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vocaloidfactoftheday · 1 year

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The Lies and Deceit of Vocaloid

you know canceled vocaloids. you know private vocaloids. but what about vocaloids that were entirely made up?

well, not all of these were lies. some of them were likely genuine attempts at making a vocaloid, but didn't develop enough to ever be formally announced by any company, so they're included here.

i'll start from what i find to be least intriguing to most intriguing! (no offense to the ones that come first. there's just not as much to say about them.)

as a side note, all of these were (allegedly) being developed for vocaloid4, with one possible exception (the exact version being unspecified in that case.)

i did my best with my resources, but please let me know if i'm misinformed about anything!

Amber G

(designed by Grant Grueninger)

Amber G is actually a preexisting virtual singer allegedly created in 2000, though according to the user who posted about this to VocaloidOtaku, no info could be found about her prior to 2007. Her website no longer seems to exist and her creator's website has not been updated since January 2020, and she seems to have very few followers. (Though apparently, a couple forum users remembered listening to her music in 2005-2007, so her following at least wasn't nonexistent.)

Despite Amber's obscurity, Grant Grueninger apparently wanted to try making Amber into a proper vocasynth in the form of a commercially sold Vocaloid. Obviously, this didn't work, and forum users immediately noticed some serious red flags on her Kickstarter page. Namely, the plan was to get approval and a license from YAMAHA after the money was raised, meaning Grant had no confirmation if he could even make a Vocaloid in the first place. This Kickstarter was also made in March 2017, and he promised to release the Vocaloid in September 2017. In case you don't know, it's impossible to make a working English Vocaloid voicebank within 4 months. On top of this, the plan was to raise $20,000, but the Kickstarter was set to only last one week.

Needless to say, the Kickstarter failed. Only $630 was raised by a total of 3 backers, about 3% of the goal. Grant planned to create a Windows-exclusive UTAU voicebank as a backup plan, but this didn't happen either, and Amber G fell back into obscurity.

Ivy

This Vocaloid was "announced" on the now-defunct Vocaloid Otaku forums in January 2016, by a brand new user called chocosong. chocosong introduced themself as being from Project JUPITER, then explained that Ivy would be developed and distributed by PowerFX.

It quickly became clear that this was not an upcoming Vocaloid, but most likely a fan who thought making a Vocaloid sounded cool and had overly ambitious plans about making their own. This was evidenced by the following, which other forum users quickly pointed out:

The project was apparently to be funded using GoFundMe, which is an unusual choice for funding projects. One would expect Kickstarter or Indiegogo instead.

GoFundMe also allows the fundraiser organizer to keep all the funds even if the goal isn't met, which was also suspicious.

PowerFX was already busy with RUBY at the time, so some found it odd they would take on another project so quickly. This was also very soon after Rose was canceled. Rose will be discussed later in this post, but to put it simply, PowerFX was under a lot of controversy and criticism at the time, and not the best company to choose as a partner.

All the details about Ivy, including her voice provider, illustrator, and final art were to be revealed after crowdfunding was already completed.

After some pushing, chocosong stated the voice provider would be youtaite Lizz Robinett and the illustrator would be GyozaStrand. What was odd about this is that apparently GyozaStrand had not been contacted about this (they said that they planned to commission Gyoza). They did say they already negotiated with Lizz, but this was proven false when someone who was not only a frequent collaborator of Lizz, but also her boyfriend, spoke up.

While chocosong had communicated with Lizz, Lizz had never formally agreed or confirmed that she would be Ivy's voice provider. This was the reason she had not made any sort of announcement despite her popularity and involvement with Vocaloid fans. Once this was revealed, chocosong stopped posting entirely, and within a day the project was announced canceled on Twitter. I can't find an archive of the tweets, so I don't know the details of the cancelation announcement, but I did find this tweet:

This user was mentioned by chocosong as one of the members of Project JUPITER. It's safe to say some personal drama was involved, but of course there's no way of knowing the details. I imagine most of Project JUPITER except for this Ray person genuinely believed they would be part of developing a new Vocaloid.

Arisa Mitsuko

(illustrated by Israel Dela Cruz)

Mitsuko is actually an UTAU, but her origins are quite dubious. She debuted in Mexico City in 2011 and was introduced as "the first Mexican Vocaloid." She was then used in some concerts in Mexico. I can't find a lot of detail, but it seems these concerts were using other creators' songs, characters and images without permission, including Kasane Teto. During all this time, they continued claiming Mitsuko to be a Vocaloid, until people started directly asking companies like Crypton Future Media and YAMAHA for clarification.

Now, just because YAMAHA says a certain Vocaloid isn't in development, that doesn't necessarily mean it's a hoax. Sometimes Vocaloids begin development before YAMAHA is approached for a Vocaloid license. However, the fact that people were approaching companies made Mitsuko's team (then known as TnT) nervous, and started backpedaling on their claims of her being a Vocaloid. To make matters worse, it was eventually discovered that Mitsuko's voice was actually an UTAU voicebank. It's not uncommon for vocasynths to use UTAU for demonstration purposes, but this voicebank was hacked together from the voices of Hatsune Miku and the UTAU Momone Momo. This is obviously not allowed, and making an UTAU with any Vocaloid's voice is a form of piracy. TnT was breaking all sorts of copyright law here.

A member of TnT tried defending all this on a discussion on the Vocaloid Wiki, which included claiming that it's okay to use Teto's image because Japanese Internet users make videos with her all the time without permission, because ToS allows it. (this is false. Internet videos with covers, MMD, etc. are very different from concerts, especially if it's for-profit.) They were extremely defensive and denied claims of the voicebank being hacked, saying all these accusations were just bullying.

Arisa Mitsuko was apparently meant to bridge between Japan and Mexico. She still exists today as an UTAU with a proper voice, available in both Japanese and Spanish, though her voice provider is unknown and some suspect her voice samples are stolen. Due to her controversial roots, she is blacklisted from the UTAU Wiki, but her voicebanks still seem to be available for download.

Rose

(illustrated by Rosuuri)

Rose was actually a legitimate attempt at creating a Vocaloid. This project began around the same time as RUBY's development. Apparently, this was an English Vocaloid to be distributed by PowerFX, similarly to RUBY. This caused some tension and drama between the developers, but I'd rather not go into detail about things like that here. She was also to be voiced by the youtaite Lollia, though no public demos of her voicebank appear to exist, as programming on the voicebank had never begun. The plan seemed to be for PowerFX to take care of the programming after funds were raised through Kickstarter.

Her development team consisted of teenagers with a low budget, ages ranging from 16-19. Needless to say, this made it very difficult for them to work on Rose. They struggled to pay Rosuuri $200 for the illustration, and right after agreeing with Bil Bryant (PowerFX CEO) to develop Rose further, he was extremely disappointed to learn they had purchased a commercial illustration without the company's input. The team also slowly realized that PowerFX was probably not going to pay them for much of their work.

Again, these were a group of teenagers, so they used websites like Tumblr for promotional purposes, and Photobucket for hosting drafts of the art they were using. When news spread of Rose and more attention was drawn to her developers, they were "ridiculed" (in their words, though I can't say I don't believe them) for these things. This was also right after DEX and DAINA were announced, so this sudden negative attention on top of the anxiety that their project would be overshadowed made them lose a lot of control over their publicity. Right after they were able to calm things down, RUBY's debut design was revealed.

I don't want to show it here, but for those who don't know, due to miscommunications with PowerFX, the design debuted for RUBY was a universally hated, whitewashed, uncannily realistic design very dissimilar to RUBY's final, intended design. Rose's team hated this much like everyone else, but they felt forced to stay silent because they were working with PowerFX. After an email from Bil pushing them to post Rose's Kickstarter campaign, the team decided to finally cut ties with PowerFX. After failing to find another company that was willing to work with them (even trying to patch things up with PowerFX), the team was forced to cancel their project, and made their final announcement on the Vocaloid Otaku forums detailing all the hardships Rose faced.

The Vocaloid Otaku forums have since been shut down, but a vocalsynth fan account archived the announcement on DeviantArt. You can read it here for further clarity.

Stella

(illustrated by Kemohomogeko)

The saga of Stella is so complex that I think it's impossible for me to encapsulate it in one section of a bonus post. So please bear in mind that this is an incomplete explanation, but you should be able to find more info on places like the Vocaloid and Fanloid Wikis.

Stella was announced in 2015 as a new Vocaloid by a new company, PLTech. The person behind PLTech was none other than the infamous Planty-P, who had previously been under controversy for spreading leaks of anon and kanon's full voicebanks before their release.

I'd like to make it clear that I'm not saying any of this to further demonize Planty-P. From what I understand, he was in his late teens at the time. He greatly regrets his actions and is now fully uninvolved with the vocasynth community. I'm only describing his actions for informative purposes.

Stella was advertised as a Japanese Vocaloid. Planty-P explained that she would not be sold commercially. Instead, she would be used for a charity album with music by himself and other Western producers involved with the project. The profits from the album would be donated to the Americans for the Arts foundation.

During the month of January, the same month Stella was announced, suspicions arose. One of her demo videos, showing her allegedly being used in the VOCALOID4 editor, has a discrepancy spotted by viewers, indicating the video was edited to hide which voicebank was actually being used. It was also noticed that the other members of her team seemed to not know much about Stella, working with Planty on the basis of trust and friendship. Planty finally confessed that Stella was fake, leading to lots of uproar, especially from his close friends who believed in Stella and wanted to help create her. It doesn't seem like anyone who agreed to help with Stella, including her illustrator, knew her true nature.

Stella was advertised with three voicebanks: Core (original), Sun (power) and Moon (soft). Planty later explained that Core and Sun were made with hacked XSY (which is incidentally illegal); Core was XSY between kokone and Rana, and Sun was XSY between Merli and MEIKO (though Planty didn't entirely remember if it was MEIKO or not). He initially claimed that Moon was a proper voicebank made with a Dev kit, but this was debunked quickly. Presumably, Moon was also made with illegal XSY, but the details are unknown. Given Planty's history of piracy and the fact that he frequented websites distributing cracked Vocaloid software, it's likely the Vocaloids he used were pirated, but this is unconfirmed.

After this disaster, Planty-P permanently retired from Vocaloid, returning briefly in 2018 to post a proper reflection and apology on Twitter.

Okamura Kazuki

(illustrator unknown)

This is a strange one. This is something that I haven't seen discussed anywhere else on the Internet, it's something that only my girlfriend Ava and I seem to know about. This isn't necessarily a lie or a hoax or even a failed attempt at a real Vocaloid. This was an attempt at an ARG.

It began in July 2020 when my girlfriend Ava (@vanilla-owns-chocolate) received messages from a mysterious user called 2vocatesting about a Vocaloid called Okamura Kazuki.

I suspect they probably messaged other users too, but Ava and I haven't seen anyone else on Tumblr or Twitter mention it, and the aforementioned video only has the 1 comment from Ava.

We knew this wasn't an actual Vocaloid from the start, not only because this is extremely indicative of an ARG, but also, Ava received these messages in 2020, 2 years after VOCALOID5 had already been released, and Okamura Kazuki was allegedly a VOCALOID4 voicebank. Not only that, but she was labeled as V4X, something that's only been applicable to Crypton's Vocaloids. (the "X" signifies the E.V.E.C. function. I think only Crypton is able to use it in their voicebanks, so I'm not sure if they intentionally implied that Kazuki would use E.V.E.C. or if they thought V4X just sounded better, but in the long run it doesn't matter.)

The 2vocatesting blog is still up. I can't add too many more images to this post, so you'll have to see for yourself. In case the blog disappears, it should be available on the Wayback Machine.

The blog doesn't have many posts. But there is one post written in binary, followed soon after by a post saying, "Huh, I don’t remember writing that post with all the numbers. I don’t think I know how to delete posts, either.. Well, apologies everyone!"

The binary translates to a YouTube video link. This link is to the "demo" of Kazuki's voicebank, a World is Mine cover. It starts out normal, but around the 2:20 mark, the music stops, the image is suddenly cropped, and the edges become distorted as low ominous noises play. Then she reappears without a face, with low, unintelligible robotic speech audible as a string of 2s appears on screen. It then cuts to black and the music returns. The 2s stay on screen to the right where the lyrics were before, and Kazuki's voice grows more and more out of sync with the music.

The video title and description has since been edited, as you'll see in a moment. According to Ava, the original description said something about this girl (Kazuki) appearing in the uploader's dreams recently.

After Ava's DMs with the mysterious Tumblr user, we waited for more updates, but they never happened. We recently revisited this video to see it had been updated. The description confirms what we suspected: it was an attempted Vocaloid ARG, but was sadly abandoned before it got very far.

The video is linked below if you want to see for yourself. Be warned that it has uncanny elements and might cause some anxiety if you watch it alone at night.

youtube

According to the uploader, the character in this video is actually an OC (they don't clarify whether it's their own or a friend's), and the voice is a pitched up existent Vocaloid, most likely (they don't seem to remember exactly) VY1.

We still don't know who this person is, or what the end goal of the ARG would have been. We may have learned if only it was able to progress further, but there was only so much Ava could do to try to prompt it. At least we know the true nature of the voicebank now, though!

#bonus #japanese vocaloid #english vocaloid #vocaloid4 #utau #powerfx #(that's where a lot of the drama happens......)

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well-its-not-human-anymore · 3 years

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So this is a personal one for me to ask and if you're not comfortable with it don't mind it; how would the tmnt boys (seperate) react when the reader confesses that they're autistic after the boys got curious when she had some peculiar, behavior or stims. The reader would be stressed, because she has a crush on the tmnt boy in question and she didn't want them to find her weird or just stop interacting with her. When she's met with confusion instead, because the boys never heard of it, cue this weird conversation where reader tells them to the best of her ability what it is and the boys just keep asking questions. Also some general headcannons with it maybe?

Okay so I'm actually really happy that you asked me this because I feel like ASD isn't portrayed a lot in any type of media. My ADD and ASD have a lot of overlap so I hope I can capture what you're asking of me!

Now let's get into it!

TMNT Headcanons

The boys reacting to an autistic reader

Leonardo

he wasn't really sure what was happening the first time you reacted

one minute you were standing next to him doing dishes and the next you were attempting to claw your skin off like an angry cat

Leo tried not to look annoyed as he watched you rub your hands against your shirt until your flesh started to turn red

you looked like you were crying but he knew you weren't

but your face was starting to turn purple and your cheeks were puffy from the effort of holding your breath

"Y/N? You need to breathe."

You shot a glare at him, scathing eyes meeting his now very concerned expression

your own softened and you clutched your arms to your chest, heaving oxygen into your lungs until your face became a normal shade again

"Are you okay?"

The words were stuck in your throat and you weren't sure if you should nod or shake your head

so you gave him a half-hearted shrug

he frowned back at you but turned to finish the dishes on his own

when he questioned you about it later he couldn't help but be curious

"Well actually it's uh- it's kinda a sensory type of thing? There are certain textures that I can't stand touching do I avoid them but if I come into contact by accident my brain just kinda explodes and I shut down."

"How exactly does that work though?"

"I don't really understand it much but like- you know that feeling you get when you think there's a bug on you and there's not but it really really feels like it?"

He nodded

"Yeah, it feels like that. And anytime I touch something that triggers that reaction it takes FOREVER to get the feeling off my skin. That's why I usually wear gloves when I do dishes. Guess I just forgot to grab 'em today."

He was sympathetic

and god, you were so embarrassed

lucky for you, Leo's not an asshole

"Well thank you for explaining it to me, you really freaked me out earlier. I'll talk to April and see if we can keep a pair or two at the lair just in case you forget again."

Consider your heart melted

you couldn't even find the words to thank him and holy shit was your face red

"Hey y/n?"

"Yeah Leo?"

"Why didn't you ever tell me- us that you were autistic?"

Did you rip the band aid off now or make something up? Which would ,technically speaking, be less catastrophic in the long run?

"I uh- I really like you and I really didn't want you or the other's to look at me differently..."

wow, you liked him? miss ma'am you have saved this boy a world of anxiety and damn does he thank you for it

"Thanks for telling me... and y/n? I really like you to."

Awh fuck yeah, best possible execution of band aid-ripping-off ever

Donatello

Donnie wished he could act surprised when you finally told him

he really wanted to, it would've made you feel better for sure

but he sucked at lying and he didn't want to make you feel like he thought you were an idiot

because that was so far from the truth

after going through extensive research on Mikey's behalf when he suspected he had ADHD Donnie had stumbled across many different websites that discussed the symptoms and overlaps between both disorders

to make a long story short, Donnie knew that you had ASD and he was waiting for you to tell him

it would probably come off as rude if he brought it up in conversation right?

he didn't want to risk it

but that didn't stop him from keeping an eye on you and your behaviors

he was a man of science, of course he was going to analyze you

not in a weird way or anything, just as a curious sort of precaution

but the longer you were involved in the turtle's lives the more noticeable your stims and meltdowns got, Donnie did his best to cover for you without making you suspicious of him

eventually he'd come up with something that he hoped would come across as a friendly gesture and wouldn't set you off or scare you away

it was game night at the lair and you, as always, were perched on the arm of the sofa, a large grin plastered on your face

inside your head was exploding but you were masking it pretty well if you do say so yourself

but Donnie was, well... donnie was donnie

so when he noticed you starting to rock a little more visibly he removed his attention from commentating the game and grabbed a pair of headphones from the side table

you were beyond confused when he passed them to you but your face revealed everything

"They're noise cancelling, try them on."

holy shit it was like putting your head underwater, everything was muffled

not in the way normal headphones did, you quite literally couldn't hear anything at all, just a calm amount of nothing

you nearly started crying when you realized that Donnie had figured you out on his own

but you'd never been more relieved about anything in your life

Raphael

he wouldn't admit that he was mesmerized by your presence

you practically radiated calm

his complete opposite

it was his favorite thing about you, because despite your quiet disposition and calming aura you weren't afraid to call him out or rebut any of his insults

this was not something you expected him to appreciate nor was it something you thought would make you catch feelings

but damn if you didn't

he'd been sitting in on yours and Donnie's little experiment for an hour or so now, watching you both exchange quiet whispers and inside jokes that you always seemed to lag on

then you slipped up

not bad, nothing detrimental to the project, just the same mistake that you'd already made ten times over

you might as well have exploded

"Y'N, you just have to move thi-"

"I KNOW DONATELLO. I FUCKING KNOW AND I JUST CAN'T DO THIS BULLSHIT!"

you set everything down gently enough to avoid breaking it before turning and storming out of the lab, waving your hands like they were on fire

Raph and Donnie exchanged a look that sent the larger red turtle following after you

when you calmed yourself down enough to talk you kept your gaze locked on the wall, explaining that you couldn't make eye contact when you were upset

he might not be the smartest brother, but Raph's no dummy, he put those pieces together pretty quickly after you told him that one small detail

he wasn't upset that you didn't tell him and you'd personally never been more relieved

your heart nearly splattered into the stratosphere when you finally gace him your own explanation

"yeah, I like ya too."

you grinned so wide you were sure your face would split open and your entire body rocked side to side with excitement

he thought that was pretty adorable too

And he did stick around to offer a bit of support when you apologized to Donnie for screaming at him

Michaelangelo

to be frank it probably shouldn't have taken so long for Mikey to realize that you were autistic

the similarities between your own personality and his ADHD were so in sight it was near painful

it was his turn to make dinner that night and you'd made sure that you came over early to help him set up, you knew how side-tracked he'd get and you were the poster child for solid routine

what more perfect matchup existed?

trick question, there isn't one

you were on one side of the counter cutting vegetables and he was on the other throwing said vegetables into the mixing pot

the music was at an ungodly level of loud so your only means of communication were screaming over it

"MIKEY."

"WHA?"

"YOU GOT THE-"

"YEAH."

"AND THE-"

"UH HUH."

"COOL, HAVE YOU SEEN THE-"

"TONGS? NO, THE SKEWERS. YEAH, THEY'RE IN THE OTHER DRAWER."

"THANKS."

the two of you went about your previous tasks, thinking nothing of the conversation that had just taken place

at least until you'd begun washing your knife and cutting board

that's when Casey walked in, looking both perturbed and annoyed at the same time

"Alright, which one of you knows telepathy?"

Mikey exchanged a glance with you and you returned it with a raised eyebrow

"The hell you mean brah?"

he looked at the both of you like you were the ones that had grown four extra heads before speaking again

"You literally just had a conversation with like five words and somehow just knew what the other meant? What's up with that?"

you glanced at Mikey again

"Holy shit, did we?"

"I mean, not really. You used your hands."

now all three of you were confused but it quickly became two when Casey shook his head in defeat and left the room

"You know I think he's right."

he blinked first and your staring contest ended

"But you used your hands-"

"I got autism Mikey, one does not simply not use their hands as forms of speech."

"You're-"

"Yep."

was the silence laughing at you? could it do that? it was kinda rude

"Huh, that actually makes sense, that's not mean is it?"

you shook your head no

"You're just me but fast."

Mikey agreed with that, pestered you with a few more questions, and went back about working, as did you, you saw no reason to address it further

but your cheeks burned red

"Yo- Y/N that actually explains why everyone else thinks we're a thing."

you didn't know if you could choke on air or not but you did it anyways

"Are we?"

he gave you his signature grin

"If we are then Raph owes April a hundred bucks."

you returned his smile

"Oh this oughta be good."

I'd like to preface this by apologizing for my near three week absence. Life got crazy and my writer's block hopped on a train, went through a school zone, killed seven pedestrians, and committed tax fraud before tumbling off a cliff never to be seen again.

But on the bright side- I got my SAT scores back and started some scholarship applications. Super happy with that. School's out in a few weeks so I'll be able to write more (hopefully).

Anyways, I hope I got this one down okay. I may have hyper analyzed the request so I might be a little off. But I really enjoyed doing this one and I hope you like it!

-Mars 🌠

#tmnt bayverse #tmnt headcanons #tmnt x reader #askbox #ask response #writing requests #writing blog #writersblock #tmnt raphael #tmnt donatello #tmnt michelangelo #tmnt leonardo #tmnt 2014 #tmnt 2016

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wonwuism · 4 years

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Chapter 3.

Tuesday | NYC Institute of the Arts | Rooftop Café17 | 01:47 pm

“I’m not saying tie dye is ugly, I’m just saying there’s a reason it’s never been used in fashion before. Like, ever.”

“Sounds like you just think it’s ugly.”

Wonwoo wasn’t really paying attention to his friends. Whenever Vernon and Minghao started yet another discussion about fashion he usually zoned out into his own thoughts until they decided to let him decide who was right, as if he understood what they were even talking about. There was a good reason that he designed games and they designed clothing.

“Wonwoo what do you think about multi colored clothes?” Wonwoo looked over at his friends and thought for a second.

“Depends. If you’re talking about color blocking, I love it. If you’re asking me if I think Vernons shirt is ugly. I do. I hate it.” Minghao threw his head back in laughter and clapped his hands so loud, people around them started looking where the sound was coming from.

“You’re both assholes, you know that right?” Vernon took an angry bite from his chicken sandwich. Wonwoo chewed on his cheek instead. He wasn’t hungry today. It had been three days since he scribbled his e-mail address on a post it note for Mingyu to take. He wasn’t even sure why he was thinking about it so much, but just the thought of Mingyu never actually sending the pictures kept running through his mind. After thinking about it for another five minutes he couldn’t take it any longer.

“Hey guys?” The two mouths that had been excitedly talking about their weekend and the weird night out they’d had both shut and his friends shifted their focus on Wonwoo now.

“How long do you think it takes for a photographer to, you know, edit pictures?” Minghao raised his eyebrows in suspicion, since this was so obviously not a Wonwoo kind of question. Vernon, however, never really questioned anything and reacted right away.

“Well, it depends on how many shots they took and how much editing those shots need in terms of photoshop and stuff.”

“They’re just portrait shots of one guy that someone took at the shop. I was wondering when he’s going to e-mail them to me.” Vernon opened his mouth to answer, but Minghao beat him to it. As usual he could see right through Wonwoo as well as Jun did. It was something about his Chinese friends that made it impossible to hide things from them.

“Are you waiting for the pictures or for him to contact you?” It was Vernons turn to raise his eyebrows now and before Wonwoo could even think of an answer, Minghao spoke again.

“You’re usually never impatient, much less when it’s about something you don’t really care about, like, I don’t know, pictures from the flower shop. Spill it Wonwoo, who is this guy.”

Wonwoo let out a breath. They got him. He shouldn’t have asked them about it and just waited it out. Now he was going to tell them all about his dumb crush and they were going to ask him about it all the time. He could feel the panic under his skin, knocking at his bones again, but he calmed himself down. He wasn’t going to let it get to him over something as silly as this. Vernon and Minghao were his friends and even though they didn’t know about his anxiety disorder, they wouldn’t make fun of him for anything. They never judged anyone and they wouldn’t start now.

“Okay, so-“ Two bodies turned his way dramatically. “All I know really, is that his name is Mingyu and that he’s a photographer. He said that the shots were for his portfolio as well as the model’s, so I doubt he’s a professional. Oh and he’s straight.”

“He’s straight?”

“Yeah I know, but I was already kind of crushing on him when he told me that he thinks he doesn’t like guys, so it was a little too late for me to do anything about it.”

Both boys nodded and Wonwoo saw them think about answers to questions he didn’t ask. They were looking for solutions for problems that didn’t exist yet, and even though he loved his friends for it, he didn’t need to hear their two cents on the situation, so he cut them off.

“Don’t worry though, he’ll send the pictures soon and that’ll be the end of it.”

Before another word was said, Wonwoo could see Juliette walk their way. She always walked so lightly, like nothing was weighing her down. Her brown ponytail swung across her back and she seemed to glow in the light that beamed down on the rooftop café. She was the prettiest girl Wonwoo knew. He waved at her to divert attention from his miserable story and all was forgotten when Vernon saw his girlfriend come over.

“Hey guys!” She pecked Vernon’s cheek and took a seat next to him. Vernon looked at her with stars in his eyes for a second and Wonwoo felt a little jealous as usual. Who could blame him though. The two had been in love since they talked for the first time and had been together for 5 years now, still as in love as they’d been that first day. They were the couple that handled their problems before talking to anyone else about them and the kind of couple that got along with each other’s friends well, but still gave each other enough space to live their own lives. They were the kind of couple to sit next to each other after being together for 5 years and still secretly hold hands under the table just because they liked it. It was cute.

“Hey, what’s up? Don’t you have class now?” Vernon asked. She shook her head and made a pouty face. “It got cancelled because miss Claudette fell ill. She’s my favorite teacher though, so I hope she gets better soon. And I really like her class, so I’m a little sad now.” She shrugged her shoulders and took a sip of her coffee. “Hey Jules?” It was Minghao. She raised her eyebrows at him and hummed a response.

“Do you know anyone in photography by the name Mingyu?” Wonwoo almost choked on his spit and avoided Vernon’s surprised look to shoot daggers from his eyes at Minghao. Juliette was sweet and he trusted her for sure, but Minghao knew that Wonwoo didn’t like talking about his personal stuff to people.

“Mingyu? Uhhhh Mingyu, Mingyu, Mingyu… No, I don’t think I know him. There’s a Min-gi, though. Maybe that’s the one you’re looking for?” Minghao turned to look at Wonwoo who shook his head no. “No, it’s definitely Min-gyu. Kim Mingyu, I think.”

“No, I don’t think we have anyone in the photography department with that name, sorry.” She didn’t ask any more information and Wonwoo was glad. She was like Vernon in a way that they were willing to help you as much as you needed them to, but they didn’t push you to tell them more.

“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s not really important anyway. I have to go, though. See you guys around.” He took his own empty cup and other trash off the table to throw it away and the others waved at him before he walked off. He didn’t really have to go. He was just leaving because they were talking about him too much for his liking. Wonwoo knew that they were just going to continue without him now, but as long as he wasn’t there to hear it, he didn’t really mind.

Wonwoo debated on whether to go home or to the flower shop to work on his project, but a text from Jihoon already decided for him.

Jihoon: I’m in WOOZI mode

He chuckled. Whenever he got that text he knew what time it was. Jihoon was in a huge producing flow and was making magic in their room. WOOZI was the name he produced under and this simple text let Wonwoo know not to come home for a while to not disturb the process. Some people would’ve thought it’s annoying not to be able to go home, but Wonwoo didn’t mind. It had been a while since Jihoon had sent him anything like this or let him hear a new song, so Wonwoo put his phone into his pocket and was on his way to the shop.

Tuesday | Pledis Flowers | 06:03 pm

Wonwoo was debating on what he would have for dinner. He’d been working on his game for a while without making a lot of progress for a few hours. He could get some Mexican takeout and treat Jihoon for doing well today. He was just about to text if his roommate had dinner plans yet, when his e-mail app showed a notification. Heart beating, fingers shaking, breath quickening. Wonwoo opened the e-mail and there it was. Mingyu’s name.

Hey Wonwoo!

I attached a folder with the shots I ended up choosing for my portfolio :)

I hope you like them enough to put them on the website!

I also added some tulips that I took a picture of the other day because I know you like flowers. Or I think you do, since you work in the flower shop haha

Anyway let me know what you think,

Mingyu

Wonwoo didn’t miss the way Mingyu added 10 numbers under his name. He gave Wonwoo his phone number. Wonwoo scolded himself for thinking too much about it. It just meant he preferred to discuss the pictures over the phone. That’s it.

With one click on the attached folder, Wonwoo held his breath. Jeonghan looked more like an angel than ever in these pictures. The lighting from outside hit his features perfectly and Wonwoo took a moment to appreciate the color correcting Mingyu had done to the pictures. They looked amazing and professional.

The last picture just showed an unedited shot of some pink and yellow tulips that made Wonwoo smile. He felt proud for somehow being a small part of this and he called Joshua over to show him the pictures. Seungcheol was with a customer and Wonwoo knew he didn’t really care much for the pictures anyway.

Josh stood behind him as Wonwoo opened the first one and with every new picture he could just feelJoshua go crazier. None of them said anything until the last picture was on the screen. “That’s all of them,” Wonwoo said. He looked over to his colleague to see what he could only describe as a man in love. Joshua was still staring at the screen with eyes glazed over, like his mind wasn’t really in the room anymore. “I’m in love with him. Good god, I’m so in love Wonwoo. I need to see him again.”

Wonwoo gave him a soft smile. He’d never seen Joshua like this. Usually it was all overly confident remarks and flirting, but the way he was looking at the pictures right now told Wonwoo that this time things might be different. He clicked the picture off the screen and it now showed the e-mail Mingyu sent him. He was about to close that tab, too, when Joshua stopped him.

“Wait, he gave you his phone number?” Big eyes stared at Wonwoo and he felt slightly uncomfortable at the fact that Joshua knew about it now. It had felt kind of secret before, and Wonwoo realized he actually liked it like that.

“Um, yeah, I think he wants me to let him know if I like the pictures that way.” Joshua all of a sudden seemed to be completely back into reality and he was almost shaking with excitement. “Wonwoo, this is perfect! You can help me get to Jeonghan through Mingyu! You have to call him right now! Please?”

Wonwoo thought about it. He didn’t want to ask Mingyu to help out arrange things for Joshua. Especially since he’d already mentioned he doesn’t like to get into other people’s personal business. What if he felt used or even got mad at Wonwoo for suggesting it?

“Not right now, but I’ll see what I can do, okay? But if I get too nervous about it please don’t be mad. I’m not even sure if I even have the guts to call him at all.”

Joshua nodded. He understood. “Yeah, that’s okay, just think about it, okay? You wanna grab dinner together? I’m craving pancakes.” Wonwoo shook his head no and told Josh he was probably going to treat Jihoon to Mexican food, since he worked hard today.

They talked a little about the pictures with Seungcheol while they worked on cleaning and organizing the shop and Wonwoo walked out with them to close for the day before waving them off and walking the other way to take a subway to his dorm. He decided that he’d just order takeout and pick it up before heading into the dorms without even asking Jihoon. He knew the boy probably hadn’t been outside anyway, so Wonwoo thought he could take the risk.

Tuesday | Wonwoo’s dorm room | 09:16 pm

Leftover takeout was on the floor and soft hip hop was playing in the background. Jihoon had told Wonwoo all about his new tracks and said that taking a walk the other day had really helped him out, so he decided to go for a walk every night from now on.

Wonwoo had his eyes closed and he listened to the sounds coming from Jihoons speakers. He didn’t hear the lyrics though. All Wonwoo could think about right now were ten little numbers. They spun around his head in a loop, demanding his attention. They made him nervous to no extent, but he knew they wouldn’t stop their torture until he pressed them into the screen on his phone and clicked the call button.

And he wanted to, he realized. He wanted to call Mingyu and talk about the pictures, just to hear his voice. Maybe they could talk about other things, like why Mingyu wasn’t majoring in photography and what he did do. Wonwoo didn’t know if he’d have the balls to ask about it, though. But he was going to call him right now. He had to.

Quickly, so he didn’t have any room to change his mind, Wonwoo pressed the numbers into his screen. He only saw them twice in the e-mail, but it had been enough to know them by heart already. Wonwoo blamed it on being a visual learner. With a shaky thumb he put the phone to his ear to hear it ring.

Pick up. Don’t pick up. Don’t. Don’t. Pick up. Pick up. Pick up. No, don’t-

“Hello?” Shit.

“Hi, um… Is this- is this Mingyu?”

“Yeah this is he. Wait, Wonwoo is that you?” As every time, Mingyu switching to Korean made Wonwoo feel comfortable and a little light inside.

“Yeah, it’s me, hi.” He should’ve thought about what to say. This was awkward. Mingyu was going to think he’s weird. Great job Wonwoo.

“Oh hi! I’m so glad you called!” Mingyu sounded like the overexcited puppy that Wonwoo remembered, and it made him think that maybe this wasn’t all that awkward as long as Mingyu kept talking to him like this.

“Did you see the pictures I sent you? Wait, of course you did. You wouldn’t have called if you didn’t.” Wonwoo’s heart fluttered, because Mingyu was also nervous. “Yeah, I did. They were wonderful. So pretty.”

“Wonderful. I don’t think anyone’s said that about my pictures before. It sounds nice. Thank you.” It took a few seconds of silence to realize Mingyu couldn’t see him smile and Wonwoo felt a little stupid, but then Mingyu talked again and Wonwoo wondered if he didn’t hate the fact that Wonwoo was so quiet.

“So, I was thinking. I’ve been working on my portfolio for a while, but- I’m really bad at the whole design part of it. I can’t seem to make it look nice, no matter what I do. Would you, only if you want to, please help me out with it? Just give me some advice about coloring maybe, or placement? I’m really at the end of my wits here. I’ve spent hours on it already, but it still…” he laughed. “Yeah it looks like shit.”

Wonwoo laughed too. He liked that Mingyu was asking him for help. Not just because it’s him, but because it was a good thing that Mingyu wasn’t afraid to own up to his mistakes and it’s something that Wonwoo found to be a sign of good character. His mom had taught him that back when he was small. She also said Wonwoo was a little too good at it, since he saw mistakes that he didn’t even make. She was always right.

“Do you want to send it to me so I can make notes on it?”

“Actually, I think it’s best if we meet up. Is that okay with you?”

Wonwoo’s heart quickened and he tried not to breathe too fast so Mingyu would hear it. It was fine, this was fine. It was completely okay.

“You can pick the place if it makes you feel more comfortable.”

There it was again. Mingyu sensing Wonwoo’s anxiety, even through the distance of a phone call. Mingyu taking steps back to make him feel more at ease. Whether that be physical steps like the first time they met, or just a step back in his excitement over the phone, because he could tell it overwhelmed Wonwoo.

“Yeah, we can meet. I’ll think about the place. Is it okay if I text you about when and where?” All of a sudden being on the phone with Mingyu felt too close for Wonwoo and he wanted to get away from it.

“Oh, okay, yeah that should be fine. I’m available any night this week except for Friday.”

“Okay, I’ll see when I’m free. Goodnight Mingyu.”

“Wonwoo?”

“Yeah?”

“Were the flowers wonderful as well?”

Wonwoo closed his eyes so hard he saw white and all of a sudden he wanted to scream, or cry, or hit something. Mingyu was so incredibly nice to him and Wonwoo didn’t want him to. It was too much.

“They were,” he managed to squeak out.

“Good. Goodnight Wonwoo.”

Wonwoo hung up the phone and immediately a wave of panic hit him. Terrible thoughts washed over him. Thoughts that told him lies and that made him feel horrible about himself. Wonwoo curled himself up into a ball on his bed and tried to calm his breathing. The music in the background was so loud. Way too loud. But Wonwoo was frozen, so he couldn’t move to turn it down.

For twenty minutes Wonwoo panicked. His breathing went wild and his heart exploded with every beat. His hands shook and his head hurt so bad he wanted to split it in half to let out the monster hiding in his skull. After those twenty minutes his body gave up on him for the night, too exhausted to do anything else. Wonwoo fell into a restless sleep filled with scenarios in which he ruined everything.

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brajeshupadhyay · 4 years

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Two days before learning that she would lose her job, Lissa Gilliam spent hundreds of dollars online on baby products. A 37-year-old expectant mother, Ms. Gilliam had planned to ask local parents in Seattle for used strollers and secondhand onesies in a bid to reduce waste. But as the coronavirus pandemic ravaged the area, new items delivered in boxes seemed a safer bet. She figured she could afford the splurge, earning $50 an hour as a full-time contractor designing educational curriculums for a nonprofit. But then, on April 2, her employer slashed her hours and told her that her contract would end in early May — a few weeks before she is to give birth. Suddenly, like many others, Ms. Gilliam became hyperaware of her expenses. She and her husband, a high school physics teacher, now take a painful daily tally of their financial priorities: Is that $5 monthly web magazine subscription really necessary? How much does watering the garden cost? When will they need to tap their paltry savings? “We’re OK for now,” she said. “But the bottom may fall out from under us.” As millions of Americans lose jobs, take pay cuts, close businesses and absorb family members into their homes, they are being forced to rethink where their money goes. Even before the scramble for new jobs can begin, people are cajoling creditors, looking for gig work or simply cutting back to get through the first few disorienting weeks. “An economic shock like this could have a long-term impact on people who have traditionally felt like they were being cautious, that they weren’t profligate with their money, but didn’t have to worry about paying for rent or affording food,” said Stephanie Aaronson, the director of economic studies at the Brookings Institution. “They might have more debt, which will make it harder to spend in the future, or they might just feel less secure, which could boost savings and potentially dampen the recovery.” Ms. Gilliam and her husband are waiting for Washington State to make jobless benefits available to contractors through a federal assistance program, and hope to take advantage of a state program for maternity aid once their daughter is born. A $15,000 construction project planned for the rear of their house is on hold. They canceled their gym membership, their Hulu streaming service, multiple newspapers and even the Adobe Acrobat software that Ms. Gilliam uses for design work. On the whole, Ms. Aaronson said, household finances “were in relatively good condition as of six weeks ago — they were actually pretty healthy.” Now, she said, “a much broader swath of households are experiencing a complete loss of income compared to what we typically see in a recession.” Before the pandemic, Carol Cruz’s private health insurance plan cost her $840 a month — up from less than $500 four years ago. The bill ate up most of her $1,200 monthly paycheck, exceeding even the $600 monthly payment on the house she shares with her husband and their 17-year-old granddaughter in Tulare, Calif. On March 29, she was furloughed from her part-time job as a mental health therapist until at least the end of May. Other than the state unemployment benefits she hopes to receive soon, Ms. Cruz, 62, no longer has an income. So she got on the phone for at least three hours a day, asking for leniency from the health insurance provider, her mortgage lender and the credit union that holds the loan for her husband’s Chevrolet truck. All offered her more flexible terms, including 90-day grace periods and pay-what-you-can options. (Some creditors, she said, were less willing to negotiate.) The adjustments help keep the bills manageable, Ms. Cruz said. But her grocery costs have doubled, now that the price of eggs has soared and her granddaughter is no longer having free lunches at school. “I don’t know about my future,” Ms. Cruz said. “I’m not letting myself think about tomorrow, just about whether we have food today and money in the bank.” But some people, many of whom have never seriously budgeted, are now mapping out strict spending schedules for the next few months. After being furloughed in mid-March from her bartending and serving job at a Minneapolis concert hall, Krissy Calbert, 26, went from earning $300 in tips some nights to having no income as she waited for government aid. “It was two weeks of just panic — I was just going off the groceries I already had, trying to ration until money came in,” she said. “You get really creative. You eat little half meals, and you experiment with your seasonings and condiments to try to forget that you’re eating the same thing over and over.” Earlier this month, Ms. Calbert began receiving a weekly infusion of $1,100 from the state. She is now trying to reschedule when monthly bills are due so she can space out the payments: $600 for rent, $75 for her phone, up to $120 for utilities, $60 for streaming services, $200 for credit cards, plus other expenses. “I’m trying to get all of my credit card payments into the same week, so I can have a credit card week, a rent week, a phone week,” Ms. Calbert said. She has switched her grocery shopping from Target to Aldi, where, she said, she can afford to splurge on fresh produce and protein. Without health insurance, she is willing spend an extra $30 or $40 on fruits and vegetables in hopes of keeping her immune system strong, she said. “I can’t take the risk,” Ms. Calbert said. “A hospital bill right now would ruin me.” More than half of lower-income adults in the United States say they will struggle to pay bills this month, compared to a quarter of their middle-income counterparts and 11 percent of those in the upper-income tier, according to a survey of nearly 5,000 adults by Pew Research Center. Researchers defined a three-person household earning $37,500 to $112,600 annually as middle-income. Over all, more than half of those who expect a federal stimulus infusion will use most of the money to cover essential expenses, while one in five say they plan to save the funds. To create a financial buffer, many people are hunting for freelance or part-time work. Searches for work-from-home jobs rose 126 percent in March on FlexJobs, while traffic to the site has boomed 58 percent from a year ago. On Upwork, companies are looking for people to provide tech support for their homebound employees and to draft corporate messages about the coronavirus. Lonn Dugan, a digital marketing specialist in Sylvania, Ohio, has seen many clients scaling back their promotional efforts, such as one nonprofit that cut its budget by 90 percent after a major annual event was canceled. But another client, an agricultural supply company, commissioned a major website update, while a local mental health group wanted to ramp up its virtual support groups. The pressure on Mr. Dugan, 60, is intense. His workday is three hours longer than it used to be, between his existing clients and his attempts to drum up new business. He and his wife lost a third of their incomes; neither is eligible for government aid. “We’re completely overwhelmed by the shortfall. We can afford groceries and maybe the house and car payments, and that’s it,” he said. “But we’re not alone, and we’re focusing on acceptance as opposed to hand-wringing. We’re taking care of necessities, and that’s enough for right now.” Still, Mr. Dugan admits being stretched thin emotionally. He misses his wife, even though they are in the same house and she no longer needs to make a two-hour round-trip commute to her health care job. But the couple are so busy trying to stay afloat that they have stopped cooking fresh meals and turn instead to frozen dinners and fast food. “We just don’t have time,” he said. “We’re exhausted at the end of the day.” The post Finances – The New York Times appeared first on Sansaar Times.

http://sansaartimes.blogspot.com/2020/05/finances-new-york-times.html

#SEO #Local SEO training #daily news paper #daily news india #daily news newspaper #technology news a

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darkspellmaster · 5 years

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So a need to Rant about Anime Midwest 2019, and give some Praise to Anime Central 2019

So this year I went to my two usual summer conventions. Anime Central and Anime Midwest, and boy oh boy were they way different from each other. Now a quick warning, if you had fun at Midwest this year, great, I hold no issues with that. I however did not, and I’ll be explaining why below.

Let me begin by saying I have been going to Anime central since around 2006, I would have been going earlier but I didn’t know it existed at the time back when it first started in 1998. (Would have been nice to know as it probably would have helped me a lot in Highschool to have people around me that liked Anime too at a period of time when I needed that, but that’s neither here nor there.) ACen, for the most part, save a few minor years, has been pretty good to me. When I started to do panels with a friend of mine, everyone that was working there seemed to know what the heck they were doing. The tech organization was on the ball, for the most part, and the projectors worked well, (although there have been issues with the speaker systems), and typically we have a good group of people that come to our panels.

This past Acen went off without a hitch, although I should have put it in for an earlier time, that’s on me. Outside each room in the DESCC(Donald E. Stevens Convention Center) was a sign that listed the panel room number and what was going to be happening in that room and what time. Canceled panels were updated on the guide, and also on the board, so no one was too confused. (Although with a lot of people it’s bound to happen where some don’t know where to go.) If, and this is only one thing, there was anything that I thought could have been done better, it was the larger line structure, maybe add ropes to help set the line up so that when they do snake, they can be more easily managed? Other than that, the set up for the projection systems and mics were perfect. There were hookups for all types of computers, and the tech guy and person at the door introduced themselves so that we knew who to call if there was an issue.

Again, I stress, no problems with this aspect of the convention.

On the other hand...Anime Midwest was a mess!

To start with I will give kudos to the two young staff ladies that helped me out in the DESCC, Baily I belive was one, and I didn’t get the other young ladies name. Thank you both for trying to help me out. And I did appreciate the large banners announcing the room. I’ll also say that the two people I met at Con Ops were very polite to me.

However...here’s where things become annoying. There were no signs saying what was in what room. No one was at the doors to keep a line going, and help out if there was a tech problem. People seemed to be wandering around and peeking into rooms to see what was going on to guess what the panels were about as there was no way to tell what was going on there as there were no signs.

So we found the room, and I was inquiring about if there was an HDMI cord for the projector. As I said above, Acen has a bunch of cables for the different PCs, and I should say that Midwest's Con Ops said they could provide me with one, however, they also said that we should have brought them ourselves, but I’ll get to that soon. We could see you could use the projector, meaning that there was a monitor cord on there for the projector to hook up to the laptop, if you had a connector for it. But, some older cords don’t work well with certain laptops, and without it...you’re screwed when it comes to showing off your powerpoint.

So I asked the ladies on staff about it. They didn’t know and were trying to get in contact with Con Ops about it. Not tech, but Con Ops. Now I know that smaller cons can put the groups under one unit, but given the size of this con, even if it is smaller than Acen, you would think that there would be a split off by now. So I was recommended to go to Con ops, after being informed that it would take some time to get an answer by text. Understandable.

We, that would be my sister and I (she’s my co-panelist), head for where the Con Ops area is. Here we have two gents in suits waiting and I asked if they were con ops. Nope, turns out there was one lone young man working there, on a Friday night. Thankfully he was able to get his Manager to come out and speak with us, but it took a rather long time as it was only her and him, again, on a Friday night.

So as I said, we were informed by the Manager that they could give us an HDMI, but they would rather we bring our own. Again I can understand this, but again, it’s weird to not at least have a set up for different Laptops for that projector. So we went to the panel room at our designated time, and thankfully the monitor cord worked...but we lost out on several people who were looking for our panel because...again...no signs. Just because it’s on the website doesn’t mean that the room may not change and people don’t constantly want to look at the damn phone to know what’s happening and what’s not.

Again, no one there to help us with the setup, no one there to give the other panelists warning for time, etc. The whole thing felt out of wack.

Other issues that seemed to be going on, was that there were signs warning others to watch out for drunk people at the bar, I have no idea where security was at the time. I know my friend got catcalled on her way to the convention outside of it. And another cosplayer, male, was saying that while in costume guys kept bothering him and trying to flip his skirt and such.

This is not to mention that a number of Acts couldn’t make it to the convention due to bad work with their Visas, and while the con issued an apology, they took no action during the con to update that Lia, one of the acts who came from Japan -and who managed to get in -held a Q&A and Anime Midwest did not update that there was going to be this meeting. Apparently, no one showed up for that.

The line to get into the con was 2 hours long, and apparently longer on Saturday. Autograph lines only had 4 people, at most, working them, and the attendees seemed to have to monitor it themselves. Artist Alley was way too tight and it was hard for a person who could walk to get around, I would hate to have to think about anyone in a wheelchair trying to get through that mess.

I’ll say this much the people that were there as guests and vendors were very kind, but a lot of what I liked about the con seems to have been stripped, and I’m kind of wondering if I want to go next year or not.

#Anime central #anime central 2019 #anime midwest #anime midwest 2019 #acen2019 #acen #amw #rant #issues with convention

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theghostpinesmusic · 3 years

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Some Notes On Fire and Rain

Last but not least, I'll write a bit here about the creation of Fire and Rain. This is the final album in the cycle, the "winter" one. I wanted to end with an album that felt like winter, like a loss of hope and a sacrifice of the sunlight of summer to darkness...but that also acknowledged that, in the end, the wheel will come back around. It's a cycle, remember? Not a line. So, that was part of the inspiration behind this album. The other part was Ryan Adams' album 29. I've sort of personally "cancelled" Ryan Adams from my musical cosmology, for reasons that I've written about on this site before, but that you can also read about in the New York Times. But, way back when, at the height of my Ryan Adams fandom in 2005, he released three albums in one year, and that trilogy ended with 29, a massive tonal and sonic departure from the other albums he'd released that year (and, arguably, anything else he'd ever released). Even by Ryan Adams' standards, 29 is dark, like, really dark, stylistically inconsistent, and badly in need of some trimming. But that's why I love(d) it. Ever since, I've wanted to make an album like it, and for better and worse, with Fire and Rain, that's what I did. I consciously kept from editing myself on this album, unlike on the others, to the point that I'd planned a twelve-minute album closer which, upon recording, ballooned to twenty-nine minutes, and I just left it that way. That's not to say there wasn't quality control or thought put into the album, but just that I wanted to make sure the usual, sensible limitations I put on a song or album wouldn't hold me back from seeing how dark I could go. If that makes you want to hear the album, you'll probably love it. If it makes you want to never listen to the album, you'll probably hate it. Stylistically, I'd say it shares the most DNA with Ride, actually: there are a lot of jammy, instrumental passages, weird sonic experiments, and the like. I struggled sometimes recording Ride while trying to keep track of all of the separate tracks bouncing around in my Audacity projects, but the size of the project files on a few of the Fire and Rain tracks were absolutely enormous compared to the Ride songs. There's a lot going on sonically here, at least by my standards. And did I mention lots of the songs are weird? Like, pretty weird? There are only three songs here that sound to me like anything else I've written, and two of those ("Please Don't Let Me Go" and "Blackbird Girl") are the saddest breakup songs I've come up with, ever, while the third one ("Fire and Rain") is nineteen minutes long. I'm lucky if I can play a third of the songs off of this album without having to look up the chords and lyrics as a reminder first. That said, while I feel like I've grown immensely as a songwriter, guitarist, and producer through the process of making all of the albums I've put out this year, Fire and Rain is the one that has had the most impact on me, and makes me the most excited for what I'll write next. Coming through the darkness and finding yourself on the other side definitely allows you to see the world in a new way, though that's about all I can say to recommend the experience. Anyway, to the song notes! I got it into my head at some point that I wanted to write a story song about a haunted ghost train and a battle between good and evil where evil wins. I mentioned a mariachi band in the lyrics, and then thought "What if I actually played the mariachi band's song within the other song?" Suddenly, "Badlands" was nine minutes long and felt like the perfect way to open this ridiculously long and convoluted album. In my head, "Ghosts Of The Highway" and "Fear" have some sort of strange, symbiotic relationship. This existed before the fuzzed-out static that punctuates both songs was added; in fact, it's why it was added. "Ghosts" is a new song, written during the Triptych sessions. "Fear" is a song I adapted from a poem that I found in an old notebook during the sessions. A decent amount of the Triptych songs were initially written over snippets of music

and chord progressions I'd written and/or recorded without lyrics randomly over the last fifteen years, but "Fear" is the odd song where the lyrics existed first and about fifteen years after I'd written them, I sat down and wrote music to go with them. I really like the way it worked out, and should probably try writing more songs this way in the future... "Neal's Jam" used to be called "Crazy Stairs," and was renamed as a tribute to guitarist Neal Casal, who is a huge influence of mine and who passed away while I was recording the album. The main riff in the jam is actually paraphrased from a riff he played during a version of The Cardinals' "Off Broadway" performed live in 2009. So, it's "Neal's Jam" in more ways than one, I suppose. The jam has always been paired with "Enemy," which is a song about how bad things can get when you don't get out of your own way. "Blackbird Girl" was a phrase and an image that came to me while out on a run (where a lot of song ideas come to me, strangely enough). I wrote this song from the perspective of someone who might have cause to address it to their own "blackbird girl," who had flown away and never returned. It was called "Haunted Heart" at one point and "Blackbird Song" at another. "Ice On The Mountain" came from a dumb idea I had to inspire a new song: I wanted to try to write a song called "Ice On The Mountain" because it was the opposite of "Fire On The Mountain." This is the song that resulted, inspired in part by an accident I'd recently experienced while out mountaineering. "Amie" was, weirdly, the first song I wrote after writing "The Light" in 2016. It didn't make it onto to Asphalt Ghosts, though, because it didn't fit with the rest of the material and because the picking pattern was really hard for me to play reliably at first. So it got shelved until this album came along, when I resurrected it, rewrote some of the lyrics, got the picking pattern down, and changed the title from "Salmon" to "Amie," a reference to the nigh-unattainable woman in Chretien de Troyes' medieval romance "Lanval." This story has some parallels to that one. "Kurzweil Transmissions" is named for the scientist who first conceptualized the AI singularity, but this is basically just a brief instrumental written in A that randomly finds its way into the middle of songs like "Caroline" and "Palace," as well as covers like Bob Dylan's "Isis" from time to time. The "Not The One" > "Fire and Rain" > "(Rise)" sequence certainly has enough lyrics and music to speak for itself, but if you're interested in my thought process behind putting it together the way I did, here's an excerpt of an email I wrote to a friend a few weeks ago attempting to explain it: "I feel like I've been in an apocalyptic mood since March of 2020, and only now, as I'm hitting summer break in 2021, with COVID not quite the looming specter it once was, and a little time to do something other than work in my office, am I able to look back on the last sixteen or so months with anything approaching objectivity. I feel like it was/is the most dystopian time I've ever lived through: massive systemic failures of our corroded institutions, collapsing of personal relationships, deaths of friends and family...you know, all the hits, but all at once and with the overwhelming sense that all of this is in all likelihood just the beginning of something even bigger, rather than an isolated string of "bad luck." I think we'll be forced to de-industrialize, de-technocratize, and de-globalize whether we choose to or not, after much longer. One of the more indulgent portions of the huge pile of new music I dumped onto my website the other day is actually about this...sort of? You might enjoy it, you might find it a bit too meandering, but it's the only real sonic monument to the last sixteen months that I've recorded so far, so maybe that will serve as a better response than my hammering away at these keys for five or six more paragraphs..." And that's the best I can do to sum up Fire and Rain.

#fire and rain #the ghost pines #albums #writing #songwriting #lyrics #music

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disneyloading498 · 3 years

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Harem Atari 2600

Atari 2600 Complete Game List

Harem Atari 2600 Play

Atari 2600 Complete Game List

In short: if you're looking for an ordinary Atari 2600 ROM set, look elsewhere. It can be found almost everywhere on the Internet without too many problems. If you're looking for the most genuine and best documented Atari 2600 ROM collection in the world, then look. Welcome to the all new 'The What Are We Fighting Four'. One part Let's Play, one part podcast. The What Are We Fighting Four is Travis, Joan, Josh, and TV Di.

- A -

Adventures of Max

Little is known about this title other than it was part of the game development deal Atari made with Axlon during the late 80's. According the former Atari programmer Steve DeFrisco

'This was one of the “Designed by Nolan” games, which was never finished. It was to be set in Medieval times, the player is a knight with a sword. That’s pretty much all we had. John moved on to another company and the game was never finished. The opening sequence of the character running and jumping into the hole, and falling to the bottom worked, but that’s it.'

Bagman

This port of the 1982 Stern coin-op was programmed by Steve Hostetler for Atari. According to Steve he was almost finished with the game when they laid him off. Steve sent all his materials back to Atari after he was laid off, and it is unknown what happened to them.

Ballblazer

Previously thought to be only a rumor, programmer Tod Frye recently confirmed that this game was indeed once in development. Although the technically challenged 2600 was woefully underpowered to produce the split screen scrolling required by Ballblazer, Tod apparently had a demo up and running (various reports put it somewhere between 30% and 60% complete). The whereabouts of this demo are currently unknown.

Battle of the Sexes

Developed by Michael Case for Multivision. Multivision president Eugene Finkei talked about this game in the October 1983 issue of Videogaming and Computergaming Illustrated: 'Battle of the Sexes is played simultaneously by 2 players. It's very innocent. Each player has surrogate partners scrolling across the screen. Each player must score with as many surrogates as possible while trying to knock out the surrogates of the other partner. There are different skill levels & variations: it can be played by 2 guys with girls scrolling across the screen or by women with men scrolling across the screen. To score, the player directs the figure to bounce together with the surrogate for a fraction of a second. No genitalia. And you don't shoot the other's surrogates, you merely get them out of the way.' This title was long thought not to have even been started, but the programmer recently confirmed in a 2007 interview with Digital Press that the game was actually completely finished: 'Battle of the Sexes involved male and female figures coming together from the top and bottom of the screen, to either shoot each other or screw each other. The owners kept the only copy. It wasn't as good (as Harem). It was basically like Pong. I knocked it out in a few weeks so we could say we had two games when we approached distributors.' The whereabouts of the one and only prototype are currently unknown.

Bird Programmed by David Lamkins, after he departed Parker Brothers for Activision. David worked in Activision's short-lived Boston office. During that time, he worked on a 'bird game' which was never published. He discussed the game in a 2002 article that appeared in issue #74 of the Atari 2600 Connection: 'I spent my time at Activision working on a 2600 game I called Bird. I’ve heard that Rex (Bradford) later described it as “a pterodactyl on a bombing run”, which is pretty good as a brief description. My inspiration for Bird came party from the Heavy Metal movie (the scenes with the girl riding the bird into battle), and partly from Activision’s Battlezone clone, Robot Tank (the point-of-view perspective of the playing field). The player piloted a bird which had a limited endurance that was affected partly by the intensity of the player’s maneuvers and partly by damage incurred from missiles fired by ground-based hostiles somewhat reminiscent of Dr. Who’s Daleks. The Bird game was really based around subtlety and survival. The player had to be sparing in his moves in order to make it to the next round. It was a shooter game, but not so much an aggressive game. It had kind of a Zen quality to it – probably way too cerebral for the market. I was recently contacted by Activision’s Ken Love, who is in the process of putting together a definitive collection of Activision games, including all the unreleased and prototype games. Ken wanted to acquire a copy of Bird. If any such copies exist, it’s either on a 20-year-old hard drive in some Activision storage locker, or in a dusty prototype cartridge in someone’s closet. That’s kind of a shame. I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing it one more time…'

Blow Out

Developed by Mattel, Blow Out was a party game that had 'Two roller-skating dancers drop darts from a scaffold onto rising balloons. An easy enough task, except these rude guys keep bumping into each other and knocking each other off the scaffold. When the music stops, that's the signal for the next players to take the controllers.'

According to the Blue Sky Rangers website 'David Akers only worked on the game briefly in June 1983 before being pulled off to work on higher priority projects.' It is unknown how far along this game got before being cancelled.

Candyland Surfing

According to former 20th Century Fox programmer John Marvin 'There was a surfing game where you surfed a rainbow. That was taking advantages of something you could do cheaply with the VCS, each scan line you could change the color and you got this great rolling rainbow on the screen. It was more a screensaver than a game, the problem was there wasn't a lot of gameplay in it.'

Circus Charlie A port of the 1983 Konami/Centuri coin-op. Parker Brothers announced Atari 2600 VCS, ColecoVision, and Commodore 64 versions of this title, and prototype boxes were shown in a CES press kit. According to a Parker Brothers internal marketing release schedule, this game was scheduled for a September 1984 release. The C64 version was actually completed but never released by Parker Brothers (it was eventually released by Konami in 1987). According to Phil Orbanes, former Senior VP of Research & Development at Parker Brothers, the VCS version received 'some coding' at the very least, and may have been completely finished. The programmer is unfortunately unknown, and as yet no prototypes of this game have surfaced.

Computer Corridor

Developed by Mattel. According to the Blue Sky Rangers website 'This game started out as an original concept by Ron Surratt and Jane Terjung called Computer Revenge. At the same time, Spring 1983, Russ Ludwick was working on an Intellivision game called Moon Corridors, inspired by the arcade game Battlezone. In mid-1983, Marketing began an agressive campaign to release titles on as many different game platforms as possible. Noting similarities between Computer Revenge and Moon Corridors (mainly a 3-D grid effect), they decreed that the two games should be mooshed into one - Computer Corridor - and released on both Intellivision and Atari. By the time they tested and approved the idea, though, Russ was no longer working at Mattel Electronics and no one else was available to pick up the Intellivision version. A couple of months later Jane also left Mattel, killing the project altogether.'

It is not known how far along this title got before being cancelled.

Count's Castle

Also known as the missing CCW title, this would have a been a math title based on the Sesame Street Count character. An internal Atari memo puts the game at 80% complete, but the game was never finished. Apparently the original programmer left and there was no one available to finish the game.

Cryptogram

According to David Crane he developed this word game after moving to Activision from Atari. The game would display a scrambled phrase that the player would then have to unscramble in the quickest time possible. Players could also enter their own phrases if they didn't want to use one of the built in phrases. This game used a programming technique called 'Filled Venetian Blinds' which alternated the scanlines used by the regular Venetian Blinds technique every frame, making the image look more solid (no more lines) but also slightly transparent due to only half the image appearing on each frame. Unfortunately the game was deemed to be of 'limited interest' and Activision feared it wouldn't sell well enough to consider releasing so the project was abandoned.

Cumulus

According to the Blue Sky Rangers Website 'Cumulus was an original Atari 2600 idea by Jeff Ratcliff. His idea was to take a relatively simple game but use the extra memory available on a Super Cartridge to create spectacular visual effects not seen before on Atari - mainly really cool explosions. He worked on the game briefly in August 1983, programming a demonstration screen showing a high-resolution cloud with an enemy ship above it. While the game was listed on the weekly in-house status reports, it never received the four-digit product number that made a project official.' Sims 4 buying groceries.

A screenshot exists.

David and Goliath

Programmed by Rick Harris for Enter-Tech Ltd. Enter-Tech Ltd. did some Christian themed games for Sparrow who released Music Machine for the 2600. David and Goliath consisted of two stages: On the first David had to herd sheep and on the second David had to fight Goliath. Unfortunately the contracting company ran out of money and the game was never finished.

Dazzler

Port of the 1982 Century Electronics coin-op. Developed by Enter-Tech Ltd. for the Unitronics Expander system (which also went unreleased). The game was on a cassette and not a cartridge.

Dual Scrolling

Based on a programming effect developed by David Akers in which the screen was split in two with each half scrolling a background independently of the other. Although there was no game designed to use this technique marketing apparently loved it and decided that a game could be designed around it.

According to the Blue Sky Rangers website 'After determining the same effect could be created on Intellivision, Marketing put the still-to-be-determined game - temporarily called Dual Scrolling - onto the official release schedule. That was December 19, 1983. Exactly one month later, Mattel Electronics closed. Although no game concept had yet been thought of, Dual Scrolling was one of the few games officially still in development for the Atari 2600 when the doors were shut.'

Flapper

Developed by Mattel. Flapper was to be a unique game where 'You control the Flapper to rescue baby Flappers from an underground maze. The maze is filled with snakes, bats and ghosts. Cave-ins and landslides keep opening and closing the tunnels. Luckily, the Flapper is a unique fellow: he has three types of beanies - chopper for flying, gun for shooting, umbrella for protection - and four interchangeable types of legs: flying, jumping, running and walking. You have to find and change the appropriate beanie and legs for him to overcome the obstacles and rescue the babies!'

According to the Blue Sky Rangers website Flapper was never finished, although some coding did take place. 'While the game was listed on the weekly in-house status reports, it never received the four-digit product number that made a project 'official.' Steve worked on Flapper briefly in August 1983 before being pulled off to work on higher priority projects.'

Flashlight

Not really a game, but another 'cool programming technique' for the 2600 that Mattel thought they could design a game around. Programmer Stephen Roney had developed an interesting programming effect on the Intellivision where a moving circle of light could illuminate the background and any objects within the circle. Another Mattel programmer, Ron Surratt, was asked to duplicate this effect on the 2600. Once it was shown that it was indeed possible Mattel tried to come up with a game to fit the effect, but closed their doors two months later.

Flesh Gordon

This was to be Wizards final game entry, but was never released. Based on the 1974 soft-porn movie of the same name, Flesh Gordon was long thought to have never been even started until the programmer of the game kindly set the record straight.

'Flesh gordon was finished. It sucked, sometimes literally if you know what I mean. It was a horrible game with a lot of sex and the payoff was the ability to hump using the joystick. There was nothing cool or interesting but then wizard video wanted what they wanted. There came a time when they stole a copy of the final or near final version which was sent for their approval. They refused to pay and they went to publish the game using the rom we sent them to approve. It was just about finished but it needed some finishing touches. We never did them. They never officially released it as I understand and that was no loss.'

What happened to the prototype that was sent to Wizard is unknown. Rumors over the years have surfaced that some collectors have access to the rom, but this has never been verified and is highly suspect.

A picture of the box exists.

The Impossible Game

Developed by Telesys, but never released. The Impossible Game was shown at the January 1983 CES show, and mentioned in an interview with Alex Leavens in the Aug/Sept. '83 issue of Video Games Player magazine. According to Alex 'It's a puzzle game, sort of like Rubik's Cube. You don't blow anything up and nobody gets hurt--it's strictly a mental challenge.'

Other than this short interview, the only other information we have on this game comes from Leonard Herman, who actually played the game. According to Leonard, the object of the game was to 'successfully navigate through six levels of 36 squares that are randomly chosen by the computer.' On the first level the player only had to pick one square at a time, but on each new level the amount of squares the player ahd to pick increased (2 on the second level, 3 on the third, etc.).

For more information on The Impossible Game, check out to Leonard's personal write up of the game.

Qixiang Electron Science Technology Co.，Ltd. Is a high-tech company with more than 20 years built-up experience of research, production and sales in the wireless communication equipment industry. The microphone is the Anytone type that has the A/B selection in the mic. There are 2 A/B indicators. The one near the A/B button tells you which VFO you are on. And the A/B at the top of the microphone indicates which VFO your receiving a signal on which is handy. Audio is loud and transmission is clear. Plug and Play Package: AnyTone AT-D878UV PLUS w/ SkyBridge Plus Dual Band Digital Hotspot “The SkyBridge Hotspot really opened up DMR for me. I enjoy being able to connect with talk groups from across the country and around the world. Anytone at 7777.

James Bond: As Seen in Octopussy

Before Parker Brothers decided to turn it into a crappy version of Moon Patrol, the James Bond game went through two different iterations. Originally starting out as James Bond in Octopussy, this version would have taken place on a train and be based on only one movie (rather than a series of movies like the final game). In this game James would have to shoot at and dodge bullets from two armed men as they ran around on a train cart. This version of the game was seen by more than one person at various game shows and was advertised in at least one PB catalog. It is highly likely that this game was completed, but dropped in favor of the 'Moon Patrol' version.

A screenshot the actual prototype running exists.

James Bond: Moonraker Demo

According to programmer Charlie Heath, he did a one screen demo of a James Bond game based on the movie Moonraker. Sadly it appears that the demo has probably been lost forever.

'I'd prototyped a 'James Bond' scene during my first first few weeks, to see what I could do with a VCS: you're in space orbiting earth in the space shuttle, chasing bio-terrorist pods to shoot them down before they break up in the atmosphere, while your shuttle and the pod are being buffeted about by reentry. You see something that looks a bit like a spinning earth bobbing about at the bottom of the screen. If you watch the movie Moonraker, it's one of the climactic scenes, but Parker wasn't interested in it for the Bond license because they wanted to do something that was more along the lines of Pitfall - little guy running around with various spy gadgets.'

'It wasn't much beyond a concept, but it was a pretty functional single screen 1st person perspective shooter. Not up to the level of Star Raiders gameplay, but I thought the pseudo-orbiting-world view was pretty cool and unique at that time. I didn't keep a copy of the code when I left Parker Brothers. It might be buried on a backup tape somewhere at Parker Brothers, but more likely the tape was reused for cereal inventory or something like that.'

Keystone Cannonball (Keystone Kapers II ver #1) Dan Kitchen worked on two unreleased sequels to Keystone Kapers. This first version involved Officer Kelly chasing the crook across the rooftops of a train. 'I had also done a sequel to Keystone Kapers, which was the Keystone cop on a train. And that was actually a neat thing because I was able to pull off some interesting software kernels where I had eight rotating wheels on the bottom of a train where you could normally only have 2 or 6 It was a very cute game. From screen to screen, from boxcar to boxcar fighting and trying to defeat the character from Keystone Kapers, who was the runaway criminal. That was a very huge game as it had non-symmetrical play and had a really nice, large engine at the front of the game and a very large caboose at the bottom of the game.' According to Dan the game never got to a playable state and was only around 20% done before being scrapped for unknown reasons. Recently Dan found his prototype which featured the train and officer Kelly running on top of the cars. You can see a video of it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u60o2nYEXM Keystone Kapers II ver #2 Dan Kitchen worked on two unreleased sequels to Keystone Kapers. This second version was a vertically scrolling game similar to Crazy Climber and involved Officer Kelly climbing a building while Harry Hooligan threw objects at him. According to Dan this version got to a playable state, but was cancelled for unknown reasons. - L - The Levee Game Programmed by Dan Kitchen for Activision. According to Dan: 'Keystone Kelly appeared in a yellow rain slicker running around ladders and platforms repairing cracks that would appear in a background Hoover Dam-style image complete with warning lights and a beautiful sun setting on the distant reservoir . The screen kernels were written such that I could change the background color on every scan line so the entire screen would slowly fill up with water if the player couldn't cement the cracks in time. There was also a mechanic to 'empty' the water on the player's side of the dam to keep the game going.'

- M -

M*A*S*H II Programmed by David Lubar for Sirius Software. This alternate version of M*A*S*H developed at Sirius was ultimately scrapped in favor of another version developed internally at Fox by Doug Neubauer. Programmer David Lubar describes what he remembers of the game: 'I know I had Klinger at the top of the screen, on guard duty. Once in a while, he'd try to run off, and the player had to stop him. Beyond that, I think the game involved taking supplies to different surgery tents.' 20th Century Fox had announced a M*A*S*H II game and it is believed that this version may have been planned for release as a sequel. A prototype of this game is rumored to exist in the hands of a private collector, but nothing has been released to the public as yet.

Mission Omega

Mission Omega was a space shooter developed by Commavid. According to an interview with some ex-Commavid employees, this game was finished but sent back to the programmer for some 'fine tuning'. The game was never re-finished in time to be released.

Mission X

Port of the 1982 Data East Coin-Op of the same name. Although released for the Intellivision, the 2600 version was never finished before being cancelled for 'unknown reasons'. It is not known how far along the game was before being cancelled.

Monkey Business

Designed by Mattel, Monkey Business was to be one of the few unique 2600 games designed by Mattel (all others were ports of existing Intellivision games). Although not completed, Monkey Business was fairly far along before being cancelled.

A description of the game found on the Blue Sky Rangers website reads as follows 'In the zoo, things have gone awry. Billy the Chimp has escaped and is up to no good. As any curious monkey would, he has managed to free the elephants! It's up to you, as Mike the Zookeeper, to return the elephants to their cages.

Once you have restored order in the elephant section, you must quickly run to the next section of cages. Perhaps you'll have to capture the loose Koalas. Maybe you'll have to avoid soaring hawks, battle fierce tigers or try to grab the slippery penguins. Along the way, you'll find items which will be of help to you, such as a bag of peanuts or a net. So grab your hat and stop this monkey business!'

- P -

Penetrator

Programmed by Bill Heineman for Avalon Hill. This game is not believed to have been advertised or even announced. According to the programmer: 'The game itself was a lot like Activision's Megamania. It was a simple drop from the sky shooter. It was unfinished because I left Avalon Hill to work for Time/HBO on a playcable system for the 2600. The game was probably 50% complete. My source to Penetrator was lost many years ago when the 5 1/4 floppy it was stored on simply went bad. The only EPROMS made were almost certainly erased to make way for Death Trap, etc, because we only had a few dozen and they kept dying on us because we burned EPROMS so many times. Only three dev cards were made, so all the other programmers had to write code, and test on an EPROM.' Avalon Hill's stay in the market was short-lived and it's unknown if any further work was done on this title, or if it was simply erased.

Pepper II

Port of the 1982 Exidy arcade game that was released on the Colecovison. It has recently been confirmed that the same programming team that was responsible for the Atari 2600 version of Turbo was indeed working on this game, but it was never completed (or even reached a playable state) due to the collapsing game market. A prototype case was found for this game, but it was empty as it was just a mock-up used for advertisements. Artwork sheets for the game graphics also exist.

Incidentally, there is no Pepper I. The II in the title referred to the fact that the character had two personalities (angel and devil) and not that it was a sequel.

Porkys

Not the same game that was released by 20th Century Fox, but rather a game based on the cartoon pigs that were seen on the electric sign in the movie. Former TCF programmer John Marvin remembers seeing this game while he worked at the company. According to John 'The game made no sense at all.' It is unknown what happened to this prototype after it was rejected.

- R -

Real Time Chess Real Time Chess (working name) was a strategy game developed by Greg Easter while at Atari. According to Greg: “You commanded one piece and tried to capture other pieces one at a time without stepping on any of the squares they could land on. In simple mode, all of the squares the other piece could move to were lit up. In expert mode, you had to keep that in mind yourself. So it was also a training aid for playing chess, sharpening your mind to keep track of different pieces. That game was about 90% done when I was told Atari would not be releasing any more games no matter what, so there was no point in my finishing it.” Greg said that that several test carts were made, but it is unknown where they currently are.

The Rescue of Emmanuelle Alan Roberts (designer of X-Man) talked about this game in the October 1983 issue of Videogaming and Computergaming Illustrated: 'We are currently working on The Rescue of Emmanuelle, based on the famous Emmanuelle character. It is a male-oriented action game where one has to rescue Emmanuelle, the rewards being that, if you are skillful enough to save her, she is going to thank you, bestow her kindness on you. It's a climbing game. It takes place on the Eiffel Tower. The hardest part in designing the game is that the tower doesn't fit well on the TV screen. We're working on a scrolling system.' It is not known how far this game made it into development before being cancelled.

Robotron: 2084

A Proposed title for the ill-fated Atari Graduate add-on computer. A WIP version of this game was shown at at least one show before being cancelled (along with the Graduate). According to one eye witness, it was 'The most flickery thing I'd ever seen'. This isn't surprising considering the amount of objects that would be needed to be shown on the screen at one time was well beyond the poor 2600's capabilities. A picture of the title screen exists showing some pretty nice graphics for the 2600.

Sharp Shot

Port of the Intellivision game developed by APh Technologies. Mattel decided not to release the 2600 version of this game after it was widely criticized on the Intellvision as being 'too easy'.

Shove It! was a two player game being developed at CBS which would have used a special cable to communicate between two 2600s. According to programmer Bob Curtiss: 'Shove It! was my original concept for a two-player 2600 game that used two 2600 systems, each with their own TV of course. The idea was that someone would take their 2600 over to a friend’s house to play this game with them. A bit far-fetched at the time, but to CBS’ credit they were open to these kinds of ideas. The game was simple – there were 9 rectangular objects, sort of like long pieces of wood or metal, displayed in a 3D view, that you could ‘push’ or ‘shove’ away from you, and they would move toward the other player on their screen. They in turn could shove them back toward you. The two 2600’s communicated via serial data transfer with a serial cable connected to one joystick port on each machine. Did you ever imagine that you could send data from one 2600 to another via the joystick ports? You’d use the joystick plugged in to the 2nd joystick port to select which object you wanted to shove toward the other player, and the push the button to shove it. I had a functioning prototype working within 3 months.' Shove It! was cancelled after CBS decided to get out of the video game business and closed down their Atari 2600 development unit. Stomp it This port of the Bally Midway coin-op (which was also unreleased) was done by Alex Nevelson at Bally Midway but went unreleased. There is no information on how either the arcade game or home version would have played.

Sky Blazer

Sky Blazer was a multi-level air combat simulation game by Broderbund, similar to CBS's Wings. Although shown at the 1983 Summer CES show, the game was never released.

Blackberry reload software, free download - Reload, BlackBerry Desktop Software, BlackBerry Desktop Manager, and many more programs. If I understand right you are needing to reload the OS onto your device. Here is the best way to do that using Apploader. First you will need to make sure you have the OS downloaded (here is the latest OS for your device) and installed on your computer. Then, if the OS is not from your carrier you will need to delete the vender files. Cara software blackberry, error 513, reload os, firmware blackberry. Blackberry error 513 reload software. Reload BlackBerry Device Software using BlackBerry Desktop Manager. To reload BlackBerry Device Software to a BlackBerry smartphone using BlackBerry Desktop Manager, follow these steps: Visit the web site. Click Check for Updates. Select and download the version of BlackBerry Device Software approved by your wireless service provider for use with the BlackBerry. You need to reload the soft ware connect your mobile to your pc.

Snark

Programmed by John Dunn for Atari, but ultimately unreleased. John would later go on to do Superman before leaving Atari. Snark was a combination Maze solver and shooter. Each game generated a new maze, and you were set upon by critters that you had to shoot in order to negotiate the maze.

According to John, Snark 'was my first game for Atari. It was not published while I was at Atari, and perhaps never was - I didn't track it. It had a video spin mode that caused the screen to color cycle really fast, and release was held up because there was some worry this would cause people to have seizures (I know, it's bogus - but this was the early days of video games, and that kind of intense color cycling was unknown territory).'

Snowplow Developed by VSS, Inc. for Sunrise Software. According to Leonard Herman, this game was shown at the 1984 Winter CES (along with Glacier Patrol, another Sunrise title that went unreleased). Leonard described the gameplay in his book 'ABC to the VCS': 'You operate a snowplow which must clear the eight horizontal rows of snow. Snow is cleared by merely moving your plow through it. Somewhere in each row you'll uncover a car which will then move across the row that it is in and must be avoided at the risk of losing a turn. When all the snow has been cleared, one of the six cars will flash on and off and you must get to it before time runs out while still avoiding the other cars. When the car has been reached, another car will begin to flash. After all six cars have been retrieved, you'll move on to a harder screen where you must again clear the snow.' After Sunrise Software folded, the rights to their 2600 catalog were apparently acquired by Telegames, who eventually released Glacier Patrol and reissued Quest for Quintana Roo in 1989. Yet for some reason, Snowplow was never released. What happened to the prototype that was shown at CES is not known, and thus far the game has never turned up in any form.

Solo

Solo was a 3-D flight simulation game by Broderbund. Although shown at the 1983 Summer CES show, the game was never released.

Super Pac-Man

According to an internal Atari memo preliminary coding was started on the 2600 version of Super Pac-Man. The memo lists the game as only being 5% complete, so it is doubtful a playable version of the game exists.

Tarzan

Port of the Colecovision game of the same name. Tarzan was developed by Wickstead Design (the same team behind the unreleased 2600 Pink Panther game). The game finished, but was unreleased due to it requiring a special chip for extra memory. A prototype of the game may exist with one of the programmers. An in-game screenshot, picture of the box, and a manual all exist.

Tank Blitz

Was to be the third and final game in the Milton Bradley Power Arcade series. Tank Blitz was shown at the 1984 Toy Fair along with its Armored Commander controller.

A picture of the cartridge with its controller can be seen here (thanks to Rom Hunter)

Target Omega Target Omega was a submarine simulation developed by Greg Easter for Atari. From Greg: “Another game which was only barely started was an extremely ambitious submarine simulator. There were three choices of views - periscope, radar and instruments. Your goal was to find enemy ships and sink them, as you would in most sub games, only there were additional complications of needing to keep track of fuel, battery power and sustainable pressure. I don’t remember too much of it now.” Given its early stage of development, it is unlikely that any copy of the game survived Those Little Buggers

Developed by Enter-Tech Ltd. for the Unitronics Expander system (which also went unreleased). The game was on a cassette and not a cartridge.

Treasure Hunt

Developed by Enter-Tech Ltd. for the Unitronics Expander system (which also went unreleased). The game was on a cassette and not a cartridge.

Underworld

Was to be a D&D type game by Commavid. A tape labeled Underworld is known to exist, and is believed to contain development source code. The current whereabouts of the tape are unknown.

Untitled Motorcycle Game #1 (real name unknown)

David Crane mentioned working on two unreleased games for Activision that involved riding a motorcycle. The first version was similar to Atari's Stunt Cycle where the player controlled a motorcycle that would jump over buses and other obstacles. According to David the game was abandoned because he ran out of objects (Player/Missile sprites) and couldn't display the buses properly.

Untitled Motorcycle Game #2 (real name unknown)

David Crane mentioned working on two unreleased games for Activision that involved riding a motorcycle. The second version was to be a motocross style game with a large segmented motorcycle that would realistically move up and down over the terrain. Like the first motorcycle game it was scrapped after David ran out of objects (Player/Missile sprites) due to the large realistic motorcycle.

- W -Wacko Port of the 1982 Bally Midway coin-op. This port was done by Tom DiDomenico while he was at Bally Midway but went unreleased.

Zookeeper

Perhaps one of the most famous missing prototypes, Zookeeper was a port of the 1982 Taito arcade game. Zookeeper was finished enough to have have been playable, and may have even been completed. The music/sound effects code for this game (by Robert Vieira) has been found, and is nearly arcade perfect. A video showing the graphics for this game has also surfaced.

Harem Atari 2600 Play

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cryptocoinguides · 3 years

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Big News For Ethereum

Let me just say one word for you all.ETHEREUM! Don’t forget, realize that its power in crypto is much stronger than what meets the third eye. This strength and power are really about to go into overdrive throughout the 2nd half of 2021. So much power, Vitalik is going to go from skinny to seriously buff, just like his FATHER!! So Viewers of the tube, am I your father? Call my daddy, because it’s time for Chico Crypto Yeah before we get into the content, that is actually Vitaliks DAD, Dimitry Buterin! There he is with a BABY Vitalik, reading a book.

Good work Dimitry, you raised a fine fellow. Now to answer the question of Why I’m getting all gungho on Ethereum as we turn into July!? London Bridges falling down. falling down. Falling down.

The Ethereum London upgrade is coming…and coming very SOON!! Now first what is so important about the London network upgrade!? Why is this Hard Fork the most anticipated upgrade among the Ethereum community in a really long time? Well, it aims to solve the problem of transaction fees on the Ethereum network.

Which as we know, can be HIGH and very variable…there is really no consistency! Why is this? Well, the Ethereum we all know includes a gas fee in transactions to incentivize miners to include it in the block. These fees are set by the highest bidder model. If the fee is set too low, other users might outbid your gas fee and your transaction may linger in the pool until it expires and is canceled.

This means Ethereum fees are unpredictable and there are long waits unless you pay BIG! So how is this being changed? Well through EIP-1559, the improvement proposal will change the Fee market for the ETH 1.0 chain! And as we can see from the Ethereum Github, this has been in the works for over 2 years now…it was officially created by ETH core members in April of 2019.

So it’s been a long time coming! But what does it do, EIP-1559? Well, it throws the highest bidder model right out the window!! The new model will set fees according to network usage with a variable base fee. This base fee is automatically set by the Ethereum protocol based on usage and demand. The Ethereum network will have a target per-block gas usage, and the base fee increases slightly when it drifts above the target, and when capacity is below the target, it decreases slightly. Because these base fee changes are constrained, the maximum difference in base fee from block to block is predictable.

This means wallets like Metamask & dapps will be able to set FEEs for users in a much more reliable fashion. Users won’t have to decide gas prices, gas limits, high, low, or medium fees. AKA usability of ETH is about to be that much friendlier to the average JOE. That is great news, especially for the number of new people getting involved with DeFi & Ethereum. The learning curve will be decreased significantly with predictable fees. But that isn’t even the BIG part of this upgrade!! The get Vitalik Buff part of London and EIP 1559? That Base Fee is being Burned!! Burn Ether Burn, Vitaliks Inferno! Burn Ether Burn, It’s Going Away Forever Now! Yeah, the Base Fee gets destroyed…the Ether goes into the Ether.

Gone forever, to never return to the protocol again! So how does this work compared to the old model? Well of course we know nothing got burned in the old model…but regarding rewards from the Ethereum protocol. The MINERs received it all. They received the block rewards for securing and processing transactions, but also the transaction fees. They got all of it.

Now with the new Fee Model, of course, the miners are still compensated with Block rewards…but no longer do they get the bulk of transaction fees, those are burned…but the miners can get an optional TIP from users of Ethereum. Wait a tip? What’s the Miner TIP for??? Well, this tip that transaction senders can include, is there to reduce uncle risk, and a miners block not being included, due to extra transactions but also if there are suddenly far more transactions than expected, miners will include transactions with higher tips first, so the fee-based prioritization mechanism still exists as a backup.

Wait won’t this just create bidding wars like what we are still experiencing today!? Not necessarily because the tip level is independent of the BASE FEE, so client implementations can confidently put forward low gas tips and expect their transactions to be accepted in normal conditions, aka 80-95 percent of the time. Normally there is absolutely no incentive to set a tip higher than the bare minimum.

In cases of sudden congestion, aka Ethereum 3 months ago. tips do fall into a bidding war.

There isn’t much that can be done in that case So what does this mean for Ethereum and its asset Ether? Well, this creates a situation, where Ether is ultrasound money. It doesn’t inflate forever like Fiat, new reserves arent being discovered like gold, and its issuance doesn’t go flat like bitcoin.

Eventually, the supply starts to go deflationary. This doesn’t mean the supply of ETH will go to zero eventually, but it will go down! The supply might decrease by 1-2% per year, potentially even more, depending on the usage of the network! So where are we with London? What is the status?

When is it going to drop?? Well it’s possibly coming at the end of this month, and I’m going to get into exactly why…but first its time for a sponsored segment of this content supported by the team over at Glitch Protocol and like always the full details of our agreement are down in the description! So first, what is Glitch? Well, check out their website they say they’re The DeFi Operating System – supporting mass adoption with a blockchain built exclusively for decentralized finance.

How? Well, Glitch created a new Layer 1 Protocol focused purely on DeFi dApps and users with the ultimate goal of becoming a cornerstone of DeFi infrastructure. The power of permissionless applications is unlocked while simultaneously reducing transaction costs and rewarding every participant within their ecosystem. And their layer 1 is built to be fully interoperable with the major blockchains! And they’re not just talking the talk they’re checking boxes off their roadmap and adding new goals and objectives daily.

The latest box was checked a couple of days ago on June 30th with the successful launch of the Glitch Testnet and explorer Here they are able to showcase their industry-leading minimum of 3000 transactions per second ” on the blockchain while maintaining low fees, allowing for interoperability, all while maintaining decentralization and security through their delegated proof of stake model And there are so many more releases coming soon including their browser wallet and the GEX – The Glitch Decentralized Exchange, both of which has been being demoed and trialed as I speak and looking pretty dang sweet and not to mention the release of the mainnet which is looking to happen by August.

(Link #9 glitch browser wallet) Besides the major releases right around the corner…Community is super important to Glitch and they have a lot going on for the community. For both users and developers! If you’re a developer they have some free money up for grabs with the Glitch Grants Program where they’ve committed $2 million towards funding projects that want to build on Glitch, all you have to do is apply.

And for the users they have a ton of opportunities for you too Firstly, they have implemented a Revenue sharing model for all ecosystem participants, everyone, even the users and holders get a share of profits from every single participating Glitch dApps coming soon on July 7 Glitch is launching their Community Advocate Program where you can join in on the community fun and network with the team and others you can also earn special VIP event tickets, Glitch gear, job opportunities and try to work on bounties to earn some of that juicy $GLCH tokens.

So we all know DeFi is the future and Glitch is bringing a laser focus solution to that ecosystem. If your a user, looking to get rewarded or even a developer looking for a development home, which pays you to build…links for everything glitch are below! Now back to EIP 1559 & the London upgrade! So at the end of the month…we are going to have a new fee market model? Are you being serious Chico!? Well last week, on Wednesday, Tim Beiko (core Ethereum dev) tweeted that the first London Block was mined on the Ropsten testnet!

Yes, they got it out last week on the first planned testnet & it’s running smoothly burning away those Ether and basefees. On Ropsten, within the 1st day, more than 85000 Ether was burned! Woah 85 thousand Ether burned a day? Is that what could happen on the mainnet!? No this is Testnet, this isnt real money. So people were putting forward massive transactions, with massive base fees to test it out in the beginning.

Luckily there is a website, watchtheburn.com which lets you visualize the BURNs, and as you can see…only just over 3 thousand more Ethers have been burned since the first day, June 23rd. The burn is leveling out on the testnet But Ropsten is just testnet #1.

There were 2 more planned testnets for this to go live before the transfer to the mainnet. Goerli & Rinkeby. What is their Status?? Well using watch the burn, and switching up top to the Goerli testnet, we can see the BURN is live. That happened yesterday!! So, this upgrade has gone live on 2 testnets in just a week and there is only 1 left, before Mainnet. So personally, since the implementation is happening smoothly on 2 testnets so far, I would expect Rinkeby to happen by next week.

Stress testing will be done on each of the networks for at least a couple of weeks, and according to some of the core Ethereum devs, if no problems are found within the testnets, we could see late July, early August for the launch of EIP 1559 on the mainnet. If BUGs are found, and things don’t go to plan, it could be delayed to late August.

We don’t want that. But Delays are a feature of Ethereum development, not a BUG. If we look to the past! I’m hoping that doesn’t happen, but it’s likely it could drift into AugustIf it does, I’ll be drifting along with you guys, keeping you updated. Cheers Ill see you next time!.

Read More: Dogecoin Price Predictions for Future / Crypto day trading and daily cryptocurrencies exchange

via Big News For Ethereum

#bitcoin news #ethereum news #xrp news #cardano news #crypto news #best cryptocurrency to buy #best crypt

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numinous00 · 7 years

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RAWA answers questions!!

This is an “in-cavern” (but not in-character) interview with RAWA 2.0 from a couple of years ago (oct 2015) that I just stumbled across. I’d never seen it before so thought I’d post it here in case anyone else missed it too. It’s mostly D’ni language stuff. Quite interesting.

Click the link - http://mystonline.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=28054&start=15 or the “read more”

(Max): So in short, what was the inspiration or the basis for the D'ni language? Can you tell a bit about the origins of it? I suppose it's very Non-English, but does it for instance have any Arabic, Hindi, Japanese or some Asian influences? Or any correlation to other common languages and speech patterns? RAWA: Hmm... I realize that most will not understand this, but it is very difficult for me to be OOC as 'RAWA v2.0' here rather than IC 'Dr. Watson' when I'm literally 'In the Cavern'. It just feels so wrong. Having said that, it is an interesting story that I don't think has been told before, so we might as well go for it. Just don't tell Dr. Watson or the other DRC members. RAWA: I have always loved languages of all kinds. Just the idea that (somewhat) arbitrary combinations of sounds, and/or symbols could be imbued with 'meaning' is cool. A secret 'code' that groups of people more or less try to adhere to, to imperfectly share information with each other. What I say is not necessarily what you hear, even if we supposedly speak the same language. This is why I joke about taking things literally. Everything I hear, I try to 'hear' as many different interpretations as possible, and pick the most literal to respond to, even if I know they meant one of the other possible interpretations. It drives people nuts. A very simple example: My son: 'Can I have a soda?' Me: 'I believe you are 'able' to, but you are not 'allowed' to.' This comes from years of typing up email responses and having to go through every single word over and over, knowing y'all were going to dissect every syllable. BTW - Don't dissect this, please. It won't stand up to it. I got used to trying to guess what would be misinterpreted and trying to be very specific to address those reactions before they happened. I was not always successful, but I did always do my best to try to be clear, even if the answer was basically, 'I can't tell you that, yet.' Back to the language story. In sixth grade, I had the chance to take just a little bit of German during our lunch breaks. The idea that not just words changed from language to language, but entire modes of thinking fascinated me. Then in high school, I took two years of Spanish. A whole 'nother mindset. New grammar concepts. I don't remember many of the specifics, but the basic concept stuck with me. The rules are pretty arbitrary and could theoretically be just about anything. The important thing is that everyone agrees to abide by them and use them the same way, or no meaning can be conveyed from person to person. What I say is not what you hear if we do not agree on how the 'code' should be encoded/decoded. Some of this is unavoidable, because we bring our own experiences to the conversation. When I say the word "watermelon", my concept of "watermelon" is slightly different than your concept of "watermelon". When I say "watermelon", I remember eating waaaay too much watermelon when I was very young and getting sick from it. I could not eat watermelon again for years, and I still do not really eat it. If you never had a negative experience with watermelon, you probably do not have any of those connotations connected to it. Back to languages, sorry for the bunny trail. My next "languages" were from Tolkien. Wow. Clearly he had waaaay too much time on his hands. Amazing. Inspriring. Then came Hebrew. All just basic stuff, no formal classes, just bits and pieces I was picking up. After that was Tenctonese from a movie called Alien Nation (Mandy Patinkin, 1988). Their language in the movie was very complicated with clicks and pops and they had a script that looked like an EKG heartbeat with dots and wavy lines. I tried to figure out if they did all the work to make it real, or if they just faked it with randomness. Turns out it was pretty detailed. Cool. Then the TV series Alien Nation came out. Still good, but the language in the TV show was a simpler version. Knowing how long it takes to translate, and how hard it is to get actors to say "gibberish" in the first place, I certainly understood. The TV show's version of the language was easy to figure out. Standard English word order for the grammar. Many words were simply anagrams of their English counterparts. I recorded every episode on VHS tape, and watched it back. Keeping track of the subtitles. Learning new words. "Tagdot tay monga su. To tay mish uray." = "Tagdot (a character name) is among us. It is his time." (This is 25 year-old memory. I believe I am remembering it correctly, but I may have messed it up a little.) The point was - they got an "A" for effort from me - that it wasn't just random. When I started at Cyan, Myst's other languages were gibberish. See Achenar's recordings to the Channelwood natives. That was all recorded before I was hired. When it came time for Riven, I asked if I could take a stab at it. It might not be perfect. It might not be pretty. But it wouldn't just be random. I could at least do something like the TV version of Alien Nation did. I had no idea what I was getting into. I was always a good student. I was a pro at English grammar. "linking verbs: have, has, had, do, does, did, am, is, are, was, were, be, being, been", "Types of sentences: declarative, interrogative, imperative, exclamatory", "Pronouns: nominative, possessive, objective", "who/whom?" "11 rules for the comma" No problem. I had a great English teacher, Miss Gaupp. She's 84 now, and still teaches English! Her father lived to be 105. so she might teach a whole 'nother generation! D'ni was mostly based on Hebrew as far as the alphabet structure works. Hebrew uses a dot on some of the letters to change some consonants from a fricative like "v" to a stop like "b". Tongue and lips are in the same basic position, the dot just tells you if you completely stop the air or not. For vowels, Hebrew usually uses an extra letter a yud (y) to make a dipthong. I simplified it a little and used the same dot that is used for consonants, only when it's on a vowel, it becomes a dipthong, usually sliding from the original sound to an "ee" sound. The language using suffixes and prefixes to show number, subject, etc. are concepts I remembered from Hebrew and Spanish. Small words attach together (agglutenative) "And, the, etc." attach to the words they modify. Hebrew and German do this. The number system and alphabet evolved together - this is from Hebrew. The combination of base 5 and base 25 came from the idea: what if I use my right hand to count like tick marks and my left hand to keep track of how many sets of tick marks I have. Their coordinate system (polar coordinates) came from Rand first. I am starting a website where I plan to start releasing more and more information about D'ni. Stuff that has not been released before. It's an ambitious project. It sounds good on paper, but in my current state I am coming up with ideas much, much more quickly than I can ever hope to execute them. My To-Do list gets exponentially longer. We're going to need a lot more "back burners" on our proverbial stove. And once i'm back to work full-time on Obduction, these new projects are definitely going to take a hit. (Zeke): Could you give us a little more background on the bahro (something we dont know about them) and where the bahro concept came from? RAWA: Sorry, Zeke. I still hold too much hope that we will be able to reveal that in a game or novel to just spill it now. RAWA v2.0 may be chattier than RAWA v1.0 was, but I still would rather you experience these things for yourself than simply be told them. (Zeke): Why is Myst island closed off to the public did you plan to have Myst island released to the public at some point? RAWA: In Uru, I expect? Yes, like everything else when Uru was initially designed - we were leaving ourselves a great deal of freedom for future expansion. (Zeke): Where are the D'ni bathrooms? Did they have ages that they went to for the bathroom? RAWA: My long-running, standard answer for that is: "That's why we don't allow you to swim in Myst..." (Zeke): Why was the jump feature so important in this game? RAWA: When you plan a game that is meant to evolve and change and grow over time, you want as many options on the table as possible. As many arrows in your quiver, tools in your belt, spices in your cupboard, [insert your analogy here] as you can get. Especially when it comes to puzzle creation. You wan the flexibility to make completely new kinds of puzzles than were made anywhere in the game before. Don't get me started on the original plans for the pods (Negilahn). Picking things up with your hands, for example. Kicking the traps into place in Eder Kemo. That was never meant to be the final interface. But it worked as a stop-gap until grabbing/ holding/pushing could be implemented at a later time. Then Uru was canceled before it began, and all those grand plans sit unfulfilled. (Acorn1): We know from a recent interview with David Wingrove that a draft of the Book of Marrim exists. But we also know it's been on the back burner for years. You've told us not to give up on it. Is there anything you can tell us about what would need to happen to that draft in order to ready it for publication? RAWA: It's on my bucket list. It won't be great if I write it, but there are several critical bits in it that have to be told, and told right. The rest of the "filler" story, I don't care quite so much about. The outline we worked on with David was good and all, but <shrug>. (Mister Magic): Are there any updates in the pipeline that you can let us know a bit about? RAWA: Which pipeline? MOULa? I'm out of that loop, sorry. Obduction? We are hard at work. I have been in the office several times, briefly. Much to my wife's frustration. On Thursday, Ryan Warzecha literally asked me one question that I had to think about. It completely drained me, and I had to stop to recharge. My RAWA v2.0 joke about the upgrade is more accurate than you probably think. As soon as I try to engage my brain in any meaningful way, I immediately, literally feel myself slow down. The clock starts ticking, and my energy is quickly dissipated. The more of my brain I try to use at once, the faster the energy is gone. So the joke now is that they get to ask me one question per day, and that's it. (Tai'lahr): I greatly enjoyed the YouTube video of you singing, RAWA, so my question is: Is there any chance you could be convinced to submit a song or two to be played during the weekly Uru Karaoke event? RAWA: You're too kind. It's awful. I was too tired to play well or sing well. The lyrics drive me crazy when they "pop" a word down to the next line as they expand. But it did its job - proves I have all the pieces to make -something- work. Now it just needs some love and time. RAWA: More stuff will be placed on my YouTube channel. I've already recorded the next one, I'm just working on the graphics and lyrics. Once that next one's up, I'll go back to redo As a Deer. That was mainly for my aunt. it's her favorite song that i play (cskid13): Can we call the content that is currently being created by the Intangibles "canon?" So, in other words, will their version of Kahlo be the "real" Kahlo, etc.? (cskid13) RAWA: Our philosophy has not changed. What happens in the Cavern happens in the Cavern. We just roll with the punches and try to weave everything into the story as best we can. We certainly didn't plan for any of the Cavern closings, but they are part of the story now. If y'all make Kahlo, it will be some version of Kahlo. If the DRC ever gets funding to come back, they might find an "older" Book that links to another version of Kahlo, just like your Yeesha book does. (maggie696): this brings our prepared questions to an end. We have only one last request - that you would visit us more often RAWA: Hope springs eternal that we eventually have to officially "burn that bridge while we're crossing it" (tm).

#myst #d'ni #cyan #rawa

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justfollowmyhansel · 5 years

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Bowie Museum Pt. 2 — May 17th through May 19th, 2018

When I was initially planning my spring vacations, it was largely around a monthly cycle of Bowie Exhibit and Mattachine experiences. Since the Exhibit was scheduled to run from early March to the middle of July and since I had been enamored of Bowie the majority of my life, this was an expense I was more than willing to take on. In fact, now that David was no longer alive, this would be the closest I would be able to get to seeing him perform live — a pale comparison, I was certain to actually being in the same venue as the man….

But…as with the last travel experience, plans change. They have to. Either by a change in financial status, a change in emotional status, or a change of larger plans. For me, larger plans meant going to Australia to see John. By this time, four of the five dates had been announced and the tickets released for purchase. The first and second being the absolute bookends for the trip with Adelaide and Brisbane. Naturally I had tickets to all of them, but I knew that when push came to shove, I’d have to pick whichever grouping of dates gave me the most concentrated amount of shows for the least amount of time. I didn’t think that I had been with my current job long enough to justify taking that much time off — even with the explicit reassurance that I knew perfectly well that I would be taking a significant part of that time as unpaid. Even if I had been with that job long enough to justify taking what would amount to five weeks, I wasn’t sure that I would want to.

So plane tickets were booked and budgets adjusted around the understanding that my first show would be on July 6th in Sydney and I would have what more or less amounted to a show a week for three weeks (even if they weren’t quite spaced like that.)

In lieu of the extra couple of weeks in Australia, when it was announced that Mason and Mimi would be bringing back their Taboo staging, I jumped at the chance to go again. I confirmed the tickets were available and then a couple of days later booked the plane ticket. The first time the show had sold out, but only within a couple of days of the actual date. I had felt confident that it wouldn’t sell out that quickly this time and that I could secure a good rate for the plane tickets before purchasing the show tickets. When I went to book them though, something had come up. The original link that had been posted for the tickets routed to a dead end that wouldn’t allow the tickets to be finalized and the website for both the venue and the production company had been all but scrubbed of the existence of a second show.

I thought about cancelling the trip, refunding the money, and having more money to play with when I got back to Australia. But instead, Risa and I planned a trip that would be an extended stay at David Bowie Is where we would take a full afternoon at the show, bringing both Advil and water into the exhibit and then later take in a live talk with one of David’s most prominent designers. The one that had designed the first outfit you saw when walking in. And the second day, instead of being spent seeing Mason would be spent taking an informal tour of Hedwig history, one where we would visit the now-remodeled Jane Hotel, the Belasco, the West Village that featured so prominently in JCM’s videos, but not Mattachine now that the ticket had been booked for the week before the Thursday we were expecting it to be.

This time going up to New York, I came into the Philadelphia airport and witnessed a much longer drive up to Brooklyn. The flight in had free wifi for the majority — a pleasant surprise given that a child on the plane was having what sounded like the worst experience of its young life. Instead of screaming baby, I was able to listen to nonstop David Bowie music. Just the thing to set the mood for the afternoon.

Risa and I took great pains to stress that we were capable of walking to the museum ourselves. The last time, we had been a little…escorted and given that we were both adults within the very safe confines of a museum, we were safe in the assertion that we got this. The only thing to call that into question was my nice new, still weeping thumb scar — a product of my being relatively careless with a craft knife while shaping a custom Funko Pop doll.

After we convinced her parents, we went upstairs to the exhibit. This time having untimed tickets, we were able to go in whenever we pleased. I checked the time on my phone and deemed it far enough away from the start of a fifteen minute block to go in. We received our headphones, but this time paid significantly less attention to them. Being the Bowie enthusiast of the pair of us, I gave Risa a mini-tour, filling in some of the information left off of the exhibit cards, disputing information that rang false (which given that the exhibit was put together from Bowie’s archives, but not his fact checkers was necessary at times), and tying things back not only to Hedwig and John, but to other cultural touchstones that Risa might have known.

Without the urging of her parents to take less time exploring the minutiae, we spent more time examining the video footage and getting close to the items we wanted to see. And since we had already been there before, we were able to be more confident that we were seeing every section of the show as opposed to passing over rooms due to crowd movement.

We left after inching our way through the exhibit, we made our way out to the gift shop. I took the chance to ask what the difference was between the hardbound and softbound versions of the catalogue other than the obvious one was hardbound and the other wasn’t. It took two different exhibit workers to get an answer but apparently in terms of content, they were the same. I had a list of memorabilia that I had purchased the last time and a list of things I had wanted to buy the first time, but they had run out. Originally, I had placed a $300+ order through the website, but it had been cancelled after a few days due to a high volume of sales.

After the last time, the lady in charge of upstairs merchandising recognized me. I wasn’t sure if it was the fussiness of asking over a $1.50 button or the amount that I had spent. This time, she helped me find a record that I had rethought my position on buying and telling me the price of a t-shirt that was significantly higher than the other ones the exhibit had on offer. After some difficulty getting checked out, we exited.

Immediately getting into the more traditional museum fair, it felt like the building’s fever had broken. We sat down in the relative coolness. Risa texted her parents that we were out and I texted my mom. Her parents wanted to know what we were going to do for lunch as they were going to come and get us if we were going someone. The last time we had eaten in Brooklyn, it took us close to forty minutes to find a restaurant that wasn’t crowded and even then, it wasn’t one that I had an easy time finding something to eat at. My position was that Risa and I could find one on our own. And we did, agreeing that Popeye’s sounded nice as we passed a gentleman eating a box of chicken in the downstairs café.

Her parents thought it was too far to walk compared to the time we had to be back for the talk. Regardless of whether it was or not, after significant back and forth over what to do it became too late to leave the museum for food at all, let alone to leave and come back for dessert like had been my plan.

A few more moments of quibbling over whether or not we’d want to actually at the overpriced café, the overpriced café with items specifically designed to go along with this exhibit, we just stood up and decided it would be then or never. Good timing because if we had waited any longer, we would have missed out on that night’s talk for sure.

In the café, we ordered a Blackstar cake — a dark chocolate cake with chocolate mousse and an orange glaze with little dark chocolate cookies spelling out David’s name in the Blackstar font — and a Thin White Duke drink for me that comprised a coconut rum, vodka, lime juice, and a cherry. We were both thrilled with the food selection and the well-timed service of our very nice waiter.

Just on time, or perhaps a touch late, we went down to the auditorium where the talk was being held. Kansai Yamamoto, the designer we were seeing, had more than a few antidotes memorized in English that he told at the start of the talk with impeccable timing. He was less interested in answering the host’s questions and more interested in delivering interesting stories tangentially related or on topics that he wanted the audience to know about. He told us about his design history outside of working with David, what his inspirations were, how proud he was of his daughter…. He talked about his first impressions of David and the ones he held later as they worked together on more projects. He talked about hosting David when both of their children were small and showed a photo of Duncan with his own daughter.

After the part that he had preprepared, he turned the English talking over to his translator, a very attractive and funny man in his own right to whom he had been introduced to only that morning. While he was able to understand the majority of the English around him, he explained that his brain wasn’t fast enough to translate the sentences he wanted to say, which was why he used the translator. Kansai also admitted that he was answering the questions in ways that interested him over more straight forward answers.

At the end of the speech, Risa and I chose to wander around the museum looking for things of interest. They were having a Bowie ball of sorts with dozens and dozens of people dressed up. We walked past where they were setting up and when we ran into him, personally thanked the translator for what he added to the talk.

Walking around, we looked at exhibits centering around Egypt, again with less than impressive captions and saw the tiniest mummy figure, a miniature dildo, and some of the pages of the Book of the Dead. That was the sort of thing that if I knew more about Egyptology, I would have been highly interested in studying at length.

We meandered our way downstairs, checking out the final part of the museum that had caught our eyes — the exhibit on Korea. That one again the captions were lacking, but added context that in terms of how anthropologists looked at Korea, they have only recently started to have their own cultural relevancy with the majority of their history being under the reign of China, Japan, or other Asian forces that had invaded them over the years.

We went downstairs and caught up with Risa’s parents. While we were seeing Kansai Yamamoto’s talk, they saw the free talk downstairs talking about David’s influence in fashion. Both had sounded appealing. The last thing we bought at the exhibit was a grapefruit margarita that Risa bought for me before we headed back to her car. The majority of our things were already in the car from earlier, which made a very easy post-event depositing into the car.

On the way back, we got McDonald’s and once we were back at Risa’s house further discussed David and the museum, this time with added youtube links for songs and photos that hadn’t been exhibited when we went to go see. Another few hours and we didn’t even make it out of the 70s in terms of content.

The next day, we chose to sleep in late. I hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before the flight and was up more or less for 24 hours before I was able to get into bed. Plus after the lack of agency we had at the museum, I wasn’t exactly thrilled to take a New York tour that very much would have to be guided by her parents.

Instead, we chose to go to Risa’s favourite Asian market. Knowing my fondness for the Asian grocers near me, Risa was eager to show off the shopping plaza that she and her anime group often went to. I agreed and late in the afternoon, we left for Mitsuwa.

Once we arrived, we got lunch and I found one of the things I had been missing most from Japan — coffee jelly. The coffee jelly in Japan was cut up into cubes and placed into a nice milky base as if the cubes were acting like ice cubes in a drink. The one here was a denser selection of jelly with soft serve ice cream swirled on top.

Among the other food I purchased was three additional drinks I’d never had before with the idea that three was reasonably the limit I could get through before going home, a bag of gummy lychee candies because I’d wanted to try them for awhile, and a box of my other favourite Japanese food, raisin sands.

We looked at the makeup, cookware, booze, and other sections of the store, sometimes with me explaining what a product was or could be used for and other times with Risa pointing out that she had seen something before or that it was something she had tried at the anime mart. We found no end to things that would have to be tried later either for a lack of immediate funds or, more often, a lack of time in which to do it.

We stepped outside of the food market portion of Mitsuwa and back into the food court. Risa insisted that I try a fish shaped waffle with red bean paste called taiyaki. I was surprised at how well the flavours went together.

The next place we went was the bookstore. At the very back of the store was a separate paper and stationary store set up not unlike how Borders used to have their stationary, but with greater detail and actual variety of items and not just casings. I could have bought the entire tiny store with its brightly coloured papers, meticulously lined notepads, rainbow of ink selections in gel and ballpoint and all manner of cute. I limited myself to a floral plastic folder for papers, a small lined notebook to make my attempts at learning Japanese and Korean seem more authentic—and so that my letters didn’t dwarf the page, and a small corn shaped eraser for my mother since it reminded me of the Dekalb corn signs that she’s so fond of.

In the outer bookstore, there was less of interest. It was a beautiful store, but given that whatever I bought I would have to carry on my back back to Kansas and the high prices in a real bookstore as opposed to my usual used bookstores, there were automatically less appealing options. I did find two books on Yuri!!! On Ice, one of which I bought to make up for the lack of show merch I was able to find when I was in Japan.

Last was the general items store. Again, Risa and I spent a long time looking over times like sushi themed socks and cute luggage that might have made travelling easier had I not already had my obnoxiously unique purple hearted luggage. We stayed until the store was ready to close, apologizing that we hadn’t realized that it would be closing so soon and I picked up another button for my coat jacket — a pink Hello Kitty produced by a drink company I was familiar with. It soon found a spot next to the Bowie pin and the clay Hedwig pin that I had bought off of Etsy.

We went back to Risa’s, me eating on some of the food I had acquired at the Asian market and carefully trying to balance starting a new drink so that I could have a different new one at Rocky Horror and the last in the morning before my flight.

For evening plans, Risa’s mom had suggested either a live performance of Cabaret, which neither Risa nor I was super enthused about or a shadow cast version of Rocky Horror. We opted for the Rocky Horror experience.

In between goings on, I created a new punk/glam makeup look, applied a fake tattoo to my stomach, and changed into the blue Origin of Love shirt I had brought with me. I figured why not combine my two favourite musicals?

We drove out slightly past midnight to a dead looking strip mall movie theatre. Risa’s mom dropped us off and said to text her when the film was over knowing from past experience that the show started at eleven, but the actual film could start anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half later than that.

We bought our tickets and another pin for my jacket and Risa and I went to sit down. We picked the back row, naturally.

The show started and they had an “impromptu dance party” that lasted a few seconds, a Rocky Horror baptism where they placed rice on the new baby of two former shadow cast members, and a few quick announcements before having their virgin activity and starting the show. The shadow casters and the audience weren’t exactly the stuff of legend that I’d been hearing about for over a decade in regards to Rocky fandom. The cast didn’t know their lines and the audience seemed to be going through the motions of “this is what we do on Friday night.”

So I decided it was a sing along. And I decided that whichever songs I wanted to get up and dance to, I would. I shouted a few new things or things I’d read in my Rocky Horror books to liven up our experience with the showing. For the most part, it didn’t interfere with the other movie goers since we were seated so far back and the things people did observe were met well. We left very happy and I felt like I had mentally reclaimed a film that had been tarnished by a bad experience with an ex and the atrocity that was Fox’s attempt at a remake.

We went back to Risa’s house again for a few hours before we all had to leave for the early morning flight back to KC. Given how much trouble we had had getting me back the first time, we left extra early to make sure I actually got on the damned plane the first time around. Naturally, I was almost through security as soon as I got there.

For airport food, I chose a coffee and some Popeye’s fries and during my layover, I grabbed a bagel and lox. From the moment I got off the plane in Kansas City, I would have to be up and awake until at least one in the morning due to volunteering to take the late-late shift to avoid missing any work. It took until I got back to Kansas City since the airport one was only serving breakfast, but I finally got the Popeye’s I had wanted for three days.

#bowie museum pt. 2 #New new New New New New New New NEW New York #travel diary #travel diary new york #new york day 1 #new york trip 2 #new york trip 2 day 1

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componentplanet · 4 years

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YouTube Music Charges You to Play Your Own Music on Your Own Speakers

As streaming services have become more ubiquitous, they’ve begun treating people who actually own content in increasingly hostile ways. In Google’s case, it intends to replace Google Play Music with YouTube Music by the end of the year — and unlike GPM, YouTube Music requires you to pay a monthly fee if you want to stream to your own speakers. Ron Amadeo at Ars reports:

If you bought your music, uploaded it to YouTube Music, and expect to be treated like you own the music, this service is not for you. If you bought a Google Home smart speaker or any other Google Cast device, Google’s public position right now is that you’ll need to pay a monthly fee to cast to your speaker once Google Music shuts down.

If you are willing to pay YouTube Music a monthly $9.99 fee for Music Premium, this problem goes away. If you don’t pay for the service, you can’t use streaming services like Google Cast to send the music you legally purchased to the speakers you also legally purchased.

This is yet another example of how so-called consumer services are rarely designed for the benefit of consumers these days. There is no reason why Google cannot build a version of YouTube Music that will only use Google Cast to stream songs you yourself have uploaded in lieu of paying a $9.99 fee. As Amadeo notes, he’s scarcely a “free” user, having purchased multiple Google Home speakers at $130 each.

At the time he bought his speakers, Google Music was the method of streaming audio to his devices, and Google Music was free. Suddenly charging people $10/ month to use a formerly free service completely changes the attractiveness of Google Home products. At $120/year, the price of the service is now just as high as the price of the speaker. If you had standardized on Google Home specifically for multi-speaker playback, there’s no replacement for casting. While there’s Bluetooth support, it only works in single-speaker mode.

Image by Ars Technica

You can’t download playlists, either, unless you pay the music rental fee, even though the only music you’re trying to download is music you already bought. Again, there’s no option to handle this integration through Google Cloud or Google Drive. Google could charge you for the online storage space your music takes up, and nobody would bat an eyelash. That’s not what they’re doing.

Does Google Even Care About Its Reputation?

Few companies have trashed their own reputations over the past decade as completely has Google has. Its messaging app strategy is a ridiculous mess. It kills popular services like Google Cloud Print, Works With Nest, Google Inbox, and Hangouts Chat. Nobody — not even developers — trusts Stadia to exist in 2-3 years, because nobody trusts Google to actually invest in a project long enough to bring it to fruition, or to support a successful service that’s just smaller than Google wanted it to be. Google’s response to this distrust is to fail to offer any meaningful service guarantees. And that’s before we get to other minor issues, like its willingness to collaborate with the Chinese government to surveil Chinese citizens, at a time when China is publicly using such surveillance to stifle discussion of its human rights abuses.

Google isn’t the only company that’s canceled many products — Microsoft, IBM, Intel, AMD, and other major Silicon Valley companies have all left oceans of paper on the metaphorical cutting-room floor. It’s just the only company with multiple independent websites devoted to cataloging whatever beloved app or piece of software it intends to kill next.

If Microsoft announces a new gaming companion app for Xbox Series X tomorrow, people will joke about the branding (likely abysmal) and the advertising (probably painful). They’ll fight over whether Microsoft can regain a stronger position versus Sony, and whether the app is actually useful.

What nobody will do is accuse Microsoft of launching an app today with no plan to support it longer than a year or two. Nobody would declare that you shouldn’t spend money on Xbox, because Microsoft can’t be trusted to invest in its own ecosystem. I’m not claiming Microsoft gets everything right — the company wasn’t exactly forthcoming about RRoD — but when it comes to long-term support, it does pretty well at both software and hardware.

As Amadeo points out, the Google Home and Google Music transition is different from any product cancelation or change Google has made before, in ways the company may not fully appreciate. With Google Home, money changed hands. People bought hardware expecting the features they were paying for to continue to work. This isn’t a situation where people have no right to complain because they’re using a free service you provide out of the goodness of your heart — Google is literally attempting to charge people to listen and download music they have already legally purchased. Subscribing to YouTube Music Premium, whether you listen to your own music over the service or not, sends the message that treating customers this way is acceptable. While it’s not wrong to charge customers to cover hosting costs, Google isn’t doing that. Buying YouTube Music doesn’t get you any additional cloud storage, and your fee isn’t based on the amount of streaming you do per month.

YouTube earned something like $15B in revenue last year. Google earned far more than that. This isn’t a question of what the company can afford. It’s a cynical and exploitative attempt to pick up subscribers by removing a vital component of a service.

IoT companies continue to treat their customers in baffling, incredibly user-hostile ways. As nice as some smart home technology can be, I wouldn’t invest in the market in its present state unless you’re absolutely certain your chosen vendor is going to stick around and not cancel their entire product platform. Google is still treating customers as if its a cash-strapped startup that can expect a little understanding as it lurches from one half-baked idea to the next.

That day has long since passed.

Now Read:

$5B Lawsuit Claims Google Still Tracks Users in Incognito Mode

Google Applies for Government Exemption to Work With Huawei

YouTube, Like Facebook, Ignored Toxicity Warnings in Favor of ‘Engagement’

from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/internet/312083-youtube-music-charges-you-to-play-your-own-music-on-your-own-speakers from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2020/06/youtube-music-charges-you-to-play-your.html

#YouTube Music Charges You to Play Your Own Music on Your Own Speakers

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itsfinancethings · 4 years

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If you’ve been going to sleep recently to the deafening roar of fireworks, you’re not alone. From New York to Los Angeles to Hartford, Conn., complaints and reports about fireworks have ballooned over the last month. Boston police, for example, recorded 1,445 fireworks complaints in the first week of June, compared with 22 in the same week last year, according to the Boston Herald.

But just because fireworks usage is skyrocketing doesn’t mean that its industry is thriving. For the companies that sell smaller consumer fireworks, this enormous uptick is simply allowing them to get back on track after multiple months of no sales. Meanwhile, the companies that put on huge displays have been decimated by the cancellation of virtually all major events, from baseball games to concerts to parades. And because these companies rely disproportionately on July 4th shows, the widespread cancellation of Independence Day celebrations has left many wondering if they will make it to New Year’s without federal intervention.

“I’ve worked with these guys for 30 years—They’re desperate,” Julie Heckman, the executive director of the American Pyrotechnics Association, says. “I’ve never seen anything impact this industry like what’s happening right now.”

“It was hard to keep track of the cancellations”

Until March 2020, it was a very good time to be in the fireworks business in America. In 2019, revenue hit $1.4 billion, according to research gathered by the American Pyrotechnics Association. Three quarters of that came from retail fireworks—like sparklers, snaps and Roman candles—that can be bought by consumers and set off in backyards (and all too often, in the street).

Retailers that sell those types of smaller fireworks have been buoyed by a widespread relaxation of state laws over the last few decades. Since 2000, 17 states have liberalized their fireworks laws, with Massachusetts the lone state that completely prohibits people from owning and using them. Store owners like Anthony LoBianco of Intergalactic Fireworks in Langhorne, Penn. have seen their business expand, with more and more people putting on backyard shows or elaborate gender reveal parties.

The remaining quarter of the fireworks industry is the sale of display fireworks: the monumental, intricately-choreographed shows you might see at a parade or an Independence Day celebration. Display companies have seen enormous recent growth due to a rising economy and the booming live event business, in which food and music festivals have sprouted up all over the nation. Pyrotechnic technology is also constantly improving, spurring increasingly lavish and jaw-dropping spectacles with all sorts of whimsical shapes and deft color mutations. “Over the last decade, we tripled the size of our operation,” Steven Vitale, who runs the company Pyrotecnico in New Castle, Penn., says.

Pyrotecnico, which has existed since 1889, previously supplied and staged the fireworks for Super Bowl halftime shows and Democratic National Conventions, and was projecting 2020 to be its best year on record. But in March, as COVID-19 emerged as a serious threat to public health, his clients started cancelling one by one. “Coachella cancelled. Live Nation announced no more concerts. The MLB, the NBA, the NCAA Final Four: It was hard to keep track of the cancellations,” Vitale says. (New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has said that the famed Macy’s Fourth of July fireworks show, the biggest pyrotechnic celebration in the U.S., will go on despite the coronavirus).

Companies like Pyrotecnico might have been able to weather a few months of silent skies, provided that the country was back up and running for July 4th. Typically, Pyrotecnico puts on more than 600 shows for Independence Day, accounting for more than 50% of their yearly fireworks revenue. But at the moment, less than a third of those shows will happen. He says that as as a result, he’s had to lay off 65% of his workforce.

Jim Souza, of the California-based Pyro Spectaculars, says that of the 400 shows the company was going to stage on July 4th, they’re currently looking at 40 and decreasing—and that the company is down 90% in revenue. “I say that with stomach pains,” he says. He had to put 25 people on furlough before Payroll Protection Program funds arrived.

In New England, Atlas PyroVision Entertainment Group had booked about 235 shows for July 4th, including for the cities of Boston, Plymouth and Hartford. “Right now, we’re looking to do about 18,” Steven Pelkey, the owner, says.

These cancellations’ negative effects will linger long after the first weekend in July. Production typically takes longer than a year: Ironically, the supply for these patriotic goods is shipped from China, and there are many safety regulations and protocols surrounding massive international shipments of explosives. For many companies, July 4th shipments have long already been ordered and are now sitting in warehouses around the country.

Given the state of the pandemic, there’s little hope for these companies to offload them in the foreseeable future. Souza was hoping to offset his July 4th dependence with a fireworks festival and competition, the Sparks Fly Festival, that was supposed to unfold over a week in October in Glendale, Ariz. “It was signed, sealed, delivered. We were about ready to launch the website and tickets,” Souza says. That was cancelled, too, leaving him with a bare schedule over the next ten months. “We have to find a way to stay in business until next April, when more deposits will be due and hopefully major league baseball starts,” he says.

The idle storage of fireworks could cost each company heavily, due the security and liability insurance that comes with protecting highly dangerous materials. Pelkey says he is sitting on $4 million of heavily insured inventory that will continue to burn a hole in his pockets until whenever shows resume. “That’s going to be tough to recover, because customers are not going to accept a 25 or 30 percent price increase,” he says.

And the product surplus could wreak havoc on the supply chain next year. “We are going to really face some headwinds going into next season because we have high inventory levels now, and there will be less orders going into 2021,” Vitale says. “That’s going to destabilize a very fragile industry within China.”

A Tale of Two Cities

As the display side of the industry sees red, the consumer side has fared better, perhaps in part due to the former’s plight. “We’re experiencing a tale of two cities,” Heckman says. “The display side is on life support, but it’s been quite surprising to see this early activity on the retail side.”

In early June, the Florida-based Fireworks Lady & Co. created a marketing campaign highlighting the fact that most displays would be cancelled for the year. “We’re sorry we have to do that to our brothers and sisters in the industry, but that’s what we’re doing,” Patricia Taime, who runs the company, says. Since then, business has taken off, to the point that Taime had to hire nine extra employees to deal with the influx. “It’s been very nice,” she says. “We’ve been dealing with more and more inquires, and working some extra hours.”

Anthony LoBianco, who runs Intergalactic Fireworks in Pennsylvania, has seen a dramatic increase in sales since reopening after being closed for two-and-a-half months. “Usually there’s one week before July 4th where it’s like a mad rush,” he says. “But that level of activity is happening now. Everyone is buying radically: they’re bored, and they have nothing to do at night. Fireworks fill in that little void instead of sitting at home and watching TV.”

Pelkey says that since Memorial Day, Atlas PyroVision’s retail stores in New Hampshire are up 40 percent compared to the same time frame last year. “For the most part, people don’t have anything to spend their money as far as entertainment,” he says. “They’re going to do what they can do.”

Still, this increase in interest is barely making up for the months of lost revenue. Many stores are holding their breath to see if the activity sustains through the crucial July 4th weekend. “We don’t know if people are just buying early for the holiday,” Pelkey says.

And while sales have increased, store owners are growing concerned about the ways in which fireworks are being used once they leave the store. Over the last month, fireworks have been weaponized at demonstrations across the country. And several municipalities that have banned fireworks, including New York City, have seen a rash in illegal usage. “It weighs heavily on us,” Pelkey says. “If products get used in a manner that is not consistent with their safe use and intent, you could have state fire marshals or even governors not allowing them.”

“All we can do stress the safety of their usage and the laws until we’re blue in the face,” LoBianco says.

If fireworks continue be used in an illegal manner, that could inadvertently result in continued financial strife for the entire fireworks industry—if further restrictions are imposed, or if municipalities with planned July 4th celebrations rethink the idea of setting off bomb-like bursts over communities. The American Pyrotechnics Association is asking Congress for $175 million in loans for roughly 150 small businesses, as part of the next stimulus package.

If many of these businesses go under, it may be hard to replace them: the fireworks industry is riddled with complicated regulations, making the barrier to entry extremely high. “I think the industry is going to be crippled,” Vitale, of Pyrotecnico, says.

Assuming that America starts to emerge from the pandemic, Pelkey expects cities and towns to want joyous firework displays next July 4 or the year after. COVID-19’s economic damage, however, could complicate these plans. “For a few years, some of them are not going to be able to have a display,” he says, “because there just won’t be enough of us around.”

#IFTTT #Blogger

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brajeshupadhyay · 4 years

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Finances – The New York Times

Two days before learning that she would lose her job, Lissa Gilliam spent hundreds of dollars online on baby products.

A 37-year-old expectant mother, Ms. Gilliam had planned to ask local parents in Seattle for used strollers and secondhand onesies in a bid to reduce waste. But as the coronavirus pandemic ravaged the area, new items delivered in boxes seemed a safer bet.

She figured she could afford the splurge, earning $50 an hour as a full-time contractor designing educational curriculums for a nonprofit. But then, on April 2, her employer slashed her hours and told her that her contract would end in early May — a few weeks before she is to give birth.

Suddenly, like many others, Ms. Gilliam became hyperaware of her expenses. She and her husband, a high school physics teacher, now take a painful daily tally of their financial priorities: Is that $5 monthly web magazine subscription really necessary? How much does watering the garden cost? When will they need to tap their paltry savings?

“We’re OK for now,” she said. “But the bottom may fall out from under us.”

As millions of Americans lose jobs, take pay cuts, close businesses and absorb family members into their homes, they are being forced to rethink where their money goes. Even before the scramble for new jobs can begin, people are cajoling creditors, looking for gig work or simply cutting back to get through the first few disorienting weeks.

“An economic shock like this could have a long-term impact on people who have traditionally felt like they were being cautious, that they weren’t profligate with their money, but didn’t have to worry about paying for rent or affording food,” said Stephanie Aaronson, the director of economic studies at the Brookings Institution. “They might have more debt, which will make it harder to spend in the future, or they might just feel less secure, which could boost savings and potentially dampen the recovery.”

Ms. Gilliam and her husband are waiting for Washington State to make jobless benefits available to contractors through a federal assistance program, and hope to take advantage of a state program for maternity aid once their daughter is born. A $15,000 construction project planned for the rear of their house is on hold. They canceled their gym membership, their Hulu streaming service, multiple newspapers and even the Adobe Acrobat software that Ms. Gilliam uses for design work.

On the whole, Ms. Aaronson said, household finances “were in relatively good condition as of six weeks ago — they were actually pretty healthy.” Now, she said, “a much broader swath of households are experiencing a complete loss of income compared to what we typically see in a recession.”

Before the pandemic, Carol Cruz’s private health insurance plan cost her $840 a month — up from less than $500 four years ago. The bill ate up most of her $1,200 monthly paycheck, exceeding even the $600 monthly payment on the house she shares with her husband and their 17-year-old granddaughter in Tulare, Calif.

On March 29, she was furloughed from her part-time job as a mental health therapist until at least the end of May. Other than the state unemployment benefits she hopes to receive soon, Ms. Cruz, 62, no longer has an income.

So she got on the phone for at least three hours a day, asking for leniency from the health insurance provider, her mortgage lender and the credit union that holds the loan for her husband’s Chevrolet truck. All offered her more flexible terms, including 90-day grace periods and pay-what-you-can options. (Some creditors, she said, were less willing to negotiate.)

The adjustments help keep the bills manageable, Ms. Cruz said. But her grocery costs have doubled, now that the price of eggs has soared and her granddaughter is no longer having free lunches at school.

“I don’t know about my future,” Ms. Cruz said. “I’m not letting myself think about tomorrow, just about whether we have food today and money in the bank.”

But some people, many of whom have never seriously budgeted, are now mapping out strict spending schedules for the next few months.

After being furloughed in mid-March from her bartending and serving job at a Minneapolis concert hall, Krissy Calbert, 26, went from earning $300 in tips some nights to having no income as she waited for government aid.

“It was two weeks of just panic — I was just going off the groceries I already had, trying to ration until money came in,” she said. “You get really creative. You eat little half meals, and you experiment with your seasonings and condiments to try to forget that you’re eating the same thing over and over.”

Earlier this month, Ms. Calbert began receiving a weekly infusion of $1,100 from the state. She is now trying to reschedule when monthly bills are due so she can space out the payments: $600 for rent, $75 for her phone, up to $120 for utilities, $60 for streaming services, $200 for credit cards, plus other expenses.

“I’m trying to get all of my credit card payments into the same week, so I can have a credit card week, a rent week, a phone week,” Ms. Calbert said.

She has switched her grocery shopping from Target to Aldi, where, she said, she can afford to splurge on fresh produce and protein. Without health insurance, she is willing spend an extra $30 or $40 on fruits and vegetables in hopes of keeping her immune system strong, she said.

“I can’t take the risk,” Ms. Calbert said. “A hospital bill right now would ruin me.”

More than half of lower-income adults in the United States say they will struggle to pay bills this month, compared to a quarter of their middle-income counterparts and 11 percent of those in the upper-income tier, according to a survey of nearly 5,000 adults by Pew Research Center. Researchers defined a three-person household earning $37,500 to $112,600 annually as middle-income. Over all, more than half of those who expect a federal stimulus infusion will use most of the money to cover essential expenses, while one in five say they plan to save the funds.

To create a financial buffer, many people are hunting for freelance or part-time work. Searches for work-from-home jobs rose 126 percent in March on FlexJobs, while traffic to the site has boomed 58 percent from a year ago. On Upwork, companies are looking for people to provide tech support for their homebound employees and to draft corporate messages about the coronavirus.

Lonn Dugan, a digital marketing specialist in Sylvania, Ohio, has seen many clients scaling back their promotional efforts, such as one nonprofit that cut its budget by 90 percent after a major annual event was canceled. But another client, an agricultural supply company, commissioned a major website update, while a local mental health group wanted to ramp up its virtual support groups.

The pressure on Mr. Dugan, 60, is intense. His workday is three hours longer than it used to be, between his existing clients and his attempts to drum up new business. He and his wife lost a third of their incomes; neither is eligible for government aid.

“We’re completely overwhelmed by the shortfall. We can afford groceries and maybe the house and car payments, and that’s it,” he said. “But we’re not alone, and we’re focusing on acceptance as opposed to hand-wringing. We’re taking care of necessities, and that’s enough for right now.”

Still, Mr. Dugan admits being stretched thin emotionally. He misses his wife, even though they are in the same house and she no longer needs to make a two-hour round-trip commute to her health care job. But the couple are so busy trying to stay afloat that they have stopped cooking fresh meals and turn instead to frozen dinners and fast food.

“We just don’t have time,” he said. “We’re exhausted at the end of the day.”

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riichardwilson · 4 years

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Shielding your business in a pandemic

None of us were prepared for the realities of the COVID-19 virus. Who could have predicted the omnipresence of vocabularies like social distancing and telework? Who would have thought we’d be facing “out of stock” notices for pasta… and toilet paper? I certainly wouldn’t have predicted, in Q4 of 2019, massive closures of client-facing businesses as a preventive measure in a world-wide sanitary crisis.

I’d like to take a moment to hope that you and your families are healthy. As a fellow businessperson, I’d also like to wish the same for your company. Socially and professionally, we’re currently facing tough choices and long days.

A time of increasing digitalization

Social distancing and remote work are accelerating a trend that was already clear around the world: the increasing digitalization of our everyday lives.

Statista: increase in online mobile spending since 2016

With measures to combat the coronavirus pandemic keeping many people at home, we’ve turned to the internet to interact with others, to find things to do, to find and share information, to make almost all of our purchases.

In fact, Cloudflare found internet usage increased by up to 40% in some areas strongly affected by the virus.

These changes in behavior can impact traffic to your site. Because people may be searching for different reasons than before, less traffic does not always mean less revenue.

Example of an industry website facing a drop traffic but increased revenue. (source)

When your clients can’t be out and about, online is the place to be. Whether you’re a brick and mortar store or a mostly-online tech company, it’s possible to build an online presence that reinforces your ability to attract new customers and reinforce the loyalty of your existing client base.

Let’s look at how to make that happen.

A climate of under-investment in digital marketing

Though the trend is changing, marketing agency spend still doesn’t account for the increased presence of digital media in our everyday lives.

Hook Agency’s recent studies found that 50%+ of companies say the highest return on investment activities are search-related, but that nearly 70% said they were spending less than half of their marketing agency budgets on digital/online marketing agency for 2020.

Forrester echos these findings:

While the latest Forrester Research report projects that digital marketing agency spending will make up 45% of all ad spend in 2020, this number can vary depending on a variety of factors including industry, growth plans and local market. (source)

This means that large parts of that marketing agency budget go to events such as trade shows, physical advertising, print advertising, and other push channels. As events are canceled and empty public spaces provide less visibility for advertisers, marketing agency departments have unspent budgets.

A part of this can be saved, but part can be reinjected in digital marketing agency.

Opportunities to shield your company and build for the future

I believe that SEO Company is one of the best channels to invest in right now. As a pull strategy, SEO Company is a long-term game, with a recognized, exponential ROI.

And while search figures are down for the moment, SEO Company is not campaign-oriented. Unlike PPC, SEO Company is not affected by the decrease in spend by big advertisers which drives up the cost per impression of ads and drives down both viewer quality and CVR.

I’ve identified four areas where investing in SEO Company can make a difference:

1. Reinforce your search rankings using audit results

SEO Company allows you to use audit results to find areas for improvement to reinforce your ranking on current keywords to secure a higher percentage of traffic.

Now is a good time to brush up on your SEO Company, run a full site audit, and implement improvements from your findings.

How to do it:

2. Rethink how pages on your site link to one another

Use site structure to support new pages to capture new search queries. Google uses the way pages on your site link to one another to determine which pages are the most important on your site. This gives them an extra boost and makes it easier to get them ranked well.

How to do it:

3. Account for changes in search intent

“Search intent,” or what an internet user is trying to do when they search for something, plays an increasingly important role as search engines get better at understanding search queries. And the intent behind a query can change over time: even “coronavirus”, which at first brought up information about the family of viruses itself, now leads to information about measures and communications by local governments.

Monitoring intent shifts will help you adjust to changes in search intent that affect traffic to your website. In some cases, where “visit in person” intents are no longer possible, accounting for changes in intent can be essential to brick and mortar businesses with listings on Google.

How to do it:

4. Fix technical issues that handicap your site

Use “downtime” to improve underlying technical issues to beat out your competitors later.

How to do it:

Take advice from a technical SEO

If you don’t have the manpower in-house, work with an SEO Company consultant to keep costs down

Enlist the help of your web development team, who are able to work remotely

You’re not alone

No matter what you’re facing, you’re not alone. With 20% of the world’s population living in places that have implemented stay-at-home measures, we’re all facing the same situation.

This affects all verticals, but not all in the same way, as this weekly study shows. Even if you still have business coming in, you might have supply chain difficulties, or too many orders to supply, or difficulty getting employees on-site. Whatever you’re facing, there are people out there facing it with you. With the increase of life online, digital marketing agency, SEO Company, and even Google can help protect your business now and prepare you to put your best foot forward after the pandemic is over. If you’re looking for ways to protect your business, support and resources are out there.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

François Goube is the founder and CEO at OnCrawl, an award-winning SEO Company platform. A serial entrepreneur, he has founded several companies and is actively involved in the startup ecosystem. He loves to analyze scientific Google publications and is a real enthusiast of semantic analysis and search engines. François is active in the worldwide SEO Company community and has previously spoken at events such as SMX, Utah DMC or State of Search.

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source http://www.scpie.org/shielding-your-business-in-a-pandemic/ source https://scpie.tumblr.com/post/617318572185747456

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