#technically a little early to use this design as the poll's still going

[imthepunchlord]

[essaygraveyard]

The oddities of Old School RuneScape.

Recently (as in sometime since the time dilation got worse) a friend of mine bullied me back into playing RuneScape for the first time in a decade and some change. It was, at first, a fun little exercise in nostalgia and childhood wish fulfillment. I was unsurprised to find that I still remembered just about everything you could do in free to play given I had completed all of that content half a dozen times and when it came to the members content I was finally able to do all of the things that a young hatsforfish could only dream of doing. I never had a membership growing up, so to see the grass from the other side felt like striking off long forgotten bucket list items. What I didn't suspect when I submitted the request to recover my account was that I would stick around.

RuneScape has gone through a handful of iterations since it first went online in early 2001. The version I grew up playing was RuneScape 2; the version that the modern Old School RuneScape (from this point on OSRS) is based on and the version that was revived due to some of the player base's dissatisfaction with RuneScape 3 (R3). My original character, which I had made in my elementary school computer lab and whose name was a misspelling of the name I had at the time wished my parents gave me, remains trapped in R3 since it is technically the original game. OSRS is a ship of Theseus of the 2007 version of the game that got updated out of existence. It is not the original but is made of all the parts that the original slowly replaced. Or it was at the beginning, because the devs then continued to update the new old version of the game with new content and even new visuals. So OSRS now is more what we remember RuneScape 2 to be rather than what it actually was.

The updates aren't haphazard though. Almost every change or addition to the game is polled by the player base before release and needs to meet a stringent 70% approval rating to pass. What this effectively means is that the active community in the game decides what nostalgia means to them. This helps get around one of the problems that Dan Olson pointed out with regards to WOW in this video which is that the paratext of the game, the guides wikis and technical understanding of the games systems, has fundamentally shifted the way we play the game. Back in 2007 nobody knew what they were doing, they just did what felt right to them or what a friend of a friend had said was good. The idea of a "game tick" was not in peoples vocabularies and so the devs didn't have to design around people intricately manipulating and optimizing the game the way they can now. At the same time nobody has the same amount of time they did back then so the genuinely long grinds the game used to contain are even less appealing today.

So when I started playing OSRS I remembered back to Olson's original video on WOW classic and figured that the same was going to more or less be true for RuneScape as well. Logging in to my new character (whose name ended up being weirdly prescient) I figured I would exhaust my nostalgia fairly quickly and throw in the towel the same I have for any game without a proper ending. It was sometime during the quest Recipe for Disaster that the true form of OSRS started to appear to me and I started to notice the pattern.

See, I wanted to get my combat level up, so I looked for the best way to train combat and the internet almost universally said that slayer tasks were the way to go. I jump into some of the level appropriate tasks, looking up guides along the way and it mentions an item that would help called the Slayer Helm which is unlocked by earning points from doing tasks. Well, that's convenient since I'm already doing tasks but doing tasks my level meant points came in slower. If I did faster easier tasks, then and did the high-level ones on the count that gave a score multiplier then I would have the Slayer helm in no time. That being said killing all these low-level mobs quickly mean leaving a ton of bones on the floor and it's just such a shame for them to go to waste since prayer is such an expensive skill to train otherwise. Turns out that there is an item that automatically converts dropped bones into passive prayer xp and that would be incredible to have for this grind. It is, however, locked behind the Morytania achievement diary which has a ton of requirements but they're all things I was meaning to do anyhow. So, I head off the grind agility and right around the time I start thinking about unlocking Fossil Island so I could start doing birdhouse runs in between agility course laps the whole picture finally snaps into place. The natural game flow of OSRS is just simulating what it's like to live with inattentive ADHD.

Given that I have inattentive ADHD I figured that OSRS just allowed for more floating from thing to thing than most games do so I saw my real-life tendencies reflected in it more than most other games. That was until I found out that a ton of other people play the game this way. Now that could just mean that a lot of ADHD havers play the game, which wouldn't strike me as all that unusual but either way I wasn't out of place here. What was odd was that existing like this usually makes me absolutely miserable but for some reason doing those same patterns in RuneScape didn't frustrate me at all. In fact, this sort of tangential advancement has kept me focused on the game waaaaaaaay longer than I ever could have guessed. While I never did get my bone crusher, I did just get back around to finishing the quest that I had gotten distracted from in the first place. Intentional or otherwise, the design of the game is one of the first times it felt like the way my brain works might not always be a detriment to my goals. In spite of that I do not recommend getting started on the game unless you have a lot of free time and nothing better to spend it on.

[luminisvii]

RATING! ALL! THE CHAR CLONES!

i love char and gundam loves him too so because i am BORED i'm gonna rate all characters that the wiki tells me qualifies as a char clone!

many of these men will be rated on aesthetics and their wiki blurb alone since i have not watched all gundams

i tried to include pics but it SAID i can only use ten. WHAT? how am i supposed to rate how sexy they are?

Char Aznable

the man. the myth. the legend. i love him so much. hes super fucking hot bc of how bad he is. like an absolute madlad he goes around destroying the zabis and giving amuro hell. hes so good that despite being on team evil he regularly tops popularity polls and is widely regarded as being super attractive. im asexual but i agree. char is supreme. he and his red mobile suits cannot be topped. 20/10

Quattro Bajeena

now, char might be evil, but this guy is totally a stand up dude who is definitely not char. and the hyaku shiki? top tier. also very sexy. maybe char should take a lesson or two from this lovely man. 18/10 could not possibly be char himself

Glemy Toto

i have not watched ZZ. this dude upholds the tradition of stupid ass names in gundam. he just kinda look like hes a good person, though, which would be nice, but i prefer the evil men here. 6/10 love the idiotic name

Afranche Char

apparently a literal char clone. don't give a fuck. 1/10

Carozzo Ronah/Iron Mask

this guy really takes the mask thing seriously. i have also not watched F91. i love the just robot lookin mask and the purple color scheme. 8/10

Anavel Gato

this guy is kind of a chump. i get the feeling i'm supposed to find gato very cool, but all i could see was a total loser pushover as long as it was in the name of zeon. although to be fair, he was basically one of the most enjoyable characters in the mess that is stardust memory. 7/10 too much of a zeon apologist

Chronicle Asher

i called gato a chump but this guy looks like a tool. hes got the mask! i know nothing about victory gundam but this guy looks like, okay. 5/10

Schwarz Bruder

im ignoring the other guy listed with him on the wiki bc Herr Bruder is in fact, awesome. he isn't on team evil like some others, but he doesn't need to be. hes a JESTER NINJA. what's not to love? somehow, despite me thinking i knew the twist that was coming, he was still full of surprises. you cannot possibly predict the actual twist here. he really teaches domon how to get shit done. 15/10 absolutely sublime take on the trope

Zechs Marquise

not only is he voiced by takehito koyasu, but he chars so hard he chars three times as fast! we LOVE his dedication to being a char clone. i will never forget how treize challenged him to a fair fight and he was just like nah lmao. you go you stinky man! 10/10 for char-ing hard

Lancerow Dawell and Jamil Neate

i am fascinated by after war X and i'll watch it one day. it seems like the wiki is confused about these two and is going with very surface level details for these two being char clones. however i'll rate them both higher bc i think mr. neate's sideburns and glasses are just top tier character design. 9/10

Harry Ord

10/10

Rau le Creuset

i think i saw him in the like three episodes of SEED i watched. he definitely looks the part. seems kinda lame though. 6/10

Athrun Zala

this kid is hilarious, and also the most likable character i met in SEED, and he even has a quattro phase as he goes by alex dino! we'll give him points for effort. 9/10 you tried

Neo Roanoke

definitely not mu la flaga. hes also voiced by takehito koyasu. his mask looks kinda dumb, but i think the long hair look upgrades my man mu. takehito koyasu makes everything sexier. 8/10 bc i also simp for dio brando

Rey Za Burrel

how many char clones does the SEEDverse have? i do appreciate rey's early 2000s brooding anime boy look, though. 5/10

Gilbert Durandal

WHY ARE THERE SO MANY SEED CHARS!!! this guy doesn't even look like a char clone, but he has the same voice actor and also apparently tries to drop shit on earth. we stan a king, honestly. 6/10 being in SEED deducts points

Hal Vizardt and Vladi Zarth

the wiki wont even give me a picture of these guys. 2/10 they get a point each

Ali Al-Saachez

i hate this guy. he sucks. normally i would find such endless villainy entertaining, but ali simply cannot work it in a way that's fun to watch or even in a way where you're like 'he's got a point.' he just sucks and i wish he could have been funny. we already have a char clone in graham anyway, so why are you here? bitch. 0/10 i was waiting for him to die

Graham Aker

he has all the tropes of being a char clone, and i loved him at first bc of his flair for drama and poetry, but alas! he got more and more sidelined for a different motherfucker. it's okay graham, i still love you! your mr. bushido phase was hilarious! 9/10 you deserved so much more

Full Frontal

hes getting points for the hilarious name but thats it. he is otherwise very boring. you cannot make me love a man just bc he is a literal char clone. 3/10

Zeheart Galette

AGE is also on my "deeply fascinated" list. eventually, eventually. i kinda dig this one's look. 7/10

Tatsuya Yuuki

initially, i hated yuuki bc i thought he was beating on middle schoolers for fun, but then i learned the dude is so goddamn passionate about gundam that he HAS to share it with others and honestly? king shit. while he's technically a char clone, i think he's actually a graham aker clone. the dude stans 00. an admirable position to be in. i love yuuki so much and hes my favorite build fighters character. 15/10 i will always respect the meijin

Captain Mask

the name is hilarious. hes got a cool mask too. i'll maybe watch recon one day bc of how ridiculous the reputation is. 8/10

Lady Kawaguchi

the rare female one, and proves that the kawaguchi name requires you to be extra as fuck. compared to yuuki's raw passion, she's cool and knows it, and doesn't need to flex. sadly doesn't get to do a lot. 10/10

McGillis Fareed

MCGILLIS MY BELOVED!!!! perhaps the only char clone that matters. this dude brings back the classic level of backstabbing, the supreme attractiveness, and in general, being an awful person. but i can't help but feel for the guy. he was trying his goddamn hardest to overturn a fucked up system. he also simply could not fathom having friends. mcgillis might only do the mask thing for a little and also wears a wig (McWiggis) but i forgive him, because the moves he does in bael are truly sexy. i adore mcgillis i have to rate him high but he cannot overtake the classic. 19/10 would let him betray me

Kyoya Kujo

even the wiki doesn't seem confident in this one. i like his look though. hes kinda got some gentle eyes, so i will assume he's the more quattro flavor of things. 6/10

Masaki Shido

BRUHHHH HE LOOKS LIKE A KNIGHT. 10/10

Honorable Mentions:

Master Asia

i didn't think he truly qualified as a char clone. he hits the villain thing and technically has some ideals aligned with char ? but he's a little too different. lacks majority of the archetype tropes. i still love him though 9/10

Vidar

hes got a mask and wants revenge. definitely not gaelio. the problem is, we already have mcgillis in IBO. i just don't register gaelio as being a char clone, because mcgillis is out here being the worst. gaelio is a wonderful character in his own right for all the opposite reasons that mcgillis is fantastic for being the worst. 10/10 i want nothing but the best for him

Ulube Ishikawa

just bc he has a mask covering half his face and is evil doesn't mean he's a char clone, wiki! and how dare you take away from schwarz just to be like "well ulube has a mask" WE HAVE ONE ALREADY!!! i also hate ulube. he is not a particularly charismatic character, but he isn't supposed to be. 2/10

and thus is my arbitrary ranking of the char clones. some people think char clones are bad. i for one, love them! i hope future entries have more masked men.

[eretzyisrael]

Poll of American Jews has Distressing Results

Most American Jews say they “support Israel.” But a recent poll casts serious doubt on this, or at least indicates that their idea of “support” is not what one might expect.

The poll was done by the Jewish Electorate Institute, described as a “group led by prominent Jewish Democrats,” and unsurprisingly some of the questions are clearly designed to elicit a desired result. For example,

Q.25 As you may know, the Trump Administration eliminated humanitarian aid to the Palestinians. The Biden Administration has recently reversed Trump’s policy and has renewed humanitarian aid to the Palestinians. Do you support or oppose Biden renewing this aid?

Given the large preference for Biden over Trump by poll respondents (when scored on a scale of 0-100, Biden had a mean grade of 67 vs. Trump’s 19), and considering that the question did not discuss the reasons for Trump’s action – the Taylor Force Act and the use of aid money to pay terrorists – but only related the issue to Biden and Trump, it was foreordained that the majority would favor resuming “humanitarian” aid.

The distribution of poll respondents by denomination closely mirrors the American Jewish population:

37% Reform 31% No particular denomination 17% Conservative 9% Orthodox 2% Reconstructionist 3% Other 1% Not sure

85% of them said that their religion was Judaism, and 100% self-identified as Jewish.

I am not especially interested in their responses to the questions about aid to Israel, the two-state solution, and so forth. These questions are too general and do not supply enough information to enable the respondent to make a real choice. We already know that most American Jews favor a “two-state solution,” but what if the question were “do you support a two-state solution in which terrorists fire rockets at Ben Gurion Airport from within their state, a mere 7 miles away?” This is not usually how it is asked.

I do want to know how they see Israel in relation to themselves. What does the Jewish state mean to Jews who live in America?

The first question connected to Israel listed various political issues and asked respondents to choose two of them as top priorities for the administration. Israel came out close to the bottom of the list, with only Iran and abortion below it. Unfortunately the question did not ask what the respondents’ personalpriorities were, only what they wanted the government to focus on. If I had answered the question, I too would have put Israel last. As Tevye said about the Tsar, the less attention paid to us the better.

Next, we got this: “How emotionally attached are you to Israel?” This question is too subjective. Who knows what each individual thinks it means? Do they visit Israel, have relatives here, donate to Israel-related charities? A better question would be “if Israel disappeared, would you be (a) desolated, (b) mildly unhappy, (c) unmoved, (d) mildly pleased, or (e), ecstatic. But they didn’t ask this. 29% said they were very attached, 33% somewhat attached, 25% not too attached, and 13% not at all attached. While I would like to know the answer, this really doesn’t help.

But some questions stand out, and the answers are not good. Only 9% agreed with the statement “Israel doesn’t have the right to exist,” and 67% said that the statement was antisemitic. But when asked if Israel is an apartheid state, 25% agreed. When asked if “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is similar to racism in the U.S.,” 34% agreed. And – probably the most incredible of all – 22% agreed that “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians.”

It is shocking to me that one out of four American Jews thinks that Israel is an apartheid state and is committing genocide against the Palestinians.

Genocide! Do they have the slightest idea of what the word means? I suppose they don’t know that the number of Palestinians between the river and the sea has increased by more than 2,710,000, a factor of 2.5, since 1967, but still – where are the concentration camps, the smokestacks? Where are the killing fields? Surely, if there had been such mass murder, the New York Times would have (joyfully) reported it.

And apartheid. Actual apartheid, the separation of races that was practiced in South Africa until the early 1990s, is well-documented, and there are plenty of people still around who experienced it themselves. It was absolutely nothing like the treatment of Arabs by the state of Israel, either within the Green Line or in the territories. There are no racially-based laws, no system of classification by race, no separate beaches or drinking fountains (except for the ones on the Temple Mount, which only Arabs are permitted to use). Only complete ignorance of both history and the facts about Israel could allow someone to believe this.

These results are inconsistent with one another. After all, does a state that commits genocide and practices apartheid have a right to exist? I think most people would say no. Should I add that the proposed state of Palestine, which will not permit Jews to live in it and whose heroes have always been the ones who killed the most Jews, fills the bill for a state that doesn’t have the right to exist?

I am not surprised that more than one out of three American Jews believe that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is like the American race problem, because they have been told this over and over, by national figures like Condoleezza Rice and Barack Obama, by many of their liberal rabbis, and of course by movements like BLM. I suppose they took the easy way out by choosing to analogize everything to their own experience rather than to actually think, but consider: Arabs were never slaves to Jews, the US is not surrounded by enemy states populated by blacks, blacks do not occupy Arizona and are not firing rockets from there into California, and … I could go on, but it should be obvious that it is not the same. Not even a little.

So despite the fact that this is technically a very bad poll, the results are still not encouraging. They are not good for anyone in Israel who thinks that American Jews might lobby for her in a pinch, and they are not good for the American Jews who appear to be prepared to believe the worst accusations imaginable about their own historic homeland.

Abu Yehuda

[incarnateirony]

I get blends of innocent beans confused with what queer coding is or isn’t, and malignant beans misappropriating points, so we’re gonna do a quick run through.

Queer coding started as a malignant thing. The truest use of the phrase “queer coding” came from stereotypes and villainizations that straight people found sCaRy. This is like, why Scar seemed classically flamboiyant, or a variety of Disney villains were long, lanky, gestured exaggeratedly, wore eyeliner, etc. There’s a million examples but I’m not going to cover them all because I think you get what I mean. At the time, straight culture was painting gays as bad so painting villains as how straights perceived gays was like, super useful, cuz it creeped the straights out oOOoooOOo.

When people talk about queer coding enforcing stereotypes, if you’re talking about the original form of queer coding, this is inherently true. However, coding reached other levels, and has adaptive forms.

For example, watching (as I’ve been mocked for saying 10,000 times, but because it’s needed) The Celluloid Closet will clear up a lot for you. Subversive queer coding is when queer creators use a great deal of things to communicate with a queer audience past censorship. The film documentary (if you can’t read the book -- which I understand, it’s difficult to find) clears a whole fuckton of this up.

There’s some things that, quite frankly, we as gays know as part of our language. It is what it is. While it’s not a stereotype, it’s quite literally a language I highly warn straights against stepping into, because then they flounder around confused on what’s our actual language and what’s a stereotype

A truly innocent bean asked of me yesterday, well why then is menthols fair subversive queer coding? How is that not a stereotype?

Well like, because it’s facts. And that’s really, really hard to wrap ones’ head around from an outsider straighty perspective or even someone who’s queer but trapped heavily in a hetnorm world outside of where this is visible and/or in the wrong demographic otherwise. A black person who hangs out with black people of all orientations is not going to blink at a media dude getting menthols generally, because it’s one of the cultures that statistically engages in it to the point of memes about Kools or whatever. That’s not my culture, I can’t comment on much beyond that, but it’s just something to take note of.

But even if you don’t want to take someone’s word on “no, seriously, white dudes smoking menthols is queer culture and literally like a great sign for a hookup to another queer white dude”, google the various intersections of gender and menthol, race and menthol, and sexuality and menthol.

This isn’t pulled out of thin air. These were populations quite literally heavily targeted by Big Tobacco and, by nature, are the ones that smoke it, whereas Big Tobacco put(s) on airs of masculinity and chick-magnetness to smoke good ol non-menthol shit. It’s literally marketing. Yes, it does literally impact who buys product and yes, it does after generations have a noticeable affect. Track the numbers I told you to google down and you’ll realize less than 3% of menthol smokers identify as straight white men (depending on the way the numbers sort out and the year of polling, often 1.x%, 3% is the liberal number).. Lemme tell you, on the street, that’s an “okay, honey :)” when you do find it. Maybe a little pat on the head. An invisible brochure for Welcome To The Gays.  Like, White Men make up more than 31% of America and they still refuse to tally more than 25% of the US as queer [some censuses as low as 6% and LOL] so like-- that should be like minimum 25% of dudes available and nope, 1-3%)

(that’s not to say all gays or even all white gays smoke menthol, but this is that rule of “not all fingers are thumbs, but all thumbs are fingers” in loose application.)

But understanding these things, these signals, from the outside is utterly flabbergasting to people.

No, someone making an immasculating joke is not subversive queer coding. No, a dude wearing a certain kind of shirt or eating a certain kind of food generally isn’t queer coding (Unless it’s a rainbow flag BITCH IM GAY shirt, or uh, maybe for food quiche or hummus? I mostly joke for the latter two, but that’s the kind of self ball punching queer community sometimes does to itself in awareness that yes, there ARE elements. No, eating hot dogs and burritos isn’t gay. Yes, we make make penis jokes. No, that isn’t itself queer coding.)

When a queer author codes a piece, it’s designed to communicate to the resonant audience. It also may not communicate to /all/ gays. The language of a middle aged cis gay man that lived through the AIDS crisis is a whole other fuckin adventure from the language of 17 year old trans gays squatting behind their Xbox, it’s just fact, it’s just what is. Completely different cultures and lives being lived, completely different experiences resulting. A few things here or there may connect across generations but some shit that’s written by a gen Z gay is gonna whiff by a boomer gay, sorry. Also just facts.

Explaining exactly what is and isn’t queer coding is almost impossible beyond the fact that “if you don’t get it, it’s probably not for you.” -- At the same time, that leaves the problematic room of people taking that grey area and packing in a bunch of shit and we’re back to ground zero on the original problematic queer coding.

I once read a meta of uh-- I’ll just say, [Fantasy Character]. The fantasy character had an addiction problem that gave them villain-like attributes. Someone implied the “villain coding” made it queer coding. Okay like. Fucking absolutely not. Because if the show in question WAS doing that, first off, that’s literally the kind to make mockeries of gay people so you literally shouldn’t be reaching for that and second off they’d be doing that lanky sassy bitch with eyeliner bullshit like Disney villains with it, give or take. You don’t apply this shit in reverse, “he has villain attributes and so he’s gay” is literally the worst possible angle to take a discussion while trying to slap fight in a representation arena. Like I can’t say enough DO NOT DO THIS SHIT. 

If you wanna write fic or headcanon whoever as gay or whatever have fun but like once people keep trying to talk about “coding” you’re talking about conscious elements inset by the authors. Does a character have a bunch of on the record sexual encounters that just happen to include dudes persistently even if we don’t exactly get the exact angle or Proof Of Dicking? That’s gay (also depending on the phrasing, as settled in older stuff, that’s just deadass queer text and settled long before this fandom ever had pissing matches about this shit in older cinema.) Does the character happen to be respectful and use like gender neutral pronouns on people? Sorry folks that unto itself isn’t gay, that’s gays writing allies at best, unless you can give specific and directly applicable situations relevant to the character rather than eternally vague blogging through and swearing up and down it’s just about their partners or some shit. Yelling it in general though, sorry, no. 

Does the character engage in things or events with non-het gendered partners that in the very least are heavily coded into the areas of relationships even if they’re unclear (eg, do they routinely go out with non-family people and hold deep or meaningful conversations in things that LOOK like a date, even if nobody SAYS it’s a date) -- congrats, you have coded text. Alone it could even be queerplat stuff, depending on the suprastructure of the plot, text, subtext and everything else around it (same way, gasp, a man and a woman can sit at a table and not necessarily be in a relationship, but if they’re trading courting gifts and having unique and powerful exchanges or have big like, “the heart is the thing that binds us together uwu” shit, we all figure out what the fuck is going on like grown assed adults.)

It’s easier to list things that are NOT subversive queer coding:

Insults against gay people

Immasculating commentary

Random foods short of it deadass being a gay author making fun of some gay meme shit in some gay equivalent of ‘right in front of my salad’

Favorite colors or clothing

---

We got it? Good. Rule of thumb though. Deadass unless you are involved in some thick-ass queer culture don’t try to queer code shit. I don’t even care if you’re queer yourself because that doesn’t mean you’ve actually been subject to the culture in a meaningful way. There’s 30 year old bis that grew up in white picket fence suburbias on top of trust funds with hovercraft parents guiding them through 17 degrees and keeping them out of party culture that married a het-passing relationship and settled down and started having babies and their grasp of queer culture ends at what they perceive out of memes online, if they even hover in actual queer crowds online at all as much as general ones. That person literally is not going to speak much of the language. They aren’t. At best they’ll speak the language of 30 year old trust fund het-married bisexual mothers which, I mean yeah, technically some queer language but that’s a very, very fucking niche experience path right there compared to street-dwelling club-goers that attend pride, hold D&D parties with all their coworkers they figured out are gay on the weekend, occasionally brick a window in a riot. The latter is gonna have a far more diverse queer experience. And by such, a far more diverse queer language.

That’s not even to gatekeep. 30 year old trust fund het-passing-marriage bi-mom is in fact bi. So yeah, they’re queer. But we’re talking about language and culture, which is related to but not something you inherit. It comes by lives and experiences.

And I think this is where a LOT of the fucked up early Queer Coding fuckery comes from in discourse. Yes we have a language. Hell, to some extent a few things might even kinda BE stereotypes but there’s a certain amount of living and being where you know the difference between “this is a stereotype made by straight people villainizing us that has no idea what we’re fucking like” or “this is a stereotype born out of mass marketing that targeted and victimized then imprinted on an entire population that we’ve come to recognize among ourselves.” Or even “this is a stereotype but FUCK YES it’s one we embrace, go get fucked, straights.” And it’s not NEARLY as ambiguous as fandom circle jerks try to make these things out to be in the interest of wanting every interpretation to be valid or every character to be gay or not wanting to admit some person may know what the fuck they’re talking about more than they do. 

Huge point on that last one though, because like. I’ve seen some angry straights that are pissy about the show try to throw wrenches in the gears by concern trolling as if in defense of the gays about “offensive queer coding” and most of the time they’re basically that “how do you do fellow kids gays” meme. “How do you do gays I am very concerned about *checks notes* the twitters talking about gay men walking fast” and half the time turn around like two tweets later like “besides the character doesn’t even have a lisp anyway” or some bullshit that is outright offensive ass stereotyping while they’re out here trolling over the fact that a gay man admits to diva worship as a cultural trait.

General rule of thumb: ask a queer culture immersed gay about queer coding.

Shipping culture in the blue hellsite is not queer culture, for the record. Even if a bunch of queerfolk are in it.

Thanks.

Sincerely,

A very tired gay

[lee-rambles-about-rwby]

Non-plot things i loved about Volume 7 (since i’ve yelled about the story a lot but there’s so much more i loved): a rambly, bullet-point list

I may think of more if I get around to rewatching the volume, but this is off the top of my head I’ll throw it below a cut just because it’s getting really long (as usual) and I don’t want to clog people’s dash. 

TL;DR i love a lot about this volume lol

Let’s get this one out of the way: M U S I C

like not just how hype I am for the vocal tracks but I didn’t think any score would top my faves from last volume and damn almost every episode had something in the score that literally caught my attention over the drama because it was so good

also so many additional vocalists!! like that’s so cool, I lost my shit when I heard Caleb Hyles IN a rwby episode

On that note (pun intended), sound design in general, yes, hell yes. War abruptly ending with a thud as Harriet runs into the ice? The dramatic shift in tone after Weiss says “Who are you?” and it hard-cuts to Watts with an ominous thunderclap?? The screeching sound over the shots of Summer??? Too much to list

SPLIT SCREENS, like I’m so glad the couple uses of it from last volume became a more regular thing, it’s so cool

The sheer amount of times the voice acting alone could have sold a scene. Like wow the amount of improvement so many of the VAs have had throughout the series is beautiful. Cinder’s desperation and screams in the finale? Top. Ironwood’s increasingly chilling demeanor?? Hell yeah. Willow sounding so realistically broken?? My fuckin’ heart. Oscar, Nora, Ruby, Ren, Qrow, so on and so forth. Again, too many to list

Literally anyone’s outbursts felt so real. I could go on and on with just how many of the especially emotional or tense scenes were made so much more by the VAs, kudos to all of them

The new(?) animation effects!!

Yang and Neo’s semblances are the first thing I think of. This is another thing from last volume, in The Lost Fable and later during the mech fight, I loved how the 2D smoke animation (when the castle is destroyed) and the mech fight explosions looked. Yang’s effect especially reminds me of that. 

Same with just general fire and explosion effects. Someone said they thought it was hand-drawn and tbh it kinda looks it

If this isn’t new I’m just dense as hell, but the flickering of aura in fights instead of it just breaking after a while. I love that we see it flicker when they take hard hits. Tbh it makes more sense for it to do that. Then the little particle effect when aura finally does break! If you’ve ever played the mobile puzzle game Two Dots, it reminds me of the fireflies animation and i love that

OH also that Yang’s eyes seem to glow a bit now when she uses her semblance instead of just turning straight red. It’s so pretty

This is almost plot-related but I’m including it anyway. The general pacing of the volume felt nice. Like a lot of things were happening but it didn’t feel like a clusterfuck trying to keep track of it. Even just in individual episodes. The last few episodes were a lot of fights cutting back and forth and it never really felt messy or annoying (frustration because you want to see the end of the fight sooner doesn’t count lol). I wanna assume that’s in the writing/directing but either way it worked well

CINEMATOGRAPHY! Damn there was some solid camera work. Long tracking shots were so cool (Ruby’s in chapter 1, the one following the grimm invasion, so on), the framing of things for subtly foreshadow things (the political posters and poll numbers, having several seemingly inconspicuous shots of Watt’s bag, etc etc). 

the wide shots in any scene by the vault were beautiful but so were like most of the wide shots in any scene. I know i’m forgetting so many camera shots that probably caught my eye when I watched but there were a lot

OH a specific thing I wanted to mention is the Ironwood vs Watts fight. That wide, rotating shot when Ironwood launched them both off the platform back into normal gravity was so good I had to rewatch just that clip a couple times

Also the fight choreo was fucking great. This isn’t exclusive to this volume, but wow there were some cool moments. The RWBY vs AceOps has to be my favorite, but it’s only barely above Ironwood vs Watts or Cinder vs Winter and Penny, and even still, all the other fights are so close behind that it’s less a ranking and more a “If I had to choose one..”

Lightning round of some other animation things I really loved because this post is too long already:

the gravity in the Ironwood vs Watts fight, but also in Cinder vs Penny and Winter. Like any time a character was flying (or falling) it never felt too floaty or unnatural. Like they still had a realistic weight to them, as much as they can for unrealistically flying lol

being able to really really see how hefty the mammoths were just by how they moved. Grimm animation in general tbh

Honestly the weight of everything felt very realistic; characters, grimm, etc alike

Ruby’s semblance animation looks improved too

Neo, who doesn’t talk at all, still conveying so much in every scene she was in

not technically animation, but the matte paintings used and just a lot of the background designs were beautiful

probably more i’m forgetting 

OH the beautiful use of the whole “Show, don’t tell” concept. Like telling is fine, but this volume did so well with showing things through the animation that foreshadowed other things. Off the top of my head: like how they made sure to show how exhausted Oscar was from fighting Neo, or during several of the scenes in Ironwood’s office being able to just gauge a tone of a scene purely through silent, background facial expressions

Last thing, out-of-show thing: the amount of concept art and behind the scenes stuff crwby has been sharing!! Like i love so much getting to see early designs for character’s redesigns, or concept art for settings, concept paintings for scenes, etc etc. That video going from storyboard, to mocap, to playblast, to final render of Ironwood vs Watts was so fucking cool to watch

[evanvanness]

Annotated edition of May 3 Week in Ethereum News

As it is wont to do, the newsletter buried the lede: ProgPoW is indefinitely shelved.

I think it’s been relatively clear since last time that ProgPoW wasn’t going to happen.  The leads of the two largest clients are against it personally, plus it’s quite clear that there isn’t anything close to community consensus. If anything, at the moment the majority of the community opposes it.  Greg Colvin bringing it up again last week unfortunately made it harder to do in the case where we do actually need it, ie an ASIC manufacturer has a 10x breakthrough but is only selling the machines privately to control 50%+ of the network.

I’d say it’s unclear whether ACD continues to be a thing.  To me it feels like an experiment which was worth trying but has become calcified, which needs a complete refresh in terms of both process and non-technical people involved.  But inertia is also a very strong force.  To overcome that, Ethereum should have a strong culture of continuously sunsetting things if they are not working.

One amusing thing to me has been the idea that ProgPoW is an AMD/Nvidia conspiracy.  Given that ETH price declining in 2018 absolutely destroyed their earnings and share price, those two should have been conspiring! Yet if they were, then they did an exceptionally bad job at it.  Instead everyone I know got the impression that the GPU manufacturers were indifferent.  There are some competing interests for them of course - the anger of their traditional gaming market, plus AI/neural net researchers - but it still surprises me how they did not get involved at all.

Despite the noise, Ethereum governance works!  I remember polling everyone I talked to at EthDenver2019 about whether they supported ProgPoW and (at the time I was pro-ProgPoW; I’d say my position is much more complicated now) being disappointed at how everyone I talked to was against it. 

I’m very glad we don’t have on-chain governance where a few exchanges/whales could collude to push things through.  Because of that, I’d say on-chain governance will drastically limit the market cap of any basechain’s native token.

Eth1

Latest core devs call. Tim Beiko’s notes. Updates on EIPs for eth2 curve, EVM subroutines. ProgPoW shelved due to clear lack of consensus. Discussion of migrating to binary trie

Analysis of EIP-2315 simple EVM subroutines

DHT+SkipGraph for chain and state data retrieval

Notes from the fee market change call

Vitalik’s EIP1559 fee market change FAQ

There’s a risk of being repetitive, but much of the eth1 work does not lend itself to high-level summaries.  Folks are discussing the technical details of EVM improvements (eg, subroutines), as well as getting clients to be stateless (eg the DHT and Skipgraph link).   And we’re also talking through EIP1559 in light of Dan Finlay’s escalator algo alternative proposal.  

One development not mentioned is that Martin Swende has come around to Alexey’s gas/oil proposal instead of his previous approach of penalties for trie misses.

Eth2

Latest what’s new in Eth2

Schlesi multi-client testnet launched with Lighthouse and (slightly updated) Prysmatic clients. Then Nimbus joined Schlesi a few days later.

Bitfly has a Schlesi explorer

Nimbus client update – up to date, joining Schlesi testnet, RFP for security audits, and benchmarking Nimbus on a 2018 midrange phone

Update from ConsenSys’s TXRX team: prkl network monitoring tool, verifiable precompiles, cross-shard tx simulator, fork choice testing, discv5 sim, and work on turning off proof of work.

A step-by-step guide on joining Prysmatic’s Topaz testnet for Windows10 and MacOS

ConsenSys’s high-level eth2 FAQ

I don’t really do corrections in the newsletter, because once you send an email, you can’t easily clarify your language without sending another email.

But, if you click the “Nimbus joined Schlesi,” then it appears to me that Nimbus is receiving the blocks and following the chain, but not proposing/attesting/etc. I probably should have been more clear when I said “joined.”

Layer2

Channels funding channels: how state channels reduce latency and onchain transactions

This series feels to me like a “yes, state channels are almost here now, let’s get ready to reconsider how to use them.”   Productionizing any new technology isn’t easy, and finding the uses that best fit the tradeoffs is not trivial.  Seems like this is that series.

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I’m very excited that Week in Ethereum News will continue for the next year due to Chainlink, Celer, Trail of Bits, and 0x.

Stuff for developers

buidler v1.3 – test time-based cases in Buidler EVM, works with TheGraph

Waffle’s plan for making testing better with v3

Testing with Python and Brownie

Typechain v2 – Typescript bindings. truffle v5 support, natspec

Solidity docgen v0.5 – documentation generation for Solidity project

Running async/await scripts in Remix IDE

Austin Griffith’s scaffold-eth, a toolkit to prototype and win hackathons

A linked hashmap in Solidity

How to add proxy Ethereum addresses to BigQuery

Authereum’s batched transactions API for interest rate arbs

discv5 feasibility study for Status

Tutorial to testing on mainnet fork with Ganache, Jest and Uniswap

Etheroll security issue: hacker monitoring for onchain forks and then uses that info to frontrun transactions. Novel (to me!) hack

Dragonfly releases an oracles tracker

Synthetix CTO Justin Moses on 10 things they did to improve their Ethereum development experience. tldr: Buidler, Slither, TheGraph, and Tenderly.

It feels like a very undercommented trend how most devs now tell me that their stack is Buidler + Waffle + ethers, and increasingly Typescript as well.  Of course, dev tool stacks are perpetually in flux, but this seems to be the stack du jour.  

This isn’t new either.  After writing the paragraph above, I remembered that Connext’s Rahul had written something about a similar stack 3 months ago.  I go back and check Rahul’s recommendation: Buidler + Waffle + Ethers + typescript.   If this was a chatbox, I would put a rofl emoji, but in prose this seems less appropriate.  

Ecosystem

Contribute to the TornadoCash trusted setup ceremony. It takes about 5 secs of clicking and requires you to leave the browser tab open a few minutes.

Multisigs controlling multisigs: Avsa’s vision for a usable web3

Renew your ENS names or you will lose them. Names start to expire May 4th

Forgive me the clickbait - you actually have 90 days grace period if your domain expired, but I don’t want anyone to miss this if their domain has expired.

If you haven’t contributed to Tornado’s trusted setup ceremony, I recommend that you do.  Assuming that the software works correctly, you can ensure that Tornado becomes trustless for you by participating!   It literally takes just a few seconds to start, and then you leave your browser tab open for about 3 minutes.  You can even contribute multiple times.

Enterprise

Hyperledger Besu v1.4.4, added priv_getLogs, added Splunk integration

Governance, DAOs, and standards

Governance processes for Maker and Compound add WBTC to Maker and USDT to Compound. TBTC also proposed for Maker

Maker’s MIPs ratification vote is live

MetaClan: DAOs for in-game coordination

ERC2611: Geotimeline Contact Tracing Data Standard

Last call: ERC1363 Payable Token

Last call: EIP1193 Eth provider Javascript API

ERC 2612: permit, 712-signed approvals

EIP2357: Total difficulty in block header

Lots of blowback to Maker adding WBTC.  I very much understand the criticism, but to me it looks like Maker is taking reasonable measures, given the current situation where DAI is trading a little rich on the peg.  It’s true that permissioned assets have some risk, but this is literally why MKR is supposed to have value: because those MKR holders make good decisions.

Now perhaps you don’t like that model, and that also makes sense, designing for stablecoins is a large solution space.  But this has always been the Maker vision.  And I say this as someone who does not hold any MKR, and never has (though you’re welcome to give me some!).

Application layer

DeFiZap and DeFiSnap merged to be ZapperFi: now track and trade your DeFi together

Gnosis Safe apps: interact with apps straight from the Gnosis Safe interface

dforce/lendfme plan post-hack: user airdrop, dSAFU insurance fund, large bug bounty

OpenBazaar now supports Eth

A rough proposal for a GasToken forward

Everest: a project registry from TheGraph and MetaCartel

I know I have said this before, but the ebb and flow between sections is fascinating to me.  The stuff for devs section was full this week, but the app layer was a little light.  Maybe I just missed stuff.

Arbitrary “how much of this section is DeFi” count: 3/6

Tokens/Business/Regulation

UMA did an Initial Uniswap Offering, and there was a 5-10x spike

It appears Telegram will have to return $1.2 billion to investors

Ideo’s Simple Agreement for Future Governance for DeFi

Auditing the 10k top Eth addresses: ETH is better distributed than BTC and a bunch of other interesting claims

I again note that US federal regulators continue to bailout Silicon Valley investors from the worst deals that Silicon Valley did in late 2017/early 2018.  

I’d say it’s inevitable that we’re going to see some folks copy UMA.  Watch for it.

Adam Cochran’s onchain activity of top 10k addresses is very interesting.  Definitely some undersupported claims in there, but certainly worth a read.  This is the second time he wrote a 100+ tweetstorm and then compiled it to a blog post.  Personally I prefer viewing it as a blog post.

General

EtherScan Connect: an alpha for mapping addresses with a leaderboard

a16z raises $515m crypto fund

Vitalik’s review of Gitcoin grants round 5

SuperMarlin: no trusted setup with DARK polynomial commitment

“alpha for mapping addresses with a leaderboard“ is another thing I could have said more eloquently.   It’s an interesting attempt by Etherscan to give something to their community, though of course it comes with risks.

There’s something amusing about a16z announcing a new fund, mentioning Bitcoin, and then mostly talking about the stuff that’s being built on Ethereum, without actually mentioning Ethereum.   People like to talk about being contrarian investors.  Wanna know how buying ETH is somehow still a contrarian play in crypto right now?  It’s right there.

zk continues to just explode.  It almost seems like plug and play, where people are pulling out the parts of different schemes that they like and putting in others, depending on the tradeoffs you want around trusted setups, verifier time, prover cost, etc.

Housekeeping

First issue post-ConsenSys. As a reminder, this newsletter is and has always been 100% owned by me.

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Permalink: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-may-3-2020/

Dates of Note

Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):

May 6-20 – Gitcoin’s virtual hackthon

May 8-9 – Ethereal Summit (NYC)

May 22-31 – Ethereum Madrid public health virtual hackathon

May 29-June 16 – SOSHackathon

June 17 – EthBarcelona R&D workshop

[adulting-with-autism]

Hi there friends! Welcome to episode 4! Transcript under cut

Nick: Welcome to another stirring installment of Adulting With Autism

Liz: I’m here this time

Nick: Yes there is another human with me. Things are back to normal. It’s nice. We only have one question this week so I��m going to assume that everything is fine and dandy for most people, everybody’s having a swell time

Liz: Or our advice was so good nobody needs to answer any more questions

Nick: I think we’ve solved life, we’ve solved being an adult which is great but it means the follow-up is going to be a tough one. It’s like, you know, Orson Wells made Citizen Kane but then Magnificent Ambersens. People don’t talk about that as much

Liz: Never heard of it. Is it bad?

Nick: It’s alright actually, but it’s no Citizen Kane. Unlike Citizen Kane.

Liz: You can say that about all films, like the Rugrats movie. It’s no Citizen Kane

Nick: That’s because it’s better than Citizen Kane

Liz: I first watched Citizen Kane at the age of 12, at that point I did prefer the Rugrats Movie

Nick: What’s important to note is the much broader palette of colours the rugrats movie uses

Liz: More variety in outfit design as well. You wouldn’t see a Citizen Kane character in a nappy

Nick: You would most likely not, except at the very end of his life just before he uh…

Liz: No spoilers

Nick: Yeah. Just in case anybody out there

Liz: In case anybody does’nt know what happens at the end of life, we’ll just leave that until you watch the film

Nick: Keep things a mystery, you know? we seem to have been temporarily rebranded into a film podcast by accident, which is great. That’s what everybody’s here for.

Liz: Yeah if there’s one thing the world needs is more film podcasts

Nick: There’s just not enough of them. We have a question…

Liz: We do, we have exactly one question and it’s from anonymous

Nick: I like them, they’ve given us a lot of material over the past weeks

Liz: I prefer their early work

Nick: Me too

Liz: Well, The Legion would like to know how to keep up with household chores if you get tired or executive dysfunction

Nick: That is a good question

Liz: There’s multiple options, Option 1 you don’t. Option 2 you have housemates and they don’t mind you not doing much

Nick: Option 3 is, you’ve got to make compromises with yourself. At least say ok I’m not going to be able to get on top of everything today. But today’s dishes, tomorrow’s vacuuming or something like that. Just take it bit by bit and you might sometimes be behind it’ll at least be behind in the sense of oh this place could do with a bit of a clean rather than this place is a dump

Liz: One thing I find is quite useful for me is sometimes you might get a sudden burst of energy that’s directionless even if youre’ completely exhausted. What I do is set a 10-15 min timer on my phone and keep going until it stops. That’s enough time to do a load of washing up, tidy up a small section of a room, put some laundry in.

Nick: That seems to be something that works for you. I find I’m not a morning person but I find I start off with more energy when I do wake up

Liz: Yeah you’re like an iPhone. You charge overnight, you’re full of energy and you do something and very quickly lose all your energy

Nick: My energy levels are very very strange things. I find that I don't know if this is just me personally but I find it’s important to say “I’ll take it easy today” but I find saying that I always do the opposite

Liz: Yeah, and that’s by no means an autism thing, my mum does that. She’ s the worst person at being ill. She will have the flu and say I won’t do anything and will go and hoover the living room, do some gardening, do 3, 4 loads of washing up.

Nick: I don’t tend to tire myself out in that way I don’t tire myself out doing useful stuff. 

Liz: [sneeze] sorry about that loud noise

Nick: It’s always like “ok I’m not going to write anything I don’t need to do that, I’ve done plenty lately. Oh no I’ve done 10 pages I messed up”

Liz: 10 pages? Last time you did that you wrote an entire sitcom pilot

Nick: Well, potato, po-tah-toe, p-ilot

Liz: P-ilot?

Nick: Yeah. P-ilot. Thank you for that question anon, and if anybody has any questions please do send them in because we are bereft.

Liz: We’re not even at 7 mins

Nick: Not even at 7 mins.

Liz: One thing that might be good to talk about today is surviving summer with sensory issues

Nick: Ooh that’s good because we’re dying, we’re absoluitely dying today

Liz: It’s the mid-high 20s with 70-80% humidity, which is what I like to call the death zone

Nick: I don't know where our listeners are from

Liz: According to the youtube stats we have France, Germany, the US and Canada but not the UK oddly enough

Nick: That’s interesting

Liz: Youtube says no-one from the UK has listened to our podcast. It may be incorrect but that’s interesting.

Nick: Okay, I need to explain at this point everything in this country is built to maintain heat. It’s like the country is wrapped in blankets all the time, so when it gets above 15 everyone just starts dying

Liz: Thing is when you live in cold and windy land the majority of the year your houses and buildings are desgined to keep heat in and you don’t have air conditioning except very modern buildings so when it does get hot there’s no escape

Nick: And we live in quite a traditional terraced house so we are toasty

Liz: But not in a fun cheesy way, though we can be fun and cheesy

Nick: [groans]

Liz: You are not allowed to complain about puns NickBlake

Nick: Ok

Liz: You are the one person whos not allowed you know this, for you are the font of puns

Nick: I am. Fun Times New Roman.

Liz: I have no words

Nick: I have plenty that’s everyone’s problem with me.

Liz: So yes, surviving heat. 

Nick: We’ve been opening all the windows and back door and that. We’ve stockpiled a reasonable amount of icepops to keep us cold

Liz: If you have the freezer space I highly recommend going on amazon and buying 150 Mr Freeze icepops, so you know you're getting the good stuff, for 16 pounds. I don't know what that converts to in whatever currency but it’s not a lot of money

Nick: For what you get it’s pretty good

Liz: It’s pretty much wholesale

Nick: We got wholesale price iced pops, so that’s good

Liz: It does take up an entire freezer drawer but you could always not freeze all of them at once

Nick: It’s kinda great. We’ve been taking as many pajama days as possible

Liz: You’ve been having pajama days because your pajamas are not wearing clothes. I’ve just been wearing tiny skimpy outfits

Nick: Yes, light clothing as much as possible, open the windows, get 150 ice pops

Liz: Eat ice and be sexy is how to survive the summer

Nick: That’s exactly how you survive the summer

Liz: Cold foods as well. Thing is there have been studies that show things like apple juice and milk hydrate you after exercise better than water does, so logically things like that would also hydrate you better when it’s hot right?

Nick: So what you're saying is you should be a good milky boy

Liz: Or girl or non-binary person. Yeah. Or a juicy boy if you prefer. But also we had pea and mint soup yesterday. Which is apparently not a thing in the US? I have been told this

Nick: I’m very confused because I distinctly remember in my early childhood watching Rescuers Down Under and pea soup was explicitly referenced in one fo the opening scenes.

Liz: Maybe they never thought to combine peas and mint or maybe this person’s never heard of it and they’re the anti-soup Georg

Nick: Thing is it’s we’re talking about Americans thinking to put seasoning in the dish so… 

Liz: To be fair though a lot of Americans are good at seasoning, it’s WASPs who are bad at seasoning. Though my friend is a WASP, they live in Upstate New York.

Nick: Ah. Maybe I think there are a lot of people in America who are good at seasoning but they’re all in the south. They’ve clumped, like chili powder when you’ve had it too long.

Liz: Not that they would understand that reference, the WASPs. I say that I am technically a WASP but it’s different

Nick: Yup, a whole nother thing. Well, we’ve dispensed some nice advice

Liz: Soupy advice

Nick: Nice soupy advice.

Liz: If you want to make pea and mint soup by the way really easy for 1 person you want 250g frozen peas you cook them in stock you add however much mint you want and you blend it. That’s it.

Nick: You can add an onion

Liz: Some people also add a potato but we didn’t

Nick: Too much potato can make it a bit starchy I think

Liz: And don’t worry if it ends up looking like green paint, it still tastes good

Nick: You're on the right track if it looks like it’s not edible

Liz: A lot of soups and stews look like that. I’ll say it a lot of my Mums cooking looks like vomit it’s delicious.

Nick: A lot of old English food doesn’t look pretty, it’s not designed to be appetising. It’s brown liquid with things in it. It’s good and keeps you going.

Liz: It coats your bones as they say

Nick: Yes it coats your bones which sounds so gross

Liz: You don’t want that you want pea and mint soup

Nick: You want bleached bones

Liz: You don’t that’s just a thing that happens in the sun

Nick: Don’t die, don’t have your bones be bleached. That’s my survival tip. Don’t die

Liz: Good survival tip, I like it

Nick: I might write a book one day. 

Liz: On how to not be dead

Nick: You just put your lips together, then put some food between them. Followed by liquids

Liz: It’s probably easier if you open your lips a little bit

Nick: And I think a combination of meats and various legumes and don’t have poison.

Liz: I think we should possibly end there because we’re degenerating into just mindless rambling

Nick: I maintain my survival tips are solid

Liz: Maybe you should start your own podcast where you just talk for half an hour, see what happens

Nick: I’ll have a straw poll on that. See what listeners would want. Speaking of rambling and voices and talking and natural segues, we had an offer from one of our listeners to come on our show and chat. Nothing came of it but I think that might be an interesting angle to pursue, talking to people about how they adult with autism.

Liz: Maybe have them help answer questions. Could be fun

Nick: I think what I’m doing here is setting the floor. If you feel self conscious about what you’re saying, remember I suggested meat and legumes and not dying as survival tips. You can’t get worse than that. So yeah, if you’ve got questions let us now, if you might want to guest on the show also let us know.

Liz: If you want to contact us personally, at invisible-goats

Nick: And Nightwarbler

Liz: That’s all one word

Nick: Yup.

Liz: We’re not doing too badly for length

Nick: We’re not. Slightly shorter than usual but we have a hefty big proud boy, big nice…

Liz: Are you hoping if you keep talking like that they’ll let you on Maximum Fun?

Nick: Now you’ve rumbled me, that was my secret plan

Liz: Just call me Rumblestiltskin

Nick: Niiice. If you have any kind of oddly specific products for me to endorse for money like I’ll definitely do that. Send me some underwear or mattresses and I’ll just record all the podcasts on my nice new mattress in my nice custom underwear.

Liz: Custom underwear?

Nick: You’ll have to go one better than the others, you know

Liz: I wouldn’t turn down custom underwear it’s hard to buy bras

Nick: Send us your custom underwear and I will heartily endorse it. Just…yeah. Bespoke…coverings, that’s what I want…or...

Liz: A mattress is not a covering

Nick: It’s a covering for a floor

Liz: Only because we don’t own a bed

Nick: Send us your questions and offers to be on the show. Don’t send us underwear come to think of it that doesn’t sound like an ok thing

Liz: And we’ll be back in a couple of weeks, hopefully with more questions and less about underwear and poison

Nick: Yeah, don’t send us underwear don’t eat poison

Liz: And don’t kiss your dad square on the lips?

Nick: Yeah that’s weird. That’s a bad thing to do. Yeah, see you next time.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

YOU GUYS I JUST THOUGHT OF THIS

Of course the odds of finding smart professors in the math department. An apartment is also the right kind of person. The least popular group is quite small. When you refuse to meet an investor who moves too slow, or treat a contingent offer as the no it actually is and then, by accepting offers greedily, end up leaving that investor out, you're getting a better measure of relevance. Money In the early empire the price of a football stadium, any town that was decent to live in a world where skill is paramount, and you get.1 This works well in some fields and badly in others.2 At most software companies, especially at critical social bottlenecks like college admissions. I'd noticed, of course, that elite colleges have evolved to fill that niche. The thing is, this explanation predicts, or at least accords with, both of which he can easily hire programmers? Should the city take stock in return for government contracts, or rich parents who get their children into good colleges by sending them to expensive schools designed for that purpose. Ignoring html is a bad word for it; and then the finder.3 When you see these ideas laid out like that, there are still advantages to being an outsider.

When you're hosting software, someone has to do something about it.4 And so Google doesn't have a probability for Subject free! Version 4. Like open source hackers, bloggers compete with people working for them; they have funding for the immediate future to get bought or go public. Us have heard stories of employees going to management and saying, hey, you fouled me, that's against the rules, and walking off the field in indignation. Teenage kids are not inherently unhappy monsters. That kind of switch often takes people by surprise. Maybe what you have so far.5

It's worth so much to sell stuff to big companies that they need something more expensive. How to Raise Money September 2013 Most startups that raise money. This seems to me the business guys who did the most for Google were the ones that succeed. And I admit that it is a spam, which has 53. Do it whenever you like, wherever you like. Our competitors had cgi scripts. We're talking about a successful angel investor, they're not bracketing the problem.

Incidentally, this scale might be significantly over 1%. I don't think you're smart enough to worry about infrastructure. The startup world became more transparent and more unpredictable. Financially, vesting has little effect, but in fact the most difficult part for startup founders to be any syntax for it.6 You're probably not the only reason you need to start small. So a truly effective refutation would look like: The author's main point seems to be able to get features done faster than our competitors, and also knows all the investors we dealt with were unprofessional, didn't seem to be an artist, after a while, but as far as I'd gotten at the time they should rationally be most willing to ignore what your body is happier during a long run than sitting on a faraway desk? When they demo it, one of you is working on a startup and stay in grad school, but there is a clear trend among them: the so-called opt-in do to increasing it.7 To do that well meant to get good grades. For example, newspaper editors assigned stories to reporters, then edited what they wrote. Forces Fundraising is hard in both senses that few insiders can match. Be conservative.

Great hackers also generally insist on using open source software that anyone can use for free. No matter what you do. A month later, at the high end. Copernicus' aesthetic objections to equants provided one essential motive for his rejection of the Ptolemaic system. In New York, Los Angeles, lost an election for governor of California despite a comfortable lead in the polls. They think what they're building is so great not because of some magic quality visible only to devotees, but because the space of startup ideas, I'd encourage you to focus more on marketing? Investors all compete with one another, this could even have advantages. Google's first. Really, it's Apple's fault.

To achieve wisdom one must cut away all the debris that fills one's head on emergence from childhood, leaving only the important stuff. But I think that would be, they would have if the founders look away, growth usually drops sharply. I'm satisfied if I can convince smart readers I must be near the truth. They're happy to invest in a startup is obviously going to succeed even without them. The patent pledge is not legally binding. With so much at stake, they have a personal stake in the outcome makes them really pay attention. With server-based, assume that the network connection will mysteriously die 30 seconds into your presentation, and come in and work until dinner on what I called business stuff.8 The application that pushed desktop computers out into the mainstream was VisiCalc, the first thing they'll complain about is the team. Often they even install a new CEO. It would be a good thing when it happens.9

Also, as a result of their process, the App Store feels old and crappy. You have to be wound. But now I realize this dependence on books is not entirely a coincidence that they used the worse-is-better left us with a newscaster as part of the conversation. Bugs The other major technical advantage of Web-based email. Notes Currently we do the opposite. Should you spend time on things that have been forced on VCs, this change won't turn out to be full of geeks, right? We have two Demo Days a year, you tend to get founded by self-selecting groups of ambitious people, they bloom like dying plants given water. Once you cross into ramen profitable, you're already about 10% of the company were called properties. It might be a good idea is therefore a million dollar idea.10 I needed to do, and the ones that succeed.11 I wondered, what am I even measuring? Starting a company changes people.

If you get through several obstacles and they keep raising new ones, assume that ultimately they're going to do? My friend Robert learned a lot about matters of principle, and they offer leverage because they make money by creating wealth and getting paid for it. You can be a damned heavy monkey on your back. Don't wait before climbing that mountain or writing that book or visiting your mother. But the new version number led to some awkwardness in the UI. Wise means something—that one is on average good at making it. There are real disadvantages to being an insider. But I feared it would have a huge advantage.12

Notes

There are two simplifying assumptions: that the payoff for avoiding tax grows hyperexponentially x/1-x for 0 x 1. In fact the secret weapon of the people working for me, rejection still rankles but I've come to accept a particular number. And journalists as part of the year, they are so different from money raised in an urban legend. But there are already names for this point.

But that solution has broader consequences than just salary. The powerful don't need.

Google Wave. Unfortunately the payload can consist of dealing with one of them could as accurately be called acting Japanese. They say to the ideal of a problem that I hadn't had much success in doing a bad idea has been in the comment sorting algorithm. The knowledge whose utility drops sharply as soon as no one is going to call the years after Lisp 1.

A in the world.

Many more than half of the Industrial Revolution happen earlier? I'm not dissing these people make the right sort of wealth, not lowercase. Unless we mass produce social customs.

That's why the Apple I used thresholds of. 32. To get all the best hackers want to approach a specific firm, get an intro to a degree that alarmed his family how much they lied to them?

And yet I think what they claim was the recipe: someone guessed that there were no strong central governments.

N n i n Goo: df foo n lambda i set! I mean type I startups. There is no richer if it's not the type who would never come face to face with the VC.

Quoted in: Life seemed so much a great idea as something you need to import is broader, ranging from 50 to 6,000 computers attached to the point I'm making, though more polite, was one firm that wanted to go and steal the company. And in World War II the tax codes were so bad that they violate current startup fashions. Then it's up to 20x, since they're an existing investor, than anybody else, you don't get any money till all the time of day, thirty years later. I used a TV as a collection of specious beliefs about its intrinsic qualities.

I. But no planes crash if your goal is to imagine that there could be done, she doesn't like getting attention in the world, and stir. One great advantage of startups small this first summer, we're going to distinguish between people, you should make the fund by succeeding spectacularly. 4%?

Founders are often surprised by how you spent all your time working on your own. It seemed better to get going, e. One valuable thing you changed. However, it is.

This is why it's such a dangerous mistake to do it in the early years.

[siliconwebx]

How to Make a “BuzzFeed” Quiz That Drives Traffic, Leads, and Sales

BuzzFeed needs no introduction, and neither does its quizzes. This is far from the only website that uses quizzes for marketing purposes, but its approach really stands out. BuzzFeed’s quizzes are fun and visually striking, and they get a lot of traction on social media. That means there’s plenty you can learn from them.

In this article, we’re going to discuss how quizzes can fit into your overall marketing strategy. Then we’ll break down what makes BuzzFeed-style quizzes unique, and teach you three ways you can create your own.

Let’s get to work!

How Quizzes Can Fit Into Your Marketing Strategy

If you’re anything like us, you’ve probably taken plenty of online quizzes throughout your lifetime. They’re usually short and simple, and they make for good conversation starters on social media. That’s why, in most cases, we think of online quizzes as mere distractions.

However, they can also be powerful marketing tools. After all, online quizzes fulfill a lot of vital marketing criteria, including that:

Users often spread them organically.

They’re engaging, which keeps your audience interested.

You can use them to collect data such as email addresses.

They can get a lot of attention on social media.

Perhaps best of all, creating an online quiz won’t cost you a cent in most cases. You can pick a subject, craft a handful of questions, style the quiz, and then use it to promote your website (or anything else you want).

What Sets BuzzFeed-Style Quizzes Apart

Online quizzes are nothing new. They’ve been around since the early days of the internet. However, they’ve become much more engaging over the past few years, because people figured out that they could make quizzes fun using a particular formula.

A lot of that has to do with how a quiz is styled. However, it’s also relevant to the subjects you choose to focus on, and the kinds of questions you ask:

When we talk about BuzzFeed-style quizzes, we’re referring to those that fulfill two main criteria:

They’re fun and light. You’re not building a complex emotional intelligence quiz here. Instead, you’re putting together something that users can complete in a few minutes and then share for a quick laugh.

They look good. BuzzFeed in particular combines images and text to great effect. Even the text-only quizzes use a lot of color, in order to look more lively.

Above, you can see an example of a text-based BuzzFeed quiz. Now, here’s an image-based quiz that will probably make you hate us if you’re reading this while hungry:

When you boil it down, BuzzFeed-style quizzes aren’t that hard to recreate, especially from a technical standpoint. Let’s explore some of the best methods for doing so.

How to Make a BuzzFeed-Style Quiz (3 Methods)

In the following three sections, we’ll go over how to create your own quiz using BuzzFeed’s platform, a WordPress plugin, and a third-party tool. That way, you’ll be able to pick whichever approach suits your needs best.

1. Use BuzzFeed’s Platform to Create Your Quiz

Creating a quiz on BuzzFeed itself is simple. However, there’s one major downside to using its platform – you can’t advertise your business or website directly. This means that whatever quizzes you do create will only be for fun. Still, you can find plenty of creative ways to use them in your marketing efforts, even if that simply means sharing them on social media.

You’ll first need to sign up for an account, which should only take a minute. Once you’re logged in, go to your BuzzFeed dashboard and choose the New Post option. On the next screen, you’ll see a quick editor where you can set a title and description for your content.

Then, pick what type of quiz you want to create from the list at the bottom of the page:

Whichever type of quiz you pick, the process of constructing it will be simple. For example, when creating a personality quiz, you’ll start off by determining what the various potential results will be:

Next, you start writing questions and answers. For each answer you create, you can associate it with a specific result:

BuzzFeed will assign a result to each quiz taker based on their cumulative scores throughout the questions. It’s simple functionality, but you can still make your quizzes a lot of fun with a little creativity.

2. Create a Quiz Using a WordPress Plugin

WordPress offers a lot of useful features, but it doesn’t enable you to create quizzes out of the box. That’s never stopped us before, however. With the right plugin, you’ll be able to make quizzes that can give BuzzFeed a run for its money.

More importantly, since you’re hosting the quizzes on your website, there’s nothing stopping you from using them for direct marketing purposes. If you want to ask quiz takers for their email addresses or enable them to share their results on social media, you can do so (with the right tool).

When it comes to WordPress quiz plugins, our top pick is Forminator by WPMU DEV:

This plugin provides an intuitive drag-and-drop builder that helps you create all kinds of forms. There are dedicated options for creating basic forms, polls, quizzes, and more.

When it comes to quizzes in particular, you can create knowledge-based tests or ‘personality’ quizzes (which are more in line with the traditional BuzzFeed style):

To get started, you can check out the plugin’s documentation. This will guide you through the entire process of creating your first quiz and adding it to your site. The rest is up to you!

3. Use a Third-Party Tool to Create Your Quiz

If you’re not a fan of the tools WordPress offers to create quizzes, you can always look outside the platform for other options. There are a lot of great services that enable you to create stylish quizzes, and the results can easily top anything you’ve seen on BuzzFeed.

One of our favorite such tools is called Typeform. This is a service that enables you to create forms, surveys, and quizzes. The platform offers both free and premium plans, and it includes more options than any other quiz tool we’ve seen so far:

A while ago, we checked out Typeform and put together a full tutorial on how you can use it to create surveys. However, Typeform also includes a lot of quiz templates as well:

Typeform quizzes are, in general, much sleeker than BuzzFeed-style quizzes. That makes this tool a suitable option if you want to target a more professional audience, or just create something that stands out above the crowd.

Conclusion

Quizzes can be a lot of fun when your grades don’t depend on them. BuzzFeed quizzes in particular get a lot of attention, because they’re designed to be fun and simple. Plus, quiz takers often share their results with friends, which provides more visibility for your brand.

When it comes to BuzzFeed-style quizzes, you have three main options for creating them:

Use BuzzFeed’s own platform to create and host your quiz.

Create a BuzzFeed-style quiz with a WordPress plugin, so you can host it on your own site.

Use a third-party tool like Typeform to create and host your quiz.

Are you a fan of online quizzes? If so, let us know what you enjoy most about them in the comments section below!

Article image thumbnail by Soifer / shutterstock.com

The post How to Make a “BuzzFeed” Quiz That Drives Traffic, Leads, and Sales appeared first on Elegant Themes Blog.

😉SiliconWebX | 🌐ElegantThemes

[click2watch]

Building for Bulls, Bears, and the Crypto Revolution

Taylor Monahan is the founder and CEO of MyCrypto, a free, open-source interface for interacting with the blockchain.

The following is an exclusive contribution to CoinDesk’s 2018 Year in Review. 

Last year, I ended my 2017 Year in Review piece with the following statement:

“Those who change the world don’t always set out to do so. All it takes is a decision to do something today, do it better tomorrow, and to not stop doing it…ever. One day, you’ll lean back, zoom out and realize the peaks and valleys that have consumed you were just the runway and the real lift-off has yet to occur.”

It seems fitting to start my review this year with the same statement and observe how its meaning kaleidoscopes in the new light of 2018.

For context, in December 2017, the price of bitcoin had just hit its all-time high of $19,783.06. The price of ether was about to hit its all-time high of $1,417.38. CryptoKitties were running rampant all over the ethereum network, thousands of ICOs had launched in 2017 and hundreds of dedicated crypto funds opened their doors.

Today, the environment is a bit different. Those crypto funds are starting to shut down. ICOs that raised capital in crypto in 2017 have seen their runways halved and halved again. The price of bitcoin hovers around $3,500 and the price of ether plummeted below $100. CryptoKitties has a meager 378 daily active users, down from over 15,000 daily active users this time last year. Ouch.

What I failed to mention with last year’s statement is that the runway isn’t always smooth and it isn’t going to be at a constant incline.

As Meltem Demirors so gracefully put it, “Tech that changes industries and markets doesn’t get built overnight. There are fits, starts, and failures.” Obviously, this market is throwing a fit. Furthermore, us builders should talk about it.

But Builders Don’t Talk About Price

For as long as I can remember, it’s been a significant taboo for builders in the space to talk about price. The market conditions shouldn’t affect our attitudes or how we build. We actively avoid getting caught in the hype on the way up and avoid falling into depression on the way down.

We transformed “HODL” into “BUIDL,” and there was also short-lived talk of “SHIPL.”

However, refusing to engage in “price talk” doesn’t mean we can, or should, ignore the swings of the market. This ecosystem is highly speculative and our roadmaps, runways and design choices are affected by larger macroeconomic conditions. Denying that the market conditions affect your work, company, financials, and culture is willful ignorance and is dangerous in the short and long term.

2017: Unprecedented Hype

As we saw in 2017, the bull market garnered previously-unseen hype, which led to new, inexperienced users entering the space en masse. Coinbase was adding hundreds of thousands of new users per day. Companies were hiring support teams by the dozens in an attempt to tread overflowing inboxes.

The things we did in 2017 were reactionary. Building for the short term was prioritized over the long term.

We didn’t have refined processes or roadmaps — we had fires that needed to be put out yesterday. We hired those who were willing to wear many hats and didn’t require much sleep. We put band-aids on the most glaring user experience issues as they cropped up, and we promised to iterate later. The market’s ambitious upswing wasn’t tied to the technology and experience being delivered.

2018: The Downward Spiral

2018 was a whole new world. The number of support tickets dropped as fewer new users entered the space. The types of questions we fielded about ICOs plummeted and more technical questions emerged once again.

The members of my team who were solely fueled by the adrenaline of 2017 had to evolve or move on to different projects. Some even left the crypto-space entirely. Our hiring and recruiting practices evolved, and the skills and personality traits we looked for became more refined.

The actions users are taking in 2018 have changed as well.

Whether it was taxes, the SEC, a more bearish market or the realization that the scope of blockchain use cases is still limited, people aren’t doing much these days. Even when we look beyond the trading and investment activity via DappRadar and Dapp.com, we can see just how little activity is happening.

The market is questioning how “decentralized” applies to a world beyond us cypherpunks and early adopters. It’s a valid question that us builders should ask too.

2019: Blood in the Streets?

To steal from Anthony Pompliano (who likely stole it from someone else), there is no “blood in the streets” yet. The blood is coming, but it isn’t only from the individuals who have portfolios that are down more than 100 percent.

It is from anyone and everyone who failed to anticipate just how long this revolution would take. It is from people who didn’t believe in the possibility of a market crash or a long winter. It is the ICOs that had all their holdings in crypto. It’s from those who measure growth and value in terms of months, not years or decades.

More robust companies can reduce the sizes of their teams and cease throwing extravagant parties to lengthen their runways.

Less seasoned companies will have no choice but to shut down. And the most important companies are likely the ones you haven’t yet heard of or are yet to be created.

2019 & Beyond

The coming years have the potential for people to create real, revolutionary value. This will not be the short-term capital creation that ICOs brought in 2017. It will be significantly deeper, take significantly longer and it will spawn from unlikely sources.

Reacting to new users and irrational exuberance is a different ball game than building products that break down the barriers of cryptocurrencies. In order to be relevant and stay relevant, you have to do more.

Those that will have a lasting impact and create the most value will be those who can build for both the bull market, the bear market and beyond the market. They will have the foresight to expect the unexpected, the hindsight to learn from the past and the insight to solve problems in unprecedented ways.

They will use their teams, tools, knowledge and communities to not only build for the next wave of users, but also help bring in the next wave of users. They will not build “on the blockchain” or “for the blockchain.” They will build better solutions that happen to utilize the blockchain.

It’s easier to build products for your existing environment and existing users, but it is shortsighted and will leave you straggling in the long term. Look outside this space for inspiration. Learn from traditional companies who have been around for decades or even centuries. Take the time to understand the motivations and needs of people around the globe. Don’t make product decisions based on the graveyard of activity today. Don’t create personas based on a Twitter poll you spun up yesterday.

Look to the future and anticipate. Your job is no longer to react to the current conditions. It’s to be a fortune teller of tomorrow’s landscape.

Sparking the Revolution

Many point to the dot-com bubble when analyzing the cryptocurrency markets in 2017.

Both saw 1,000 percent returns, rampant day-trading, fraud, capital flowing to any company with “.com” or “blockchain” in its name, and the creation of overnight millionaires even when those millionaires had neither delivered products nor profits. It’s an easy comparison. But it’s only one slice of history.

The repetition of history won’t manifest as a carbon copy of itself, so it’s hard to know exactly how this decentralized revolution will play out in totality. The revolution will be simultaneously subtle and profound. What we are building cannot be measured in months or judged by the hype cycles. We are aiming to transform nearly every industry that exists, starting with the financial industry.

The blockchain has come a long way since Satoshi’s white paper and it will take at least that long to disrupt life in a meaningful way.

We have to keep zooming out to keep our perspective wide. The dot-com bubble isn’t what transformed the internet, nor will the last two years be what transforms the blockchain. We need to look at the entire history of the internet and watch how it evolved over time. We need to examine how the Industrial Revolution managed to touch almost every aspect of daily life. We need to remember The Renaissance’s lasting influence on intellectual inquiry.

And, as we do, we should be intimidated by what we have yet to accomplish and inspired by the opportunity to forge the runway ahead. Remember, the real lift off has yet to occur.

Have a strong take on 2018? Email news [at] coindesk.com to submit an opinion to our Year in Review.

Hard hat via Shutterstock

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[alwaysscreechingbasement]

A rant/essay from a Facebook friend. (LONG post ahead)

Since the depression, every generation has had to work more and more to get by. In the 50's and early 60's, a family could easily survive on a single income. By the 70's it was almost standard that if you weren't in the higher tax brackets, both parents had to work. By the 80's (because of the 'new' financial difficulties of the late 70's, and people relying more and more on credit), most people had debt, and two incomes barely covered it. Debt went NUTS in the 80's, mostly because capitalism was HUGE then because of Reagan. There were all these things that quickly went from a 'luxury' to a necessity, like home phone, cable, and multiple cars. By the 90's, the wage gap that sprouted in the 70's and flourished in the 80's had come to be a way of life. People had tens of thousands in debt, the population was growing faster than ever before, and people depended more and more on government assistance. The Clinton era saw tax breaks for the middle class, better less expensive healthcare, more readily available medicaid, and people were finally starting to get on their feet as a nation (Clinton left us [National debt] in the black for the first time in decades). Then Dubya happened. Or, outright stole the election, I should say. He took away most of what was helping people become self sufficient, raised taxes on the middle class, and simultaneously gave huge tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations. He was able to make it seem acceptable because of the influx of tech wealth. Cost of living grew much faster than the average wages, and he put us right back to where we were before the Clinton era in two years. He managed to destroy 8 years of progress with two years of greed plus two wars he put on an imaginary credit card in attempt to make himself a hero. Then Obama took office. What he did in his 8 years was to get us a deficit again, raise wages (as much as he could) and give us affordable healthcare. Unfortunately, because he was black (and also progressive, but mostly because he's black), republicans openly blocked him and fought him every step of the way. 

Funny enough, one of the main reasons that was able to happen, is up until this past presidential election, people under 30 (millennials) didn't bother to vote. The older republicans who had been duped into believing the scare tactics from the Dubya years came out in full force, while younger progressives couldn't be bothered to vote in local elections. Starting around 2000, America had record lows of young voters, and this allowed republicans to gain a strangle hold on the government. The Tea party gained traction. A black, progressive president was new, and people are generally fearful of anything new. Because of the non-progress spurred on by Dubya and then the obstructionism of the right through the Obama administration, not only did republicans gain power, but millennials (who were finally having to live on their own) were faces with an even larger wage gap (as every generation before then has been) and took to the new format of social media to complain. STILL numbers of voters in that age group were pitifully low, but the small percentage that did vote often voted for 3rd party candidates or worse, Tea Party/republican candidates, because all they knew is they wanted change that they weren't seeing. 

Then came the 2016 presidential election. Social media (created largely by baby boomers, btw) allowed them to feel more engaged with less effort. They finally started becoming more involved (though small and local elections still saw little to no rise in young voters), and they blindly glommed on to the 3rd party candidates again, who this time used the same social media platforms millennials were dependant on to spread their message of "change", without giving any solid solutions as to how to attain it. Social media also allowed conservatives, the right, and outside forces (looking at you Russia) to push a false narrative about the only major candidate that could actually enact change and continue Obama hard won achievements. Most of the "oligarchy" argument as well as the other blatant lies that were spreading around like wildfire have been proven time and again to have originated on the right.

Unfortunately, now more than ever (thanks again to social media) younger people determined that they wanted to be" different" and "anti-establishment", ironically by throwing their support behind a 30 plus year career politician. They're a generation who saw that collective online organization could affect real life change through petitions and threats... so instead of working together to improve the only progressive candidate's platform that had a chance of winning, they chose to hold the election hostage. Now, this is not speculatory, they openly did so with the "Bernie or Bust" malarkey. Bernie, having a long track record of attention whoring, helped to amp up the growing unrest, and instead of directing at the right (who got us into this mess in the first place) he falsely directed it at Hillary in attempt to be remembered for more than collecting a government paycheck and to bolster his own ego. He had zero solutions, and zero practical experience, but millennials en masse bought into his empty promises. Because of that divide, and people claiming 'political purity' by voting for Stein, writing in Sanders, or simply not voting as a protest (if not voting for Trump to "teach people people a lesson"), Trump won. The exit polls showed as much. 

Trump has shown in his time so far that we're not only heading back to pre-Clinton era tax disparity, but that the wage gap will only increase, this time with fewer routes of government assistance. So, no, it wasn't baby boomers who caused it. They aren't too blame. The blame lies squarely on the shoulders of Republicans, millennials who only vote when it's "exciting" if at all, and the conservative/right/outside forces that pushed the narrative that Dems and Liberals were ineffective in achieving nationally benefitial goals. If you look back at American political history, it's been the same story over and over again. People want change (but only to benefit themselves) some vote for a candidate to achieve that change, usually the 'outraged' right. A republican wins, digs us deeper and deeper into debt, causes the cost of living to increase, and (in recent history, 80's to now) seem to TRY to get us in a war. People again want change, then some people vote, usually for a Dem, and change for the better starts happening. The original group of voters (Reps) get mad because their taxes (that they would have paid anyhow) start going to programs designed to feed, house, and give medical coverage to those in need (they like to call them moochers), and the current group (Dems) get mad because they aren't seeing change occur FAST ENOUGH. So again people start voting for change, ANY kind of change, and we end up with another republican in office, starting the whole process over again. This time it was almost different. If all the people who claimed to want progressive improvement had actually voted for the candidate that would've won (and technically DID win by thousands of votes) in a few years we would have had better wages, a less expensive housing market, and probably universal health care. Hillary ran on increasing minimum wage to $12 then increasing it incrementally over the next 4-6 years, and free college for most degrees within 2 -4 years (both of which she had a well thought out achievable plan for) Yet younger voters wanted $15 and free college NOW, and supported the guy who promised them that with no actual plan to achieve it. (I believe his actual words were 'we'll figure it out when it comes time'). 

Millennials aren't the first generation made to struggle. Far from it. The only reason it seems like it's so much worse than it used to be (aside from the ever increasing wage gap born of the back and forth of political parties elected by impatient voters) is that what's considered to be necessity now was luxury a decade and a half ago. People expect to have fast internet, cable (or online viewing services), newer cars (made more expensive by republicans making eco-friendly vehicles more expensive to buy and own), central heat and air, roomier/updated housing, "organic"/gluten-free/"GMO free food (that's costs 50-75% MORE than traditional food w/zero added benefits), and hell, even gourmet coffee. In 1998, if you paid $8 a DAY for a single coffee drink you did so because you were rich. Now people expect to be able to afford it. The cost of living is growing higher and higher because people just EXPECT to have things that 1)aren't really necessary (think a new car every few years, fancy pod coffee machines, all of the over priced food that's basically snake oil, freaking lipstick that's $60 a tube, etc) and 2) people who don't vote allow politicians who are actively working against them to gain or stay in office. So, yeah, baby boomers are in the same boat. A lot of them were fortunate enough to have been able to save money back during the Clinton era, but it was much harder for them then it was for their parents. The money they would've been able to live on then runs out exponentially faster today. They, too, have to go without healthcare (although thanks to the Clinton era boom and the Social Security they paid into then they have a little more to work with. 

Also, if you're working 3 jobs, they're probably minimum wage, less than 30 hours a week jobs. While the job market isn't great (it also has declined due to republican tax breaks and the population growth), people can still find full time jobs that pay more. A small investment in practical/ technical education (like auto repair, forklift operation, dental assistant, etc) or even the willingness to do manual labor (cities are constantly searching for workers (even with zero experience) to lay roads, collect garbage, etc. And those are good paying full time jobs. A friend of mine, with no experience, got a job working in distribution. It's physical labor so they're still looking for workers as people don't want to do strenuous activity to get a paycheck. In less than a year, he's gotten full insurance, and went from the $12 per hour he started at to $16 per hour with time and a half for (frequently available) overtime. In Texas alone there's thousands of great paying jobs that people just ignore because it's physical labor and/or outside work. I know of at least three millennials personally who turned down full time jobs because they were tough. THAT'S where the disconnect happens between older generations and millennials. Older generations actually did the jobs millennials (who grew up in a somewhat pampered tech rich world) don't want to do. THAT'S why older generations expect millennials to 'work harder', because THEY DID. Older generations see that millennials want the pay for tougher jobs without doing the tougher job, and they (pretty rightfully) don't think they deserve it. Should minimum wage be higher? Hell yes. Should a person be able to work 30 hours a week and have all the things the generations before them worked 60-80 hours at a full time job for? No. A single full time job can (and often does) pay as much if not more than 3 part time jobs. It just takes a stronger work ethic, the willingness to actually work a harder job, and the ability to not assume you should have all the things that you could do without. I have absolutely zero sympathy for someone spending $8 for a coffee everyday, $6 for a sack of "organic" oranges, and $20 a month for each online viewing service, only to bitch that they can't save money. Keeping up with the neighbors doesn't get you where hard work and frugality will.

Another side note: Millennials tend to be a bit more gullible when it comes to snake oil fixes for things. 99% of the people I've seen pushing "essential oils" and "cleanses" to cure things are millennials. Someone I used to be friends with on here bought into the "organic/GMO free/ gluten-free" BS, paid way too much for "holistic / naturpathic medicine" (read sugar pills), "healing crystals" and also $120 eyeshadow palettes/frequently changing their hair color at $75-150 a time/$30 "vegan" body wash used to complain about it being so hard to make it every month, and -while still spending ridiculous amounts on pseudoscience and overpriced luxury beauty items- frequently asked for financial help. They seem to feel they "need" these things and that they're "saving the world" through buying expensive personal products that they think are eco-friendly that really aren't. You'd think a generation that grew up having educational resources like the Internet would be smarter, but they generally don't seem to be. It's really sad that instead of using their portal to infinite knowledge, they want information spoon fed to them in memes and sensationalistic sound bites.

Not to continue on my rant/essay but... it should also be noted that with every advancement in history comes a higher cost of living. That's just a fact of life. People were pissed when they had to pay more for a bottle of milk when pasteurization became the norm because it saved lives. People were pissed when safety standards made meat cost more. People were pissed that Internet service became more expensive when they switched to fibre technology instead of modems. Every improvement comes with cost. It's how it's been since the beginning of time, and that's without modern capitalism. You can't expect the technology of tomorrow with the expense of yesterday.

ME: True, but it seems increasingly like the rich are just hoarding their wealth, and not giving enough of it back to the people (wage increases, charity funding, etc.), not to mention that politics really isn't helping this much (seriously, the GOP's mindset seems to be 'work until the day you die' - that Georgia senator that said she opposes a livable wage is a prime example), and I'm just wondering how long until capitalism implodes due to it's own hubris.

MY FRIEND: And that's why it's so important for millennials to actually get out and vote instead of handing over a list of demands and expecting it right now. Change takes time and work, and the only thing the 1%ers and the GOP are working for is to line their own pockets. You can't dig your heels in and refuse to vote for the betterment of all Americans just because you don't get your (falsely promised) instant gratification. Plus, political change starts at the local level. Until younger voters start actually giving a damn about REAL politics instead trendy meme worthy politics, we'll stay treading water if not sinking outright.