#studio nano

[toonabby]

Happy double birthdays to Madeline Dorroh (27) and Barrett Leddy (32)!

[satoshi-mochida]

Game Boy Color-style slice-of-life RPG Petal Runner announced for PC - Gematsu

Publisher iam8bit and developer Nano Park Studios have announced Petal Runner, a Game Boy Color-style slice-of-life RPG about virtual life coming to PC via Steam. A release date was not announced.

Here is an overview of the game, via iam8bit:

About Become a specialized courier known as a Petal Runner for the newest generation of artificial pet technology in this slice-of-life RPG with diverse minigames and wholesome storytelling. Hop on your bike and join Cali and Kira as they explore the sun-soaked city of Sapphire Valley and train to become Petal Runners! Make deliveries, meet new friends, play minigames, and discover a wholesome slice-of-life story about growing up and letting go. Becoming a Petal Runner is hard work, but it’s also a blast. Train with a group of quirky Mentors and learn new courier skills as you encounter the various Petal Runner branches across Sapphire Valley’s districts. Each Mentor brings their own unique stories—and minigames!

Key Features

Love letter to Game Boy Color Era Visuals – Charming pixel art graphics composed of four main colors, inspired by retro games.

Slice of Life RPG With Open World Freedom – Sapphire Valley’s open world is filled with charming discoverable interactions and side adventures that feature other challenges and minigames.

City of Sapphire Valley – Every district of Sapphire Valley is distinguishable by unique accent colors, making the environment itself its own main character.

Watch the announcement trailer below. View the first screenshots at the gallery.

Announce Trailer

[gzintle]

I Found The Best Pro Graphic Designer on Fiverr.com!

Hey everyone! Welcome. Today, we’re diving into the world of graphic design on Fiverr. If you’re looking to hire a skilled designer for your next project, you’re in the right place. Finding the perfect graphic designer can make or break your project, and Fiverr is an awesome resource packed with talent!

Did you know there are over 1.5 million graphic designers on Fiverr? Yeah, that’s a HUGE number! With so many options, it can be a real challenge to find the right one for your project. So, how do you sift through all that talent without losing your mind? Stick around, and I’ll help you out!

Alright, let’s talk about the elephant in the room. When you start searching for a graphic designer on Fiverr, it can feel like you’ve opened a floodgate of options. I mean, with over a million designers, you might think, "Wow, I’m spoiled for choice!" But here’s the kicker—this overwhelming selection can make it tough to find someone who’s really good and fits your needs. You’ll often come across profiles that look amazing but might not deliver the quality you’re after. Plus, there’s a huge variety in styles and expertise, which can add to the confusion. Maybe you’ve seen a designer with a great portfolio, only to realize their client feedback is less than stellar. It’s like searching for a needle in a haystack, right? So how do you cut through the noise and find the best designer for your project? Let’s explore some strategies!

To start, you’ve got to consider a few key factors when evaluating potential Fiverr graphic designers. First off, take a good look at their portfolio. This is where you’ll get a sense of their style and capabilities. Are their past projects similar to what you have in mind? If you’re looking for a minimalist logo, but their portfolio is filled with vibrant, complex designs, it might not be the right fit. Next up, client feedback is crucial. Make sure to read through reviews and ratings. Look for comments that mention communication, deadlines, and overall satisfaction. This gives you insight into what it’s like to work with them. And speaking of communication, it’s super important! Reach out to potential designers and see how they respond. Are they quick to reply? Do they ask clarifying questions? Good communication can save you a lot of headaches down the line. Lastly, check if the designer offers any revisions. A great designer should be open to tweaking their work based on your feedback. This flexibility can make all the difference in achieving the final product you envision!

Now, here’s the golden nugget of wisdom: the best strategy to narrow down your choices is to create a shortlist of designers based on your specific project needs. Start by filtering your search results using Fiverr’s built-in tools. Look for designers whose style resonates with your vision and who have positive reviews. Once you have a shortlist, reach out to each of them with a clear brief of your project. This not only helps you gauge their professionalism but also gives you a feel for their understanding of your needs. Ask them about their process and any ideas they might have for your project. This step is super important because it helps you see who truly gets what you’re looking for. By engaging with them, you can easily figure out who aligns best with your project goals!

Alright, let’s wrap this up! Today, we talked about the challenges of finding the right graphic designer on Fiverr, and I shared some key tips to help you out. Remember to focus on portfolio reviews, client feedback, and communication skills. And don’t forget to create a shortlist and engage with potential designers to find that perfect match for your project! So, what do you think? Have you had any experiences hiring graphic designers on Fiverr? I want to hear your stories in the comments below!

Follow the short link to hire a top pro Graphic Designer on Fiverr.com. Click Here to hire a top pro Graphic Designer on Fiverr.com: https://tinyurl.com/ysakez4n

[beastking-golion]

Manifesting Jake Manalo route for book 3 because I’m a sucker for hitmen

[queencordite]

Nanowrimo has eaten me so please enjoy this kinda old art of the main characters that I did...uh...last year probably? Ill redraw them soon.

[kingoftieland]

I’ve gathered the Infinity Stones and am primed to capture the spirit of Avengers: Endgame with this LEGO Marvel Nano Gauntlet – a challenging and rewarding 675-piece model-making project! 🤩

This vibrantly colored brick recreation of Iron Man’s iconic gauntlet features movable, jointed fingers as well as a descriptive tablet attached to a special display base. Created with adult builders in mind, this collectible display piece serves as a lasting tribute to the ultimate sacrifice made by Tony Stark to defeat Thanos once and for all.

[bradsbackpack]

Nano X Shimmer Diffussion Filter

Nano X Shimmer Diffusion Filter: Our Verdict Nano X Shimmer Diffusion Filter Star Rating ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4.5 out of 5. Pros Lightweight Can fit all sizes with the step up rings Cons Subtle changes Technical Details Main Materials Aliminium and glass Thickness 3.3mm Where to buy a Nano X Shimmer Diffusion Filter The link below will take you to Amazon if you would like to purchase the…

[dentistnewmanalapan]

Kitchen in San Francisco

[toonabby]

Happy birthday, Julia Gu!

(Updated to add image)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“Brand safety” killed Jezebel

I'll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library this Monday, November 13 at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!

Progressives: if you want to lose to conservatives, all you need to do is reflexively praise and support everything conservatives turn into a culture-war issue, without considering whether they might be right. Because sometimes…they're right.

Remember early in the Trump presidency, when conservatives all woke up and discovered that America's spy agencies – excuse me, "the intelligence community" – were dirty-tricking psychos who run amok, lawlessly sabotaging democracy? Progressives have been shouting this ever since Hoover's FBI tried to blackmail MLK into killing himself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_suicide_letter

But millions of progressives forgot about COINTELPRO, CIA dirty tricks and CIA mass spying when this "intelligence community" temporarily set out to wrong-foot Trump. Remember James Comey votive candles?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/08/30/james-comey-fbi-memo-leaks-trump-inspector-general-report-column/2157705001/

Anthropologists have a name for this phenomenon, in which one side reverses its positions because their sworn enemies have done so. It's called schizmogenesis, and it goes like this: "If they hate it, we love it":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

Schizmogenesis is an equal-opportunity delusion. Within living memory, white evangelicals supported abortion, because their sworn enemies – Catholics – opposed it. Some of those white Boomer women who voted Trump because abortion was literally the only issue they cared about held the opposite position on abortion not so long ago – and completely forgot about it:

https://text.npr.org/734303135

The main purpose of the culture war isn't immiserating marginalized people – that's its effect, but its purpose is to distract low-information turkeys (working people) so they'll vote for Christmas (the ongoing seizure of power by American oligarchs). For the funders of conservative movement politics, the cruelty isn't the point, it's merely the tactic. The point is power:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/09/turkeys-voting-for-christmas/#culture-wars

Which brings me to "woke capitalism." Conservative string-pullers have whipped up their base about the threat of companies embracing social causes. They (erroneously) claim that corporations have progressive values, and that big business is thumbing the scales for causes they despise. The purpose here isn't to sow distrust of capitalism per se. Rather, it's to stampede talk-radio-addled supporters into backing the oligarchy's agenda. Remember when culture war leaders told their base to support being gouged on credit-card junk fees "to own the libs?"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping

That's schizmogenesis working against the conservative rank-and-file, tricking them into taking the side of a cartel of wildly profitable payment processors who are making billions by picking their pockets (credit card fees are up 40% since the covid lockdowns), because (checks notes), Target pays these profiteers a lot to process its payments, and Target sells Pride merch (no, really):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping

It's easy to point and laugh at conservative dopes when they're tricked into shooting themselves in the balls to own the libs. This is not a hypothetical example:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/28/holographic-nano-layer-catalyser/#musketfuckers

But progressives do it, too, particularly when they embrace monopolies as a force for positive social change. Remember 2019, when people got excited about playing loud pop music at Nazi rallies in the hopes that the monopoly video platforms' copyright filters would make any video from that rally impossible to post?

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/23/clever-hack-that-will-end-badly-playing-copyrighted-music-during-nazis-rallies-so-they-cant-be-posted-to-youtube/

I warned then that if this tactic worked, it would be used by cops to prevent you from recording them when they're macing you or splitting your skull with a billyclub, and yup, within a couple years, cops were blaring Taylor Swift music in hopes of preventing the public from posting videos of their illegal conduct:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/07/moral-hazard-of-filternets/#dmas

Conservatives are (partially) right about woke capitalism. It is a threat to democracy. Concentrating the power to decide who gets to speak and what they get to say into the hands of five or six corporations, mostly run by mediocre billionaires, is bad for society. The moderation decisions of giant platforms are a form of (commercial) censorship, even these don't violate the First Amendment:

https://locusmag.com/2020/01/cory-doctorow-inaction-is-a-form-of-action/

(The progressive delusion that censorship only occurs when the First Amendment is violated is a wild own-goal, one that excuses, for example, the decision by school book-fair monopolist Scholastic to remove books about queers and Black and brown people from its offerings as a purely private matter without consequences for free speech):

https://www.themarysue.com/scholastic-response-to-authors-and-illustrators-on-diverse-books/

Conservatives are only partially right about woke capitalism, though. Here's what they're wrong about: corporations don't have values. Target isn't selling Pride tees because they support progressive causes, they're selling them because it seems like a good way to increase returns to their shareholders. Individuals – even top executives – at Target might endorse the cause, but the company will only durably support the cause if that endorsement is profitable, which means that when it stops being profitable, the company will stop supporting the cause:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/23/business/target-lgbtq-merchandise/index.html

The idea that corporations have values isn't merely stupid, it's very dangerous. The Hobby Lobby decision – which allows corporations to deny basic health-care expenses for women on the basis that a Bronze Age mystic wouldn't approve of an IUD – rests on the ideological foundation that corporate personhood includes corporate values:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burwell_v._Hobby_Lobby_Stores,_Inc.

Citizens United – the idea that corporations should be allowed to funnel unlimited funds to politicians who'll sell out the public good in favor of investor profits – also depends on a form of corporate personhood that includes values:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

There are undeniably instances in which corporate monopoly power benefits progressive causes, but these are side-effects of corporate power's main purpose, namely: taking money and power away from working people and giving it to rich people. That is what monopoly power is for.

Which brings me to ad-tech, "brand safety," and the demise of Jezebel, the 16 year old feminist website whose shuttering was just announced by its latest owner, G/O Media:

https://www.metafilter.com/201349/This-is-the-end-of-Jezebel-and-that-feels-really-really-bad

Jezebel's demise is the direct result of monopoly power. Jezebel writes about current affairs – sex, politics, abortion, and other important issues of great moment and significance. When we talk about journalism as a public good, necessary for a healthy civic life, this is what we mean. But unfortunately for Jezebel – and any other news outlet covering current events – there are vast, invisible forces that exist solely to starve this kind of coverage of advertising revenue.

Writing for the independent news site 404 Media, reporter Emanuel Maiberg and former Motherboard editor-in-chief Jason Koebler go deep on the "brand safety" industry, whose mission is to assist corporations in blocking their ads from showing up alongside real news:

https://www.404media.co/advertisers-dont-want-sites-like-jezebel-to-exist/

Maiberg and Koebler explain how industry associations like the World Federation of Marketers' Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) promulgate "frameworks" to help advertisers automatically detect and exclude real news from consideration when their ads are placed:

https://www.peer39.com/blog/garm-standards

This boycott makes use of scammy "AI" technology like "sentiment and emotional analysis" to determine whether an article is suitable for monetization. These parameters are then fed to the ad-tech duopoly's ad auction system, so Google and Meta (who control the vast majority of online advertising) can ensure that real news is starved of cash.

But reality is not brand-safe, and high quality, reputable journalistic outlets are concerned with reality, which means that the "brand safe" outlets that attract the most revenue are garbage websites that haven't yet been blacklisted by the ad-safety cartel, leading to major brands' ads showing up alongside notorious internet gross-out images like "goatse":

https://www.404media.co/sqword-game-dev-sneaks-goatse-onto-a-dozen-sites-that-stole-his-game/

More than a fifth of "brand safe" ad placements end up on "made for advertising" sites, which 404 Media describe as "trash websites that plagiarize content, are literally spam, pay for fake traffic, or are autogenerated websites that serve no other purpose than capturing ad dollars":

https://www.ana.net/miccontent/show/id/rr-2023-06-ana-programmatic-transparency-first-look

Despite all this, many progressives have become cheerleaders for "brand safety," as a countervailing force to the drawdown of trust and safety at online platforms, which led to the re-platforming of Nazis, QAnon conspiratorialists, TERFs, and other overt elements of the reactionary movement's vanguard on Twitter and Facebook. Articles about ads for major brands showing up alongside Nazi content on Twitter are now a staple of progressive reporting, presented as evidence of Elon Musk's lack of business acumen. The message of these stories is "Musk is bad at business because he's allowing Nazis on his platform, which will send advertisers bolting for the exits to avoid brand-safety crises."

This isn't wrong. Musk is a bad businessman (he's a good scam artist, though). Twitter is hemorrhaging advertisers, notwithstanding the desperate (and easily debunked) stats-juking its "CEO," Linda Yaccarino, floats onstage at tech conferences:

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/10/11/math-problem-for-linda-yaccarino-if-90-of-the-top-advertisers-have-come-back-but-are-only-spending-10-of-what-they-used-to-how-screwed-are-you/

But progressives are out of their minds if they think the primary effect of the brand safety industry is punishing Elon Musk for secretly loving Nazis. The primary effect of brand safety is killing reality-based coverage of the news of the day, and since reality has a well-known anti-conservative bias, anything that works against the reality-based community is ultimately good for oligarchy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

We can't afford to let schizmogenesis stampede us into loving things just because conservative culture warriors have been momentarily tricked into hating them as part of oligarchs' turkeys-voting-for-Christmas project. "Swivel-eyed loons hate it, so it must be good," is a worse-than-useless heuristic for navigating complex issues:

https://locusmag.com/2023/05/commentary-cory-doctorow-the-swivel-eyed-loons-have-a-point/

A much better rule of thumb is "If oligarchs love something, it's probably bad." Almost without exception, things that are good for oligarchs are bad for the rest of us. I mean, this whole shuttering of Jezebel starts with an oligarch imposing his will on millions of other people. Jezebel began life as a Gawker Media site, beloved of millions of readers, destroyed when FBI informant Peter Thiel secretly funded Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against the publisher in a successful bid to put them out of business to retaliate for their unfavorable coverage of Thiel:

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/02/hogan-thiel-gawker-trial/554132/

This, in turn, put Jezebel under the ownership of G/O Media, who are unwilling to pay for a human salesforce that would – for example – sell advertising space on Jezebel to sex-toy companies or pro-abortion groups. G/O has been on a killing spree, shuttering beloved news outlets like Deadspin:

https://deadspin.com/this-is-how-things-work-now-at-g-o-media-1836908201

G/O's top exec, an oligarch named Jim Spanfeller who answers to the private equity looters at Great Hill Partners, is bent on ending reality-based coverage in favor of "letting robots shit out brand safe AI-assisted articles about generic topics":

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/ai-articles-disinformation-future-g-o-media-rcna95944

Three quarters of a century ago, Orwell coined a term to describe this kind of news: duckspeak,

It was not the man’s brain that was speaking it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words but it was not speech in true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness like the quacking of a duck.

When investors and analysts speak of "content" (rather than, say, "journalism"), this is what they mean – a warm slurry of platitudes, purged of any jagged-edged fragments to render it a perfectly suitable carrier for commercial messages targeted based on surveillance data about the "consumer" whose eyeballs are upon it.

This aversion to reality has been present among corporate decisionmakers since the earliest days, but the consolidation of power among large firms – ad-tech firms, online platforms, and "brands" themselves – makes corporate realityphobia much easier to turn into, well, reality, giving advertisers the fine-grained power to put Jezebel and every site like it out of business.

As Koebler and Maiberg's headliine so aptly puts it, "Advertisers Don’t Want Sites Like Jezebel to Exist."

The reason to deplore Nazis on Twitter is because they are Nazis, not because their content isn't brand-safe. The short-term wins progressives gain by legitimizing a corporate veto over what we see online are vastly overshadowed by the most important consequence of brand safety: the mass extinction of reality-based reporting. Reality isn't brand safe. If you're in the reality based community, brand safety should be your sworn enemy, even if they help you temporarily get a couple of Nazis kicked off Twitter.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/11/ad-jacency/#brand-safety

[thebibliosphere]

My only complaints about Gotham Knights are 1) i want to get exp for killing cops and 2) I think Barbara should have been Oracle and Cass Cain should have been Batgirl. Batman not really being there is a plus imo

I would have loved Cass to be there, but I also like how they handled Barbara as Batgirl and her recovery.

I like that she still uses her wheelchair when she doesn't have her back brace on. I like that the Belfry has been adapted to be wheelchair friendly. I like that her suit is augmented to compensate for her back. and that she talks about physical therapy in terms of ongoing rehabilitation and not "I worked really hard, and I'm cured!"

It's just nice to have those little nods to dynamic disabilities in a world where you can nano-bot/magic your way out of erasing them.

I think if we'd ever gotten a second game (we still might, but IIRC, the studio went under during covid), we'd have seen more expansion of the Batfamily. It certainly feels like space was being set up for them.

And I actually think it's funnier that they don't give us XP for killing cops. Like, the game gave me a reminder the other day, "Remember, you don't get XP for attacking the GCPD," and I'm like, oh, no, bestie, I'm doing this for free.

I will gladly dropkick a cop into oncoming traffic outside the donut shop on my own time 😂.

[bebemoon]

look for the name: MAANYA

@khoyi-khoyi-si-ek-ladki

knwls bias-cut gold sequined mini dress in tan color

mirror palais "angel wisp" crop top w/ laces in burgundy

byredo "reine de nuit" extrait de parfum

paco rabanne 1969 nano gold-tone embellished bag

saint laurent "jota" platform clog sandal

alighieri "the surreal hoop" 24kt gold-plated earrings

knobbly studio 14kt gold tear-drop pearl threader earring

[duskyashe]

CAMP NANO DAY 8/9

(please see tags for trigger warnings)

[first three chapters] [AO3]

============<×^-^×>============

It had been a long time since Bruce had been this unbalanced by the thought of a conversation. He was unafraid to admit, if only to himself, that he was terrified about the kinds of things he'd hear from the young woman now sitting across from him. On the way to his office, he'd asked her if she felt safe and comfortable talking to him by herself, or if she'd prefer having his youngest adopted son sit in with them, and while she was understandably hesitant to let an unknown fifteen year old sit in on their discussion, he'd also seen the way she'd unconsciously relaxed when she saw Tim walk in.

"Before we start, my name is Timothy Drake-Wayne, please call me Tim, and you have permission to hug me, cling to me, cry on me, or even squeeze my hand tight enough to break it. Whatever you need to do to get through this discussion. I'll even leave for snacks if you need to say something intensely personal or that you feel I shouldn't hear," his son said with a small, supportive smile. Bruce was so proud of Tim, he'd come so very far since first coming to them. "I'm very well used to standing in as an emotional support person when a foster kid gets comfortable enough with Bruce to want to tell him exactly what happened wherever they'd been before coming here, and I'm perfectly content to keep doing so for as long as I live here."

Bruce watched as Jazz processed everything Tim said and caught the question in her gaze before she'd even opened her mouth to speak it. "Tim has decided he wants to work with CPS when he gets older, take his own experiences with the system and use them to help improve it. I do whatever I can to help him, to help any of the children who find themselves in my care, achieve his dreams," he explained softly, pride warming his heart and voice. "I'm not sure how well you remember him, but my first adopted son, Dick, recently decided to open his own gymnastics studio here in Gotham. His experience with you and Danny when you lived with us really left an impression."

Jazz nodded in understanding before glancing at Tim, reached for his hand, and took a fortifying breath. "My—the Fentons are… scientists, inventors, innovators, they—they discovered, independently, an entire species of interdimensional beings with incredible powers and such a rich mixture of cultures, and… and they decided those beings were unnatural, that they were evil and needed to be experimented on and exterminated. They created a portal to these beings' home dimension in our basement without following any sort of safety regulations or protocols." Jazz took another breath, swallowing as she looked down at hold on Tim's hand. "Th-the green on me and Danny when we first got here, it's called ectoplasm. It's basically the lifeblood of these beings, it makes up almost their entire bodies. Their dimension is full of it, as any excess they produce gets shed off into the environment around them.

"When the Fentons created their portal into the Infinite Realms, they didn't realize they'd installed a secondary switch that also needed to be flicked for the thing to work. A switch that was on the inside of the portal shaft and could only be reached by physically going inside it." She shuddered as she tried to bite back tears. "I wasn't home at the time. I was tutoring a fellow student in English at the local fast food joint. Danny was at home with his two best friends. Mom and dad had left the day before to track down the supposed "ghost" that had caused their magnum opus to fail to work. He should have been safe.

"I got a frantic phone call from Danny's friend, Tucker, telling me I needed to get home ASAP, that Danny'd had an accident and wasn't waking up. The student I was tutoring asked me what I was waiting for, to get going, and so I did. I—by the time I got back to the house, Sam and Tucker had managed to drag Danny away from the portal, but i-it was pretty obvious what the accident was, I mean… the portal hadn't been on before I left…"

Bruce had a bad feeling about where this story was going. He'd seen the product of lab accidents too often to be able to con himself into thinking it could be going in any other direction. He almost stopped her from continuing, but while she was very obviously distressed, the process of telling him, of telling them, seemed to actually be doing her some good, so he kept his silence and watched as she clenched Tim's hand even harder for a brief second before relaxing her grip almost entirely.

"Sam was fussing over Danny's prone form, trying to make him more comfortable on the steel flooring without moving him too much, while Tucker was pacing between the two of them and the swirling mass of green that was the portal when I got there. As soon as they saw me, Tucker was on me with tears in his eyes. "We thought he'd died," he said. "The screaming—we thought he was dead. We're so sorry, he could have died—we're so unbelievably sorry,"" Jazz quoted with a strained voice. "Sam's makeup was running from how much she was crying. Sam never cries, and there she was, kneeling over my barely breathing baby brother, nearly sobbing in terror and guilt. They—Sam had apparently dared Danny to go inside so they could get a picture, and while in there, Danny tripped, and he hit the secondary switch. The Fentons had apparently not turned the other switch off after the thing didn't work the first time, and Danny ended up paying the price of their stupidity. He was alive, he'd survived, but now he's rightfully terrified of anything to do with electricity above what comes out of your stranded wall outlet. Only, come to find out, Danny hadn't survived. Not entirely… not unchanged."

Knew it, Bruce thought wearily as he leaned back in his chair. He resisted the urge to rub his hand across his face or run it through his hair and instead just continued to listen to Jazz's tale.

"The combination of all that electricity running through him, killing him, as a portal made pretty much entirely of ectoplasm opened up literally right on top of him changed Danny on a molecular level. He's no longer fully human. He's now something called a halfa, half human and half… half ghost."

============<×^-^×>============

FINALLY got that finished! I sincerely apologize for not getting this out yesterday, I had to take a general health day due to both my lactose intolerance realizing, three days after the fact, that I'd eaten dairy and decided it didn't like that at all, and my sleep schedule being crap the past two days (⁠-⁠_⁠-⁠;⁠) that's why today's post says "day 8/9", I'm counting it for both days since I *did* start writing it yesterday (⁠^⁠～⁠^⁠;⁠)⁠ゞ

For anyone reading this directly after day 6 but hasn't read any of the reblogs of day 6, this is actually chapter 4 of this fic, not chapter 2. I have two amazing co-writers who have each written an amazing chapter for this fic, which can be more easily read on AO3 by hitting the link up at the top!

Also, due to this fic having two co-writers for it, from now on, when I post a new chapter for it here on Tumblr, I won't be linking back to my previous chapter, since there will be two chapters between each of my own. Instead, I'll be linking back to the first post back on day 6 and to the AO3 version, where the entire fic will be readily available for reading.

Also also, because this is being co-written, any and all updates for this fic will be highly sporadic at best. Please don't harass me or my co-writers for quicker updates, we're all very busy people working together to write this purely for fun.

Have a wonderful morning/day/night everyone!

[thebreakfastgenie]

I've never had bluetooth headphones because I still use an ancient iPod nano (it has all twelve of Billy Joel's studio albums on it, I don't need anything else) but as someone who still uses them regularly I think you are all remembering wired headphones a bit too fondly. They catch on stuff! The wire is a pain! I can definitely see the appeal of wireless I'm just not gonna give up my iPod for them.

[mirqmarq428]

This is bullshit and i wanna talk about why

Notepad: this is fine. There are only a couple features and they're pretty obvious.

Pico, VS: idk haven't used them but it sounds right compared to nano and vscode respectively..

Vi(m): the reality is, you will learn hjkli<esc> and that is all you will use for months. Then gradually find more features, by accident or by google. I get the meme, "haha vi users have to remember all those keybinds", but it's just not like that at the start.

Emacs: ugh, where to even begin. First of all this graph demands poetic interpretation, because proficiency cannot in fact bend time backwards in a spiral. Second, Emacs is even more like notepad ootb than vi is. It has a menu bar at the top, what could be more noob friendly than that? No, the Emacs graph here should look more similar to the Visual Studio graph, or perhaps a taller version of the Pico model.

The problem these graphs exist to ignore is that

All editors are quite boring

And all learning curves are simple transformations of each other.

[moose-mousse]

Frustrations

Following other developers, learners and makers are great. It facilitates learning and gives inspiration

But one thing that is often missing from people telling about how it is going, is the failures, frustrations and problems any developer will run into.

For this reason, two of my favorite maker youtube channels are Extractions&Ire (Chemistry) and Code Bullet (machine learning). Because these madlads are brave enough to not just show their process and result, but also their failures, mistakes and errors. And how they overcome them. Not always by learning (Sometimes making a dumb mistake is not really something you can learn from...)

It's good, because it's real.

Code tutorials and guides can give the impression that the normal process of development is "Open IDE, code, fix tiny typo error, compile, success". They don't do it out of malice, but out of a want to be concise. Which is fair.

So I also want to share when things do not go so well. I have programmed Atmel's AVR Chips for quite a while now. But I have done it mostly in microchip studio(former Atmel studio) and a bit in the arduino IDE. A job I am currently applying for, uses visual studio code. Which is fair enough. So to prepare for this specific job, and to acquire this quite good-to-have skill, I want to set that up for myself First things first, since I have not done this before, I cannot know if my code would have a weird error so I want to know everything else is working first. So I write a tiny program which simply have the microcontroller increase a number every 2 seconds and write it to my PC over UART. Takes 2 minutes.... I grab one of my Arduino Nano boards and a USB cable for it. And then... I cannot flash it... Its communication protocol have troubles.

I have seen this before. It is to do with the cables not being correct. If they are USB 2.0, very little magnetic noise can cause trouble. (And you cannot tell if a cable runs USB 2.0 or 3.0 by looking at it... because the universal serial bus is not universal... Insert grump rant here) I then spend an hour finding and trying different USB A to USB B-mini cables. Give up, notes down to buy (and MARK) some USB 3.0 versions for the future. I then grab a Arduino Uni instead, as they use USB B, which is much more resistant to noise... And then spend half an hour trying to find a the cable, as I do not have a lot of them, since... nearly nothing uses them. Finally find it, and yes, the program can now be flashed. So I packed all the cables I tested back in their places, after marking them so I will(hoefully) not have to do this again. Had to take several breaks feeling depressed and grumpy, and all in all, this adventure took 4-5 hours. And now I can START on this... And this is how work sometimes is. And that is ok. It is still... VERY frustrating ...