#extract pages from pdf

[braybenjessi]

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[turtlesandfrogs]

One of the interesting things I've noticed (been frustrated by) is that while some herbs have a whole bunch of studies done of them, and have multiple systematic reviews and are generally well studied (*cough* St. John's Wort *cough*) others have very little research done on them.

One example of this is red Raspberry leaf and its use for treating menstrual cramps, or dysmenorrhea in the literature. Red raspberry leaf is pretty well known by people in general where I am, to the point that people who don't know anything about herbalism at all know about raspberry leaf tea for menstrual cramps. It is in many herbal books, and if you look at online forums, loads of people are saying it's effective for them, some even going so far as to say it is the only thing that works for their cramps.

Seems like something worth looking into the science of, right?

But when I go to look at the research that I can access (as a non-student, non-researcher), there's very little on raspberry for this use. I found:

One article* in the Lancet from 1941 that looked at the effects of raspberry leaf on animal uteruses, which I would recommend not reading if you're squeamish about descriptions of animal experimentation.

A paper** that referenced the above and the traditional medicinal use of raspberry, and then treated human patients with dysmenorrhea with a combination of five different herbs in one pill. It did find a positive effect, but also one of the other herbs themselves are well studied in this and has a good amount of evidence to back it up.

A review*** that says they found both mild and effective herbal treatments in the literature, but doesn't let you actually read what they are without purchasing the article, which is a massive barrier. And it doesn't reference any clinical studies on raspberry leaf. Any. Which makes me suspect there aren't any studies to reference.

Another article that just references the 1941 article and traditional knowledge.

Finally, a paper in 2002****, this time on guinea-pig ileum. They did find that it had an antispasmodic effect on the guinea pig's small intestine in test tubes.

And that is it. That's all I can find through Science Direct or Google Scholar. No large scale, double-blind, placebo controlled studies in humans. No single-herb studies in humans. No in vivo studies in humans. No review articles, because there is nothing to review. To be clear, these things all exist for other herbs, and I'm super stoked to read them.

And I'm kinda really frustrated, because menstrual cramps are really common, monthly occurrence for about half the population. They suck. If you listen to people who drink raspberry leaf tea, they say it is very effective, going so far as to prevent menstrual cramps from ever happening. You would think that this would be something that scientists have studied, because that's a huge amount of possibly preventable pain.

And yeah, we have over the counter pain medication now, but it still seems like someone would have looked into it. Because I don't think I'm the only one who would prefer having a cup of tea over the other options.

* https://www.sciencedirect.com/sdfe/pdf/download/eid/1-s2.0-S0140673600713481/first-page-pdf JH Burn, ER Withell "A principle in raspberry leaves which relaxes uterine muscle" The Lancet, 1941

** Bone, Kerry. "Phytotherapy for pain management in dysmenorrhea." Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients 258 (2005): 57-60.

*** https://www.eurekaselect.com/article/95649 Rashmi Saxena Pal*, Yogendra Pal, Pranay Wal, Nikita Saraswat and Ankita Wal, "A Novel Approach on Review of Herbal Menstrual Cramps Relievers" Current Women`s Health Reviews 2019

**** https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ptr.1040 Janne Rojas-Vera, Asmita V. Patel, "Relaxant activity of raspberry ( Rubus idaeus) leaf extract in guinea-pig ileum in vitro" Phytotherapy Research, 2002

[enelica]

✨️ January on Pawtreon ✨️

What's planned on my Patreon this month :

Curious Cat

Illustration/Comic of the month: Submit an idea and vote for the one you prefer!

Small extracts from current comic pages Meet me in Eden

Sketches, WIPs and GO illustrations

Original art

Sketches and mini-comics from my AU after s2 (which still doesn’t have a name)

Storyboard “Stars” in progress

Mini-comic “Bad Customer” in progress

Avdenturous and Audacious Cats

Same as Curious plus..

1 page per week of my comic Meet me in Eden (detailed sketch)

2 pages per month of Meet me in Eden (final version)

PDFs of all my previous fancomics!

For Audacious: access to NSFW content (soft nsfw, suggestive nudity)

Lucky and Charming Cats

Same as Adventurous and Audacious plus..

An artprint sent to your home every month! Plus a unique print for your first month of subscription!

Choice of artprints: every two months vote for the artprint you want to have for the next two months!

For Charming: access to NSFW content

I am sometimes late in publishing the illustration of the month because I prioritize the current comics on my drawing schedule but otherwise I try to be regular in my publications, I usually post a little something every day.

Voilà, here’s what to expect if you join my Pawtreon, note that I’m already very touched that you’re following me! Thank you for your support and see you soon perhaps!

Print of the month: Disaster Puppy

[crystalromana]

Apocryphia Bipedium- Ian Potter

[FIXED THE WONKY MOBILE EDITING. >.< IT LOOKED FINE ON DESKTOP]

[I am obsessed with this short trip so I had to bring it to Tumblr. Yes I did just copy and paste this page by page out of the pdf and formatted it. I think about it all the time. Anyway.

Apocrypha Bipedium takes place in the gap between Time of the Daleks and Neverland. Enjoy]

A Suggestive Correlation of The Cressida Manuscripts with other Anomalous Texts of the Pre-Animarian Era as proposed for Collective Consideration by Historiographic Speculator Anctloddoton.

In my selection and placement of the following extracts from the literature of the extinct worlds, I have attempted to draw suggestive parallels between some of the Problem Texts of the humanoid cultures. Obviously, the records of those times are now so fragmentary that any conclusions we draw from the surviving evidence must remain speculative. We cannot know what evidence we are missing, thus the linking of events posited by the presentation of these documents must remain a tentative hypothesis at best.

HS A From The Primary Cressida Document – Suppressed Texts of the Vatican Library, A Mysteria Press Original, 2973 CE.

The past is another country, the Doctor used to say. By which I suppose he meant it’s a nice place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there, and you can have real problems with customs when you arrive.

I grew up in the future myself, which makes living in the past tricky at times. Liverpool was a great place to grow up if you were into the past though. It was full of it; the Campus Manor theme park, the castle, the Beatles Memorial Theatre, The Saint Francis of Fazakerley Museum, the Carl Jung Dream Tour, Post-Industrial Land and all those cathedrals, you were tripping over history everywhere. Mummy’s parents came from there too, so it was practically like we knew reallife olden days people.

It was much better than Liddell Towers where we lived in New London – most of the history near there seemed to be about some silly girl who’d let a professor of sums take photos of her and fell down a rabbit hole, or about those awful Daleks wiping out Southern England with mines and things. Much duller and hardly any variety in the rides at all.

Here in the actual olden days there’s not much past anywhere, just loads of future, and the rides are even less fun, all carts and donkeys and hardly any roads. We’re moving again, you see, dear diary. Even though the conquering Greeks don’t really seem to want to colonise any of Asia Minor themselves they don’t seem to want any Trojans settling back down anywhere round here either. They’ve occupied what’s left of the city, I suspect mainly so Menelaus can find all the expensive bits of Helen’s jewellery she seems to have mislaid, and seem keen we don’t hang about too nearby. Mymiddon Hoplites apologetically move us on now and again, clearly wondering when they can decently be allowed back home to start fighting amongst themselves again, and so we pack up and move. Some of their chaps are still feeling rather tetchy for no good reason apparently. Troilus says there’s a silly rumour going around that some terrible woman, probably a goddess, went around whipping up aggression amongst the Greeks a few years ago by magic, leaving marks on their necks that mean they can’t calm down!

It doesn’t make any sense to me. I think I might just be getting the cleaned up version of a soldier’s tale actually. I think that happens with me a lot. People treat me like a silly little girl sometimes, which isn’t really fair when I come from the future and know all sorts of things they don’t. I’m an adult now, even if not being born yet does make me about minus four thousand officially.

I don’t think Agamemnon’s Greeks really know what to do now to be honest, and after a decade’s anticipation I don’t think the trade routes or the princess they were sacking Troy to get are quite as good as they were hoping. I think they’re just hanging around stopping us settling down and looking for lost costume jewellery until they can think of something better to do. Some of the Ithacans are moaning it’ll be another decade before any of them get home at this rate. Bless them.

Running out of room, dear diary. Will write more when I have some new goats’ hides.

From Not Necessarily the Way I Do It! The True Confessions of a Ka Faraq Gatri not just written for the money when trapped on a primitive planet and needing cash to buy parts by ‘Snail’, Boxwood Books, 300 AGB.

Of course the hairy kangaroo had been at the mind rubbers and didn’t even realise the sword was there! How we laughed. Terrible namedropper, Zodin, but worth her weight in soufflé all the same

Naturally enough, mention of name-dropping reminds me of another anecdote, this one relating to dear old Bill Shakespeare, one of the finest writers and most atrocious spellers of any age. I’ve met him several times now and hope to again if I ever get off this pre-warp- engineering dustball. The last time was during that sticky business with poor Kitty Marlowe and those Psionovores from Neddy Kelley’s old scrying glass that I related in Chapter 9, but perhaps our most awkward misadventure together was the time I introduced him to some of his own characters, who included, as it happened, a dear, dear friend of mine.

From The Dairy of an Edwardian Adventuress by Charlotte Elspeth Bollard, Library of Kar-Charrat. The work, having suffered some worm damage in the Great 2107 AD Cock Up, is presented here in the Elgin decorruption.

Travelling with Wilf and the Doctor was a curious experienced already felt somewhat out of sorts with time, having discovered my very existence was making history split in two, but sharing a home with a boy from the 16th Century and a man who seemed to come from nowhere so much as his own imagination, merely heightened my feeling that I no longer belonged to any era.

We three fellow time travellers had so very little in common beyond having all read the plays the boy had not yet written that the small talk had been small indeed, and, after a few days of the Doctor failing to get Wilf home, the atmosphere had become a little tense.

Wilf, it further transpired, had difficulty reading anything written in more modern Anglish than his own, which meant there had been little of a literary nature to distract him during his sojourn with us once he had read and re-read the Doctor’s picture books about Frinchs, Sneetches, Ooblecks and Cats in Hams.

Thankfully, towards the end of Wilf’s stay with us the Doctor had discovered a futuristic version of Lido called Peter Pan Pop-O-Matic Frustration that we could enjoy playing together and those last long hibiscus-scented afternoons in his music room passed pleasantly enough, without young Wilf having to constantly relate the escapades of besocked foxes to us.

The Doctor always won our games, usually coming from behind implausibly late in the day, and nearly always using some devious subterfuge to gain victory. Indeed, it was observing the childlike joy on the Doctor’s face at his underhand triumphs on the Peter Pan Pop-O-Matic Frustration board that I first realised just how much of Peter there was in his nature. Naturally, we loved him enough to pretend not to notice his cheating (I sometimes think the whole universe did) and at times towards the end we three had so much fun that I almost forgot I was a paradox, unpicking creation like Penelope at her tapestry in the heroic age we had just left.

From The Pseudo-Shackspur – works attributed to William Shakespeare collated by Heinrich Von Berlitz and Leopold Kettlecamp, Ampersand and Ampersand, 85 AH.

This passage from The Noble Troyan Woman of Troy – fragmentary foul papers of a naive work once attributed to the very young Shackspur, is worth quoting in full.

Act 2, Scene 1. A room within the box. Enter Mistress Charley, Doctor Shallow and Young Will.

Doct. Here at last! Our journey finally through. In fifteen hundred and seventy two. Young Will, regard the ceiling viewing dome – Stratford on Avon, the Hathaway home.

Will. But sir, on those bare hills, no swarths do roll. And no houses nestle ’twixt those craggy knolls – The sun burns with a fierce un-English light And that beach there is not a Warwick sight! That’s not Stratford displayed above us

Char. – Lest the Avon’s turn’d to sea, ’Od love us!

Many scholars have disputed the authenticity of this piece of alleged Shackspurian juvenilia, pointing out, fairly, that it does appear to be the only one of his extant works that the Bard biroed in a twentieth-century school jotter otherwise festooned in swirly ink blots and doodled hexagons. However, if Shackspur did travel in Time, as several scholars suggest, this objection falls away. A more compelling argument for its inauthenticity is the verse style, experimenting uniquely within the Shackspurian canon with strict iambic pentameter composed entirely in rhyming couplets. Whilst dreadful, it is nothing like as appalling as that in Shackspur’s earliest known adult writing

***

From Tales from the Matrix – True Stories from TARDIS Logs Retold for Time Tots by Loom Auntie Flavia, Panopticon Press, 6833.8 Rassilon Era. Part of the Wigner Heisenberg Collection, The Mobile Library, Talking Books Section. Location currently uncertain.

The Doctor flicked the temporal stabiliser off and pulled down the transitional element control rod taking him out of the Vortex. Quite the wrong way to actualise and quadro-anchor even a Type 40 Time Capsule, isn’t it? Exiting the interstitial continuum at the perihelion of a temporal ellipse can cause serious buffering in your harmonic wave packet transference and sever your main fluid links, can’t it?

‘Here we are, Stratford on Avon, 1572!’ announced the Doctor proudly and wrongly. If he’d ever bothered to use his Absolute Tesseractulator to pinpoint his dimensional locations he wouldn’t have made these kind of mistakes, of course, but the Tesseractulator had never come out of its box, had it?

Charlotte Pollard, the Doctor’s friend, came over to him and flicked on the ceiling scanner.

A friend’s an Earth thing. It’s a bit like having a colleague or fellow student you co-operate with, but without any exams or project targets at the end to make the co-operation meaningful. There was a fashion for having them on Gallifrey at one time, ask some of your older cousins about it, they might remember.

Charlotte squinted at the view outside. It didn’t look like the Stratford she’d visited, with neither alien enslavers nor half timbered tea shops anywhere in sight. ‘Are you sure?’ she asked.

‘Positive. Ish,’ replied the Doctor. William Shaxsberd, a young man they’d promised to drop off in 1572, put down his coloured crayons and came to join them.

‘It does not look much as it once did, Doctor,’ said William, looking at the ceiling and cricking his neck.

The Doctor followed suit. The dustbowl outside was certainly not Warwickshire in any era he’d visited, ‘No. Indeed not,’ he admitted. ‘I think the rift in the Vortex is introducing a random element into my calculations.’

Do you remember the rift in the Vortex, from last time? That’s right, the Doctor made that too! It was due to the paradoxical interaction of two paravertical chronostreams further complicated by three retro- temporal augmented causal feedback loops, wasn’t it?

‘Another random element?’ asked Charlotte, ‘More random than the way you play “eeny meeny miney mo” with the buttons?’

‘Ha, Charley,’ said the Doctor. ‘Tres amusent.’

Charlotte turned to William to explain, ‘That’s French, Will, for “I’ve been banged to rights, Miss Pollard”,’ she said.

‘I somehow knew,’ William replied.

‘Really?’ asked Charlotte. ‘How?’

‘It’s a Time Lord gift, Charley,’ said the Doctor, ‘and yes it would be awfully de trop to ask how it works.’ Or at least that’s whatCharlotte thought he said. William heard something quite different of course.

Well, let’s get out there then,’ said the Doctor, opening the doorswithout taking any proper readings.

‘Er, why?’ asked Charlotte.

‘Because until we know how far out the rift has shunted us in spaceand time we won’t know how to get to Stratford, 15 diddlydiddly...’explained the Doctor, waving his hand vaguely as he searched hismemory for the end of the four digit number he’d lost interest in.

‘Seventy-two,’ prompted William.

‘The very same.’ The Doctor beamed, ruffling the young man’s hair in a way that, thanks to the TARDIS telepathic circuits alone, seemed endearing rather than insufferable and over familiar.

William and the Doctor headed for the doors. Charlotte was troubled though.

‘Won’t my temporal instability cause untold problems to wherever we are?’ she asked, quite sensibly, all things considered.

‘Oh, very probably, I expect,’ replied the Doctor airily, ‘but if you spent your whole life worrying about the consequences of your actions you’d never get anything done and the consequences of that would be unthinkable, wouldn’t they? Faint heart never bowled a maiden over,you know.’

Charlotte scowled. ‘Mind,’ added the Doctor as he stepped out of the control room, ‘neither did Katie “the Beast” Davies, if I remember my22nd-century Wisden correctly.’

That was an allusion to the Earth game Cricket, wasn’t it? It was the Earth’s planetary sport, despite the fact that humans were the worst players of it in the galaxy if you remember.‘

Doctor, I find your words confusing,’ said William as he followed him out.‘It’s a Time Lord gift, Will,’ Charlotte whispered. ’You’ll get used to it.’

* * *

From The Primary Cressida document

New hides! This keeping a journal business is awfully tricky when you’ve no paper around, but before mummy died, she did make me promise I’d write one when I eventually settled down. It’s a family tradition that’s been handed down for generations apparently, not that I ever saw mummy’s.

Anyhow, Troilus is still very eager to settle soon, but where? I’ve ruled out going east to the Holy Land because from what I remember from history and my travels we’ll get no peace there and the rest of the Med and Adriatic has already been bagsied. Troilus reckons Aeneas will have already have set up somewhere by now and we should have gone off on his boat when we had the chance. I just nod, and try to explain wave particle duality to the little ones.

I have a vague feeling I learned something about Aeneas from the UK-201’s didactomat box way back in the future. I think he ended up with Dido in Carthage for a bit, which confuses me because I thought Dido’s music was Late Classical, which must be after this period, surely. I’m sketchy on the details to be honest. I only remember it was Dido and not Sister Bliss because the planet we crashed into on the way to Astra was named after her.

Funny thinking about Dido, that was the place I’ve called home longest in recent years. I’ve been a nomad a while really – split between London and Liverpool as a girl, never knowing whether to talk posh and southern or not, emigrating to off-Earth with daddy, hopping about through Time with the Doctor, and now traipsing around Turkey with Troilus and his mates before its even called that or has any tourist facilities to speak of. I think I must have ‘space travel in my blood’ as one of those Baroque composers put it!

I’ve been wondering when I should discover electricity and plumbing a bit recently, these fleeces don’t clean themselves like proper clothes, so the sooner we can invent the twin tub the better. Are we before or after that Monk who invented things too early here, I wonder? I don’t want to mess things up like he did, but I’m shocking on dates. I just paid attention to the stories in the history books really, not the order they happened in. If I’d known the way round history went was going to be important I would have had the machine teach me it. Of course, as a child you never expect all that history around you is going to run away into the future like it has, do you? I’ve decided I’ll probably start with a steam engine and see if that messes up my memory of the future. The way I see it, it’ll be impossible for me to invent anything that’ll stop me being born so I can’t do too much harm.

I casually suggested making things out of iron the other day, which I know is a big step forward but everyone just laughed. Too brittle and hard to work compared to bronze or tin, they said. I suppose they’re right. You have to do something to it to make it strong, I remember that. I just don’t remember what that something is. For all I know my quad physics equations and could still compose a cogent analygraphfor the fall of the Mallatratt Protectorate, I’m a bit rusty on a few of the basics. Going to take us years to get garlic bread and sound radio at this rate.

Of course, I had a bit of training for life without the mod cons on Dido, so I can cope, but what makes things really fiddly at the moment is that my future’s past is catching up with my present, which is complicated enough to write down, let alone experience.

We’ve just bumped into the Doctor as a young man, and I’m sure it’s really bad form for me to let on I recognise him when as far as he’s concerned he’s not met me yet.

From Not Necessarily the Way I Do It!

My plan was pretty much the usual one, to go out and see if we could find out the year and our whereabouts in a way that wouldn’t arouse any suspicions, and then hang around until nightfall to get a better fix from the position of the stars. It may sound dull but I’ve found if I do that I usually find something or other to get embroiled in before sunset.

We stepped circumspectly out of the Ship and set off in search of the nearest habitation, ready as ever to improvise any number of cover stories to explain our presence and strange garb. As luck would have it we soon ran into one of the locals, and were able to subtly winkle out the info we needed on route to his encampment.

From The Dairy of an Edwardian Adventuress

People say you should never look back of course, advice we’ve been ignoring since Orpheus and EuroDisney, but I can’t help thinking that if the Doctor hadn’t landed us in the aftermath of the Trajan War a lot of that beastly business with the Time Lords might have been avoided later.

As usual the Doctor rejoiced in dropping straight into the middle of things without a moment’s forethought. Impossible, exasperating man,I tried to protest but somehow he just brushed my complaints away with a smiled shouldn’t have let him, but he did have such a lovely smile.

* * *

From The Pseudo-Shackspur

The Noble Troyan Woman of Troy

Act 3, Scene 2. Another part of the hillside. Enter Mistress Charley, Doctor Shallow and Young Will.

Doct. Yoohoo! Mister Goatboy, excuse me please, Could you tell me what time and place is this? Char. Discreet as ever.

Enter a Goatherd.

Doct. Yes, but awfully brave. Young man, there is information we crave. What land is this and what year are we in? We’ve lost track of both in our travelling.

Char. Oh I give up, you’re so inconsistent.

Doct. Just smile prettily, act like an assistant.

Char. But I never know what trick you’ll pull next!

Doct. Just grit your teeth, smile and stick out your chest; Magic’s best tricks work by misdirection.

Char. So I’m just here to stir his –

Will. Affection?

Doct. Quite so Will, a pretty face inspires trust. True, I’m afraid, if not awfully just. This chap will tell us the time and the place And Presto well head straight back into Space!

Goat. Eleven eight three BC is the year This is Hisarlik in Anatolia. I expect you’re traders from Phoenicia To be garbed and garbling here so queer. You’ve been ship wreck’d and concuss’d I’ll be bound. Which’ll be why you have no goods around. We must offer you shelter at the least Pop back home with me and well have a feast.

Char. How can he know he lives before Our Lord?

Doct. It’s just a translation device that’s flaw’d. It’s an awfully clever mechanism But it causes the odd anachronism. Kind goatherd, we would love to share a meal And watch the evening stars above us wheel. For by such means we will precisely know Our station now and where we next must go. Exeunt Omnes.

From Tales from the Matrix

‘Do we really need to do this?’ asked Charlotte as the band trudged wearily after the herdsman in their impractical shoes, ‘Surely the date and location he’s given you is enough?’

‘Perhaps,’ the Doctor replied, ‘but studying the stars will allow me to be more accurate. Besides, I’m famished. We haven’t eaten for minus three thousand years, bear in mind.’

So the Doctor and his companions blithely headed off into further temporal confusion, unaware that the goatherd had seen the TARDIS arrive and knew full well who the Doctor was already.

There’s a lesson there for anyone who thinks it’s clever to keep their TARDIS in one form, don’t you think? The Ionic Column factory preset might look nice, for example, but when using it means every Grun, Za and Caius in the Cosmos knows who you are immediately, it rather defeats the point of a chameleon circuit.

From The Primary Cressida document

One of our herdsmen saw the TARDIS arrive in the next valley this afternoon and instantly recognised it as the mobile temple that had prefigured the city’s fall, and the Doctor as a younger version of the old man from my tales.

He sent his mate back to tell us so we all had time to prepare ourselves and could all pretend we believed the Doctor’s implausible story about being a trader from Phoenicia when he turned up an hour or so later.

It’s definitely him, probably about 40 years before we met. He dresses similarly, his hair is curlier and darker and his face looks a bit different, but the years are never kind, are they? Amazingly, he’s almost as vague as a young man as he was when old, if not quite so ummy and erry. I’d always assumed that was because he was getting on a bit.

Thankfully, no one here’s too thrown by the idea of time travellers after me relating all my adventures to them, though one of the boys did ask me why the Doctor didn’t walk and talk backwards when his past was in the future. I was very clear why not when I started explaining it, but I must admit I got a bit confused as I went along. He hasn’t recognised me of course, dear diary, and we’ve invited him and his friends to have tea tonight.

From Not Necessarily the Way I Do It!

Well, imagine my embarrassment when we arrived at the fellow’s encampment and who was in charge but my old friend Vicki (now calling herself Cressida of course) and her new husband Troilus, who I’d never actually met, due to quite heavy escaping commitments around the time they got together.

I realised with a start that young Bill Shakespeare was due to write a play about this couple in a few years, and that unless I was careful thismeeting would almost certainly be what inspired it, thus complicating Bill’s already tortuous history further and bringing yet another new paradox to mine. I’d only let Vicki go away with Troilus at Troy’s fall because once I heard she was calling herself Cressida I’d assumed it was predestined (well, I was young, I believed in that kind of thing), I knew there was a play about the couple by Shakespeare and thought I was helping history take its course by hitching them up. Now, if I’d only done that because my future actions would one day bring that play about, I’d accidentally made a big chunk of my past dependent on my future, which, as you know, isn’t really the accepted way of going about things.

I reasoned it was vital for the tidiness of the time line that I kept Bill from learning the background of Troilus and Cressida in any detail, ideally forgetting as much of their present as he could too.

To complicate matters further, Vicki had actually seen Bill as an adult on my time telly, the Time Space Visualiser. She was never the most historically careful of girls, and I feared that if she found out who he was, she’d probably tell him all about his future at the court of Elizabeth and getting the commission to write The Merry Wives of Windsor and the inspiration for Hamlet on the same day and how he’d sprained his wrist in his rush to write both.

All it might take, I thought, would be one slip from any one of us, accidentally mentioning the words TARDIS or Zeus Plug over dessert, say, and causality would be tangled up like President Pandak’s kittens in twine, quicker than you could explain what you pop in a Ganymede socket.

Luckily, it seemed Vicki hadn’t spotted how anachronistic our garb was and hadn’t realised I was her old friend, seeming to completely swallow my inventive tales of sea faring, despite Charley’s rather fanciful insertions about hook-handed pirates.

I had, of course, underestimated her, as a quick and entirely accidental glance at her diary before dinner proved. Not knowing I could regenerate, she had taken me for my young self in my first form and thought she was protecting me from foreknowledge!

This, of course, suited my purpose. All I reckoned I had to do now to save Time from chewing itself to bits was keep Will busy and make sure Vicki didn’t relate her history to any of us over dinner.

Oh what tangled webs we weave, when tidy temporal strands we try to leave.

From The Dairy of an Edwardian Adventuress

Mr and Mrs Troilus seemed a sweet couple, he a lanky chap with a curly beard and a well-meaning expression and she a rather enthusiastic young thing with big eyes, yet the Doctor had become rather shifty from the moment we met them. I knew he was preoccupied by something, but I had, at that time, no idea what. After some fun, improvising tales of derring-do on the high seas to prove our credentials as traders, he took me to one side and explained that I had to get Wilf as squiffy as possible at the feast that night for reasons it was simpler at that moment not to explain. He said history depended on me getting the boy so drunk he could neither speak nor remember his behaviour the next morning. I’m normally quite good at that kind of thing, it was hardly my fault the Bawd was a functioning alcoholic at the age of eight.

From The Pseudo-Shackspur

The Noble Troyan Woman of Troy

Act 4, Scene 1. An encampment in the mountains. Enter Mistress Charley, Doctor Shallow, Young Will, a goatherd, Troilus, Cressida, divers villagers and guards severally.

Doct. Hello. (Aside) Her! ’Tis Vicki, I should have guess’d. I never with good geography was bless’d Hisarlik is the modern name for Troy. Quite a temporal tangle, boy oh boy! (To Cress.) Ha ha, my hearties! We here are sailors three. (Aside) I can but hope she does not see ‘tis me.

Cress. (Aside) Deceit upon deception! Can this be The Doctor who I first took it to be? Is this him when young as I assumed? Or must deeper deceit be presumed? I’ll play along until the truth I know. (To Doct.) Good mariners, welcome and hello.

Will. (To Char.) What’s this strange accented charade about?

Char. (To Will) Who knows, we’ll be, I bet, last to find out.

From Tales from the Matrix

Yes Time Tots, exactly! The first thing any of us would have done would have been to get out of there quickly before we compromised the causal nexus. Staying for tea and imbibing too much ethanol, which you’ll recall the Doctor had a particular weakness for on his mother’s side, doesn’t strike any of us as sensible!

From The Secondary Cressida document (a transcribed fragment allegedly found at a Church of Rome jumble sale) – Even More Suppressed Texts of the Vatican Library, A Hatper-Mysteria- Ellerycorp Press Original, 2977 CE

My ruse worked, the robot’s read my carefully exposed diary and thinks I suspect nothing! He’s so obviously not really the Doctor it’s not true, but he doesn’t know I know that yet, so we have the advantage. He’s definitely a Dalek robot double like that other one they sent after us.

They’ve probably made him the young Doctor this time to make it less obvious. He does look a bit like he could be him sometimes if you’re not paying attention, but if you look closely his face is all wrong and his voice goes a bit funny sometimes like that other robot’s did, almost doing my accent at times! I think he’s probably feeding on my jumbled memories or something.

We’ll overpower him and his companions at dinner tonight and destroy them, they won’t expect me to know how to deactivate them.

From Not Necessarily the Way I Do It!

I’ve always been keen on wine, particularly the heavier oaky reds, though I find there is a rather tiresome tendency for them to be drugged by villainous blackguards sometimes, rather impairing the subtleties of the flavour, but wine in the Homeric era was quite a different proposition. What can I tell you about it except that it tasted awful but did the job?

It wasn’t the heavily resinated stuff the Greeks later went in for, thankfully, nor indeed that watered-down muck the ancient Romans used to dish out at parties, but I think it’s telling that the most flattering thing Homer had to say about it in the whole of The Iliad was how like the sea it was in hue. When you bear in mind he was blind, you can tell he’d had to ask around a bit to find anyone with something positive to say about it.

The food wasn’t much better either. It can be terribly hard eating out when you travel like I do. These days at home, I generally try to eat only things that don’t have a central nervous system, or that I’ve knocked up in the food machine, but sometimes, when you’re a guest, qualms like that have to go out of the window, particularly on worlds ruled by intelligent plants, where you’re best advised not to ask for a celery stick and to just stick your toes in damp soil like everyone else at the table.

Even then I try to stick to my principles and not eat anything with a sense of self, parliamentary democracy or sultanas in it.

This dinner was a particularly awkward affair; Charley acting like a slightly sloshed pirate queen, Vicki acting like she didn’t know me, Bill acting up, singing lewd madrigals that officially weren’t due for invention yet in his rather reedy girlish voice, and all the while me worrying about causality falling apart around me rather too much to fully enjoy the dolmades.

Suddenly, half way through the proceedings, the impossible happened: it took a turn for the worse. Vicki shouted out ‘Now!’, and lunged at my chest and started tearing at my waistcoat.

From The Dairy of an Edwardian Adventuress

My recollections of the ensuing events are somewhat hazy; I had been struggling to match young Wilt measure for measure, you might say, when I saw the Doctor being attacked. I launched myself at his assailant and missed, I’m told, briefly losing my dignity and consciousness in the process.

A shocking melee ensued by all accounts, with Trajans tearing at our clothes with cutlery and all the usual business with tables being turned and the like breaking out; I’m only glad I can’t remember the full details, because what little I do makes me blush quite enough.

It’s quite possible I told someone I loved them, and was sick later too. I’ve never been brave enough to ask. The next thing I remember clearly was being in the main tent with the Doctor explaining a lot and me apologising a bit, just in case.

From The Pseudo-Shackspur

The Noble Troyan Woman of Troy

Act 5, Scene 2. At dinner beneath the stars.

Cress. Take that, false Doctor! But where are your wires? In sparks and puffs of smoke you should expire. Could it be that you are the Doctor true?

Char. Get your claws off him, he’s mine, you wild shrew!

Will. Oh, Pillicock sat on pillicock

Char. Will you stop that terrible singing, Will? The Doctor and I are under attack From this Troyan host, while you’re supping sack. Join in the scrap and cease your carousel Lewd songs, anyhow, douse all arousal.

Doct. Vicki, Will, Charley, all, put down those knives! You’re all making the mistakes of your lives.

Cress. Vicki, you say? You should not know that yet. If you’re the young Doctor, we’ve not yet met.

Doct. Vicki, the reason that I know your name Is that inwardly I am still the same Man who left you at Troy some years ago, I can change my looks, if you didn’t know. Char. Doctor, do you mean that you know this wench?

Doct. We travelled together many years hence. I think it’s time I explain’d the full truth Of why I’ve deceived you all, forsooth.

Will. If she’s an old friend then tell me why You did keep that fact from Charley and I?

Doct. This is an old friend, Will, but, what is worse, She features, in decasyllabic verse, In a drama that you shall one day pen That means I shall leave her with this Troyan, If you only write it because you’re here Chronological conundra appear. Effects and causes whirl and spin about, Go through the wringer and turn inside out. The egg that hatches out your chicken Does in that self same chicken thicken.

From Tales from the Matrix

Then in direct contravention of fifteen universal laws of Time and two local statutes, the Doctor sat down and explained everything that had happened, and, in explaining it, he brought all the things he was worried about happening that hadn’t into the open, didn’t he?

Of course, it turned out that some of the things he was worried about were of no concern at all, but as a result of relating them he brought worse problems about.

I expect most of you have read stories about the Doctor in other books, and I expect some of you think he’s quite clever, even though he breaks a lot of rules, don’t you? Well, you’re right! In a crisis, he’s just the kind of person you need around, he can come up with ideas almost no one else could. The only problem is, when you’re not having a crisis, he’s just the kind of person to cause one.

From The Primary Cressida document

How embarrassing. It turns out the Doctor was the Doctor after all, only older and with a new face for some strange reason. The girl who drinks too much is his latest companion and the little boy with the dirty songs and the voice like a girl is William Shakespeare! Nice enough lad, no wonder he ends up in the theatre with that voice though, perfect for all those drag roles they gave boys. We had a lovely chat about Dido and Aeneas and told each other about our scrapes with the Daleks, and I let slip the odd thing I knew about his future.

He’s told me we should go and settle in England. Apparently there’s an old book he’s read by a chap called Geoffrey that says relatives of Aeneas were the first Britons I think it’s a super idea, ’ I know Troilus will like it in England, and I think we’ve persuaded the Doctor too! Just think! could be one of my own ancestors passing on my secret diaries for years and years, a bit like mummy’s family did! How smashing would that be?

From Not Necessarily the Way I Do It!

Of course I decided in the end that honesty would be the best policy and that as long as everyone knew the full facts, and swore not to be influenced by them, we could probably darn the hole in causality in such a way that it wouldn’t show. I sat everyone down in the central tent and explained. Well, what a Charlie I looked!

*** From The Dairy of an Edwardian Adventuress

Ridiculously, the Doctor had been worried about Wilf getting inspiration for the play Troilus and Cressida from meeting the real Troilus and Cressida! I protested that Wilf had already read his own plays in the future anyhow, but the Doctor countered that they’d have been corrupted playing texts and in a court of law it would be hard to prove that was down to him, whereas if Will had got any of the plot or characterisation directly through his adventures with us that was a bit more serious.

That was when Will started laughing.

From The Pseudo-Shackspur

The Noble Troyan Woman of Tray Act 5, Scene 4. A tent in the camp.

Will. But Doctor, I did not invent the tale Of Troilus and Cressida’s love that fail’d. Why, Geoffrey Chaucer told it years ago! I cannot believe that you did not know. Have you read even half of what you claim Or do you just like dropping well-known names? Cressida’s tale is part of tradition Not the result of my precognition Of future perfect past present events, If you will forgive me my mangled tense, And my quondumque futures version Should have put you off this girl’s desertion.

Char. You should have read your Brodie’s Notes on Will. The phantom threat you feared from his quill Was nothing but an insubstantial shade, And there’s a real spectre here I’m afraid. I’m half a ghost of Christmas yet to come, Remember, I’ve made history come undone. You’ve got paradoxes enough to be Getting on with, as far as I can see, So why do you search for new ones instead That only exist inside of your head?

Doct. If I had known the work of me laddo Would I have found menace in my shadow? I here resolve to watch much less TV And be the reader I do claim to be. For half my erudite orations Come straight from books of quotations.

From Tales from the Matrix

‘What was Helen of Troy actually like then?’ asked William Shaxberd as he helped himself to more wine.

‘Is,’ corrected the Doctor, prissily.

‘She’s a good egg by all accounts,’ said Vicki, politely not mentioning the fact she thought her looks had gone, ‘and Menelaus was happy enough to have her back, even after all the bother, so she must be quite nice when you get to know her, I suppose.’

‘Well, she would have to be a good egg really,’ said William, ‘Her father was a swan supposedly.’ Like most young human men of his generation, he knew the salacious bits of Greek Mythology surprisingly well.

‘Half human on his mother’s side?’ smiled the Doctor, thinking himself clever. ‘Aren’t we all?’

‘No, just men,’ said Charlotte through a falafel.

‘She has two birthdays they say, one when the egg came out of her mother and another when it hatched,’ Troilus revealed, leaning forward over the table and whispering in that conspiratorial manner people sometimes do when divulging well known but dubious trivia.

‘It would have been an easy birth if she was born an egg,’ said Vicki ruefully, one hand on her stomach.

‘An easy lay, you mean,’ William corrected.

‘So Paris said –’Troilus began, his eyes a twinkle.

He was shouted down by his wife seconds later, barrack room tale untold, and one of those awkward silences ensued that dinner party guests in all cultures and times know only too well.

‘Have you actually read Troilus and Cressida, Doctor?’ asked Charlotte a little later.

‘You ask me, who had a hand in some of Shakespeare’s finest work – who put the mixed metaphor in the “To be or not to be” soliloquy, who hired the bear for The Winter’s Tale, and who really shouldn’t have passed on the story of A Midsummer’s Night Dream, if I’ve read Troilus and Cressida?’ replied the Doctor, rather over-egging it in that way he usually did when he was on the defensive.

‘Yes!’ they cried as one.

‘Well, no,’ admitted the Doctor. ‘It’s supposed to be one of the better ones, and well, you know, I’ve been busy. I’ve still not managed to tune the Time Space Visualiser in to catch all of The Golden Girls and I’ve been trying for decades.’

‘She doesn’t end up with Troilus in it, she ends up with Diomede, andit’s set during the war not after it!’ said Charlotte patiently.

‘Diomede! That was Steven!’ Vicki laughed.The Doctor looked confused. ‘Vicki and Steven were just friends,weren’t you? Just the odd haircut and getting locked up together, Ithought.’

‘Yes, that’s right, how many times do we have to go through that?’Vicki explained, giving a petulant Troilus a peck on the cheek.

‘Well the legend must have got a bit confused by the time it gotwritten down I think Chaucer got it from a foreign book,’ said William,draining his goblet.

The Doctor beamed, thinking he’d got away with his tinkering again.‘So Troilus and Cressida weren’t predestined after all!’ he said

‘Well, only because of your lack of reading,’ snorted Charlotte.

‘Oh that is a relief,’ said the Doctor taking the wine jug from William and helping himself without asking.

‘Now what about this business of giving us charts to help us reach this Britain young Will spoke of?’ asked Troilus, passing the Doctor a goat’s cheese nibble.

‘I really shouldn’t,’ explained the Doctor. ‘If you go there, on the basis of the frankly dubious history of Geoffrey of Monmouth then Vicki is in danger of becoming one of her own descendants, which is at least as badas the things I’ve been trying to prevent all day.’

‘Oh go on Doctor, please!’ begged Vicki. ‘We could mine tin in Cornwall and I’d promise not to invent anything I shouldn’t as long as I lived, not even roller skates!’

‘I don’t think I should. I’ve made enough of a mess looking after young Charley here, the repercussions of me sending you to Britain because the unborn Shakespeare suggested it could be horrendous,’ said the Doctor, finally being responsible for once in his lives.

‘Oh go on Doctor, I’m unborn too, remember, so that shouldn’t matte rmuch,’ said Vicki.

‘And I’m only half here,’ said Charlotte grimly ‘Why stop messing about now? You should have stayed at home watching these Golden Girls of yours if you weren’t prepared to get involved in real people’s lives. They’re messy and not always in the order you’d like and sometimes too short, and they’re not always better for having you in them, but you either face that or hide away somewhere, don’t you?

’The Doctor kissed her.

‘What was that for?’ asked Charlotte.

‘To shut you up,’ he said. He tapped Vicki on the nose and smiled,’Come on, let’s carry on the party, and in the morning, when rosy-fingered Dawn has done her bit, we’ll sort out a good map of Europe for the Trojans and get them started on their boats. Any consequences which haven’t happened yet we can worry about later!’

Some of you will be shocked at just how naughty the Doctor was in this story: jeopardising the stability of all those will-have-might-have-been futures out there depending on him by interweaving all those strands of destiny connected to the Dalek race and all on the basis of a whim.

The Doctor already knew Dalek causality was partially snagged in a loop in Time and his friend was the focus of a temporal anomaly, but of course he had spent a jolly long time in the Vortex, hadn’t he? That meant his causal connections to events future, past and maybe- somehow were a great deal more jumbled up than most people’s and he was quite good at judging just how likely to snaggle the Web of Time his whims might be.

Or so he thought.

The Doctor believed in two very wrong things you see; firstly, in something he called personal morality that he thought was more important than doing the things simply everyone knows are right, and secondly, that he was cleverer than everyone else and could always sort things out.

He deserved what happened to him next, didn’t he?

Document from the Braxiatel Collection Shakespearean Ephemera wing, a note found in the effects of William Shakespeare by literary assessor Porlock. It is not believed to be in Shakespeare’s hand though it bears some graphological similarities to the disputed Scarlioni Hamlet manuscript.

List of things not to mention

The Daleks,

That you’ve met me before when we meet next (because you didn’t mention it last time, you know),

That you’ve read half your plays already

That I wrote all the good bits in Hamlet, [‘good bits’ later amended to ‘rubbish bits’ in a different hand]

The idea of cigars (until Raleigh gets back from abroad),

That cigars will end up named after some of your characters,

That someone called Raleigh will go abroad,

That Troilus and Cressida had a lovely marriage and lived happily ever after in Mousehole, no matter how the story goes in Chaucer,

Oh, the places you’ve gone and the things that you’ve seen

[lalalenii]

I'm currently onboarding the person who's gonna take over my job (for two days only) and in the beginning I was like what am I supposed to show her for 16hrs but she asks so many questions. I had to explain to her how to extract pages from a pdf several times, how to export an Indesign file as pdf how to save a pdf, what the shortcut for the @ sign is on the apple keyboard..... I feel like I'm hosting an IT course.

And at the end of the day she asked me to show her where the train station is. This is an adult woman with adult children. Her son is two years younger than me.

She also asked if I lived with my boyfriend (although I've only ever talked about /my/ apartment and moving into /my/ first flat).

[algodocs]

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[denniswilsonzine]

Made a thing - anyone want a sampler/test print preview copy of the zine?

Sent some stuff off to mixam (UK) to see how they looked like in print versus just being on my screen, mostly came out really good. One of only three copies to exist - ordered one test zine & they sent me two extra copies. Got one copy plus some promo merch on ebay right now ... * eta: somebody incredibly cool actually bought it omg squee

[and an almost identical copy is on ko-fi or available to trade. *** message me if you're interested in trading **** ]

*(sorry this took a ridiculously long time for me to finish writing and uploading all the images thanks to exhaustion & shitty internet - the ebay copy'll probably have sold by the time you see this post / it escapes being stuck in drafts, and I still haven't added image descriptions.)

...with not quite world wide postage via ebay's Global Shipping Programme, I'm keeping the best quality one & was thinking of doing a giveaway of the other* when I finally write the review of mixam's print quality I promised months ago, unless anyone wants to trade? - fake edit: *scratch that, copy #2 of #3 is now up in my ko-fi shop & I'll probably stick it on etsy, now I've seen people are actually interested in the ebay copy.(eta: somebody incredibly cool actually bought it omg squee)

https://ko-fi.com/s/483109b440 *** message me if you want to trade **** copy #2 has the same content as #3 shown below, just slightly different margin/bleed printing & Copy #2 of #3 written on the front cover. - it's 44 pages of a couple of articles and extracts of bits of issues 1 & two plus spreads from possible future issues (mostly graphics) inc. rough drafts etc.

Thoughts Of You a Dennis Wilson fanzine Mixam Zine test print no #1 Sept Nov 2023 Stapled, bleed recycled silk 130 GSM 44 pages #1 of 1 #3 of 3 by Jenna Appleseed (me)

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/226162925472 includes coverage of virtual zine fests, inc KC Zine Con; earlier issue's cover art; collages by Valarie Simadis; zine promo; being featured on De_ziners instagram; Dennis performing Angel Come Home on The Midnight Special; a Dennis t-shirt, a Dennis song recommendation from The Horrors & tributes and art by Gino Dal Cin. Some of this is reprinted from pdf issues 1 & 2 and/or going to reappear in a proper print issue/future digital zine, revised/updated or with a better layout.

Colours are richer in print than they look in the photos. (it's impossible to get decent photos without glare or off colours) Promo stuff:

sticker is a 10cm x 3.3cm vinyl sticker showing the fanzine logo/header with a white border. (done with a stickermule discount before I realised they were as dodgy as fuck, sorry.)

Business cards are printed by Moo on card made from recycled cotton t-shirts & have three different designs on the front & fanzine info on the back.

Designs are: the zine logo, issue one's front cover, and a photo of a silver heart trinket engraved with Forever.

Three million photos showing all pages incoming, click keep reading to see them: One or two pics are NSFW for swearing

10 page feature from issue 2 about virtual zine fests inc. KC Zine Con & zine merch. (lots of trash pandas reading zines).

Two variations of a layout with a song recommendation from The Horrors, one'll end up in a zine when I work out which looks best. (background taken from the cover art for their album Skying)

A couple of Dennis image edits/layer blends & layout I designed. (these'll probably eventually appear in a proper finished zine)

Collages by Valarie Simadis from pdf issue 2. (background added by me from a stock illustration).

Zine links page & call for submissions /promo art - also from digital issue 2.

Two page feature on being featured on De_ziners instagram (from pdf issue 2)

Preview of a double page spread layout/graphic design/digital art/image editing for a future zine feature / themed issue on Dennis singing Angel Come Home on The Midnight Special.

Another couple of pages with added swearing - just need to make the text make sense and write the bloody rest of it.

Another double page spread layout design with a pull quote and a digital collage/image manipulation of Dennis singing Angel Come Home.

Page layout design experiments for Pacific Ocean Blue & Bambu that may eventually appear in a zine.

Double page spread of my photo of Dennis & Venice Surf (Dennis tee's from Bathroom Wall & Venice Surf tee was from Pep & Co at Poundland) - extract from an unofficial t-shirts feature in pdf issue 1.

Two different heart themed page designs from two different features in pdf issue 1.

A couple of digital collages/image manipulations based around Dennis' performance of Angel Come Home on The Midnight Special + lyrics from the Manic Street Preachers song You're Tender & Your Tired, that just seemed to fit so fucking well.) Probably need to rework/improve one of them if/before including in an actual issue.

Double page spread with a quote on the song + a screenshot of Dennis from youtube. (needs a little bit of tweaking before it's ready for a finished zine)

Sample credits page from issue one about Forever inspired art by Gino Dal Cin, & a sarcastic fanzine promo graphic I made.

Two versions of the same page so I could see how much of a difference the image resolution actually makes (remade the second one from the original photo - the higher res really does make it look better quality when printed) - the dpi notes won't be on the finished version (fucked up and had to replace a page in the files I'm sending to mixam to print a real physical issue one of the zine cos I got so used to having the dpi note over a lower res graphic I accidentally forgot it wasn't permanently meant to be there).

So i'm goin' away but not forever"

Back cover art by Gino Dal Cin, blue & silver (& pink) star background from a scrapbooking site.

[shanamahtopoeia]

Porting from Dragon Age: Inquisition to Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2

Part 2a - Into DA2

The process for converting a DAI armors & clothing model for DA2 is a bit different (and easier) than for DAO, so I'm going to start there. DAO ports and static models for either game will be coming later. :)

Tools needed: Blender 2.79a Blender 2.49b Blender to DA2 Mesh Export script. Also make sure to grab the v1 folder for the PDF tutorial. DAI to DA2 bone rename script The DAO Toolset, or at least its MMH & MSH processors pyGFF ERFV3 Packer GDApp TlkEdit (optional) DA2 Blender import script (do a 'find in page' for "import_dragon_age_2.zip")

Open up Blender 2.79a, with your imported model from DAI (see part 1 if you haven't yet extracted your model from DAI)

Blender has a lot of shortcut keys, and it may be worth it to you to run through a Blender tutorial. The default view for Blender 2.79 is a large 3D view window on the left, with an Outliner window on the upper right and Properties window in the lower right. Personally, I like to keep the 3D view and outliner windows open, and switch out the properties window as required.

First things first, you'll want to get rid of the armature and make sure the model is rotated to the correct DA2 orientation.

You can do this by selecting the armature (right-click) and hitting X or Delete. The model should rotate like it's fallen flat on the ground. Look near the bottom of the window, and find the pivot point selection. Change it to "3D Cursor". Your cursor defaults to 0,0,0, but if it got moved, you can put it back with Shift+s, "Cursor to Center".

Then hit A to select all the meshes. Rotate on the Y-axis by 180 degress (R, Y, 180 - literally, type the number "180", Enter) and on the X-axis by 90 (R, X, 90, Enter). Then apply the rotation with Ctrl+A, "Rotation". (changes made in 'Object Mode' always need to be applied to stick; changes made in 'Edit Mode' will stay unless you undo them)

Next, you're going to want to join all the armor/clothing bits together, leaving any skin or accessories separate (they'll likely use different textures).

You can select multiple sub-meshes by holding Shift and right-clicking on each, and then combine them with Ctrl+J. Be warned that DAI isn't always intuitive on what it considers "accessories" - if there are lightly-armored and heavier-armored variants of the same base model, any extra plating, pauldrons, etc, are likely "accessories". If there are multiple skin sub-meshes (unlikely), also join them to each other. An easy way to tell if you've accidently joined parts together that you shouldn't have (at least not yet) is to open up the UV editor window, select your mesh, and hit Tab to change to 'Edit Mode'. Submeshes from different texture maps will often overlap in weird ways. If this has happened, simply undo that joining (Blender uses the usual Ctrl+Z to undo).

Now, you'll want to fix the skeleton.

DA2 uses almost the same skeleton as DAI, which is pretty darned handy. If you expand a submesh in the outliner menu, you should see 'Modifiers' and 'Vertex Groups'. Expand 'Vertex Groups' so you can see all the bone groups. Even though DAI & DA2 use nearly identical skeletal structures, the bone names are different. In the lower window, open up the Text Editor. Then click 'open', navigate to wherever you put the bone rename script, and open it.

With the mesh group selected in either the 3D window or the outliner, right click anywhere in the text window, and hit 'Run Script'. If everything was done correctly, you should see all the bones get renamed. Repeat for any other submeshes.

Unfortunately, the DAI skeleton is a bit more complex than the DA2, and so there are some bones that don't match up nicely. It's probably not a complete list, but so far the extra bones I've found are: Left & RightUpperLegTwist_GS Left & RightFrontCloth3 HairFrontMid1, 2, & 3 Left & RightBrow3

Sometimes you can get away with deleting the extra bones, but you'll most likely need to combine them with others. Luckily, there's a nice modifier to do that for you. If you're porting an outfit, you're likely to run into the UpperLegTwist_GS bones, so I'll show you how I handle those. Switch the 3D window from 'Object Mode' to 'Weight Paint', and the Text Editor back to the Properties. Find and click the 'Modifiers' button (it looks like a wrench). Go ahead and delete the Skeleton modifier. Select RightUpperLeg in the outliner window, so you can see what's happening. Click 'Add Modifier' in the Properties window, and then 'Vertex Weight Mix'. Set group A (the one we plan on keeping) to RightUpperLeg and group B to RightUpperLegTwist_GS. Set the Mix Mode to 'Add' and the Mix Set to 'VGroupB'. This adds group B vertices to group A, retaining their weight. Hit 'Apply' to confirm. Then do the same for LeftUpperLeg and LeftUpperLegTwist_GS.

In the Properties window, now hit the 'Data' button (it's just right of 'Modifiers'). Under 'Vertex Groups', find and delete Left and RightUpperLegTwist_GS by selecting each and clicking the subtract symbol.

If you deleted any bones without combining, you should check to make sure there aren't now any unweighted vertices. You can do that by switching the 3D window back to 'Edit Mode', then hitting 'Select', 'Select All By Trait', 'Ungrouped Verts'.

If you found any, you can open up the Sidebar menu by hitting N. Find a weighted vertex near the unweighted one. Select the unweighted vertex first, then the weighted one. Under 'Vertex Weights' in the Sidebar, click 'Copy'. This will copy the weights from the weighted vertex to the unweighted. If you have a lot of unweighted vertices in an area, it's probably better to undo deleting the relevant bone.

Now your mesh should be ready for export. But, since we can't export directly from Blender 2.79a, so you'll need to 'Save As' and then make sure to check 'Legacy Mesh Format'. If you're familiar with the DA2 Exportation script, it's pretty simple from here. If not, I highly recommend reading that tutorial first. The first half deals with importing DA2 files, and the second with exporting them.

Open Blender 2.49b. If you want or need to compare your DAI mesh to DA2 meshes, open the DA2 import blend file.

If you're keeping the same race/gender combo, the DAI version should match up almost perfectly with the DA2 body parts already. If you want to convert to a different race/gender, or are importing a hairstyle, you will need to import in a DA2 mesh to make sure you adjust the proportions correctly. You should see the import script open in the left window. You can then click Text, Save in the bottom left of the window to save it as a python script that can be opened in any .blend file. Close Blender.

(re)Start Blender 2.49b, and open your 2.79 .blend file. It may have a popup warning about animation loss, but you can ignore it.

Find 'Open New' in the Text window and open the Export script. You can also open the Import script this way if you want. You'll be able to easily swap between them as required now.

If you need to adjust your mesh, now is the time. If you need to bring in a DA2 model for comparison, be aware that the import script will import it rotated: you'll need to fix that by selecting the DA2 mesh, then hitting R, Z, 90, Enter.

Before we export, we need to rename the Datablock (ME) and Object (OB) for each mesh/submesh. If you don't have a Buttons Window open, change one of the windows to that, and hit F9 to change to Editing.

Gloves should be named 'glovesm1' Boots should be 'bootsm1' Chestpieces should be 'armorm1' Full bodies should be 'bodym1', 'robem1', or 'clothesm1' Headgear should be 'helmetm1' This is necessary because the engine looks for these keywords when applying tinting, even for skin tints.

If you're exporting a female mesh, you have to do one extra step: under 'Vertex Groups' in the Buttons window, select 'spine3' and then double-click it to rename it to 'Spine3'.

To export your model, right-click on the export script, and click 'execute script'.

Select the mesh parts to export (hold Shift to select multiple parts), and click the appropriate Export msh button.

You'll get a pop-up prompting you to name the msh: this names the mesh inside the .msh file. Technically you can name it whatever, but the conventions DA2 uses are: glv_**** for gloves boo_**** for boots arm_**** for chestpiece rob_**** for robes (usually full-body) cth_**** for clothing (usually full-body) bdy_**** for any other full-body models hlm_**** for helmets of any kind hlh_**** for half-helms (faces showing) hlf_**** for full-helms (no face showing) hoo_*** for hoods Then it'll direct you to export the msh. Pick the same name as you picked above, but with 'msh.xml' appended. (so, if you're porting a nice chestpiece, name it "arm_mine" at the pop-up prompt and export it as "arm_mine.msh.xml")

Do the same for the mmh export. Using the same example: "arm_mine" at the pop-up prompt, and export as "arm_mine.mmh.xml".

Minimize Blender, and navigate to wherever you exported your xmls.

Then, open a couple new Windows Explorer windows, and navigate to your DAO processors folder (for me, it's C:\Program Files (x86)\Dragon Age\tools\ResourceBuild\Processors). Open the MMH folder in one window and the MSH in the other, and move your .xmls to the matching folder.

To process the MMH, you can simply click and drag it over to GraphicsProcessorMMH.exe, and you should get an .mmh and a .phy.

To process the MSH, you need to open a PowerShell or command line in the MSH folder.

(if you're on Windows 10 or 11, hold Shift, right-click, and select 'Open PowerShell window here') Then input "GraphicsProcessorMSH.exe -platform pc mmdtogff arm_mine.msh.xml". Hopefully, it gives you a .msh.

If either fails, the most likely cause is that you didn't have the mesh selected when you tried to export.

For some reason, the processor may also fail if you duplicated or extruded any vertices while changing the mesh, so you'll need to avoid doing either when making more complex mesh edits. -_-

Now, you hopefully have your converted .msh, mmh, and .phy files.

The readme for the export script says that the .phy generated may be unreliable, so you may want to extract a vanilla .phy to use instead. Look for one of the same race/gender combo and same type (gloves, robes, etc).

Open up your msh with pyGFF, and type 'output/' before the mesh name on the second line. Hit 'Save' in the bottom left corner, and then save the entire file.

Open up your mmh with pyGFF, and put the filepath in front of the mmh, msh, & maos (more on the .mao file further down).

Look at a vanilla .mmh to see what it should look like. The filepath should be art/characters/playercharacter/racegender/. If your model has multiple submeshes, you'll need to input the filepath for each part's mao. Make sure to hit 'Save' in the bottom left after editing each line. Save the .mmh.

Open up your phy with pyGFF, and either enter the filepath (if you've kept the generated one) or change the mmh name to yours (if you're using a vanilla one). Save the phy, making sure to change the name to match the msh & mmh if necessary.

If your model has multiple parts, you'll need to make sure the mmh has its nodes ordered correctly. The 'Root' node should be above the mesh chunks, and the [filename] node after the chunks. Use the box in the bottom left to re-order them. Similarly, the phy should have the 'Root' node above the [filename] node. (not all vanilla multipart models have the [filename] node, and I'm not sure why. But, if the mmh has one, the matching phy will as well.) See the pics below, or pop open some vanilla files to compare.

You now have a model, but testing will be difficult without textures.

My tutorial for converting DAI textures to DA2 can be found here. If you use GIMP or Photoshop, I recommend these tutorials: magpie's for GIMP sapphim's for Photoshop If all you need is quick placeholder textures for testing, simply export the textures from DAI with FrostyEditor as .dds files.

Use pyGFF to open a vanilla .mao from a model similar to the one you're exporting (race and gender don't matter for this one, just general color and whether it's mostly cloth, leather, or metal), and change the texture names to the ones from DAI. Then save the mao, naming it to match your msh & mmh.

Now, you've got to pack everything so that DA2 can read it. DA2 uses a weird nested folder system for organization, and we're going to copy it.

Make a new folder for your files, and create a nested series of folders inside matching the filepath ('MyMod/art/characters/playercharacter/racegender') and put your msh, mmh, phy, and mao in the racegender folder. Make a 'textures' folder next to them, and put the textures in it.

Navigate all the way back up, and open another window to wherever you put the ERF Packer. Drag and drop your 'MyMod' folder over the ERF Packer. It'll open an ERF Packer window; choose 'Create PAK'.

Yay! Now you have a DAI model, in DA2 format, packed so that DA2 can access it. Put your shiny new .erf into your DA2 override.

If it's a hair model, testing is as simple as adding a new line to your chargenmorph.xml and starting a new character. If it's an armor or clothing model, you'll need to put it on an item or a companion.

I often use my poor siblings for testing with a quick APR_base edit.

Open up APR_base.gda with GDApp, then delete all the lines except the follower(s) you'll be using for testing. Look over at the 5th column, 'MODELTYPE', and if it's a P ("parts"), change it to H ("head"). Then put your new model with filepath in the 4th column, 'ModelName'. Save the edited GDA with a name like "apr_base_testing.gda" (the game will read this as an override for your edited lines). Open up DA2 and find your guinea pig of a follower!

If you'd rather test with an item, the easiest way is to extract the UTI for an item you already have, then open up item_variations.gda with GDApp.

Delete all the lines except one of the same type as your chosen item (so for a ported robe, find a line with a robe or clothing). Change the 'ID' field to something unique (there's no limit on length, so a random 7+ digits is fine), and the 'model' field to your mmh. Save the edited GDA with a name like "item_variations_test.gda". Then open your item's UTI, and put the ID number for your model in the 'ModelVariation' field. Save.

Put both the item_variations gda and your edited UTI into your DA2 override folder. Open up DA2 and see if it worked.

If your model doesn't quite look right, you'll have to go back into Blender and make adjustments. But, you'll generally only have to re-export the msh. If you remove/add/rename any bones, though, or split/combine meshes, you'll have to re-export the mmh as well.

Common problems: -- Some parts extend into infinity: either unweighted vertices, or misnamed/unrecognized bones -- Noodle limbs: exported wrong MMH type, or re-exported mesh with changed bones without also re-exporting mmh. -- Game crashes: too many bones in a single mesh (the limit is somewhere around 68-70). Split the mesh into multiple submeshes, and then use Scripts, Clean Meshes to remove Vgroups. Re-export everything. -- T-posing and flashing red: can't find the mao -- Grayscale and shiny: can't find texture(s) -- No model / invisible item or body: either can't find the mesh, or the mesh was oriented wrong (in my experience, this only happens the model is rotated on the Z axis) -- Flat on the ground w/distorted limbs: rotated wrong on the X and/or Y axis

Part 2b covers converting DAI models and getting them into DAO.

[open-hearth-rpg]

Usability: Great RPG Mechanics #RPGMechanics: Week Nine

Continuing my week of meta-elements which make for great games, I want to talk about physical presentation. There’s a weird mix in my collection of ttrpgs. I have 8-9 shelves filled with physical books and way, way too many accumulated in my badly organized “rpg e-files” folder which has migrated across five different desktops. I’d say pdfs have become the majority at this point. I usually read those on a crappy Samsung tablet, mostly because I have a hard time reading large amounts of text on a screen. So pdfs work better than others– and I appreciate when the designers have thought about these elements. 

Printer-Friendly: I love it when a ttrpg has a printer friendly mode. This can take a couple of forms. Some games, like The Sprawl, have a day-mode and night-mode versions. When I first saw the Sprawl’s white text on black background, I didn’t like it. Eventually I found out that was a more comfortable approach for a lot of readers. But I appreciated that Hamish Cameron eventually released a version with standard black on white page design. Other games publishers in the last few years have begun to do this more and more. Star Trek Adventures includes that with the pdf purchase. 

The other version of printer/reader friendly is to have layers available in the pdf. This allows readers to turn off distracting page elements: paper textures, watermark art, intrusive page frames. This allows for easier printing, but frankly for me, it makes for easier reading. It just makes me unreasonably angry when I get a pdf with page backgrounds that make it harder for my old person's eyes and I can’t turn those off. Sometimes a pdf will have layers but turning off the backgrounds removes the text as well because they’ve merged the two together. The best games have layers, cleanly separated and cleanly labeled. 

Give Me Text: Some games in recent years have offered text-only versions, like The Veil. I love this. It is hugely useful and makes it more likely that I’m going to run that game. I run the majority of my ttrpgs online. Usually that means I’m putting together materials for the players: setting background, cheat sheets, and character keepers. Extracting text from pdfs is a pain, even with a good program. You almost always have to deal with the paragraph breaks and formatting. When a company provides the text, it makes my job significantly easier. If you want people to play your game online, outside of a set VTT package, include the text with the pdf. A lot of folks on itch.io know to do this. 

Accessibility: There are a couple of elements which I can’t speak to from experience, but I appreciate when I hear about publishers who spend the extra time getting these things right. My father was color blind and the few board games he played with us often had to be modified to make up for that. Some companies use online tools to check how their material works for the color blind. That’s important where color is used to mark out important information: particularly different colors to indicate different things. 

On the other hand, one complaint I’ve heard about certain books is that they’re particularly dyslexia-unfriendly. They choose fonts which look cool but become a pain to actually read for people with this condition. I know tools and resources exist for checking which fonts work better than others. Of course it isn’t just about fonts, but general typographic elements, size, background bits, etc. When I designed the earlier Gauntlet Community revised logos, I had input from a couple of folks who encouraged me to move clutter away from the words and remove some extra type flourishes. It looked better and became more useful as a result.  

[tap-tap-tap-im-in]

Haven't done a computer status update in a little bit. Raspberry Pi media server has been psuedo-retired. It's currently still functioning as a media server for a christmas display at my wife's work until the end of December.

It has been successfully replaced by the Dell Optiplex that I got from work. I was able to skip the process of building a migration script for the server (to allow files to be moved and refound via filename & hash), but only because I've been mapping storage outside the server's webroot via link files in the upload directory. So on the new HD the files are actually in the upload directory rather than linked to it. As far as the server knows they're in the same place.

I transferred the software between machines by making a new install of vogon on the optiplex and then importing a mysqldump of the existing install into it, bringing the user accounts, media data, and other configuration elements with it. I did end up changing the storage engine of the data and data_meta tables into innodb (from isam) and adding some additional indexing. There were some noticeable performance differences on the generated join queries between servers. We were looking at 7sec+ lookup times for searches in the audio module. I'm still not sure if it's a mariadb version difference between raspbian and ubuntu lts, if something got corrupted in the export/import process, or if it was some strange storage lookup difference between running the database off of a SETA Hard-Drive versus an SD card. I initially thought maybe it was a fragmentation issue, but the built in optimization processes didn't really impact it, but with the adjustments to the indexing we're regularly getting query times measured in microseconds versus seconds, so it's working pretty well now.

The x86 processor and the faster storage (without the power dropout issues) have really improved the experience. Especially with reading comic books.

If I haven't explained it before, the way the CBZ reader works is that it sends a file list from the archive to the browser, the browser requests an image, and the server extracts the image data into RAM, base64 encodes it, and sends it back to the browser. It's a process that is bottlenecked by both CPU and storage speeds, so it's noticeably snappier on the new machine, even if the CPU is over a decade old at this point.

I'm actually considering taking a crack at forking mozilla's pdf.js to work a similar way, sending a page of data at a time, to decrease transfer times and allow lower memory devices to open large PDFs without having to actually download the whole thing. I suspect that means I'm going to have to build smaller single page PDF files on the fly, which would mean coming up with some kind of solution for in document links. I'm still in the phase of deciding if it's enough of a problem to put effort into solving, so I haven't done enough research to know if it will be easy or difficult. It's always hard to tell in situations like this because just about every web reader project assumes downloading the whole file, and the question is do they do it this way because it's hard to sub-divide the format, or do they do it because full clientside logic can be demoed on github pages.

[jediplinth]

Did Acrobat offer free editing?

I ask this because I was one of the original engineers who worked on Acrobat in the 90's and there was a distinction at that time between viewing and creating/editing PDFs. The reason was that (1) Adobe wanted to make money so giving away everything wouldn't work and (2) Adobe wanted PDF to be adopted so they tried to make it easy to view documents.

But let's take a moment and talk about why the general problem of "editing PDF" is so challenging. The file format for PDF is an object-based text format that is derived from the PostScript programming language. This is a language that uses postfix notation for all operations. So instead of writing, say "3 + 4" you would write "3 4 +" or more precisely "3 4 add". The problem with PostScript for documents is that it's a full programming language which is Turing complete, which means it can computer anything we think is computable. It also means that it's prone to the halting problem, which is "how can you determine a priori if a program will halt". That's a problem when you're trying to read a document because page 16 might have an infinite loop on it. PostScript printers can get away with this because they have something called "page timeout" and "job timeout" both of which are acceptable in a printer but not in a desktop app.

So PDF uses syntax similar to PostScript, but it has no looping and you can't define functions, so it's guaranteed to halt.

What happens on any given page is that the page has an element called Contents which is supposed to be a stream of operators that might look like this:

BT /F0 12 Tf (This is some text) Tj ET

which means Begin Text, set the font to F0 which is a named font resource in the page to size 12 (Tf is the operator) Write the text on the page (Tj) and End Text.

The problem is that there is nothing from stopping you from writing this:

BT /F0 12 Tf (This ) Tj (is ) Tj (some t) Tj (e) Tj (x) Tj (t) Tj ET

which is equivalent, but not identical.

Another issue is that the file format is very tricky to get right. Nearly everything is based on where the objects lived in the file. So something that sounds simple like "remove a page" can be devilishly hard. Imagine taking a fishing net loaded with fish, cutting out all the sections of the net that have barnacles on them, picking up the net and putting it down somewhere else without losing any fish.

So things that *sound* simple may be very very hard. For example, just extracting the text from a page is a real pain in the ass. I worked with the guy who wrote that code and it's...OK, but it was not easy to do because we kept finding reasonable examples that broke it.

Some 20 years later, I wrote a modern toolkit for reading and writing PDF and it took me a long time to figure out how to do text extraction better than the original code. I'm going to explain it and maybe you'll understand it, maybe not, but it will give you a sense of the task.

First you create a bounded space. Then you "render" a page. Every time you hit a text operator, you bundle up all the elements that describe the text which includes the text, it's encoding, the font and size of the text, the transformation matrix, and the bounding quadrilateral. You throw it at the bounded space and divide it into quadrants around the text. This process is building a 2 dimensional spatial tree. Every time you throw another piece of text, you either resubdivide the space, you find that the text is "close enough" to text in the space to join it together in fragments. Lather rinse repeat until you're done with the page. So when you're done, by walking the quad tree you get all the text off the page in fragments that group logically together. Next step is to sort the page into reading order. But wait - what's the reading order of the page? Depends on the language or languages in which it is written.

And ta-da, you now have the text extracted from the page. Want to correct a typo? Sure - go for it, but that is, how we say, non-trivial because where a word is in the stream of operators may be a profound effect on the rest of the page. The general solutions are hard.

When I wrote my toolkit, I focused on (1) making the API I surfaced easy to use (2) hiding the details of the PDF spec (3) making it performant and (4) making it easy to maintain.

One of my favorite things that I did was make a piece of code that could take an existing PDF and and a JPG, decompose the JPG into pixels and drop a rectangle annotation on the page for every pixel in the image. In doing this, I found that my code could do that correctly in a second or so. That's laying 4000ish rectangle annotations and rewriting the document (remember the fishnet?). It took Acrobat MINUTES to open the document. I could open it in well under a second with my code.

tl;dr - anything that involved writing PDF had a price tag put on it at Adobe. The PDF spec is amazingly flexible - it's meant to represent anything you can put on paper. It is devilishly hard to do simple things with PDF - it was more or less designed to be write-only.

[aimarketresearch]

Well Intervention Market Size, Share, Trends, Key Drivers, Demand and Opportunity Analysis

Global Well Intervention Market - Size, Share, Demand, Industry Trends and Opportunities

Global Well Intervention Market, By Service (Logging & Bottomhole Survey, Tubing & Packer Failure & Repair, Stimulation, Remedial Cementing, Zonal Isolation, Sand Control, Artificial Lift, Fishing, Reperforation, Others), Well Type (Vertical Well, Horizontal Well), Intervention Type (Light Well Intervention, Medium Well Intervention, Heavy Well Intervention), Applications (Onshore, Offshore), Country (U.S., Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Rest of South America, Germany, Italy, U.K., France, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Turkey, Russia, Rest of Europe, Japan, China, India, South Korea, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Rest of Asia-Pacific, Saudi Arabia, U.A.E., South Africa, Egypt, Israel, Rest of Middle East and Africa) Industry Trends

Access Full 350 Pages PDF Report @

**Global Well Intervention Market Analysis**

The global well intervention market is a crucial segment of the oil and gas industry, responsible for maintaining and enhancing the production of oil and gas wells. Well intervention involves various activities such as logging, perforation, zonal isolation, artificial lift, and stimulation to improve well performance. The market has been witnessing steady growth due to increasing energy demand, aging wells, and the need for efficient extraction techniques.

**Segments**

The global well intervention market can be segmented based on the type of service, application, and region. In terms of service type, the market can be categorized into logging and bottom hole survey, tubing/packer failure and repair, stimulation, remedial cementing, zonal isolation, sand control, artificial lift, fishing, reperforation, and others. Each of these services plays a crucial role in enhancing well productivity and ensuring smooth operations.

By application, the market can be divided into onshore and offshore segments. Onshore well intervention activities are primarily focused on conventional oil and gas fields, while offshore interventions are crucial for maintaining production from deepwater and ultra-deepwater wells. The offshore segment is witnessing significant growth due to advancements in technology enabling operations in challenging offshore environments.

Geographically, the market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East and Africa. North America, particularly the United States, holds a significant share in the well intervention market due to the presence of mature oil and gas fields. The Middle East and Africa region is also a key market, driven by extensive oil and gas reserves and ongoing exploration activities.

**Market Players**

- Halliburton - Schlumberger Limited - Baker Hughes, a GE Company - Weatherford - Archer Limited - Superior Energy Services - Expro Group - Hunting PLC - Altus Intervention - National Oilwell Varco

These market players are leading the global well intervention market with their innovative technologies, diversified service offerings, and strategic partnerships. The competitive landscape is characterized by intense competition, prompting companies to focus on research and development to stay ahead in the market.

The well intervention market is witnessing several trends that are shaping its growth trajectory. One significant trend is the increasing adoption of digital technologies such as AI, IoT, and data analytics to optimize well intervention operations. These technologies enable real-time monitoring, predictive maintenance, and decision-making, enhancing overall efficiency and reducing downtime.

Moreover, the shift towards sustainable practices and environmental regulations is driving the market towards cleaner and more efficient well intervention techniques. Companies are investing in greener technologies and solutions to minimize the environmental impact of their operations, thus aligning with global sustainability goals.

However, the well intervention market also faces certain challenges that could impede its growth. Fluctuating oil prices, regulatory uncertainties, and geopolitical tensions are some of the key challenges impacting market dynamics. Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted operations and supply chains, leading to delays in well intervention projects.

In conclusion, the global well intervention market is poised for steady growth driven by increasing energy demand, technological advancements, and the need for efficient well maintenance. Market players are focusing on innovation and sustainability to gain a competitive edge in the market and tap into emerging opportunities.

Core Objective of Well Intervention Market:

Every firm in the Well Intervention Market has objectives but this market research report focus on the crucial objectives, so you can analysis about competition, future market, new products, and informative data that can raise your sales volume exponentially.

Size of the Well Intervention Market and growth rate factors.

Important changes in the future Well Intervention Market.

Top worldwide competitors of the Market.

Scope and product outlook of Well Intervention Market.

Developing regions with potential growth in the future.

Tough Challenges and risk faced in Market.

Global Well Intervention top manufacturers profile and sales statistics.

Highlights of TOC:

Chapter 1: Market overview

Chapter 2: Global Well Intervention Market

Chapter 3: Regional analysis of the Global Well Intervention Market industry

Chapter 4: Well Intervention Market segmentation based on types and applications

Chapter 5: Revenue analysis based on types and applications

Chapter 6: Market share

Chapter 7: Competitive Landscape

Chapter 8: Drivers, Restraints, Challenges, and Opportunities

Chapter 9: Gross Margin and Price Analysis

Regional Analysis for Well Intervention Market:

APAC (Japan, China, South Korea, Australia, India, and Rest of APAC; Rest of APAC is further segmented into Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, New Zealand, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka)

Europe (Germany, UK, France, Spain, Italy, Russia, Rest of Europe; Rest of Europe is further segmented into Belgium, Denmark, Austria, Norway, Sweden, The Netherlands, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania)

North America (U.S., Canada, and Mexico)

South America (Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Rest of South America)

MEA (Saudi Arabia, UAE, South Africa)

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About Data Bridge Market Research:

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[enelica]

March 2024 Planning

What's planned on my Patreon this month :

Curious Cat :

· Illustration/Comic of the month: Sport AU (Submit an idea and vote for the one you prefer!)

· Small extracts from current comic Meet me in Eden

· Sketches, WIPs and GO illustrations or original art

· PDF "Bonfire"

Avdenturous and Audacious Cats :

· Same as Curious

· 1 page per week of my comic Meet me in Eden (detailed sketch)

· 2 pages per month of Meet me in Eden (final version)

· PDFs of all my previous fancomics!

· For Audacious: access to NSFW content (soft nsfw, suggestive nudity)

From Lucky and Charming Cats :

· Same as Adventurous and Audacious

· Two artprint sent to your home every two month*! Plus a unique print for your first month of subscription!

(*In March you will receive the print of February and March)

· Choice of artprints for the month of April and May

· For Charming: access to NSFW content (soft nsfw, suggestive nudity)

Voilà, here's what to expect if you join my Patreon, note that I'm already very touched that you're a subscriber! Thank you for your support and see you soon perhaps!

[algodocs]

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Dive into a realm of efficiency and precision – discover why AlgoDocs is your key to unlocking a new dimension in data extraction! 🌐✨

Take charge of your scanned files' processing efficiency with AlgoDocs! Sign up for a free subscription now and experience the convenience of parsing your PDF documents. AlgoDocs is your forever companion with 50 pages per month free. Check our pricing plans for larger processing volumes.

[yashikasharma98]

Data Extraction: The Overlooked Champion of Data Analysis

In the glamorous world of data science, we often hear about sophisticated machine learning models, complex algorithms, and insightful data visualizations. But lurking beneath the surface, often overlooked, is a crucial process: data extraction. It's the unsung hero that makes all the other cool stuff possible.

If you want to advance your career at the Data Science Course in Bangalore, you need to take a systematic approach and join up for a course that best suits your interests and will greatly expand your learning path.

What is Data Extraction?

Simply put, data extraction is the process of collecting data from various sources and converting it into a usable format for analysis. These sources can be incredibly diverse:

Databases: Structured data stored in relational databases (like MySQL or PostgreSQL) or NoSQL databases (like MongoDB).

Web Pages: Extracting information from websites using web scraping techniques.

APIs: Retrieving data from application programming interfaces (APIs) offered by various services.

Documents: Pulling data from PDFs, Word documents, spreadsheets, and other file formats.

Social Media: Gathering data from platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Sensors and IoT Devices: Collecting data from connected devices.

Why is it So Important?

Data extraction is fundamental to data science for several key reasons:

Data is the Foundation: Data science is, at its core, about extracting insights and knowledge from data. Without data, there's nothing to analyze, no models to build, and no insights to uncover. Data extraction provides the raw material that fuels the entire data science pipeline.

Quality In, Quality Out: The quality of your data directly impacts the quality of your results. If the data extraction process is flawed or incomplete, the resulting analysis will be unreliable and potentially misleading. Ensuring accurate and comprehensive data extraction is critical for generating trustworthy insights.

Data Integration: Data often resides in disparate systems and formats. Data extraction allows you to consolidate data from multiple sources into a unified dataset, enabling a more holistic view and more powerful analysis. This integration is essential for identifying patterns and relationships that might be hidden when data is siloed.

Automation and Efficiency: Automated data extraction processes can significantly reduce the time and effort required to gather and prepare data for analysis. This allows data scientists to focus on more strategic tasks, such as model building and interpretation, rather than spending countless hours on manual data collection.

Real-time Insights: In many applications, timely data is crucial. Data extraction techniques enable real-time or near-real-time data acquisition, allowing for immediate analysis and decision-making. This is particularly important in areas like fraud detection, financial trading, and supply chain management.

Challenges in Data Extraction

Despite its importance, data extraction is not without its challenges:

Data Variety: Dealing with diverse data formats and structures can be complex and time-consuming.

Data Volume: Extracting large volumes of data can be computationally intensive and require specialized tools and techniques.

Data Quality: Ensuring data accuracy and completeness during the extraction process is crucial.

Website Changes: Web scraping can be fragile, as website structures can change frequently, breaking existing extraction scripts.

API Limitations: APIs may have rate limits or other restrictions that limit the amount of data that can be extracted.

Ethical Considerations: Web scraping and data collection must be done ethically and legally, respecting website terms of service and privacy regulations.

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Tools and Techniques

A wide range of tools and techniques are available for data extraction, including:

SQL: For extracting data from relational databases.

Web Scraping Libraries: Beautiful Soup, Scrapy (Python), Cheerio (Node.js) for extracting data from websites.

API Clients: Libraries for interacting with APIs (e.g., requests in Python).

ETL Tools: Tools like Apache NiFi, Talend, and Informatica for extracting, transforming, and loading data.

Regular Expressions: For pattern matching and data extraction from text.

OCR (Optical Character Recognition): For extracting text from images and scanned documents.

Conclusion

Data extraction is the often-under appreciated but absolutely essential first step in any data science project. It's the foundation upon which all subsequent analysis and insights are built. By mastering data extraction techniques and understanding its challenges, data scientists can unlock the full potential of their data and deliver impactful results. So, next time you hear about a groundbreaking machine learning model, remember the unsung hero that made it all possible: data extraction.