#How to Add Value to Optimism

[empresa-journal]

Is Optimism (OP) worth $1.31?

Interest in Optimism (OP) is high. For example, both CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap gave OP a $1.31 on 21 September 2023. Optimism was CoinMarketCap’s 13th most trending cryptocurrency on 20 September 2023. Conversely, Optimism was CoinGecko’s seventh most trending cryptocurrency on the same day. Moreover, CoinGecko named Optimism the 42ndlargest cryptocurrency, while CoinMarketCap labeled OP the…

[callmearcturus]

beginner tips for Balatro

ppl will not shut up about their weird poker game so wtf is going on

BASICALLY:

It's Roguelike Poker.

A LITTLE LESS BASICALLY:

You want to play hands to gain enough Chips to reach enough Chips to beat the level (called "Blind"). You can play things like Full House, Three of a Kind, Flush, etc.

The hook of the game is the Jokers. After every Blind, you can visit a shop to buy Jokers. These Jokers affect your hand in weird ways. You can carry 5 Jokers at a time. Mixing and matching these will unlock useful and sometimes hilarious combinations.

The ultimate goal is to reach the boss of the 8th Ante. An Ante is a Small Blind, Large Blind, and Boss Blind. The chip requirement will grow over time.

It's extremely addictive, has a lot of both vertical and horizontal progression curves, and despite how it looks and sounds, Balatro is a one-time purchase single-player game with no microtransactions or ads.

here's a fast list of things I wish I understood when I first started playing Balatro:

+chips < +mult < X-MULT is the way usefulness works. +chips will add chips to the left, blue side of the score calculation. +mult will add to the red, right hand side of the score calculation. X-MULT will take the final score and then multiply the WHOLE thing by it. So basically the formula is (+chips x +mult) x XMULT. The game does not explain this very well but it's vital.

You can always play 5 cards. Even if the scoring hand you are playing is less than 5 cards, you can use the rest as a free discard. For example, if I play Ace, Ace, 6, 3, 2, I will play a Pair of Aces, and the 6, 3, 2 will be discarded.

Money is king in this game because money gets you access to the Jokers. The easiest way to control the money game is to get to 25$ as soon as possible, then try to avoid going under that. 25$ will get you the maximum interest every round. When at the shop, feel free to spend down to 22-25$ish.

However if you need to bankrupt yourself because you see Card Sharp or Flashback or another extremely-high value joker, don't think, just do it.

If it says +1 hand in yellow, that means draw an extra card in your hand. If it says +1 hand in blue, you get a full extra hand to play in the round. Yes, it's confusing.

YOU CAN MOVE YOUR JOKERS AROUND. (This is a little Advanced but if you want to know the optimal Joker order, it's like the card usefulness: Jokers that add chips go to the left. Jokers that add XMULT go to the right. Effects Jokers, like Four Fingers (allows you to play Flushes and Straights with 4 cards instead of 5) can go anywhere.)

YOU CAN ALSO MOVE CARDS IN YOUR HAND. Playing a Straight as Jack-Ten-King-Queen-Ace is still a straight. If you have a Glass card, put it to the rightmost side of the hand.

DO NOT DO THE MATH. Or, until you get to very very high level play, do not check your math. There will be times when you have a single hand left on the boss blind of the 8th Ante and you will google the Balatro Score Calculator, we've all been there. But you need to believe in the heart of the cards and the vibes of the jokers.

You will unlock decks as you beat the 8th Ante boss with the last deck you unlocked. Red, Blue, Yellow, Green, and Black are the basic decks. After you have those, you have to use any deck to beat the stakes. Raising the stake will add weird conditions to the game to try to make reaching the 8th Ante harder. For example, I am currently on the Orange Stake on Abandoned and Plasma Decks. Red, Blue, and Yellow Decks are easiest for tackling the stakes. Black Deck is the fucking devil.

When you walked in the sand and saw the footprints behind you, that was Flashback as they carried you.

[sims3fiend]

S3SettingsSetter New new version New

I have returned from the grave to do another re-rewrite of Sims 3 Settings Setter! Hopefully the last! The main new features are a pattern detection approach, meaning it should work on any version of the game, and a new platform for some function rewrite optimizations I've done (steam only). Also most importantly includes the ability to set the Streaming settings to throttle lots, reducing stutter dramatically and a patch to make lots load on radius instead of view.

A full write-up below, but here's the main features:

Change "variable" settings ingame: This lets you change things that normally require mods but live ingame, letting you tweak things how you want. This includes things like changing bloom levels, light colors, sunlight brightness, weather (so you can have snow in summer), sunrise times, tweaking shadow distances, etc etc. Highly recommend just playing around to see what can be done. These are now correctly mapped so they should all work correctly.

Change "Config" settings (not ingame): This lets you set any config (graphicsrules.sgr) thing you want, including some that aren't in the original files (idr the name). It also lets you have set presets, and means you can (hopefully) more clearly see what settings you've changed. I will slowly (I've said this before lol) manually add Config and Options settings to the live edit, I haven't found an easy automatic way of doing this unfortunately.

Performance tweaks and notifications: Set notifications for hitting memory thresholds, letting you know before an E12 happens. Improve game performance with tweaks to game code. Uhh, maybe other stuff soon idk

Please note, as this is a new rewrite, this is still a beta. There will probably be bugs, the menu may glitch out, etc. Please also note that some settings may effect things in unexpected ways, if you're not sure what a setting does, maybe try it out in a fresh save first. Generally though, everything is correctly mapped and shouldn't have any lasting negative effects on your game.

BaselinePerformance preset (put into Presets folder and load ingame with File -> Presets). This should reduce stuttering while still being light enough that it wont tank laptop players. Use this instead of my GraphicsRules file please! https://simfileshare.net/download/5333998/

Download: http://www.simfileshare.net/download/5333999/

Source: https://github.com/sims3fiend/Sims3SettingsSetter

\/ More details/blog post/How to use \/

How to use

Installing:

Just like before you 'll need an ASI loader. I recommend dxwrapper but if you're using Smooth Patch that comes with one too. You then just plonk it into your The Sims 3\Game\Bin folder like any other .asi mod and run the game.

Using:

Preset insert to open the UI

The menu should open up, if it doesn't, look in your game directory for hook_log.txt and send it to me x. If you don't have one, chances are your asi loader isn't working correctly.

The settings tab only becomes editable once a game has been loaded (might change this later). These are values that can be edited live ingame and should change something even if that thing isn't immediately obvious.

Most have sliders, the min/max/step are determined by the game itself, but you can set them above/below these values by right clicking

This also lets you "Clear Override" AKA remove it from the ini, or "Reset to Default" which resets it it to default :)

When you've got things how you want, go to file -> save to save them. If you want to make a preset out of them, that's in file too x, presets save things like patches, Config and QoL too, so just be careful. When loading a preset you can chose to Overwrite which basically clears your ini, or merge, which adds that preset on top of your current settings.

Everything else should be pretty easy to figure out idk

What's new/blog

New function approach for live edit

I actually properly looked at the code flow and found a neat vtable that had, essentially, what I was dreaming of when I made the version version of this. The function gives the name, min, max, step and address of incoming variable manager controlled settings, which is rly rly good! A much more sane and easy to develop for approach than the manually mapping out address spaces approach I was taking before!

Patterns

I've tried to use patterns for the most part, this means finding the function and trying to write a "pattern" of bytes that matches both main versions of the game (Steam and EA). This can be pretty tricky as you have to be specific enough that you don't get false positives while being loose enough to get both versions. It seems to work on both EA/Steam version (with the exception of the patches), but please let me know if it doesn't.

Patches

NERD ZONE NERD ZONE SKIP THIS PART

These will primarily be direct naked ASM patches to functions, and I'll probably be keeping them exclusive to the steam version of the game unless there's something that's a substantial improvement, as the EA one has been compiled differently so different instructions are used, meaning I'd have to write two patches. You can probably skip using them for now if I'm being honest, I have a bunch in the works but these mostly suck.

Point intersection patch

Essentially this is a hand written naked ASM patch for the point intersection code TS3 uses, this is used for nav meshing IIRC, and was the first proper one of these I did after seeing it in vtuner. Sadly, It's not really going to be noticeable at all, maybe a second faster load on custom maps, as they bulk call it during load. IIRC non-custom ones also call it during sims moving but I could be wrong as I wrote this aaages ago and didn't keep great notes. It has a lot of stuff in it and does achieve a very substantial boost vs the default function as a result, it's just that the function isn't really a cause of lag (though is on the render thread IIRC so..). It achieves the performance boost by I guess nearly fully rewriting it, I added an early exit, use prefetchnta, switched to SIMD, lddqu, shufps, fast paths… idk these are all words that mean nothing to basically everyone reading this including me but I'm quite happy with how it turned out.

Target Framerate

Changes what I can only assume is the games framerate target, it seems to interact w/ the frame buffer. I haven't noticed any noticeable difference but give it a go! This one may desync things in theory but I haven't noticed so 🤷 lol actually this makes animations slow down for some reason so I've removed it oops, need to look into this more.

Lot Visibility

Disables the games check for if a lot is in view, instead it should just load based on the radius around the camera. This is a the patch in Stutter Reducerer so if you're using that you don't need this (just enable Lot Throttling under streaming)

LZ Optimization (not released)

This is basically the point intersection but for the games main package decompression (RefPack) implementation. I… am/was a bit of a dunce with this, for whatever reason my original implementation was focused on large reads using AVX,SSE, etc… Now, the issue is… LZ does small (1-4) byte reads… so… I'm in the process of rewriting it once more. Plan to uroll the functions and do idk like MOVZX I think would be huge, simplifying the flow, etc etc.

The performance gain might actually be somewhat noticeable for this as this function is used in gameplay quite a bit. How you might ask? Well, every single lot that is loaded reads and extracts files for every object in that lot every single time it is loaded, in excess of 40mb/s with that being several hundreds of thousands of calls (some files are very small, and refpack also is byte-by-byte). This is all also done on the render thread, so the game has to wait for this to do its thing (and several other functions) before it renders the next frame. Very good very fun.

Multithreading (maybe eventually)

I've tried but no real luck, I've had some "success" but mostly it's been failures. I do have some interesting things I want to look at, especially related to lot loading so we'll see what the future holds. I think some degree of multithreading for the render thread would be incredibly huge.

Other patches

I have like 10 other ones that are not quite ready yet but should help, hopefully I'll just trickle them out but I think waiting until I can get them working properly is probably dumb.

Coming soon:

Stuff that I'm working on I swear I promise!!! It's coming!

UI QoL - There's a lot wrong with it.

"Options" category support. This is tricky as changing these settings directly writes them to the .ini file in documents for some reason

Several patches

A system for automatic performance tweaks like reducing active lots to 0 when loading, then throttle-loading them back once game has loaded, or automatically reducing settings related to object caps, etc.

More live-edit settings. There's a bunch I want to add it's just annoying. Most are static values though but having to find patterns that find them for both versions is rly annoying. Things like RenderSimLODDistances, FogDistances, the Script category…etc. If you have any requests lmk!

The ini file is kinda ugly garbage horrible to look at

Need to figure out why these have min/max/step like, is there some sort of debug ui I'm missing out on? It seems like there is but idk how to trigger it, gunna be pissed if it's something obvious

[krisp-xyz]

Was experimenting with halftone effects after watching this video and it almost has spiderverse vibes honestly. I actually learned some neat things about why printers use CMYK instead of just CMY so I thought I'd share !!

So in our optimal little computer space, Cyan (0,255,255), Magenta (255,0,255) and Yellow (255,255,0) all multiplied together gives us a perfect black (0,0,0) Awesome! The issue is that ink colors irl arent exactly perfect like this, and color is a bit more complicated irl compared to how computers represent it, so they aren't the greatest at combining into black if they aren't those perfect CMY values:

Left: CMY

Right: CMYK

(thats not even black, its a dark blue in the original image but dark colors just look so much richer)

An important step to make sure you arent doubling up on the black values though is to divide the image by it's own "value" (the max of all 3 color channels) that way the value is equal to 1 everywhere, and you're letting the black ink take care of the value on its own.

Left: CMY (normalized value)

Middle: K (black)

Right: Combined

Now obviously the grids of dots cant be aligned perfectly with each other because you'd just get a bunch of black dots in unwanted areas, but if the grids are misaligned, then some dots become more prominent than others which tints the whole image. This was an issue because older printing methods didn't have great accuracy and these grids were often misaligned.

The solution was to rotate these grids such that they can move around freely while getting rid of that tint effect if they aren't perfectly aligned :D

(I have no idea how they came up with these angles but that might be something to look into in the future who knows)

SPEAKING OF MISALIGNMENT

I wanted to implement that in my own filter to get some cool effects, and I discovered another reason CMYK is better than CMY for lots of stuff !!

With CMY, you're relying on the combination of 3 color channels to make the color black. This means if you have thin lines or just details in general, misalignment can make those details very fuzzy. Since CMYK uses a single color of ink to handle value, it reduces color fringing and improves clarity a lot even if you have the exact same misalignment as CMY!

Left: CMY

Right: You guessed it! CMYK

(yes these comparisons have the exact same color misalignment, the only difference is using a fourth ink color for black)

ANYWAY I just thought there was a lot of cool information in this tiny little day project, I also just think it looks really neat and wanted to share what I learned :3c

EDITING BECAUSE THERE'S ONE MORE THING I WANTED TO ADD

So, I talked about how to get K in addition to CMY instead of just CMY, but how exactly do you separate CMY from an image in the first place?

Well, CMY is a subtractive color space, meaning the "absence of color" is white, compared to RGB where it's black. This makes sense because ofc ink is printed on white paper. You can use dot product to get the "similarity" between two vectors, and this can be used to separate RGB actually! Using the dot product of a color and red (255,0,0) will give you just the red values of the image. This is cool though because if we get the dot product of our image and the color cyan (0,255,255), we can get the cyan values from our image too! If we first divide our colors by their value to separate the value from them, then separate CMY using those dot product values, and using K for our final black color value, our individual color passes end up looking like this:

While it's called a "subtractive" color space, I find it more intuitive to treat white as the absence of color here, and then multiply all these passes together. It makes it much easier to understand how the colors are combined imo. Notice how cyan is the opposite of red: (255,0,0) vs (0,255,255) and magenta and yellow are the opposites of green and blue respectively! This means you can actually kinda get away with separating the RGB values and just inverting some stuff to optimize this, but this example is much more intuitive and readable so I won't go too deep into that. THANKS FOR READING I know it's a very long post but I hope people find it interesting! I try my best to explain things in a clear and concise way :3

oh thank you I realized I should probably add an eyestrain tag

[genshin-impact-updates]

Artifact Management and Enhancement Screen Optimizations Are Here~ | Developers Discussion - 12/06

Hello, Travelers~

In Version 4.3, we will implement a series of system optimizations in the game. We will be introducing some of these in this Developers Discussion. Let's take a look together~

〓Archon Quest "Requiem of the Echoing Depths" Unlinked From World Quest〓

To ensure that Travelers have a smoother experience with the Archon Quest, from Version 4.3 onwards, "The Chasm Delvers" quest series will no longer be prerequisites for this Archon Quest. When you reach the objective "Enter The Chasm: Underground Mines" in the Archon Quest "In the Depths, an Unexpected Reunion," a Teleport Waypoint will be automatically unlocked in The Chasm: Underground Mines so you can continue with the Archon Quest.

The Archon Quest "Requiem of the Echoing Depths" requires Travelers to head to The Chasm: Underground Mines, but this location will be locked until Travelers have completed the corresponding World Quest that allows them to enter and continue pursuing the Archon Quest.

〓One-Click Features〓

▌Dispatching Characters on Expeditions

One-Click Expeditions will become available in Version 4.3. This will allow Travelers to claim Expedition Rewards with a single click, as well as repeat expeditions with a single click.

(This is under development and is not indicative of the final product.)

▌Ingredient Processing and Forging Screens

Aside from expeditions, you will also be able to claim processed ingredients and forged items that have been completed with a single click in Version 4.3.

▌Mystic Offering

When performing Mystic Offerings at Crafting Benches, you'll now be able to add multiple Artifacts in batches with a single click.

In future versions, you'll also be able to claim created Furnishings from the Creation Screen in the Serenitea Pot with a single click.

〓Optimized Artifact Management〓

As the journey goes on, the number of Artifact Sets you can collect will continue to increase. To help Travelers quickly find and manage Artifacts, a significant optimization has been made to the Artifacts filter function.

Automatic Locking and Quick Unlock functions have been added to the Inventory > Artifacts screen. Travelers can use these to automatically lock and unlock Artifacts according to the requirements they set.

(This is under development and is not indicative of the final product.)

(This is under development and is not indicative of the final product.)

(This is under development and is not indicative of the final product.)

Additionally, as a reference to help Travelers when choosing Artifacts, recommended Artifact set information based on recently active players will now be shown on characters' Artifacts screens.

For more details about Artifact management optimizations, please stay tuned for future official descriptions.

〓Optimized Enhancement Screens〓

In the current version of the game, when Travelers level up characters or enhance Weapons and Artifacts, a pop-up appears showing how the corresponding values changed before and after enhancement. In Version 4.3, enhancement information will be integrated into the original screen instead. This will make the enhancement experience smoother for Travelers by getting rid of the frequent pop-ups.

Apart from integrating enhancement information, there will also be some small targeted optimizations on these screens:

▌Character Level-Up Screen

(This is under development and is not indicative of the final product.)

The speed of interface special effects related to leveling up characters has been increased, and you can now use Auto Add to add sufficient Character EXP Materials to get the character up to the highest level they can reach before Ascension with a single click.

▌Artifact Enhancement Screen

(This is under development and is not indicative of the final product.)

Other optimizations:

1. You can now consume up to 15 items per time when enhancing Artifacts.

2. Added the "Enhance to Next Tier" function. Once activated, when there are still open slots to add Enhancement Materials but this action will already cause the Artifact to reach Level 4/8/12/16, no more additional Enhancement Materials will be automatically added.

3. In Settings > Other, you can choose whether or not 5-Star Artifacts can be auto-added as Enhancement Materials.

Combined with the Automatic Locking function mentioned above, we hope that these changes will make managing 5-star Artifacts more convenient for Travelers.

▌Weapon Enhancement Screen

(This is under development and is not indicative of the final product.)

You can now consume up to 40 items per time when enhancing Weapons on, and select multiple materials when refining Weapons.

We hope that these optimizations make the enhancement experience smoother for Travelers.

〓Character Reload Spot When Challenging Domains Repeatedly〓

In Version 4.3, after entering the Domain or if you continue to challenge the Domain after claiming rewards, characters will reload nearer to the Domain challenge location. This means you won't have to run over from the Domain entrance to this location again.

(This is under development and is not indicative of the final product.)

〓Other Optimizations〓

To improve your gaming experience, some other optimizations will be implemented in Version 4.3. These include:

1. The way enemy avatars display in Adventurer Handbook: Enemies will be adjusted to help you find them. Also, you can now select "Cancel Navigation" on this screen to stop navigating towards the corresponding enemy on the map.

2. On the various creation screens (Crafting/Cooking/Forging/Create Furnishing), if there are no selected character records on the Traveler's device, the first character that can provide a bonus when creating the selected item will be chosen by default.

3. On the map screen, you'll now be able to check bosses' current remaining respawn times by clicking their avatars.

(This is under development and is not indicative of the final product.)

And that's all for this Developers Discussion. We'll have more information about new version content and optimizations for you in the future, so please stay tuned for further official announcements. If you have any thoughts or feedback, feel free to send them to us through the various channels within and outside of the game~

[nianeyemystic]

Hi! How do you interpret woman's pluto conjunct man's venus and mars in synastry? The sign is sagittarius. Thank you :))

Her Pluto aspecting His Venus & Mars

In synastry, Pluto conjunct Venus and Mars creates an 🔥 intense and 🔮 transformative connection between two people. Since this conjunction is in Sagittarius ♐️, it adds an adventurous and free-spirited vibe! Let me see how I can break it down:

Pluto conjunct Venus (Woman's Pluto, Man's Venus)

💘 Magnetic Attraction: The Pluto person (woman) has this powerful, almost hypnotic energy that draws the Venus person (man) in like a moth to a flame. The connection can feel fated or karmic! ��� Power Dynamics: Pluto loves control, so the woman may feel the urge to understand (and sometimes dominate) the man’s values and love language. 🔥 Passionate Intensity: The romance here is off-the-charts! The Venus person might feel captivated, while the Pluto person is equally enchanted by Venus’ beauty and charm. 💔 Healing or Obsession: This bond can lead to deep emotional growth.. which we love to see, but it can also trigger possessiveness and obsession if things get out of balance.

Pluto conjunct Mars (Woman's Pluto, Man's Mars)

💥 Raw Power and Chemistry: MMMMMM this is spiiiiicyyyyy! The physical attraction is electric. This connection oozes passion and could feel almost primal. 🤜🤛 Potential for Conflict: Mars loves action and assertion, while Pluto seeks control and transformation. This could lead to power struggles (watch out for ego clashes!). 🌱 Mutual Growth: If both partners work together, this aspect can spark amazing personal and emotional breakthroughs!

Now, in Sagittarius ♐️

🌍 Adventure and Growth: Sagittarius brings a love of exploration and expansion to this mix. You might feel like your connection is a journey—filled with travel, learning, and self-discovery. 💡 Passionate Ideals: This fire sign adds a spark of optimism and a shared desire to seek truth and meaning in life. 🏃‍♀️ Restlessness Alert: Sagittarius craves freedom and independence, which could clash with Pluto’s more possessive tendencies. Balance will be key!

This aspect screams transformative passion 💫! It’s the kind of connection that could change you both in powerful ways—hello, soul growth! 🌱 Just be mindful of power dynamics and enjoy the ride 🚀.

[proustiansleep]

LE: In any case, we both see sex as a site for experiencing this intensified encounter with what disorganizes accustomed ways of being. And as Lauren and I both want to suggest, that encounter, viewed as traumatic or not, remains bound to the nonfutural insistence in sex of something nonproductive, nonteleological, and divorced from meaning making. In this sense sex without optimism invokes the negativity of sex as a defining and even enabling condition. Gayle Rubin reminds us in “Thinking Sex” that “Western cultures generally consider sex to be a dangerous, destructive, negative force,” to which we might add: if only sex lived up to such press more often (Rubin 2011, 148)! If only, that is, the Panoptimism that rules us, even (or especially) in our denial of its hold, did not so often lend value to sex through the world-preserving meanings imposed upon it to repudiate its negativity. One need not romanticize sex to maintain that it offers, in its most intensely felt and therefore least routinized forms, something in excess of pleasure or happiness or the self-evidence of value. It takes us instead to a limit, and it is that limit, or the breaking beyond it, toward which sex without optimism points. LB: ...one no longer has to see sex only as expressing a relation of power, or someone’s singular pleasures, or the shattering activity of the drives. We wouldn’t have needed Rubin to help us calm down and think about sex, and to think about affirming what’s threatening about it either, if we did not need to figure out how sex reproduces normativity while predictably disorganizing assurance about why we want what we want and what our variety of attachments mean; at the same time, not quite knowing ourselves, we demand all sorts of things on behalf of the appetites, such as the right to anonymity, aggression, acknowledgment, pleasure, relief, protection, and, often, repair ... As I wrote recently in an essay about the work of Leo Bersani and David Halperin, “When in a romance someone has sex and then says to the lover, ‘You make me feel safe,’ we understand that she means that there’s been an emotional compensation to neutralize how unsafe and close to the abject sex makes her feel. ‘You make me feel safe’ means that I can relax and have fun where I am also not safe, where I am too close to the ridiculous, the disgusting, the merely weird, or—simply too close to having a desire. —Lauren Berlant & Lee Edelman, Sex or the Unbearable

[autistic-evil-xisuma]

If we're being haters, then can I add that I'm like 70% bored of the constant portrayal of Xisuma overworking himself. Like, occasionally, it's used in a way that's interesting, but what is it based on? Like Xisuma would never sacrifice his precious sleep for work. That man is constantly trying to min-max his health, lol.

YEAH FR. Like I think he's a doofus and can be forgetful and whatever but why is that made into a central character trait. He seriously values his health and isn't gonna see it as less important than fucking. Idk. Optimizing chunks or whatever Sorry I don't really know what server maintenance involves. I'm just thinking about that post about how fandom can't comprehend a genuinely confident character. Yeah insecurities are fun to explore and I for sure think xisuma has some of them but Come on. There are more ways to explore a character than making them woefully self sacrificing when that trait is nottt even there in canon.

[askagamedev]

Why do temporary solutions end up being so foundational in a lot of games?

It has to do with how software engineering works. Whenever we build a system, that system doesn't typically exist in a vacuum - temporary or not, it exists to handle some particular task or solve some problem. A temporary solution might not handle that task or problem optimally, but it works well enough that the system can function within the greater context of all of the other systems that use it to handle their own tasks/problems.

If enough other systems are built on top of the temporary solution, that temporary solution becomes load bearing - removing that temporary solution will cause everything built upon it to break. Any attempt at replacing the temporary solution needs not only to replace the solution itself, but also needs to ensure that every system built on top of it still functions properly. Software development tends to be this constant layering of system upon system upon system as the game comes together. This generally means that the longer it takes to replace a temporary solution, the more difficult and expensive it becomes to do so. We call this cost [technical debt].

Since games must eventually ship, team leadership must make judgement calls on what debt we fully pay off and what debt we just pay the maintenance cost on. That determination is often determined by how much effort it takes to fix the problem properly and how much dev time we have left. Fixing tech debt is often mostly invisible to the players and we need to weigh those costs against having the developers work on new features or content instead. The temporary solutions work, they just don't work very well. Improvements in performance or workflow may not translate directly to value-add for the player.

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[marmaladeinlemonade]

Event tickets in sky were never going to work anyway.

It's way too good to be true; a currency that cannot be transferred across events or into candles/hearts for the sole purpose of making event cosmetics easier to obtain, that is collected by participating in the event itself? Thats already fishy enough by tgc's standards.

Thatgamecompany has a habit of making short term solutions for long term problems because of the sheer amount of content they make yearly, leaving less room to optimize regular gameplay. ET has probably been the most apparent example of this. (MAAAAJOR YAP SESSION AHEAD!)

When event tickets were first released, I was ecstatic. I was already struggling to keep up with Days of Bloom and Mischief since I have taken many breaks from sky, but I couldn't begin to fathom how the prices may feel to a new player. I also hated picking and choosing between what items to buy simply because i didn't dedicate the past two weeks so candlerunning alone. Hopefully this new addition of ET would take off that load and i can enjoy the following events to it's fullest, and well, I did.

For the first year that is. These cosmetics that costed ET were damn near free for me. Yet, in the back of my head i always wondered what would happen the following year once these ET cosmetics came back, alongside the new ones that were to be released. Would they cost just as much ET as last year's items? Then collecting ET would only get more stressful and inflate its value. Would the past items go away? That is unfair to new players and pushes FOMO to get everything every year.

Maybe the total price could stay the same but older items depreciate each year as newer ones release, making the oldest ones the cheapest.

And to my great surprise as i look at beta logs for this year's days of summer, not a single item from the year before is under 90 candles! How could this possibly be fair to new players who are trying to enjoy sky for what it is and get items? I've seen some people argue that the player has the choice to not get all cosmetics, which is true, but I'd like to show you what thought process is implied with this system. Think:

"We know you don't fully know your way around sky's economy, or don't have the time to grind everyday, but for this year only these new items are free just by participating in the event! And if you don't, for any reason, the price of the items will be worth 3-6 hours of candlerunning on top of MORE cosmetics! But it's all up to you!"

This isn't to say us as a playerbase have zero autonomy, but i hope you can see how FOMO is enforced when you add a currency with zero value outside of an annual 2 week event that gives players a "now or never" mindset. This is great in the moment, it pushes people to participate! Yet, this ruthlessly punishes players who aren't available for any reason, even those who weren't aware of sky before joining.

Sky is still a new game. Event tickets were only introduced a year ago, but if tgc keeps going down this economic pattern then imagine the amount of cosmetics locked away from new players, or players who took breaks, because of this exponential increase in pricing!

This is a more subjective opinion- but let me be honest; these cosmetics are not worth their candle/heart prices.

I was lucky enough to get all the days of style and days of summer items from last year for ET and i barely wore them, i can only imagine ONE item from each event being rewearable. I didn't mind though because i knew the towel capes and silly glasses were nice starter items for moths, but it's not even moth friendly anymore?! In the past only items that were in high demand were priced outrageously like rhythm and lightseeker TS, and now I'm spending extra for a purple top hat that doesn't even match any of the other purples in this game☠️☠️ you're getting less bang for your buck with a 110 candle towel cape bro

And lastly, there are other issues I've seen in sky that i would say are parallel to this whole event ticket situation. The time gaps between seasons have grown significantly smaller, and each seasonal update has been saturated with glitches and disappointment. Season of the Nine-Colored Deer is another very apparent example of this for me. The castle and crescent lake is done beautifully and the quests are decent, but no one is returning to the area. The rest of the town is empty and awkward, and half the map is in a canyon where you spawn so it's already a good 2-3 minutes getting out of that area alone. The place is just rushed. Its inconvenient.

Ill be posting a poll right after this post, but me personally i would not mind having 3 seasons a year if it meant higher quality content and more breaks from events. More spirits that are well thought out, detailed seasonal quests that arent cleanups or scavenger hunts, less quantity but higher quality cosmetics and emotes, and elder appearances! It's clear that tgc has a more complex world design outside of Sky: cotl when we look at The Two Embers, but that the energy it takes to make it in game is placed elsewhere.

Thatgamecompany is pushing out more content than they ever have before and I think their work is starting to crumble under the weight.

If you made it here THANK YOU!!! you're a lifesaver, theres so much that i want to say and i really hope a lot of skids see this post so that we can get a cohesive discussion going❤️

[malk1ns]

march 15 v devils, 7-3 win

nice.

i really enjoyed geno's bizarro over-the-top penalty fugue state he went into for this one. almost like he was glitching out...

we can call this a homage to @sevenfists' wonderful tragic hockeybot geno, but not as good because like...duh.

this does contain a homophobic slur just fyi.

Evgeni has followed a fairly strict game-day protocol ever since he woke up in Pittsburgh almost 20 years ago. The details have changed, refinements and efficiencies added in as his software was upgraded, but the basics, the stuff that keeps him running at optimal performance and giving his all on the ice, have remained the same.

Most of his start-up process is automated now, thankfully. Those first couple of years he needed to be manually disconnected from his charging station and powered on every morning, and since the station was bulky and he had to charge upright all night he’d spend the first half-hour trying to loosen up his joints and walk without a hitch in his step. It also meant he had to stay at the rink—the unit was permanently installed in his maintenance room, and they only had one more extraordinarily bulky one that got lugged around for road trips. Evgeni spent a lot of mornings after Dana woke him up wandering the hallways until the rest of the guys started to trickle in.

He came back from the Olympics in Sochi with a new charging port, discreetly installed under his left armpit and USB-C compatible provided it’s connected to one of his new, portable power packs. The automated start-up patch came through shortly after, and all he had to do was program in a power-down and power-up time and he boots up all on his own.

Powering down in a comfortable position had been a revelation. Being able to do it wherever he wanted was another.

Evgeni considered buying his own house—the idea of his own space is appealing, even if he’s not quite sure what people do at home by themselves at night. He’d run a pro/con analysis, though, and asked someone to look over the results to verify the conclusion he came to: however unlikely it may be, the scenario of something going wrong when nobody is there to find Evgeni and perform emergency maintenance is an unacceptable trade-off for home ownership.

Sidney’s suggestion that Evgeni just move in with him was much more logical.

Something else that came with Evgeni’s 2014 upgrade was an unexpected, but not unwelcome, libido add-on. All part of the goal to make Evgeni and others like him more human, integrate them more into society at large. It took a few months for Evgeni to calibrate to his new desires; he’d expected a standard program, especially with his lab of origin located in Russia, but after a while he figured out he was gay.

He spent the off-season experimenting and arrived in Pittsburgh for the season with a list of likes and dislikes, and a type. Sidney almost exactly matched the latter, and based on Evgeni’s new experience he was confident that the first two items could be adjusted to suit.

He’d been right. 

Sidney has said he’s in love with Evgeni. Evgeni’s emotional response center has been upgraded on a regular basis over the years, but most of the time it seems like he’s a little…slow, maybe, or removed from how he should be feeling, such as it is.

Not about Sidney. He’s pretty sure he loves Sidney too.

Sidney also understands the value of a routine. He has his own, more rigidly engrained than anything Evgeni does on gameday, and he’s more than happy to leave Evgeni alone to boot up and run his diagnostics in peace. It’s unsettling to watch, Evgeni’s been told—his eyes go disconcertingly blank, and for a solid five minutes he’s utterly unresponsive. People get weird about it, even if they’ve seen it before. He prefers to be alone.

Mid-March in a season like this one is a grind. Evgeni’s been in for repairs more this season than the last two combined, and they might not be officially eliminated from playoff contention yet but it’s just a matter of time; motivation is hard to come by, even for Evgeni. It’s reassuring to fall into his programming and run through each system one by one, making sure he’s primed for optimal performance.

There’s a spark in the corner of his vision.

Evgeni pauses, scrolls back through lines of code, reviews. Nothing. He must have imagined it.

When he pulls himself out, he’s running a few minutes late; Sidney will be almost done with his breakfast.

Evgeni heaves himself to his feet and heads downstairs. Sidney drives on game days, so Evgeni downloads the Devils’ five most recent games to review in the car.

—

He shouldn’t need to, but Evgeni likes to top-up his charge while Sidney takes his pre-game nap. Sidney likes it too, says it feels like they’re falling asleep together; it also helps that once Evgeni’s powered down he doesn’t move, so once they’re arranged to maximize Sidney’s comfort there’s no mid-sleep jostling.

When Evgeni boots back up, he feels…weird. Wrong, lying in bed with Sidney wrapped around him like normal.

He unplugs his charger and extracts himself as carefully as he can, putting on his suit and making his way downstairs to wait until Sidney is awake and ready to drive them to the rink for the game.

Sidney frowns at him when he finally comes down, but Evgeni turns his head, and Sidney lets him be.

They make small talk in the car like usual, but Evgeni’s distracted, and eventually Sidney goes quiet. To distract himself Evgeni runs back to his source code, a well-worn self-soothing mechanism when he’s feeling jumpy or off.

The code itself is simple but effective, wrapped inside a descriptor of the reason Evgeni was made in the first place.

The modern sport of ice hockey was developed in Canada…

By the time the game starts Evgeni’s restless, shifting from foot to foot during the anthem and eyeing the opposing team with more hostility than he’s used to experiencing. 

Evgeni’s never pretended to be the cleanest player in the league. He’s sneaky with his stick, takes risky penalties because when guys hit back he doesn’t feel pain like humans do, and sometimes it works. Even for him, though, this game is tough sledding.

When his reckless double minor results in a goal against and lets the Devils draw within one, Evgeni shatters his stick in the box, then glides back to the bench with his mouth twisted in a frown. He feels—he wants to hit something, or maybe someone.

His higher processing is on alert at this aberration in behavior, but all Evgeni can do is sit on the bench, accept his new stick, and wait.

“G,” comes Sidney’s voice in his ear, and Evgeni flinches away violently—what is Sidney doing, sitting so close? Why is he pressing their legs together like that? Why is he reaching for Evgeni’s hand where it’s resting on his thigh? “Hey, you okay? You seem a little rattled; do you need a breather, maybe someone to check you out?”

“Fuck off, what you do,” Evgeni hisses, snatching his hand away. “Don’t touch me, like, what are you, a faggot? Back off.”

Crosby freezes, and Letang peers around from his other side, eyes narrowed. “What the fuck did you just say to him?”

“You fuck off too,” Evgeni snaps, half-rising with his fists clenching in his gloves, and suddenly the bot maintenance guy has an iron grip on his arm.

“Cool it, or I’m taking you back and decommissioning you here and now instead of letting you get through this game and get examined,” Freddy snaps in his ear.

Evgeni shakes his head. There’s an odd echo in his ears, metallic and hollow, and snippets from his source code keep floating into his brain—Hockey Canada announced a plan to address "systemic issues" in the culture of hockey; the early history of hockey encouraged physical intimidation and control; oh, the good old hockey game....

The rest of the game is a blur. Evgeni doesn’t cause any more goals against, even manages to put up a primary assist on the power play, but he spends his time on the bench spacing out, shrinking away from anyone who tries to talk to him as he scrolls through his coding.

The diagnostics are all still fine. Something’s wrong, though.

Evgeni spent a year in stasis while his system was flooded with hockey history and hockey culture. He doesn’t remember it very well, but those first few years had aligned pretty well with what he’d learned—hockey was rough, hockey was physical, hockey was insular and conservative and macho.

Times change. So did Evgeni, through programming and his own conclusions drawn from observing the world around him.

He seesaws between past and present, software upgrades and personality patches warring in his motherboard until he thinks he might short out. He doesn’t, obviously; there are enough redundancies built into him to keep the ISS in orbit, let alone one android on an ice rink, but that doesn’t stop him from feeling overheated and dazed by the time they troop off the ice.

Instead of walking to the locker room he turns left, toward the bot maintenance room.

He half-hears a whispered argument behind him, and shortly after it cuts off someone hurries to catch up.

“Hey,” Sidney says, and Evgeni cringes, his words from earlier rattling in his skull like they were said by someone else.

“Sorry,” he grits out. He wants to reach out and take Sidney’s hand, but the thought of someone seeing him holding hands with a man fills him with nausea. “Not sure…”

“Yeah,” Sidney says. His voice is even, flat and unsettling, but Evgeni doesn’t have room to work through that and find a fix.

Freddy’s waiting outside the room with his arms crossed. He relaxes when Evgeni rounds into view, raising his eyebrows but not commenting when Sidney follows them into the room.

“Alright, let’s get you opened up and see what’s going on,” Freddy says, gesturing to the maintenance station.

It looks like a torture chamber, a metal chair surrounded by needles and machinery and a large, ominous machine with a screen and dozens of blinking lights. Evgeni gingerly lowers himself into the seat and closes his eyes, flinching a little when the chair lifts and tilts him forward, giving Freddy access to his control panel.

It doesn’t hurt to have his panel opened, but it feels wrong, invasive and intrusive. Evgeni used to need to get strapped into the chair to stop from fighting, but now he squeezes his eyes closed and bites on his tongue and takes some of the big, soothing breaths that do nothing for the functioning of his shell but seem to settle his mind anyway.

“Fuck,” Freddy murmurs, and Evgeni’s eyes fly open. Before he can say a word, Sidney’s at his side.

“What is it?” Sidney demands, resting a hand on Evgeni’s shoulder and rubbing his thumb soothingly as he leans over to peer into the panel. “Oh, shit.”

“What!” Evgeni demands, clenching his fists. He hates this, hates feeling helpless and paralyzed while people bend over his back and stare down into his innards.

“Not sure what happened in here, bud, but you’ve got some seriously fucked-up wires. Something in here burnt out, and a few of the metal casings are fried.” Freddy touches something inside Evgeni that sends his left knee straight out in a kick. “Yeah, damn, that’s no good. You were maybe a few days from catching on fire.”

Sidney’s hand spasms on Evgeni’s shoulder. “Can you fix him?” he asks, voice low and worried.

“Oh, sure,” Freddy says, and the easy confidence in his voice is reassuring. Freddy never sounds overwhelmed, never sounds like there’s something he can’t make work. “Might take a while, I think I’ll have to boot him into safety mode for a few hours to make sure everything’s connected okay, but he should be ready to go by Tuesday’s game.”

Sidney’s exhale is shaky with relief. Evgeni wants to reach up and touch his hand. “We start now?” he says instead, keeping his eyes on the ground.

“Sure thing. When was your last backup?” Freddy asks, rummaging through his toolkit. “Sid, when you head back can you let Sully know what’s going on, tell him I’ll get everyone a full rundown once I can pull the readout?”

“Sure. And he backed up last night, so you can probably just—”

Evgeni interrupts him. “No,” he says firmly, finally gathering the courage to crane his neck and look up at Sidney’s face. “Back up now, please. Want to remember what I say.”

“Good man,” Freddy says, clapping Evgeni on his other shoulder.

Sidney crouches down so he can look Evgeni in the eye. “You didn’t mean it,” he says quietly. His eyebrows are furrowed, and there’s a frown tugging at his mouth. He’s sad, Evgeni concludes, and hurt, and he’s trying to hide it. “I mean, it’s like…you’re hurt, you pulled something out from your coding, it’s not—”

“Sid,” Evgeni interrupts, and Sidney startles. A quirk in Evgeni’s programming is that he doesn’t use nicknames unless he really makes an effort. “Doesn’t matter why, I still say. Can’t forget I do, it’s not…” He thinks, running through the relationships course he downloaded back in 2015 when the team was struggling and Sidney seemed like he was on the verge of ending things. “It’s reason, not excuse. I still need, like, accountability.”

He mangles the word, but Sidney’s small smile is worth it.

—

Evgeni doesn’t dream, exactly. When he’s powered down there’s still a flicker of awareness as long as he has battery, enough to pull himself to wakefulness if there’s a threat, but extended downtime for repairs is like floating in a thick black cloud. There’s a very distance perception of voices, of movement and hands on his shell and wires being replaced, but nothing that Evgeni can actually truly call a memory as opposed to a superimposed expectation of what happened.

The grogginess when he’s powered back on is very real, though, as is the stiffness in his knees. He hopes he’ll have enough time to loosen up before he has to play.

“Welcome back,” Freddy’s cheerful voice booms, and Evgeni winces. “You should be set. Had you walk and sit and do a few jumping jacks yesterday in safety mode, nothing else loosened up or shorted. Okay—hands?”

He walks Evgeni through the post-repairs protocol, checking his reactivity, his senses, the last things he remembers to check his backup loaded correctly. Check, check, check.

When Evgeni stumbles out of the room, blinking against the harsh overhead lights in the hall, Sidney’s waiting for him.

“Hey,” Sidney says, eyes flickering over Evgeni’s face.

“I’m so sorry,” Evgeni says immediately. The shame that rolls through him is new and unexpectedly powerful—he rarely feels embarrassed, his programming doesn’t allow for him to make choices that lead to that. When it’s working correctly, of course. “God, Sidney, you know I don’t mean.”

“I know,” Sidney says, and the caution in his voice makes Evgeni’s chest ache. “I told Kris what happened, he said he won’t kick your ass unless it happens again.”

“I let him,” Evgeni says earnestly, which makes Sidney laugh. “Promise, I stand there, he kick and scratch and do whatever, I just let.”

He reaches forward tentatively, touching his fingers to the back of Sidney’s hand. The flood of relief when Sidney turns his hand up and laces their fingers together is nearly enough to make him lose his balance.

Emotions are tricky things, Evgeni thinks, but he wouldn’t wipe them for the world.

[kaibutsushidousha]

Thoughts on Solomon/Romani and Goetia?

A long time ago, Nasu wrote a character named Angra Mainyu. Angra was randomly chosen to have a greater spiritual purpose and because of that he never learned how to be human, but after unique circumstances in a Servant summon, he got the opportunity to have the mundane life he never had in his time, finally learn to be human, and because he valued what he took so long to obtain, he felt compelled to return himself to nothing so that the people he cared about wouldn't lose it.

Great narrative, right? Shame that it happened in the limited frame of the mind of Emiya Shirou, a notorious tsundere. Imagine how hard this same story would hit if it happened to a character much more expressive. Someone who, while not exactly honest because Romani was even more full of secrets than Angra, was super open about his joys and griefs, engaged intensely with everything without exception, and overall the symbol of positivity among the team.

Romani may be a pessimist and chicken at heart, but he's rivaled only by remake Roa in terms of being tangibly happy to be alive, and that adds so much weight to his conclusion.

Both to Solomon and Goetia, Romani represents the difference between knowledge and experience. Solomon never learned to be human because he lived his whole life doing as the voice of God told him to. He knew everything but never learned anything. He was a good judge of character, a good legislator, and a good administrator, but couldn't a good person because he wasn't a person at all.

Solomon lived his life on autopilot, feeling nothing about the many tragedies he saw. With the power to see past, present, and future, Solomon did nothing about the horrible tragedies within his sight but beyond his reach, because he objectively knew his choices were optimal. That's why Goetia disparages him as the heartless and uncaring king.

But Romani is different. Their core as a compulsive people-pleaser with a crippling fear of disappointing remains the same, but Romani is not self-assured like Solomon was. Romani needed to go out and see the world, learn things the hard way, try and fail, and accept being disliked. Every Servant not named Bedivere is vocally critical of him, but in his 10 years alive, Romani learned to live with that. He's someone who always tries his best but values the experience of his failures as much as his successes. That's why his final answer to Goetia was "There's nothing to feel angry about". The same answer Solomon would have given, but with completely different in terms of unspoken meaning.

Goetia already has his own post, so I don't need to extend his part much, but same deal. Goetia is mad at mortality because he knows it but never experienced it. Then after Ars Nova, he experiences it and suddenly gets what it's about. Mirror to Solomon as Romani valuing the world by experiencing it.

Goetia was really intent on having Mash as the one human who agrees with his vision, and the beginning of the story, Mash could have agreed, because although she knew a lot of history, she never experienced history. But 7 Singularities and any number of events later, she did, so history mattered a lot more to her than Goetia's dreams of deathlessness.

[taylor-on-your-dash]

Notes on the Fearless recording sessions [CHAOTIC]

So this is an unhinged post that's basically a stream of consciousness. This is basically how I work when I have to find a date.

We know that the Fearless was recorded throughout 5 sessions:

December 2007

January 2008

March 2008

Summer 2008

September 2008 (last-minute)

For now I'm gonna leave out the March 2007 sessions, when Taylor said that she was gonna re-record her 2005 songs for TS2, so at least You All Over Me, That's When, We Were Happy and Don't You.

December 2007 Session

On December 23, 2007, Taylor posts on MySpace that she has recorded six songs for TS2. We know that Change and Breathe were two of the six songs because we have footage. A third is likely The Best Day, since Taylor said that it was her Christmas gift to Andrea. She also specified that she recorded it in the studio with the band.

We are missing three other songs. It's likely that it's something from the mirror tracklisting:

Permanent Marker

Tell Me Why

I'd Lie

Fearless

Dark Blue Tennessee

Sparks Fly

The One Thing.

It's unclear which ones of the 2005/2006 songs like the Vault, Permanent Marker, I'd Lie, Dark Blue were re-recorded. We also know that R-E-V-E-N-G-E was strongly considered as it was mastered.

Songs:

Breathe

Change

The Best Day

Bye Bye Baby

Sparks Fly

Superstar

January 2008 Session

Around the release of Fearless, Taylor does an interview with MixOnline:

The recording process on this album was spread out over the last year. We started recording last winter, and we did about three songs. About a month later, we did three more.

In mid January, likely on the 14th, Taylor had done an interview with Blender and the interviewer got to listen to some demos: the Kelly Pickler collab The Best Days Of Your Life, Fifteen and Change.

So in January Taylor recorded Fifteen, plus at least two other songs (my guess is that Fearless was also one of the first songs). She also says that in December she recorded three songs instead of six. I'm not the greatest at math but I know when shit don't add up. What happened to the other three? My opinion is that they weren't released, at least not in November 2008, so Taylor cut the number down.

Songs:

Fifteen

Fearless

Tell Me Why

I don't think that only three songs were recorded... but I'll leave it be.

On February 27th, she says that the album is half done.

March 2008 Session

On March 8th she posts on MySpace that the "second album is coming along quite nicely". On March 26th an interview with Billboard is published, probably done before March 8th and she says:

I’m going in to record six more this week and then we have another session scheduled for summertime. We’re really trying to just cut a bunch of stuff and put whatever is best on the album.

So it makes sense that in February Taylor said that she was halfway done with the album: she had completed 2 sessions out of 4.

We know that the March 2008 session was the one when Love Story was recorded, because we got confirmation directly from Nathan Chapman. I actually think that You Belong With Me was one of them. Taking at face value what Liz Rose said, Taylor asked her if she could write on a Sunday. Looking at the timeline, the only possible Sundays are: March 2nd, April 20th, May 11th and June 1st. However, Liz also specified a few times that Taylor recorded the song the day after they wrote it. The only date that matches a recording session is March 3rd.

Nathan revealed that the BMR complained about the recording process for You Belong With Me because it took all morning, therefore, to optimize the time, they recorded 4 songs in the afternoon. I know that BMR is now Public Enemy #1, however, it makes sense that they complained, as they were on a strict budget.

The other song that I think was recorded in March is Hey Stephen, as these are the weeks in which Love and Theft opened for her and she and Stephen Barker Liles got close (as confirmed by him). Also, the finger snaps on the songs were the ones of Marina McBride's children and classmates that just got out of school and correct me if I'm wrong but this means that it could've not been late June or early July as American schools are close I think.

On June 8th, Taylor filmed the Hannah Montana cameo, so Crazier had to be recorded before that date. Crazier and White Horse were mastered together before Love Story was released so I'm placing both of them as being recorded during the March sessions.

Songs:

Love Story

You Belong With Me

Hey Stephen

White Horse

Crazier

The Way I Loved You

Nathan Chapman says that there was another recording session the day after they did You Belong With Me+4 songs. So they made 5 songs in the first day and at least one the day after.

On June 6th, Taylor debuts Love Story at the CMA Music Festival.

Summer 2008 Session

The fourth session, that was supposed to be the last, took place in the summer and we know that that's when You're Not Sorry was recorded. John Keefe from Boys Like Girls played the drums on the song and he could've not done it during the March session (the band was in Australia and then Canada that week). It's unclear how many songs were recorded in this session.

The days in which Boys Like Girls were free were from June 23rd to June 25th and also July 1st and 2nd.

Songs:

You're Not Sorry

The Other Side Of The Door?

On July 28th Taylor says that all the songs were recorded.

On July 31st and Aug 1st, Taylor shoots the album photoshoot. The pictures are strongly connected to the songs (like You Belong With Me, Breathe, You're Not Sorry etc...)

On August 6th, an insider on Pulse mentions The Way I Loved You.

On August 8th, journalist Brian Mansfield mentions Hey Stephen, You're Not Sorry, Fifteen, You Belong With Me, Change, Tell Me Why, The Best Day and Breathe on USA Today. Brian and Taylor are friends and USA Today was one of the go-to PR outlets before Tree took over.

September 2008 Session

I think that this is the most famous session of Taylor's career, even the most casual fan might know that Forever & Always was a last minute addition to the tracklist. There's not really much to say here.

MISC

Jump Then Fall is one of the songs that almost has full credits on the booklet because it's an outlier... since Nathan Chapman did everything on this song. I think it's a demo. It was recorded at Nathan's studio anyway. There's a reason why the Programming of the synths is only in the Platinum Edition credits.

The Other Side Of The Door is also an outlier because it was mixed by Mills Logan, a mixer that only appears once in Taylor's discography... why did they bring another mixer? Who knows. Not me. I put it on the summer 2008 sessions because I didn't know where to place it. It's probably wrong.

Today Was A Fairytale??? Probably another Chapman demo.

Come In With The Rain wasn't re-recorded. It's just the 2006 version. They were really broke, uh.

In October 2008, Rolling Stones says that 50+ songs were recorded for Fearless. We know of 28 songs confirmed, plus 3 uncomfirmed (excluding Come In With The Rain, Untouchable and F&A Acoustic), so we're still missing a lot.

[sims3fiend]

Some dumb sims 3 updates/stuf

Or, how to develop severe brain damage in 10 easy steps.

Sooo… This is going to be more of a blog post than anything of any real substance, more of a whinge with maybe a few teasers for some stuff I may or may not release (probably not). Feel free to skip if you're after hot tips or coherent writing.

Stutter "fixer"

Sooooo…. The sims 3 has some stutter issueeesss… Incredible discovery, I know! I started looking at remedying them with settings, found some hidden settings that help reduce some of the issues but that can only do so much when the game was made in 2009 for 2009 computers.

So I had a looky at some things I thought could be causing it, mainly WinAPI functions because that's the easier route (h-haha…), and started to try to "optimize" some of the more common ones:

ReadFile: Was the first, and looking at the sheer volume of like 12783972198 calls a milisecond every time you move the camera, I thought surely I can speed it up a little r-right. Not really. I tried all sorts of… interesting things, file caching in memory, implementing the overlapped flag (took ages), etc. Oh and the performance increase? Literally nothing. It's called weirdly from wherever it's called and so we must suffer.

Threads: So, I had a look at other areas that were potential targets for speedup, ran an actual profile and it showed a problem areas namely threads and some other stuff I don't remember. ZwWaitForMultipleObjects and WaitForSingleObject take up a lot of time, so I very poorly attempted to optimize them, adding some timeout optimizations (and a bunch of other failed attempts). Despite being the most insane, this actually worked, and I got like a 40% speed increase in a very very niche metric that did not noticeably effect the game one single bit. I plan to combine all my failures into a single script eventually, maybe once combined they'll do something…

Actual insanity - Memory IPC: Then I had an idea, everyone hates e12, why don't we shove the games memory into another process and that'll fix it. No brain moment. No clue what past me was thinking, for some reason I thought you could like, access another processes memory if it was spawned from it, but uhh.. no, that's not how things work… I tried a few other things in a similar vein but it just crashed and crashed, so for now I'm just gunna work on:

Alloc/free mee - Current insanity: Currently, I'm still working on VirtualAlloc and VirtualFree (which is what I was redirecting to another process), but more from an optimizing memory usage standpoint than a… whatever the IPC thing was. There's a lot of things to try, and I've had some luck in some areas and some abysmal failures in others. There's a few promising functions calling VirtualAlloc/Free that seem to be potentially pointing towards memory leaks (004e54d0), but I'm too dumb to investigate that. At the moment, I'm going mostly just gathering more logs which takes forever and hurts my brain real bad.. On testing there's like 180 allocs that we could probably yeet no problem, which is like 750mb saved… Maybe idk.

I have plenty of ideas for deduplication, memory pool implementations to reduce churn/fragmentation, shoving things aggressively into pagefiles if they're not being used, etc. etc. Basically, there's a lot of avenues to explore, and I feel like there's potential… though I've definitely said that before and been dead wrong so…

Anyway, rambling over. I plan to release a dumb little renderer settings mod maybe-soon-ish that'll let you do dumb stuff that might be useful for reshade like turn shadows/drop shadows off and post processing off and on. I guess I could add max lots and other settings eventually too since they're static values.... Might also do a mythbusting post for some performance "tweak" stuff I see thrown around that isn't super accurate but I also don't want people to be angry at me so maybe not.

Sorry to whoever read all this, but also thanks :)

[loudclan-clangen]

Someone might have already pointed this out, or it's obvious, but, the extra art with Eklutna about "seeing your own face(?) reflected back", and Owlstar saying that "StarClan said", which I'm assuming is him repeating what Eklutna told him, I have a feeling that it's just... a lie. Yes, StarClan was reaching out about the oil, and it just so happened that Eklutna was the one who they reached out to and she spread the word. But that was it. They just needed help with that, it wasn't meant to be something bigger. But Eklutna NEEDED to feel like she was meant for even more, and she started lying to herself that her kits are meant to rule, to the point where she herself started to believe in her own lies. StarClan said... nothing. It was something she made up and yet fully believed it was StarClan who told her that due to how deeply she believed in her own lies. And when she looks up, it really it just herself reflecting back, cause StarClan's mission for her was already complete.

The newest update is just living in my head rent-free. Welcome back! I see you've joined ArtFight, and if I may suggest adding Eklutna herself. Have a nice day!

I have now added Eklutna to the artfight profile! (friendly reminder to tell me who you guys want to see refs for because I likely won't do a ref for everyone, this post has a list of all the refs I've done so far), and you're definitely onto something here about what went down between Eklutna and Starclan. The question is I think, "is a lie really a lie if the liar truly believes it?" would Eklutna be so certain that Starclan would protect her if none of it was true? If it is all made up then what does that mean for her kits? Will they face punishment from Starclan for their mother's actions? Does her belief in it make it true in some way? Regardless, glad I could infect you with my silly cat brain worms.

Rosehippaw is certainly angry, with Starclan for letting her be so sick, with her parents for babying her, with the clan for acting like she's worth less than her sister, with her sister for being born healthy, ect. She's gonna have a complicated relationship with starclan for certain, whether she makes it or joins them. Currently she is more than sick of the medicine den, and cannot wait for the day to come where she leaves it and never comes back. Absolutely you can add an emoji! I'll do my best to keep an updated list for "optimal recognization" lol.

Thank you so much! It's such an honor to be someone's favorite blog, especially among all of the super talented creators in this community! I hope to inspire as many people as possible to start their own clangen blogs, cause they're SO FUN and you never know where they might go! As far as your question... wow, I wonder if we'll get an answer to that in a couple of generations time... hmm... But to really answer you: It, like a lot of things, would depend on the leader. They might decide to delay their leadership ceremony for a couple of moons, leaving them a perfect target for an opportune murder, or they could go ahead with it, potentially sacrificing their kit's health for the good of the clan and some insurance should anything go wrong during the birth. It would all depend on what the leader valued more, their kits or their clan.

Anyway, not to get off topic but all of these above asks have one thing in common:

(If you do not know what the dodgeball of prophecy is: they all predict something different that will come up later in the story.)

[gwynndolin]

Screenshotting and posting myself to avoid having to subject miss punkitt to any potential resulting discourse

I think the “blame” has come down to Mojang, being a Microsoft property, and always needing to make money, must always be updating the game. And it creates a weird scenario where they must continue to add content, but have not really decided on an actual direction; the updates have become vapid and fluffy.

Vapid and fluffy would NOT usually be an issue, Minecraft has ultimately become a “pointless” game, in the same way that Animal Crossing is a “pointless" game. So content gets added with no real gameplay value, but since Minecraft has become a "pointless game", the valueless content must be defended as "Not everything needs to have a use!", which is true! But...

Minecraft's original gameplay is to exploit all of the resources around you and to use them to do Minecraft colonizing. Minecraft has contradicted its core gameplay by adding things that are not able to be exploited (no use value), or only have a promise of becoming exploitable, but ultimately get dropped when the next major update starts being worked on. No one is logging on to play Minecraft to see a sniffer, people want to do the Minecraft colonization. So the question then becomes "Why does Mojang bother with these updates that aren't with any clear intention to add onto the gameplay? Players clearly don't want this, so why continue?"

I think ultimately, the banal, directionless nature of the recent Minecraft updates is less indicative of a desire to add interesting spectacle and more of a loss of drive. I think Minecraft needs to be put to rest. Mojang needs to put a pin in it and say "We're done, this isn't what we're interested in working on any longer (ostensibly), and we feel stifled by how limiting the framework of Minecraft has become and desire to move on to different projects".

So, when you consider that survival games (or at least variations in the genre are, simulation, colony builders, farming sims, etc.) are still one of the most popular genres on Steam, I think saying "Minecraft is itself, conceptually, to blame for getting stale" is a much smaller portion of the picture; Mojang has the opportunity to keep the game interesting, they simply have not, be it poor priorities, low resources, lack of desire, lack of confidence, a limiting engine.

All that said, I know the recent snapshots have been working on reworking the NBT data system for all items in the game into something more accessible, allowing for ease of use in data packs and probably mods too. And maybe this is a hot take, but I think that this is all they should be focusing on at this point. I think if Mojang is interested at all in maintaining their (dwindling) playerbase, they should be going all in on optimizing for external player creation and allow for players to revitalize the game themselves, instead of wasting resources on trying to come up with a new flower to put in, or something.