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thewolf-xiv · 4 years

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LFRP: Terran Rieneport

BASICS Full Name: Terran Matthias Rieneport Nickname(s): None! (That he's aware of, anyway) Age: 23 Birthday: 27th Sun of the 4th Umbral Moon (August 27th) Race: Half-Hyur (Midlander)/Half-Elezen (Wildwood). He definitely favors the Hyur side of things, though. Gender: Male Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual Romantic Orientation: Heteroromantic Relationship Status: Single Pringle. PHYSICAL APPEARANCE Face Claim: N/A Hair: A brown so deep it's almost black. Straight and long, hanging down beneath his shoulder blades in length. Sometimes, he'll add a tiny braid or two to it. Just one or two. Wouldn't want to upset its luxuriousness. Eye Color: A deep blue. Height: 6′1″ Build: Muscular. He's a tough little shit. Distinguishing Marks/Characteristics: The long hair (it's glorious, and you'll never tell him otherwise); the beard he can't (or won't) seem to part with; that winning grin; a couple of scars across his right pectoral; the way that his ears point *just* a little near the tops. If you're not looking for it, you'll miss it. Common Accessories: A bandana he is literally N E V E R without; a silver flask, its contents something he is reluctant to share with anyone; an ornate-looking throwing dagger; his sword, Harlequin.

PERSONAL Profession: In-between jobs? He'll take whatever you throw at him. Otherwise, he's tanning hides. Ooh yeah, you heard me. Hobbies: Leatherworking, working out, cooking. Sometimes, he knits. Please don't tell anyone. Languages: He barely speaks his native language, and you want him to know more than that? Residence: An apartment in the Goblet. Birthplace: Gridania. Patron Deity: Nophica RELATIONSHIPS Parents: Sazeane Rieneport and Aldred Wright. Both still living. Dad was more than kind of a douche, so after seventeen years of his life, Terran took his mom's surname. Siblings: None that he knows of, but it's a gamble on what his dad's been up to all of these years. Children: One, a boy named Mathieu. He's four, and he lives with his mother, Lorelei Gabriev, near Limsa Lominsa. Pets: None! Additional information Smoking Habit: No. Drugs: No. Alcohol: Is water wet? It's a miracle he even has a liver at all.

RP Hooks "It's Rieneport... Like, Wineport, but... Look, don't think too hard about it." What do you get when you cross a Wildwood with a Midlander? The cosmic joke that is Terran Rieneport, that's what. Bar Hopper: Terran's favorite pastime? Being drunk. He frequents bars of all names, shapes, sizes, and locations. He drinks enough to kill any normal man, and he's super sharp at any tavern game you can come up with. How, one might ask, is he so good when he can hardly stand up straight? A mystery in three parts! Or perhaps just one, but that's up to you to figure out. "Why're ya lookin' at me like that? Course I was born here!" Gridania: While he may not live there any longer, and despite the fact that he looks like he just rolled fresh out of a sand dune, he was born and did live in Gridania for the first seventeen years of his life. Maybe you remember him from the years he spent growing up there, before he was a Grade A Fuckboy. When the guy had a conscience. Lewd: It is absolutely no secret that Terran is a lover of the ladies. It is also no secret that he tends to leave said ladies come morning light, if not kick them out of his room on his own. His name is known far and wide for his (less than gentlemanly) activities. Some people are okay with it. Others want to stone him. Whatever the case, he's strangely good with the opposite sex, though he's not big on boasting about it. In fact, he might ask you not to mention it. "Right. Soon as the three of you stop spinnin', I'm knockin' ya on yer ass." Swordplay, archery, and arena fights: Despite what it might look like, Terran loves his swords. He loves swordplay. He loves archery, he loves hunting. But most importantly, he loves arena battles and spars. He might be attending them. He might be participating in them. Once upon a time, he used to actually excel in all of the aforementioned, and he still may yet. Unless you're following his drunk ass around, you'll never know, will you? "Personally... I think the little green one's a lot softer'n the..- What?!" Ooh, little trinkets!: When he's not lugging around more armor than a normal person should wear on the daily for mundane activities, he's either making various items and garments out of leather, or knitting. Yes, you heard me. Yes, his wares are for sale. No, he doesn't want to talk about it. Carrd goes here!

@mooglemeet @crystalxivrp @crystal-rp-ffxiv @balmungrp

#lfrp #screenshots

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talabib · 3 years

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Simple Tools For Making Better Use Of Your Free Time.

There are a lot of books out there offering tips, rules and complex systems on how to work more efficiently and be more productive. But does any of that stuff really make you happier in life?

Adding happiness to your life is less about the choices you make at work and more about the choices you make outside of work.

This post is about a checklist for how to make better choices about your free time, so that you’ll feel more fulfilled and start living a more meaningful life.

Your time is one of the most valuable resources you have, because it is limited – and shrinking by the second. So why not use science to ensure you make the most of it?

Finding more happiness and success starts with choosing better experiences.

It’s pretty common for concerns about free time to take a back seat to concerns about being more productive. Indeed, if you were raised in a capitalist society, you may think that time not spent earning money is time wasted. This might even be why we tend to idealize people who are always busy taking care of the next piece of business.

Our desire to be efficient also explains why we tend to feel like we have less free time than we actually do.

Studies have shown that the average American has five hours and fourteen minutes of free time per day, while the average Brit has five hours and forty-nine minutes.

Yet other studies show that, despite these healthy sums, four out of five Americans feel they don’t have enough time to do what they’d like, while three out of four Brits feel they aren’t getting the most out of their time.

But there are other reasons for feeling like we don’t have much free time. At the top of this list is the fact that people spend a daily average of three and a half hours interacting with their phones. This often comes from the fact that with so many emails, texts and social media updates arriving daily, there’s an anxiety-inducing fear of missing out on something – known as FOMO – which results in hours spent just keeping up with your digital life.

But here’s the thing: even though we place a high value on work and productivity, they aren’t the only important things in life, especially when it comes to feeling happy and satisfied. According to multiple studies from institutions like Harvard Business School and Cornell University, what really brings happiness into people’s lives are experiences.

While this is a pretty interesting idea on its own, research also shows that happiness is a strong precursor to success. Conventional wisdom usually tells us that happiness is a byproduct of success, and yet a lot of evidence suggests that it’s actually the other way around.

What all of this adds up to is that positive experiences lead to happiness, which in turn leads to success. So to achieve success, we should try to have positive experiences. The question then becomes: What is a positive experience, and how can I introduce more of them into my life?

For enduring happiness, choose experiences that add to your own heroic story.

What kind of positive experiences lead to enduring, sustainable happiness? In researching this question an expert came up with the STORIES checklist.

This stands for Story, Transformation, Outside & Offline, Relationships, Intensity, Extraordinary, and Status & Significance.

So when considering whether or not an activity is going to be a worthwhile way of spending your time, the first question you can ask yourself is: Will it add to my Story? Any valuable experience will add to your story by ticking off one or all of the items on the checklist.

For example, if you had an eye-opening experience while on a yoga retreat in India, that would count as transformational, intense, extraordinary and significant. Ultimately, experiences like this inform the kind of people we are, and they also form the narrative of our own life stories.

There are two popular versions of all the heroic stories we find so satisfying. The first is called “The Man in a Hole Story,” introduced by the American writer Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. It suggests that every hero in a narrative starts out in a good place, then gradually sinks into a hole of misfortune before being restored to good fortune by the end of the story.

The other version of this story is what scholar Joseph Campbell calls “The Hero’s Journey,” which is a more circular tale. It starts out in the ordinary world, where the hero accepts a “call to action” that requires perseverance through many trials and tribulations.

Through this process, the hero learns new skills, overcomes the supreme ordeal, receives a reward and returns home. In the end, he shares the gifts and wisdom he acquired, and in doing so forever changes the ordinary world into a new world.

By placing yourself in the hero’s role, you can not only recognize what your particular call to action is, but can also begin to be more adventurous and understand that difficulties and struggles are crucial to our stories and shouldn’t be avoided. It is through these challenging experiences that we acquire the tools that allow us to reach our goals and slay our own metaphorical dragons.

Events that provide change and transformation are key to finding fulfillment.

Once you place yourself in your own hero’s journey, you can start to see that change – Transformation, on our checklist – is the name of the game. After all, if you were watching a story in which the hero wasn’t changing in some way, it would be pretty boring and maybe even sad, right? Well, the same holds true for your life, and it’s why change and personal development are key to feeling happier and more fulfilled.

This is a good time to consider two simple but revealing questions: Looking back over the past ten years, how much do you think you’ve changed, on a scale of one to ten? Now, how much do you think you’ll change over the next ten years?

For most people, the first number is higher than the second, and this is known in psychology as the end of history illusion, which means we tend to think of change as something happening in the past, not the future. As a result, significant changes are often unplanned.

But once you understand that change is a key part of a fulfilling life, you can start actively seeking it out, by finding experiences that bring new inspiration, new skills and other transformative elements into your life.

Let’s take vacationing, for instance. There are basically three ways you can approach a vacation: fly and flop, find and seek, or go and become.

With fly and flop, personal development is not on the menu. Fly and flop might involve going to a resort and engaging in passive experiences like lying in the sun, eating familiar foods and reading books and magazines that require very little effort on your part. While it might be relaxing, this approach results in some pretty dull stories to tell others back home.

Find and seek involves more active engagement. You travel to new places with the intent to explore, or maybe attend a music festival like Burning Man. You’ll see new things and have some interesting stories to tell, but for the most part it’s an experience that any other sightseer or concert-goer might have.

The go and become approach, however, offers a real chance for transformation. In this scenario, your vacation would come with a purposeful intent to learn inspirational things about different cultures and customs, or new skills like painting, boating or traditional sushi techniques. Or it might involve a spiritual retreat of some kind.

Whatever the case may be, it will include very personal, and possibly very transformational, experiences – and therefore a great story.

Being outside and offline has been shown to improve people’s moods directly.

Next on the STORIES checklist is Outside and Offline, which is pretty self-explanatory: valuable experiences that lead to happiness are more likely to take place in nature and away from the online world.

Let’s first consider the benefits of nature. Around 1990, Japanese researchers began looking into the claims of health benefits surrounding a pastime known as shinrin yoku, or forest bathing – and, sure enough, the claims appeared to be valid.

Compared to walks on a treadmill, these immersive forest walks were far more effective at reducing tension, anger and fatigue, as well as blood pressure and cortisol levels, while at the same time improving mood.

There’s also the revealing evidence gleaned from the 20,000 or so users of the Mappiness app, who periodically entered their mood and activity while the app recorded GPS and weather data.

Ultimately, the data showed that people were unhappiest while at work, sick in bed, or commuting to work, and that they were happiest while in nature – especially when close to water. Happiness levels in coastal areas, for instance, were generally six points higher than in urban areas.

There’s a biological factor at work here. Scientists believe we’re simply predisposed, from an evolutionary perspective, to enjoy the calming sights, sounds and smells of nature and water.

Biological factors also help explain why we should choose to spend more time offline. Researchers have long known that humans are susceptible to conditioning. You may be familiar with the psychologist Ivan Pavlov, who over a century ago conditioned dogs to salivate with hunger – not in the presence of food, but at the sound of a metronome that signified the arrival of food.

Interaction with your smartphone is much like gambling on a slot machine: what’s at work is a system of operational conditioning known as intermittent variable rewards.

This means you’re interacting with a system that offers an inconsistent promise of large or small rewards. And when this happens, even the most intelligent people can end up picking up their phones 300 times a day, checking how many likes their latest Instagram or Facebook post has racked up, or scouting for a funny new meme.

The problem is that, as multiple studies in the US and Europe show, too much time online leads to feelings of isolation, stress, depression and insomnia. Fortunately, however, if you start spending less time online now, your mood can improve immediately.

Engage in activities that connect you with others to avoid the potentially fatal effects of loneliness.

While solitude and some time alone can be a nice change of pace from time to time, no one enjoys feeling lonely. This might sound obvious enough, but what you may not know is just how dangerous loneliness can be.

Over time, persistent loneliness has been proven to cause stress and create more protein fibrinogens in your body, which clog arteries, increase blood pressure and make you more likely to get diabetes and have a heart attack.

What’s more, in compiling seven years’ worth of data from nearly three and a half million people, researchers found that loneliness increased a person’s chances of death by 29 percent. Meanwhile, social isolation increased that chance by 26 percent, and living alone by 32 percent. Remarkably, these statistics show that loneliness is deadlier than type 2 diabetes or smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

This brings us to the third item on the STORIES checklist: Relationships. Curbing loneliness is about finding ways to connect with other people. And the good news is that there are many ways of doing this.

Basically, the way to be less lonely is to do something interesting – anything, really. Most experiences involve other people in some way, whether you’re outside playing sports or indoors playing a board game.

But even if you’re pursuing solitary experiences like meditating, reading an interesting book or working on a painting, psychologists have found that these activities can still provide a sense of belonging in the larger sense.

And remember, whenever you have an interesting experience, it gives you a good story to tell, and sharing stories is one of the best ways to form bonds with others.

Ideally, your experiences speak to who you are as an individual, so think about what you like to do, and then see whether there’s a group in your community or online that you can join. If you like to go hiking, there are plenty of outdoor groups; if you like to read, join a book club, or start your own.

Check out what’s going on in your community. It’s highly likely that there’s a group or association doing something that you find interesting. If not, there may be a festival within a reasonable distance that you can attend. And when’s the last time you talked to your neighbors?

No matter what you’re up to, there’s probably a way to make adjustments and find ways for your activities to connect you with others.

We’re at our happiest when engaged in intense, immersive activities that allow for good flow.

There’s a good chance you’ve heard about flow, a state of being in which you’re so fully immersed in what you’re doing that you lose track of time. Studies have found that when we’re experiencing flow, we’re also experiencing some of the happiest moments in our lives.

This brings us to the Intensity part of the checklist. After all, finding flow essentially means being so intensely focused on what you’re doing that all your troubles recede. Needless to say, when it comes to deciding how to spend your time, choosing an experience that gives you flow is often the smart way to go.

For starters, what you do should be challenging enough that staying engaged with the activity requires all your abilities and demands a state of full-body awareness. This is what athletes call the zone.

Note that mindless video games, binge-watching and endlessly scrolling through a news feed are not sufficiently challenging activities. Even though they can cause you to block out everything around you and suck hours from your life, they’re not going to leave you with the kind of transformative satisfaction that you’ll get from good flow.

A handy, simple rule of thumb for telling the difference between good and bad flow is to know that good flow requires you to put in true, intense effort in order to receive the reward at the end.

In fact, the progression of a real flow experience is not unlike the hero’s journey: there’s an initial struggle, followed by a release in which you enter the zone and the flow begins, and then, at the end, you feel physically, emotionally and mentally drained, yet also ecstatic at having slain your metaphorical dragons.

Difficult experiences are thus not only worthwhile, they can be some of the happiest and most rewarding things you’ll ever do, if they’re intense and require your full engagement.

And where can you find such experiences? Well, sports are great for adding flow to your life, but you can also get it from performing in front of an audience, writing, carpentry and any number of other activities that require skill and attention.

For example, have you ever considered taking an improv comedy class? Few activities are more intense than trying to be funny in front of a live audience.

How we remember activities has a lot to do with beginnings, peaks and ends.

The penultimate item on the checklist for improving how you spend your time is Extraordinary. This, as the name suggests, stands for experiences that are out of the ordinary. But it also means paying attention to the peak moments that determine just how memorable an experience is.

Peak moments, as well as endings, have a disproportionate amount of influence on how we experience things. In fact, psychologists have a term for this effect: the peak-end rule. Essentially, it means that you can wait in line for an annoying length of time, but if the line speeds up in the last moments, you’ll likely look back at the experience as not that annoying.

In other words, even though the experience was mostly annoying, you’ll remember it as being pleasant enough because of how it ended, or how it peaked.

The peak-end rule applies to a person’s experiencing self and remembering self, and knowing about this difference can allow you not only to make better decisions about how you spend your time, but also to plan those experiences better.

For example, if you’re having a miserable time stuck in traffic on the way to a music festival, you can rest easy knowing that this is your experiencing self suffering, and that the peak moments of the festival will be the things your remembering self will care about, while the misery of the traffic will be forgotten.

Now, this doesn’t mean you need to pack every day with as many peak moments as you can. After all, if it’s all extraordinary experiences all the time, you’ll likely burn out. Plus, it takes an ordinary baseline to make the extraordinary stand out. Since everyone’s needs and preferences are different, we all have to find the right balance that works for us.

It’s also worth noting that you can inject a seemingly ordinary moment with extraordinary significance just by appreciating the inherent wonder in nature and human existence. Therefore, while it makes sense to add new and exciting experiences to your everyday life, you can also have a happier life by recognizing the everyday as already pretty special.

Consider a cup of tea, for example. On its own it may be ordinary, but if you make each brew part of a daily calming ritual, it can be pretty extraordinary.

Activities that boost our status can lead to happier lives.

All societies contain hierarchies of some sort, and wherever there’s a hierarchy, there are people of different status. In the workplace, for example, we have clerks, supervisors, managers and directors. But there are also two other primary ways for gaining status: there are the experts who gain status through their education, and successful people who’ve earned theirs through money.

This is significant, since researchers have found that status can bring happiness, primarily through the added amount of control and number of options in life that come with it.

According to a University of Cambridge study, three things can lead someone to flourish in life: control, capabilities and social participation. And the way you increase these three things is by attaining more education, money and power – the three elements of status.

With more education comes more capabilities, and with more money comes a wider array of experiences to choose from. This equates to more opportunities and more chances for social engagement, which in turn can lead to increased happiness.

As for the kinds of experiences that can contribute to more status in life, one of the best things you can do is continue your education in order to become more of an expert in your field. Travel is also a great way to gain more knowledge through transformative experiences as you visit more places, do new things and go on more adventures.

As for social participation, this can be increased through any activity that helps you become more connected to your community, and a more important figure within it. This could include joining a local committee or just networking with more colleagues and peers.

It also helps to do things that help you become more fit. But this isn’t about body image – it’s about being in better shape so that you can increase the range of physically demanding adventures and activities that are available to you.

The final path to higher status is to turn off the TV. According to experts, it’s no coincidence that the lower someone’s status is, the more TV he or she watches. The more you watch, the fewer story-worthy experiences you’re having. So start thinking of TV as a last resort to turn to when all other options are unavailable.

When it comes to the association between status and money, however, it’s important to understand that it’s not about how much you make, but how you use it. Happiness doesn’t come from buying interchangeable material things that anyone else can buy. It comes from using your money, as well as your time, to help others.

The STORIES checklist helps people add more fulfillment, meaning and happiness to their lives by focusing their attention on the seven key elements that make up the best experiences: Story, Transformation, Outside & Offline, Relationships, Intensity, Extraordinary, and Status & Significance. These are all characteristics that guide you toward experiences that further your personal development and increase your happiness, while keeping you away from empty activities that either add nothing of value or promote unhappiness.

Action plan: Go offline this weekend and get wild. Plan some outdoor activities for the weekend ahead, like hiking, canoeing or biking. Maybe pack a picnic and head out to the seaside, or set up camp in the nearest forest reserve or park. You could also just set up some long weekend lunches with friends.

Whatever you decide to do, plan to turn off all your internet devices and leave them off from 7 PM on Friday until 7 PM on Sunday. Then make a note of how you feel during the weekend while you’re untethered. There’s a good chance you’ll feel some withdrawal-like symptoms, but see whether you can repeat this experiment at least one weekend a month while trying to move toward having more internet-free weekends.

#Here Are Some Simple Tools For Making Better Use Of Your Free Time.

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mmkingofcards · 4 years

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The Etymology of Card symbols

Notes from website

What are cards used for?

Amusing pastimes (an activity that someone does regularly for enjoyment rather than work; a hobby), high-stakes gambles, tools of occult practice, magic tricks and mathematical probability models.

‘Today’s 52-card deck preserves the four original French suits of centuries ago: clubs (♣), diamonds (♦), hearts (♥), and spades (♠). These graphic symbols, or “pips,” bear little resemblance to the items they represent, but they were much easier to copy than more lavish motifs. Historically, pips were highly variable, giving way to different sets of symbols rooted in geography and culture. From stars and birds to goblets and sorcerers, pips bore symbolic meaning’

‘Some historians have suggested that suits in a deck were meant to represent the four classes of Medieval society. Cups and chalices (modern hearts) might have stood for the clergy; swords (spades) for the nobility or the military; coins (diamonds) for the merchants; and batons (clubs) for peasants.

Bells, for example, were found in early German “hunting cards.” These pips would have been a more fitting symbol of German nobility than spades, because bells were often attached to the jesses of a hawk in falconry, a sport reserved for the Rhineland’s wealthiest. Diamonds, by contrast, could have represented the upper class in French decks, as paving stones used in the chancels of churches were diamond shaped, and such stones marked the graves of the aristocratic dead.’

‘British and French decks, for example, always feature the same four legendary kings: Charles, David, Caesar, and Alexander the Great.

As the Spanish adopted playing cards, they replaced queens with mounted knights or caballeros. And the Germans excluded queens entirely from their decks, dividing face cards into könig (king), obermann (upper man), and untermann (lower man)—today’s Jacks.

The French reintroduced the queen, while the British were so fond of theirs they instituted the “British Rule,” a variation that swaps the values of the king and queen cards if the reigning monarch of England is a woman.’

The ace rose to prominence in 1765, that was the year England began to tax sales of playing cards. The ace was stamped to indicate that the tax had been paid, and forging an ace was a crime punishable by death. To this day, the ace is boldly designed to stand out.

‘Hand craftsmanship and high taxation made each deck of playing cards an investment. As such, cards became a feast for the eye. Fanciful, highly specialized decks offered artists a chance to design a kind of collectible, visual essay. Playing-card manufacturers produced decks meant for other uses beyond simple card playing, including instruction, propaganda, and advertising.

cards were often repurposed: as invitations, entrance tickets, obituary notes, wedding announcements, music scores, invoices—even as notes between lovers or from mothers who had abandoned their babies.’

Years later, Bostock tells me, card makers added corner indices (numbers and letters), which told the cardholder the numerical value of any card and its suit.

-ADRIENNE BERNHARD-

The Atlantic Article.

Our modern playing cards evolved into a deck of 52 cards with four suits in red and black and with two Jokers by making a journey that took hundreds of years and involved travelling through many countries. In fact, the most significant elements that shaped today's deck were produced by the different cultures and countries that playing cards travelled through in order to get to the present day.

The East

‘There is clear historical evidence that playing cards began to appear in Europe in the late 1300s and early 1400s

They seem to have come from somewhere in the East, and may have been imported to Europe by gypsies, crusaders, or traders. The common consensus appears to be that an early form of playing cards originated somewhere in Asia, but to be completely honest, we cannot be entirely sure. Paper is fragile and typically does not survive well across the ages, so solid historical evidence is lacking.

Educated guesses have made links to the cards, suits, and icons of 12th century and even older cards in China, India, Korea, Persia, or Egypt, which may have been introduced to Europe by Arabs.’

My View:

These card designs look very different compared to the modern decks we see now. The cards above have a lot more detail and colours to them. As you can see the cards do not have any letters or numbers instead they have illustrations and patterns. The shape of these cards are rectangular which are similar to bookmarks.

Italy and Spain

‘In the 1400s playing cards often appear along with dice games in religious sermons as examples of gambling activities that are denounced, and there is clear evidence that a 52 card deck existed and was used in this time. The suit signs in the first European decks of the 14th century were swords, clubs, cups, and coins, and very likely had their origin in Italy, although some connect these with the cups, coins, swords, and polo-sticks found on Egyptian playing cards from the Mamluk period. At any rate these are still the four suits still found in Italian and Spanish playing cards today, and are sometimes referred to as the Latin suits.

The court cards from the late 14th century decks in Italy typically included a mounted king, a seated and crowned queen, plus a knave. The knave is a royal servant, although the character could also represent a "prince", and would later be called a Jack to avoid confusion with the King. Spanish cards developed somewhat differently, the court cards being a king, knight, and knave, with no queens. The Spanish packs also didn't have a 10, and with the absence of 8s and 9s in the national Spanish game of ombre, it resulted in a 40 card deck.

The first playing cards in European Italy were hand-painted and beautiful luxury items found only among the upper classes. But as card playing became more popular, and methods were developed to produce them more cheaply, playing cards became more widely available’

My View:

There is a great difference between these cards and the ones above. These card designs relate to the countries culture and the important people and objects within them. Compared to the first deck designs, these cards have numbers and letters. However the modern deck only goes up to a 10 then it leads on to the Jack, Queen, King and Ace.

Germany

‘To establish themselves as a card-manufacturing nation in their own right, the Germans introduced their own suits to replace the Italian ones, and these new suits reflected their interest in rural life: acorns, leaves, hearts, and bells; the latter being hawk-bells and a reference to the popular rural pursuit of falconry. The queen was also eliminated from the Italian courts, and these instead consisted of a King and two knaves, an obermann (upper) and untermann (under). Meanwhile the Two replaced the Ace as the highest card, to create a 48 card deck.

Custom decks abounded, and suit symbols used in the novelty playing cards from this era include animals, kitchen utensils, and appliances, from frying pans to printers' inkpads! The standard German suits of acorns, leaves, hearts, and bells were predominant.’

My View:

Personally, I like the colour scheme and the illustrations within these designs. The German cards don’t seem to have any lettering and numbers unlike the Italian and Spanish cards. They have used similar shapes to the standard cards as stated, the German cards uses the suits of acorns, leaves, hearts and bells.

France

‘In the 15th century, the French developed the icons for the four suits that we commonly use today, namely hearts, spades, diamonds, and clubs, although they were called coeurs, piques, carreaux, and trefles respectively. The French also preferred a king, queen, and knave as their court cards.

But the real stroke of genius that the French came up with was to divide the four suits into two red and two black, with simplified and clearer symbols. This meant that playing cards could be produced with stencils, a hundred times more quickly than using the traditional techniques of wood-cutting and engraving

--the more well-known and commonly accepted ones for the Kings being King David (Spades), Alexander the Great (Clubs), Charlemagne (Hearts), and Julius Caesar (Diamonds), representing the four empires of Jews, Greeks, Franks, and Romans. Notable characters ascribed to the Queens include the Greek goddess Pallas Athena (Spades), Judith (Hearts), Jacob's wife Rachel (Diamonds), and Argine (Clubs). The Knaves were commonly designated as La Hire (Hearts), Charlemagne’s knight Ogier (Spades), Hector the hero of Troy (Diamonds), and King Arthur's knight Lancelot (Clubs).’

My View:

The cards in France are much clearer to play around with. The pips, kings and queens are clear with names on. The pips are not numbered instead they just show how many there are plus they are in black and red. I also like the aesthetics of this design, where the traditional wear have illustrated a lot of detail on with a good combination of colour.

Posted by Will Roya

by BoardGameGeek reviewer EndersGame

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murai5i · 5 years

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Boxing: Knocking Out Racism and Inequality in America

Modern boxing is as antique as America. They grew up collectively, and like America herself, boxing is as majestic as it's far brutal. It's as stunning as it's miles primal. From the bloody and outlawed "exhibitions" in New Orleans to the "naked-knuckle" brawls within the shantytowns out West, boxing came of age with America. It has been called the "Sweet Science" and "the Manly Art of Self Defense," but in the long run "boxing is a recreation of disagreement and fight, a weaponless conflict," pitting warriors against each different to do struggle in the squared circle.

We can hint the records of America's negative and disenfranchised thru the arc of boxing's beyond. Prizefighting is a prism via which we are able to view the records and struggles of America's most disenfranchised. Its heroes of legend regularly exemplify the social issues of the day. In many approaches, the fight recreation serves as a means of "socioeconomic" advancement Engagement Rings Perth. Author and boxing historian Jeffrey T. Sammons states in Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society: "The succession [of great fighters] had long gone from Irish to Jewish... To Italians, to [B]lacks, and to Latin[o]s, a pattern that pondered the socioeconomic ladder. As every group moved up, it pulled its teens out of prizefighting and driven them into more promising... Pastimes."

Two combatants especially epitomize the struggle in their human beings: the brash Irishman John L. Sullivan, and "The Black Menace" Jack Johnson.

Boxing's Origins

Boxing has its origins in Ancient Greece, and become part of the Olympic Games in round 688 BC. Homer makes reference to boxing within the "Iliad." Boxing historian Michael Katz recalls the sports activities primitive origins:

Much just like the first American settlers, prizefighting made its manner to the New World from England. And like the pilgrims, boxing's early days were regularly brutish and violent. Sammons states: "Like such a lot of American cultural, social, political, and highbrow establishments, boxing originated in England. In the late 1700s, when the game existed only in its crudest form, prizefighting in Britain assumed an air of class and acceptability.

The early Puritans and Republicans often related sport gambling with the oppressive monarchies of Europe, however as American opponents of amusement misplaced floor, the game quickly started out to develop. In the 1820's and 1830's boxing, regularly known as pugilism, became a famous game amongst the American "immigrants who were unaccustomed to regulations upon amusements and games."

As the sport grew in reputation amongst the immigrants, so too did the parable of the person. For better or for worse, the USA is a country weaned on the parable of the individual. This is the American Dream, that fundamental creed that we will all "pull our selves up with the aid of the bootstraps" and become wildly wealthy, outrageously a hit, and madly fulfilled. For nearly two hundred years the "Heavyweight Champion" turned into the crown jewel of the wearing international, and the bodily embodiment of the American Dream. He became the hardest, "baddest man" on this planet, and commanded the arena's appreciate.

Sammons states: "[T]he bodily man nevertheless stands for the ability of the character and the survival of the fittest. He is the embodiment of the American Dream, wherein the lowliest of people upward thrust to the pinnacle by way of their own initiative and perseverance. The elusiveness of that dream is immaterial; the which means of the dream is in its attractiveness, no longer its achievement." During the 1880's, nobody embodied the physical man, or the American Dream, extra than boxing's first first rate heavyweight champion, John L. Sullivan.

John L. Sullivan and the Plight of the Irish

Sullivan, additionally referred to as "The Boston Strongboy," turned into the final of the "bare knuckle" champions. The son of terrible Irish immigrants, he turned into a brash and tough-nosed man who toured the "vaudeville circuit imparting fifty greenbacks to anybody who should remaining four rounds with him within the ring." Sullivan famously challenged his audiences by means of claiming, "I can lick any sonofabitch within the residence."

"The Boston Strongboy" have become one in every of America's first sports legends while he snubbed millionaire Richard Kyle Fox, owner and owner of the National Police Gazette and the National Enquierer. Legend has it that one fateful night in the spring of 1881 whilst at Harry Hill's Dace Hall and Boxing Emporium on New York's East Side, Fox turned into so inspired by using one in all Sullivan's boxing matches, that the newspaper multi-millionaire "invited him to his desk for a business talk, which Sullivan impolitely declined, gaining Fox's hatred."

Sammons states:

Fox turned into furious and vowed to break Sullivan in addition to manipulate the crown. He did neither; Sullivan beat all comers, which includes some Fox hopefuls." Sullivan have become an global superstar and American icon "who had risen thru the ranks without searching down on others. Sullivan did extra than build a private following, but; he helped elevate the sport of boxing. The prize ring now spanned the gulf among decrease and upper lessons."

Sullivan have become a image of wish and pleasure for latest Irish immigrants residing in a brand new, hostile land. Nearly million Irish immigrants arrived in America between 1820 and 1860. Most arrived as indentured servants and were taken into consideration little greater than slaves inside the new us of a. Of the ones million immigrants, more or less seventy five percentage arrived throughout the "The Potato Famine" of 1845-1852. The Irish fled from poverty, disorder, and English oppression. "The Potato Famine" had claimed the lives of virtually one million Irishmen.

Author Jim Kinsella states:

America have become their dream. Early immigrant letters described it as a land of abundance and advised others to observe them through the 'Golden Door.' These letters have been study at social events encouraging the young to sign up for them in this notable new country. They left in droves on ships that had been so crowded, with conditions so horrible, that they have been referred to as 'Coffin Ships.' (par. 1)

The Irish arrived in America destitute and often unwanted. An antique pronouncing summed up the disillusionment felt by American immigrants in the Nineteenth Century: "I came to America because I heard the streets had been paved with gold. When I got here, I found out 3 matters: First, the streets were not paved with gold; second, they weren't paved in any respect: and third, I turned into predicted to pave them."

Kinsella says:

Our immigrant ancestors have been no longer desired in America. Ads for employment were frequently accompanied by "no Irish need apply." They had been pressured to live in cellars and shanties... With [no] plumbing and [no] jogging water. These residing conditions bred illness and early loss of life. It become expected that 80 percent of all babies born to Irish immigrants in New York City died... The Chicago Post wrote, "The Irish fill our prisons, our terrible houses... Scratch a convict or a pauper and the chances are that [we] tickle the pores and skin of an Irish Catholic. Putting them on a ship and sending them home would quit crime in this us of a.

But the Irish arrived in America at some point of a time of want. Kinsella maintains:

The united states become developing and it wished guys to do the heavy work of constructing bridges, canals, and railroads. It become tough, dangerous work. A common expression heard many of the railroad people claimed "an Irishman was buried beneath each tie.

John L. Sullivan became the satisfaction of the Irish at some point of his legendary championship reign among 1882-1892).

Historian Benjamin Rader wrote:

The athletes as public heroes served as a compensatory cultural characteristic. They assisted the public in compensating for the ardour of the conventional dream of success... And emotions of person powerlessness. As the society have become more complex and systematized and as achievement had to be received increasingly in bureaucracies, the want for heroes who leaped to reputation and fortune out of doors the regulations of the system appeared to grow.

During his decade lengthy reign as champion; no person captured the public attention greater than "The Boston Strongboy." He destroyed Paddy Ryan in Mississippi City, Mississippi for the "Heavyweight Championship of America" in an unlawful "boxing exhibition" on February 7, 1882. The championship belt turned into named the "the $10,000 Belt" and was "some thing healthy for a king." Sammons states: "It had a base of flat gold fifty inches long, and twelve inches huge, with a center panel which include Sullivan's name spelled out in diamonds; 8 other frames eagles and Irish harps; a further 397 diamonds studded the symbolic ornament."

After receiving the "$10,000 Belt," Sullivan pried out the diamonds and offered it for $a hundred seventy five. He later went directly to defeat his arch nemesis Jake Kilrain inside the seventy-5th round, marking the very last "naked-knuckle" championship bout in boxing history. Sullivan reigned splendid till his knockout loss to a younger, faster, extra professional fighter named "Gentleman" Jim Corbett in the twenty-first spherical on September 7, 1892 in New Orleans, Louisiana.

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topworldhistory · 5 years

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The palace with more than 2,000 rooms, featured elaborate gardens, fountains, a private zoo, roman-style baths and even 18th-century elevators.

In the early morning of October 6, 1789, hundreds of starving, defiant women and men (some disguised as women) from Paris stormed the palace of Versailles, the legendarily extravagant seat of government in France. They tore through the gilded halls, beating and beheading palace guards, displaying one grisly head on a pike.

The mob headed through the marbled corridors adorned with art celebrating the Bourbon dynasty, towards the private apartment of the half-dressed Queen Marie Antoinette, as a bloodied guard ran ahead to warn the monarch of the impending deluge. The Queen escaped to King Louis XVI’s rooms, before the Marquis de Lafayette came to calm the crowds. Later that day the couple and their children were forced to travel to Paris to take up residence in the Tuileries Palace.

Louis XIV Built Decadence at Versailles

View of the palace of Versailles around the late 17th century.

Into the vacated palace the citizens of France swarmed, finally able to see the excessive luxuries of Versailles for themselves. They walked through the echoing Hall of Mirrors, never again to be graced by the King’s ponderous footsteps or the Queen’s soft patter.

It hadn’t always been this way. For many decades, the magnificence of Versailles had been a source of pride for the French. “A Parisian bourgeois says in all seriousness to an Englishman, “What is your king? He is badly lodged: to be pitied, in fact,’” the writer Louis-Sebastien Mercier wrote. ‘Look at ours. He lives at Versailles.’”

Versailles was seen as a glorious symbol of the absolute monarch, of France’s divinely ordained royal family, and of the state itself. But well before the French Revolution, some were warning that the grandeur and excesses of Versailles were in fact terrible for public relations. “A generation earlier,” writes Tony Spawforth in Versailles: Biography of a Palace, “the Marquis d’Argenson thought that the palace had signaled the arrival on French soil of ‘oriental regal extravagance.'"

It is not surprising the Louis XIV (1638-1715), known as the “sun king” and the “vainest man ever” was the royal responsible for turning what had once been a small royal hunting lodge into the most extravagant court that Europe had ever known. Entrusting Europe’s master architects, designers and craftsmen with what he termed his “glory,” he spent a huge amount of taxpayer money on Versailles and its more than 2,000 rooms, elaborate gardens, fountains, private zoo, roman style baths (for frolicking with his mistress) and novel elevators.

The Hall of Mirrors

The Hall of Mirrors in Versailles, on the occasion of the marriage of the Dauphin, in 1745.

At a time when most of his subjects lived bleak lives in little more than wooden or stone hovels, Louis was paying for the Hall of Mirrors, whose Baroque splendor dazzles to this day. As Francis Loring Payne describes the 240-foot-long hall in The Story of Versailles: “Seventeen lofty windows are matched by as many Venetian framed mirrors. Between each window and each mirror are pilasters designed by Coyzevox, Tubi and Caffieri—reigning masters of their time…Walls are of marble embellished with bronze-gilt trophies; large niches contain statues in the antique style.”

On May 6, 1682, Louis officially moved his court—including his government ministers, his official family, his mistresses and his illegitimate children—to Versailles. He also demanded that nobles and minor royals be in attendance at Versailles and live in whatever small apartments they were given. This move was designed to neutralize the power of the nobles. This it did, but it also created a hotbed of boredom and extravagance, with hundreds of aristocrats crammed together, many with nothing to do but gossip, spend money and play.

Royal Amusements Broke the Bank

May Ball at Versailles during the Carnival of 1763.

From the start, everything was over the top at Versailles. The elaborate dress required for the court nearly broke many noble families, while they were also expected to buy large quantities of French goods to support various industries. Amusements—be they concerts, multi-course banquets, balls or parades—packed the calendar. Plays and pageants were favorites of the royal household, and an enormous amount of money was spent on everything from the costumes to the set.

“Who would have thought, Monsieur, that a stage décor that shone with so much order, industry and innovation could have been created in less than a fortnight, in order to stand for perhaps a day?” the Abbe de Montigny wrote.

Gambling was also a favorite pastime during the reign of all three kings to rule over Versailles. According to Payne, “Sometimes the losses of the players at the tables were enormous; again, nobles counted their gains by the hundred thousands.” Payne recalls one game where the granddaughter of the King, the Duchess of Bourgogne, lost a sum equaling 600,000 francs, which her doting grandfather paid.

While most of France lived in poverty, fortunes were made and lost at Versailles on a nightly basis. Bribery was common, as were graft and embezzlement. The royal stables were often the target of corruption, Spawforth writes. In 1775 one noble was accused of taking 120 of the king’s horses for his own personal use.

By the time the sun king’s grandson, Louis XV, took the throne in 1715, public sentiment was beginning to turn against the crown—and Versailles. By the time his grandson Louis XVI was crowned in 1774, Versailles had acquired a sordid reputation that was further degraded by Louis XV’s love affairs and mistresses.

French Revolution Targets Versailles

French women wielding scythes and banging drums storm the palace of Versailles on October 6, 1789 during the French Revolution.

In the 1780s, as the economy went into a tailspin, Versailles became the symbol of the crown’s lack of concern about its subjects. Protests became frequent and pamphlets depicting the debauched gambling, sexual liaisons and wanton spending of the royal family at Versailles appeared across the country. As 2000 starving workers protested outside Versailles in 1786, it was said courtiers enjoyed a sumptuous ball, dancing with the “greatest gayety.”

For many French folks, the Austrian-born queen, Marie Antoinette, became a hated symbol of all that was wrong at Versailles. “Her budget overruns on an annual clothing allowance of about $3.6 million in current spending were, in some years, more than double,” writes by Laurence Benaim in Fashion and Versailles. “Sometimes the King made up the difference, and occasionally the Queen made a propitiatory gesture of economy—she once refused a set of jewels on the ground that the Navy could use a new battleship.”

Then there were the bad optics of the epically “rustic” Petite Trianon, the Queen’s Versailles getaway, and the fake country village she built there for her amusement. “At one end of the lake a hamlet was created, with a picture-mill and a dairy, fitted with marble tables and cream jugs of rare porcelain,” Payne writes.

In the lead-up to revolution, rumors of the extravagance and excess of Versailles reached an all-time high. And so, it is not surprising that when revolution finally came, Versailles was one of the first places attacked.

Versailles, Spawforth explains, had become “the symbol and working center of a political and social system that many French people now saw as anachronistic and corrupt.”

from Stories - HISTORY https://ift.tt/2PrElC7 October 29, 2019 at 11:35PM

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pressography-blog1 · 8 years

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Sports Making a bet Is Starting to Appearance a lot More Like Wall Road

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Sports Making a bet Is Starting to Appearance a lot More Like Wall Road

Your March Insanity workplace pool is just like the Charles Schwab of Sports activities Making a bet. Beyond the ones hastily chosen brackets, there’s an entire cottage industry of Sports activities Making a bet that’s increasingly such as Wall Avenue.

In 2016, overall Sports activities wagers in Nevada had been $four.five billion, consistent with the Nevada Gaming Manage Board. With that a whole lot at stake, gamblers are turning to More state-of-the-art equipment that involves complex information analysis to attain higher odds, real-time wagering in the course of video games, fund managers who pool bets and danger management practices. The end result is something corresponding to day trading. Here’s how:

1. Robotic oracle

Gamblers can find a plethora of assets online guiding them to the first-rate Sports alternatives. IntelligentBettingTips.Com is one service that gives suggestions based totally on a prediction version similar to “collective intelligence” used by the huge banks. Collective intelligence targets to acquire reviews from a collection of human beings, hoping it’ll lead to a consensus that’s higher than a single individual’s guess.

IBT gives predictions, alternatives, and hints for the university, expert and worldwide leagues via combining input from enterprise experts for each game blended with sentiment facts extracted from social media. “We then take those records sources and use our personal algorithms to run diverse eventualities to discover profitable tendencies and styles,” stated Kael Mansfield, leader executive officer at IBT. Currently, the website online has Greater than 11,000 paying contributors, Mansfield stated.

2. High-frequency Having a bet

Whilst you think of Sports activities Betting, you probably envision humans making calls earlier than the begin of a particular game or match. However bets made in the course of live video games are on the upward thrust: In 2016, 20 percentage of all bets at William Hill %’s Nevada places have been made “in-play,” marking a 33 percent growth from the preceding year, consistent with Michael Grodsky, the agency’s vice president of advertising.

That’s in flip using the demand for real-time records. The facts can be disseminated faster than a television broadcast, which comes in with a multi-2nd transmission postpone. “Extremely rapid and correct statistics provide sophisticated gamblers with a cloth advantage over someone working on a 5 to 10-second put off through a tv feed,” said Ryan Rodenberg, an accomplice professor of forensic Sports law analytics at Florida State University. “The brink is most first-rate in the stay, in-recreation wagering wherein odds and prices can differ wildly upon the incidence of an specially important event like an overdue-recreation 3 pointer in basketball or key third-down conversion in American football.”

The practice is referred to as “courtsiding,” and the benefit actual time data give to bettors may be as compared with a trader acting on information of an acquisition seconds earlier than his or her competition. Courtsiding can give a gambler a face on even the bookmaker.

three. A laugh(d) managers

Some professional bettors have begun to take on the role of fund supervisor, pooling together cash from backers seeking out higher returns. Legalized in 2015, entity Betting lets in someone or organization of humans to installation a fund in Nevada supplying Sports Betting as an investment possibility.

Contrarian Investments LLC is one example. Proprietor Chris Connelly said he has each home and foreign investors. just like the not unusual Wall Street approach of searching out arbitrage in overrated or undervalued stocks, Connelly said he uses a laptop model to look for overrated playing spreads and bets against them. “In preference to making an investment within the stock marketplace and taking a certain inventory, I’m investing on Sports activities spreads of athletic groups,” Connelly stated. “So I awareness on football and basketball, university and seasoned.”

Contrarian Investments LLC fund is under $500,000, However Connelly stated he anticipates breaking the $1 million mark through subsequent football season. He’ll have lots of opposition because the exercise becomes More famous.

4. Watchdogs

A developing and increasingly complex marketplace can foster cheating. Many bookies are counting on era and consultants to try to ensure a truthful marketplace.

Whilst not quite the Securities and Change Commission, there are corporations that screen for fraud in gambling. Genius Sports organization Ltd. Works with Sports leagues and gambling operators around the world, monitoring suspicious hobby in the worldwide Having a bet markets. Genius Sports looks at reams of records for deviations from everyday industry moves by using tracking masses of sportsbooks and monitoring social media, said Christopher Dougan, a business enterprise spokesman.

“We provide the identical machine as a High-tech algorithm and reporting structures for Sports around the arena, including English Most excellent League, to track any uncommon pastime inside the worldwide Betting markets that might imply something unusual going on,” he said.

The way to Get started With Sports activities Making a bet Sports activities Betting is really setting a bet on a carrying event. You are Making a bet that your team, horse, canine, or driving force will win. In the event that they do win, so do you! If they lose, you lose your guess quantity. Sports Having a bet takes location all over the international, although within the USA this sort of Having a bet isn’t as exceptionally accepted as it is in Europe.

online Sports activities Betting might be the great alternative for folks that are exciting in trying it for the primary time. When you have by no means tried online Sports Making a bet, You are lacking so much A laugh and excitement, and it is able to all show up within the relaxed surroundings of your property! The artwork of Sports Having a bet can seem perplexing at the beginning, However once you are acquainted with some of the jargon this is used to give an explanation for the standards and common sense at the back of every form of guess, it is all much simpler to understand.

One of the pleasant ways that allows you to experience this engaging way to wager on your favourite racing and sporting events is to get acquainted with on-line Sports activities Having a bet. But, so one can excellent take benefit of all that Sports Betting has to provide, you need to realize a little Greater about it.

Sports activities Having a bet – The percentages

How does online Sports activities Making a bet paintings? You need to begin with the aid of studying The percentages for the sporting occasion You’re most interested in setting a guess upon. While the use of on-line Sports Having a bet, you could discover those odds inside the diverse online Sports books utilized by Internet game enthusiasts everywhere. You should open an account with an online Sportsbook before you could area your wager, However this is straightforward to do.

Once you have selected in which you will do your Sports Having a bet, you need to decide how you will place your wager. There are many different approaches that allows you to bet your selected amount of cash, But first, permit’s speak approximately the spread and the way it may have an effect on the amount you wager.

Sports Having a bet – The unfold

The unfold is a point gain in Sports Having a bet, that is typically given to the crew that is usually anticipated to lose a selected carrying event. If you decide that you’ll bet on the team that is predicted to win, they may should win via More than the spread quantity and cowl the unfold before You’re taken into consideration to have selected correctly. In case you choose the crew that is predicted to lose, that crew will need to lose by much less than the spread number so as in your select to be considered correct. If by way of threat the team wins through the number of factors that were chosen as the unfold, the game is known as a push.

No person who engages in Sports activities Making a bet wins a component if a sport is called as a push, However you do get the quantity of your original bet back. The factor spread is executed so that it will make the all of the bits pop out even for the Sports activities ebook, and is typically done for Sports such as basketball or soccer.

Sports Betting – The bet

If you had been to guess towards the spread, maximum probably you’ll region a form of bet known as an 11-10, or spread bet. via Having a bet $eleven, you win $10 in case your team’s score covers the unfold. That is any other way that the online Sports ebook makes its cash.

An over-below bet is likewise an eleven-10 wager. With this type of bet, the whole rating of the 2 groups that performed can be either over or beneath the full score that became indexed earlier than the sport changed into performed. Making a bet at the rating being over is referred to as ‘Betting on the ball’. Having a bet on the rating being below is known as ‘Having a bet on the clock’.

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talabib · 5 years

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Here Are Some Simple Tools For Making Better Use Of Your Free Time.