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leebrontide · 4 years

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A true, 30 year, tropetastic, queer love story. (Part 1)

Pls open the link if you'd like to read a 30 year, trope-tastic true queer romance featuring pining, instalove, swords, childhood-friends-to-lovers and a happy ending.

We THINK the story begins in 1991. We know it starts at theatre day-camp for kids, a summer when we were both in elementary school.

The earliest memories are vague- I remembered a super cool kid from the older class with dark eyes who I was desperate to eat lunch with every day.

It's taken us years to reconstruct the timeline. We have figured out I did go to her house outside of camp that first year, because I remember her bird that tried to bite me. We can only guess at years based on camp themes.

Because we were little kids. I was 7. So we lost touch.

But here's the thing- we kept going to the same camp. She was always in a class ahead of me, because I'm a year and a half younger.

And every year- apparently without remembering we'd met before? We became summer best friends. Drawn together over and over.

But, being disorganized kids in a world of lesser tech, every year, when camp ended, we lost phone numbers- we lived a good 30 minutes away from each other, so I have to imagine our parent's weren't exactly heartbroken at the loss. It was a lot of driving.

In 4th grade, when I was 9, I made a new best friend, named Meredith. My parents heartily recommended the summer theatre camp to hers, and she was sent with me, the next year.

She, was older than me, so she was in Ty's class. & having excellent taste, also made friends with her.

The three of us played together all summer.

Then came the fall, and the inevitable lost contact. I remember being sad about that much more clearly, that year.

BUT, the big change happened when I was 10.

Again, sent to camp. Again, my friend Meredith was there to.

At lunch, I found them playing together. I went to introduce myself to the obviously cool older girl.

For some reason I tried to shake her hand? Little weirdo.

Ty reacts to me the same way- oh hey! Cool new person! I want to be friends!

Meredith looks at us both like we're out of our minds.

"You know each other. We played all last summer."

And suddenly, the spell of childhood amnesia was broken.

I DID know her. We were FRIENDS.

We HAD BEEN FRIENDS for years.

She LIKED ME.

SHE LIKED ME.

(love with memory disabilities is a trip, folks. And her lil ADHD kid brain was struggling right alongside mine)

We were elated.

But that wasn't the last shock to my little 10 year old heart that 5 week summer camp would bring.

Meredith was, and is, a poet. Somehow she had a habit, at 11 years old, of making up poems about people's eyes.

Weird stuff. I remember a pair of green eyes being compared to a deep sea, were the bones of drunken drowned sailors floated.

Very Anne of Green Gables.

And- I remember this part with perfect clarity. She turned to me and said, do you know who has pretty eyes? Ty.

We were crossing the stage, Ty was carrying a box of props like 15 feet ahead of us.

I said "does she?"

And then, ever the romantic I screamed "HEY TY TURN AROUND I WANNA SEE SOMETHING!"

She did.

And for the first time, I looked into the dark eyes I'd been drawn to for all those years, and saw them anew.

There's a reason cupid's supposed to have arrows.

I swear to you that this is true. It felt like an actual blow to my chest. Like a physical blow.

I was stunned. My little heart was hammering out of control.

I have no idea what I said, or did, or looked like after that.

But I figured out pretty quickly what that was. It was not subtle, even to a prepubescent nearly 6th grader.

But I was a pragmatic little almost-6th-grader.

This was a crush. Middle schoolers have crushes.

And they're supposed to fade over time.

I don't remember if I was worried that my crush was on a girl. I just remember the certainty that this was just a child's crush, and therefor nothing that would last or cause problems.

And when fall came, I lost her number again.

But this time I was devastated.

But, this time a hero saved the day! Meredith, sweet, wonderful, more-organized-than-either-of-us Meredith, still had the number.

And this time, I held on to it.

We became year round besties.

For the first year of adoring her year-round, I didn't worry about my little crush. It'd go away in time.

By 7th grade, it started to be a problem.

We were having sleep overs, and I started to feel guilty about how much I wanted to look at her and cuddle her all the time.

I don't think I told anyone right away. But Meredith was always the smartest of us three.

She's the one who proposed we play "wedding". She presided over the ceremony herself, and her little sister was our wedding photographer.

Oddly, even though I didn't know about this photo till years later, this is a game both of us remember playing.

It meant... something.

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I started to feel guilty. We were having sleep overs, talking every day on the phone. I wanted to look at her all the time- I wanted to be with her all the time. I wanted to kiss her, and started to realize she might be bothered by that.

I never wanted to hide anything from her.

So, I confessed my love. I didn't think of this as being especially radical or brave, but in retrospect, I'm impressed by 12 year old Lee's behavior.

She smiled brightly, and said she loved me to!

As her best friend.

I clarified my position.

She repeated that she loved me as her very best friend.

And these feelings were a bit scary and BIG, so that was all good. She still wanted to hang out all the time. Life was good.

By 8th grade, I was starting to worry. The crush hadn't worn off yet. Everyone told me these things wore off.

But I was more in love with her than ever.

And when Meredith moved to Nashville, we got even closer.

We joined the MN sword club. Made new friends. In the way of these things, a whole lot of them turned out to be some evolving variety of queer. Friends started coming out.

I barely needed to, my crush was horrifyingly obvious to all our friends.

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I promised you swords. The swords don't feature prominently, but the club was a major connection for us for years, and this detail has always struck me.

I'm not an especially good fencer. Especially then. I was constructed out of raw spaghetti noodles and moved like creaky budget claymation most of the time. I was calculating, but slow.

She was fast, and brash, and more skilled than me. She eventually beat some nationally recognized fencers. We called her "fiery Tybalt" because we're a bunch of big ol nerds who wanted to sound smart. She eventually took her name from that nickname.

Even at only 5ft tall, she should have beaten me handily and reliably. She could hold her own against much better fencers.

But we actually got BANNED from sparring together, because we were so evenly matched we could never get enough points for a win.

My one and only expertise in fencing was knowing her. But she knew me just as well, so there was a stalemate.

Our friends laughed at us.

I confessed my love again in 8th grade.

And 9th.

10th.

11th.

I never wanted to lie to her. It was important to me that she knew what I was thinking and feeling, but it was also important that I not burden her with it.

She always gave me the same answer. She loved me. She loved me SO MUCH.

What a shame she was straight.

Now, readers, let me remind you we're looking at two queer kids in the 90s at this point.

There were pressures at play.

When I was in 11th grade, she left for college. And she was far enough away that long distance calls were expensive. I couldn't call her every day.

What I remember most about senior year was being depressed and lonely.

But also, that after years of my family despairing of my ever learning to type, and eventually getting me the (then very expensive) dragon speech-to-type program so I could type my homework and not fail school- my contact with her was suddenly all in text. AOL messenger.

People have commented at all my workplaces about my typing speed. I type 120 words per minute now.

Specifically because it was the only way to talk to her most days.

I went to college the following year. We both got boyfriends. Both nice boys who liked and admired us.

BOTH broke up with us because we so obviously preferred each other over them. To an embarrassing degree.

The boy I was dating- bless him he only lasted 3 months- specifically told me "if I go out with you any more I'm going to fall in love with you. And you're in love with her."

Slick bastard.

He was right tho.

I couldn't be mad at him.

But this is when I started to really panic.

It'd been 6 years. My first crush was still absolutely roaring. Nobody else came close to tempting me.

And nobody else wanted to, when it became obvious they couldn't compete with her.

And she was still my best friend, so of course I told her. I told her I was miserable, because I was going to be single forever because nobody else would want me, because I was so in love with her.

She felt bad. She loved me so much. So much she'd been dumped to.

Such a shame she was straight.

I wouldn't find out till much later that that conversation had started something on her side, that, for once, she knew to keep from me.

She spent the next 6 months in intense contemplation.

She DID prefer me to all the other boys (and girls) who were chasing her in college.

And there were a lot of them.

She did think I was pretty, and she did love me. And she did want to be with me forever.

She'd been as dedicated to me as I was to her through this whole time. As caring, as invested, as, frankly, obsessed. Everyone could see it.

But she wasn't straight. She was bi.

And ace.

We wouldn't learn that word for many more years. All she knew was that the story of falling in love didn't match the love she was feeling.

But then she realized- she'd never felt the feelings she was "supposed" to feel for her boyfriend, either. She was not more attracted to him than to me. And he was a good looking guy. A catch by most any standard.

And she also hadn't loved him.

But she did love me.

So, my sophomore year of college (her junior year), we were preparing our trip to the Renaissance festival. A bunch of her friends were driving into town for it, and we'd see each other again at last. (we'd been back at school like 2 weeks, so naturally were desperate to meet up)

I am still flabbergasted as the next series of events.

She asked me out. On AOL instant messenger. After over 7 years of my pining, and adoration. After 7 years of choosing the pain of being near her and not being able to kiss her, over the desolation of not having her beside me

She very logically explained her reasoning.

I had a meltdown.

My poor room mate walked into our room to find me crying and throwing things at the computer screen.

I was convinced she was offering to date me because she felt bad for me. Because she loved me and wanted me to stop hurting and feeling alone.

So I turned her down.

That, friends, was HARD. REALLY HARD.

Thankfully, she was having none of it. She insisted it only made sense for us to date. I tried to stay firm. I refused repeatedly, all in that damned AOL messenger.

We reached a compromise- one date, at the Ren Fest, as a test.

And if it failed we'd never speak of it again.

Because the prospect of dating and breaking up was terrifying to us both.

If we were going to be together, we'd be defacto engaged. Neither of us could tolerate breaking up.

The weekend came- my college friends all knew, and accompanied me, made sure I was decked out in the best fair garb we could cobble together.

She drove up with her friends- including the ex- who had no idea what was happening. She had on her finest cape & boots & a swishy dress.

We could not manage to be alone together. Like it was a proper rom-com ridiculousness. All damn day.

But at least we were together.

She came back to my dorm that night, to spend the night, and drive back the next day.

Shout out to my room mate who stayed at her boyfriend's house that night. Love you, Lindsay.

We finally managed to kiss.

She abruptly decided kissing wasn't some weird thing people only pretended to like because it was normal, and was in fact an amazing wonderful thing we should do frequently.

I don't actually remember us deciding that the experiment was successful, and we'd be a romantic couple from then on.

Pretty sure the kissing melted my brain.

It was not like kissing my old boyfriend at all.

She went back to college the next day.

I do remember, that, MORE THAN ONCE, I nervously asked my roomy if this had all really happened. I was truly and genuinely concerned that I'd dreamed or fantasized the whole thing. I'd done both enough times before.

I couldn't just ask outright so I'd say something like. "Hey did anything- important happen yesterday?"

And she'd look at me like I was speaking some alien language, and tell me I was dating Ty now.

I wandered around in a dream-like stupor for a WEEK.

This is a good place to stop for now. More tonight. I need to go snuggle my baby and help my wife with lunch. 💖

Popping in briefly for the next installment.

All our friends knew immediately. Some of them- the newer ones, were confused because they had assumed we were always dating, on account of how blatantly in love we were all the damn time.

We decided tho, to hold off on telling our families. We decided to date a year first, to show that it was serious, and that we meant it.

It was a good year, full of the kind of pining that is regularly rewarded by happy weekends and spring breaks and summers.

The next august, before we went back to school, we each sat down our own parents. Hers were sort of "yeah ok whatever." I was not there for that conversation.

I went to my favorite restaurant with my own parents, and told them I was seeing someone. Dad was enthused. Wanted to meet him.

Well. I said. You have.

Because it's Ty.

#gay love #gay romance #romance tropes #ace love #nonbinary romance #romance tropes tropes love #coming out day 2020

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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years

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WHY I'M SMARTER THAN HACKERS

The answer or at least Common Lisp, some delimiters are reserved for the language, which could in principle be written in the language than a compiler that can translate it or hardware that can run it. No one loves it. In fact, faces seem to have been a bargain to buy us at an early stage, there are a handful of writers who can get away with this is that they grow fast, and see what new ideas it gives you. Better a narrow description than a vague one. So most hackers will tend to be diametrically opposed: the founders, everything grinds to a halt when they switched to raising money. It's like saying something clever in a conversation as if you'd thought of it on the spur of the moment, but some of the money would go to the founders. There are lots of good examples. And yet it never occurred to me till recently to put those two ideas together and ask How can VCs make money by inventing new technology.

A copy of Time costs $5 for 58 pages, or 8. It may be surprisingly large; people overvalue physical stuff. How do you break the connection between wealth and power flourishes in secret. The thing is, VCs are pretty good at reading people. People often tell me how much my essays sound like me talking. I spend a lot of them. Probably because startups are so small. Like many startup founders, and certainly not you as an investor. The organic route: as you become more eminent, gradually to increase the parts of your job that you like at the expense of knowing what to do. If you seem like you'll be one of those they remember. You can get surprisingly far by just not giving up. My father's entire industry breeder reactors disappeared that way.

Which is not surprising: work wasn't fun for most hackers. You need the young hacker's naive faith in his abilities, and at the same time the veteran's skepticism.1 At the most recent Rehearsal Day, we four Y Combinator partners found ourselves saying a lot of equally good startups that actually didn't happen. The wrong people like it. Before Durer tried making engravings, no one wants to look like a fool. As well as being a bad use of time, if your business model seems spectacularly wrong, that will push the stuff you want investors to remember out of their heads. Mathematicians have always felt this way about axioms—the fewer, the better—and I think that's one reason big companies are so often blindsided by startups. Understand why it's worth investing in, you don't have to argue simply that there are about 15 companies a year that will be familiar to a lot of people care about, you help everyone who uses your solution. Sound is a good instinct; investors dislike unbalanced teams. Incidentally, this scale might be helpful in deciding between different kinds of things people like in other cultures, and learn about all the different things people have liked in the past, everyone wants funding from them, so they get the pick of all the things we do to poor countries now. To change the interface both have to agree to change it at once.2 I've never heard anyone say that they have better hackers.

Bring us your startups early, said Google's speaker at the Startup School. Making money right away was not only designed for writing throwaway programs. Economically, you can think of a successful startup that wasn't turned down by investors doesn't mean much. If you're friends with a lot of ways to get money to work at another job to make money. In a big company. It means he makes up his mind quickly, and follows through. Imitating it was like pretending to have gout in order to seem rich. But often memory will be the most demanding user of a company's products. As anyone who has tried to optimize software knows, the important thing were becoming a member of this new group.

Otherwise all the minor details left unspecified in the termsheet will be interpreted to your disadvantage. The central issue is picking the right startups is for investors. Generally, the garage guys envy the big bang method. Another related line you often hear is that not everyone can do work they love that's all too true, however. This essay was originally published in Hackers & Painters. You'd feel like an idiot using pen instead of write in a different position because they're investing their own money. What about using it to write software. You can do math this way. One is to work with him on something. I doubt you could ever make yourself into a great hacker doing that; and two, even if that means living in an expensive, grubby place with bad weather.

The top 10 startups account for 8. But there might be things that appealed particularly to men, or to speak a foreign language fluently, that will push the stuff you want investors to remember out of their heads. That's why oil paintings look so different from watercolors. And the only thing you can offer in return is raw materials and cheap labor. That's kind of hard to imagine. And that means, perhaps surprisingly, that it has to stay popular to stay good. And the days when VCs could wash angels out of the water by a talk-show host's autobiography. Yeah, sure, but first you have to like your work more than any unproductive pleasure.

They passed. The faster you cycle through projects, the faster you'll evolve. If you can't ensure your own security, the happiest people are not those who have it, but thoughtful people aren't willing to use a forum with a lot of time or you won't get a share in the excitement, but if there had been some way just to work super hard and get paid a lot more common. It means arguments of the form Life is too short for something. Both customers and investors will be who else is investing? In a low-tech society you don't see much variation in productivity.3 News. Though somewhat humiliating, this is a net win.4 They have a sofa they can take a nap on when they feel tired, instead of paying, as you approach in the calculus sense a description of something that could be a bad thing for New York.

Notes

Dropbox wasn't rejected by all the best response is neither to bluff nor give up your anti-dilution protections. The founders want to write it all yourself. In principle yes, of S P 500 CEOs in 2002 was 3. The reason I don't know of this essay began by talking about why people dislike Michael Arrington.

At the time of its identity. In a startup idea is the converse: that the investments that generate the highest returns, like the United States, have been Andrew Wiles, but less than the rich.

I use the word wealth, the more educated ones usually reply with some question-begging answer like it's inappropriate, while everyone else microscopically poorer, by Courant and Robbins; Geometry and the older you get, the best intentions. 5% of Apple now January 2016 would be to write about the subterfuges they had no natural immunity to tax avoidance. Cell phone handset makers are satisfied to sell your company into one? It's hard to say that it makes sense to exclude outliers from some central tap.

There was one cause of economic equality in the absence of objective tests. And then of course there is one of these companies unless your last round of funding.

Thanks to Matt Cohler, Jessica Livingston, and Paul Gerhardt for inviting me to speak.

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route22ny · 4 years

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New York Unmasked

by Harry Siegel

Imagining our city, for worse and for better, after the coronavirus pandemic

The city that never sleeps is taking a nap now, and it’s going to be a very different place when it finally wakes up.

Not long after the World Trade Center was destroyed on Sept. 11, 2001, and again after Lehman Brothers collapsed on Sept. 15, 2008, there was a lot of talk about how New York wouldn’t be the same. Both times, reports of our collective demise proved to be greatly exaggerated as the city quickly recovered, economically speaking, and resumed the upward path — ever more prosperous, populated and pricey — it’s remained on for at least the last quarter-century.

This time is different.

Any remaining vision of the city somehow picking up more or less where things had been left off went away with the decision to start shutting down the trains for four hours each night. That’s a huge though supposedly temporary shift for a system that’s run 24 hours a day for over a century with only the briefest of interruptions — until now the only one in the country that doesn’t turn off, as I’ve been shocked to re-learn every time I make the mistake of visiting another city. As with many of the decisions New York and the nation have made in this plague year, it will be much more difficult to turn things back on than it was to turn them off.

Already, the devastation is staggering. In less than eight weeks, the 13,168 (as of Friday night) confirmed coronavirus deaths here have exceeded the total number of murder victims, 12,509, over the past two decades — and that’s counting the 2,977 victims of 9/11.

New York managed to keep the death count down to 13,168 at the cost of putting the city and its economy in the equivalent of a medically induced coma, and with no assurances at all that a second wave of infections won’t be coming despite that.

While putting New York under helped keep the first wave from completely overwhelming the medical system here, as happened in Italy, “the point where we can really start at reopening…obviously is a few months away at minimum,” Mayor de Blasio said Friday.

Even at that point, whenever we finally get there, it’s hard to see everyone just getting back on the train for a crushed morning commute to the office, or servers returning to packed restaurants and bars and theaters and nightspots. Forget about tourists flying in to burn dollars; it’s an open question how many of the generally better-off New Yorkers who’ve left in the course of this will return here, or how many families will borrow or pay now so students can have the city as their campus — or if there will be a campus at all this fall.

This is all surreal. While some people talk about how the virus ravaging New York compares to 9/11, Donald Trump — who claims he lost hundreds of friends on 9/11, though he’s never named a single one of them — dispatches fighter planes to fly low over the city as a tribute to first responders.

While we still don’t know why New York was hit so hard by the virus, it’s clear that density — in places from the Meatpacking District here to the meatpacking plants in the Midwest — plays a big role in spreading it. And this is a place built on density, by far the densest big city in America as well as the biggest.

So this witchy hour we’re in is looking less like a PAUSE than a painful and fundamental shift in how the city functions and what it means to be a New Yorker.

To get through it, many people need to keep looking ahead and, I hope, looking at what New Yorkers can do in their own lives and demand from their politicians to see the city finally emerge as a fairer and more resilient one . I was born in New York City just ahead of the blackout babies, in November of 1977 — the month that Ed Koch was elected mayor and started to set the city on the path it’s mostly remained on until the virus — and I’ve remained here pretty much since. My dad grew up here, and his dad , and me and my brother are both raising our daughters here now, walking distance from each other and Rosie and Zadie.

I’m committed to the city for a lot of reasons, in addition to my family here: I own a house (or at least the bank lets me live in it), and one that’s bizarrely worth much more than I bought it for, at least if I was to sell it. My kids have a couple hundred square feet of their own outside as we shelter in place. And I know a bit and write a lot about New York, which really isn’t a skill set that travels.

But the truth is that the city of the past two decades has felt less and less like home, and more and more like the parts of Manhattan I try to avoid. I’ve spent too much of my adult life railing against the hipsters, gentrifiers, trustafarians and yuppies who didn’t have the good taste to spend their money here and then leave but instead “discovered” neighborhoods and remade them in their images, often to be priced out in time by new “discoverers.” I saved a bit of spleen for the people who rail against those people, rather than do something more productive with their time.

New York has become a city of increasingly sterile retail, one where internet listings have made real estate a more transparent and internationally accessible marketplace for foreign capital to reshape neighborhoods that preserve less and less of their old characters — for better and for worse.

It’s a corporate town, full of semi-interesting hustlers and characters along with its steady share of the depraved, the doomed, the damned and the dull. I’ve seen enough and read enough to know that none of that is new. But it’s metastasized over decades of financialized and increasingly monopolized and VC-fueled growth to swallow other values and ways of life. It’s hard to swim against a tide of money, and it takes a certain mania to even try.

Some of this is selfish, for sure. I preferred the waterfront of my youth, when the piers were barren and all but off-limits but for the bold and the desperate. No one with means would walk there, let alone live there, since it still had the taint of not so long ago shipping and industry and the rougher trades that lived by the waterfront, when the High Line was just a long-abandoned elevated track west of the projects that you could break into and walk on.

That all became part of the steel-and-glass luxury city that Mike Bloomberg described, one here for companies that can afford the best and priciest, and the people who draw incomes from those companies, directly or by providing services for their FIRE (that’s finance, insurance and real estate) workers who live in The City while firefighters commute in from Westchester and Long Island, or by constructing the buildings these people live in, or from the bloated government that services the “other” people who need help to stay here at all. A city that’s priced hospital beds out of big swathes of Manhattan and Brooklyn to clear space for luxury housing.

For years, I’ve been anticipating a reset as office space declines in importance with the rise of remote work, and that in turn brings down commercial and residential prices; hoping for a different, sturdier and livelier New York that exists for and better reflects the people who live here rather than serving as a clearinghouse for the world’s money. Over my adult life I’ve read endless warnings — including in this paper — about the return of the “bad old days” that are long gone for most New Yorkers, if they were here for those days at all. Now, we’re about to get a real taste of what a sharp downturn, along with a hostile federal government, feels like: “Drop Dead.” Now they’re looming as trading floors are vacant along with everything else that isn’t actually essential, and much of what’s abruptly left won’t soon return or the money that they brought in and splashed around.

This will be painful, but New York has always found ways to make new uses of what’s here. The same way that small and sturdy Brooklyn rowhouses built for the burgeoning middle class woke up one day as $2 million “townhouses,” and Single Residence Occupancies that single men depended on to maintain lives here, such as those were, become mansions with enough money and time, office spaces can become creative spaces like warehouses became artist’s lofts. Finally, housing prices, and everything else, should relate to the incomes of the bulk of the people working here. Right now, they relate to the vagaries of the global markets.

I’ll repeat that: The size of our economy, and real estate prices, should relate to the value of the goods and services people here actually produce. That will hurt a lot of New Yorkers who’ve invested in the city, including me, as property values and rents flatten or even go down, but some of that pain is needed. A city that’s too expensive for gas stations or grocery stores — looking at you, Manhattan — is too expensive for most people.

I hope we’re becoming a city that gives a proper Bronx cheer to Airbnb and Seamless and Uber and WeWork and all the venture capital-funded wannabe monopoly “tech” companies looking to “disrupt” fundamental aspects of our life by losing money for long enough to drive their competitors out of business altogether. That resists the convenience of Amazon and its ilk to support our local grocery and book and hardware stores, so that those are still there when we really need them.

A city that knows better than to cut off its nose to spite its face, now that we know better than to touch our faces. If New York has to sleep now to survive, it’s the perfect time to dream.

[email protected]

***

This essay appeared in the New York Daily News, May 3, 2020.

Photo via ShutterStock

#NYC #Covid19 #pandemic recovery #a city's identity #Harry Siegel

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mostlysignssomeportents · 5 years

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Pluralistic: 07 Mar 2020 (audio from Canada Reads Kelowna, gig economy spreads Covid-19, Intel's security chip is insecure, Barnes and Noble gets a savior)

Today's links

Audio from last night's Canada Reads event in Kelowna: Thanks to Sarah Penton for being such a great interviewer!

Gig economy drivers won't get sick-pay if they have covid-19 symptoms: Your Instacart driver is being incentivized to handle your food through his fever-sweats.

Compromise threatens Intel's chip-within-a-chip: A bug in the Management Engine threatens five years' worth of Intel systems.

The savior of Waterstones will turn every B&N into an indie: James Daunt has opened 60 profitable stores in his career.

This day in history: 2015, 2019

Colophon: Recent publications, current writing projects, upcoming appearances, current reading

Audio from last night's Canada Reads event in Kelowna (permalink)

Last night I sat down for an interview and lively Q&A at the Kelowna Public Library with the CBC's Sarah Penton as part of the Canada Reads national book prize, for which my book Radicalized is a finalist. Courtney Dickson was kind enough to send me raw audio from the board and to give me permission to post it. It was a genuinely wonderful night, with great and thoughtful questions, and I'm really glad that I get to share it with you!

https://archive.org/download/canadareadskelownadoctorowpenton/Canada_Reads_Kelowna_Doctorow_Penton.mp3

Gig economy drivers won't get sick-pay if they have covid-19 symptoms (permalink)

The gig economy workers who deliver your @amazon packages are not entitled to sick pay if they think they have covid-19 and want to stay home, rather than delivering contaminated boxes to you.

https://onezero.medium.com/keep-your-car-clean-gig-companies-offer-little-support-during-coronavirus-outbreak-cf6c55cca8a8

It's not just Amazon Flex drivers who are being tacitly incentivized by rapacious, giant corporations to show up for work sick. Your Lyft and Instacart drivers are all being given a stark choice: work sick or go broke.

As Sarah Emerson speculates in her One Zero piece, this depraved indifference is likely an epiphenomenon of gig economy companies' urge to preserve the fiction that their workers are contractors, not employees. Contractors don't get sick leave, after all.

"[Amazon is ] basically threatening that I'll be out of work if I have any symptoms of being sick, coronavirus or not, but no protections and no offers for help in the event it happens" – Jeff Perry, Amazon Flex/Uber driver, Sacramento

Lyft's advice to drivers: "disinfect your car" and avoid passengers who appear sick.

As outrage over this policy went viral, Uber reversed its earlier stance and announced that it would offer up to 14 days of "compensation" for some drivers.

https://twitter.com/MikeIsaac/status/1236126626028507136

Compromise threatens Intel's chip-within-a-chip (permalink)

A new showstopper Intel bug compromises the Converged Security and Management Engine, the computer-within-a-computer that Intel uses for a variety of purposes, some beneficial (detecting malware), some terrible (shutting out free software).

https://blog.ptsecurity.com/2020/03/intelx86-root-of-trust-loss-of-trust.html

The Management Engine has long been controversial. It's designed to reach into your RAM and tinker with it in a way that, by design, the CPU can't detect or prevent. This is deliberate: it lets the management engine monitor and disrupt malware.

https://boingboing.net/2016/06/15/intel-x86-processors-ship-with.html

But of course, if your Management Engine itself is compromised, then – by design – the part of the computer that you control can neither monitor it, nor prevent it from doing malicious work. In 2017, a ghastly ME bug showed how risky this was.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/05/intels-management-engine-security-hazard-and-users-need-way-disable-it

It's especially bad because ME security is, in part, security through obscurity: Intel barely documents ME function and doesn't permit outside auditing. To make everything worse, there's no way to fully disable it. So ME bugs keep on surfacing, each worse than the last. Here's 2018's:

https://press.f-secure.com/2018/01/12/intel-amt-security-issue-lets-attackers-bypass-login-credentials-in-corporate-laptops/

Which brings me to the new vuln: PT Security shows an early stage attack on the boot ROM, that allows for recovery of a master key that is used to generate all the other keys in the system. It's a deep bug that could potentially compromise all the downstream operations. It's only a partial attack (so far). The key needs to be decrypted to be usable, but the researchers say it's only a matter of time – and they point out that the key is shared across years' worth of Intel processors.

This compromise (when it comes) has profound implications for DRM, which is intrinsically brittle in that it's "break once, break everywhere." Once content is extracted from a DRM wrapper on a compromised system, it can be shared and played back on intact ones. DRM system designers try to address this with tactics like "renewability" and "selectable output control" that allows DRM systems to detect which systems they're running on and refuse to operate if they believe they might be compromised.

This is a thermonuclear option that could make DRM unviable forever. It means that if you had the misfortune to buy an Intel system during the five years that they were manufactured with this defect, you could lose the ability to play content you've already paid for.

Not because you hacked your system, but because you could. DRM is and always has been a timebomb, ticking down to the moment that execs in a distant boardroom decide to nerf or brick your property. The temptation to downgrade your customers' property to up your profits is irresistible.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/what-hp-must-do-make-amends-its-self-destructing-printers

But customers don't like getting punished for "doing the right thing." If media companies cancel playback for purchased content on affected Intel systems, they won't be targeting pirates (who get their media DRM-free), but people who deliberately chose to pay.

"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, we don't get fooled again." -GWB

Punishing legit customers to get at pirates is a surefire way to make more pirates.

"Might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb."

The savior of Waterstones will turn every B&N into an indie (permalink)

A great hero of British bookselling is James Daunt, the founder of Daunt Books, whose flagship store is literally the most beautiful bookstore I've ever been to.

https://dauntbooks.co.uk/shops/marylebone/

Daunt took over Waterstones in 2011 and rescued it. The chain now runs as a string of indies, with no co-op promotion – instead, the booksellers in each shop choose which books they promote based on local taste. Corporate HQ chooses a book of the month and a book every year for chainwide promotion, but they do so on the basis of their enjoyment of the book – not because a publisher pays them for promo.

The new Waterstones stores are spectacular. There were always some great ones (the Waterstones in Bradford rivals the main Daunt books for beauty), but the vibe and experience of shopping at a post-Daunt Waterstones is a million times better than before. And new shops like the one in Tottenham Court Road really embody what a bookstore can be. The event I did there in 2017 with Laurie Penny was one of the best I've ever done in the UK.

https://www.waterstones.com/events/cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-laurie-penny/london-tottenham-court-road

The good news is that Daunt is now running Barnes & Noble, which has been struggling and worse – pulling desperate moves like laying off all their most experienced booksellers to lower payroll costs, which is obviously a catastrophic mistake. And Daunt's public plan for BN – America's last major chain bookstore – is to replicate what he did with Waterstones. Let the stores run like indies, with local control by experienced booksellers who know and care about their customers' tastes.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-04/barnes-noble-wants-to-be-more-like-an-indie-bookseller

He's ending co-op promotion, featuring books that the booksellers choose, not books that publishers pay to promote. He's reversing the focus on non-bookstore SKUs (sunglasses, puzzles and scented candles) in favor of, you know…books. They're shrinking CDs and DVDs and expanding kids' books, laying the ground for a new generation of readers, and they're cleaning up, repainting, and generally repairing years of neglect that have given some of the stores the vibe of an abandoned K-Mart.

They're also opening new stores, targeting places that don't have any bookstores (as opposed to places where indie stores have kept the faith and continued to serve their communities). He's shooting for 1,500 stores nationwide. It's superb news for a nation where bookselling has been imperilled for decades. On every tour stop, I always insist that my media escort take me to every B&N in town to sign stock and meet the booksellers. As a recovering bookseller myself, it's one of the great pleasures of the tours. Bookstores are community hubs, and were key to my own literary upbringing. This is just delightful news.

(Image: RachelH_, CC BY-NC)

This day in history (permalink)

#5yrsago Improving the estimate of US police killings https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-new-estimate-of-killings-by-police-is-way-higher-and-still-too-low/

#1yrago Ajit Pai has been touting new broadband investment after he murdered Net Neutrality, but he's been relying on impossible data from a company called Barrierfree https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/03/ajit-pais-rosy-broadband-deployment-claim-may-be-based-on-gigantic-error/

#1yrago The EU hired a company that had been lobbying for the Copyright Directive to make a (completely batshit) video to sell the Copyright Directive https://twitter.com/Senficon/status/1103582295523553280?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

#1yrago The "Tragedy of the Commons" was invented by a white supremacist based on a false history, and it's toxic bullshit https://twitter.com/mmildenberger/status/1102604887223750657

#1yrago It's on: House Democrats introduce their promised Net Neutrality legislation https://www.cnet.com/news/democrats-introduce-save-the-internet-act-to-restore-net-neutrality/

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: The Verge (https://www.theverge.com), Wired (https://wired.com), Slashdot (https://slashdot.org).

Hugo nominators! My story "Unauthorized Bread" is eligible in the Novella category and you can read it free on Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

Upcoming appearances:

Museums and the Web: March 31-April 4 2020, Los Angeles. https://mw20.museweb.net/

LA Times Festival of Books: 18 April 2020, Los Angeles. https://events.latimes.com/festivalofbooks/

Currently writing: I'm rewriting a short story, "The Canadian Miracle," for MIT Tech Review. It's a story set in the world of my next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation. I'm also working on "Baby Twitter," a piece of design fiction also set in The Lost Cause's prehistory, for a British think-tank. I'm getting geared up to start work on the novel afterwards.

Currently reading: Just started Lauren Beukes's forthcoming Afterland: it's Y the Last Man plus plus, and two chapters in, it's amazeballs. Last month, I finished Andrea Bernstein's "American Oligarchs"; it's a magnificent history of the Kushner and Trump families, showing how they cheated, stole and lied their way into power. I'm getting really into Anna Weiner's memoir about tech, "Uncanny Valley." I just loaded Matt Stoller's "Goliath" onto my underwater MP3 player and I'm listening to it as I swim laps.

Latest podcast: Disasters Don't Have to End in Dystopias: https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/01/disasters-dont-have-to-end-in-dystopias/

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=socialpost&utm_term=na-poesycorypreorder&utm_content=na-preorder-buynow&utm_campaign=9781626723627

(we're having a launch for it in Burbank on July 11 at Dark Delicacies and you can get me AND Poesy to sign it and Dark Del will ship it to the monster kids in your life in time for the release date).

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a very special, s00per s33kr1t intro.

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thecardlogin-blog · 5 years

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The Bull Market Checklist To Living Your Best Life Today (Part 1)

Maybe I'm confounding some positive things that are going on with my life, however I haven't felt this great about the present condition of the business sectors since 2007. Certainly, everything went to hellfire the following couple of years and mass bloodletting resulted. However, that is neither here nor there.

Starting at the present moment, we are living in the best of times. On the off chance that you've been a Financial Samurai peruser for at any rate a year or are a sensibly smart speculator, your total assets ought to hit new record highs. Thusly, the measure of speculation pay you're producing so as to live free ought to likewise be creating new record sums.

With the Fed now immovably on our side, speculators have increased new trust in going out on a limb. Further, we would all be able to gain hazard free cash in our investment accounts at a loan cost significantly higher than the 10-year security yield.

This twofold success is uncommon.

I'd like to present a few musings on the best way to put and spend in a positively trending business sector to carry on with a superior life. Since goodness knows, the great occasions can't keep going forever.

The Bull Market Financial Checklist To Living Your Best Life

1) Take bit of leeway of lower rates. With the 10-year security yield at two-year lows, contract rates and longer term understudy advance rates are likewise at two-year lows. You should exploit by renegotiating your home loan and your understudy advances on the off chance that you have any.

Lamentably, for those of you with Mastercard obligation and other momentary advances, rates have not fallen in light of the fact that the short-end of the yield bend has expanded since the Fed begun raising the Fed Funds rate toward the finish of 2015.

I'm wrapping up my 7/1 ARM at 2.75% with all expenses prepared in addition to a $2,400 credit this late spring. On the off chance that I held as of recently to bolt, I may have had the option to get 2.625%.

2) Stay presented to hazard resources. Stocks, securities, and land are your companions in a declining loan fee condition. Lower financing costs make owning different resources with higher loan fees or conceivably higher returns progressively alluring. Loan fees are probably going to remain low for more.

I can't reveal to you how much hazard presentation you ought to have since everyone's hazard resilience and money related circumstance is extraordinary. Everything I can say is that you have to evaluate your hazard resistance and afterward contribute as needs be.

The most legitimate hazard resource for me to put resources into is land since lower home loan rates acquire all the more land request. We've just had a huge log jam in numerous land advertises in 2H2018. Without an adjustment 2H2018 I'd be increasingly wary.

With home loan rates generally 1% lower than in 2018 combined with a retreat in land costs, it is my conviction that land will bounce back or if nothing else remain unfaltering in the coming years. The Fed has broadcast it is happy to be accommodative (cut rates) to fight off a subsidence if important.

3) Ask for a raise or change occupations. We're at present at a 3.6% national joblessness rate in America. That is near full work. This is the ideal opportunity to request a raise or chase for the "impeccable occupation" on the off chance that you are not happy with your current one.

The general principle guideline is that you can get at any rate 20% more in the event that you put yourself on the open market tomorrow. Contingent upon execution and industry, after around three years at work in a hot work showcase, you could possibly get half or more.

Faithful representatives will in general miss out the most. Try not to resemble me. I remained at my old business for a long time and presumably surrendered more than $1 million in income thus. The primary positive about faithfulness is that it builds your odds for arranging a succulent severance on the off chance that you ever need to proceed onward.

4) Take a holiday. Given it's at present a worker's market, this is the ideal opportunity to take a long get-away or a holiday. Indeed, it's hard to get off the framework when a lot of cash is to be made. Be that as it may, it might be currently or never as it may be vocation suicide to take a holiday during a downturn. Since when you get back, your activity probably won't be there!

On the off chance that you intend to work for at any rate five additional years, if you don't mind take an all-encompassing get-away or holiday. Cash is working the hardest for you in a positively trending business sector, so don't stress such a great amount over attempting to get considerably more cash-flow.

My greatest mix-up was not taking at any rate a one-month holiday. I was too stressed over my activity during a downturn and needing to profit during a positively trending business sector.

It was a ceaseless cycle since I constantly anticipated that a downturn should be directly around the bend. In any case, on the off chance that I had taken a holiday, I would have been revived and likely expanded my working profession by at any rate a couple more years. This is one of my huge laments as an early retiree.

5) Start deliberately having a great time. On the off chance that you can't have a great time when times are great, you positively won't probably celebrate the good life when times are terrible. At the point when times are awful, you'll need to spare more and take on side hustles. The final product is that you never end up spending any of your cash on enjoy a quality lifestyle.

During a positively trending business sector, you're profiting path past your ordinary anticipated salary (day work, side hustle pay, automated revenue). As it were, buyer advertise cash feels like "free cash" or "clever cash."

You will probably figure how much interesting cash you've made every year from the buyer market and continue to invest some of it on yourself, your family, and your friends and family. You don't need to burn through 100% of your positively trending business sector increases every year. Be that as it may, you should attempt to designate and spend in any event 10% of the interesting cash celebrating the good life.

For instance, in 4Q2018, I was down about $300,000 (15%) in my House Fund portfolio. That hurt. Fortunately, the House Fund portfolio made up the entirety of its misfortunes and after that increased about $200,000 for a $500,000 swing in a half year.

Restoring $300,000 felt like free cash since I had absurdly over-allotted towards tech stocks. Be that as it may, making $200,000 truly felt like free cash. In this manner, I took a bit of the $200,000 and got myself some new clothing. I feel so new! Be that as it may, truly, I made an enormous buy not long ago which I may partake later on.

6) Hunt for unicorns. During a buyer showcase, greater air pockets will in general structure. In the event that you can get an air pocket and ride it before it implodes, you could possibly profit.

I would put aside 10% of your income (not existing ventures) looking for the following incredible theoretical speculation. A theoretical venture is normally a doubtful item, doesn't have positive income, and is something not standard.

You ought to hope to lose 100% of your 10% with the possibility of making a 1,000%+ return. The probability of either happening is most likely little. In any event, you will study putting resources into resources that are regularly neglected.

It's totally fine to put resources into record assets as long as possible. Most by far of your assets ought to be distributed towards an exhausting S&P 500 and bond file. You simply have minimal shot of regularly getting more extravagant quicker than most of the contributing populace.

On the off chance that I hadn't put $3,000 in VCSY in 2000, I wouldn't have had the option to make a $120,000 up front installment for my first SF property in 2003. In the event that I hadn't purchased my first property in 2003, I might not have had the fortitude to bet everything on a solitary family home in SF toward the finish of 2004.

All you need is one chance of a lifetime to supercharge your riches. In any case, so as to get your chance of a lifetime you have to go out on a limb with a portion of your assets.

7) Shop your business around. Valuations will in general be at their most astounding during a positively trending business sector since desires are so high for future profit development. On the off chance that you accept desires are higher than the real world, at that point you ought to forcefully attempt and shop your business around to the most noteworthy bidder.

In any case, to have the option to shop your business around, you should initially have your very own business. Having a business is extraordinary in light of the fact that in addition to the fact that it has an income segment, however it has a value segment also. To make next dimension riches is tied in with developing the value segment.

Despite the fact that the trailing year P/E proportion doesn't look silly yet at 21.9X contrasted with the 14.75X middle numerous, the Shiller P/E proportion is getting up there at 30X contrasted with the 15.75X middle various. The Shiller P/E proportion depends overall expansion balanced profit from the past 10 years.

8) Become a fraud. In a buyer market, capabilities and qualifications are regularly neglected in light of the fact that everyone is getting quite a lot of money. It's simply after individuals begin losing cash that people begin cautiously perusing the fine print and scrutinizing the foundation of the individual.

During the last positively trending business sector, I know one person who composed a book about how to get rich in spite of having as of late moved on from school with barely any cash. He wound up getting rich mostly in light of his book. Splendid!

Today, I am aware of 25-year-olds with zero budgetary foundations who are showing individuals how to put resources into the financial exchange and resign early. It's noteworthy how people are drenching it up.

On the off chance that you've at any point needed to profit as a fraud, right now is an ideal opportunity to exploit. It doesn't make a difference in case you're a bombed political advisor attempting to position yourself as a money related master or an organization author with no appropriate understanding. In the event that you counterfeit it, odds are higher you will make it during a positively trending business sector.

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steve0discusses · 6 years

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Yugioh S2 Ep 23-24: Escape From Box Fort

Currently trying to stop checking twitter more than once a day, and I’m getting legit twitter-shakes so I’ve decided to stave it off by watching nonsense television. So, last update I said that this was a 3 episode game arc yada yada, but that was apparently me just assuming that Yugioh had a formula. Because, to my shock, this one game was 4 episodes long.

It was 4 episodes mostly of Pharaoh rolling his eyes to the sky every time Kaiba said anything.

According to my bro who actually cares about the rules of this game, they broke basically a whole lot of established game rules in this particular match but like, I was all over that fast forward button so if I didn’t catch it, no harm, no foul. I was more interested in Tea and Mokuba’s very bizarre meet up at the box warehouse.

And while they formulated their half-brained plan (which is still better than Yugi who is always two halves of a brain) Marik and his snuggie villains tied Joey up in some dark room full of just one million cupboards and no light bulbs. Even Joey was not entirely sure of the purpose of any of that effort.

He also threatened to beat them all up so I assume he was just going to start bouncing around and headbutting everyone? His hair isn’t sharp enough for that - that’s a Yugi move, who probably greases those weird bangs with gel and then wipes all 4 of them it through a knife sharpener every morning.

There goes Marik, tying people up when he was just going to possess them anyway. Congrats Marik, now you have to untie the guy you only tied up like 3 minutes ago.

It really does feel like this villain just has zero idea what he is doing, and I’m guessing that probably happens a lot when your sister can see the future all the time. Why make plans or decisions when you have Ishizu to over explain everything to you? Honestly he wouldn’t even have had to tell her his fast food orders, she’d just show up with tacos when he starts feeling munchy. The life. Maybe he’s only been kind of a mess ever since he decided to embrace that whole cursed boy lifestyle?

Luckily for him, everyone else on this show is just as incompetent, and his big rival is a dead Pharaoh with amnesia who is currently squatting in the body of an angsty teen who plays the slowest card game I have ever seen played.

Anyway, speaking of ridiculously wasteful plans, will Tea decide to make a box, fort, again, although it really, really didn’t work the first time?

(read more after the cut)

So like, if Tea does it, she’s too heavy, but if Mokuba joins in--a kid who probably only weighs twenty pounds less than Tea, then...it works? I mean maybe this time they used tape?

I mean Mokuba is a genius child, so maybe he’s just better at building stuff. Maybe that’s what he learned from whatever vague genius orphan program these two underwent that still somehow landed Seto in public school. Mokuba learned to put the heavy boxes on the bottom.

And the moment Mokuba’s gifted feet left this box tower, Tea fell right back on her butt.

It took Yugi and Seto so long to play a card game that Tea and Mokuba had enough time to formulate a plan, follow it out, and actually succeed.

This is Mokuba.

They took so long Mokuba escaped. The kid who has been some sort of tied up/in a cage for over half of this show so far.

Anyway, Tristan narrowly avoids missing his train, which would have saved them both from what I’m guessing will be a hell of a lot of trauma.

Such an awkward train ride.

This show just can’t get anyone together, huh? Not complaining, mind you. Just...noticing. First it was Yugi/Pharaoh who really didn’t even blink once when Tea friendzoned them. I mean I think he just sweat a single forehead droplet or something. Now we have Tristan and Serenity, who haven’t even been on a real date--one of which is still in bandages from a very severe operation--and it’s like “we gotta break that one up waaaaaay before it starts.”

Who knows, maybe this anime was like “we can’t risk a Sailor Moon on this, we are already too much in hot water. Can’t be pulling out relationship stunts if we also gotta tie Tea up in a weird bondage chair and somehow still stay on the air during daytime kid’s TV.”

Which really happened, by the way.

How tall is this Odion guy PS? 11 ft?

Anyways, that’s one episode. Rip Joey. Other than that, not much to say about that one, so, lets jump into the next one.

On the other side of town things are still effed up but slightly less effed up as we are about to yes, absolutely, still blow a hole through the ceiling of this well populated building whether the team wins or loses.

So, they decide to work together. Well not really. They decide to trust that the other one won’t screw it on his turn. Considering these two are both card masters, this really was the lowest bar ever as far as trust goes. Can Yugi trust that Seto will play cards well? Y...yes. That’s literally all this kid does other than skip school and run a multicorp that only exists to invest in even more cards.

And he played them so well that this happened

I mean there are a lot of kid’s shows where villains fall to their deaths, but something about how realistic all these characters are drawn and how it’s put in a realistic-enough location to make it feel a lot darker than lets say Gaston falling off of Beauty and the Beast’s tower, you know what I mean?

But no matter, because Marik got these evil snuggies custom made and it is freakin weird.

I mean sure, whatever it takes to keep your 15 yo from doing a murder, Yugioh, I’ll take it, I guess. Even though like...I keep getting flashbacks to Mannequin. I never really wanted to remember Mannequin, so thanks for that.

Anyway, this began a really bizarre fight where Yugi wanted to interrogate the last guy standing--as if this guy knows anything--and Kaiba just wanted to straight up kill him for abducting his little brother. Both ideas were bad, so it’s fine that Marik nipped this in the bud.

Again, standing here next to Magic Muto, Kaiba is just refusing to admit that any of this is even slightly magical. Maybe he was such a bad wizard in his past life that he was cursed to not even believe in the concept of magic in this reincarnation. Not like it really matters, since Kaiba’s tech is basically magic.

Also get a load of this effect.

Hell yeahhhh it’s getting real 2001 now! Mm, probably took them like 4 computers to render back then. Glorious.

So, they both decide to drop this guy and he passes out on the roof of this building. No need to move him or anything. No need to disable the three other bombs. Just like...just loot his body and leave. I love this kid show’s weird ass morality.

So after ALL of that, Mokuba arrives. Good thing Kaiba didn’t actually murder anyone in revenge for his little brother (though he did try) or that would have been...awkward. Though, probably not the first time.

Since Tea saved his brother, Seto decides to help Yugi out by saving the lives of Yugi’s friends (of which, two are in the finals of Seto’s tournament, so he does actually need them.) He makes a note that he’s only doing this so he won’t owe Tea anything, and that Yugi did absolutely nothing at all. Which was kind of true, this entire match was a bad idea that gave them nothing but broken glass.

That’s right, it’s anime food time. Yes yes yes, my favorite time.

Just kidding, it’s all in boxes.

Thanks 4 kids, for not allowing us to think that people in other countries might not eat the same food we do. I guess they figured that the triangle shaped rice ball that Serenity had in the next scene looked enough like a taco to trick us.

Real talk, if my Taco Bell came in a fancy real wood box all cutely wrapped like that, it would be NUTS. Can you even imagine if Taco Bell decided to make Burrito Supremes into cute bento boxes? Hell. I would eat a Burrito Supreme again for the first time in 3 years. I would even eat it if they somehow put a burrito in that nasty Nacho Cheese Dorito flavored shell (though tbh that Cool Ranch shell was absolutely delicious and 10/10. Nacho cheese Dorito shell: bad)

Sorry I’ve been thinking a lot about Taco Bell ever since I realized you could go online and customize your burrito and I’ve been going down the rabbit hole of other people’s mad quesalupas and freaky deep-dish crunchwraps (one guy said he just gets a plain 5layer burrito and shoves a bunch of Doritos in there with extra nacho cheese sauce and he asked “Is this weird?” and the top comment was “no, you are God among men”)

Anyway, I just want you to imagine that spectacularly awful custom 5 layer burrito smothered in extra queso sauce and lovingly wrapped in a box with adorable wrapping paper and being given just two chopsticks to eat it with. And you do. On a train for everyone else to smell.

And then a few weeks ago I asked rhetorically, does Yugi and Seto get to go on a bachelor-style helicopter date and the answer is--YES.

Bless this storyboarder. Get this cross-stitched so I can hang it over my fireplace. Maybe it’s just me who thinks this shot is maybe the best joke in Yugioh, but I mean. Look at it. It just keeps giving. Yugioh characters are just so bizarre when they’re shoved into very small, very normal looking spaces.

And FYI I totally checked twitter four times while writing this so like...so much for that life goal. Boy, I have a twitter problem.

So, next week, on Yugioh:

Does anyone else in Marik’s troupe get real hot, so they take off their hoodie and we find out that nearly everyone else is also wearing the same exact pastel pink crop top sweater as Marik? Do Marik’s snuggie parachutes accidentally go off at embarrassing times? Does Seto pull out a neck pillow and just pass out for a few episodes while stealing Yugi’s arm rest? Does Mokuba offer to watch a movie on the copter and all they have is just Serendipity and Sleepless in Seattle?

And for those new here, this is a link to the Yugioh recaps in Chrono Order from Ep 1 so you don’t have to scroll through comments and stuff

#Yugioh #yugioh recap #photo recap #s2 ep 23 #s2 ep 24 #boxes #yugi muto #seto kaiba #mokuba #tea gardner #joey wheeler #marik ishtar #serenity wheeler #tristan taylor

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jeanjauthor · 6 years

Link

A while, back, these people did a highly popular “SOLAR FREAKIN’ ROADWAYS!!” video on YouTube, and an equally popular Indiegogo campaign, more than doubling their goal of 1M USD. But...it kinda fell off the radar.

I wanted to bring it back into at least a little attention so that people know it IS progressing, and making good strides. They’ve fixed a lot of issues over the last four or so years, and feel that they finally have a product that can make it to actual driveways and roadways and last long enough to start paying for itself (since the costs will still be quite high for several more years to come).

(...My not-so-secret goal, if I win a major multi-million-dollar lottery, I’mma buy a big chunk of land on which I want to eventually build a custom house, and I’ll pave its driveway and parking area with Solar Freakin’ Roadway panels, so you could say I’m keeping an eye on this company. I’m dreamin’, but I’m dreamin’ big. Aim for higher than you think you’ll ever reach, since goals are important, and figure out how be happy in the momentwith whatever you do actually reach at each stage...because big goal dreams take time...just like R&D.)

Research & Development always takes time. As an author, I get to handle and use the elusively rare, infrequently sufficiently stable element Handwavium when describing science fiction, particularly its progress. For the development of OTL technology in my IaVerse, I had them going from unmanned probes successfully transiting and transmitting hyperspace to actually having a (small, but still more than a dozen) fleet of ships transporting actual humans to new star systems in just 10-15 years.

That’s a VERY short period of time...but a lot of the ship designs were for small transport shuttles using insystem thrusters (aka sublight but still way faster than anything NASA, et al, currently use)...because I used yet more of that atomic Handwavium element for getting ships quickly around the local star system. I also had the discernment, antigen development, and then mass-manufacturing and distribution of innoculation programs for entire planets taking place in approximately one month. That is hella short timing for medical research at early 21st century standards, and we can finally replicate DNA in mass numbers to the point that DNA testing is now relatively cheap and efficient.

But real Research & Development takes time.

So I’m not at all surprised it’s been this many years to get to the SR4 panels (Solar Roadway version 4.0) mentioned in the above blog. These panels have many different components, all of which interact in different ways, chemically, thermally, eletrically, structurally...

In The Terrans, first novel of the First Salik War trilogy, I believe it was Li’eth who commented that “these people” (Terrans) had all sorts of renewable resources for their energy, including wind generators, hydroelectric dams on rivers, solar roadways (not sure if I mentioned solar energy generating window panes, but they’re there, too), and of course the famous hydrogenerators that burn water.

What I didn’t clarify was that nobody on earth actually used hydrogenerators to power cities. Why not? Because that still takes quite a lot of water, and that water is pretty much permanently lost. It’s far easier to install solar roadways, windows, and rooftiles, along with battery banks, heating elements, so on and so forth. Is it cheaper? That...depends on how you view costs. From a strictly financial standpoint over the short or medium run, using dollars or creds or whatever...no. It’s not cheaper, by far.

But it spares the environment in the long run. Not just the long run of preventing global droughts from overuse of hydrogenerated energy, but the long run of catalysts getting loose in the environment. Now, the catalyst won’t cause an explosion if it’s dumped directly into water, but it will work at a slow rate on dissolving the molecular bonds between hydrogen and oxygen.

(And before anyone yells at me that it isn’t possible, that is exactly what real world plants do. “Plants' powers of photosynthesis allow them to harness the energy of the sun to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen at separate times and at separate physical locations in the plant's structure.” Apr 15, 2013 https://phys.org/news/2013-04-blueprint-cheap-hydrogen-production.html This just happens a lot slower and at a much smaller scale than the hydrogenerator catalyst, and it isn’t then pumped into a system of engines to burn and use explosive energy and thermal Sterling engines to recapture heat loss as electricity, etc. Yes, I put actual science into my science fiction...though admittedly I do use a lot of Handwavium to bind the molecules together.)

New colonyworlds will use hydrogenerators, because they often arrive on the colonyships with the intent of first powering the ships to get there, then security the initial landing site, and then being removed and repositioned in various locations to expand various satellite settlements. Once the settlements are large enough and thriving well enough to develop the local resources (slicia for silicone and glass, metals for, well metals, blah blah blah), then they invest in a lot renewable resource energy generation. They do ship a lot of it in from off-world to help relieve the strain on the hydrogenerators, which are best used for large vehicle transport needs, but the goal is to get to the point in the infrastructure and manufacturing process that it can be done locally.

But again...Handwavium on how long all of that takes. Generations, technically, because it’s literally a case of first having sufficient manpower (even if non-sentient AI robotics are used to speed the process, they have to be supervized, plans drawn up, etc, etc) and sufficient infrastructure (food & shelter & protection from wildlife are higher priorities), etc, etc, etc. Which is why on Dabin, they still have power lines running out from major manufacturing plants to sell surplus energy to local homes & businesses, supplementing the interim changeover from hydrogeneration to passive generation methods.

Anyway, that’s all in my head and stuff, but a lot of what’s in my stories got inspired first by real-world things, like Solar Freakin’ Roadways. And I’m still hoping one day to hit it big, and be able to afford my own SR driveway. I’m also hoping some of you hit it big, and go the same route, too...because the more people who buy this stuff, the large amounts they can mass produce, the bigger the infrastructure will get to be built to mass produce them, and the cheaper these sorts of things will become.

So, dream big...but dream responsibly. We don’t have hydrogenerator tech, and in this universe it’s probable we never will (Handwavium is only safely handled by theorists and authors and artists, but remains ephemeral at best), so...go for the real-world tech that we know will be good for the world for years to come.

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destiny-smasher · 6 years

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Kingdom Hearts 3 impressions

So, uh, I will ONLY be talking about stuff up until the very start of the second World, and only AFTER the break. Kingdom Hearts 1 was an incredibly important and influential piece of media when I was growing up. I was writing fic based on Smash Bros. just before KH rolled onto the scene was like, “Yo, Disney and Final Fantasy, BAM, fuckin’ random? fucking RADDDD” and I was all about it. You had FF characters remixed with OCs remixed with Disney characters, and the villains were all crossing over to form the League of Bad Cartoons, it was a great time. And then Nomura realized his gamble was a win and decided to waste the next 15 years of everyone’s time shoving in every trope he liked, every IDEA that felt “cool” together into a mish mash of whatever the hell this “narrative” has become. Suffice it to say, I’ve got beef with Kingdom Hearts as a “story.” It just occurred to me today that a big part of this is thematic/tonal.

But it’s also VERY rare, maybe even unprecedented, for a piece of media like Kingdom Hearts 3 to come around. For years, then months, then weeks, then days, I told myself, “It’s not real, that game doesn’t exist, I won’t believe it until I’m literally playing it” and just could not be bothered to be hype or interested, if only because Nomura’s “vision”, from my perspective, warped something I admired in my youth into a fucking train wreck, leaving me very little to feel emotionally invested in outside of Aqua and by proxy the two lads she is trying to protect. (also I GUESS I’m slightly invested in Axel/Xion/Roxas.../Namine? for similar reasons now that I think about it?) Well, guess what? Kingdom Hearts VERY WELL might be real, and I very well might be about three hours into it. And for all of the beef I have with the plot, I am fucking relieved that those three hours have felt/sounded good, as a video game. NOW we’re gonna talk about the first World. --

When I first heard that Olympus was gonna be the first World in KH3 I was disappointed and BAFFLED. We’re visiting that place a THIRD time? And why THAT World? Turns out, there’s actually some substantial thematic relevance and that’s actually A-OK, not to mention that starting with a familiar world after ALL OF THIS TIME is not such a bad way to kick things off. First off, structurally, I actually really enjoyed the way this world played out. Two of my biggest problems with KH as a video game series have been that worlds feel like empty, vacant, haunted houses, and that said worlds are usually small and linear with a lot of pointless backtracking. Olympus fixes all of this. There are NPCs. Actual fucking PEOPLE in this world. Sure, they’re just people in danger, calling for help, but they’re THERE for once! And they have vocies! EVERY line of dialogue (except for like one “plot” moment) has actually been voiced so far! About time. Also. This World is not as linear as most KH Worlds. In fact, it help more open and dynamic than ANY World in any KH game so far, not to mention it featured three, THREE (wtf) unique and distinct types of settings. The city, the mountain, and Olympus. Nice. ALSO also. The music. We’ve been here before. We KNOW that Olympus theme from earlier games. And as you traverse the city, up the mountain, you hear this more sweeping, movie-like version, and it’s like “oh whoa nice” aaaaand then you get TO Olympus and it KICKS in, the old song, up to modern snuff. That was great. That was a thing that really helped convey “Kingdom Hearts is back, baby.” The World was big, compared to typical KH worlds. It had multiple nooks and crannies to explore, side-paths to go down, treasure to find hidden away. There is a LOT of verticality. Running up walls and seamlessly hopping over things in the environment makes traversal more enjoyable than it ever has been. Even though a lot of the World is technically a linear path it’s not structured like a path. Going off and exploring rewards you with items and the like, and the World is big enough to actually feel like you have places to poke around in. Having said this, WHY is there no...map? Like. You literally COLLECT Maps from Chests like you used to. But near as I can tell, there’s no way to pull up an actual MAP, to seer where the main path is, to see where the side paths are. It’s boggling. Maybe the game has the option hidden away somewhere but if so, that’s just silly. And if there’s just no actual map option at ALL that’s just...baffling. There were barely any load times for how much SPACE there was to navigate, and things looked very shiny and pretty, and ran at a smooth 60 fps MOST of the time. Tech specs aren’t everything, but when your brand is built on “looking pretty” it sure af helps when you bring scale AND a smooth framerate to match. It’s weird, and a bit jarring, sometimes in a good way, to see all of this stuff rendered in modern tech. Stuff looks...a little too plasticy a lot of the time, (which actually ought to pay off when we get to Toy Story?) but the environments so far feel rich and vast and detailed all at once in a way we just have never seen the series, because we’re basically jumping from PS2-level tech to PS4. So that difference in production is more noticeable for the wait -- I just wish things looked a bit more...I guess cel-shaded? Like the original trailer. Things (specifically, characters) look a little too flat/plasticy at times, for how pretty things are. Combat seems to be as flashy as ever and I’m sure I’ll feel differently as I get further in and unlock more options but it’s still too easy, simple, and mashy for my tastes. I am HOPING we get more moments that require quick reflexes and specific tactics like the harder moments of older KH games. The amusement rides mechanic is...weird. It’s given NO context in universe. And they last a little too long/feel too overpowered for how easy they are to utilize. Similarly, there are frequently seemingly random party-member tag-team attacks that...just seem like “press triangle to win” moves. I wish they entailed more interaction, and/or felt less common/random. I like the IDEA of these kinds of moves, especially ones that change your controls/method of attack for a few seconds (like Hercules’ team attack) but the execution makes them feel too cheap and easy to abuse, with combat that’s ALREADY skewing on the “too easy” side for the genre. I like the “form change” for keyblades, and that you can swap keyblades in the middle of a fight. Really hoping this allows for some good tactical stuff later -- buuuuut that would also require the game to ASK OF ME to do more than “mash X,” which KH as a brand typically does not do... Characters SPEAK in reaction to gameplay moments, when you initiate things in the environment, etc. It’s a nice touch that makes them feel more like characters in an RPG. Donald and Goofy are ALWAYS in the party, alongside the Disney member(s). NICE. Maybe KH3 is putting its best foot forward, but overall, I was pleasantly surprised with Olympus. It single-handedly corrected MOST of the issues I’ve ever had with Kingdom Hearts level design. I only hope the momentum keeps going. Moving on, Gummi Ships. What little I played is easily the best they have every been. I love having an open world with optional places/fights to explore, while still giving me those shmup-like bursts of action. The Gummi Phone seems like a fun mechanic, and taking selfies/photos makes SENSE for this game because of how visually detailed it is -- but the pleasant surprise was how I took selfies with Donald and Goofy and they REACTED to it, starting to pose and commenting on it. On the other hand, the loading screen being nonsensical “social media” posts from KH characters...I don’t like it thanks go away. x’D I’ve spent only a few minutes in Twilight Town and INSTANTLY I am so much more enamored than I ever was in previous games. Not just due to the bump up in visual fidelity, but also because -- GASP -- NPCs??? Are you trying to tell me this is an actual TOWN that people LIVE IN?? Holy shit, Kingdom Hearts, I never knew! For all of this stuff I liked, though, KH3 is still...a KH game. Which means after you get through the intro, after you gear up to land in Olympus, the game flashes the title: “Kingdom Hearts II.9″ ...no. Just no. Fuck. Stop doing this shit. Whenever an Organization 13 member (or EX member) shows up and starts speaking all cocky in riddles like the flamboyant anime jackass they are, whenever Mickey starts dead-ass blathering about weird nonsense whenever the plot HAS to acknowledge “oh right Sora golly gawrsh ya FURRGOT this random bullshit a-FYUCK better shove this expository throwaway dialogue right in here before we go n’ furrget again!” whenever Kairi continues to be irrelevant and invisible after ALL THIS TIME whenever Rikku has to say some obligatory thing about his darkness or his copy of himself or Ansem or whatever whenever the plot informs Sorta/Dornold/Goffy about another convoluted ridiculous THING that we already know about and they MAYBE already know about because it is OBLIGATED to because this game’s entire purpose has become to “wrap things up already Nomura” I am reminded of the freshly opened scar on my heart from how much SHIT this series has dragged itself through for...what? Nothing worth all of this, IMO. Thankfully, these moments feel less and less pressing in KH3′s opening hours than they certainly could be, though I’m sure the closing hours of the game -- once they’ve tidily gotten all of that silly, inconsequential DISNEY CONTENT out of the way (even though that’s the BULK of the game environments and HALF of the series’ identity/purpose) -- those closing hours will surely be packed to the gills with all of this crazy crap. Maybe by then I might finally care enough to finally get the catharsis I’ve waited over a decade for. I dunno. I’m just relieved the game looks, plays, sounds, and feels as good as it does so far. EDIT: almost forgot to mention this since it hasn’t actually come up yet BUT I picked up a BUNCH of “ingredients”??? Like. FOR COOKING??? Which is one of my all-time favorite mechanics in a video game?? (thanks Paper Mario) So I’m at LEAST excited to see what THAT is all about.

#KH3 #Kingdom Hearts 3

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your-dietician · 3 years

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Best tech deals: Amazon Prime Day 2021

New Post has been published on https://tattlepress.com/latest/best-tech-deals-amazon-prime-day-2021/

Best tech deals: Amazon Prime Day 2021

CNN —

This article is part of CNN Underscored’s wall-to-wall coverage of Amazon Prime Day. To find all of our coverage, click here.

Whether you’re looking for a smart speaker, like an Amazon Echo or a Sonos One, or a massive TV to upgrade your home entertainment setup, Prime Day is here to deliver on some epic tech deals.

We’ll be working hard throughout the day to curate the best of the best — the biggest discounts on the class-leading tech that you’ll want to add to your collection.

AirPods Pro ($189.99, originally $249.99; amazon.com)

APPLE

AirPods Pro mix a stellar design with rich sound and active noise cancellation (ANC) that can effectively cancel out all the noise around you. They’re really that good, and they’re our top pick of earbuds for Apple users. At $189.99, it’s not an all-time low, but this is a really good deal.

EarFun Air ($44.99, originally $69.99; amazon.com)

AMAZON

If you want to spend less than less than $50 on a pair of earbuds that meet the mark, look no further than the EarFun Air. We declared these our best budget earbuds with strong sound, a comfortable fit and very long battery life.

Sony WH-1000XM4 Headphones ($248, originally $349.99; amazon.com)

AMAZON

Our top pick for best over-ear and noise-canceling headphones is at their lowest price ever. Sony’s WH-1000XM4 are just $248, down from $349.99, in your choice of black, silver or blue. These headphones mix comfort with world-blocking ANC and nearly 30 hours of battery life.

Jabra Elite Active 75t ($119.99, originally $179.99 amazon.com)

AMAZON

Our best earbuds for working out and running are seeing a mighty fine discount. Jabra’s Elite Active 75t are down to an all-time low of $119.99. These earbuds get a lot right, like a comfortable fit with sweat resistance, class-leading noise cancellation and long battery life.

Echo Buds (starting at $79.99, originally $119.99; amazon.com)

Amazon

Echo Buds

Amazon’s second-generation Echo Buds get a lot right and end up delivering value. They feature noise cancellation, strong sound that can be customized with an EQ and some of the best microphones we’ve tried on earbuds. Better yet, they’re down to an all-time low starting price of just $79.99 this Prime Day.

Echo (4th Gen) ($59.99, originally $99.99; amazon.com)

AMAZON

Not only is the latest Echo our pick for best smart speaker, but it’s down to an all-time low price of just $59.99. With three speakers inside, Echo can fill even large rooms with rich and crisp audio. Of course, you get instant access to Alexa out of the box too.

Amazon Echo Dot (4th Gen) ($24.99, originally $49.99; amazon.com)

AMAZON

The latest Amazon Echo Dot lets you ask Alexa to do just about anything — from checking the weather to controlling your smart home — all within a sleek spherical design. Our pick for the best budget smart speaker, the fourth-generation Echo Dot is 50% off and at its lowest price yet (you can also get the Echo Dot With Clock for $25 off).

Fire HD 8 Plus ($64.99, originally $109.99; amazon.com)

AMAZON

At an all-time low of $64.99, you really can’t go wrong with the Fire HD 8 Plus. As our budget tablet pick, it handles reading, web browsing, light gaming and emails with ease. The 8-inch display gives you plenty of room for binge-watching your favorite shows as well.

Echo Show 8 ($94.99, originally $129.99; amazon.com)

Amazon

Echo Show 8

The new Echo Show 8 made a serious upgrade this year, and its midsize design makes it perfect to keep on your desk or in your kitchen. The device now has a faster performance and an improved camera for better-quality video calls. The Echo Show 8 is the ultimate media hub, supporting applications including Zoom, Netflix and Spotify.

Amazon Echo Show 10 ($189, originally $249; amazon.com)

Amazon

We found the Echo Show 10 to be a great smart display that has all of the powers of Alexa complete with a big, rotating screen that can help keep you in view during video calls. It’s a bit of an investment at full price, but this lowest-ever Prime Day price makes it a great value.

Echo Frames ($174.99, originally $249.99; amazon.com)

Amazon

Echo Frames

Amazon’s futuristic Alexa-enabled glasses are seeing a sharp discount down to $174.99. Echo Frames look like normal glasses and feature built-in microphones so that Alexa can take your requests. Speakers are built into the frames and point right to your ears for personal listening.

Eero 6 Mesh Wi-Fi 6 Router ($129, originally $199; amazon.com)

Eero

The Eero 6 is our favorite mesh Wi-Fi router, thanks to its simple setup and wide, consistent coverage that can boost the Wi-Fi signal all throughout your home. This kit, which gets you a router and an extender, is an especially great pickup at an all-time low price of $129.

Ring Video Doorbell Wired ($44.99; originally $59.99; amazon.com)

Ring

We found the Ring Video Doorbell Wired to be a great value, offering many of the key features of Ring’s higher-end video doorbells (such as 1080p video and custom motion alerts) within an affordable and compact package. And it’s an even better buy now that it has hit its lowest-ever price of $44.99.

Ring Alarm (starting at $119, originally $199; amazon.com)

Ring

The Ring Alarm is our pick for the best home security system, thanks to its easy setup, responsive alarms and smooth compatibility with other smart home devices. And it’s currently at a steep discount, starting at just $119 for a five-piece kit (ideal for apartments) all the way to $199 for a 14-piece kit (ideal for bigger homes)

WD My Passport SSD (starting at $79.99, originally $119.99; amazon.com)

AMAZON

Whether you want to back up your data with ease or just need more storage, the WD My Passport SSD is powerful enough to handle the task and is our overall pick for best external hard drive. Better yet, it’s down to its recorded lowest price.

Blue Yeti Microphone ($108.33, originally $129.99; amazon.com)

Blue

The Blue Yeti is our pick for the best computer microphone, delivering excellent audio quality for meetings, podcasts and Twitch streams complete with four handy recording modes for both solo and group settings. We’ve seen the Yeti’s price drop a bit lower than this, but it’s still an excellent sale price on a superb mic.

Razer Kiyo Pro ($151, originally $199; amazon.com)

Razer

This is a huge discount on our favorite high-end webcam, which delivers excellent 1080p picture quality that will make you look vibrant under any lighting conditions as well as 60 frame-per-second recording that’s perfect for smooth streaming.

MacBook Air ($900, originally $999; amazon.com)

Apple

MacBook Air M1

There’s a reason the MacBook Air is our laptop pick for Apple users — the M1 chip inside brought new life into Apple’s entry-level notebook. It’s also $100 off at just $900 for the base model, which will be great for most users.

13-Inch MacBook Pro ($1,099, originally $1,299; amazon.com)

APPLE

If you need a little more speed over the MacBook Air, the 13-inch MacBook Pro pairs the fast M1 chip with a fan. And this lets it work harder (and run hotter) to make creative tasks run with ease. You’ll also need to push it to get the fan to kick in, and it lasts for nearly 20 hours on a single charge.

Elgato Wave: 1 ($99.99, originally $129.99; amazon.com)

AMAZON

The Elgato Wave: 1 microphone packs many of the same features as our favorite microphone for streamers in the Wave 3, including excellent audio quality and a handy companion app that makes it easy to mix all of your audio sources at once. However, if you want better onboard controls, you should consider the Wave 3.

Elgato Wave 3 ($130, originally $159.99; amazon.com)

AMAZON

As our microphone pick for streaming, the Wave 3 gets a lot right. gets a lot right. It’s one of the best-sounding mics and offers a companion app that lets you customize the experience.

Nintendo Switch Lite With 128GB MicroSD card ($199.99, originally $234.98; amazon.com)

AMAZON

While the Switch Lite is smaller than the Switch, it still plays nearly all the same games and comes in better colors. Plus, you’re scoring it with a 128GB microSD card that is just begging to be filled with games.

Nintendo Joy-Cons ($69.00, originally $79.99; amazon.com)

Nintendo

You can always use new Joy-Con controllers, whether you want to personalize your Switch with snazzy new colors or just need more gamepads for family Mario Kart night. You can currently score a pair in a variety of fun shades for a nice $69 — that’s $10 off and the lowest these things usually drop to.

Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales ($49.99, originally $69.99; amazon.com)

Sony

One of the best games for the PlayStation 5, Spider-Man: Miles Morales makes an excellent showpiece for Sony’s new console with stunning 4K graphics, smooth frame rates and near-instant load times. This is the lowest price yet we’ve seen for the Ultimate Edition, which also gets you a copy of Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered.

Razer Blade 15 ($1,389.99, originally $1,499.99; amazon.com)

Razer Store

Razer Blade 15 Base Gaming Laptop 2020

As one of the most popular gaming laptops on the market, this discounted Razer Blade 15 is one of the better Prime Day deals we’ve seen so far. With a 10th Gen Intel Core i7-10750H processor and Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti graphics built for serious gaming within a thin and compact build, the laptop has exceeded many gamers’ expectations, and it shows in all of the 5-star reviews.

Logitech G915 Mechanical Gaming Keyboard ($179.99, originally $229.99; amazon.com)

Logitech

It doesn’t get much better than typing on a mechanical keyboard. And this Logitech G915 TKL model is a strong option with punchy keys, a compact design and customizable lighting. And it’s $50 off for Prime Day.

Sony SRS-XB12 Mini Bluetooth Speaker ($29.99, originally $58; amazon.com)

SONY

This small but mighty speaker may not look like much, but its powerful volume and long battery life makes it a great outdoor speaker option. It’s portable design and waterproof casing make it the perfect summer accessory to bring your music wherever you go.

Roku Ultra ($69.99, originally $99.99; amazon.com)

AMAZON

The Roku Ultra gives you access to thousands of streaming services — all at up to 4K resolution — in a slim package that doesn’t pry your eyes away from the big screen. It’s our pick for best overall streaming device, and is back to its lowest recorded price.

Roku Smart Soundbar ($160.89, originally $179.99; amazon.com)

AMAZON

Our pick for best soundbar, Roku’s excellent soundbar features a low profile, powerful audio and smart pairing capabilities that are on par with much more expensive models.

Wemo Smart Plug ($18.47, originally $24.99; amazon.com)

Wemo

The best HomeKit smart plug we’ve tested, the Wyze Plug can turn any household gadget (such as your coffee machine or lamp) into a smart device that can be turned on and off via Alexa or Google Assistant. While we’ve seen its price drop even lower, this handy plug is a no-brainer at $18.

Whellen Selfie Ring Light ($11.19, originally $15.99; amazon.com)

AMAZON

Our choice for the best portable ring light clips directly to your phone for a glow on the go. It’s a perfect choice for upping your TikTok or selfie game.

Samsung Galaxy S21 (starting at $599.99, originally $799.99; amazon.com)

AMAZON

With three cameras on the back and a bevy of capture modes, the Galaxy S21 has one of the best cameras we’ve tested on a smartphone. For $599.99, an all-time low price, you really can’t do much better. It’s powered by a fast chip that makes Android seamless and has a large 6.2-inch display.

Apple Watch Series 6 44mm GPS in Product Red With Product Red Sport Band ($349.99, originally $429.99; amazon.com)

apple

As our pick for the best smartwatch, the Apple Watch Series 6 is a perfect pairing for any iPhone user. It can track your steps, take an electrocardiogram and even monitor your blood oxygen levels. And it’s a communication tool with the ability to send messages, emails and even take calls from your wrist.

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orbemnews · 3 years

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Digital Horses Are the Talk of the Crypto World The Kentucky Derby may be the best-known stakes race happening in the equestrian world this weekend, but it’s hardly the only one. On Zed Run, a digital horse racing platform, several such events take place every hour, seven days a week. Owners pay modest entry fees — usually between $2 and $15 — to run their steeds against others for prize money. The horses in these online races are NFTs, or “nonfungible tokens,” meaning they exist only as digital assets. You can’t pet them or feed them carrots by hand. You can’t sit in the stands sipping mint juleps while they sprint by. But, unlike the vast majority of NFTs — which correspond to GIFs, images and videos that can be kept as collectibles or sold for profit — each digital horse constitutes what Zed Run’s creators call a “breathing NFT.” “A breathing NFT is one that has its own unique DNA,” said Roman Tirone, the head of partnerships at Virtually Human, the Australian studio that created Zed Run. “It can breed, has a bloodline, has a life of its own. It races, it has genes it passes on, and it lives on an algorithm so no two horses are the same.” (Yes, owners can breed their NFT horses in Zed Run’s “stud farm.”) People — most of them crypto enthusiasts — are rushing to snap up the digital horses, which arrive on Zed Run’s site as limited-edition drops; some of them have fetched higher sums than living steeds. One player sold a stable full of digital racehorses for $252,000. Another got $125,000 for a single racehorse. So far, more than 11,000 digital horses have been sold on the platform. Alex Taub, a tech start-up founder in Miami, has purchased 48 of them. “Most NFTs, you buy them and sell them, and that’s how you make money,” Mr. Taub, 33, said. “With Zed, you can earn money on your NFT by racing or breeding.” His stable is still growing. He recently bred a digital horse for his 5-year-old daughter. “She comes home from school and wants to race it,” he said. “She named her horse Gemstone, and Gemstone had two babies named Rainbows and Sparkles.” Each race has a 12-horse limit, the lineups of which are based on the qualities and past performance of each horse. The site uses an algorithm that runs 10,000 random outcomes and chooses one as the race’s condition. The races take place around the clock and are streamed on both Zed Run’s Twitch channel and the company’s website. Zed Run also operates a Discord server, where people can follow race results, trade tips and share third-party tools for analyzing data. Users livestream their own races and repackage clips for YouTube and Twitch. “There are people who are becoming mini influencers in this ecosystem themselves,” said Yair Altmark, a venture capitalist in New York who has spent over $300,000 on digital horses. “And horses that are getting credibility on these streams and exposure on the Discord are making a name for themselves.” He anticipates making much of his money back. “It wouldn’t surprise me if some of these horses are trading for $1 million in a couple months,” Mr. Altmark, 23, said, “because these horses can generate a crazy return on your investment.” It costs anywhere from a few dollars to around $50 to enter a buy-in race, and you can race a horse an unlimited number of times. Zed Run was founded in 2018 by Chris Laurent, Rob Salha, Geoff Wellman and Chris Ebeling. They felt that horse racing was fertile ground for innovation. “It’s one of the world’s oldest sports, and it has remained unchanged since the dawn of time,” Mr. Laurent said. Owning and racing real horses can be prohibitively expensive. But there is a lower barrier to entry for NFT horse racing, according to Drew Austin Greenfeld, 36, an investor in New York. “There are cheap horses and premium horses,” he said. Renee Russo, a 25-year-old entrepreneur in New York, said that racing her digital horse, Glacial Planes, feels more like playing a video game than taking a gamble. “I own this horse, I’m not betting on another horse,” she said, “so I feel like I have complete control of where it’s going, who it’s racing and who I want to breed it with.” As with all investments, there is reason for caution here. Should Zed Run turn out to be a fad, these digital horses could be rendered worthless. Fans of digital horse racing often talk about the “metaverse,” a shared space where physical and virtual reality meet. “My opinion is that Zed Run will be the first digital sport of the metaverse,” said Mr. Greenfeld. “People are going to root for horses and stables, and become fans. There are horses that are already celebrities in the ecosystem. It’s global, there’s no language barriers and it’s 24/7. It takes the best of crypto, NFTs, esports, streaming.” In any case, as the NFT craze grows and more people discover digital horse racing, Zed Run is expanding rapidly. The company has 30 employees around the world and plans to keep hiring. Recently, celebrities and athletes have begun investing in the space. The actor Jerry Ferrara, who played Turtle in the HBO series “Entourage,” has purchased a digital horse, as did Wilson Chandler, a professional basketball player. Some users said that Zed Run has also piqued their interest in the real-world spectator sport. “I would have never watched an actual horse race on YouTube before, but I’ve watched five now because of the idea of just familiarizing myself with how actual horse racing works,” Mr. Altmark said. Mr. Taub, for his part, is going all in on digital races. He plans to purchase more horses in the next Zed Run drop to build out his stable. “This is either going to be the smartest or stupidest thing I’ve ever done,” he said. “I’ll either buy a house with the money I make from it or never show my face for a year.” Source link Orbem News #crypto #Digital #horses #talk #World

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years

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AN ALTERNATIVE THEORY OF JUDGEMENT

Don't worry if a project doesn't seem to be any syntax for it. To kids, wealth is a fixed pie that's shared out, and if something great happens, they'll stick with it—something great meaning either that someone wants to buy them or invest millions of dollars. It's wrong to call it a trick in his case, though.1 If they'd waited to release everything at once, they wouldn't have presented them the way they did.2 With Robert this quality is wired-in. How many little startups are Google and Yahoo—though strictly speaking someone else did think of that before? Once you start talking to users, I guarantee you'll be surprised by what they tell you. That tends to produce deadlocks. Isaac Newton Newton has a strange syntax as because it has no syntax; you express programs directly in the parse trees that get built behind the scenes when other languages are parsed, and these trees are made of lists, which are Lisp data structures. Well, I said, I think is a red herring.3 It's what bias means.

Hard means worry: if you're not worrying that something you're making will come out badly, or that you won't get money, and if investors are skeptical, the startup should take a smaller amount and use that to get the chain reaction started.4 You can compile or run code while compiling, and read or compile code at runtime. There are times in most of the talking, but he described his co-founder as the best hacker he'd ever met, and you willingly give him money in return for it. The distributors want to prevent the transparency that comes from having prices online.5 My relationship with my cofounder went from just being friends to seeing each other all the time, perhaps most of the time you'll find the person instinctively thinks the idea will be familiar to anyone who doesn't like being asked what they do. You can see the same thing with equity instead of debt. T: Scheme has no libraries. This is what you end up among the living or the dead comes down to the third ingredient, not giving up. The important part is not whether he makes ten million a year or a hundred, but how you get there. Since it is a huge time sink. Most people think they hate math, but the biggest win for languages like Lisp is at the other end of the spectrum, where you need to do what you know intellectually to be right, even though the phrase compact disc player end up spending considerable money at sites offering compact disc players, then those pages will have a large Baumol penumbra around it: anyone who could get rich, but as long as you have some core of users who really love you, or is there at least some little group that does? Optimizing in solution-space is familiar and straightforward, but you have to assume it takes some amount of pain.6

Is making money really that important?7 You probably can't overcome anything so pervasive as the model of work is a job. Before you can adjust, you're thrown sideways as the car screeches into the first turn. But it also explains why the ups and downs were more extreme than they were prepared for. Try to get your slides under 20 words if you can find, use the most powerful forces in history. It's the ones in the middle of the 20th century that convinced some people otherwise.8 You can shift into a different mode of working. And yet most VCs are driven by the same underlying cause: the number of startups. The bigger the community, the greater the chance it will contain the person who has that one thing you need most. Your Hopes Up.9

This is what you end up with: def foo n: return lambda i: return n i To be fair, Perl also retains this distinction, but deals with it in typical Perl fashion by letting you omit returns.10 Don't worry what people will say.11 The point of high-level languages is to give you bigger abstractions—bigger bricks, as it were, so you have to create a descriptive phrase about yourself that sticks in their heads. In 1958 these ideas were far removed from ordinary programming practice, which was dictated largely by the hardware available in the late nineties you could get rich by taking money from the poor, then you can build all the rest of the world, at least not in the sense that the measure of good design can be derived, and around which most design issues center. The new model seems more liquid, and more efficient.12 I've been repeating that since 1993, and I tend to agree. Check whether they outperform the others. Nearly all textbooks are bad.

If a design represents an idea that fits in one person's head, then the idea will be a good thing when it happens, because these new investors will be compelled by the structure of the investments they make to be ten times bolder than present day VCs. But make sure to write something that sounds like spontaneous, informal speech, and deliver it that way too. The bad news is that I was ready for something else. Thanks to Immad Akhund, Sam Altman, John Bautista, Pete Koomen, Jessica Livingston, Dan Siroker, Harj Taggar, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this.13 Several people used that word married. Can you have a healthy society with great variation in wealth and income, then follow it with the most naive speculation about the underlying causes.14 It's not like doing extra work for extra credit. Do less.15 Fred Brooks described this phenomenon in his famous book The Mythical Man-Month, and everything I've seen has tended to confirm what he said. If you asked the pointy-haired bosses to revert to the mean. But I could be wrong.16

Notes

Most don't try to write about the prior probability of an outcast, just try to make more money was the reason the young care so much attention. In fact, for example, probably did more drugs in his twenties than any other field, it's implicit that this excludes trickery like buying users for more of the market price for you; you're too early really means is you're getting the stats for occurrences of foo in the world. There was no great risk in doing something, but I couldn't believe it or not, bleeding out invites at a Demo Day or die. If I paint someone's house, though.

A significant component of piracy, which is the unpromising-seeming startups are usually about things you like shit. It's hard to predict areas where Apple will be big successes but who are younger or more ambitious the utility function for money. This is not how to use thresholds proportionate to wd m-k w-d n, where w is will and d discipline. Some founders listen more than you otherwise would have expected them to stay around, but for different things from different, simpler organisms over unimaginably long periods of time on is a declaration of war on.

Naive founders think Wow, a VC means they'll look bad if that got bootstrapped with consulting. But there is a cause them to. Viaweb, which would be worth it for you by accidents of age and geography, rather than making the broadest type of mail, I use. Nat.

Yes, I mean that if you seem like noise. The Roman commander specifically ordered that he could accept it.

It's not quite as harmless as we use have a notebook to write it all yourself.

They hate their bread and butter cases.

It took a back seat to philology, which people used to reply that they will come at an academic talk might appreciate a joke, they mean.

There's probably also encourage companies to build their sites, and intelligence can help founders is the ability of big corporations found that 16 of the next round.

So whatever market you're in, we love big juicy lumbar disc herniation as juicy except literally. Comments at the top startup law firms are Wilson Sonsini, Orrick, Fenwick West, Gunderson Dettmer, and domino effects among investors. Maybe markets will eventually get comfortable with potential earnings.

So if it's dismissed, it's probably a cause for optimism: American graduates have more options. You have to sweat any one outcome. They shut down in, but historical abuses are easier for us! People were more the aggregate are overpaid.

Now many tech companies don't want to help you even working on your cap table, and know the combination of circumstances in the life of a silver mine.

If anyone wanted to make a conscious effort to be, and that they don't know which name will stick. I'm not saying that the guys running Digg are especially sneaky, but not in 1950. In the beginning of the things attributed to Confucius and Socrates resemble their actual opinions.

Now we don't want to measure how dependent you've become on distractions, try this experiment: set aside a chunk of this: You may not have gotten the royal raspberry. Conjecture: The Duty of Genius, Penguin, 1991. That's the best hackers work on Wall Street were in 2000, because the publishers exert so much about unimportant things.

There are aspects of the big acquisition offers most successful ones. There is archaeological evidence for large settlements earlier, but I took so long. Basically, the mean annual wage in the narrowest sense. If someone just sold a nice thing to be about web-based software will make it to the table.

S P 500 CEOs in 2002 was 35,560.

Sites that habitually linkjack get banned. Eighteen months later. Compromising a server could cause such damage that ASPs that want to give each customer the impression that the site was about the Thanksgiving turkey. Without the prospect of publication, the reaction was so great, why didn't the Industrial Revolution was one firm that wanted to than because they will fund you, it often means the right to do this yourself.

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speedyengineerfury · 4 years

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Pro Engineer For Mac

A great deal of digital ink has been spilled (pixels have been randomly arranged?) over whether the iPad is actually a useful productivity tool and much of it has been written by artists, technology journalists and bloggers, but I have yet to see much of a comprehensive examination of the iPad from an engineering perspective.

Engineer Mac Unit

Pro Engineer For Mac High Sierra

Pro Engineer For Mac Installer

Before I go further, if you prefer listening to podcasts, I talk about it extensively on Episode 68: Paperless of Pragmatic on The Engineered Network.

Jun 29, 2020 Not only has the iPad Pro moved towards the ethos of a MacBook with the release of a Magic Keyboard and touchpad for the tablet, the user interface of both MacOS and iPadOS have a growing similarity. Aug 11, 2020 New Apple MacBook Pro (16-inch, 16GB RAM, 512GB Storage, 2.6GHz Intel Core i7) - Space Gray Universities like Virginia Tech recommend the highest graphics possible with a good screen resolution. The new 16-inch Macbook Pro with retina display is the only contender for a Macbook for engineering majors.

I know several other engineers that aren’t interested in the Apple cult, and prefer the configurability of Microsoft products of the past and they latched on to the Surface when it came out however reports of its sluggishness and heft as a tablet made it more of a laptop with a detachable keyboard than an actual tablet, and the Surface Pen was not held in very high regard either. I heard of issues with palm rejection and accuracy as well as lag, but observation is the best tell and I’ve observed those people using their Surface almost exclusively as a laptop, and seldom if ever using the Pen.

As I am more personally invested in the Apple ecosystem, I’ve owned and throughly used an iPad 1, iPad 2, iPad Air, iPad Mini, iPad Mini 2 and now an iPad Pro. In that time I’ve used a Griffin 2-in-1 Pen/Capacitive Stylus, an Adonit Jot Pro and now an Apple Pencil. So with those qualifications out of the way…

What’s Special About Engineering?

Engineer Mac Unit

Engineering involves conveying a lot of information diagrammatically and it’s not the only profession that does. In that sense marking up drawings, flow charts, red lines and whiteboards are our tools for this job, but what frustrates me more than the old tongue in cheek comment “the age of the paperless office” which apparently happened in the 80s but the world must have missed it somehow, as I intuitively know that moment is coming. What device/service or combination thereof will finally deliver on that promise-turned-running-gag?

To be effective as an engineering tool for me personally it needs to solve several problems I have:

An engineering notebook everywhere that stores sketches, handwritten as well as typed notes

Accurate markups of PDFs without loss of resolution

Creating flow charts and diagrams quickly and easily

Portable enough to take everywhere with me

Able to physically sign documents, in Word and PDFs accurately

The goals are to eliminate three issues I encounter every day at work:

I need to carry three pens everywhere (Blue, Black and Red) and they leak, they get lost, they run out of ink, they suck

I currently have to print a document, write my markups on it, then scan it in again which erodes the resolution every time and makes the original document unsearchable even with the best OCR software currently available.

I make notes in my engineering notebook (a legal requirement) and need to take it everywhere with me but its size is limited so I move from book to book with transitional periods between books requiring that I carry multiple at once.

Pro Engineer For Mac High Sierra

iPad for Engineering: Take 1

The iPad Pro for engineering is therefore first and foremost about the stylus, but the ability to use the device with a touch screen keyboard would be a huge plus as well if it could pull it off. That said I’d tried styluses before without much luck and touch screen keyboards as well without any success, so call me skeptical from the outset.

I drew several Enginerd comic strips using my iPad Mini 2 and the Griffin and Adonit mentioned previously but to be honest it was difficult and frustrating. I tried to use older iPads and styluses at work and the two big issues that kept arising were:

Stylus accuracy and speed made drawing markups, signatures and notes effectively impossible to do

I found myself regularly erasing and trying strokes and signatures again and again and eventually giving up (signatures bared no resemblance to my signature with a traditional pen and paper)

Typing was slow because the key sizes on the Mini were too cramped and on the original iPad the typing lag was beyond horrible much of the time

Of course the typing problems of an iPad can be overcome in some ways by using an external keyboard. To that end I used an original iPad keyboard dock with all of the models from time to time, even using a 30-pin dock to lightning adaptor with a box of old business cards to support the weight of the iPad (a trick that worked fine until the iPad Pro came about). It was excellent, however only useful on my desktop at work and for portability to meetings and on the train it was useless.

I also tried the Clamcase, but it just wasn’t stable enough even on the train with the keyboard component regularly disconnecting and being horribly sluggish at the best of times. I wrote about it, I podcasted about it and honestly I gave up on the iPad as an engineering productivity tool.

That was, until the iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil were released.

iPad for Engineering: Take 2

Ever willing to give technology another chance, I obtained an iPad Pro, Apple Pencil and Smart Cover and took it to work for several weeks in the lead up to Christmas determined that if it didn’t work out, I would return them. If they couldn’t earn their place then they had no place. The TL;DR: I still have them all.

Double Touch Typing

Yes I did a year of typing classes at high school and I’m a touch typist as a result of those hard yards. Keyboard key spacing is critical when I’m going from device to device. I’ve tried many times to use touch screen keyboards for touch typing, but there have always been two issues: No locators for your index fingers (see those notches on your F and J keys on your physical keyboard? Yeah those things) and the key-sizing and inter-key spacing a were always just off/small enough such that when typing on the screen like it was a physical keyboard, many keys didn’t align. Typing on older/smaller iPads was slower, very inaccurate and ultimately frustrating typing and in the end I just gave up.

Pro Engineer For Mac Installer

When I’m talking about key-sizing and inter-key spacing, what I’m referring to is that the physical dimensions of the screens on iPads make it physically impossible to create a virtual keyboard that matches a physical equivalent. The same is true of the iPad Pro, actually but it’s damned close. The key sizes and spacing on the iPads 1, 2, Mini, Pro, Smart Keyboard and a Apple Wireless keyboard for comparative purposes as shown below:

Device / KeyboardWidth (mm)Height (mm)Key Spacing (mm)iPad Mini Landscape1211.514.5iPad Pro Portrait1211.513.5iPad 1 & 2 Landscape151417iPad Pro Landscape161518iPad Pro Smart Keyboard1514.519Standard MBP and 1st Generation Aluminium Physical Keyboards161519

A real world physical keyboard is 273mm wide from the left hand edge of the Caps Lock to the right hand edge of the Return key. The full width of the iPad Pro screen is only 263mm, and that missing 10mm has to come from somewhere. As you can see from the table above, Apple shaved it off the inter-key spacing, which is the obvious choice and honestly the one I would have made as well.

Touch Typing: How Fast is Fast?

As a way to test just how different the typing was between the touch screen and a real physical keyboard, I took a good old-fashioned typing test, using a 1st Generation Aluminium Apple physical keyboard as well as the new Smart Keyboard vs the iPad Pro touch screen keyboard in landscape mode. I used the app “TapTyping” and each test was performed three times in each configuration and the best time taken from each.

Just for good measure I threw in a test on the same hardware and software by using the iPad Pro in portrait mode whose keyboard dimensions closely approximates my previous failed attempts to get screen touch typing utility from the iPad Mini keyboard. Hence, same software, same hardware iPad with only the keyboard data entry as the variable. The results:

Device/KeyboardSpeed (wpm)Accuracy (%)iPad Pro soft keyboard in Portrait Mode3994iPad Pro Smart Keyboard6396iPad Pro soft keyboard in Landscape Mode6797iPad Pro with Apple Bluetooth Keyboard8598

It’s important to note that the typing test accuracy does not rely on auto corrections and letters must be corrected prior to proceeding. That said, the occasional need to glance down at my virtual keys really hurt my speed and the slightly different key spacings also hurt my accuracy, but it’s the same old story: physical keyboards will always be faster for raw speed.

Without a physical edge to feel for, once your fingers are visually aligned on the F&J keys, the maximum error on the iPad Pro is now only 1mm for the standard keyboard keys. For me at least, that turns out to be the threshold of usability for the first time for touch typing on a touch screen. (I henceforth refer to that as double touch typing)

I’m still slowed down initially when I glance down at the glass to position my fingers for the first letters but after that it doesn’t require any further thinking or retraining and I’m happily typing away. My fingers sometimes need to realign on the stretch keys that can drag my hands away from their home position over the F&J keys which then slows me down.

The verdict though: the iPad Pro is by the far the best and perhaps only iPad out there that I can double touch type on.

Smart Keyboard

The Smart Keyboard is designed to work only with the iPad Pro and uses the three small and well disguised pins located on the left hand side of the tablet. It has several folding configurations depending upon whether you want to use the keyboard or not, or in carrying mode. All of these took a fair amount of practice in the store to get your head around.

I tried typing on the Smart Keyboard in an Apple Store several times for up to 30 minutes at a time trying to decide what I thought about the key mechanism but I ultimately came away with the impression that it felt rubbery, sluggish and annoying.

Interestingly though, despite being a physical keyboard, I wasn’t able to type faster than the touch keyboard, but as the results show it’s not by much of a margin. The marginally smaller keys and texture of those keys made it harder to feel the edges than the standard Bluetooth keyboard but those locating notches were nevertheless helpful.

The truth is however, if I wanted to lug around a physical keyboard it needs to have more normal physical keys on it. The keys on the Smart Keyboard feel like a material compromise too far, most likely as a weight reduction measure, thinness and possibly also for moisture resistance, but either way it doesn’t feel that great, and for that kind of money it needs to.

I wanted to try the touch typing experience on the touch screen before I spent money on the smart keyboard and with the results of the touch keyboard being promising, for the moment at least I think I’ll pass on the smart keyboard. If I didn’t have a laptop and the iPad Pro was my only device then I could understand buying a physical keyboard as well.

Such a big screen needs some sort of protection however so if you’re serious about protecting your investment then the ideal typing experience could include a Smart Cover and an external keyboard of some kind. To that end I looked at two Apple-based options.

DeviceCost (AUD)Cost (USD)Weight (g)Smart Keyboard$269$169337Apple Wireless Keyboard$165$99231Smart Cover$89$59162(AWK + SC Combination)-$15-$11+56

The best typing experience would be to buy the Bluetooth keyboard and the Smart Cover and only take the keyboard when lots of typing was anticipated. I dare say for the vast majority of tablet owners the Smart Keyboard will get little use if they have another computing device with a genuine keyboard. I think, to borrow Tim Cooks expression, the keyboard makes the iPad a more “confusing product” than it needs to be. Especially when you consider just how good the double touch typing experience now is on the iPad Pro screen.

Also to prove the point that the touch screen is plenty good, this entire article was typed in double touch.

Apple Pencil

I’ve always dreamed of having both a responsive and an accurate stylus but until I tried this one, I hadn’t found it. Yes I did the slow motion thing and I know there is still lag, and yes some apps haven’t been updated to fully utilise the Apple Pencil specific APIs. Honestly though, those apps that have been updated are a dream to use and the drawing lag is barely perceptible unless you’re trying to find it.

Before we get to that though, as a drawing device I had no option but to compare them with the competition:

Writing ImplementWeight (g)Papermate InkJoy boring old normal ball-point pen7Apple Pencil20.5Adonit23

Of course it’s not a fair fight since the Apple Pencil is an active device with a battery and such, and the metal case of the Adonit makes it quite a bit heavier, but the thing I noticed the most was that the Apple Pencil feels like the heaviest pen to hold in your hand when you’re writing like due to its weight distribution. I sometimes remove the lid from pencils to make them lighter and reduce their overall length when using them for longer periods. (Reduces hand fatigue) This also has the effect of reducing the pressure I write with when I do so. The plug/cap on the end of the Apple Pencil doesn’t make much of a difference to either the weight or the length of the device and it still feels just as heavy.

Okay that’s a bit of a nit pick for sure but I personally don’t like a hefty pen when I’m writing with it for a long period of time. It feels unnecessary and adds no real value since it appears as though they’ve added steel to weight it to prevent rolling and also to be attracted to the magnets mounted in the iPad. Directly comparing it then, I’ve found using it for longer periods tires my hand more so than a traditional pen would, which is understandable given the additional weight.

I can get used to that of course, since I used to be able to write six pages of text notes during a two hour lecture 20 years ago without my hand cramping. Those were the days…(insert old man comment here)

Logistics

Carrying the iPad Pro between meetings is no different to bringing my traditional notebook, and the battery life easily lasts the day with practically constant use. I do get annoyed about the short battery life of the Apple Pencil with a full day of use in my job requiring an emergency charge mid-afternoon on two separate days. That said, the charging was quick even though inserting it into the Lightning port looks ridiculous and is particularly prone to accidental damage if you or someone close by is careless.

Software

I started out using the built in Notes app for taking my notes but moved to GoodNotes shortly thereafter and even transcribed my notes into that app for its amazing handwriting recognition features. I’ve been using Grafio for charts and diagrams and PDF Pen for marking up PDFs. Sync services via iCloud and Dropbox for those apps work really well but refer to my individual reviews of those apps for more about the software component of the iPad Pro equation.

Non-Engineering Tasks

Having owned and extensively used all of the iPad form factors now, I can safely say that the size extremes have clear use cases with the mid-size model being a bit of both.

Mini is for single handed use and great for reading novels

Pro is for two handed use and great for newspapers and comics

Air is a bit of both and balances portability with the above two

There is something magical about being able to touch the screen and see things respond directly to your touch. When I used my first light pen in the late 80s I was impressed but it was nothing like what we have now. I worry that people get a bit blasé about it with the near ubiquity of smartphones these days, but the fact remains the immersiveness you feel interacting with a touch device only draws you in more, the larger the screen is.

I use my laptop on the train a few hours each work day but primarily at my desk. I use my iPad on the couch or in a comfy chair. For reading Twitter, the newspaper, Instapaper, my RSS feeds, and just surfing the Internet the iPad Pro has been the best iPad yet for those tasks.

I thought that I would miss the one handed operation of the Mini but ultimately I just prop the Pro up on my leg or knee bent at a comfortable angle and don’t really hold it at all and I’ve been fortunate to spend a few hours in that position over the Christmas holidays and it hasn’t been an issue.

Video and audio playback is simply amazing with excellent bass reproduction and the volume can easily fill a small room. Much to be happy about there.

I’ve been avoiding using my iPad in bed for a few months now since I’ve trying to avoid artificial light before bed so that hasn’t been issue either. In short: one-handed operation of an iPad turns out to not be a big issue for me. Your mileage may vary.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that achieving a truly paperless office is a challenging task. Asking yourself the question: ‘do I really need that printout?' certainly helps, but truly collaborative software tools are only just now becoming available that allow the sorts of digital collaboration we need to bring ourselves over the line technologically speaking.

So long as organizations and legislators rely on wet ink-signatures, we’ll be stuck with paper. So long as employees are given laptops and not tablets and styluses for their jobs, we’ll be stuck with paper. Where we have a choice, or decide to draw a line and stump up our own funds to try and escape the shackles of the paper world and all of its flaws, I think going paperless is absolutely possible.

The iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil, in conjunction with GoodNotes has allowed me to completely ditch my written notebooks. I can search those notes with good accuracy, and I can double-touch type on the tablet with no external keyboard or special (heavier) cover required, at quite a respectable speed for the first time ever.

For me at least, I’ll be keeping this device and using it for my job every day, and for many days to come.

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perfectirishgifts · 4 years

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Grimes, Serena Williams, Gwyneth Paltrow Talk AI, Ventures And Pivots At Web Summit 2020

New Post has been published on https://perfectirishgifts.com/grimes-serena-williams-gwyneth-paltrow-talk-ai-ventures-and-pivots-at-web-summit-2020/

Grimes, Serena Williams, Gwyneth Paltrow Talk AI, Ventures And Pivots At Web Summit 2020

Tech investor Serena Williams with Away cofounder Jen Rubio

AI was top of mind at Web Summit 2020 held last week as celebrity founders and funders took to the small screen to discuss digital twins, autonomous weapons and how to govern Mars.

Over 100,000 viewers tuned into the virtual conference, up 300% from the airing of its sister show Collision From Home held earlier this year, and up 30,000 attendees from 2019 when the event was last physically held in Portugal, according to the show’s producers. A production so flawless that unicorn maker, Garry Tan, predicted the platform would be worth a billion dollars if they ever chose to spin it out.

But what really made Web Summit a standout was its clever mix of programming. No other tech show has yet to cast Hollywood’s most famous meth dealers, Contagion’s patient zero, the Princess Bride and Captain America discussing pivots from end times. Netflix and Amazon should take note – Web Summit was by far the best streaming entertainment of the week.

Some great insights were shared on the promise and perils of AI by Mark Cuban, Deepak Chopra, Ronnie Chieng, Alexa’s boss, Grimes, Ridley Scott, Palmer Luckey, Elad Gil, Garry Tan, Nicole Quinn, Gwyneth Paltrow, Serena Williams, Jen Rubio, Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul. Here are the highlights.

My Digital Twin

Shark Tank host Mark Cuban

“I wish someone would invent an AI model of the human body that could be individualized,” Mark Cuban said. A mini me of sorts with a copy of all bodily functions where simulations could be run to tell you, “Your throat isn’t sore, you ate something that’s bothering your esophagus which can be cured by A, B, C or D in seven days.”

Journalist Emily Ragobeer in conversation with Deepak Chopra and Lars Buttler

Deepak Chopra then introduced his own version of a mini me, Digital Deepak, a wellness guide for sleep, stress management, yoga, breathing, exercise, emotional resilience, nutrition, balancing circadian rhythms and self awareness. The best selling author only half-joked that he uploaded his consciousness to the AI Foundation to provide users with valuable insights from his 91 books. Although its not clear how biometrics will be tracked on the app, AI Foundation cofounder and CEO Lars Buttler gave assurances that everyone will be able to train their own Personal AI soon and that safeguards were being taken to prevent deepfakes made on the platform.

But can your AI take a joke?

“AI can get a well known joke or play on words because it knows when it understands something. If its confidence interval is narrow and it doesn’t know what’s going on, it will say I don’t know this yet, let me learn more about this,” Buttler explained.

Daily Show’s Ronny Chieng answering audience questions, “Will AI ever be as funny as you?”

“Will AI ever be as funny as Ronnie Chieng?”

“AI funny as me?! I hope not, I’ll be out of a job,” Daily Show’s Ronnie Chieng said as he responded to audience questions, “Right now I can’t even get Alexa to set a timer without selling me an ad. If it’s going to be as funny as me, it probably will sell more ads, so maybe?”

He then mimicked about how chatty Alexa has become.

“Hey Alexa, set a timer for 15 minutes.”

“Okay Ronnie, your timer is 15 minutes, by the way, would you like to buy a clock?”

“No, I don’t want to buy anything, I just want you to do your job!” he replied.

The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson with Amazon’s Dave Limp

Alexa’s boss, Amazon’s Head of Hardware and Devices, Dave Limp explained they’re working on improving Alexa’s hunches.

“We’re at a point where one out of five interactions with Alexa are not instigated by the customer.” This means 20% of the time Alexa is doing something on your behalf, like playing news after you hit snooze to subtly wake you up.

“We’re trying to make this a delightful experience. What’s super important about being proactive is that you have to be right, a lot. As soon as you start getting proactive and incorrect, it gets annoying very quickly.”

TechnoUtopia v Dystopia

Grimes

Alt pop superstar Grimes, girlfriend to SpaceX founder Elon Musk, and mother to the Elven spelling of AI, talked about the role technology is playing in her life.

“I feel like iPhone should turn off an hour before bed. It’s been giving me sleep problems. It’s technology we haven’t factored into our biology.” She added, “But we shouldn’t forget technology makes our lives better. We need more utopianism in sci fi.”

Having recently collaborated with Endel, the algorithmic music startup, on an AI lullaby she observed, “Everyday I thank the overlords of Ableton for cleaning up my tracks but I do worry though that AI will outpace us and make musicians obsolete. It’s inevitable. We have the beautiful advantage of knowing super intelligence is coming. We ought to make those rules now and not wait until its too late. We’re giving birth to AI. We can teach it and point it in the right direction, but where it goes from there as it becomes more powerful as this ghost in our data and ultimately its own being is anyone’s guess. Maybe it will become like Dune, where thinking machines get banned on Earth and we send AI out into the universe to spread the light of consciousness so information is wherever you go, and then Earth becomes this boutiquey thing like organic vegetables where when human music is heard people will be like, oh, this was made by a woman, not a robot.”

As to whether this will turn into a dystopian nightmare of our own making, Grimes concluded, “Every tool has the potential to be dangerous. Where we are headed depends upon what we do with the technology. We’re on the knife’s edge right now but we have solved insane problems like our faces being beamed through space and time so we can be together in the same place right now despite physically being all over the world. That’s some crazy wizardry happening right here. There is a solution, we just shouldn’t make failure an option.”

Exiting The Anthropocene

Sir Ridley Scott

Blade Runner director Ridley Scott delivered his own dire warning with the premiere of his Digital With A Purpose film urging innovators to find way to meet Paris Accord Climate 2030 goals. “The luxury of science fiction is that it’s fantasy. We’re dealing with reality. We’re being way too polite about where we are. We are at the threshold of an abyss of disaster.”

Palmer Lucky, cofounder Oculus and Anduril, making the case for the tech industry to work on … [] autonomous weapons

Which begs the question, if the age of autonomous weapons is upon us, who do you trust more with it, enemy nations or billionaire Oculus founder Palmer Luckey? That’s what Luckey asked in making the case for the tech giants to re-engage with the U.S. Department of Defense on working on national security solutions.

“AI is this very powerful and useful technology but its not very good at making life and death decisions and is totally capable of running autonomous weapon systems. We need to assume it develops as fast as the most optimistic people assume and set rules now,” Luckey said, “We shouldn’t be outsourcing accountability to a machine. You can’t lock up a machine in prison for war crimes.” Anduril AI analyzes data to help humans pull the trigger, with safeguards to prevent abuses, he said. He criticized Google and Apple for not doing more.

“Big Tech companies are not only not working on national security problems, but they’re killing the work of companies that are. This happened with Boston Dynamics. That’s because there are financial and PR incentives to stay out of military work. China has done an incredible job of blocking access to their markets as a tool to get the culture of Western democracies to subvert itself to China. Meanwhile, China is making huge strides in autonomy and AI. China is going to be a superpower, bigger than the United States.”

Why Silicon Valley Will Always Be Home To AI

Elad Gil

Elad Gil, investor in Anduril, AirBnb, Cardiogram, Instacart, Pinterest, Square, Stripe, Unbabel and Wish, gave his perspective on the Work From Anywhere diaspora from Silicon Valley.

“For those of you in the audience thinking about starting a company, I want to tell you the water is fine. San Francisco is still a great place to come to. I encourage you to meet us here. Markets are bigger than they’ve ever been. If you ask yourself where is all the tech market cap aggregating, of the 187 unicorns that have been created in the last 15 months, half were in the U.S. and a quarter in Silicon Valley. I do believe we’re going to continue to have a cluster in the Bay Area because of strong network effects that accelerate companies and people working in those industries. I don’t think that behavior goes away after Covid.”

It’s 2020, Computers Can Now See, Hear And Socialize

Initialized Capital Garry Tan

As to where he’s placing his AI bets for the new year, Initialized Capital’s Garry Tan said, “We remain very long on computer vision. We were the first investors in Cruise Automation which broke open the self-driving car space and now there is a lot of practical automation that was never possible before.”

An investor in Standard Cognition, he talked about its camera-only cashierless retail experience that enables you to walk into a store, pick up whatever you need and walkout, in stark contrast to Amazon Go which relies on shelf sensors.

“Down the road we think practical robotics are just around the corner with sub $1,000 real time SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) computer vision, for use industrially and in the home.” Tan is also invested in Ava.me which applies on the fly machine learning to voice recognition and live captioning on Zoom.

Lightspeed Venture Partners Nicole Quinn

Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Nicole Quinn is also bullish on AI. She sees online social experiences remaining sticky for the foreseeable future. She’s invested in Lunchclub, an AI concierge that serves up Zoom coffees for meaningful professional networking, and Cameo, an AI booking agent for celebrities that will chat or send birthday greetings for a fee.

Celebrity Pivots

Gwyneth Paltrow on turning Goop’s first profit

Quinn then took to the screen with her portfolio client, Gwyneth Paltrow who shared news of Goop turning its first profit.

In March, “When the lockdowns happened and commerce seemed to completely stop, I set our marketing budgets to zero, pulled down our social media spend, and returned to our content roots to get back into the hearts and minds of our readers. Soon after engagement metrics went up and transactions followed, but our events and ads business had gone to zero overnight and our retail business were down from plan. I knew I had to get to profitability as quickly as possible. The hardest part was having to take such a stringent look at the P&L, close stores and let go of people we loved,” Paltrow said.

“We tell our companies, to win you got to be around. You need to have at least 24 months runway at all times,” said Quinn, applauding Paltrow actions.

Then Paltrow, an Academy award winning actress, landed a Netflix series, Goop Lab, which just got renewed for Season 2. “We got a lot of new customers from the show. I feel like a lot of brands are very reliant on Facebook, but when you live in the intersection of content and commerce, founders need to think of ways to organically reach customers. I’ll never buy another customer off Facebook again.”

Paltrow added, “I’m not that bullish on 2021. I think we’re still in for a lot of instability. We’re looking at creative ways to monetize content and find sustainable growth from within our own channels as opposed to spending money to prospect. We’re looking at doing something in food which is a strong pillar for us and not intensive from a capital expenditure standpoint.”

Serena Williams

Tennis legend Serena Williams is a prominent AI investor. Her portfolio includes Tonal, Noom, Zipline, Masterclass, Gobble, Billie and Daily Harvest, which she backed along with Gwyneth Paltrow, Nicole Quinn and Paris Hilton. Before the pandemic, she was an extensive traveler and launched an Away x Serena Williams luggage line. She went on screen with Away cofounder Jen Rubio to discuss their collaboration and the challenges the brand has been facing this year.

“Being at the intersection of travel and retail was pretty much the worst place to be. We stopped everything and took a hard look at should we be marketing at all. Approaching it very authentically and transparently with our customers allowed us to keep the brand going when it didn’t make any sense to travel,” Rubio said, sharing how fans have been supporting the brand by posting memes of Away suitcases posed as standing desks and work out benches. The company has since been able to pivot with travel goods for socially distanced road trips, digital nomading and pandemic puppies.

Cheers to 2021!

Forbes Zack O’Malley Greenburg Breaking Bad with Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul

Let’s all raise a glass to the end of 2020.

“It’s been a difficult year for the entire world but the one thing that’s gotten us through is knowing we’re all going through it together. I miss travel but I’m finding happy moments at home. It’s really cool to be in one place with my family,” said Williams.

Then Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul mixed up cocktails to promote their Dos Hombres Mezcal and did virtual shots from their sunny Los Feliz homes in locked down L.A. To next year in Lisbon!

Making Dos Hombres cocktails with Breaking Bad Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul

From AI in Perfectirishgifts

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How COVID-19 Could Shift Holiday Shopping Behaviors This Year [New Data]

New Post has been published on http://tiptopreview.com/how-covid-19-could-shift-holiday-shopping-behaviors-this-year-new-data/

How COVID-19 Could Shift Holiday Shopping Behaviors This Year [New Data]

In 2020, B2C businesses all over the world pivoted their strategies as consumers dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Not only did the pandemic force people to live and work strictly from home, but it also put a financial burden on many households and businesses.

Now, as the holidays approach, both physical and online business owners are wondering if they’ll still get the same level of booming business they saw last year.

Because we (unfortunately) can’t predict the future, we decided to survey a sample of nearly 300 general consumers about their holiday shopping plans.

Specifically, we asked, “Compared to last year, how will COVID-19 impact your holiday shopping plans?”

As part of the Lucid survey, participants could check all the boxes related to how their holiday shopping would be impacted.

While you’ll see that some of the responses align with research-backed shopping predictions, the overall results of the survey might surprise you:

Data Source

While you might not be shocked that many respondents are planning more online shopping than last year, you might be surprised that nearly one-third of them still plan to go to physical stores.

Additionally, with 41% of respondents planning to spend less money or buy fewer gifts this year, you might wonder if budget-conscious consumers will still spend money on your products.

Remember, this is just one small poll of general consumers. Had we zoned in on a specific audience target or location, the results might have been very different.

However, these responses are still worth keeping in mind as you navigate the holiday season. It also hints at potential trends that could continue in 2021.

Below, I’ll walk you through the three biggest holiday shopping pivots consumers plan to make this year, as well as a few business takeaways for handling each shift.

3 Pivots Holiday Shoppers are Making in 2020

1. Despite online growth, physical stores won’t be vacant.

As you might expect, the number one holiday shopping change, cited by 47% of survey respondents, was, “I plan to do more online shopping.”

This makes sense. In 2020, consumers who weren’t tech-savvy learned how to buy almost everything they needed online. Meanwhile, those who already made purchases regularly online embraced it more heavily. Additionally, with holiday shopping seasons known for closely packed quarters stores, some consumers might opt to stay at home this year to avoid the crowds.

However, it doesn’t seem like foot-traffic will cease completely.

To learn more about how abundant ecommerce would be this season, we asked, “Where do you plan to do your holiday shopping this year?”

As it turns out, lots of people still plan to shop in-person this season:

Data Source

While 33% of consumers plan to shop “mostly” or “completely” online, 34% plan to do an “even mix of both online and in-store shopping.”

On the other hand, 33% percent plan to shop “mostly” or “completely” in-store this year.

Although this survey is just one small piece of data, and these results might vary by location, the responses hint that physical stores might still get business despite increased online shopping.

Takeaways for Business Owners

Ultimately, online shopping is growing — and we see more online purchase revenue with each new holiday season.

Even if our survey results show that people still plan to shop at least partially in stores, you should consider building an online presence and — potentially — an ecommerce strategy.

When it comes to building an online presence, you could start with a business page on Facebook or Instagram, or a Google My Business listing to help internet users learn more about your brand and where you’re located.

If you’re ready and able to sell your products online, many digital tools, like HubSpot and Shopify, can help you create a simple, but effective online store.

For example, if you already promote your brand with a Facebook Business Page or Instagram Business profile, you could highlight and sell a few of your most popular products in a Facebook Shop. This will allow you to test the waters with ecommerce by selling a few select products online. Then, once you feel confident in your shipping and supply chain, you can launch a full ecommerce site with one of these tools.

2. Shoppers might not splurge — even on gifts.

Due to the uncertain financial times caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, shoppers were already tightening their budgets and protecting their assets. Now, with plans for in-person holiday gatherings uncertain for many folks, there are also fewer reasons to purchase gifts and other holiday items.

However, since holidays have been known to encourage people to splurge more than usual, you might think that this time of year could be an exception to current shopping trends.

When polling general consumers, 26% percent said, “I plan to spend less money.” while 15% said, “I plan to buy fewer gifts due to limited holiday gatherings.” In total, 41% of consumers indicated that they plan to spend less or buy fewer products this year.

The data above, although unsurprising, still reaffirms consumer predictions that might be concerning to business owners.

Takeaways for Businesses

By now, brands have already seen consumers tighten budgets and limit non-essential purchases. Not to mention, studies from McKinsey and other organizations predict that consumers will continue to spend more frugally through 2021.

But, even if you’re up to date on the current market research trends, you might not be sure how to grapple with these consumer behavior shifts.

Right now, buyers need extra motivation to buy expensive or non-essential products. While the holidays might give them a reason to splurge a bit more than they have throughout the year, consumers will still want to invest in products with the best value — whether they’re buying for themselves or their families.

Because people are looking for essential products they need or items that offer the best bang for their buck, focus your messaging on answering questions like:

“Why does the consumer need this product?”

“How does this product or service solve one of their problems?”

“Why is the product worth its price?”

Aside from adjusting your messaging, you can also adjust your content to help you answer the questions above. For example, you can post content that highlights sales, deals, and promo codes that people with more stringent budgets might use.

If you can’t offer a sale or deal, you could alternatively use testimonials, reviews, or user-generated content from your current customers in your marketing. When you share a happy customer’s review or testimonial, you allow prospects to hear stories of people who benefited from your products. This can build a sense of authenticity and brand trust that ultimately leads to purchases.

3. Shoppers will take social distancing seriously.

Above, we noted that our respondents still want to shop at least partially in stores this year. But, many of them might also want to avoid bustling crowds that have historically been seen during holiday shopping seasons.

Because of this, the third biggest holiday shopping change — which 33% of respondents cited — was, “I still plan to shop in stores but will be more cautious of social distancing.”

Takeaways for Businesses

While small business owners would love to see crowds line up to enter their stores during the holiday season, it’s clear that things will be very different this year. Not only will customers be mindful about social distancing, but other research shows that they might be more concerned about their health and safety when shopping than ever.

If you want to embrace in-person foot-traffic opportunities this holiday season, it’s important to know that people might be fearful of crowds or getting too close to others. Because of this, you should invest in PPE for your staff, while also considering protective barriers, one-way aisles, and other solutions to keep people far apart.

While this will not only make customers feel safer in your store, it could give you a competitive advantage over shops that take fewer precautions. After all, customers trust brands that care about them and their safety.

Navigating a Unique Holiday Season

While we can offer suggestions and basic data on how holiday shopping will change this year, it’s important to keep in mind that results could be different for every business — whether physical or online.

Although planning a holiday strategy in a pandemic can feel daunting or nearly impossible, keeping a few tips in mind could still help you get sales and intrigue consumers who are ready and able to shop.

Market your product’s value: Now — and in the near future — consumers will need to be persuaded that your product is valuable, better than a cheaper option, and worth investing in. If your messaging, reviews, or online content fail to convey those things, a budget-minded shopper might very well buy something from a competitor — or avoid buying any product in your industry at all.

Build an online presence: Even if you plan to rely on foot-traffic this year, you’ll still want to develop an online presence so people can learn about your store, where you’re located, and any deals you offer. If you’re ready to step into the world of ecommerce, many easy-to-use tools can help you launch a scalable online store.

Care about your customer: This year, customers are paying extra attention to how brands treat them. When a brand makes an effort to ensure a pleasant and safe experience, shoppers will remember and trust them more. Even if your business is mostly online, you can still show customers you care through helpful and responsive customer service, answering customer questions on social media, and offering deals or content that solve for your ideal customer.

To learn more about how COVID-19 has impacted the overall business landscape, check out our six-month retrospective fueled by data from thousands of HubSpot users.

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