS.

IBM knew that antitrust enforcers were very suspicious of tying software to hardware — so it tapped a couple of hacker kids, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, to sell it DOS, from their new company “Micro-Soft.”

Unfortunately for all of us, antitrust enforcement only declined after that, so IBM was able to return to its monopolistic ways, and Microsoft escaped from antitrust scrutiny after a mere seven years in regulatory hell.

Antitrust enforcement can sap monopolists of the will to power, as they become increasingly concerned that their actions will attract aggressive legal reprisals.

Think of how Apple “lost” the Epic lawsuit but still “voluntarily” rescinded its heretofore hard rule against apps providing links to web-pages where you can use third-party payment processors to make purchases.

As monopolists lose their nerve, space opens up for all kinds of pro-worker, pro-user interventions, far beyond those afforded by traditional antitrust.

Next year, Beacon Press will publish THE SHAKEDOWN, a book I co-wrote with Rebecca Giblin about the monopolistic corruption of creative labor markets and how creative workers, regulators and fans can resist it.

The Shakedown catalogs the ways that monopolization of investment, distribution and sale of creative works allows entertainment companies, Big Tech, and major retailers to shift an ever-larger share of the creative industry’s revenues from workers to themselves.

More importantly, we identify tools beyond breakups that we can use to de-monopolize the industry — things we can do right now, without having to wait for the conclusion of an antitrust suit that might run for decades.

Take reversion rights: many copyright systems allow creators to take back their rights after a set period (35 years in the US). This lets artists who signed bad deals — before they were proven successes — to resell their catalog or extract reparations by threatening to.

But reversion is really hard to do, and 35 years is way too long. Only an handful of creators — even those with valuable catalogs that could be renewed through reversion — ever manage it.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/06/backsies/#take-backs

Congress (and other legislatures around the world, including Canada, where this is likely to come up in the new Parliament) could fix reversion: make it easier to do, and make it available after a shorter period — say, 14 years.

And what about those bad contracts? The “freedom to contract” has always been subject to limits, where some clauses are deemed unenforceable “as against public policy” or because they are “unconscionable.”

With the entertainment sector consolidated into just a couple of states, state legislatures could act to void the most abusive clauses — for example, clauses that allow labels to claw back royalties indefinitely to recoup (often inflated or fictitious) “expenses.”

Our book explores dozens of these kinds of ideas, from co-operatives to trade unions; better accounting practices and direct arts subsidies; radical interoperability and collective licensing; minimum wages for creative labor and collective bargaining.

None of these are replacement for reducing the size and power of conglomerates throughout the supply chain, but all of them are interventions we can make as the power and nerve of conglomerates declines, changes that will hasten that decline and open more space for breakups.

And all of them are applicable, to a greater or lesser extent, to helping workers and users of all the other consolidated industries, from health care to cheerleading.

For example, expanding California’s ban on noncompete clauses would help fast-food workers nationwide — because today, fast food employers are the most aggressive abusers of noncompetes.

That means that a fried chicken cashier earning the tipped minimum wage can’t quit to work at a burger joint across the street for a $0.25/hour raise. Creative workers aren’t the only ones suffering from monopolization — we’re not even the worst off.

But by definition, creative workers have a platform. We reach people. We have the potential to help form the kind of unstoppable coalition that we’ll need to reverse the generations of oligarchic, post-Reagan consolidation.

You may have heard about how Danish McDonald’s workers earn $22/hour and get six weeks’ paid vacation and sick leave. That didn’t come about because McDonald’s was required by law to pay it.

It was worker solidarity that did it. As Matt Bruenig writes, McDonald’s initially refused to sign the voluntary “hotel and restaurant” collective agreement. So its workers went on strike.

https://mattbruenig.com/2021/09/20/when-mcdonalds-came-to-denmark/

Now, if McD’s workers had struck alone, they’d probably have lost. But Danish law allows for sympathy strikes — that is, it allows workers in other parts of the supply chain to take industrial action to support their sisters and brothers who are striking.

When the McD’s workers walked out in 1989, sixteen other sectoral unions joined them. They didn’t just help picket at leaflet in front of McD’s restaurants!

Dockworkers wouldn’t unload McD’s shipments. Printers wouldn’t print their cups and placemats.

Builders downed tools on McDonald’s construction projects. Typesetters wouldn’t set the McD’s ads in the daily papers. Truckers wouldn’t deliver to McD’s restaurants. Food industry workers wouldn’t produce the drink syrups, fries and other inputs to the McDonald’s kitchens.

McD’s caved.

Now, as Bruenig points out, these kinds of sympathy strikes are illegal in the US, but it’s a mistake to think that workers don’t have power because sympathy strikes are illegal — rather, sympathy strikes are illegal because workers don’t have power.

Workers across all sectors face the same kinds of monopolistic exploitation. Workers across all sectors have a common enemy (literally, thanks to “common ownership” where companies like Vanguard and Berkshire Hathaway hold significant stakes in almost every major company).

With a shared cause, shared tactics, solidarity and a renewed sense that we can do more than root for the giant we think will mistreat us the least, creative workers and their sisters and brothers in every sector can reverse generations of losses.

That’s why the new antitrust matters — because it is an assault on the consolidation that gives all industries the power to shift money and other forms of value from workers and users to a small elite of investors.

[my-writings-and-musings]

MTMTE Headcannon Prompt

Sharing a Berth

Part One: Here!

Part Two: Here!

Part Three: Here!

Part Four: Here!

Part Five: You're Here!

This batch is dedicated entirely to Rung because my lonely boy deserves all the attention and love I can give.

Rung

·Being human makes you immune to information creep and thus the only being he's ever met who's never forgotten him or his name, and despite how happy this makes him he's kept his absolute euphoria quite subdued as your relationship has grown to avoid frightening you, but when you ask if he'd like to spend the night every now and then...

·He removes his glasses under the pretense of polishing them, but you absolutely catch him brushing away a few happy tears, subtle as he tries to be while he says he'd be delighted to share a berth whenever you'd like.

·Up until now you've been only slightly physical in the form of gentle hugs, or if necessary he's lifted you up to reach places you can't, so this is also your way of expressing you'd like to be closer to him in the physical sense.

·No matter his absolute delight at this prospect, he's always going to double check and make sure everyone around him is okay, and that goes double for you the night you decide to bring your blankets and such to his room.

·Despite his smaller build and lean frame the size difference is still considerable, so he asks you to describe your ideal sleeping arrangements, with the intent of letting you control the layout while he gives you ample space for your safety.

·Having expected this kind of commitment to minimizing his own needs and desires, you lay your hands on his from your spot on his desk, giving a digit a squeeze of reasurance while you explain you really want to have as much physical contact with him as possible.

·He's quite thankful for his lenses in this case because he doesn't want you to see him tearing up a second time, even if you'd certainly never judge him knowing how lonely he's been until now, but you do offer a hug as his voice cracks while he confirms he'd love to be as close as safety allows.

·Rather prone to resting on his back like most Cybertronians, he opts instead to lay on his side facing you, but he does check in repeatedly to ensure you're okay with it.

·Bundled up in your little nest of blankets and pillows, you motion for him to bring his hand close, and a hug against his palm combined with a nuzzle of your head accompanies your reasurances that you do indeed want his face to be the last and first thing you see each day.

·His digits curl protectively against you, and the two of you settle in to whisper softly to one another before drifting off, with his tired but beaming smile bidding you a quiet goodnight as you close your eyes.

·Every successive night together grows closer together until you move completely into his room, and in turn you both become more comfortable with physical closeness as well, your tiny body snuggling closer for longer every night.

·It's this new proximity that allows you to truly understand just how touch starved this poor bot is, as you finally begin to notice how his hands linger for moments and his hugs pull you a little tighter than expected, making it clear he's desperate for every instant of affection.

·Spurred on by his troubles voicing his obvious needs, you start initiating the most aggressively affectionate cuddles you're capable of, packing them full of all the love and appreciation he deserves.

·It starts with you crawling on his chest while you two are chilling before bed and securing yourself to rest on your belly, surprising him so greatly he just stares at you with a wordless gape before you explain this just feels more comfortable, which confounds him to the point of confused but elated chuckles at your antics.

·There's an incredibly soothing warmth and a kind of relaxing hum from his spark at all times, something you weren't prepared for but happily accept as it lulls you straight to sleep right there, something he finds extraordinarily cute as he lays your blankets over you and falls asleep with you closer than you've ever been.

·While he's a rather average sleeper, neither especially deep nor light, you will catch the occasional soft sound passing his lips as his antennae flex in time to his dreams.

·It's hard to believe due to how easily he wakes with his alarm, but he's actually not a natural morning bot, and has instead just developed the habit of rising early due to his career and for the sake of a healthy schedule.

·Should you be more prone to sleeping in, he'll remove himself from the bed with the grace of a well trained surgeon, ensuring the room is quiet as could be while he has a hot cup of fuel sweetened with a few crystals for taste.

·To your incredible surprise, he studied the preparation of earth food and mastered cooking on your scale just so he could surprise you with breakfast in bed, and you had no idea until a tray of your favorite foods is laid before your sleepy eyes.

·He credits model building for making him so good at cooking on such a tiny scale, and insists this is the least he can do after you brought him more happiness than he's ever seen in years, though he doesn't refuse a loving nuzzle of your foreheads or the tender kiss on his nose you follow with...

[toobadchadlytime]

I can hide my curiosity no more, please tell me about 100% Orange Juice

=O

I just want you to know that merely by asking, you've like, made my week

100% Orange Juice is a digital board game that I very much compare to Mario Party due to both being cute, colorful, and chaotic to similar degrees. Having grown up with that series, I naturally fell in love with this a few years ago. =P And pretty much anyone can play it online as long as they have Steam, a Windows computer, and an Internet connection! There’s a whole bunch of boards, with this kind of style:

It's not quite the same as Mario Party, as there aren't really minigames, but whenever you pass by another player on the board, you can choose to stop on their space and battle with them. Each player attacks once, followed by defending/evading once (the latter two are always a choice you can make). There's also a deck of cards in the center that every player draws from that can be used like items, some of which are designed to make battles absolutely ridiculous in the best way.

Each character gets a few stars at the start of every turn, but can do a few things to get some more such as land on bonus panels, random encounter panels, or KO other players to steal half their stars. Each character gets a special Home Panel space that they can stop at to achieve Norma, or level up, whenever they reach a set goal of stars held or battles won (that you can choose from each time you complete one). The overall winner is the first player to level up 5 times.

Battles are really interesting because the "stealing half the victim's stars" aspect is really important. You could get knocked down many times in one game to the point where you're super behind, but then make up for all of that in an instant with One Really Good Victory in which your foe had a ton of stars! And that one move can make you go from dead last to virtually unstoppable at the right moment.

I also like them a lot because every character has a unique playstyle! And the roster has like, more than 70 characters at this point (and counting - a new pair releases every few months or so), all of which work differently!

For example you have QP who's your jack-of-all-stats character, average HP and average rolls for every battle stat:

Every character gets a unique Hyper ability as well! QP for instance, while being otherwise average, has one of the most effective Hypers in the game, in which she gets a big attack boost in battle while protecting herself from any real penalty if she is KO'd in the battle in which the card is played.

An example of a more risk/reward character would be Suguri, who is extremely good at dodging... unless she rolls low and gets KO'd in one hit. It's sort of a meme to say that Suguri lives either by being Very Fast or Very Dead. =P But she can be one of the most powerful characters if the game feels like being nice to you!

But she also gets a Hyper in which she rolls double dice for all actions on a given turn. She could roll snake eyes, or attack up to 13. And because that double dice also applies to movement, she could easily play the card from right behind another player and move onto their space.

There are a lot of other playstyles as well! You have your regular glass cannons, your tanks...

There’s another character who can be either a glass cannon or a tank whose Hyper toggles between them, another character who is one or the other just based on whether the turn number is even or odd...

But also more unique ones, like one of my (multiple) go-to favorites, Miusaki! (Though she is part of a DLC character pair that's a few bucks, which is a thing that happens)

That passive ability of hers is really powerful, because some special attack could have the strength of a truck, and merely by picking Defend in response, she still takes a mere 2 damage from it. But because her Defense stat is so low, she's likely to roll bad from it and almost definitely take her max of 2 damage, so at any moment she's either temporarily impossible to KO, or one light feathery tap away from death.

One reason I love her in particular is that she practically recontextualizes one of the most ordinary types of card that you can bring to the central deck, Saki's Cookie.

If she plays that card while at 2 HP, healing up to 3 instantly makes her go from "almost guaranteed to die in the next battle" to "guaranteed to survive the next battle”. And this is a card that you pretty much have unlocked at the start.

There are definitely more characters I could go into, but in general there's a lot of room for experimentation with strategy, seeing what neutral-use cards synergize with which character types, and just seeing how luck works out for you. Plus there's plenty to do solo and colorful outfits to unlock and stuff.

One of my favorite LP groups, TheRunawayGuys, recently did a big LP of the game. If you want a visual overview of how a game typically goes (I feel there’s only so much to explain without seeing a round in action), I'd recommend watching the first 1 or 2 boards that they do, if you want! Jon does a great job explaining how the game works. ^^

[giftofshewbread]

Gone            (Prophecy Update)

 By Daymond Duck    Published on: September 26, 2021

After Moses died, Joshua became the leader of the Jewish people. Joshua led them across the Jordan River, took them to a place called Shiloh, and gave Shiloh to the largest and most powerful tribe called Ephraim. The Jews erected a Tabernacle there, priests served there, offered sacrifices there, felt God’s presence there, and it was a special place to God for more than 300 years. But the Jews eventually abandoned God, started worshipping a false God, angered God, stirred His wrath, and He destroyed Shiloh (Psa. 78:56-67).

Those that think that God won’t destroy a nation should go and look at Shiloh (Jer. 7:12).

Those that think that God won’t destroy a city should go and look at Sodom and Gomorrah.

On Sept. 16, 2021, several members of the media reported on an interview that former White House Press Sec. Sean Spicer had with former Pres. Trump.

Trump said, “Our country has gone really downhill in the last eight months like nobody’s ever seen before. And we’re not going to have a country left in three years; I’ll tell you that.”

Is Biden really the end of America?

Will America’s Deep State and the global Deep State succeed in bringing about the demise of America before 2024 and the establishment of a godless world government and religion by 2030 or sooner?

Perhaps, it is time for the Lukewarm Laodicean churches and those that think that God won’t destroy a godless world government and religion to go and look at the tower of Babel.

Without God, America is gone.

Consider the following:

Vice Pres. Harris was part of a group that raised funds to bail rioters, looters, and arsonists out of jail, and one has now committed murder.

The Biden administration knows that human traffickers, drug dealers, terrorists, and people infected with Covid are crossing the U.S. border with Mexico, but they are ignoring it or, in some cases, assisting it.

Biden said he would not leave American citizens in Afghanistan, but he has left hundreds there.

Biden let Taliban terrorists have up to 80 billion dollars of U.S. weapons.

The FBI destroyed Hillary’s cell phones for her.

Biden lied about his knowledge of Hunter Biden’s alleged crimes (he boasted about threatening the Pres. of Ukraine if he didn’t fire the man investigating Hunter; e-mails on Hunter’s laptop have been confirmed to be legitimate), but that is okay with the Democrat Party, and the FBI and DOJ have done nothing.

Pelosi, Schumer, and the Democrats impeached Trump over something he didn’t say in a phone call to Russia, but they are ignoring Gen. Milley’s treasonous calls to China, even though he could have endangered the security of the U.S.

Biden has been warned that too much spending can collapse the U.S. economy, but he continues to propose multi-trillion-dollar stimulus packages.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that mandated vaccinations are unconstitutional, but Biden is trying to force people to get one.

The Biden administration is trying to force average citizens to get vaccinated, but he has exempted Congress, their aides, the DOJ, the U.S. Supreme Court, and postal workers.

Fauci lied to Congress about funding Covid research in Wuhan, China, but the Biden administration supports him.

The above list shows that the America most of us grew up in is already gone, but there is no need to worry because the Church will soon be gone (Raptured) too.

FYI: Trump’s slogan was “Make America Great Again” (Strengthen America don’t weaken it). Biden’s slogan was “Build Back Better” (Get rid of the old America and build it back with a different America. That is what he is doing). Obama called it “The Fundamental Transformation of America”).

This writer believes the length of the above list could easily be doubled, but readers will get the point, and there are other things that need to be mentioned.

One, concerning the decline of the U.S. and the establishment of the Ten Kings: on Sept. 20, 2021, it was reported that the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) met to discuss weakened ties to the U.S. and the restructuring of CELAC into a block of nations patterned after the E.U.

Ten groups of nations patterned after the E.U. with a leader over each group (Ten leaders or Ten Kings) that would eventually cede their power to one leader has been a globalist goal for many years.

Also concerning the decline of the U.S.: Biden’s surrender to the Taliban in Afghanistan has triggered calls for the E.U. to establish a military that does not have ties to NATO.

Also concerning the decline of the U.S.: France has recalled its ambassador to the U.S. for the first time in history over a deal the U.S. and U.K. made to provide Australia with the technology to build submarines.

Two, concerning world government: the globalists have weakened America, and now China wants to replace America, take over the New World Order (NWO) and dominate it, not submit to it.

The globalists are just as much against China dominating their New World Order as they were against America dominating it.

George Soros and some of his globalist buddies are now getting worried about the growing power of China. They are even trying to cut off investments in China to weaken China like they weakened the U.S.

According to the Bible, the E.U. will be the main power in the coming world government, not China.

Expect China to resist and invade the Middle East as one of the Kings of the East, but don’t expect China to defeat the Antichrist and head up the coming world government.

Three, concerning the Mark of the Beast: it will be a global mandate to identify and track everyone on earth, and it will go into effect at the middle of the Tribulation Period.

There is good reason to believe that Covid-19 vaccine certificates are on the way to becoming a global mandate to identify and track people.

On Sept. 15, 2021, it was reported that 35-40 nations (Israel, the E.U., and other nations that want to join) will have a digital system in place by early October to identify and track those that have been vaccinated and those that have had Covid-19 and recovered. Those that get an approved certificate will be allowed to travel, enter restaurants and other venues, but those that don’t get one will not be allowed to do these things.

Four, concerning Israel and Jerusalem: America’s Deep State has manipulated Pres. Biden into many mistakes since putting him into office.

It seems that God is willing to let America’s Deep State and Biden weaken America because He said He will allow them to establish a godless world government and religion for seven years.

But now, these godless people appear to be preparing to weaken Israel by reopening America’s special consulate for the P.A. in Jerusalem and canceling America’s recognition of Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel.

God will allow them to do this for three reasons:

He is letting Israel learn to trust Him and not the nations.

He is letting the nations choose their own judgment (what they try to do to Israel will come back on them; Zech. 12:3).

He is letting the world know that He is God, He restored Israel, and Israel cannot be destroyed (Amos 9:11-15).

FYI: America’s Deep State apparently does not know, believe, or understand the story about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace (a type of Israel in the Tribulation Period). One like the Son of God delivered them out of it (Dan. 3:25), and all Israel, all that believe in Yeshua, will be saved in the wilderness (Matt. 25:16-22) by a Deliverer out of Zion (Rom. 11:26).

Five, in May of this year, terrorists in Gaza fired more than 4,000 rockets into Israel, but many were shot down by Israel’s anti-missile Iron Dome System.

Israel needs to replace and boost her stock of Iron Dome missiles.

In June of this year, U.S. Sec. of State Lloyd Austin told Israel’s Defense Min. Benny Gantz that the U.S. plans to replace Israel’s Iron Dome missiles. On Aug. 27, Pres. Biden met with Israeli Prime Min. Bennett and said the U.S. will replace Israel’s Iron Dome missiles. Nancy Pelosi recently put $1 billion to replace Israel’s Iron Dome missiles in a bill to raise the U.S. debt ceiling, but the Squad and other leftist Democrats strongly objected to spending money on the defense of Israel. Pelosi removed the money but promised to put it in a later bill.

The Biden administration has made many mistakes (Afghanistan, border with Mexico, etc.), but nothing could be as bad as abandoning its promises to defend Israel.

Six, concerning the division of Israel and the Battle of Armageddon: on Sept. 21, 2021, Pres. Biden repeated his support for the Two-State solution in a speech at the U.N. (but he did say it will be a long time before it happens).

Seven, concerning wickedness and corruption at the end of the age: on Sept. 16, 2021, Special Counsel John Durham got an indictment against a Democrat lawyer for creating and giving false information (lying) to the FBI to smear Pres. Trump during the 2016 Pres. Campaign. According to the indictment, the lawyer’s lies were used to suggest that Trump was colluding with the Russians.

In 2016, the FBI questioned him about it, and he gave the FBI false information while claiming to be an ordinary citizen and denied that he was being paid by anyone to give the FBI a false story.

It is now 5 years later, and the FBI says it has proof that the Democrat lawyer was billing the Clinton campaign, and Clinton’s group was paying him for his work. There are now rumors that Durham plans to go after Mrs. Clinton, but this writer is skeptical. It would not be surprising if Durham goes after some of Clinton’s aides, but Clinton is a prominent member of America’s Deep State.

Some say George Soros is destroying America, and Obama is in his third presidency, but nothing is ever done about what they are doing. Why?

The DOJ and FBI appear to be treating America’s Deep State as a protected class of people. If this is not true, why haven’t they been prosecuted for some of the things they have done? If it is true, it means the DOJ and FBI are protecting the wickedness, corruption, and treason of America’s Deep State (like in the days of Noah when the wickedness of man was great).

FYI: Here is some good news.

If (a big “IF”) God allows the Antichrist to confirm a 7-year covenant with many for peace in the Middle East by 2030, Jesus will be sitting on the throne of David in Jerusalem, and the Kingdom of God will exist on earth by 2037. Christians will be here in new bodies with their loved ones; Christians won’t get sick or die; there will be peace, justice, and righteousness on earth; no Covid, etc.

The bad things mentioned above are signs that a new world is coming soon.

Eight, concerning a falling away in the Church: on Sept. 21, 2021, LifeSiteNews reported that Pope Francis has a history of praising pro-abortion politicians, he supports serving communion to pro-abortion politicians, and he has endorsed gay civil unions.

Pope Francis has the spiritual qualifications of the False Prophet (supports world government, world religion, etc.), but he is getting old. If he is the False Prophet, the Rapture could be very soon.

Before closing, here is a personal message.

I get a little uncomfortable when other ministries ask me to publicize what they are doing because if they or some of their people go astray, I don’t want it to have a negative impact on Rapture Ready or my ministry. Having said this, a Christian group called Tactical Civics is seeking God-fearing patriots that want to restore America. I am thankful for (and support) anyone that wants to restore America. A member of the group has asked me to encourage people that Love Jesus and America to watch the 11-minute video at this link: www.tacticalcivics.com/video

The group wants more people to know what they are doing and perhaps get involved.

Finally, are you Rapture Ready?

If you want to be rapture ready and go to heaven, you must be born again (John 3:3). God loves you, and if you have not done so, sincerely admit that you are a sinner; believe that Jesus is the virgin-born, sinless Son of God who died for the sins of the world, was buried, and raised from the dead; ask Him to forgive your sins, cleanse you, come into your heart and be your Saviour; then tell someone that you have done this.