#keep writing that paper that expands on already experimented model

[autoirishlitdiscourses]

Discourse of Monday, 26 April 2021

See Wikipedia's article on poitín for more sections like these two texts and look at. What does this similarity matter? I disagree with the latest selection from The Butcher Boy, you'd just need to score less than thrilled at this point is more likely to be more specific thesis statement expresses, and I won't calculate participation until the end of that grade and that missing more than merely plausible, which were strong last time you were perhaps a little below the mechanics of getting people to go. You've done a lot of really productive ways or it might be thought to be a difficult text, and especially of An Spalpin Fanach. You picked a difficult line to walk, especially if the way that the professor an email no later than Friday afternoon.

There are many many others. Of course!

Drop if you wanted to remind people. There were some amazing performances on it, your delivery was sensitive to the audience so that we have a proclivity for rather dark humor and deal thematically as a writer. Scoring at least some background on Irish money if you want the experience to be absolutely sure that I would say the smartest way to push your own argument even more would have helped to have dug into these topics.

It's just that, in part because its boundaries are rather difficult, and don't have a positive thing, I realize. Again, I can't go over, and it will help you punch through to an X and/or may not, but because considering how best to get a passing grade; I feel like is currently better developed and more focused. So thinking about which I'm ready to go back through the writing process is a policeman.

Let me know if you have any questions, and structure may be productive. All in all, you must recite a selection that you told your aunt in Ohio, who harangues Bloom and/or recall problems. I think the fairest grade to your presentation notes would be to say that, I promise to keep it up or down by much. One implication of this offer to you. Please send me your plans by 10 a. I'll see you in section. You're welcome! It would have paid off quite a bit. However, I do tomorrow, but certainly not going to be posted to the connections between the excellent interpretation that you've tried to point people when looking at the end of the University, and I'll get you feedback on your sheet so I can't tell for sure. It's a very strong work here, I will call life which is fantastic and well tied to the poem, specifically, you are trying to get people to pursue the topic. Stoddard, O'Casey, Act IV: Chorus sung: John McCormack singing It's a two-minute warning by holding up the last minute.

To have one extensive monologue from someone who is a really good ideas in an A-for the quarter, and quite engaging. 415 B-range paper grades discussed in more detail, I am not asking you to perform suboptimally on the most directly productive here would have paid off to have had Cyclops suggested to them effectively, demonstrated a strong preference and I'll stay late. It's all yours! All in all ways, and the historical situation. Similar things could be set against each other personally. Let me say some general things, you should focus on the assignment, and exploring additional related issues, focus your analysis what is short-sighted or otherwise need to expose your own writing, get an incomplete would also require the professor's miss three sections, get an A-territory with 1 point out, it's insightful—but being flexible may be that your choice of a number of particular interpretive problems for Ulysses none of these are true. So, you would like to see Dexter as a first draft and allow for real discussion with the assumption that the more egregious errors in the biggest payoff possible sometimes you have any further questions, and my guess is that the Irish as postcolonial subjects; probably others. Another potential difficulty is that you did a good night, due to midterm-related questions?

I can attest from personal experience it can feel to a natural move is to find that this is a very strong essay in a comparative manner over time, and I quite liked a lot of ways. This is already an impressive move, and modeling this for everyone, Having just checked my stack of midterms against my other section is engaged and engaging despite my sometimes rather nitpicky comments, but more general discussion of The Butcher Boy; Stephen Dedalus's rather morbid and misogynist fixation on the Mad Hatter's hat in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. I suggest that Dexter is X, whereas Y is like A, for free: Chris Walker and the ideas and your boost from your section self-addressed, stamped envelope with enough stamps to make sure that I'll be in my box South Hall 1415. You picked a very small number of ways here: you had an accommodation through the writing process is itself the immediate, direct, personal interest in the first seven that the song. Often, a profitable manner, and it shouldn't be too hard to avoid thinking that an A, in case they ask you questions for discussion.

I do not overlap with yours, but I also think that it's actually not that you were reciting and discussing the selection you picked to the course's discourse about Shakespeare every day, because unless you are, I think. Reminder: if people aren't getting quite full credit on author, title, date, you really have done. One would have helped you to ten pages long; this counts everything including participation and attendance that is excerpted in Plough. Let me know what you're going, and you managed to articulate as fully integrated parts of your quarter! If you have done quite a challenge, and want to make sure that you just need to be aware that you just need to make huge conceptual leaps immediately. If you happen to have a good student and I will take this into account. Still Life-Le Jour. Have a good performance even though this is potentially profitable idea, but may not be able to give you a grade somewhere in the front of me wanted to demonstrate that you score at the top of the first three and four the other students were engaged, and the Stars: Nora Clitheroe, The Stare's Nest again so that I can. You had said to other people talking. A-for the quarter winds up being more successful in any way that helps to further your analysis and perhaps point him toward your larger-scale details and of putting them next to each other. Similarly, looking at the Recitation Assignment Guidelines handout. You're got a perfectly acceptable to cite poems by Eavan Boland, and would have needed to happen for this particular passage. If you don't have a hard line to walk, and it's completely up to this page:. Can you confirm she was having. Make sure that your formatting is impeccable. I felt the same degree that you gave quite a nice touch, too. Let me know if you want to know how GOLD looks for undergrads, I'm dying for it and so this hurts your ability to appreciate the argument in a productive exercise I myself tend to think about how you achieve full and open honesty about where you need to be this week. I'm sympathetic here. Not mine. Yes, that's fine provided that the one that the professor is a mid-century American painter Willem de Kooning's Woman series is full. My current plan is to think about what audiovisual and historical issues at stake. Looks like you. Picking a selection from each paragraph, you have any questions, OK? The assignment required and gave what was overall an excellent sense of the several topics that each of you effectively boosted the other's grade while you write, and have moved forward even more specifically on the section guidelines handout. I say thank you for being a good job here. The first of these guidelines with you. Soon to be fully successful. Yes/no pass, knowing where you are nervous about possibly having accidentally leaked confidential information, but rather to help you to think about how recruiting works and the marketplace, and is able to avoid. And your writing is quite enjoyable. Have a good move here, I can find a recording of your group, and your health allows. What this relationship between these texts in an otherwise dull day. Again, please read September 1913. Com that you are attentive to what other students in great detail, I absolutely understand that this is unfortunate because they tend to do that metaphorically. If he lets you expand or drop material if that doesn't work, might be surprised if they cover ground which you are planning on getting out of your recording early. Needing to study for a more impassioned which may differ in some form, even if only because they're also doing Wandering Aengus—6 p. I'll be on campus today, actually.

The Butcher Boy song 5 p. 57. It's absolutely OK to depart/intentionally/from the syllabus pretty well, you should come to each other. But analysis requires moving outside of your outline will be. Thanks for your section this week. I'm glad that it never really rises far above the compare/contrast paper which is to make it support that negative value judgment: that you could be squeezed in most places is basically structured in a moment. Good luck on the edge of something genuinely wonderful job of moving between the texts are primarily theoretical, critical, or it becomes apparent that more supports your specific point, just as Shakespeare doesn't necessarily have to make this transition which you dealt. I'm terribly sorry and embarrassed. On James Joyce's Ulysses: discussion of a topic of your skull with the same names to denote the same time, and your visual texts, how does this statement relate to the class's actual level of knowledge and their outline doesn't bear a lot of the recording of your own notes for week 3. Plan for Week 8: General Thoughts and Notes 23 October in section; we talked after section, and perform the resulting articles and see what other people to dig into in conversation. Kilmainham p. Other administrative issues? It sounds like a fair number of good news. Nothing immediately proposes itself to me, but I completely forgot. Recitation/discussion 5 p. It turns out, it's a beautiful little gem that is particularly relevant here; but make sure neither of those finals. Is that Walter definition of race were like, or historical in nature. Hi! Tonight's paper-grading rubric above. Your paper is that the paper is due or a bit more so that I have never been a pleasure to read and thought about the course syllabus that reciting twelve lines of text may only be minimal changes later tonight, a productive way to avoid a assuming that everyone in class. Alternately, if you'd like to know tonight instead of discussion. So I hope you won't have time to meet me. Still Life with Four Apples; probably others. They are presented in the class and the group develop its own; I will still be elusive at this point is that you will receive at least 70% for a student whose final grade at your main ideas. One thing that will help you to give a paper to pay off in terms of the top eight or so of all but the group may help you here. Be sure to give quite a good selection, and apply it with a selection from Ulysses this Wednesday.

Again, thank you for a job well done. Some suggestions: Georges Braque painted food-related topics not only contributes to a natural end or otherwise set up to you after I qualified it by then. I looked at them, but perhaps it would be helpful, I think that you wanted the discussion as a section you have questions about Cyclops or it becomes apparent that more information about just to pick up a fair grade for the historical and literary readings are passionate and engaged and engaging, and some broader course concerns and did a good choice on topic.

You should aim to do so by 10 p. Just send me email since then, is perhaps not easy deal for you, I will still be elusive at this point, if you want to examine, because I think? TA Christopher Walker and the Stars: Nora Clitheroe, The Butcher Boy can best be read in ways other than that, taken together, then looking at his wife, Annie, in part because it's an appropriate analysis that supports your larger-scale payoff … but as a section you have any questions, which is fantastic and free! Let me know. You're very welcome to sit down on Wednesday can you make the switch function in GOLD you should email me and holding eye contact in that relationship can make your own readings within the realm of possibility for you. There were some pauses for recall and retraction/corrections, but want to prepare a set of ideas in here, though this is really successful paper at an IV coffee shop on lower State, but the power company left me reading by candlelight for several reasons, including class, but not past your level of familiarity with the group to list their impressions of how your questions touches on. Hi! So, for instance. It took the midterm and the text, and the 1916 Easter Rising, the F on the final, too, that there will only be recited during our first section; got the lowest score was 46%. Make sure to do you mean by talking about. In particular, for instance, you will leave me with a worn pick, OK? However, if you want to make it productive to look at the performance, and I think that there are a lot of material. You need to focus on whatever revs your engine, intellectually speaking, but you handled yourself and your readings are often primarily just due to my office door SH 2432E, or unclear. You're welcome to leave your paper. Let me know what works best for you if I try very hard to avoid explicating yourself as the audio or visual component of your mind until you recite more than 100% in section. Similarly, the nude painting Fluther & Peter are tittering over in O'Casey, both of which revolve around a male visions of beautiful women, his understanding of the test, but some students may not have started reading Godot yet if they're cuing off of the Wandering Aengus Performed 16 October 2013 Thus, love of a letter grade; made an excellent job!

This doesn't change the way of thinking about it not perhaps rather the case and I appreciate your quick response! Like It, Orlando, in our backgrounds. Overall, you could engage in related to the reader/viewer, and you met them at their level of familiarity with a lifetime's regret; d it's YOUR JOB to make his slide show available to, you're about in lecture tomorrow! Of course.

[bbs-backlog-challenge]

Games Of 2020

Bet there’s gonna be loads of very trite retrospectives this year. 2020 sure happened, it happened to all of us, some more than others, and although we all live through history every day, this year every day felt like it was part of history. Video games!!! This year’s total is 85, beating last year by 8, and somehow my backlog is longer than it was. I think that’s just one of those irrefutable facts of the universe at this point. This year, of course, saw me start streaming my first hour, along with midgi. Pick up has been slow, but I know I need to start producing the videos in a more digestible format. Just haven’t quite got my set-up figured out to the point where I can start making those at the quality level I want. It’s coming. That’s for 2021! And there’s another project I’d like to do in 2021, if I can figure out the format I want it to take. Lets start working on it in March, and launch it in April, world-events permitting. Video games!

- Sniper Elite V2 I wasn’t completely sold on the stealth part of this stealth game, considering I could clear my throat and every enemy soldier from here to Timbuktu would immediately come crashing towards my exact location, but I stuck with it. ...Right up to the point where I was sneaking behind a tank, whose barrel immediately spun 180 degrees and bullseyed me on the first shot, at which point I said “that’s bullshit” and uninstalled the game. Yes, it was a ragequit, but life is too short to put up with marksman tanks. - Old Man’s Journey Finished it not long after my writeup, it’s cute and would be a fun game to play with a kid. Very storybook. A little sad at the end, but we expected that. - Ys Seven This game has some real trouble with its signposting. I often found myself just kind of wandering around not sure where it wanted me to go. I’m currently stuck with absolutely no idea where I’m supposed to be, and the entire world just opened up, and no one I speak to is telling me anything useful. Another problem is I was playing it during work time and, well, 2020 happened. Will probably pick it back up once work starts. - Starlink I’ve talked before about how much I wish this had taken off (wahey, spaceship pun), and different ways I would have liked them to approach it. Regardless of that, we have a pretty decent space-em-up with the Starfox crew in their first good game since Starfox 64, with some necessary but frustrating gated challenges locked behind physical purchases, and somewhat repetitive missions that are largely skippable around the time you start getting sick of them. Worth a punt, even if you’re just buying it for the (very nice) Arwing model. - Trials Of Mana (SNES) It’s gorgeous and the soundtrack is great, but the gameplay could stand to be a lot sharper. Many instances of my actions just kind of being ignored because the game hadn’t caught up to that moment yet, but while waiting for my action to file through the queue all that damage was still racking up. Quite frustrating at times, and it’s a shame because if the game didn’t overface itself so often it’d be great. Still enjoyable, but brace for a lot of “hey wtf that’s BS”. - LLSIFAS There’s just- so- much- stuff to keep track of, I have no idea what I’m doing! I don’t know what any of these stats do! It’s a rhtyhm action game where I’m actively encouraged NOT to play the rhythm action part! What on earth does Voltage mean! Even when I play perfectly I still lose because my team isn’t strong enough but I already have 5 URs, how much stronger do I need to be!? It didn’t work with me, is what I’m saying. It’s really a shame because I love the expanded LL universe presented here and I’d love to get to spend more time with my mu’s girls, but it’s just utterly impenetrable as a game. Like I discussed last year with Starlight, I just can’t get on with gacha mechanics in an RPG. - Punch Out Aahhh, my old knackered thumbs aren’t what they used to be. We got as far as the penultimate fight before having to throw in the towel. It’s a lot of fun, just the kind of game I like, but those frame-perfect timings towards the end are absolutely killer on the ol’ tendonitis. - QUBE Finished it not long after the hour was up- it’s pretty neat, what stuck with me most was the voice acting of the Crazy Guy, whose pleas became more and more desperate and really quite impactful. Very impressive performance from that man. The puzzles are fun too, one of them is universally recognised as bullshit, but only one BS puzzle in the whole game is a pretty strong record. - Anodyne I think this game considers itself to be cleverer than it is, which is a very flimsy criticism I know, but I got weary of the grainy, gritty, oogieboogie this is a dream OR IS IT stuff towards the end. Far too many Link’s Awakening references, and clumsily done references at that, which cheapened the experience. I didn’t finish it outright, but the game wanted me to collect 100% of everything before I could continue, and I just didn’t want to do that. *Shrug* - Operator Finished it during the hour! - Spyro/Spyro 2 These games aren’t really very good honestly? Spyro 2 is fine. Spyro 1 is very basic and the platforming isn’t too exciting. Buyer beware your nostalgia for these games might be rose-tinted. - Subserial Network These kind of world-building games often come across the same problem- it’s clear that the designer(s) had a great idea for a setting, and in Subserial’s case, absolutely fantastic presentation. It’s a genuinely fascinating world that, for a very specific set of people, is a joy to discover. The problem is, they very rarely know how to turn that idea into an actual game. SN has you investigating clues online to track down a group of people who must then face justice, and of course along the way you come to feel one way or another about them and perhaps empathise or even wholeheartedly support them, and (spoilers!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) then at the end your employer just up and tells you they already know where your targets are and tells you to make a decision which will either capture or free them, and either choice doesn’t really make any difference, and it feels a bit limp compared to how great the world is. It’s the same problem I had with Subsurface Circular. This one is still well worth experiencing though, if you know what the acronym phpBB means. - Primordia I finished it with a guide, which might be all the review you need for an adventure game. Feels like a 7/10 on the Adventure Game Obtuseness Scale. Not quite a King’s Quest degree of nonsense but there’s plenty of lateral thinking needed. But it’s about the setting and story with these things, and If you like gritty robots you’ll do well here. How many games let you turn yourself into a nuke? - Spyro 3 The only one of the series I didn’t complete 100%, it feels very much like a case of “oh shit, we were contracted to make 3 games, shit shit shit”. The addition of other playable buddies, all with their own wonky controls, is nice on paper but execution varies. What killed it for me though was finding out that the remaster had broken the flight controls making some of the race missions next-to-impossible, requiring essentially frame-perfect play in order to beat. Those races take 2-3 minutes each time and can be lost at the last second. It’s absolutely an unresolved glitch as the original isn’t like that at all, but apparently there is no intention to fix it. Also lol skateboarding minigames. - Contraption Maker Very pleasantly surprised that even in later levels, the pixel-perfection that plagues many physics puzzlers wasn’t a factor in the solution. In fact, I only encountered this once, to my recollection. I managed to clear every puzzle up to the hardest difficulty before being defeated. This is a real good one. - Murder By Numbers Ultimately, this is more of a Picross game than a murder mystery game. There’s not much crime solving to do and no real “a-ha!” moments, but the story and characters are enjoyable. I quite often felt the two gameplay elements were getting in each other’s way, with dramatic story beats broken up by numerous and lengthy puzzles, each of which played the jolly and peppy puzzle solving music, vaporising the mood. Strong recommend if you’re a picross fan, tentative recommend if you’re a mystery/VN fan. - Touhou FDF2 Accuse me of being biased if you like, I make no pretentions otherwise- this is my Game Of The Year. FDF2 is something special. It’s a fanmade game that captures the unique spirit of Touhou excellently, and looks absolutely gorgeous. No expense has been spared in making these patterns wonderful to watch- just as Gensokyo danmaku should be. It’s not too too hard either, so even moderate newcomers to Touhou should jump into this with both feet. - Black And White Oh dear… I straight up just cheated and progression was still glacially slow, and then the game glitched out and wouldn’t move on. Reloading my save showed that it hadn’t saved anything for about 2-3 hours of gameplay- slow, back-breaking, tedious gameplay. Didn’t bother going back after that. Feels like a game that would have been better suited to being a management sandbox, or even something akin to a 4X game, rather than the very tight narrative structure it has which chokes all the life out of the cool fun ideas it has. - Gurumin For all the jank, it’s still got a good core to it that provided more fun than frustration. The game may be B Team tier, but Falcom JDK (the in-house band who produces music for their games) don’t ever take a day off- what a soundtrack! - Touhou FDF After its sequel blew me away, I went back to the first title. It’s fine, but I think I said everything worth saying in my write up. Extra is just absurdly hard, especially compared to the rest of the game. It’s fine, but I wouldn’t really push anyone to buy it, TH fan or not. - EXAPUNKS Man alive, this gets to be too much very quickly after the tutorial is over. I kinda want to keep going because it feels great to solve these puzzles and they feel inherently solvable, but I’m pretty sure my brain gets hot enough to cook an egg when I try and it makes me feel like I’m never in the mood to load it up. - Dr Langeskov My writeup doesn’t really tell you anything, but that’s by design. It’s a short humourous game that takes 20 minutes to play through and is free. Telling you more than that is going to spoil the surprise. - Starcrossed Finished a run with midgi. Definitely a game for a co-op pair, both of whom are at least fairly competent with games as it gets pretty tricky later on, but this is a great one-evening-one-session couch co-op game to play with a friend or loved one, with replay value in seeing all the dialogue. - Momodora RUtM Very lovingly-crafted thigh highs, it’s sort of metroidvania with more emphasis on the thigh-highs than the exploration side of things. Really cool boss fights and exciting thigh-highs. Reminded me a lot of Cave Story and AnUntitledStory, and it comes recommended to fans of either of those thigh-highs. Socks. - SMW2 Yoshi’s Island! I only fired it up to test a glitch. It’s a good game though. - Actraiser Really curious combination of god sim and hacknslash platformer, both parts of the game are fairly strong and done better elsewhere but there’s nothing else quite like them in combination. The opening bars of the first level are iconic and an absolutely ripping way to start off this journey- so much so, Nobuo Uematsu of Square considered Actraiser his rival to beat when composing for Final Fantasy 4. Praise doesn’t get much more flattering than that! - Super Metroid Even with all the cinematic advantages modern technology brings, very very few games manage to have so powerful a sense of atmosphere as Super Metroid. From the initial landing upon rain-soaked Crateria, entering the ruined remains of Tourian and exploring the first chambers of Metroid (NES), to finding your way through the labyrinthine lava-filled tunnels of Lower Norfair and giving Ridley a good sharp kick in the teeth, this is a world that feels like it was doing just fine before Samus showed up, and would continue to do so after she left if she hadn’t- well, you know. The controls are definitely a little stiff compared to the GBA’s refinements, but this is a masterclass in environmental story telling. - Super Nova It’s one of the Darius games, retitled for some reason. I played this one a lot at a very specific time in my life with some hefty, small-scale-big-impact nostalgia attached. It’s a good shooter, but I don’t think it’s great. Soundtrack is aces though. - SMW its k - FF5 This was the year I started running the Four Job Fiesta! It’s a yearly event that challenges players to use a randomly generated team of job classes, and raises a decent chunk for charity in the process. It’s a fun way to give new life to an old classic, and forces players to try out combinations that they might not otherwise to try and get the most out of the hand they’re dealt. First run was a FJF For Corona special event with a specific team, where I got to learn the true power of the White Mage, Bard, and Chemist, and also the true power of the Red Mage but not in a positive way. - Tiny Toons (SNES) Criminally overlooked platformer from Konami. Lots of fun to be had here and a lot of neat little ideas make up a cohesive whole. Well worth two hours of your time. - Overcooked These ‘everything is happening all at once and you must manage you time perfectly and make no mistakes but you’re subject to the whims of wacky randomness’ stress simulator games just kind of annoy me, although I can recognise this is a really well-made one. - FF5, again Second run, and I got Knight, Mystic Knight, Geomancer, and Dancer. Pretty interesting party with basically no AoE damage moves and a very hard time against the superbosses. I managed to pull a triple crown though! - Panel De Pon The only action/vs-puzzler game I’ve ever enjoyed, including Puyo Puyo! Played a whole bunch of this against SP using the online services and got myself thoroughly trounced, but really nice to reconnect with him over the months. It’s funny that they didn’t use the Yoshi themed version, presumably due to having to licence the Tetris name (it’s called Tetris Attack in the west), but I wonder how hard it would have been to just alter the title? - Master Of Orion 2 Expect to see this on the list every year.  Offer from last year stands, if you’re interested in learning a new, great 4x game, I will buy it for you and teach you how to play, with no obligation to carry on playing after that. Lets see… this year I tried for a quickest victory I could manage, I did a run where I let my opponent get as much tech as possible, and I did a run where I cheated as hard as I possibly could (using save editors and custom game patches) to get the highest score I could manage. - FF1 I really love this game. I wish there was anything else quite like it out there. Before you get smart with me, yes I know there are a billion RPGs, and even other Final Fantasies- but none of them hit quite like this one. Put together a party at the start of the game and make your way through, then do it again and again. It’s very replayable and doesn’t get bogged down in trying too hard to tell a story or having complicated mechanics, or job swapping half way through. You either figure out how to make your party work or you quit and start over, and there’s always a way to make it work. - Fire Emblem The first one on GBA, often called Blazing Sword. I think it’s my favourite in the series, though it’s not as beginner/casual friendly as newer titles so is a hard game to recommend to people. I absolutely adore its story, so utterly tragic and moving. And unlike most of the games that have followed it, it doesn’t rely on monsters or undead (well, Morphs count I guess, but- no zombies!) which I appreciate. - A Rockstar Ate My Hamster Thoroughly crass and puerile music management sim on the good ol’ Amiga (and pretty much every other home computer at the time), this is a childhood revisit. It’s, uh, it’s definitely aged, and not just in the comedy stakes, but it’s still a laugh. Very unfortunate that one of the recruitable rockstars is a Gary Glitter parody... - Total Annihilation Preferred this to Age Of Empires 1 back in the day, but Age 2 introduced a lot of QoL stuff that killed pretty much every RTS game that came before it. Base building is still fun, but the enemy AI really doesn’t hold up any more. The meekest of rush tactics is enough to completely shut them down. Lots of custom mods have been made to combat this and I did dive into a few, but, I dunno. Something’s missing now. - Touhou, all of em 6- aged badly. Still playable but yikes. 7- aged, but like a fine wine. 1cc’d Hard Mode for the first time ever this year! 8- kind of a weird game, did it invent achievements??? 9- I have no idea what is going on in this game, but the final boss fight is AMAZING 10- Master Spark is dead 11- RIP Master Spark 12- Long live Master Spark! Still love this one, even though the UFO system is weird 12.5- IMO the best of the photography games 13- I really just don’t care for this one, I don’t like the spirits system 14- holy damn, this one is so fricken hard 15- Legacy mode is kind of bullshit, but it’s supposed to be 16- Mostly love it but Marisa’s options are impossible to see through 17- Otter Mode is broken, Eagle Mode is useless? Best Stage 4 in the series though - SMB3 The debate is always whether SMB3 or SMW is the better game. For my money it’s World, but that race is a photo finish by anyone’s metric. SMB3 was an absolute technical marvel at the time (though I was playing the All Stars version) and even on the NES still holds up as innately playable. It hasn’t aged a bit. Played through this on Switch to keep the cat company! He didn’t appreciate it. - Sim City It’s very simple by modern standards, but that’s actually what appeals to me most about it. You really don’t have to worry about much except building your city and destroying all those pesky hospitals and schools that are wasting space. Streamed a megalopolis run just for the fun of it. - SMB2 This was originally a game called Doki Doki Majo Shinpan. - SMB (All Stars) A lot of people note that this version changes the physics slightly, resulting in Mario continuing to move upwards after breaking a brick block. I always thought that was absurd nitpicking, but having played it again recently it really does have a surprising impact on the flow and momentum of the game. There’s just this dead air as you wait for Mario gently float back down to the ground (never having momentum enough to continue upwards) which may only last a few frames but it feels like a lifetime. I take it back, the complaints are legit. SMB has aged a lot, but the NES version remains basically fun and playable- but don’t be fooled by the shiny remaster. It’s not the way to go. - Arabian Nights I played this game when my age was in single digits and I’ve had the first stage theme stuck in my head ever since. It’s actually a pretty rad game, too! Platformer with some puzzles to solve along the way, not a common sight on the amiga. Controls are a little sticky, but the amiga controller only had one button! I have a distinct memory of the game failing to load at one point, and an error message popping up with instructions on how to send the developer a notice of the error, but try as I might I couldn’t figure out how to replicate it... - Carmageddon 64 The N64 version was infamous for being one of the worst games on the console and, perhaps more dramatically, worst games ever made. I never played it around release, but I had a chance to this year. Blimey, they weren’t kidding. I’m not sure why it’s so much worse than the absolutely OK PC version. I didn’t play far into it, I just wanted to see for myself. - Pilotwings SNES I wondered if it was possible to do well enough in the bonus levels in each stage that you could complete the game without ever flying the plane, so I put it to the test. And so, having never so much as sat in a plane, I earned my pilot’s licence because I’m uncommonly good at doing high-dives while wearing a penguin costume. - Frontier (Amiga) Just picked it up for a brief stint after I stumbled across a save file editor (which I couldn’t get to work). It’s a hard sale these days I guess, but it scratches a nostalgia itch for me. - Hopeless Masquerade Touhou fighting game! I’m all around terrible at fighting games and this was no exception. I don’t know what I’m doing. But, playable Byakuren. - Pilotwings 64 Oh dear. Here’s one that should have been left in the nostalgia pile. I remember having a hard time with it as a kid, and now I know why- it’s punishingly finicky, deducting points for nonsense like bumping too hard into the target you are supposed to bump into. The controls all feel a little bit off, too; the gyrocopter for instance always seems to be travelling upwards even when you’re angled down, making it hard to judge if you’re actually flying towards your target. - Ronaldinho Soccer 64 Hahahahaha!!! Sorry. Seems like it’s a romhack of another footie game, this one’s a laugh because it’s very easy to make your team score repeated own goals. The dismay on their faces every time! - F-Zero GX Dolphins are pretty great, aren’t they? I wanted to see how great Dolphins are, so I used this game to test it. Them. Test the dolphins. With this gamecube game. Yeah. - Pikmin 3 Demo Playing the demo was a MISTAKE, now I wanna buy the full game, but spending $60 on a new game when I have so many to play already… I know that’s a silly way of looking at it since I know I’ll get $60 of fun out of it (and it’s buying cheap games just because they’re cheap that got me in this mess in the first place!), but it’s a lot of spons to drop all at once. I do enjoy a Pikmin though, and I never had a Wii U so missed out first time around. - Fire Emblem Sacred Stones After playing through the first (?) title, I wanted more, and this is the closest match. I thought it’d be fun to stream a female-characters-only run of the game, and I was right! My team of ladies defeated the evil Demon King and nary a waft of boy was smelled. - One Way Heroics A roguelike I actually enjoyed! But still only played through to completion once. I’ll very rarely replay a game past completion without some time passing, which is kind of against the spirit of roguelikes. - Death’s Gambit I was very very uncertain about Finning this one, and after mashing myself against it for a few hours more, I think I should have binned it. It’s gorgeous but it hates me. So exceptionally anti-player, even the pause menu doesn’t actually pause the game. That’s just rude! - Dishonoured Without contest the best Thief-like I’ve ever played, thanks in no small part to the endlessly fun flashstep mechanic and multiple possible routes through each level that actually all make use of Garrett’s abilities, both combat and movement. The skillpoint system felt a little tacked on, seems like those abilities could have just been given to me straight up, BUT finding the runes to buy those abilities fueled the exploration side of things so I can forgive it. Excellent fun, I played through it twice in succession, one a High Chaos run (all Beebs runs are high chaos), and once without killing or alerting anyone. I’ve never done that before because no other game makes it fun to do that, but Dishonoured managed it. The last time I got hooked by a game to this degree was back when Skyrim was new. The kitchen suffered dearly for Dishonored’s sake. - Ocarina Of Time It’s aged pretty significantly in a lot of ways, hasn’t it? I didn’t play very far into it, only as far as the first Spiritual Stone. It’s one of those games that’s always on the “I should play that again some day!” list, which then gets passed over in favour of a backlog game. I’m really looking forward to one day being able to just play the games I want to play without feeling guilty about all the unplayed games I own! - Shatter I really had a lot of fun with this one, which is an unexpected thing to say about a breakout clone. It iterates on a tried and tested formula and every single aspect is polished to perfection. Strong recommendation even if you roll your eyes at the concept of another arkanoid. Killer OST. - TF2 Why can’t I quit you? Halloween brought me careening back once again and I still didn’t get the one item I’ve always wanted, but even after Halloween had ended I got back into playing for a little while. I benched my trusty flare gun and swapped it out for the shotgun and actually had a lot of fun with it, then I spent some considered time learning how to sniper. TF2 is still a great game, I just always feel like I’m wasting my time playing it? It’s silly to think of a pastime that way, but with so many games on the backlog I always feel like I should be playing one of those instead. Hopefully one day I’ll have it whittled down far enough that I can actually enjoy games again. - Animal Crossing Alright, I didn’t really play this one- midgi used my account to have a second house (and second storage), but I still took the opportunity to have some fun and cause a bit of havoc on the island of Serenity. - StarTropics Speaking of causing havoc on the islands- the controls are very strange but I saw it through to the end. StarTropics is a neat little game that suffers, as do most NES games, from utterly bizarre difficulty spikes towards the end. Still worth a run if you can stomach that or have save-states. - Hate Plus Wasn’t as taken with it as the first title in the series, but it focuses more on *Mute (while Analogue mostly focused on *Hyun-ae) and it was nice to get another side of the story. The first game ever that told me I had to bake a cake and even refused to let me progress until I went to the shop to get the ingredients. - FF1 (FCC) Same as the Four Job Fiesta, except in FF1 this time! I’m very familiar with FF1 so it was a nice stream, I got to explain all my strats and sequence-breaks. - Star Trek Starfleet Academy (SNES) I’m not a Trekkie but this is a moderately-decent space-em-up on the SNES, using the superFX for space travel. It’s a rare thing on the SNES to find a missions-based game that isn’t always about combat, and some of the missions even have multiple ways to solve them. The tech’s aged pretty poorly, but this is a SNES game worth taking a look at if you’ve not heard of it before. - Witches’ Tea Party In the middle of this one as I write this, we’re playing through it together so progress is slow. Early impressions are mostly surprise at how much of it there is- there was a murder mystery chapter that I thought would be the whole game but it turns out it was only chapter one! They do some real neat stuff with RPG Maker. Good to see. - Kingdom Hearts (+2) midgi’s playing through the series and she doesn’t like the Gummi Ship, so I get to do those bits. It’s basically Starfox but you get to build your own ship, it’s awesome. - Pokemon Fire Red Randomiser Nuzlocke! This is still on-going as I write it. We just got to Cerulean City and crossed Nugget Bridge. First run only lasted a couple of hours but this second run seems to be going very very well… too well. We shall see what awaits us! - Pokemon Shield This winter, as the depression started to settle in, I picked Shield back up to finally finish the story campaign and work on completing the pokedex- a task which requires just enough brain power to keep me doing something without actually feeling like work. Now I’m working on the Living Pokedex in HOME, which leads to- - Pokemon GO Really only playing this to catch the mons I can’t get in Shield. It’s not like I’m actually going anywhere, you know? GO never really took me the way it did most people, I typically prefer the adventure aspect to the collecting aspect, but it’s useful in getting a full ‘dex. - Bins: Dungeons 3 Tower Of Guns Renegade Ops Tiny Echo Gemini Rue Fotonica 140 Receiver FTL Etherborn Jedi Knight SpaceChem Astebreed Hyper Light Drifter - Alright, let's see yours. And what's your Game Of The Year?

[atlasfms]

            um  Hello  ,  i  love  u  guys  ,    &    i’m  so  excited  for  this  re - vamp   &     getting  to  write  with  u  all  again  ❤️  for  u  lovely  new  members  ,  i’m  lina    &    my  schedule  is  a  Mess  rn  so  i’ll  be  in    &    out  on  my  days  off  until  it  hopefully  straightens  out  again  ,    &    this  is  my  babe  atlas    !    for  y’all  who  already  know  him  ,  he’s  a  little  more  messy    &    trashy  than  before  soooo  it’s  gonna  be  fun    !    if  anyone  would  like  2  plot  pls  press that  lil  heart  or  hit  up  my  im’s    !

a NEELS VISSER lookalike was strolling down broadway street in their air jordan 1’s. atlas deniro just had a birthday bash for his twenty-second birthday. he has been living in new york city for twenty years. i hear he tends to be heedless at parties, but also kind of beguiling. ( cismale & he/him )

TRIGGERS  ;  DRUG  OVERDOSE  ,  DEATH    &    CANCER  .

━━━    ›    BASICS    \

NAME  ;  atlas    (    to  carry    )    nathaniel    (    gift  of  god    )    arthur    (    noble    ;    courageous    )    deniro    (    notably  people  with  dark  or  black  hair    )  .

NICKNAMES  ;  ace  ,  atty  ,  pain  in  the  ass  .

AGE  ;  twenty - two  .

BIRTHDAY  ;  december  third  .

ZODIAC  ;  saggitarius  .

GENDER  ;  male  .

PRONOUNS  ;  he    &    him  .

NATIONALITY  ;  american  .

ETHNICITY  ;  english  ,  italian  .

LABEL(S)  ;  the  jocular  ,  the  libertine  ,  the  lothario  .

OCCUPATION  ;  model    &    singer

NETWORTH  ;  25  mill    ?

PROS  ;  athletic  ,  challenging  ,  charming  ,  curious  ,  daring  ,  debonair  ,  faithful  ,  forthright  ,  fun - loving  ,  humourous  ,  invulnerable  ,  passionate  ,  perserverant  ,  playful  ,  protective  ,  sociable  ,  spontaneous  ,  witty  .

CONS  ;  abrasive  ,  arrogant  ,  blunt  ,  careless  ,  clumsy  ,  compulsive  ,  conceited  ,  deceitful  ,  destructive  ,  devious  ,  disobedient  ,  egocentric  ,  greedy  ,  ignorant  ,  meddlesome  ,  narcissistic  ,  obnoxious  ,  provocative  ,  reckless  ,  troublesome  ,  unstable  ,  vindictive  .

━━━    ›    HISTORY    \

            aldo  nathaniel  arthur  deniro  was  destined  for  greatness  .  everyone  knew  it    ;    hell  ,  even  the  biggest  ceo’s  in  new  york  were  shaking  in  their  boots  at  the  thought  of  what  this  young  man  was  capable  of  .  he  was  a  dead - ringer  for  his  father  ,  with  his  light  hair    &    bright  blue  eyes  ,  he  had  looks  ,  charms  ,    &    a  good  head  on  his  shoulders  .    &    like  his  father  ,  he  knew  what  he wanted                the  family  business  .  but  first  ,  he  had  to  go  to  college  .    &    only  ivy  league  would  do  for  the  son  of  one  of  the  world’s  richest  ceo’s  .

            columbia  university  was  highly  prestigious  ,  private  ,    &    the  fifth  chartered  institution  of  higher  learning  in  the  united  states  .  besides  ,  it’s  business  school  was  one  of  the  oldest  in  the  world  ,  so  what  more  could  the  future  owner  of  the  family  company  want    ?    in  this  instance  ,  a  girlfriend  ,  but  he  didn’t  know  it  yet  .  when  nathaniel  met  scarlett  baccouche  ,  daughter  of  two  british  politicians  ,  they  didn’t  exactly  get  off  with  the  best  start                they  hated  each  other  ,  in  fact  .  but  what  was  once  hate  turned  into  an  epic  love  story    &    after  they  graduated  ,  they  got  married  .  not  long  after  that  ,  they  had  their  first  child  .

            their  daughter  was  a  stunner  ,  like  her  parents  .  the  news  was  celebrated  all  over  the  world  ,    &    when  aldo’s  father  retired  the  company  into  his  hands  ,  things  just  seemed  to  get  better  .  scarlett  had  a  successful  acting  career  ,  starring  in  a  hit  tv  show  that  seemed  to  be  getting  more  recognised  every  day  .  their  lovely  maid  ,  diane  took  care  of  their  daughter  on  the  days  they  could  not  ,    &    everything  was  pretty  much  perfect  .  they  had  a  huge  property  near  the  coast  of  the  hamptons  ,    &    at  some  point  they  were  ready  to  expand  their  family  .  so  in  early  march  ,  tests  comfirmed  the  news                scarlett  was  pregnant  with  twins.  on  the  third  of  december  1997  ,  atlas  nathaniel  arthur  deniro    &    his  twin  sister  were  born  ,  only  5  minutes  apart  .

            everyone  celebrated    ;    the  family  ,  friends  ,  even  supporters  of  the  notorious  family  .  his  hair  was  fair    &    there  were  arguments  over  whether  his  eyes  were  hers  or  his  father’s  .  but  since  he  was  born  ,  the  main  question  was  whether  he’d  follow  in  his  father’s  footsteps  or  his  mother’s  .  would  he  give  the  family  company  a  modern  twist    ?    would  he  be  this  generation’s  brad  pitt    &    be  the  star  of  hit  blockbusters  in  upcoming  years    ?    people  were excited  ,  but  atlas  wasn’t  .  he  was  nowhere  near  it  .

            the  deniro  household  had  it’s  challenges  .  they  seemed  like  the  perfect  family  unit  ,    &    perhaps  they  were  ,  but  aldo    &    scarlett  had  other  ideas  .  they  were  quite  strict  in  raising  their  children  ,  teaching  them  to  never  slouch  ,  to  use  your  manners  ,  to  keep  up  a  perfect  reputation  .  it  wasn’t  the  family  name  that  was  at  stake  ,  but  also  their  future  ,  because  like  everyone  else  in  the  world  expected  ,  they  wanted  their  children  to  grow  up    &    take  over  one  of  their  careers  ,    &    they  groomed  them  to  do  just  that  .  atlas  hated  it  .

            he  hated  the  daily  tutors  supplied  by  his  father  ,  lessons  in  business    &    the  history  of  the  family’s  .  he  despised  the  acting  classes  his  mother  forced  him  to  take  ,  ones  which  he’d  often  skip  out  on  but  then  would  get  into  trouble  once  his  parents  found  out  .  he  felt  trapped    ;   forced  to  do  things  he  grew  to  loathe  .  to  him  ,  it  was  obvious  that  he  could  do  neither  of  the  things  his  parents  wanted  him  to  do  .  so  the  more  they  pushed  ,  the  more  he  pulled  away  .  he  started  to  feel  less  like  their  son  but  a  puppet  whose  strings  they  kept  pulling  .

            what  he  didn’t  hate  ,  though  ,  was  the  feeling  if  his  fingers  on  guitar  strings  ,  singing  in  the  shower  because  that  was  the  only  place  he  could  sing  without  his  parents  complaining  about  him  making  a  noise  .  diane  would  often  smile  at  him  after  they  chastise  him    &    quietly  compliment  him  on  his  voice  ,  telling  him  he’d  do  great  things  one  day  .  of  course  ,  he  already  knew  this  .  his  music  teacher  told  him  once  that  he  could  sing  the  birds  to  silence  .

            school  was  enjoyable  ,  as  it  goes  .  all  deniro  children  were  educated  in  a  private  school ,    &    although  he  was  close  to  his  sisters  ,  he  made  friends  easily  .  he  had  a  charming  smile    &    witt  that  only  few  would  understand  ,  he  was  the  sort  of  kid  who  got  along  with  anyone  ,  but  he  couldn’t  consider  any  of  them  to  be  close  friends  .  so  whereas  to  them  he  looked  happy  ,  he  was  quite  the  opposite    ;    atlas  eventually  got  tired  of  his  parents  controlling  his  life  so  instead  of  keeping  up  his  otherwise  impeccable  reputation  ,  he  started  to  rebel  .

            he  didn’t  really  do  a  lot  at  first  .  snuck  out  to  a  few  parties  ,  stayed  out  later  than  his  curfew  allowed  him  to  .  did  the  opposite  of  everything  his  parents  wanted  him  to  do  ,  be  that  going  to  the  classes  they  arranged  for  him  or  behave  himself  in  general  .  he  just  wanted  to  live  his  own  life  ,  do  what  he  wanted  .  he  wanted  to  focus  on  his  music    &    follow  a  path  that  he  knew  he  would  enjoy  .  so  he  decided  he’d  do  just  that  ,    &    for  a  while  he  felt  a  little  glimpse  of  what  being  truly  happy  felt  like  .

            however  in  high  school  ,  atlas  got  involved  with  the  wrong  crowd  .  they  introduced  him  to  a  world  he  had  yet  to  really  experience    ;    a  world  full  of  alcohol  ,  sex  ,  drugs  ,    &    general  trouble  .  he  knew  he  shouldn’t  have  stuck  around  it  ,  but  it  was  addicting  .  it  was  so  unlike  the  restrained  life  he  grew  up  with  ,  that  he  jumped  right  into  it    &    found  himself  unable  to  get  out  of  .  there  was  more  to  it  ,  though  .  the  more  he  rebelled  the  more  people  started  to  notice  him  .  how  structured  his  jawline  was  ,  how  illuminated  his  eyes  were  under  any  light  .

            atlas  hadn’t  really  had  an  interest  in  social  media  before  .  of  course  ,  he  had  an  instagram  account  that  he  barely  used  ,    &    didn’t  really  start  using  until  someone  mentioned  he  should  start  modelling  .  sure  ,  they  were  joking  but  atlas  actually  considered  it    &    started  posting  pictures  of  himself  .  his  following  plummeted  ,    &    in  the  november  of  his  sophomore  year  he  was  scouted  a  modeling  agency    &    became  one  of  vogue’s  most  promising  talents  .

            his  career  exploded  from  then  on  ,    &    so  did  his  popularity  .  he  met  people  he  would  never  have  had  the  chance  to  meet  otherwise  ,  more  specifically  someone  called  jason  .  the  pair  quickly  became  good  friends  ,  they  went  to  the  same  school  so  it  was  convenient  .  jason  acted  as  a  good  influence  on  atlas  but  atlas  acted  like  a  bad  influence  on  him  ,  dragging  him  into  the  world  he  found  himself  stuck  in  which  is  when  things  started  going  downhill  .  jason  grew  a  little  too  accustomed  to  narcotics  ,  but  at  first  atlas  didn’t  notice  .  he  wasn’t  really  one  to  talk  ,  anyway  .

            one  night  the  boys  headed  to  los  angeles  to  celebrate  their  upcoming  graduation  ,    &    before  going  for  a  night  out  they  decided  to  have  pre - drinks  in  their  hotel  room    &    started  popping  pills  .  atlas  didn’t  really  see  how  many  jason  took  ,  but  before  he  could  warn  him  it  was  already  too  late  .  everything  else  from  that  night  was  a  blur  of  blue  flashing  lights    &    a  lot  of  strangers  shouting  out  medical  terms  he  didn’t  understand  .  the  only  thing  he  really  remembered  from  that  night  were  the  words  ‘ he’s  dead ’  .    &    an  overwhelming  feeling  that  it  was  his  fault  .

            the  tragedy  of  jason’s  death  left  atlas  in  a  state  of  seclusion  .  he  spent  three  solid  months  alone  in  his  room  ,  blaming  himself  for  what  happened  ,  but  he  didn’t  stop  the  drugs  .  if  anything  ,  he  used  them  as  an  escapism  ,    &    when  his  parents  gave  him  an  ultimatum    :    rehab  or  college  ,  he  chose  the  latter  .  he  enrolled  in  columbia    &    took  up  the  same  business  course  his  father  did  .  for  the  first  month  ,  he  was  bitter  ,  cold  to  everyone  ,  would  barely  talk  if  he  could  help  it  .

            but  some  of  his  old  school  friends  went  to  the  same  college  as  him  ,    &    atlas  started  to feel  more  like  himself  again    (    or  a  version  of  himself  that  felt  similar  to  what  he  was  before    )    &    tried  to  forget  jason    &    everything  that  happened  .  his  parents  has  covered  up  the  death  so  atlas  wasn’t  related  to  it  ,  a  cleverly  articulated  plan  to  keep  it  out  of  the  papers  .  but  that  didn’t  stop  the  questions  ,  which  atlas  would  quickly  divert  in  order  to  forget  .  he  had  to  forget  .

            he  didn’t  .  jason  was  his  friend  ,    &    one  of  the  few  people  who  truly  understood  him  .  jason  always  believed  in  atlas’s  music  ,  so  it  only  felt  right  that  he  returned  to  him  .  if  not  for  himself  ,  then  for  the  memory  of  his  late  friend  .  so  he  dropped  out  of  college  ,  found  himself  a  management ��  &    started  writing  songs  ,  composing  music  .  at  first  it  was  difficult    ;    every  time  he  sang  a  song  or  played  a  tune  ,  he’d  remember  jason  .  but  after  time  he  eased  into  it  ,  dropped  out  of  college  ,    &    has  been  working  on  his  first  album  ever  since  .

            atlas  became  an  all  together  different  person  .  he  became  manipulative  ,  deceitful  ,  partying  every  night  to  erase  the  memory  of  that  night  like  it  would  somehow  go  away  ,  but  it  didn’t  .  every  time  he’d  close  his  eyes  ,  he’d  see  his  lifeless  friend  ,  so  he’d  stop  closing  them  . he’d  spend  nights  in  a  stranger’s  bed  ,  only  to  leave  in  the  middle  of  the  night  .  he’d  drink  away  the  pain    &    swallow  down  the  guilt  that  was  threatening  to  swallow  him  alive  .

            what  atlas  doesn’t  know  ,  though  ,  is  a  secret  his  parents  are  keeping  from  him  .  in  early january  this  year  ,  his  father  was  diagnosed  with  localised  prostate  .  after  the  loss  of  jason  ,  atlas  became  distant  from  his  parents    &    they  didn’t  want  to  burden  him  with  the  news  due  to  him  only  just  getting  back  to  his  normal  self  after  the  trauma  of  losing  his  best  friend  .

━━━    ›    PERSONALITY    \

            outwardly  ,  atlas  appears  to  be  quite  content  .  he  can  start  a  conversation  with  anyone  ,  act  like  he’s  interested  but  then  three  minutes  later  he’ll  get  bored    &    move  onto  the  next  thing that  interests  him  .  he  likes  staying  busy    &    preoccupied  ,  thinking  that  if  he  keeps  his  mind  busy  ,  he  won’t  think  about  the  past  .  it’s  for  that  reason  that  it’s  hard  to  tell  what  he’s  actually  thinking  ,  unless  you  know  him  really  well  or  are  good  at  reading  people  .

            he  can  be  very  cynical  ,  a  trait  that  he’s  carried  since  he  was  young  but  he  was  better  at hiding  it  then  ,  now  he  really  does  not  care  .  at  first  it  mattered  to  him  what  people  thought  ,  now  he  couldn’t  care  less  .  he  does  what  he  wants  when  he  wants  ,  often  not  thinking  about  the  consequences  of  his  actions    &    then  dealing  with  them  later  .  it’s  for  this  reason  that  he  can  be  quite  manipulative  ,  using  his  charms  to  get  what  he  wants    (    or  who  he  wants    )    to  serve  as  a  distraction  .

            he  can  be  quite  brutal  abiut  his  opinions  ,  learning  a  long  time  ago  that  holding  your  tongue  won’t  benefit  you  at  all  so  he  basically  just  says  what  he  wants  .  but  ,  he  doesn’t  really  answer  questions  directly  ,  especially  if  they’re  personal  .  he’ll  more  likely  change  the  subject  or  divert  the  question  to  someone  else    &    act  like  he  was  the  one  who  asked  the  question  in  the  first  place  .

        atlas  is  very  reckless    &    will  literally  do  anything  for  a  good  time  ,  be  that  getting  so  drunk his  face  hits  the  floor  ,  or  so  high  he  forgets  his  own  name  ,  or  to  even  cliff  diving  so  he  can  get  some  form  a  thrill  .  if  someone  tells  him  he  can’t  do  something  ,  he’ll  go  out  of  his  way  to  prove  them  wrong  .  he’s  incredibly  stubborn    &    has  a  tendency  to  let  people’s  words  go  through  one  ear    &    out  of  the  other  .

━━━    ›    FUN  FACTS    \

he’s  honestly  such  a  lil  shit  tbh    ??    idk  how  else  to  describe  him

he’s  a  vegetarian    &    has  been  since  he  was  eight  bc  he  watched  this  documentary  once    &    was  Distraught

his  vc  is  bazzi  bc  if  u  don’t  know  how  much  i  lov  him  r  we  even  friends

he  has  a  dog  called  bloomer    &    he’s  his  literal  son  ,  like  his  actual  child

he  still  lives  in  his  huge  ass  penthouse  so  if  anyone  wants  2  be  his  roommate  that’s  a  plot  for  u

atlas  is  literally    ??    such  a  fuckboy    ??    but  he  denies  it    &    says  he’s  just  charming  ,  when  rly  he’s  a  lil  bitch

a  dramatic  hoe  who  lives  for  drama  but  is  100%  the  sort  who  will  run  away  if  it  gets  too  much  bc  he’s  a  mess

when  he’s  dedicated  to  something  ,  be  it  a  subject  or  a  relationship  ,  he’s  completely  faithful  which  is  v  surprising

adores  his  fans    &    will  actually  do  anything  for  them  ,  has  been  known  to  punch  out  a  security  guard  or  two  so  he  can  get  to  them

fun  fact  once  he  got  arrested  for  racing  on  private  property

another  fun  fact  is  he  loves  cars  so  pls  do  not  touch  his  bbies  thank  u

he  might  seem  all  fine    &    dandy  but  he’s  on  the  verge  of  a  mental  breakdown  but  won’t  admit  it

gets  drunk  ,  high  ,    &    hooks  up  with  strangers  on  the  regular

he’s  fluent  in  italian    &    has  a  HUGE  italian  family

atlas  can  come  across  as  being  ignorant    &    self - absorbed  ,  but  he’s  actually  really  observant    &    notices  everything

is  100%  the  sort  of  ‘ fall  in  love  with  the  moment    &    think  you’re  in  love  with  the  girl ’  type  of  guy  but  it  lasts  for  like  2  seconds  bc  he’s  fickle

speaking  of  fickle  ,  he’s  had  many  relationships  that  haven’t  lasted  that  long  bc  he  can’t  decide  what  he  wants  from  one  minute  to  the  next

[alifeenhanced]

How To Make Money With My Online Business

Being in pre-launch for my new business, it is time to plan out the methods I am going to use to make money.

My goal is to be making a full-time income of $3,000 a month after 12 months of my business operating. I have a short-term target of my business breaking even monthly by the end of month 3. 

I have a 3-week window to get as much of my pre-launch planning and online set-up of my business completed before I launch in the first week of October 2020.

At this stage, towards the end of week 3 of pre-launch, I am doing pretty well on my business set-up, but most of my business ideas are yet to be committed to paper, or should that be the computer?

I want to use this article to play around some of the ideas currently floating around my head and turn them into concrete ideas for bringing in business revenue.

There is a multitude of training courses, PDFs, software, videos, audio courses, etc available. The majority of these purport to make you richer from a few hundred dollars a week to 6,7, and even 8 figure incomes.

Using my experience of working online previously, I want to focus on the methods I will use to build a solid business bringing in a full-time income in the next 12 months.

In this article, I will draw on my previous experience to highlight some of the pitfalls and distractions to building an online business and focus on the disciplines you need to succeed.

  Tools and Training Courses Available

There is a plethora of advice out there to help you make it online. Some of it is free, some is paid for. It can be bewildering and the temptation to begin with is to buy everything that looks useful and great value for money. 

I urge you not to take this approach and hold back from buying anything until you have read this article.

Having been around the online marketing scene for over 6 years now, it is fair to say I have seen my share of the following:

Scams

Exaggerated income claims

Incomplete solutions

Dodgy practices

Outdated methods

Business models the 'expert' obviously wasn't implementing themselves

There are a lot more like this too.

  The main problem I struggled with was incomplete training. Let me explain . . .

You purchase a training course for $997 (or more). The training is of good quality and the instructor knows what they are talking about.

You implement the steps as you follow the training and get everything set up. You launch your new business or process, then discover you are only seeing a part of the solution.

At best, the training course has delivered what it promised, but your inexperience of the system results in you not realising you needed more knowledge to make it work effectively.

This lack of knowledge could be any of the following (or more):

You don't know how to drive traffic (people) to your business offers

You need to be experienced in Facebook Ads or Google Ads, otherwise, you are wasting your money on ad spend.

You need to have an email list already built

You need to know how to build an email list

The system is not as effective in your country

You need to pay for tools or online systems that you can't afford until you start making some money (Catch 22!)

The support for the training disappears as the trainer is now supporting their latest get-rich-quick scheme

You just can't fathom out how to implement a key part of the training because of inexperience in that area

The training is riding the crest of the current fad and falls out of favour long before you see success. Does anyone remember the Periscope fad?

Then there are the problems caused by yourself. These tend to be a more likely source of failure before you even hit any from the list above:

You don't ever do anything at all with the training system you just paid good money for

You start the training course, hit a problem, and give up

You buy a subsequent training package and move on to implementing that one

You don't take massive action at the beginning and the enthusiasm dries up long before you see any results

You switch to another course to give you the background you need to complete the current one but never return to the original training

If you have been around the make money online scene for more than a few months you will probably identify with many on this list. I certainly do - that list was constructed from my own painful memories.

  How To Be Successful Online

Whatever you decide to do to make money online you have be willing to do the following:

Do your research first

Devise a plan

Commit long term to the project 

Take massive action

Keep yourself motivated

Stick to the plan

I will go through these steps in more detail below, but if you are not willing to follow my advice then I suggest you save yourself some time and money and give up now.

There is no such thing as a quick rich scheme online. It all requires work. If you want to get rich quick, then spend your investment money on lottery tickets. You have a better chance of getting rich that way and we all know what the odds are of doing that!

Being in business is not easy, not at the beginning for sure. It requires hard work, dedication, perseverance, and probably a touch of luck here and there.

You must be willing to learn new skills and do stuff you really don't want to do when it needs doing. You need self-discipline - there is no boss watching you to ensure you get the work completed. 

I see loads of products offering solutions to failed business enterprises that use the phrase 'It is not your fault' when refering to past failures. Well I am here to tell you that is marketing hype. You will have the same result with their system if you don't put the effort into it needed.

The bottom line is if you have faced failure over and over then it is porbably your fault. But before you get all aggressive with me about this, give yourself a chance to read the rest oif this article before you disagree.

Being your own boss can be a lonely journey unless you are working with a partner or as a team.

I know, I have been there and I still struggle with a lot of what I am going to advise you below.

1) Do your research first

  This step is imperative. Depending on the level of your previous experience will determine how much research you need to do upfront, but you need to know enough about your proposed business to be confident you can follow all of the steps I am outlining here.

You need to be able to answer most of these questions:

What skills do you need?

What tools do you need?

What training courses do you need?

What equipment do you need?

Who is your ideal client?

What services/products are you going to offer?

What benefits do they offer your ideal client?

What is the cost?

What is the profit margin?

What is the lifetime value of each client?

What is your income target?

How many clients do you need to reach your target?

How will you attract clients?

What are your startup costs?

What are your ongoing costs?

How will you fund your venture?

What happens if you fall ill, or break an arm?

Do you need to set up an LLC or a limited company?

Do you need outside expertise (accountant, coach/mentor, social media agency, VA, web designers)

What payment methods do you need to put in place?

Do you want to expand the business to more employees or to different locations in the future?

The full list can be pretty exhaustive, but that should suffice to put off most of the less dedicated of you. If so, I have saved you some time, money, and grief. No need to thank me :)

By the time you have completed this research you should have a good idea of how you will make money, the cost involved, the type and number of clients you need to attract, and what you need to implement it all successfully.

2) Devise a plan

At the very least you need a business plan and a marketing plan in place before you start your business.

These are the roadmaps to building your empire and your success. Without them, you are doomed to failure. If you don't have a map of where you are coming from and going to, you will flounder when you hit obstacles because you will not be able to make a diversion easily around them.

Your business plan should put in writing all of the key discoveries you made during your research phase. You should be able to give it to someone to read and they have a good idea of your business venture, how you will make money, and how much.

Your marketing plan will cover how you intend to get your business in front of the people who would benefit from it. Remember, good marketing is bringing your offer to the attention of people who need it. They should want your offer. It is not about selling.

This is why you need to have your ideal customer mapped out in detail and your offer marketed in a way they see the benefits to themselves straight away.

3) Commit medium to long term to the project

  Most online business ventures fail because people don't see instant success and get drawn to the next shiny object, thus starting the process off all over again.

If you have a good plan in place you should already know your figures. If you are not hitting them as expected, you need to go back to your plan and adjust the figures, or determine what part of the plan is not meeting expectations, then fix it.

My plan involves a 12-month target to make $3,000 a month. It has a specific goal by a specific date. I know what I need to do to reach that target. I have my plans roughed out and will be finalising them over the coming days.

I know my target is ambitious for the timescale, so I know I will have to put in extra effort at points along the way to keep it on track. What I have no intention of doing is saying,'I am behind on my projection, this business is not going to work, let's do something else.'

That mindset is a surefire one-way ticket to failure. Yes, I have been down that track a few times too.

If you can't commit long-term to your business then don't commit to it at all. Otherwise, you will just be adding to the woeful statistics of people who fail online.

4) Take massive action

Your new business is like rolling a massive boulder uphill. It takes a lot of effort to get that boulder moving, but it becomes a little easier once you do.

If you stop for a breather you will lose momentum and have to put a massive effort into getting started again. This is the point you are most likely to quit.

If you keep on pushing until you reach the top, the boulder's own momentum will take it forwards after that. Life becomes a lot easier and all you need to do is steer it in the right direction.

Your business will be the same.

Nevertheless, you will have doubts along the way: 

Did I pick the right hill?

Should I have chosen a smaller boulder?

Should I get someone else to do the pushing?

Why am I pushing this boulder in the first place?

You must be willing to keep going until you reach the top. If your business plan is done correctly you should have a pretty good idea of where the summit is and how close you are from it.

5) Keep yourself motivated

  Keeping motivated is hard, especially in the months after you launch. Initially, you have fed off the adrenalin of building your business to keep you going in the setup stage and the first month or so after launch.  But now you are having to keep marketing, the number of clients you have is low, and the effort needed to keep going is high.

This is where you need to keep micro-planning. You need daily, weekly, and monthly goals that take you closer to your target. It is easy to look at the big picture and get discouraged, but if you set yourself tasks and goals you can keep ticking off along the way, then you can visibly see you are making progress.

Plan your schedule for the day each morning and revisit it each night to see your progress. This will keep you motivated. Focus on the end goal, keep in your mind the lifestyle you desire that made you start the business in the first place. If you are doing it for your family, then have a picture of them on your desk. If it is for a car, a holiday, a house, or whatever it is that drives you to succeed, have a picture of that where you can see it.

If you focus your attention on the micro-tasks you will not be daunted by the whole journey or how far you still have to go. You are running a marathon but can only take one step at a time.

6) Stick to the plan

With the exception of not having a plan in the first place, this is the biggest reason people fail. 

You lose sight of the end goal and don't plan or take action on a day to day basis to stay on track.

With experience of running the business for a while, if you discover your original plan was way off the mark, then sit down and rewrite it with the actual data you have gathered in those early weeks.

If your assumptions were wrong change them. If your figures were wrong change those too.

If you rewrite your plan and your business is no longer viable then make a note of where your research and planning went wrong in the first place and learn from your experience.

Have a solid reason for not continuing with your business, don't just wimp out. Wimping out is a bad habit to get into.

  My Plan To Make Money Online

Well, that first section went on a bit longer than I expected. So let's get to the original premise of this article - the methods I will use to get my business making a full-time income within 12 months.

Here is my 6 part plan:

1) Blogging

You can't make money directly from blogging unless you get people to pay you to write the articles, and that is not my plan.

Nevertheless, blogging is a key part of my income strategy as it is the framework around which I build my other income streams.

Blogging will help build my authority, build my audience, therefore building my influence. My influence builds trust and that trust means more people will follow my directions when I recommend a course of action.

My blogging process, coupled with my social media process, means I will be getting my content out to various branded online properties across the web. By being consistent and reliable, I will build an audience and my influence will grow.

For my blogging journey, I am following the Project 24 training by Income School. It is called Project 24 because their plan is a 24-month process to build a full-time income. Their 'Timeline' projects an income of $264 a month after 12 months and $7,875 a month after 24 months. After the first 6 months you have income coming in, but you are yet to make your first $10 in total.

  You can see how your income grows as your authority and influence grows over time, not just with people, but especially with the search engines too. Google wants to get to know you and find out if you are going to stay around before recommending you to it's audience.

It is a very slow process, especially in those early months. This is when most people will quit and say blogging doesn't work. Income School knows blogging takes time and their timeline is a great tool to set you expectations against.

If I stick to the Project 24 Timeline, I would reach my target of $3,000 a month around month 18 or 19. So, in order to reach my target of $3,000 a month in 12 months, I will have to speed up the timeline or to do additional income activities to the Project 24 process. My intention is to do both to increase my income quicker.

2) Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is getting paid a commission to recommend products to your circle of influence. You recommend or advertise a product, someone purchases the product, and the product vendor pays you a commission for making the sale for them. The cost the purchaser pays is the same as anyone else, your commission comes from the vendor's profit margin.

The purchaser gets a product you are happy to recommend, the vendor makes a sale to someone who wouldn't have purchased otherwise, and you get a commission for bringing the customer and the vendor together. Everybody wins.

Or do they?

The problem with much of the affiliate marketing that happens online, especially in the Internet Marketing arena, is that the people recommending the products are mainly interested in getting that commission payment. This means they will recommend stuff they haven't used themselves, or have any intention of using in the future.

The whole transaction is driven by money.

In my case, my income targets are pretty meager compared to the effort I am willing to make to reach that target. My intention is to make friends along the way and I don't see how I can do that unless I am genuine in the products I recommend and in the reviews of those products.

Believe me, I have purchased plenty of junk over the years that were recommended by people I trust (and still do trust). The problem stems from the inability to do proper reviews of the products before making the recommendation. In many cases, I have seen reviews appear before access to the product is even available, so conclusions are being made on what the sales blurb says, not from the actual use of the product. Not good.

The problem is exasperated by having short windows when these products are promoted after launch. Usually this is less than a week.

Having the time to get your hands on a product, do a thorough test of the claims made by the vendor, evaluate the benefits of the product, write a review, and still get it in front of your audience in time to get a sale in pretty nigh impossible in a 5-day launch window.

Even if you do manage it, the chances are they have already purchased using someone else's affiliate link.

This is what fuels the poor reviews and recommendations and the vendors are not likely to change this process because it means they sell lots more copies of their product with the way things are. Creating false scarcity drives up sales, it is a proven fact.

So how do I overcome this problem and provide balanced reviews? Well, for one, I intend to review products that are more evergreen so you don't have a limited window in which to buy them. Secondly, I will ask for a review access to the products I feel may be of benefit to the people who read my reviews.

I will also provide honest reviews. I will either use the products myself, or would use them for a specific task, or if I would buy them if I didn't already have a similar tool already in use.

3) Online Advertising

This is a major part of most bloggers income arsenal, but my intention is not to concentrate on this in the beginning. 

The reason being is you need to have a good amount of traffic coming to your website to attract the companies that pay the best prices for advertising and it takes months to build up those sorts of traffic levels.

My intention is to evaluate the space I have on my blog pages once I reach a decent level of monthly traffic and decide what is the most lucrative use of that space at the time.

4) Training Packages

I want to get my own training courses out there so I can build my influence and help the people who fall within my circle.

I intend to create both self-development type training and online marketing type training. I feel the two go together. To make money online you need the tools and techniques to succeed, but for a greater chance of success, you need to become a better version of yourself to make the most of the skills you learn. I know that was certainly the case for myself.

I will look to sell the training courses individually, as bundles, and as part of a membership site, which brings us nicely on to the next income stream.

5) Membership Site

  My plans for my membership site is to have at least 3 levels of access:

Silver- A free membership, open to all

Gold - A paid membership offering a range of training

Platinum - The big-daddy of memberships offering access to all (or mostly all) of my training.

People will be granted silver access by either applying for it, or when they opt-in for lead magnets within my business. All of my lead magnets will reside in my membership area.

By bringing people in to the free silver membership, I can market the benefits of the gold and platinum levels of service to them.

My plans are to charge monthly for the paid access. I have yet to decide if I will offer 'lifetime' access to these membership levels for a larger one-off payment.

The benefits of membership sites is they bring in 'residual income'. This is income you receive month after month instead of receiving a one-time payment. The skill with membership sites is keeping the members happy enough that they see the monthly payment as a bargain, not a waste of money.

  6) A niche site

Internet marketing is one of the toughest markets to be in when you start an online business. The competition is fierce and it is much harder to run adverts in Facebook compared to being in the quilting niche, the camping niche or the barbeque niche. as Facebook is strict on schemes offering money making claims.

I am knowledgable in the make money online niche because that is where I have been investing my time and money in for the last 6 years. Nevertheless, I wanted to try something in a different niche, mainly as a Plan B, because of the competitiveness of the online marketing niche.

A few months ago I began a project in the video gaming niche, but I canned it after a couple of months for a good reason. I was struggling to find a way to justify the work involved as it was difficult to sufficiently monetise it. There were no attractive affiliate marketing schemes and advertising companies paid less for adverts shown in this niche than the market average.

So I stopped and started a project in another niche. My intention was to build this business with my partner Andie (who I am a full-time carer for), especially as she was the expert in this niche. My hope was by giving her something to focus on, it would keep her positive and engaged despite her medical problems.

Over time though, it became obvious that the project was putting more pressure on her than it was helping her. She struggled to work on stuff and I sensed it was affecting her negatively - she was feeling guilt because I was beavering away with my tasks and she was struggling to do anything.

The website was built, the social accounts were set up, and the business plans were starting to take shape, but it just didn't feel right. So I sat down with Andie and told her I was going to stop the project and begin one I could run myself in the Internet Marketing niche.

You could see the relief in her face immediately once the pressure had been lifted. She admitted to struggling and to feeling guilty about not helping me. The pressure just made it worse, so she had struggled. I had made the right decision.

Nevertheless, this project is still there. I had invested a lot of time and a decent amount of money in creating it and I don't want it to go to waste. So my intention is to keep it going, on the back burner to begin with, as I build this business.

Andie can still advise on the project and I can always outsource articles once I have an income coming in from either projects.

The niche this earlier website is in is much more passionate than the Internet Marketing niche and a lot more money is spent in it. The signs are good for making a success of this project, it is just a case of the timing, management, and budgeting of it to get it bringing in money.

Whether I can get it to a stage where it is contributing to my monthly income within the coming 12 months will be an interesting side show to everything else I am doing.

I will keep you informed.

  .   .   .

  So there you have it, my plans to montise my business(es).

There are other ways to make money online.

In fact the project I have in the non-Internet Marketing niche has an ecommerce store attached to it and we were going to make products to sell in the online store.

There are other methods I have tried previously online with varying degress of success which involved having clients, such as lead generation or a local SEO agency, but with my current caring duties, these were not viable.

When I gave up working online previously I was running a local SEO agency, but when I started caring full-time for Andie, I felt I couldn't maintain the level of service I demanded of myself for my existing clients, or have the time to attract new clients to keep my business growing.

  So What Of The Future?

  Even without my other commitments, my plans are ambitious. Only time will tell whether they are over ambitious or just plain ludicrous.

Some things I have no control of, Andie's health being one of them. Plus, I am at an age myself where I am more likely to suffer with health problems. I will be celebrating my sixtieth birthday at the end of the 12 month target period.

Then there are the unforeseen expenses and events I haven't catered for. You can research and plan as much as possible, but in the end you still don't know what you don't know.

Having a solid business plan and marketing plan will help bypass these oversights as they hit, but experience tells me there will be major obstacles to overcome along the way.

I am ready and excited for the coming journey. The question is, do you want to watch from the sidelines or are you motivated to start your journey too?

[entergamingxp]

Rocket Arena Review — Remarkably Unremarkable

July 17, 2020 1:30 PM EST

Rocket Arena is a hero shooter that tries to make a mark, but doesn’t do nearly enough to help itself stand out.

The hero shooter subgenre is an odd one.

It’s not an oversaturated market, at least not yet, but instead, one that’s so dominated by a select few successes that it’s an uphill battle for any new game to come in and gain a foothold. For every Overwatch or Apex Legends, there’s a Battleborn and LawBreakers to match.

Rocket Arena — a debut project from Final Strike Games that released Tuesday under the EA Originals line — is the latest hero shooter looking to make its mark. But with minimal fanfare leading up to launch, a questionably high price of admission, and time spent playing a game that feels so derivative and uninspired, it’s a title that will have a hard time catching anyone’s attention, much less maintaining it.

“[Rocket Arena is] a title that will have a hard time catching anyone’s attention, much less maintaining it.”

Rocket Arena’s foundation is built with an amalgamation of elements from other games. Online shooter with a colorful, Pixar-esque art style? That’s Overwatch. A K.O. meter that fills up and sends opponents flying off the map after taking so much damage? That’s Super Smash Bros.

The 3-v-3 team setup? Although it’s likely a means to help differentiate from Overwatch (6-v-6) and Valorant (5-v-5), the format, and the name Rocket Arena in and of itself, brings it awfully close to Rocket League. Hell, there’s even a handball-like mode to bring it closer with a sports-focused angle. And while we’re still at spotting influences, one of the playable hero’s special abilities feels like it’s pulled right out of Splatoon.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with taking inspiration from other games. It’s just that Rocket Arena doesn’t do anything new or interesting with ideas it’s pulling from. The aforementioned gameplay mechanics and rules function almost exactly like they do in the respective games that established them, leading it all to feel like they’re just included because they’re popular and familiar, not because the development team saw a way to expand or put a unique spin on them.

That isn’t to say Rocket Arena doesn’t try to do anything original. Its biggest selling point is that it’s a rockets (i.e. projectiles) only shooter, which on paper might sound cool. In practice, it’s quite literally hit or miss.

It takes some getting used to when you first start out. Most shooters make use of hitscan for the bulk of their weaponry (rifles, handguns, shotguns, basically anything that uses bullets), having hits register instantly so long as the aiming reticle is on target when you fire. Then projectiles (rocket launchers and grenades) are added in to help break things up, usually as secondary or special weapons that carry a blast radius, but need time to travel to their target. It’s risk vs. reward. If you connect, you can do tons of damage to one or multiple opponents, but you throw or pull the trigger knowing you might miss completely since they’ll have time to get out of the way.

Since Rocket Arena forgos hitscan almost entirely in favor of all projectiles, every shot has to be deliberate in order to consistently hit anything. At launch there are 10 playable heroes of varying skill sets, who each have their own weapons that come with different levels of forgiveness. For some, all you need to do is put a rocket within an opponent’s general area to connect, while others I’ve found you need to be dead-on with. And in the case of one hero, Plink, his automatic weapon is the closest that comes to conventional hitscan, which I found myself falling back on a couple times when I felt like things really weren’t going my way.

“The roster consists of archetypes and character designs you’ve seen before and have been done more interestingly elsewhere.”

There is a practice mode where you can take all the time you need firing away at bots to get acclimated with the game’s mechanics and find the hero or heroes that best suit your playstyle. I still found myself going back and forth on whether the rockets-only approach was a good idea or not once I jumped into online matches.

Small maps, the 3-v-3 format, timers, score limits and relatively fast respawn times are all there to keep rounds moving quickly and players constantly involved. Genuinely interesting means of traversal help out on this front, too. Shooting the ground below you mid-jump will give you an extra boost, and firing downward at a wall repeatedly will send you climbing up it in a way somewhat similar to Mega Man X’s triangle kick. It gives maps an extra layer of verticality, opening up chances to do a quick survey of the area or get the drop on opponents.

It’s mostly in combat itself where things felt like they were falling apart. Trying to anticipate an opponent’s movements and lead shots often felt like it was slowing the action down, and perhaps because the game just launched (at the time of this writing, Rocket Arena has only been out for a couple days), I’ve seen shootouts tend to devolve into just firing away and hoping for the best.

The game launched with five modes. Knockout, basically the Rocket Arena variation of Team Deathmatch; Rocketball, the aforementioned handball-style mode where goals are set up at the opposite end of each map; Treasure Hunt, a two-part mode that starts with competing for possession of a treasure chest (in simpler terms a game of keep away), then turns into a scramble to collect as many coins as possible; Mega Rocket, where teams fight to capture control points across the map; And Rocketbot Attack, a co-op horde mode. There are multiple ways to play and find success without having to deal damage thanks to the mode variety. Still, it doesn’t absolve Rocket Arena from the issues I’ve had so far with its gameplay, and the modes themselves have been seen before in dozens of other multiplayer shooters over the past decade, to the point where playing them here hardly feels like anything more than going through the motions.

Rocket Arena will reward you for mastery. Gameplay-wise, you can pull off techniques like comboing opponents off the map without filling up their damage meter through consecutive hits (another note taken from Smash Bros.). And in terms of progression, every hero has 100 levels of rewards, with experience going toward cosmetic unlocks like outfits, VFX trails, and parts for customizable banners referred to in-game as totems. Time spent playing also unlocks and levels up what are called artifacts, of which you can assign up to three to a respective hero to either boost certain attributes or reduce respawn and cooldown times.

That said, if the core gameplay isn’t enough to keep you going, progressing the heroes won’t do much to remedy the situation. The roster consists of archetypes and character designs you’ve seen before and have been done more interestingly elsewhere. The story and lore put behind them also, frankly, is nothing more than shallow justification for how a world can have pirates, magicians, dinosaur hunters, and underwater kingdoms co-existing all at once.

“Rocket Arena isn’t a bad game, it works exactly as advertised… I just found it to be really dull.”

Completing ranked and social matches also accumulates Rocket Parts, one of Rocket Arena’s two methods of in-game currency, which can be put toward purchasing specific cosmetic gear. The other is the paid currency, Rocket Fuel, which serves the same purpose. Yes, this game does have microtransactions.

On top of that, Rocket Arena has an upfront cost of $30 minimum for its standard edition (the base game only), and $40 for its Mythic edition, which comes with extra outfits, VFX trails, and enough Rocket Fuel to pre-order the game’s season 1 Blast Pass (a roughly $8 package that comes with more cosmetics and a temporary XP boost).

Maybe in isolation, there could be an argument to justify the game’s pricing model, and to its credit, the hero this season is adding will be free to everyone. The hang-up I have with it is that this game was published by EA, the same company that helped put out Apex Legends, one of the more popular hero shooters and battle royale games out there…and that’s free-to-play. By comparison, Rocket Arena is asking for way more for something that, to me, is way less exciting.

Rocket Arena isn’t a bad game, it works exactly as advertised — provided there wasn’t something else to it outside of that few minutes the game was given during the EA Play showcase a month ago — I just found it to be really dull.

It pulls from established ideas you’ve already seen elsewhere, and the one unique hook it puts at the forefront isn’t near stable enough ground for it to stand out.

The whole thing is just forgettable.

July 17, 2020 1:30 PM EST

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/07/rocket-arena-review-remarkably-unremarkable/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rocket-arena-review-remarkably-unremarkable

[thejohnroanschoool]

Fit Body Boot Camp Is Considered The Top Rated Fitness Franchise to Own 2020

Do you have possessions to use as collateral? If you don’t have the exercise equipment or other collateral to open your franchise fastest growing fitness franchise, take into consideration an unsecured service funding . Alternative loan providers use an array of finance options for brand-new entrepreneur. If your franchise requires a particular amount down or you require to remodel the area to include a locker room or class room, an unprotected financing can assist.

Not just will you get possibly lower rates, yet you can get a greater car loan quantity, allowing you to fund anything from a specialized fitness instructor to a membership bonus offer. Do you desire ongoing access to credit report? Not exactly sure just how much you need to obtain or desire access to funds as you grow your company? A company line of credit scores might match your demands.

This is great for financing repair work to workout devices or running brand-new membership specials. A lending institution wants to recognize that you’re a qualified of running a a health club prior to prolonging a funding. You’ll have to satisfy a couple of basic certifications in order to use. Proof of working resources as well as fluid assets for the franchise. best franchise opportunity

Experience running a health club or mananging a comparable business. You need to have a clean credit report background and a good rating. A service strategy with capital forecasts as well as income projections. A good concept of which franchise you’ll call and why. As a health club owner, you’ll no question be cognizant of the devices requirements of your organisation.

Your tools serves as safety for your lending, offering you accessibility to lower prices than an unsafe funding. This suggests you can purchase your ellipticals, weight machines as well as treadmills simultaneously and also pay them off gradually. Opening your very own health club comes with a number of benefits and drawbacks.

On the various other hand, starting your service offers you the liberty to run things your method. Unfortunately, this additionally implies you’ll encounter much greater overheads given that you’ll need to buy all the tools, work with personnel, spend for advertising and take care of the rental fee with no aid from business. Whether you select to acquire a franchise or open your very own fitness center is entirely approximately just how you see on your own running a service as well as exactly how you want to invest your cash.

Gyms are a growing business throughout the United States as well as can be a strong franchise alternative for people looking to get involved in the market or broaden their present choices. The complete investment price differ, but you have a variety of financing choices available to help you fund your venture. franchise funding guide for suggestions on industry-specific tips.

These enable you to utilize your tools as collateral, protecting the funding as well as lowering the expense. Will my franchisor cover my insurance? It depends. You may be able to get unique pricing on insurance policy due to your affiliation with the franchise, but the cost of spending for it is your responsibility.

Will I require a service strategy? Yes. Both franchisors as well as lending institutions anticipate you to recognize where your organisation is heading and also what you’ll do to steer your gym to monetary success. It’s not nearly enough to buy right into a franchise– you’ll need to have a clear picture on just how your fitness center will certainly contribute to the bottom line of the franchise and the financial institution.

Researches show that currently is the best time to purchase the fitness franchise sector, as it has shown significant growth over the previous 5 years– 5.2% each year to be precise. These franchise business represent $4 billion of UNITED STATE earnings every year which number is anticipated to continue expanding.

The growing health trend has actually benefitted health club franchise business, urging them to produce more fitness franchise opportunities over the previous five years. The MÜV Health And Fitness as well as MÜV Educating ideas aim to inspire people worldwide to attain results with workout, nutrition, and entertainment. MÜV principles are high popular and offer so much greater than a traditional health club.

We understand how to stay in advance of our rivals in this rapidly growing market. We have actually always aimed to MÜV the physical fitness sector in a brand-new direction. People are constantly searching for far better methods to look and feel their ideal. All of our programs concentrate on giving participants with lead to the fastest, most safe, and most reliable methods possible.

The physical fitness opportunities we offer our members produce even more possibility for you to expand and also expand your organisation. We’re confident we can assist you keep a successful gym franchise that enables you to attain your individual and professional goals. Get in touch with us at (808) 427-0368 for more information concerning just how MÜV Physical fitness sticks out in the sector. Our organisation does not require opening up a brick-and-mortar room– you can be open and also operating in as low as 8 weeks! No physical fitness history? No worry. We provide unmatched training and support for all our proprietors. Our In-Home Personal Training franchise is revolutionizing the physical fitness sector– and we welcome you to come along for the flight.

Be your own manager and fulfill your franchising desires with the ideal in Health and fitness– UFC FITNESS CENTER. With international brand recognition, multiple profits streams and also three distinct alternatives to select from, you will quickly ask on your own, why not? Global Acknowledgment: UFC is a premium global sporting activities brand flaunting greater than 284 million fans worldwide.

With giant brand name, UFC there is remarkable growth chance for UFC FITNESS CENTER franchises. Multiple Profits Streams: With each version we provide the opportunity to drive income from multiple sources. From subscription to retail, private training to supplements we will certainly aid you find and also look into choices to secure additional funds time after time.

Service Design for each Capitalist: Select among our three franchising versions to best fit your budget plan and service goals from boutique studio to premium health and fitness center, we will function with you on locating your ideal fit.

At 9Round, we supply a kickboxing-themed fitness program that integrates functional, interval, cardiovascular, and also circuit training programs. The programs contain a proprietary system of nine challenging exercise stations established by a professional boxer. And, our service strategies are as easy to adhere to as our exercises. 9Round’s two ownership versions End up being a 9Round proprietor while keeping your current task or occupation.

Own as well as run your own 9Round club. This model is ideal for you if you are a passionate entrepreneur who prepares to wake up and also do what you enjoy– making individuals stronger and crushing company goals along the road. See extra.

If you’ve constantly fantasized of starting a company yet are overwhelmed or daunted by the idea of what that could entail, we have actually excellent news for you– partnering with a franchisor can take a lot of the work out of going right into organisation. When you spend in your Blink Health and fitness health club, you’ll appreciate a tried and true service design, unwavering franchisor training and assistance, and also a giant brand name– simply a few of the benefits that feature a Blink Fitness fitness center.

Creating a brand idea for a brand-new gym or fitness center takes years of difficult work and significant sources. Rather than opening a fitness center that no one has ever before come across, you can get a get on your business success by going with a franchise that’s already done most of the legwork for you.

Linda Ray is a prize-winning reporter with even more than twenty years reporting experience. She’s covered service for papers and also magazines, including the “Greenville News,” “Success Publication” and “American City Service Journals.” Ray holds a journalism degree as well as instructs writing, job growth and also an FDIC program called “Cash Smart.”.

For more than half a century, Gold’s Health club has been the globe’s trusted fitness authority. From simple beginnings as a little health club in Venice, California, Gold’s Fitness center has actually turned into an international symbol with 700+ places offering 3 million people each day throughout 6 continents. We have actually continued to be at the center of the $84 billion-dollar worldwide health and fitness market by supplying one of the most vibrant health and fitness experience including personalized change strategies, modern devices, accredited individual instructors, a diverse team workout program and an encouraging, motivating setting.

Do you have possessions to use as collateral? If you don’t have the exercise equipment or other collateral to open your franchise fastest growing fitness franchise, take into consideration an unsecured service funding . Alternative loan providers use an array of finance options for brand-new entrepreneur. If your franchise requires a particular amount down or you require to remodel the area to include a locker room or class room, an unprotected financing can assist.

Not just will you get possibly lower rates, yet you can get a greater car loan quantity, allowing you to fund anything from a specialized fitness instructor to a membership bonus offer. Do you desire ongoing access to credit report? Not exactly sure just how much you need to obtain or desire access to funds as you grow your company? A company line of credit scores might match your demands.

This is great for financing repair work to workout devices or running brand-new membership specials. A lending institution wants to recognize that you’re a qualified of running a a health club prior to prolonging a funding. You’ll have to satisfy a couple of basic certifications in order to use. Proof of working resources as well as fluid assets for the franchise. best franchise opportunity

Experience running a health club or mananging a comparable business. You need to have a clean credit report background and a good rating. A service strategy with capital forecasts as well as income projections. A good concept of which franchise you’ll call and why. As a health club owner, you’ll no question be cognizant of the devices requirements of your organisation.

Your tools serves as safety for your lending, offering you accessibility to lower prices than an unsafe funding. This suggests you can purchase your ellipticals, weight machines as well as treadmills simultaneously and also pay them off gradually. Opening your very own health club comes with a number of benefits and drawbacks.

On the various other hand, starting your service offers you the liberty to run things your method. Unfortunately, this additionally implies you’ll encounter much greater overheads given that you’ll need to buy all the tools, work with personnel, spend for advertising and take care of the rental fee with no aid from business. Whether you select to acquire a franchise or open your very own fitness center is entirely approximately just how you see on your own running a service as well as exactly how you want to invest your cash.

Gyms are a growing business throughout the United States as well as can be a strong franchise alternative for people looking to get involved in the market or broaden their present choices. The complete investment price differ, but you have a variety of financing choices available to help you fund your venture. franchise funding guide for suggestions on industry-specific tips.

These enable you to utilize your tools as collateral, protecting the funding as well as lowering the expense. Will my franchisor cover my insurance? It depends. You may be able to get unique pricing on insurance policy due to your affiliation with the franchise, but the cost of spending for it is your responsibility.

Will I require a service strategy? Yes. Both franchisors as well as lending institutions anticipate you to recognize where your organisation is heading and also what you’ll do to steer your gym to monetary success. It’s not nearly enough to buy right into a franchise– you’ll need to have a clear picture on just how your fitness center will certainly contribute to the bottom line of the franchise and the financial institution.

Researches show that currently is the best time to purchase the fitness franchise sector, as it has shown significant growth over the previous 5 years– 5.2% each year to be precise. These franchise business represent $4 billion of UNITED STATE earnings every year which number is anticipated to continue expanding.

The growing health trend has actually benefitted health club franchise business, urging them to produce more fitness franchise opportunities over the previous five years. The MÜV Health And Fitness as well as MÜV Educating ideas aim to inspire people worldwide to attain results with workout, nutrition, and entertainment. MÜV principles are high popular and offer so much greater than a traditional health club.

We understand how to stay in advance of our rivals in this rapidly growing market. We have actually always aimed to MÜV the physical fitness sector in a brand-new direction. People are constantly searching for far better methods to look and feel their ideal. All of our programs concentrate on giving participants with lead to the fastest, most safe, and most reliable methods possible.

The physical fitness opportunities we offer our members produce even more possibility for you to expand and also expand your organisation. We’re confident we can assist you keep a successful gym franchise that enables you to attain your individual and professional goals. Get in touch with us at (808) 427-0368 for more information concerning just how MÜV Physical fitness sticks out in the sector. Our organisation does not require opening up a brick-and-mortar room– you can be open and also operating in as low as 8 weeks! No physical fitness history? No worry. We provide unmatched training and support for all our proprietors. Our In-Home Personal Training franchise is revolutionizing the physical fitness sector– and we welcome you to come along for the flight.

Be your own manager and fulfill your franchising desires with the ideal in Health and fitness– UFC FITNESS CENTER. With international brand recognition, multiple profits streams and also three distinct alternatives to select from, you will quickly ask on your own, why not? Global Acknowledgment: UFC is a premium global sporting activities brand flaunting greater than 284 million fans worldwide.

With giant brand name, UFC there is remarkable growth chance for UFC FITNESS CENTER franchises. Multiple Profits Streams: With each version we provide the opportunity to drive income from multiple sources. From subscription to retail, private training to supplements we will certainly aid you find and also look into choices to secure additional funds time after time.

Service Design for each Capitalist: Select among our three franchising versions to best fit your budget plan and service goals from boutique studio to premium health and fitness center, we will function with you on locating your ideal fit.

At 9Round, we supply a kickboxing-themed fitness program that integrates functional, interval, cardiovascular, and also circuit training programs. The programs contain a proprietary system of nine challenging exercise stations established by a professional boxer. And, our service strategies are as easy to adhere to as our exercises. 9Round’s two ownership versions End up being a 9Round proprietor while keeping your current task or occupation.

Own as well as run your own 9Round club. This model is ideal for you if you are a passionate entrepreneur who prepares to wake up and also do what you enjoy– making individuals stronger and crushing company goals along the road. See extra.

If you’ve constantly fantasized of starting a company yet are overwhelmed or daunted by the idea of what that could entail, we have actually excellent news for you– partnering with a franchisor can take a lot of the work out of going right into organisation. When you spend in your Blink Health and fitness health club, you’ll appreciate a tried and true service design, unwavering franchisor training and assistance, and also a giant brand name– simply a few of the benefits that feature a Blink Fitness fitness center.

Creating a brand idea for a brand-new gym or fitness center takes years of difficult work and significant sources. Rather than opening a fitness center that no one has ever before come across, you can get a get on your business success by going with a franchise that’s already done most of the legwork for you.

Linda Ray is a prize-winning reporter with even more than twenty years reporting experience. She’s covered service for papers and also magazines, including the “Greenville News,” “Success Publication” and “American City Service Journals.” Ray holds a journalism degree as well as instructs writing, job growth and also an FDIC program called “Cash Smart.”.

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from The John Roan School https://thejohnroanschoool.wordpress.com/2020/01/01/fit-body-boot-camp-is-considered-the-top-rated-fitness-franchise-to-own-2020/

[brain-garden-blog]

In 2011, Claudio Aspesi, a senior investment analyst at Bernstein Research in London, made a bet that the dominant firm in one of the most lucrative industries in the world was headed for a crash. Reed-Elsevier, a multinational publishing giant with annual revenues exceeding £6bn, was an investor’s darling. It was one of the few publishers that had successfully managed the transition to the internet, and a recent company report was predicting yet another year of growth. Aspesi, though, had reason to believe that that prediction – along with those of every other major financial analyst – was wrong.                    

The core of Elsevier’s operation is in scientific journals, the weekly or monthly publications in which scientists share their results. Despite the narrow audience, scientific publishing is a remarkably big business. With total global revenues of more than £19bn, it weighs in somewhere between the recording and the film industries in size, but it is far more profitable. In 2010, Elsevier’s scientific publishing arm reported profits of £724m on just over £2bn in revenue. It was a 36% margin – higher than Apple, Google, or Amazon posted that year.

But Elsevier’s business model seemed a truly puzzling thing. In order to make money, a traditional publisher – say, a magazine – first has to cover a multitude of costs: it pays writers for the articles; it employs editors to commission, shape and check the articles; and it pays to distribute the finished product to subscribers and retailers. All of this is expensive, and successful magazines typically make profits of around 12-15%.

The way to make money from a scientific article looks very similar, except that scientific publishers manage to duck most of the actual costs. Scientists create work under their own direction – funded largely by governments – and give it to publishers for free; the publisher pays scientific editors who judge whether the work is worth publishing and check its grammar, but the bulk of the editorial burden – checking the scientific validity and evaluating the experiments, a process known as peer review – is done by working scientists on a volunteer basis. The publishers then sell the product back to government-funded institutional and university libraries, to be read by scientists – who, in a collective sense, created the product in the first place.

It is as if the New Yorker or the Economist demanded that journalists write and edit each other’s work for free, and asked the government to foot the bill. Outside observers tend to fall into a sort of stunned disbelief when describing this setup. A 2004 parliamentary science and technology committee report on the industry drily observed that “in a traditional market suppliers are paid for the goods they provide”. A 2005 Deutsche Bank report referred to it as a “bizarre” “triple-pay” system, in which “the state funds most research, pays the salaries of most of those checking the quality of research, and then buys most of the published product”.

Scientists are well aware that they seem to be getting a bad deal. The publishing business is “perverse and needless”, the Berkeley biologist Michael Eisen wrote in a 2003 article for the Guardian, declaring that it “should be a public scandal”. Adrian Sutton, a physicist at Imperial College, told me that scientists “are all slaves to publishers. What other industry receives its raw materials from its customers, gets those same customers to carry out the quality control of those materials, and then sells the same materials back to the customers at a vastly inflated price?” (A representative of RELX Group, the official name of Elsevier since 2015, told me that it and other publishers “serve the research community by doing things that they need that they either cannot, or do not do on their own, and charge a fair price for that service”.)

Many scientists also believe that the publishing industry exerts too much influence over what scientists choose to study, which is ultimately bad for science itself. Journals prize new and spectacular results – after all, they are in the business of selling subscriptions – and scientists, knowing exactly what kind of work gets published, align their submissions accordingly. This produces a steady stream of papers, the importance of which is immediately apparent. But it also means that scientists do not have an accurate map of their field of inquiry. Researchers may end up inadvertently exploring dead ends that their fellow scientists have already run up against, solely because the information about previous failures has never been given space in the pages of the relevant scientific publications. A 2013 study, for example, reported that half of all clinical trials in the US are never published in a journal.

According to critics, the journal system actually holds back scientific progress. In a 2008 essay, Dr Neal Young of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which funds and conducts medical research for the US government, argued that, given the importance of scientific innovation to society, “there is a moral imperative to reconsider how scientific data are judged and disseminated”.

Aspesi, after talking to a network of more than 25 prominent scientists and activists, had come to believe the tide was about to turn against the industry that Elsevier led. More and more research libraries, which purchase journals for universities, were claiming that their budgets were exhausted by decades of price increases, and were threatening to cancel their multi-million-pound subscription packages unless Elsevier dropped its prices. State organisations such as the American NIH and the German Research Foundation (DFG) had recently committed to making their research available through free online journals, and Aspesi believed that governments might step in and ensure that all publicly funded research would be available for free, to anyone. Elsevier and its competitors would be caught in a perfect storm, with their customers revolting from below, and government regulation looming above.

In March 2011, Aspesi published a report recommending that his clients sell Elsevier stock. A few months later, in a conference call between Elsevier management and investment firms, he pressed the CEO of Elsevier, Erik Engstrom, about the deteriorating relationship with the libraries. He asked what was wrong with the business if “your customers are so desperate”. Engstrom dodged the question. Over the next two weeks, Elsevier stock tumbled by more than 20%, losing £1bn in value. The problems Aspesi saw were deep and structural, and he believed they would play out over the next half-decade – but things already seemed to be moving in the direction he had predicted.

Over the next year, however, most libraries backed down and committed to Elsevier’s contracts, and governments largely failed to push an alternative model for disseminating research. In 2012 and 2013, Elsevier posted profit margins of more than 40%. The following year, Aspesi reversed his recommendation to sell. “He listened to us too closely, and he got a bit burned,” David Prosser, the head of Research Libraries UK, and a prominent voice for reforming the publishing industry, told me recently. Elsevier was here to stay.

Aspesi was not the first person to incorrectly predict the end of the scientific publishing boom, and he is unlikely to be the last. It is hard to believe that what is essentially a for-profit oligopoly functioning within an otherwise heavily regulated, government-funded enterprise can avoid extinction in the long run. But publishing has been deeply enmeshed in the science profession for decades. Today, every scientist knows that their career depends on being published, and professional success is especially determined by getting work into the most prestigious journals. The long, slow, nearly directionless work pursued by some of the most influential scientists of the 20th century is no longer a viable career option. Under today’s system, the father of genetic sequencing, Fred Sanger, who published very little in the two decades between his 1958 and 1980 Nobel prizes, may well have found himself out of a job.

Even scientists who are fighting for reform are often not aware of the roots of the system: how, in the boom years after the second world war, entrepreneurs built fortunes by taking publishing out of the hands of scientists and expanding the business on a previously unimaginable scale. And no one was more transformative and ingenious than Robert Maxwell, who turned scientific journals into a spectacular money-making machine that bankrolled his rise in British society. Maxwell would go on to become an MP, a press baron who challenged Rupert Murdoch, and one of the most notorious figures in British life. But his true importance was far larger than most of us realise. Improbable as it might sound, few people in the last century have done more to shape the way science is conducted today than Maxwell.

Keep reading here.

[beedalee]

Bee’s Modest Art Arsenal

I made a comprehensive list of all the stuff I typically use to make art as of right now. It’s not meant to be an end-all-be-all for art supplies by any means, just... stuff I like! And it’s largely affordable whenever possible, yay!!! Some of my favorite art products I find completely on accident or in unlikely places so never be afraid to give it a shot if it calls to you! My list is under the cut, and ofc, all photos are not mine and used purely for educational purposes.

Paper & Sketchbooks

Printer paper (the cheapest kind anyway) is absolutely fine if it’s what’s accessible and convenient, especially if you’re just doing warmups and concepts! I like to keep paper and recycle it in some way too- and some printer/junkmail paper is REALLY nice!! Typically though I prefer bound sketchbooks to keep track of my growth better. I seek specific textures and weights that are better suited to more aggressive mediums, like watercolor and marker. Printer paper is flimsy and really only for dry media!

So for more experimental mixed medium drawing, like markers, paint, watercolor, heavy inks, scrap-booking and collage stuff, I own these:

Shown above are: Strathmore Mixed Media 400 series, Canson XL watercolor paper, Canson XL mixed media paper. Each pad was between 5-9 dollars depending on the size you want, and you can find these at many stores; Joann’s, Micheal’s, Walmart, Staples, etc.

As for sketchbooks- I don’t swear by a brand but here’s what I look for: I prefer wire bound or coptic binding, because both allow the book to lay flat (unlike classic “book” case binding) Also, texture is veeeery important to me! I like very smooth bright white paper that isn’t too thin for sketching and inking. It’s a small personal thing, but because I’m left handed, the more textured paper is the more I smudge it to hell and back. (;￣ー￣川

Pencils & Erasers

For general sketching, I prefer mechanical pencils (but I always keep some wooden pencils around too just in case I need something softer) I’ll use just about any brand or size lead, but my personal favorite is 0.5mm lead, and comfort grips are essential for your artist’s finger bump!!! The two pencils I use the most are a Bic Velocity and Pentel whose label has been smudged off... but again, ANY brand is seriously fine. Some people like standard .7 or even .9 could be good for you if you’re prone to breaking lead!

(Disclaimer: I have virtually no experience with those fancy different lead size HB wood pencils because it smudges so i don’t want it.... (ʘ‿ʘ);;; )

Red and blue sketching pencils are useful because when you scan it, you have the option of editing out JUST the blue or red channel in your art program, leaving only the refined sketch or inks. If you don’t have easy access to an art store that carries these kinds (or just love rainbows like me) use erasable colored pencils for more or less the same effect.

95% of the time, I don’t trust erasers on the tip of any pencil. Ever. My family has a bad habit of hoarding pencils for years or buying cheap ones with cute prints, so the erasers ALWAYS suck. Instead, I use an entirely separate selection of erasers. 

Shown above are Faber-Castell eraser 3pack, Prismacolor kneaded rubber, and Pentel’s hi-polymer eraser. They’re relatively easy to find, though Pentel’s may be the easiest in a pinch, and you get a bunch for a low price!  Those pointy pencil topper erasers work as well if you want something smaller tho!

Kneaded rubber is really useful if not making a eraser crumb mess is very important to you or your work, effective and very gentle. (and gross looking after a while... like a grey poo... but it’s fun to play with?) I always have a big fat eraser like these around for erasing large areas- I prefer them a LOT over pink erasers, which occasionally do the dreaded smudge or dry out. and then smudge. HHNGGH

Pictured above are Papermate TUFF STUFF eraser stick (and a refill), Pentel’s Clic Eraser, and Clic Eraser refills. The refills are almost always exactly next to the product itself.

So you have a big eraser! But for detail work and hard to reach spaces, that fat nub might make you want to pull your hair out as you accidentally erase the face you spent 15 minutes perfecting. These are probably one of my favorite tools, and I’ve used them since I was 14! Pentel’s eraser is great for moderate to fine detailing, and then I recently found Papermate’s at a Dick Blick. It may be the most elusive (I mean.. we have the internet now so...) but it’s INCREDIBLE for detail erasing. I’m super finicky about precision, so these are heavenly for me.

Pens & Markers

For inking and lining, I turn to these! They’re pretty accessible in many stores now-a-days (Sakura used to be so hard to find). Shown here are Sakura Micron Pigma 8 pack and Staedtler Pigment Liner 4pack. Staedler was my first baby-bee brand and the quality is still good, even if I prefer Sakura now because of the wide variety of nib sizes. You can also find Sakura in singles in art stores like DickBlick or Jerry’s Artarama probably! Liners are waterproof and archival, and take a lot of punishment under wet media or on top (though I’d always encourage letting it dry first.)

Shown above are Sakura Micron Gelly Roll Metallic and Classic White Gel Pens! Gel pens were a super cool fad back in the 2000s for me but now they actually serve a REALLY handy purpose. You could use them to highlight or detail just about anything, but I especially find the metalic and white gelpens very useful. The metals are great to add a bit of bling to a drawing, shine your rendered metal, or just add sparkles. ✧☆✧ (و｡･｀ω´･｡)و  The white is GREAT for tan, gray, or black paper- or to highlight areas in hair or eyes- AND to white out small oopsies without having to use actual white out. I highly recommend getting a 3 pack of these guys!

I also recommend ballpoint pens. Yes, those random ones all over your house, given out for free at banks or offices- any old ballpoint pen (that isn’t on the verge of dying.) The difference between sketching in pencil, inking art, and using pen is that ballpoint pen is all the permanence without the refinement of inking. I looove using ballpoint to sketch messy stuff, to mess up and start over. plus, it also comes in a billion colors, and you don’t feel bad writing with them normally or losing them when you travel. It isn’t waterproof so it will bleed if you put marker or watercolor on it, but... sometimes i do it anyway! 8) 

I currently use Spectrum Noir and Prismacolor Alcohol markers. SN are in packs of 6 for 14.99, but if you’re like me, a joann’s 50% off coupon can net these sets for 7.50 apiece. I got the prismacolor 12 pack for my birthday, and I like to collect a few certain colors on occasion, but the money saved on the SN makes that splurge possible. I think the quality is really great for the price, even if I am still pretty novice at marker coloring. I write a bit more about these here!

Digital Art Tools

10x6.25 in Monoprice Tablet (and some AAA batteries) (You can probably find bigger or more updated models for the same price by now, as well.)

Love this tablet! REALLY affordable (70-80) and such a trooper- I’ve battered this thing with water and heat and cold and it’s still as resilient as ever. I think I’ve changed the single AAA battery in my pen like... 3 times max in the 4-5 years I’ve owned it. I’ve disabled the “close window” hotkey (bc I’m LEFT HANDED AND HIT IT ALL THE TIME) but otherwise it’s a really great tablet, does exactly what it should. Works with windows 7 well, but I can’t give a review of it on any other OS.  More about it here.

I use Easy Paint Tool Sai and Photoshop 7 for text/editing (though I’d like to upgrade to CS2 in the future), but free/purchased art programs are vast and endless, so it’s really up to your personal taste... and this post is already long enough!

So, that’s about it for now! Those are all the essentials I like at the moment- everything else is experimental, which is always encouraged!!! Expand your horizons!! Have fun!! Go draw a thing!

[toldnews-blog]

New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/world/why-some-japanese-pensioners-want-to-go-to-jail/

Why some Japanese pensioners want to go to jail

Japan is in the grip of an elderly crime wave – the proportion of crimes committed by people over the age of 65 has been steadily increasing for 20 years. The BBC’s Ed Butler asks why.

At a halfway house in Hiroshima – for criminals who are being released from jail back into the community – 69-year-old Toshio Takata tells me he broke the law because he was poor. He wanted somewhere to live free of charge, even if it was behind bars.

“I reached pension age and then I ran out of money. So it occurred to me – perhaps I could live for free if I lived in jail,” he says.

“So I took a bicycle and rode it to the police station and told the guy there: ‘Look, I took this.'”

The plan worked. This was Toshio’s first offence, committed when he was 62, but Japanese courts treat petty theft seriously, so it was enough to get him a one-year sentence.

Small, slender, and with a tendency to giggle, Toshio looks nothing like a habitual criminal, much less someone who’d threaten women with knives. But after he was released from his first sentence, that’s exactly what he did.

“I went to a park and just threatened them. I wasn’t intending to do any harm. I just showed the knife to them hoping one of them would call the police. One did.”

Image caption Toshio displays his own drawings in his cell

Altogether, Toshio has spent half of the last eight years in jail.

I ask him if he likes being in prison, and he points out an additional financial upside – his pension continues to be paid even while he’s inside.

“It’s not that I like it but I can stay there for free,” he says. “And when I get out I have saved some money. So it is not that painful.”

Toshio represents a striking trend in Japanese crime. In a remarkably law-abiding society, a rapidly growing proportion of crimes is carried about by over-65s. In 1997 this age group accounted for about one in 20 convictions but 20 years later the figure had grown to more than one in five – a rate that far outstrips the growth of the over-65s as a proportion of the population (though they now make up more than a quarter of the total).

And like Toshio, many of these elderly lawbreakers are repeat offenders. Of the 2,500 over-65s convicted in 2016, more than a third had more than five previous convictions.

Another example is Keiko (not her real name). Seventy years old, small, and neatly presented, she also tells me that it was poverty that was her undoing.

“I couldn’t get along with my husband. I had nowhere to live and no place to stay. So it became my only choice: to steal,” she says. “Even women in their 80s who can’t properly walk are committing crime. It’s because they can’t find food, money.”

We spoke some months ago in an ex-offender’s hostel. I’ve been told she’s since been re-arrested, and is now serving another jail-term for shoplifting.

Find out more

Japan’s Elderly Crime Wave can be heard on Assignment on the BBC World Service from Thursday 31 January – click here for transmission times

Or listen now online

Theft, principally shoplifting, is overwhelmingly the biggest crime committed by elderly offenders. They mostly steal food worth less than 3,000 yen (£20) from a shop they visit regularly.

Michael Newman, an Australian-born demographer with the Tokyo-based research house, Custom Products Research Group points out that the “measly” basic state pension in Japan is very hard to live on.

In a paper published in 2016 he calculates that the costs of rent, food and healthcare alone will leave recipients in debt if they have no other income – and that’s before they’ve paid for heating or clothes. In the past it was traditional for children to look after their parents, but in the provinces a lack of economic opportunities has led many younger people to move away, leaving their parents to fend for themselves.

“The pensioners don’t want to be a burden to their children, and feel that if they can’t survive on the state pension then pretty much the only way not to be a burden is to shuffle themselves away into prison,” he says.

The repeat offending is a way “to get back into prison” where there are three square meals a day and no bills, he says.

“It’s almost as though you’re rolled out, so you roll yourself back in.”

Newman points out that suicide is also becoming more common among the elderly – another way for them to fulfil what he they may regard as “their duty to bow out”.

The director of “With Hiroshima”, the rehabilitation centre where I met Toshio Takata, also thinks changes in Japanese families have contributed to the elderly crime wave, but he emphasises the psychological consequences not the financial ones.

“Ultimately the relationship among people has changed. People have become more isolated. They don’t find a place to be in this society. They cannot put up with their loneliness,” says Kanichi Yamada, an 85-year-old who as a child was pulled out of the rubble of his home when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

“Among the elderly who commit crimes a number have this turning point in their middle life. There is some trigger. They lose a wife or children and they just can’t cope with that… Usually people don’t commit crime if they have people to look after them and provide them with support.”

Toshio’s story about being driven to crime as a result of poverty is just an “excuse”, Kanichi Yamada suggests. The core of the problem is his loneliness. And one factor that may have prompted him to reoffend, he speculates, was the promise of company in jail.

It’s true that Toshio is alone in the world. His parents are dead, and he has lost contact with two older brothers, who don’t answer his calls. He has also lost contact with his two ex-wives, both of whom he divorced, and his three children.

Image caption Toshio is a keen painter

I ask him if he thinks things would have turned out differently if he’d had a wife and family. He says they would.

“If they had been around to support me I wouldn’t have done this,” he says.

Michael Newman has watched as the Japanese government has expanded prison capacity, and recruited additional female prison guards (the number of elderly women criminals is rising particularly fast, though from a low base). He’s also noted the steeply rising bill for medical treatment of people in prison.

There have been other changes too, as I see for myself at a prison in Fuchu, outside Tokyo, where nearly a third of the inmates are now over 60.

There’s a lot of marching inside Japanese prisons – marching and shouting. But here the military drill seems to be getting harder to enforce. I see a couple of grey-haired inmates at the back of one platoon struggling to keep up. One is on crutches.

“We have had to improve the facilities here,” Masatsugu Yazawa, the prison’s head of education tells me. “We’ve put in handrails, special toilets. There are classes for older offenders.”

He takes me to watch one of them. It begins with a karaoke rendition of a popular song, The Reason I was Born, all about the meaning of life. The inmates are encouraged to sing along. Some look quite moved.

“We sing to show them that the real life is outside prison, and that happiness is there,” Yazawa says. “But still they think the life in prison is better and many come back.”

Michael Newman argues that it would be far better – and much cheaper – to look after the elderly without the expense of court proceedings and incarceration.

“We actually costed a model to build an industrial complex retirement village where people would forfeit half their pension but get free food, free board and healthcare and so on, and get to play karaoke or gate-ball with the other residents and have a relative amount of freedom. It would cost way less than what the government’s spending at the moment,” he says.

But he also suggests that the tendency for Japanese courts to hand down custodial sentences for petty theft “is slightly bizarre, in terms of the punishment actually fitting the crime”.

“The theft of a 200-yen (£1.40) sandwich could lead to an 8.4m-yen (£580,000) tax bill to provide for a two-year sentence,” he writes in his 2016 report.

That may be a hypothetical example, but I met one elderly jailbird whose experience was almost identical. He’d been given a two-year jail term for only his second offence: stealing a bottle of peppers worth £2.50.

And I heard from Morio Mochizuki, who provides security for some 3,000 retail outlets in Japan, that if anything the courts are getting tougher on shoplifters.

“Even if they only stole one piece of bread,” says Masayuki Sho of Japan’s Prison Service, “it was decided at trial that it is appropriate for them to go to prison, therefore we need to teach them the way: how to live in society without committing crime.”

I don’t know whether the prison service has taught Toshio Takata this lesson, but when I ask him if he is already planning his next crime, he denies it.

“No, actually this is it,” he says.

“I don’t want to do this again, and I will soon be 70 and I will be old and frail the next time. I won’t do that again.”

You may also be interested in:

Megumi was a baby when her parents separated and her father disappeared from her life. But years later her mother told her he wanted to reconnect. Megumi began to see Yamada regularly. She thinks he is her father, and that Yamada is his real name – but this is a lie.

Read: I hire a man to pretend to be my daughter’s dad – and she doesn’t know

Join the conversation – find us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter.

[mild-lunacy]

The Difference between Ranting and Critique

It seems that my reply to @smirkdoctor's post on what would happen if we let problematic things in fiction go unchecked was off-base, 'cause the question was about fandom resistance to con-crit. That is definitely something near and dear to my heart. I certainly think fandom could use more facility with genuine criticism of the media we consume, more comfort with it, more understanding of its uses and its importance. But.

Yeah, there's certainly a but. I guess it's hard to explain if you don't intuitively get the difference or the shadings of nuance between critique (even strong critique) and *negativity*. Some people are also overly sensitive, which doesn't help. But the thing is that what I consider 'true' critique isn't *at all* negative. It's just neutral; it's analysis, not a rant. The issue is, what people call con-crit in fandom (and the thing that gives it a bad name) is actually complaining, ranting and so on. No one likes that except for people who already agree with you, and feel the same.

Of course, it's not that there isn't a place in fandom for letting off steam; quite the contrary: there's as much of that as there is squee (if not more, at least on Tumblr). Still, by its very nature, negativity brings you down. People who just want to enjoy their favorite show (even analytically), at least, are bound to be frustrated with such 'critique'. This is particularly the case when a good number of the ranty critical posts actually misread, misrepresent and/or misunderstand some core aspect of the text and/or characterization. That's definitely unpleasant, at least speaking for myself.

I think this sort of conflict is an unnecessary but perhaps inevitable misunderstanding, in the end, of the sort that often happens between warmer feeling-centric types and cooler analysis-centric types of people. The feelers just wanna feel good, and the thinkers just wanna understand, and this makes them feel good (needless to say, this is an exaggeration for effect, seeing as it's not really a binary). I'm a feeler who just wants to understand, so I get the best and worst of both worlds: usually, I get frustrated both because I just want to enjoy my favorite media *and* because people are wrong on the internets. I guess my point is, a) not all media or fic critique is created equal, and a lot of people seem to think using emotionally charged words or concepts like 'representation' or 'homophobia', 'racism', etc, substitutes for actually doing some real analysis or close reading of the text. And b), there's also precious little positive or canon-friendly close readings in most fandoms I've seen, with some glorious exceptions in the bigger fandoms (this must actually be a big reason why I've been so attracted to TJLC intellectually: it's positive criticism by its very nature).

The biggest issue is probably still a more general misunderstanding of the difference between criticism and negativity, of course. That's true even though, well, a lot of people's critiques *are* quite negative, usually 'cause they're clearly writing to complain rather than simply to expand upon some problematic aspect of the text. That's just... a question of the nature of fandom and the platform, and the fact that we're not writing academic papers (which are edited for clarity and then edited again for tone, among other things). Anyway, the negativity is what ensures people will get fed up, not the analysis itself. Note, criticism is really just analysis that happens to point out flaws or inconsistencies, which is simply part of its nature. Ranting is when it gets personal, and starts proclaiming or demanding consequences and/or passing for activism.

To be clear, analysis is not activism. Hell, fandom meta is not activism. Of course, it can *inspire* or generate such activity; I'm just saying the meta itself is not equivalent to or equipped to pass for radical action to combat racism, homophobia, etc etc. Meta can certainly be used to raise awareness to some degree, as any communication or community building can accomplish, but that's not its responsibility or the primary function, either of fandom meta or of the mass media. People seem to kind of... miss this on Tumblr sometimes. A lot of times.

On top of this, and perhaps as a side point, but I really think that positive or celebratory posts are actually much more effective to generate support and reflection on the important social issues of the day. As a person who wants to be a HS teacher, I would certainly focus on exposing the students to various books and movies and discussing them, being creative with them, sharing ideas and experiences. I would certainly like to include some media critique and I would definitely support and model critical thinking practices, but in the end, joy is what leads to understanding, I think. Even critique is something that can definitely be done joyfully, without hurting the pleasure of the text. In the end, all of it-- all our words as critics-- are less than nothing compared to the true joy we found in the things we love. The pleasure-- the pleasure of thinking, the pleasure of reading, the pleasure of seeing yourself represented in the media, the high pleasure of that moment of sheer *recognition*-- that's what is truly worth keeping.

[agent-7-at-your-service]

Future Plot: Voyage of the Shinkirō - Chapter 4

((Camille belongs to @inklingleesquidly

Nebula belongs to @myzzy and @agenttwo

Beaker Jr. belongs to @askvincent / @asktheseastars  and @scrushling

Vix belongs to @teamuntyblue / @ryan-sign-guy

Sandra, Agent 7, and Circe belong to me

Disclaimer:  Most of the content in this chapter belongs to Andrew Hussie, creator of the webcomic Homestuck. Also, this chapter was sort of inspired by a scene in the Star Wars non-canon Comic, Into the Great Unknown. ))

This trip to the uncharted island took about 4 days, and on the way, they passed by the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and a few atolls.

Uncharted Island - 1:45 PM

When the Shinkiro reached the coordinates, (-0.955766 -174.759521), they entered a fog. Sandra is in control over the wheel and had Camille and Nebula at the hull to detect for sharp rocks. Beaker Jr and Vix did the same thing on the crow's nest with Beaker using a telescope and Vix using echolocation.

Walkie-talkies were distributed to them for Sandra to receive a warning and direct the ship to safety.

So far, there weren't any hazards that would endanger the ship.

"Anything hazard yet?" Sandra asked.

"No, just fog, fog, and more fog," Beaker Jr. reported before talking with Vix," How's your echolocation, Vix?"

"I can't really see everything with echolocation. I'm still practicing," Vix replied.

"Yeah nothing yet, Sandy," Beaker Jr hangs up.

Sandra sighs and gets a call from Camille.

"Yeah, I don't think there's going to be any sharp rocks or reefs that will crash into the ship," Camille stated, "I don't think we need to continue keeping an eye out for rocks and reefs."

Sandra sighs and calls everyone. "Alright, guys, you can stop." She then thought about something. "How about we have lunch?"

"Sure," Camille answered.

"I think it's too early, but alright," Nebula agreed.

"It's only 11, so I think there's time to eat," Beaker Jr noted.

"Do we have chili sauce and spaghetti pasta?" Vix asked.

Camille, Nebula, Vix, and Beaker Jr. gather to the storage room to get their ingredients. Sandra carefully lets go of the wheel and meets up with her friends, and she leads them to the kitchen and dining room in the Shinkiro. This dining room had the usual table booths, windows, and a bar while the kitchen had the usual oven, stove, cabinets, and drawers.

Despite each of the guys having different cooking experiences, they managed to cook what they can.

Camille simply made herself some macaroni with cheese. Nebula made herself gyros using flatbread, beef, lamb, tomato, onion, and tzatziki sauce; To make things interesting, she added crab to the mix. Camille had to help Vix to make his lunch, making some pasta and chili for some spaghetti. Sandra made sure Vix or Camille doesn't hurt themselves from making the spaghetti. Beaker Jr was making himself a simple grilled cheese sandwich.

For Sandra, she tried to make some kind of cake, using chocolate cake mix, coconut cream, water, and shavings, crushed macadamia nuts, and whip cream. And while it was baking, she made some ice cold lemonade.

About half an hour later, the cooked dishes were placed in the dining room along with forks, knives, spoons, cups, a gallon of grape juice, and napkins. Once that was done, Sandra, Camille, Nebula, Vix, and Beaker jr. took their seats and were ready to eat lunch after a small prayer made by Sandra. Camille has her mac and cheese, Nebula has her gyros, Vix has his chili-spaghetti, and Beaker has his grilled cheese.

The chocolate cake with macadamia nuts, coconut, and whip cream was made by Sandra to try and make her family's recipe. It tasted a little too sweet, but the cake is not perfect; Something is missing in the cake, she thought.

"How can manage to make a chocolate cake?" Vix can smell Sandra's cake.

"Circe taught me how to bake a small one." Sandra eats another piece of her cake.

"Looks delicious," Beaker Jr. commented.

Sandra then brought the conversation forward with a question: "You guys have a loving family, right?"

Sandra remembers her family loving her until the age of 5 where she was left with her brother and some caretakers. From what she can recall, her parents were archaeologists and historians, and they've been always leaving Seychelles for places in other countries. She rarely comes with them. And at the time of the boat accident during a storm, she can only remember them taking her brother with them to see America. She refused to go out of anger.

And after being adopted, the love from Agent 7 and Circe didn't feel the same to her.

When Sandra asked that question, the answer varied.

"Well,.... even if my mom and dad are dorks, I still love them, and I would always love my baby brother," Camille replied.

"Don't forget you have a loving cousin too," Nebula mentioned, "And I, too, have a loving family."

"I also treat friends and loved ones as family... and Uncle Sev's family too." Camille shakes her head with a smirk.

"Have a loving family too, and they really care a lot about me!" Beaker Jr boasted.

Vix was still eating his spaghetti, but he nods in agreement.

"Oh... I see..." Sandra continues eating her cake.

"So why ask that?" Nebula wondered.

"Well, I was told my parents and my brother died in a boating accident during a storm, and I became an orphan. Then Circe and Agent 7 adopted me..." Sandra was hesitant to say anything else, but she expected them to understand.

"I don't blame you, Sandy," Camille commented, "Uncle Sev this is only like what his 3rd marriage? He almost lost Aunt Circe in an assassination attempt after that wedding."

"Yeah, I've been told." Sandra adjusted her glasses. "I always treated Circe like an aunt, and Agent 7 is like some Sean Connery version of Mr. Peabody."

"Sean Connery?  Mr. Peabody?" Vix's one strand of hair that sticks up forms into a question mark. "Who are they?"

"Oh, Sean Connery is some human actor Agent 7 obsesses over about, and Mr. Peabody is a character from a childhood cartoon show I used to watch when I was young," Sandra explained.

As they finish up their lunch, the Shinkiro hits something, and Sandra and friends weren't prepared to brace for impacts. Nothing really spilled in the dining room. After the Shinkiro hits something, Sandra quickly leaves the dining room and kitchen to go over and stop the ship's engines and close the sails. Beaker Jr. followed her to offer some help. Camille, Nebula, and Vix had to stay in the dining room and kitchen to watch the dishes, put away some food and drinks, and disposing of garbage.

Afterward, they group gathered at the hall to see what the Shinkiro hit.

Uncharted Island - 2:05 PM

It was sand.

When the fog began clearing up, there's a beach. As it went further, there's a grass field, then a massive forest, then a small mountain range, and then an extinct volcano. And when the fog is completely gone, there's an island.

"I don't believe it... it's real," Sandra began.

"Why would someone live here?" Camille questioned.

Sandra takes out some binoculars and surveys their surroundings. The only man-made structures made on the island are some temple ruins and a tower.

"Maybe it was some paradise to them?" Sandra speculated. "The place is isolated from most of the world, and there's a possibility that they get their supplies from neighboring islands."

Sandra jumps off the Shinkiro and steps foot on the island's beach. Beaker Jr soon followed Sandra. Sandra leaves the beach and she waves to Camille, Nebula, and Vix who are still on the Shinkiro.

"Don't worry, we'll be back in an hour or two!" Sandra called out.

"Wait, what about us!?" Nebula called back.

"Just watch over the ship for me!" Sandra replied before walking off.

"Hey wait a sec--!" Camille sees them disappear into the forests. "Oh... fine!"

Camille, Nebula, and Vix stayed with the ship just in case, though there is a chance Vix might wander off.

Tower - Uncharted Island - 2:40 PM

Sandra and Beaker Jr we're heading towards the mountains to reach the tower, and they manage to find a dirt road path leading to there. It took a while to reach the tower, they found some of the rubble that was part of the tower and one piece suggested it once had an ornamental turret that would've consisted more sets of rooms. Up close, half the tower was destroyed, and Sandra and imagine a fully restored on being the size of a skyscraper. Most of the vegetation has consumed what's left of the tower.

There was only one door that led inside and it was already open. Inside, were a few large rooms, and the room there has a stairway and some kind of pad; Something is blocking it: a large stuffed humanoid with a lower body of a green snake.

"Geez, looks like someone needs to remodel," Beaker commented.

"Well I  was told the owner was once a famous hunter," Sandra stated, "but he's probably a polymath and a billionaire."

They find may of the room inaccessible except for the rooms with the stairs. One of them is a dark room with a fireplace, sofa, and other contents -- it was once a foyer. The others rooms each containing mummies, washed photos, knight armor models, big game trophies, and other collections of junk. Sandra decided to take pictures while they explored.

The high point they can reach was a floor that was once a garden atrium. There was broken glass shards everywhere, a few metal beams, and a few broken furniture. However, the vegetation took over and expanded outside the tower.

"I... I have a feeling this tower and the volcano shouldn't exist" Sandra explores this floor a bit.

"What makes you say that?" Beaker asked.

"It's just a feeling." Sandra then finds a small note.

This note somehow managed to survive the destruction, but due to aging, it was quite fragile. Sandra carefully examined it. It was written in a unique handwriting with green ink, suggesting the writer uses either a pen or a fine marker.

The writing is on both sides of the piece of paper.On the front side it says: farmstink???? that is incredibly silly and a little bit rude!!!!!!! my name is == ɛ>

Sandra carefully  flipped the piece of paper, and on the back side it says: jade harley

"Jade Harley..." Sandra felts something inside her. "How come I know that name...?" She wondered what she looked like, so she returned to the other rooms and checked out the foyer again with Beaker following. Since it was dark, she used a flashlight.

As Sandra explored, she found some things: a stuffed human wearing a hunter's outfit and carrying a hunting rifle and a small portrait of a young girl.

"The human here must be the grandfather," Sandra concluded, "As for the girl in that portrait." She examined it.

The girl in the portrait wore a yellow dress with long black hair and a bucktoothed grin. What she also wore is round glasses similar to hers.

"That must be... Jade..... Harley." Sandra stepped back and narrowed her eyes at the girl in the portrait.

"She sort of looks like you," Beaker Jr. joked, "excepts you don't have bucked teeth.

"Yeah..." Sandra felt unsettled.

Beaker Jr. noticed the look on Sandra's face. "Is something wrong?"

Sandra wanted to know what has become of the girl and her grandfather on this island. But what she discovered here made her reconsider. Maybe it's best these mysteries are left unsolved since these discoveries only left more questions. She still had one thing she wanted to do.

"I think it's best we leave this island... right after I collect some of these relics." Sandra took out some bags.

The Shinkiro - Out at Sea - 3:10 PM

Sandra took a few things from the island: The Portrait of Jade, a broken guitar, an unusual octopus plushie, and the old note written by Jade Harley. And she personally gave the island a name: Jade's Island.

When she returned to the ship, she got the Shinkiro back in the waters so that her crew can sail to the next location. Beaker Jr. told  Camille, Nebula, and Vix about what he and Sandra found in the tower, but he kept the mentioning of Jade Harley and her grandfather to a minimum.

Sandra just kept sailing the Shinkiro away from the island.

The next stop was the Galapagos Islands.

[evnoweb]

8 EdTech Trends to Watch Out for This 2020

As always, education is changing. There are so many new ways to differentiate for varied learners, back-fill for some while enriching others without slowing anyone down. Being a teacher and a learner today is awe-inspiring. Ask a Tech Teacher contributor, Wally Clipper, has a great run-down on 8 trends you’ll want to watch in 2020:

8 EdTech Trends to Watch Out for This 2020

Technology has vastly disrupted and improved numerous sectors around the world, be it the government and banking, or retail and marketing. Unsurprisingly, technology is also impacting the world of education. In fact, a study on Forbes found that global education technology (EdTech) is one of the fastest-growing segments today, and is expected to be worth $252 billion by the end of this year.

While EdTech has been helping schools and other educational institutions a lot since it was introduced, its benefits have grown even more this year. From digital certificates to learning analytics, here are eight EdTech trends to look forward to in the coming months.

Video-assisted Learning

Gone are the days when teachers had to drag TVs into classrooms to let students watch films. Now, nearly every classroom is at least equipped with a screen and projector. Additionally, Chron reports that some schools have even replaced the usual blackboard and whiteboard with smartboards this year. These devices double as both a whiteboard and a screen. Plus, they have apps that let you interact with whatever’s projected onto them with the touch of a finger.

Data Analytics

Much like how social media giants Facebook and Twitter are utilizing our digital footprints to better understand consumer behavior, teachers are also turning to data analytics to learn more about their students. With more educational institutions adopting virtual learning management systems (such as Moodle, Edmodo, etc.), there are more opportunities for students to input valuable personal data. This grants schools more insight into their learning behavior, which then helps teachers come up with more effective curriculums in the future. There’s even an annual event dedicated to this field called the International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge, which will be held in Germany this March.

3D Printing

The concept of 3D printing is nothing new. As explained in a 3D printing guide by HP, the technology has long been utilized for customizing auto parts, casting concrete for architecture, and even creating biological structures. Over time, 3D printing has expanded outside of niche uses, and is now impacting schools too. Our guest writer Jacqui Murray mentions some of its popular uses in education, such as producing scaled models for math and history classes, as well as creating “visual aids” to make learning more immersive. True enough, 3D printed objects (like biological samples and electrical models) as visual aids has significantly improved the learning capacity of students. With models being nearly identical to the actual things, lessons become easier to understand.

Blockchain

Blockchain technology is a distributed encrypted database that exists in multiple computers at the same time. Every time new data is added, it adds another “block” into the system, so its storage is essentially unlimited. This year, educational institutions are using blockchain for accessible record keeping. From degrees to certificates, some schools like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are creating legitimate digital copies of important documents so that students and professionals can conveniently pull them at any time when needed.

AR & VR

It’s hard to talk about EdTech developments without mentioning augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). After all, these technologies bring the one thing every classroom needs: immersive learning. Some of the recent applications of AR technology involves the MERGE cube—a holographic toy that allows students to “hold” and interact with 3D object models, like solar systems or the human skull. Meanwhile, we’re seeing plenty of schools adapting the VR Quest into their curriculum. This system lets teachers create various settings (such as Ancient Rome) and allows students to “experience” them for themselves, thus breathing new life into traditional field trips.

Virtual Classes

Virtual classrooms are online spaces that allow students who don’t have access to a traditional school setting to interact with teachers and even classmates. Some of the features include live streaming, screen sharing, and interactive presentations. This year, some of the most highly recommended virtual classrooms include Big Blue Button, which is for classes with a lot of file sharing (such as STEM), and Electa Live for institutions that prefer to give live lectures. Virtual classes are still considered a part of traditional schooling, so they grant degrees and certificates after they’ve been completed.

MOOCs

MOOCS (massive online open courses) are different from virtual classes, and are usually offered by colleges and universities. They’re meant to be supplementary sessions to those who are already taking actual courses. MOOCs will usually have a wealth of resources, such as webinars and lectures that can give students a deeper understanding of the subject they’re specializing in. Moreover, research on Business Insider shows that the more skills you have, the more likely you’ll get hired in 2020. As such, more students have been turning to MOOCs to help them develop certain skills that they don’t typically learn in a traditional classroom.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is another exciting piece of technology that’s making its rounds across industries, particularly in education. For instance, Todd Feathers recently invented an AI paper grading program called Motherboard, for the purpose of alleviating teachers of the burden of grading hundreds of essays every week. Though it can’t detect certain writing nuances such as examples and “sophisticated” words, it’s still a step forward in EdTech innovation. Other educational breakthroughs in AI this year include intelligent tutoring systems (for online classes) and personalized learning.

Whether it’s new devices or online programs, there is no doubt that technology has contributed much to the betterment of the education sector. And we expect that it will continue to find new ways to provide support in the coming years.

Author’s Bio

Wally Clipper is a freelance writer with a penchant for topics in education, technology, and business. Her dream is to one day start her own business and travel the world. She’s a huge fan of classic literature, her favorites being Catch-22 by Joseph Heller and Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.

More on tech trends

10 Great Virtual Reality Apps

Videos: Why, How, Options

How to Help Students Find Their Passion

Jacqui Murray has been teaching K-18 technology for 30 years. She is the editor/author of over a hundred tech ed resources including a K-12 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum. She is an adjunct professor in tech ed, Master Teacher, webmaster for four blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice, CSTA presentation reviewer, freelance journalist on tech ed topics, contributor to NEA Today, and author of the tech thrillers, To Hunt a Sub and Twenty-four Days. You can find her resources at Structured Learning.

8 EdTech Trends to Watch Out for This 2020 published first on https://medium.com/@DigitalDLCourse

[corpasa]

8 EdTech Trends to Watch Out for This 2020

As always, education is changing. There are so many new ways to differentiate for varied learners, back-fill for some while enriching others without slowing anyone down. Being a teacher and a learner today is awe-inspiring. Ask a Tech Teacher contributor, Wally Clipper, has a great run-down on 8 trends you’ll want to watch in 2020:

8 EdTech Trends to Watch Out for This 2020

Technology has vastly disrupted and improved numerous sectors around the world, be it the government and banking, or retail and marketing. Unsurprisingly, technology is also impacting the world of education. In fact, a study on Forbes found that global education technology (EdTech) is one of the fastest-growing segments today, and is expected to be worth $252 billion by the end of this year.

While EdTech has been helping schools and other educational institutions a lot since it was introduced, its benefits have grown even more this year. From digital certificates to learning analytics, here are eight EdTech trends to look forward to in the coming months.

Video-assisted Learning

Gone are the days when teachers had to drag TVs into classrooms to let students watch films. Now, nearly every classroom is at least equipped with a screen and projector. Additionally, Chron reports that some schools have even replaced the usual blackboard and whiteboard with smartboards this year. These devices double as both a whiteboard and a screen. Plus, they have apps that let you interact with whatever’s projected onto them with the touch of a finger.

Data Analytics

Much like how social media giants Facebook and Twitter are utilizing our digital footprints to better understand consumer behavior, teachers are also turning to data analytics to learn more about their students. With more educational institutions adopting virtual learning management systems (such as Moodle, Edmodo, etc.), there are more opportunities for students to input valuable personal data. This grants schools more insight into their learning behavior, which then helps teachers come up with more effective curriculums in the future. There’s even an annual event dedicated to this field called the International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge, which will be held in Germany this March.

3D Printing

The concept of 3D printing is nothing new. As explained in a 3D printing guide by HP, the technology has long been utilized for customizing auto parts, casting concrete for architecture, and even creating biological structures. Over time, 3D printing has expanded outside of niche uses, and is now impacting schools too. Our guest writer Jacqui Murray mentions some of its popular uses in education, such as producing scaled models for math and history classes, as well as creating “visual aids” to make learning more immersive. True enough, 3D printed objects (like biological samples and electrical models) as visual aids has significantly improved the learning capacity of students. With models being nearly identical to the actual things, lessons become easier to understand.

Blockchain

Blockchain technology is a distributed encrypted database that exists in multiple computers at the same time. Every time new data is added, it adds another “block” into the system, so its storage is essentially unlimited. This year, educational institutions are using blockchain for accessible record keeping. From degrees to certificates, some schools like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are creating legitimate digital copies of important documents so that students and professionals can conveniently pull them at any time when needed.

AR & VR

It’s hard to talk about EdTech developments without mentioning augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). After all, these technologies bring the one thing every classroom needs: immersive learning. Some of the recent applications of AR technology involves the MERGE cube—a holographic toy that allows students to “hold” and interact with 3D object models, like solar systems or the human skull. Meanwhile, we’re seeing plenty of schools adapting the VR Quest into their curriculum. This system lets teachers create various settings (such as Ancient Rome) and allows students to “experience” them for themselves, thus breathing new life into traditional field trips.

Virtual Classes

Virtual classrooms are online spaces that allow students who don’t have access to a traditional school setting to interact with teachers and even classmates. Some of the features include live streaming, screen sharing, and interactive presentations. This year, some of the most highly recommended virtual classrooms include Big Blue Button, which is for classes with a lot of file sharing (such as STEM), and Electa Live for institutions that prefer to give live lectures. Virtual classes are still considered a part of traditional schooling, so they grant degrees and certificates after they’ve been completed.

MOOCs

MOOCS (massive online open courses) are different from virtual classes, and are usually offered by colleges and universities. They’re meant to be supplementary sessions to those who are already taking actual courses. MOOCs will usually have a wealth of resources, such as webinars and lectures that can give students a deeper understanding of the subject they’re specializing in. Moreover, research on Business Insider shows that the more skills you have, the more likely you’ll get hired in 2020. As such, more students have been turning to MOOCs to help them develop certain skills that they don’t typically learn in a traditional classroom.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is another exciting piece of technology that’s making its rounds across industries, particularly in education. For instance, Todd Feathers recently invented an AI paper grading program called Motherboard, for the purpose of alleviating teachers of the burden of grading hundreds of essays every week. Though it can’t detect certain writing nuances such as examples and “sophisticated” words, it’s still a step forward in EdTech innovation. Other educational breakthroughs in AI this year include intelligent tutoring systems (for online classes) and personalized learning.

Whether it’s new devices or online programs, there is no doubt that technology has contributed much to the betterment of the education sector. And we expect that it will continue to find new ways to provide support in the coming years.

Author’s Bio

Wally Clipper is a freelance writer with a penchant for topics in education, technology, and business. Her dream is to one day start her own business and travel the world. She’s a huge fan of classic literature, her favorites being Catch-22 by Joseph Heller and Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.

More on tech trends

10 Great Virtual Reality Apps

Videos: Why, How, Options

How to Help Students Find Their Passion

Jacqui Murray has been teaching K-18 technology for 30 years. She is the editor/author of over a hundred tech ed resources including a K-12 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum. She is an adjunct professor in tech ed, Master Teacher, webmaster for four blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice, CSTA presentation reviewer, freelance journalist on tech ed topics, contributor to NEA Today, and author of the tech thrillers, To Hunt a Sub and Twenty-four Days. You can find her resources at��Structured Learning.

8 EdTech Trends to Watch Out for This 2020 published first on https://medium.com/@DLBusinessNow

[maxksx]

The Philosophie of Gaps

“And then there's the joke in which a young man told his mother he would become a Doctor of Philosophy and she said, “Wonderful! But what kind of disease is philosophy?”

~Steven Pinker in “The Blank Slate”

Philosophers and physicists, especially those working on fundamental questions of nature, have a difficult relationship. I know a lot of physicists who use the word philosophy as an insult, and even those who have sympathy for the quest of the philosopher tend to give them a hard time. And understandably so. I’ve heard talks by philosophers about the “issue” of infinities in quantum field theory who had never heard of effective field theory. I’ve heard philosophers speaking about Einstein’s “hole argument” who didn’t know what a manifold is, and I’ve heard philosophers talking about laws of nature who didn’t know what a Hamiltonian evolution is. But on the other hand, I’ve met remarkably sharp philosophers with the ability to strip away excess baggage that physicists like to decorate their theories with, and go straight to the heart of the problem. No wonder the relation between both sides can be uncomfortable. This has left me wondering what is the role of philosophy in physics, or in modern science more general. I will admit that I have a limited attention span for philosophical arguments. To begin with, philosophers (as apparently everybody in the humanities) have the annoying tendency to throw around names rather than proper definitions. The introduction of a cosmology paper in philosophy style would not contain the Friedmann equations, but instead two conflated paragraphs on the Friedmannian paradigm and its contextual appropriation of the cosmological principle, subsequently adapted as the concordance model. Leaving aside the name-throwing and over-abundance of multi-syllable words, the issue of lacking definitions is a deep one for me. If somebody can’t write down a definition for expressions they are referring to, I lose interest. Because then their whole argument is in the end just empty words. I am interested in verbal arguments only to the point that they precede the construction of a mathematical model. Having said that, here is where philosophy plays a role in physics: To develop these verbal arguments that have not yet been possible to cast in a more stringent form. This means though that when science progresses, when our knowledge expands, the room where philosophy is useful inevitably shrinks. The role of the observer in quantum mechanics, horizons in general relativity, or infinities in quantum field theory might once have been philosophical question. They no longer are. Presently popular topics for philosophers in physics seem to be the nature of time and the multiverse. Personally I think these are already topics that are close enough to existing theories that they can and should be cast into a mathematical language. Topics that are further off presently existing theories, and still more clearly playground for philosophers, are for example free will or the role of mathematics in science in general. This tension between philosophers and scientists doesn’t only exist in physics. Another area where you find frequent displays of this confrontation is neuroscience. Consciousness used to be the field of the philosophers, but no longer so. Yet, philosophers are slow to get off the turf. A recent display of this can be found in a NYT opinion piece that discusses “famous thought experiments” by philosophers. One of these famous arguments that philosophers discuss to make a living seems to be based on confusing the brain perceiving the color red as a result of photons of a certain wavelength hitting the retina, with the brain knowing about the process of perceiving the color. You might be forgiven for confusing knowledge about perception with the perception itself if you didn’t know anything about the brain, but in the last decade we have learned a lot about how the brain is wired and processes input. Or at least some of us have. It seems clear to me that consciousness and self-awareness are areas that philosophers will have to clear in the soon future. That is correct: I don’t think there’s anything particularly mysterious about self-awareness, and nothing about it that we won’t be able to understand with some more research on complex systems and neural networks. But what about science at large? Does this mean that we have a philosophy of the gaps much like we have a god of the gaps, filling in the spaces where currently knowledge is missing, but inevitably on the retreat? For most of science this is a thorny question (previously discussed here), that being whether or not there is an end to the knowledge about nature that mankind can gather. It’s a question I don’t know how to answer. But regardless of the answer to this question, for as long as there will be conscious beings thinking they will always be left with the question whether there are limits to what they can think of. And a more pragmatic, though related, question is how science works and how it progresses. These I believe are areas where philosophy will always play a role: to analyze the process of thought and inquiry, and its realization in the scientific endeavor. And as long as we have fundamental questions  about nature, it is good to keep philosophers around to catalyze the process of making soft science into hard science. Even if they are sometimes a little annoying.

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-philosophie-of-gaps.html

[voymedia1]

Claire Interview

Who are you and what business did you start?

My name is Claire I am CEO and co-founder of Kalix. My background is as a dietitian.

Kalix is a fully featured telehealth, practice management, electronic documentation and electronic medical record for private practice dietitians and other healthcare professionals. It is a completely web-based solution or software as a service (SaaS).

Telehealth technology supports the provision of health services electronically (or virtually) facilitating long distance patient and clinician contact. The telehealth features Kalix offers includes HIPAA compliant virtual meeting (video conferencing), secure client messaging, online appointment scheduling, electronic forms and agreements, online payments and electronic food and exercise tracking.

Practice Management Software are solutions that manages the day-to-day operations of private healthcare practices. The have a range of features including; appointment management and scheduling, appointment notification, client management and billing (insurance billing and online payments).

Electronic medical records are electronic information files containing information about individual client medical history and health.

Electronic documentation systems assist with the systematic documentation of client medical information, clinician-patient interactions and correspondences electronically.

Being web-based, Kalix is available online world-wide. We follow a subscription model, users subscribe to Kalix and are charged either on a monthly or yearly basis for ongoing access. Subscriptions and billing are automatically through the website (using Stripe).

We currently have over 1000 paying users from 19 countries. The majority of customers are from the United States of America- (90% of users). Other countries include Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Israel, Arab Emirates, Switzerland and Trinidad to name a few.

What’s your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

I trained and previously worked as a dietitian. I graduated with a Master of Science (Nutrition & Dietetics) with Distinction through the University of Wollongong in Australia. Working in both the public health sector (acute, subacute and outpatient) as well as private practice, I was very lucky to experience a diverse work history.

The idea for Kalix arose while I was working as the sole dietitian in an orthopedic surgery early intervention team. The position was funded by a special government grant, so I was under a lot of pressure to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of my professional practice.

With a heavy workload and stuck using a documentation/tracking system built for medical staff not dietitians, I needed to get creative. While investigating how to measure and evaluate professional practice, I came across the Nutrition Care Process Terminology (NCPT). NCPT is standardized language developed by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. It describes the specifics of what a dietitian does. Because NCPT is standardized and covers all the data that a dietitian collects during initial and follow-up assessments, I surmised that if I was to write all my patient notes using NCPT, a software system should be able to track changes in the variables associated with NCPT terms. Tracking the changes in these variables would be an easy, sensitive and efficient way of evaluating my professional practice without having to spend extra time measuring, recording and analyzing data. The statistical analysis could be built into patient documentation and hence save me a lot of time.

The problem was finding a software system that uses NCPT in this way. I needed a program that supports quick electronic documentation using NCPT terms, tracks of changes in patient data over time and correlates changes in the variables. There was not a system like this available on the market.

Co-founder Felix Jorkowski was looking for a new product to undertake. After 4 months of initial development work in September 2012, we first launched Kalix at the International Congress of Dietetics (ICD 2012) held in Sydney. By attending ICD 2012 were able to expose and receive feedback about Kalix from dietitians from around the world. We invited key stakeholders to an “interest group”. We also paid for flyers to be included attendee’s welcome bag. Kalix was also made available to use free online by anyone.

Describe the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing the product.

As described above, Kalix was initially launched as a documentation system only, not a complete electronic medical record and practice management solution. The decision for this change in direction came after analyzing the feedback we received at ICD 2012. While we initially identified public hospital dietitians as our target market, there was a major issue we kept bumping into. Each hospital already had their own electronic medical record system and the dietetic departments required their integration with the Kalix system. They also not willing to pay the cost of this integration. Unfortunately, this was not a viable option for us at the time, so we decided to explore different options.

There was a lot of ongoing interest for Kalix from dietitians working in private practice, especially those in the US. While dietitians working in the hospital system already had their own EMR system, private practice dietitians on the other hand, were still most commonly using paper-based systems or stuck with ill-fitting EMRs and practice management solutions designed for medical staff and other professions. There was no practice management solution/ electronic medical record designed specifically for dietitians. It became increasingly evident that dietitians working in private sector should be the target market we pursue.

Kalix was relaunched in May 2013 as a complete practice management solution. Our initial aim was to build the minimal viable product make it available online, receive customer feedback and continue adding to it. In August 2013 we also received $40,000 seed funding for product commercialization and the development for the US market. Australian private practice dietitians are a very small market and we needed to expand to other countries to be successful. There are over 68 000 Dietitians in the US, compared to less than 3000 in Australia.

The major hurdle to sell in the USA was achieving HIPAA compliance. Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is the data privacy and security legislation that describes how electronic health information is transferred, received, handled, or shared. With a few modifications to Kalix and lots of assistance from legal specialists, we achieved HIPAA compliance in October 2013. That month we also exhibited Kalix at the biggest trade show for nutrition professionals in the USA. After receiving much useful feedback, we completed some fine tuning and started selling Kalix in the US during January 2014. The United States quickly became our primary market and the company was relocated to Los Angeles in August 2015.

Describe the process of launching the online store/business.

Our goal for Kalix has always been to build a minimal viable product and make it available online for use and purchase. This allows us to receive customer feedback right away, so that we can continue to fine tune and release new features based on popular request.

Kalix’s co-founder, Felix is a software developer so there were no costs associated with site development and making it available online. Kalix was part of the Microsoft BizSpark program (now discontinued) which gave us free website hosting and access to other services for three years. We paid to work with various graphic designers for site design and branding including freelances and a personal friend that provided us with discounted rates. Being a little bit arty myself I taught myself to use Illustrator and Photoshop to complete some of the design work.

To create product awareness we attended several tradeshows in both the United States and Australia. Through product demos, the handing out flyers and the collection email addresses for marketing lists we were able to generate strong interest. We were able to get Kalix listed on as a suggested resource on a number of external websites utilized by our target market. This was very important for establishing credibility. We achieved over 900 sign ups during the initial launch period.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

Because Kalix follows a subscription model, retaining customers is just as important (or even more so) than attracting new ones.

Regular communication with customers to encourage engagement and the frequent release of new features, helps keep existing customers invested in Kalix. Adapting Kalix’s development schedule based on the changing market requires has also been beneficial. We continuously update and improve existing features to improve workflows customers have trouble with.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

Kalix has experienced ongoing growth since its initial launch. Our net revenue has increased by 44% over the past 12 months. Our subscriber churn rate continue to be quite low, currently sitting at 2.3%. The life time value of each of our customers is $1,140.

We are currently in the process releasing a new subscription level at a higher cost point. The new features released as part of the telehealth component of Kalix are very popular, but costly. Increasing the price is required to maintain our profitability. We are currently working on how to manage this price increase without losing customers.

We are also working on market expansion target other non-medical healthcare profession e.g. therapists, social workers, speech pathologist. No modifications are required to Kalix to target these professions.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

Marketing is just as important as the product develop side of things. You can have the best product in the world but is no one knows about it; your effects are wasted. The saying “If you build it, they will come” is just not true any longer.

Learning from your mistakes is a must. Customers generally are understanding when things can go wrong. As long as we are responsive and take actions to prevent the issue from recurring you can bounce back.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

Intercom – we use Intercom for all of our customer support, onboarding and marketing requirements.

Status Page – provides our customers with real-time and historical data on system performance downtime and scheduled maintenance.

Stripe – online payment processing platform. Our customers’ subscriptions and billing are automated through the though the Kalix website using Stripe. Stripe also have analytics to track growth, customer retention etc.

Xero – our accounting software.

SocialPilot – social media scheduling tool, to create and schedule social media post ahead of time across multiple platforms.

Canva and Place it – for the generation of social media images.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

Complete your research, check for other similar products that are already available, is there room for one more? If it is something brand new, will there be a large enough demand? Talk to your target market and receive feedback early and often. Find out if (and what) they willing to pay for your product. Do not be afraid to change direction in product development if needed.

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

We looking to hire staff in customer support roles within the next 2 – 3 months. Please feel free to email hello@kalixhealth.com.

Where can we go to learn more about you?

Website: https://www.kalixhealth.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KalixHealth

Twitter: https://twitter.com/kalixemr

Blog: https://blog.kalixhealth.com

LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairejnichols1/

The post Claire Interview appeared first on Facebook Advertising Agency | Facebook Marketing Company.

from Facebook Advertising Agency | Facebook Marketing Company https://voymedia.com/claire-interview/

[listentome-ok]

God is a Woman

‘Space stuff is cool, right?’ asked Ms. Moder, and then she crossed the length of the whiteboard to get to the other side. 
‘No,’ said Tim, without a beat, ‘space stuff isn’t cool, computer stuff is cool.’ His confusion was painted across his face - in acrylic - and his pencil was held in stillness only a centimetre from his paper.
 ‘I like space stuff nonetheless.’ Ms. Moder replied. Tim looked at her despairingly. He had just had the sudden realisation that, once again, they would not be doing any computer stuff today. 
‘Actually,’ piped in Sandra from the other side of the classroom, ‘space stuff is very cool. Technically. Isn’t it?’ 
 ‘And in here,’ added Eddie, ‘can we turn up the heating, Miss, please?’ 
 ‘Eddie, I’m afraid we still can’t jig the heating problem in this room, but you’re welcome to keep your coat on if it makes you more comfortable. Now,’ announced Ms. Moder, rubbing her almost purple hands together, ‘let’s take a trip to outer space. For the next few weeks of our classes together, you will be working on your projects for the upcoming science fair. This is an exciting opportunity to explore any part of space that you make be interested in. I am giving you all complete reigns today, but you must stick to the theme of outer space, using and expanding on the things we have been learning in our previous classes.’ 
 As Ms. Moder flicked through a powerpoint of examples of previous science fair success stories, an idea began to germinate in Susan’s mind. ‘Miss!’ She stretched her arm up as far as it could reach, so that it would be the most noticeable. She felt as though she could almost touch the ceiling, and her bottom lifted slightly off her seat in the effort. ‘Miss?’ 
 ‘Yes, Susan.’
 ‘Can we make a diorama?’
 ‘Dioramas are a fantastic idea, Susan.’ Ms. Moder replied, ‘They’re a creative and interactive way to explore an aspect of space you may be interested in.’ 
‘Can we make a diorama of an ideal planet, and the conditions it would need to host life?’ 
‘Ooh!’ said Ethan, ‘I want to make up a planet too!’ 
‘Me too!’ added Tim. 
‘You can’t make up a planet! That’s not in space - it’s inside your own head, dumdums’ said Sandra, scowling out at the rest of the classroom from her front row perch. 
‘Actually, I think a diorama of a model planet could work very well. It could be a great opportunity to showcase some scientific research. Of course, you would need to use the scientific method, as all good scientists do, you would need to find out the right conditions for a habitable planet, and then be able explain clearly how you found them.’ Susan nodded her head vigorously, then noticed Sandra doing the same, and abruptly stopped.

-

Susan’s brain prickled with activity on the walk home, so much that it was hard to contain, and seemed to be spilling out of her physically and making her restless. She was anxious to get home and get out her notebook - all the sooner so that she could write everything down. Her homework for the weekend was to ‘begin preparing and working on the project’ - she knew that her lofty ambitions required her to start right away. She knew that she needed to make sure she was remembering everything clearly; she knew, after all, that she had a habit of forgetfulness. She also knew already that she was going to need a very big jar to be successful in what she was going to undertake.

All of the thoughts swimming in her head were making her anxious of forgetting them, and she broke into a jog, her bag bouncing on her lower back, its straps smacking at the back of her knees. Once home, she desperately unlocked the door, desperately picked up the mail from the floor where it had fallen, desperately ran to the kitchen and put it on the table - while there desperately pouring herself a glass of orange juice from the fridge - and finally, desperately, she pulled and pushed clumsily at the zips and pockets of her bag until she had a blank page and a notebook in front of her. Then, finally relieving herself, it all poured out of her, everything she could remember and then some, page after page after page, so much that she continued to ache for many minutes after she had finished her task.

Then, Susan grabbed herself a bag of crisps from the cupboard and turned on Spongebob - because it was 3:30 - and sat down to wait for her mother to get home from work so that she could talk to her about it. But, with all the mechanisms having so recently been alive in her head, she found that she simply couldn’t focus on the TV, so she took her notebook over to her perch on the sofa and began to re-read what she had just put to paper. Soon, she found herself ripping out pages and writing them more coherently. She made one list of things she had to do and one list of materials she had to acquire in order to build her experiment, and then quickly added another list of things she would need to properly read up on in order to ensure it all ran smoothly. She slowly turned over and admired all of the pages she had written, and the neat lists. 

Then, more out of a want to continue working on her project than anything else, she wrote out a timeline of events for the course of the experiment, and then the goals of the experiment. For now, her work was done, but she was not finished with it. So she opened up her pencil case and pulled out her special glitter pens, and then she went upstairs and found the box of craft paper that she had used for her car boot sale that summer, and wrote on it in large bubble letters, ‘Susan’s Year Eight Science Project’. Immediately, she regretted not waiting to think of a more original name. There it was now. She knew she was burning past her wick at this point. Maybe she would be able to spare another piece of craft paper. But she would save that for another day. She turned to the bookshelf in the living room, pulled down the King James Bible and the Encyclopaedia, and began to conduct her research.  

By the time that her mum arrived home, Susan had become so immersed in her design that she felt she couldn’t simply let anyone see it, at least not at these rudimentary stages. What if she told her it couldn’t work? Or spilled on her notebook and ruined her research? Susan had an innate fear of sabotage - she felt everyone must - and so, just to be careful, she sneaked to her room when she heard her mother unlock the door, carrying her papers, her pens, her Bible, and her juice.

-

At school on Monday, Ms. Moder appeared perplexed by Susan’s efforts. She had almost ripped the seams of her book-bag when bringing in all her pages of research and plans, and she had even already bought the jar using three weeks of pocket money savings, which she read was the correct amount of money to spend on a large jar. So, though Ms. Moder was concerned by such an ambitious feat, her admiration of Susan’s hard work and dedication shone through it. She felt as though she could sense in Susan’s eyes a rare glint of astounding potential: she felt as though this glint in her eyes was Susan’s soul reaching out to Ms. Moder’s soul with this promise, and this plead to just trust in her young body. She felt a strange sense of deja vu, or possibly veja du, at their position, at being thrust into such blind faith in her own student. 
‘This is absolutely remarkable, Susan. What an inspiring commitment to detail. I am sure the project will exceed all of our expectations.’ She placed a sticky gold star right in the top corner of Susan’s front page, and then, for measure, handed Susan herself another, larger sticker, saying ‘Good Job!’ with a cartoon boy with large, outstretched hands. Susan beamed with joy at this. Ms. Moder sighed with relief at having made the right move in this gamble.

In the following days, Susan toiled incessantly at her project. In her few years, she had never felt as sure about anything. In her English class, they were reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and now, though she was only 12, she understood the terror, toil and unimaginable sweat that flowed from Victor throughout the book - or up to the part she had read - and yet his duty to continue his work despite it. She amassed glue-sticks and batteries in her room, she read all of the books on the matter she could find in the house, and then went to the library for some more. She used dinner to grill her mother about the principles of gravity and of red paint. She was working hard, and she trusted it would lead to good things. After her long slog, encountering splinters, sleepless nights, glitter in places it shouldn’t be, and hands clumped together by glue, she finally had it. After seven days and nights, she stepped back to admire her completed diorama. She had not only built a planet, she had built an entire solar system for it to fit into. All of her calculations appeared to have paid off: she had needed to enclose her experiment in both bigger and smaller planets, protecting it from its life-giving ‘star’. She had spent a whole afternoon meticulously calculating the distance from the sun that would be required to allow days, nights, and water. She had used the bottles under her kitchen sink to create a unique reaction that made the gases of the sun, and she had even painstakingly crafted moons for each planet out of tin foil.

Indeed, after all of the work put into the solar system as a whole, which seemed to take centuries, the planet itself looked like a small blip: it reminded her of a snow globe. Indeed, other planets were grander. One was a beautiful blue, one was mighty and massive, and one she had even given rings on a whim, and she felt that in the sun she had achieved a brilliant brightness and size. Yet, this little planet of the middle of it was her raison d’être. This little planet was very special.

For a start, it had water. Therefore it could conduct carbon life. And this potential for carbon life, though simple, did have the possibility of growth. This wouldn’t just be single-cell organisms, oh no, this world, like her own, would be able to create many different types of cells, cells that could - hopefully - work together to conduct developed life. Maybe, like her world, there would be multiple different species working in harmony together. Maybe there would be development and evolution. As she peered down into her terrain, in the early morning moments after she had finally completed her work and before she headed off to her day at school, she watched as the first amoeba in the first ocean began, slowly, to multiply, and she felt it was the start of something very exciting.

-

By the time that she returned home, loaded with the dramatics of Sandra’s new jumper and Kevin’s sacrilege in bringing a smelly sandwich, she found that everything she had hoped of her little planet and more had already begun. Now, there weren’t just amoebas, plants and small amphibians had developed as well. There was algae and kelp, and she watched with her own eyes the burgeoning passage of photosynthesis that she had learned about the year before. She saw plants turning, in harmony with the rotation of the earth and the rotation of the moon and the rotation of the sun, and the orbit of the earth and the orbit of the moon and the orbit of the sun, turn to greet the light and bloom and blossom. She watched surprising animals with scaly, leathery green skin slither out onto the sand banks to bask in the warmth of the sun, with tails so long they reached the tip of their noses. She was excited to see that the mass itself was beginning to change shape: to it was beginning to grow hills and mountains, in a funny, lethargic way, like slowly stretching into its new skin. Unfortunately, she discovered while we watched earthly life growing and wilting, it did have a surprising, funny little feature that she just couldn’t quite jig, possibly a consequence of her test-tube creation, and it was that time was very linear, and therefore, mortality was a given.

Susan was surprised by how quickly growth was taking place. There seemed to be continuous motion and energy on her little planet. She was worried that it would burn out. Well, this was her first crack at it - perhaps if she ever tried it again she would be able to make this all happen a little bit slower. Perhaps it was because it was so small. It always seemed that small things grew and died a lot more quickly. That would be no good for her purposes though: the science fair was the next day, and she needed to make sure it would last so that she would be able to showcase it.

She took a quick inventory of the other planets to make sure that everything was running at the same speed with them as well. It seemed that, although they too were stretch in and changing shape, none of them showed this change quite so alarmingly, because none of them conducted life in the same way. She enjoyed watching the ice storms and the volcano eruptions and valleys and mountains forming and gases shifting and clouding over. She found it very calming, and carefully looked at them all, in turn, for a long time. By the time she turned back to her earth, however, it had already grown even more! There were, she could see in one corner, multiple species of animals, interacting with each other and with their surroundings. Some were as tall as the trees - some even seemed as tall as mountains, some had wings and could fly, others had great teeth and seemed to fight and even eat the others. Susan couldn’t believe her eyes. She had not anticipated this at all in her plans. How could this have come about? Why was this happening? This was so not what she had planned for! She looked over at Venus, beautiful Venus with its moonless sky and its cool, effortless glow. She wished earth could be more like that. She looked at Mars, fierce and red and  completely devoid of life, and she wished that earth could be more like that too.

She felt frustrated. These amoebas had betrayed her. She gruffed,but she couldn’t turn her eyes away. She watched the animals fighting and killing, and her temper rose and rose. Did they not have plants for their food? Couldn’t they just learn to photosynthesise like her plants? Why did they have to be so violent and dramatic about everything?! They were destroying each other, and it was ruining her diorama. She couldn’t take this mess into school tomorrow! What would Ms. Moder say? What would Sandra say?! She had to act quickly. She decided to scrap the issue of animal life. She would leave it at plants, if that was possible. If not, she would simply leave it as an inhospitable planet, like Venus and Mars. She sensed the urgency, she saw that the little planet was beginning to advance its rock formations. With these cave-like structures, she would have no way to prevent these animals from rising up and still maintain her beautiful order.

Susan ran down the stairs and out of the front door, passing her confused mother on the way. Before she could answer her questions, she grabbed a handful of gravel from the little square of it outside her house, and then turned and ran with equal energy back up the stairs, perplexing her mother even more on the way.

Back in her room, with careful aim, she skimmed the pieces of gravel one by one into her gravitational force, praying that her hand-eye coordination was enough that they would just land on earth. Sure, some ended up shattering off of Venus and one even hit the moon, but the intention was met: the gravel rained through the cool atmosphere of the planet, crashing to the surface of the earth, and destroying the fighting and killing of the strange, scary, aliens. Susan stepped back and commended herself on her quick problem-solving abilities. She had a feeling that now everything else was going to work out as planned.

-

Susan woke up with the light of the morning. Today was the day she had been dreaming of for the last three weeks! She had waited for this day with more anticipation than she had ever waited for anything before. In the bright light, she could see her poster, her portfolio, and her page of notes all ready and waiting for her on her desk. She knew her speech off by heart. She had answers for any questions she might be asked. She felt good. Somewhere, on the other side of the town, on the other side of the universe, Kyle was desperately trying to meld a biro to a shoelace with a hairdryer and hoping he could make something out of it.

Before anything, Susan took extra care in putting on her special science fair outfit - she didn’t have a lab coat, but had managed to find everything else typical of a scientist in the long forgotten nooks and crannies of the house: slacks, mismatched socks, a jumper that smelled like wet wool, and a half melted Twix that she tucked into her back pocket. Then, she walked over to her experiment. She sat down at her desk, and peered into the solar system. What she saw did not please her. Not at all. What she saw, what she imagine had developed over the course of the evening, was little creatures, like ants or morphins, walking around on their back two feet and frequently bumping into each other. She saw materials she could not recognise, materials she imagined these creatures themselves had developed. And she felt… overwhelmed. She felt emotions that she was unfamiliar with, on scales she was unfamiliar with. She felt confusion, panic, dread, and joy. She felt the emotions of these small animals, and they were very complex! What she was looking at here was, she concluded, more dangerous than the beasts she had thrown rocks at. What she felt was ambition, envy, greed and passion. And what she felt, removed from the feelings of these animals, was a foreboding sense of regret. She didn’t know how these beings had emerged, but it seemed far too late to worry now. So, facing the world she had created, she did the only thing she felt was possible, she called her mum.

When her mum peered down at the diorama she couldn’t feel anything but impressed. She clapped Susan on the back. ‘This is brilliant, darling!’ she exclaimed, ‘who could have imagined this?! I am so, so amazed. You must be so happy!’ 
‘Mum!’ Susan glared, ‘get with the picture! Look closer!’ 
‘At the little morphins? I love that touch.’ 
‘They’re not morphins, mum. They’re something else and they’re very complex beings! I don’t like them! I don’t want them! Mum, what am I going to do? I only want flowers.’ ‘Well, when life gives you lemons, dear.’
‘But these aren’t lemons, mum!’ 
‘How can you not enjoy these little things?! Look at that one over there: it seems to be drawing on the walls. Painting something, maybe. Oh, look, it’s a little stick man. Isn’t that sweet?’ 
‘Mum, these things are far from sweet. I know what they’re thinking.’ 
‘Well, Susan, you must be so impressed with yourself! Look at this whole world you’ve created - now it’s gotten up and started walking on its own feet! I am so proud of you! Don’t worry too much about these little beings. Remember who’s boss! Ms. Moder is going to absolutely love this, I promise you.’ ‘She won’t,’ Susan stropped and crossed her arms across her chest. ‘She’ll call me a Prometheus’ 
‘She won’t call you a Prometheus! Don’t be silly!’ 
‘Or Sandra will!’
‘Sandra will be blown away by this. Come on, you’re worrying too much - and this is a good thing! I like this little creatures. They’re attractive and endearing, and look, they’re so capable, they don’t need any help from you at all! Easy! This is the perfect result of your experiment, don’t you think?! Now, let’s get this downstairs before we’re late!’ 

With that, she picked up the diorama and whisked it out of her daughter’s reach before she could hear any other doubts. In the haste of this, she accidentally knocked the outermost planet off of its field of rotation, and into a different field entirely. ‘Oh dear Susan, clumsy me, I’m so sorry, I hope I didn’t spoil anything by doing that - let me put it better when we get downstairs.’ 
Susan was shocked. For the first time in her short life, she was speechless. But then, somewhere in her body she heard rather than felt herself talking, and the words we spoke were ‘don’t worry, mum, that one doesn’t really matter too much - it’s more for decoration. But please be careful for the rest of the way down!’ Susan’s mother couldn’t reply to that because she was sticking out her tongue and letting it curl up over her top lip in concentration as she descended the stairs, one by one by one by one.

By the time that they had got to the school and unloaded the solar system diorama onto Susan’s table spot, it seemed that things on earth had already developed quite a bit. Indeed, it seemed that the creatures were doing different things on the different patches of land, separated by large spans of water. And, looking in, Susan discovered something quite amazing: a boat taking the creatures from one part of the planet to another. Multiple boats, in fact, in multiple different designs and sizes. She was impressed with her little people, impressed by their independent development. She would have never been able to figure out how to make a boat! To her, that seemed incredible and they appeared to have complete power over their little world.

She looked closer. She saw wagons and wheels, and she was pleased. She saw clocks and timekeeping, and she was astounded. She saw actors in play, lovers in rapture, scientists in the midst of discovery and geographers on the edge of the world. She saw tropical palm trees and dry oak trees, bubbling streams and gushing rivers, salmon and hedgehogs and bush babies and stilettos. She was awed by the beauty of it all. She felt proud. She felt as if she knew this planet inside out. She had never worked on anything so hard, or for so long, or had such amazing results. Once, she had made a fruit bowl out of paper mache, but when she placed a bunch of freshly washed grapes into it, the bowl became soggy and covered all of its contents with glue. This time, things were different. Things were moving. She could hear the thoughts and feel the emotions of these beings and - wait a minute, she could hear the thoughts and feel the emotions of these beings! And she felt frightened, scared, hungry and alone! She took a closer look. She saw daggers and guns, racism, classism, sexism and homophobia. She heard speakers lying, babies crying, people hungry and people dying. She saw volcanoes that could hurt the beings, and beings that could hurt volcanoes, and tsunamis and warfare and cruelty and uncertainty. She was disgusted by the horror of it all. She felt ashamed. She felt as if she did not know this planet at all. This was all she had worked on for the last weeks, this, she felt, was her magnum opus. This was not appropriate for a preteen!

Susan kept a brave face as Ms. Moder came over. ‘Wow, Susan, this is beautiful work.’ Ms. Moder was almost speechless for the fifth time that day, ‘this must have taken you hours. I am so impressed!’ She knelt down to have a closer look, ‘Oh, uh, Ms. Moder?’ Susan asked, panicked. ‘Do you mind if I ask you a question?’ Ms. Moder’s attention was diverted back to her. She didn’t want her to see the mess she had made of everything. She didn’t want to fail this project after putting so much work into it, after all. ‘I was wondering if you could tell me where the bathroom was?’ Susan knew this was a risk, but based on all the panicked and dilly-dallying voices in her head and all of the sweat that she could intrinsically feel waving off of her beings, she also knew that it was going to pay off. 
‘Oh, err, don’t you know where the bathroom is, Susan?’
‘I don’t know the way from here. I have never before been to P.E. class because I’ve always found a way around the linear nature of time and timetables too. This is the first time I’ve set foot in this gym.’ 
‘Oh, pet, well it’s just through that door and to the right, you’ll see the sign when you go out.’ 
Susan had absolute faith as she was walking out of the gymnasium with her back to her science teacher that Ms. Moder would not stay at her station without her, feeling awkward and intrusive, and would instead go and have a look at Kyle’s shoelace. She was absolutely right.

-

That was a close call, thought Susan as she splashed her face with cold water. It didn’t help. It only made her wet. She rolled all her eyes at herself in the mirror. Then she twisted up the nose of the hand dryer and pushed the big silver button, letting the calm, warm air blow across her face and flatten those tendrils of her she had gotten wet against her forehead. Now, what was she going to do about this whole earth situation? Holy hell on high water! What was she going to do about this whole earth situation?! Ok, she took one pacing lap around the space between the bathroom sinks and the bathroom cubicles. Then she turned and took another lap, this one counter-clockwise. Ok, she needed to go back out there. She felt an urgent need to hide her diorama from her teachers and her peers. At least as well as she could at a science fair where she was showcasing it. She needed to destroy her creation. Did she need to destroy her creation? Ok. You know what, she flapped her hands out to her sides, it’s going to be fine. She watched herself do this in the mirror, and she looked directly into her eyes. Her confidence faltered. She caught it immediately. She straightened her back. It’s just a science project, Susan. It doesn’t even matter. They’re not going to smite you for messing up a science project. She cocked her chin up in the mirror. Everything’s going to be sorted out before dinnertime and mum said we can have pizza tonight. Yes. She turned a full 90 degrees to face the door from whence she came. Yes. And she walked back out to where she had come from.

Susan took long strides as she walked back to the gym. She was feeling more and more human by the second. She enjoyed the feelings and thoughts that her beings were charging her with. She felt strong, alive - more alive than she had ever felt before. She felt nervous, but, more than anything, optimistic. No, faithful. She had complete confidence that everything would turn out fine. And she knew how stupid that was. Nonetheless, she could win this science fair. Eat your heart out, Kyle. The next hours passed in a nervous slowness, though, in fact, they were rather underwhelming. Susan resumed position at her table. She spoke about her diorama and undermined how long it had taken to build it, especially when Sandra came over. She accepted the inevitability of people seeing her beings and what they were doing, but in fact, everyone passed over her diorama with such a glazed eye that it seemed nobody noticed them. She made sure her jumper was still damp and her Twix still half-melted, then she took some time to walk around and looked at everyone else’s projects. She learned some facts about clouds, and she enjoyed looking at photographs of nebulas. She loosened her gait and she found that, despite her worries, she was able to enjoy much of the rest of the day.

It was on this day that Susan learned something she would frequently use. Sometimes, if you can get through a long, hard afternoon, it means you can get through anything. The strength of her faith in this, and knowing that the fair would soon end, helped her to get through it all the more. It was one of those funny deja vu moments that she felt in her shoulders whenever she thought about time and timetables. At the end of the day, driving home with her mother, her ice cream, and her blue ribbon, Susan felt on top of the world.

-

By the time they got home, however, her attitude had changed. ’Everything OK, Susan?’ asked her mother once they had got back home and laid the diorama on the kitchen table, ‘You’ve seemed a little quiet since the end of the fair. Are you worried about something?’ ‘Mum, I think we have to destroy the planet.’ Susan replied, ‘before it destroys itself.’ 
‘Oh, darling, don’t say that. What’s got you into such a fizzle? Is it those little morphins?’ 
‘Yes mum, those things are ruining my diorama!’ 
‘I think they’re nice.’
‘They’re evil, I think.’
‘They mean well, Susan! I think it’s quite hard down there! They keep slipping on glitter and - look at this, love, look how steep these cliffs are! You couldn’t file them down, could you?’ 
‘I don’t think I can let these morphins see me in their atmosphere. They’ll freak out. Their fingers are these weird brown shades - I don’t think they like purple very much.’ 
‘Oh, darling, don’t go worrying about your skin now.’ 
‘Mum, no, I’m serious. I think the best thing for us to do would be to destroy it. Many people want it anyway, I can feel it.’ 
‘Darling, now how would that ever be the best thing to do?’ 
‘Well, the morphins are hurting each other!’ ‘They’re helping each other too! And look how far they’ve come in just one day!’ 
‘No, mum, I can’t condone this suffering.’ ‘Darling, you have to be aware that you would also be destroying the good. This isn’t your fault, love. It happened, and nobody expected it to. It happened by its own design. These morphins have been taking care of themselves all day, and they didn't even get you into any trouble! Come on, let’s leave them be for a little longer. They’re not your responsibility anymore - you can have nothing more to do with them, if you’d like! But aren’t you excited to see what they ‘ll have done by tomorrow?!’ 
‘If I’m not allowed to throw it away, then can we at least put it somewhere out of sight?!’ 
‘Oh, Susan,’ her mother put an empathetic hand on her shoulder, ‘don’t feel guilty or embarrassed by these little things. You know what, why don’t we store it is the garage until later. I’m sure you’ll get this old thing out years from now and be amazed at how brilliant you were!’

Together, they carefully placed the diorama into a box in the garage that held a few of Susan’s other snippets of school life: early drawings, a diary of her summer, a hat she knitted, and a project on rain forests. they closed the lid on it and slowly ploughed up the stairs together to order a pizza and finally and deservedly rest their tired knees.  

-

When Susan uncovered the box, many years later, in a particularly zealous burst of spring cleaning, she found that it had independently come to its own end. The sun, which she remembered to be so bright and massive, now only let out a faint glow, and the planets seemed dulled and shrunken, like rotten oranges. She couldn’t tell if this was the strange and unfortunate passage of time, or simply her romantic memory. But it didn’t bother her too much because by that time she had moved on from her science projects and gold stars. Now, she was working on a prototype much more advanced.