#there was also a time on here i saw some like. giffed graphs that had a bunch of people in the notes going

[coquelicoq]

i love when i see an explanation for something i already know how to do that makes me go "hot damn i sure am glad i already know how to do this because if this was the first i was hearing of it, not only would this not help me learn, it would scare me off from ever trying"

[randomestpersononearth]

Hey hey HEYYYYYYY it's 2022 Nanbaka Survey Results Time!!!

No I have not forgotten about the survey, I have just been quite busy in reality land. Today we are going to break down some of the data I collected over the past 2 months!!!

First things first, WE HAD PARTICIPATION. Like 95 people summited there info in contrast to the 30 ish people who submitted last year!! The main reason is probably because I had more connections, but I am still gooped gabed and gobsmacked at the amount of people who participated this year!!!

Also, in this year's survey, I got a bit more personal! For example, the who's your favorite character and how far are you in the manga questions, which I will elaborate more on when it is their time to shine!

Question 1: What's your Name? (Optional)

Um I ask this question to just so I know names and I feel like there is actual people doing the survey, I don't really need to, and it's just a thing I like. I'm not going to name any names here, but y'all have cute names, and ❤️I love all you❤️. Platonically.

Question 2: Which of these is you?

This is the gay measurement, Nanbaka is a gay anime, and I want to see the gayness of the fandom. Me myself, I am pansexual, and it's just a thing. Normally, I would screenshot the actual graph that Google created, but I made a giant mistake. I forgot to put gay/lesbian on the survey, and I ended up adding it later, in the middle of the time. So I'm just going to just type out all of the data as follows.

Pansexual: 14 people (14.7%)

Bisexual: 29 people (30.5%)

Asexual: 26 people (27.4%)

Non Binary: 16 people (16.8%)

Transgender: 14 people (14.7%)

Cisgender: 13 people (13.7%)

Gay/Lesbian: 12 people (13.2%)

Straight: 10 people (10.6%)

General Queer: 1 person (1.1%)

Aromantic: 4 people (4.4%)

Demiromantic: 1 person (1.1%)

Unlabeled: 1 person (1.1%)

Questioning: 3 people (3.3%)

Bioromantic: 2 people (2.2%)

Hetromantic on the Ace Spectrum: 1 person (1.1%)

Genderfluid: 4 people (4.4%)

Genderqueer Polysexual: 1 person (1.1%)

Omisexual: 1 person (1.1%)

Alrighty, so there is the data, but I am going to shout out specific hand typed answers that I thought where just great.

"Those straight people who think anime women are hot." (Incredibly Valid)

And the response that reminded me I forgot gay

"gay. Y'all forgot gay."

Question 3: How did you find out about Nanbaka?

Alrighty so since Google is being a poopy face, I will rewrite the longer answers.

A gif of it from Tumblr lead me to check it out

Saw a friend get into it 5 years ago, so I got into it too

YouTube recommendations wouldn't stop showing EP 1 of Nanbaka on my recommended feed

Mi mi mi amv

I saw it on an ad while watching something else

I saw a fan made video on YouTube recommended

A Facebook page

Quite honestly I forgot how I found it.

YouTube is putting in the work and effort, to bring people here which is stunning, I'm glad that everyone has their own journey and good for y'all.

Question 4: How do you enjoy this Magical Mystery Ride?

A simple one. It is so nice to just screenshot it and not have to deal with all of the extra stuff, and re type everything.

This question correlates with another question down the road but we will get there.

Question 5: Who is your Favorite Character?

We have lots of non choosers. This is what happens when the character creation is so good, that it is almost impossible to choose. Also we have a few "I can't choose one so I will choose multiple" which is also incredibly valid.

Alrighty 5 minutes later, I now have a list! Now I will type out the list so y'all can read it better.

Enki: 1

Rock: 6

Jyugo: 20

Nico: 15

Uno: 19

Momoko: 3

Samon: 13

Qi: 3

Kiji: 2

Elf: 1

Liang: 5

Musashi: 5

Korjio: 5

Mei: 4

Ikkaku: 2

Tskuamo: 3 (still can not spell his name)

Honey: 3

Inori: 1

Building 5 in general: 1

Yamato: 1

Taura and Tauro Twisters: 1

Hitoshi: 1

Mikazuki: 1

Can't choose: 5

Zakuro: 2

Shiro: 1

Hajime: 3

Misturu: 2

Ido: 1

Shin: 3

Upa: 2

V: 1

Trois: 1

Kenshiro: 2

Ishal: 1

Yamada: 2

Blank?: 1

Kyuubi: 2

Mao: 1

Tengu: 1

Hina: 1

Five more minutes later, I have completed that list!!! I am surprised that there is so much underated character representation, and we stan. Also everybody love love loves Jyugo and I love that.

Question 6: How far are you in the series?

I asked the question for one reason and one reason only, to give people the resources so they can CONTINUE TO SUPPORT THE SERIES. and get to know all of the characters. Since Pocket comics is not working out so well for Nanbaka, I will give some Sho approved resources so your can read it in English and/or truck through it in Japanese. (Because that's pretty much what I do since not all of the manga is translated. You just gotta pretend you know what's going on.)

So there are some main categories for people in the survey,

1. The people who just watched the anime to the end.

If you feel content that's awesome, but also resources.

2. People who have felt the magic disappear, and where just done. (They don't truly have any interest in reading further)

Cool beans.

3. People who are stuck on 192.

It is the dreaded number of doom. It the last chapter available "illegally" on the internet, and is the last chapter formated by the legendary sleepykat.

4. People who have read what has been translated.

5. The people who have read all of the manga with or without translation. (Translation: they can read Japanese or can just suck it up like me)

So here are my resources, the "legal" ones.

The first one is the legendary Sleepykats blog : @when-will-i-sleep

This will get you to chapter 193-198. She also explains how to get into comico, which I will not be explaining because I'm surprised I did it myself.

Here is the Nanbaka Comico Page, where you will find Nanbaka in it's raw, uncut form. Yes! You will have to watch a bunch of stupid videos, play silly applications, or invest your own money into this! It is an investment! Because this is Sho Futamata's LIVELYHOOD. She lives, laughs, loves, off of this, so no complaining!

https://comico.jp/comic/27

This is the random word document that has all of the chapters from when sleepykat stopped, to chapter 333. Pretty legit.

https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/mobile/folders/1-oUcoitDKmeU5RxgLz_8eskOgN8bREo6

And that is all I can do. I can not translate any of the further chapters, due to my inability to speak Japanese, I cant do anything. If I find anymore resources, I will try my best to give them out, but Nanbaka is kinda on it's way out, so hopefully there is a new titan of translation. But for now there is not.

Question 7: Age Range!!

Another simple one!!

MMMMMMM pie graph.

Well, I hope that all of you feel enlightened and full of information about the lovely fandom that we have!! I would usually connect data, but this post is super long, so I'm just going to end it! I hope all of you have a great day, and stay stunnnnniiinnnggg✨✨✨

[marvxlousqueen]

Warren Worthington- Amnesia

word count: 2.5 K!! (longest thing i’ve written lately!)

warnings: cussing, gets a little angsty boys!!

A/N: this idea came to me when i was bopping to my tb playlist and amnesia by 5sos came on so yeah get ready bc this gets angsty !!! 

also yes its a roger gif bc warren has zero fucking screen time and im out of gifs

(Y/n)’s eyes were glued to his face, watching his lips part as if to make sure he continued to breathe as normal. Warren had taken a hard fall on their last rescue mission. This was his second day of being unconscious, but Hank assured (Y/n) that he would be up in no time, claiming Warren showed regular brain function.

(Y/n)’s brain was racked with thoughts about what would happen when he woke up. Their last conversation before the mission was, in a word, deep. The pair had stayed up until the late hours of the night, not even caring about the exhaustion they’d feel in the morning. That was the night Warren had finally been brave enough to make a move, sharing his feelings with (Y/n). They had spent a few hours fooling around, and then talked until the sun rose. 

(Y/n) felt nervous to see him once he woke up. 

Oh come on, (Y/n), let’s not think like this, she thought to herself. Remember what he said before he fell?

It wasn’t anything the team hadn’t done before. Flying out, saving civilians, bringing them back home. This time happened to be news helicopter that was going down over the Atlantic. It should’ve been easy in, easy out. Jean was slowing the rotors so that Kurt could bamf Peter and Warren into the helicopter to grab the civilians. As they were going through standard procedure, a plane flew by above the helicopter scene, causing a strong wind and noise that threw Jean off. She lost her connection with the rotors, making the helicopter drop. 

Kurt grabbed Peter and Warren to bamf everyone out, but on the exit, Warren’s wings were struck by the spinning rotors. He was pushed out of the copter, his wings failing him. As he fell towards the ocean, a scream ripped out from his throat. Not “help!”, not “save me!”, not even “AHH!” The only words he could think to form was, “(Y/n)!” 

The rest of the team were too preoccupied trying to get Kurt and Peter in with the civilians to grab Warren. He hit the water, causing a head injury that knocked him unconscious. 

(Y/n)’s brain snapped out of her memories.

He was thinking about me during his fall, he wasn’t joking when he said he loved me. 

“Hey, (Y/n). You alright?” 

Looking away from him, she saw Hank standing in the doorway. 

“Yeah, I’m okay. Just want to be here when he wakes up.”

Hank nodded, walking towards his cart with Warren’s graph information. 

“Should be up any minute. He’s showing more brain activity than he was yesterday so he’s probably starting to wake up. Just give him some more time.”

(Y/n) nodded, turning back to the bed, watching over Warren. 

An hour had passed since Hank had stopped by. (Y/n)’s eyes were glazed over as she stared at the monitor, holding his hand tight and praying he’d wake up soon. 

Her eyes widened as she heard stirring from the bed. Looking down she saw Warren’s eyes fluttering open, then squinting in response to the harsh lighting. 

“W-,” he cleared his throat, “Where am I? What happened?”

(Y/n)’s lips pulled into a smile, “Warren! You’re up! Everything’s okay, just took a bad fall a few days ago, but everything’s okay.” 

“Fall? What-”

Warren was interrupted as Hank entered the room, followed by Jean, Jubilee, and Ororo. 

“Warren! You’re up!”

Hank rushed to the monitor, checking his vitals, while the girls stood behind (Y/n), anxious to hear how their teammate was.

“Where’s everyone else?” (Y/n) asked.

Ororo piped up from behind Jean, “Training with Raven, but they’ll stop by after.”

Jubilee pushed to the front next to (Y/n), “Gave us quite a scare there, bird boy. Glad to see you up.”

Warren’s eyebrows were furrowed, “Bird boy? Who is that?”

Jubilee laughed, “That’s you, dummy.”

Warren clenched his jaw out of frustration, “Who are all of you?”

Hank stepped away from his monitor, “What did you ask?” 

Warren looked towards him before scanning the girl still grasping his hand, “Who are you? All of you.”

“Can you tell me your name?”

Hank’s face was wrinkled with concern, awaiting Warren’s answer. 

He raised his hand that wasn’t held by (Y/n) and point towards Jubilee, “Bird boy?”

“You don’t remember who you are?”

Warren’s was struck with confusion again, “No? No, I- I don’t.”

(Y/n) felt her stomach drop, her eyes burning, “Warren? You- you don’t remember me?” 

He looked at her, noticing her misty eyes, “No, I’m- I’m really sorry. You seem nice.”

Jean snapped her head towards Hank, “Now what?” 

He was tapping his fingers against the frames of his glasses, thinking about this situation. “It seems like a minor case of amnesia, should be back to his normal self in a few days.”

(Y/n) could hear her heartbeat in her ears as her thoughts ran wild.

What if it isn’t minor amnesia? What if he never remembers me? Or never remembers himself? What if-

“(Y/n).”

Her head snapped towards Hank, “huh?”

“How about you go get some rest? You’ve been sitting in here for days, go rest.”

(Y/n) nodded, wobbling out of her chair. Before she left the room she took one last glance at Warren, sad that when he looked at her there was an emptiness in his eyes. He didn’t know her.

Jean waited until (Y/n) left the room to interrogate Warren, “You really don’t remember who you are? Or who she is?”

Warren’s mouth open and closed, “No, I-I’m sorry. Who is she?”

“Your girlfriend, dipshit!”

Hank interrupted Jean, “Hey now! Don’t be mad at him for having amnesia, it’s all our fault for letting the mission go sideways.”

Warren blinked, “Girlfriend? Her?”

Jubilee sat down in the now empty chair to answer, “Not official or anything, but you did ask her out and make out and stuff so yeah.” 

Warren looked down at his feet out in front of him, “How could I not remember a girl like that? She looked so sad..” 

Hank piped up again, “It’s not your fault, just give it some time. It’ll all come back.”

Warren nodded, his brain was busy wandering somewhere else. “What’s her name?”

Jubilee laughed, “(Y/n).”

He nodded once more, eyes starting to droop again.

Hank took note and ushered the other students away, “Give him room to rest. And please keep (Y/n) occupied, don’t need her going down a sad path because of this.”

It was a little too late to avoid the sadness road for (Y/n). She had grabbed lunch on the way from the infirmary to her dorm room. She realized it was the first real meal she had eaten the past two days. (Y/n) scarfed down her sandwich and headed back to her room, pulling the blankets over her. She felt gross and desperately wanted to take a shower, but just didn’t have the energy. Instead she felt herself start to drift off, eyes squeezed tight as if she could make everything and everyone disappear. 

Warren visited her in her dreams, a recollection of memories from their last night together. His red cheeks when he confessed his feelings, his warm hands roaming her skin, his soft lips pressed against hers. And suddenly everything turned black and cold like the life of her memory had been sucked out. Warren turned to her, “Who are you?”

(Y/n) woke up in a sweat, breathing hard. She decided she needed to take a shower and clear her head. 

After a 30 minute shower and a few tears shed, she went for a walk around the school to get her mind off Warren. Passing by the cafeteria she bumped into Scott and Peter, who probably just finished eating dinner. 

“(Y/n)...hey.”

“Hey.”

Peter wrapped his arms around her in a tight squeeze, “It’ll be fine.”

(Y/n) shrugged him off, continuing to put on a brave face, “I know. I’m fine, guys, seriously.”

Scott gave her arm a pat, “Hank said it should just take a few days.”

(Y/n) nodded, wanting to escape the conversation of Warren. She took the beat of silence that followed as her moment to leave, so she did. Walking outside, she ran into Kurt. 

“(Y/n)! Are you okay?”

She sighed, “I’m fine!”

(Y/n) pushed past Kurt and speed walked towards the pond. 

How am I supposed to get my mind off of him if no one SHUTS UP ABOUT IT?

(Y/n) sat down by the pond, eyes focused on the water. 

“Hey. (Y/n), right?”

“Oh for the LOVE OF GOD, I’M FINE!”

Her head whipped around to see Warren standing on the grass behind her, “Oh, I-I’m sorry, I thought you were someone else.”

“No, you’re good. I’m glad you’re okay.”

Warren took a seat next to her, his wing brushing against her shoulder. 

“I’m really sorry. I know you’re upset, but I am trying to remember. I want to remember you, so badly.”

(Y/n)’s eyes began to burn, “It’s okay.”

Warren nodded, “Well that guy in the clinic said it should just be a few days.”

(Y/n) rolled her eyes, “I know, it’s just- never mind.”

“No, tell me.”

She shook her head, eyes on the water again. 

“Come on, I’m your boyfriend, right? Tell me.”

(Y/n) could feel her heart sting, having been reminded that someone she loves so much doesn’t remember her.

“You’re not my boyfriend.”

“Well that girl said it wasn’t ‘official’ but still-”

“No, you’re not Warren. You don’t even know who I am.”

Warren opened his mouth, closing it realizing he didn’t know what to say.

(Y/n) looked towards him, her heart hurting once more. He was clearly frustrated with himself for not remembering anything and she wasn’t making it any easier for him. 

“I’m sorry. You are Warren, just not my Warren. Fuck- you’re you and that’s good? Sorry-”

“Listen, I may not know who you are yet, but I care about you because.. well I don’t know why, but you obviously mean a lot to me and I want to hear what you have to say.”

God, she thought, how can he be so charming with amnesia? 

“I love you.”

Warren’s eyes widened, “I- uh, okay.”

“Fuck- sorry that probably sounds really weird, but I’ve said it to you before and- and I don’t know it just slipped out.”

He nodded, biting his lip, “Did I say it back?”

“Yeah. We’re in- I mean, we were in love.”

“We still are, then.”

“What if you don’t love me when you remember me? Like- I don’t know. What if these few days not having feelings for me makes you not have feelings for me ever again? That’s- that’s what I wanted to say earlier.”

Warren let out a sigh, “(Y/n). I do have feelings for you. If I’ve said ‘I love you’ before then that’s not going to just go away because of some fucking memory loss.”

“But-”

“No buts!”

(Y/n) shook her head, “Fine.”

Warren nodded, “Okay, well- give me a few days. And I swear I’m trying to remember.”

A few days had passed. Actually, over a week had passed. Nothing.

Warren couldn’t remember anything. He kept trying to spend time with his supposed “friends” and “girlfriend” to trigger his memories, but nothing was coming back.”

It was now 4:00 in the afternoon. Warren had been sitting in Hank’s office for the last hour getting test after test run on his brain. 

“What the fuck, Hank? You said a few days! It’s been almost two weeks!”

Hank’s head snapped up from his laptop, “Hey! Not my fault! Amnesia is tricky, it’s just takes time.”

“You said a few days and it’s taking forever. (Y/n) hates me.” 

“What? Why?”

“Because,” Warren slammed his hands onto Hank’s desk, “every time she looks at me, she sees the boy she loves, but I don’t remember it! And it just keeps getting worse!”

“What’s getting worse?”

“Our situation!”

“How? Is your memory getting worse?”

“What? No! I like her, Hank! I realize why I fell in love with her. She’s- she’s everything. The more I see her, the deeper I fall and she can’t even talk to me without getting sad because I’m not the real me. I’m hurting her and I don’t know what to do so please! Fix my brain!” 

“It’s not that easy, there’s nothing I can do.”

“Hank-”

“Warren! Just talk to her about this. I’m sure it would make her happy to see that even without all your memories of her, you still love her.”

Warren took Hank’s advice and set off to find (Y/n). She was eating dinner by herself as she often did since his fall, her head buried in a book.

Warren nervously tapped her on the shoulder, “H-hey.”

(Y/n) looked up at him, dark circles around her eyes showing from lack of sleep, “Hey?”

“Can I talk to you? Outside?”

(Y/n) nodded, standing up and following him out to the yard.

“What’s up?”

“I love you.”

(Y/n)’s breathe was caught in her throat. She coughed loudly, “You- you what?”

“I’m in love with you.”

“You don’t remember me.”

“Yes I do! I’ve known you for almost two weeks-”

“Two weeks!”

“And it only took two weeks for me to realize why I must’ve fallen in love with you in the first place! (Y/n), you’re perfect! Please, I- I know I’m not the Warren you fell in love with, but I will be that guy again soon, I know it.”

(Y/n) grabbed his face, pulling his lips to hers. 

It was as if a firework went off inside of Warren’s stomach, being able to kiss the girl he loves. Then, he felt another firework going off inside his head. His mind was racing as different images came to him. Everything from tipping over his and (Y/n)’s canoe in the pond to the time Scott threw up on Jean at (Y/n)’s last birthday party. Warren also saw himself fall, the helicopter above him, the ocean getting closer until he smacked into the water. He broke off the kiss. 

“(Y/n)!”

Warren wrapped his arms around her, squeezing her tight.

“What? Ow!”

He picked her up and spun her around, “I REMEMBER YOU! I LOVE YOU!”

“Put me down! Put me down!”

Warren placed her down on her feet, “I remember you!”

“You remember me!!!”

“Yes!! One time Scott threw up at your birthday party! The first Saturday of every month is your girls night with Jubilee, Jean, and Ororo! One time your top came off in the pond after I tipped our canoe and you flashed me! One time-”

(Y/n) cut him off by slamming her lips against his again. She pulled away, “I missed you so much, Warren.”

“I missed you more.”

Warren squeezed her tight once more, “I can’t believe I fell in love with you all over again.”

(Y/n) laughed, eyes misty from emotion, “I know.”

“We’re really meant to be, god I love you!”

He held her closer than he ever did before, so she’d never slip away.

taglist: @chocolatealmondmilkshake @thoughtlesspace @billyhargovesgurl @babebenhardy @rexorangecouny @cyndagoaway @killcomet @mcrmarvelloki @queen-turtle-boiii @hardlylo @ziggymay @jacqueline1916 @onceuponadetectivedemigod @ixchel-9275 @radiob-l-a-hblah

hmu to be added to my taglist!

[creepweirdo]

It does feel like a good match! I can’t give away my exact kpop obsession because I’ve been posting about them on my previously no kpop blog so it might give away some of the ~mystery~ of who I am (probably not because fandom is big but just in case). My favourite boys have done some blackpink covers so I started listening to more of them too! I didn’t know about the Netflix doc, I’ll watch it. 1/2

My mutual showed me an nct graph/chart thing? With all the members and I cried in fear at the amount of names and how complex it was haha I’ll try again Ahh classic. It was tumblr gifs got me too. I have one mutual (the same one who got me into kpop and they’re smug af about both) spammed my dash with these gorgeous looking people and like the weak bi I am, I had to find out more. I went right to Netflix and watched cql then the special edition on youtube. 2/3 lol

I love that you dove into fic first that’s probably smart because there are so many characters and names to learn. I haven’t watched the donghua, only read the book and some mdzs q. I’ve read some of those fics, but not all of them – so thanks for the recs. Okay two questions today – one mdzs and one not. Who are your top three characters and why? And for non-mdzs hmm what do you like to do in your spare time if you have any?? (I talk too much whoops) 3/3

hi classified cultivator!!

(i’m going to answer under the thing bc i too talk to much 😔💔 lol)

LMAOOO literally! omg i need to find that chat! or watch the nct guide thats in my youtube watch later hahah - it’s an hour and 20 minutes long though,,,, i’m crying in fear as well 💀😭 i watched their new mv that came out today?? (its saying that it came out 17 hours ago - that still counts as ‘today’) and they all appeared at the same time 😳😭i needed a trigger warning tbh.

omg i need to watch the special edition! i have it as a saved playlist on youtube hahaha i’m just not ready to be emotionally destroyed again yet 💔

omg top three characters!!! HAHAHA i’ve been thinking about this. so of course i love wei ying HOWEVER i feel like i relate to lan zhan so much more so he’s my absolute favourite. he was just such an awkward gay disaster as a teen and i FEEL that. and ahhhh (its probably more fanfic meta bc i still haven’t read more of the novel) but the way he’s just physically unable to talk about his feelings 💀 i feel that.

my second fave would have to be nie huaisang ❤️ once i finished cql and watched fatal journey i was just blown away bout how much of a mastermind he is! (and again after watching them they provided so much more context for his characterisation in fanfics LMAO) i also recently read this post on here talking about the foreshadowing at the start of the series - nie huaisang stalking and catching that bird for three days vs him planning the demise of jgy LMAOO. he’s such a king love him.

and my third favourite 🤔 idk it’s probably a tie between jiang cheng and nie mingjue 💀 jiang cheng more seriously bc his life is so tragic and painful but he’s so emotionally constipated and such a baby that i’m like LMAOOO 🥺❤️ i’ve read a few post-canon fics where jiang cheng and wei wuxian fix things between them and they’re always really nice. AHAHA another reason why i like him is because of that scene at the beginning of the show where jiang cheng and lan zhan are sitting at opposite ends of a table waiting for their juniors finish their hunt and they’re just looking at each other in silence with such hatred 💀 it makes me laugh to hard lmaooo.

(nie mingjue is a fave mostly for the meme. idk ever since i saw him in cql i was like 👁👁 i just think he’s neat. we bonded over our hate for jgy ❤️)

i saw this tiktok the other day which was like how hard it is to answer “when people ask me what i do in my free time bc i literally don’t do anything”. which is so me 😭😭 when i’m not at work i’m literally either sleeping in, or on my phone/watching youtube on the tv HAHAH. i did play a lot of animal crossing until like two months ago because i got bored of it 😔 and now i’m waiting for christmas for a new switch game (the legend of zelda age of calamity). my parents said that they would get it for me as a gift but ahhhh i want to play it now hahah i should have bought it for myself. another hobby that i haven’t done in a while is embroidery! but i accidentally got bored of it while in a middle of a piece at the start of the year lol 😳 i should get back into it lmao 

but yeah mostly i’m on my phone... looking at posts about mdzs or reading mdzs fanfiction... i am waiting for the next semester of university to start back and then i feel like i’m actually being productive hahahah.

thank you for the questions! i hope you have a good weekend ❤️

[xxairo-dev]

Next Log

So I started making a 2D pixel art game. Welcome to my new Dev blog!

No official name, but the unofficial name is Bowfish.

(TLDR and Dev log with pretty gifs at bottom)

Hello internet, friends, and 2020 -- those of you that have been following me all this time know that I’ve been doing art for a loooong time. Even before I got into digital art in 2010, I’ve been drawing with paper and pencil for as long as I can remember and probably started playing video games right at the same time. For reference, my earliest memories of video games consist of Lemmings 3D on PS1, followed shortly by Rayman and Spyro the Dragon. 

I’m still a big Spyro fan, also pretty sure this is how I became obsessed with dragons in general. 

Science based dragon MMO girl, wherever you are -- I feel you, I am you.

Basically, I’ve been playing video games all my life (to the detriment of my parents) and I owe it to gaming for igniting my early artistic ambitions. In fact, I remember learning how to draw by copying the character art of Neopets and Sonic Advance before one day stumbling upon one of my dad’s Game Informer magazines and being blown away by the art that I saw in there (particularly the WoW art). I’m pretty sure that was when I was first introduced to Big Boy™ game art and instantly thought, “Whoa, I want to be able to draw like that”.

Later, when I got my first drawing tablet and started making digital art, it became “I want to draw for a video game”.

Even later, when I learned that being a video game artist was not a very realistic career path and opted to pursue a bachelors degree in biology instead of art, it became “I want to draw for a video game... on the side”.

Even later-er, when I got my degree in 2017 and started working full-time and realized that work saps you of all energy and motivation to work on projects at home, it became “I want to draw for a video game... some day”. 

Well, today here we are in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic. In March, I got furloughed from my biology job due to the quarantine. I spent four months passing time, thinking that I’d go back to work soon. But by the end of July, I was at wit’s end of what to do with myself after getting burnt out on a number of hobbies, games, shows, books, etc. without spiraling into some very expensive hobbies (hello aquariums) with the money I wasn’t making. I badly needed to find something productive to do that I thought would also benefit me in the long run i.e. post-quarantine, and unfortunately I couldn’t work on wet lab techniques at home.

“Learn to code” is what my parents have said to me about a thousand times for the past 5 years. “Learn to code” is what I did try for about two weeks with Code Academy a few years ago before realizing that none of what I was learning was going to stick because I wasn’t programming in any part of my daily life. As a biologist, in evolution we like to call this “if you don’t use it, you lose it”. 

I know all too well about how coding is one of the best skills you can learn. However, I also know myself all too well to know that learning code for the sake of learning code wasn’t going to work for me. I wanted to wait to learn when the right situation presented itself, ideally when I would have an opportunity to use it almost every day at like a job or something.

Well, one of my good fellow artist (and biology) friends had recently taken the plunge into creating his first video game Meganura earlier in the year. I was (and still am) seriously -- and I cannot emphasize this enough -- impressed by his progress, dedication, and ability to learn coding for this game. Or more frankly, I was seriously impressed by his dedication and progress in to learning how to code for this game.

Meganura in all it’s crispy pixel-y goodness. Man, my friends are talented.

I dwelled on this for a while. 

I always considered making a game to be out-of-reach because I absolutely could not muster up the motivation to learn a single drop of code without being paid to do so after 1) being beaten over the head by “learn how to code” for so long and 2) having already tried and given up in the past. 

But as it got harder to sleep well, eat well, and feel happy during the quarantine, I feel like I hit a rock bottom where I felt like if I didn’t make a big effort to find a new purpose, then I was probably going to become depressed. To preface this, I have experienced depression before, and ever since I got out it has been my goal in life to never experience it again. 

The only way I was going to survive this quarantine was to give myself a new “job”.

I already had a creative mind and the skills to create art and animations for a game. I already had a lifetime of game playing experience that had formed a detailed list of specific mechanics and visual details that I knew I wanted or didn’t want in a game. I already had an analytical and detail-oriented mind (thanks biology... or thanks videogames?) that liked to plan and build things. 

All it would take is just a little bit of code...

If you’ve read this far, thanks for listening and I hope some of you hear yourselves in my story.

TLDR;

I am just a daytime biologist and hobby digital artist with zero coding experience.

I’m extremely proud to say that since 07/29/20, I have been successfully developing and coding my own 2D pixel art video game in Unity and am in full swing!

This is the start of my dev blog, where I’ll be logging my progress and thoughts throughout this journey for like-minded and aspiring individuals. 

My Goals:

- To create everything from scratch -- art, scripts, etc.

- To create a game about bow hunting with intuitive drag/release controls

- To create a game that has cooking and campfires

- To create a game with pretty water graphics

- To create a game that has sushi and cats

- To have a playable demo by mid 2021 (my guess for the end of quarantine)

How I’ve been learning C#:

I have been following along with YouTube tutorials to create a base script and then looking up things in Unity’s scripting documentation to expand and modify my code to achieve exactly what I want. I’ve been learning C# and how to read documentation through almost entirely pattern recognition (e.g. mimicking and experimenting with code I’ve copied from tutorials and recognizing keywords in documentation) and turning to Google or my Tech Career Peers™ for help when I get stuck or to clarify things.

The key thing is that even after copying some code, I read the documentation and figure out how every line of code in my script works before moving on.

This is because after spending a few days of looking up YouTube tutorials, I realized there were no tutorials for the exact bow controls that I wanted. Instead, I ended up watching multiple tutorials and learned how all of their scripts worked before combining and modifying pieces together. Then, I started relying entirely on documentation to write lines of code. 

I don’t know how many original lines of code I’ve written so far, but there are so many now and I am so proud of all of them.

So anyway, here’s what’s happened over the past 2-3 weeks.

Dev Log:

7/29/20

- Came up with an idea for a game

7/30/20

- Installed Unity and started watching Unity tutorial videos

7/31/20 

- Created water shader via shader graph (no coding required!)

- Created a basic background, player sprite, bow sprite, and arrow sprite in Photoshop

08/03/20

- First time coding in C#

- Struggle to code in Notepad++, switched to Visual Studio Code

08/06/20

- Created physics based slingshot controls for the bow and arrow with a line renderer bowstring

- Colliders!

08/09/20

- Unable to find a way to pull arrow back horizontally (-X) regardless of mouse Y movement (OnMouseDown)

- Decided that slingshot controls are for slingshots, not bows and arrows

- Scrapped physics based slingshot controls due to overcomplication (rip)

08/10/20

- Created new projectile based controls that still include drag/shoot physics

08/11/20

- Limited rotation of the bow while aiming to max 45° and min -45°

- Developed distaste for vector algebra

- Made it so that if you don’t drag far enough, you won’t release an arrow

08/12/20

- Created a trajectory line coming off the bow

- Made arrows fade away after colliding

- Created git repository to keep all project files backed up on github (Don’t wait to do this! Should’ve been done on day 1)

08/14/20

- Added physics and collider to player

- Allow you to face and move left/right with the A and D keys + updated bow controls to match

- Created left/right movement while aiming + updated bow controls to match

- Created mouse drag line for development use

- Created waterline

- Made it so the bow resets to it’s default position if you haven’t used the bow for over 2 seconds

08/15/20

- Updated Player sprite in Photoshop

- Obtained Asesprite

- Created walk animation

08/16/20

- Created  bow walk, bow equip, and bow unequip animations

Next Log

[breanime]

Patience

Requested by @thel0stpr1ncess:  my dude, can I get a fic where logan is being incredibly annoying because he wants your attention but you're busy trying to do some work? And something along the lines of this happens "if you loved me, you'd pay attention to meee!" And reader says in a deadpan voice, but also jokingly "guess i dont love you then." Cue logan pouting and whimpering like a sad puppy? Thank yooouu! -propertyofpoeandbucky

I had every intention of making this cute and sweet, but then it turned steamy because I am Horny and Depressed, hope you enjoy! WARNING: steamy!

*gif not mine*

“Baby.”

You ignored Logan and continued staring down at your laptop.

“Sweetheart.”

You clicked a few keys, adding something to the document that helped bring it all together.

“Princess?”

You moved a graph; it was in the wrong section.

“I’m cold,” Logan whined from his spot on the couch, “Come over here and warm me up.”

“Can’t. Working.” You said, eyes not leaving your computer.

“You’ve been working all day,” he sighed, “Why don’t you take a break? Come sit on Daddy’s lap.”

You rolled your eyes with a chuckle. This wasn’t the first invitation you’d gotten from him since you’d come home. But you had to work—Logan was lucky enough to be in a position where he could make his own hours and delegate to those below him. You were not as fortunate. Really, the fact that you were even at home was a compromise you’d made with him. You could have been at the office, where the distractions were few, but Logan had given you those big puppy-dog eyes, and you’d agreed to work at home so you two could be together. Except now he was calling for you every five seconds and disrupting your concentration. “I’m almost done.”

“You said that three hours ago,” he said, slumping against the couch, “Why don’t you just call it a day, huh?”

“Because I’m not done yet,” you said back, clicking the keys with unnecessary force, “Why don’t you call Juliet and see if she wants to hang out for a few hours?”

“A few—I thought you were almost done!”

“Well, it’s hard to tell because I have to keep stopping to fight you off,” you said back.

He scoffed, sitting up and glaring at you. “Well, excuse me for wanting to spend time with my girlfriend.”

“I’d be able to spend time with you if you would just, y’know, shut up for half an hour and let me work,” you quipped back.

Logan’s mouth fell open, offended. “I thought you loved me!” He gasped.

You laughed, turning to look at your dramatic boyfriend. He was both glaring and pouting at you from over the couch, dark hair impeccable even though he hadn’t done anything but annoy you all day. “If I didn’t love you, would I have given you three ‘pay attention to me’ breaks in one day?”

“Three wasn’t enough,” he pouted.

You turned back to your work, shaking your head. You knew Logan was needy on a good day, which is why you gave him three chances to have your undivided attention. Of course, he had the patience of…something without patience, so he’d used them all right away. You smiled to yourself, punching the keys as you remembered the breaks…one was spent with Logan’s dick in your mouth, then the next with you bent over the kitchen table, and the third was a nice, slow round of lovemaking on the bed followed by a nap that you really couldn’t afford to take. Which was why you had to push through your work and make up for lost time. “Well, three is all you’re gonna get.”

“Baby, I’m hard.”

“You’re always hard,” you closed a tab on your computer, satisfied with that part of the job, “Go to the bedroom and take care of yourself.”

“You wanna watch?” Logan smirked.

You licked your lips, hands hovering over your keyboard. You…definitely wanted to watch. Hell—you wanted to help. But you were really close to being done… “Can’t,” you said, taking a breath, “Working.”

“Baaaaaaaaaby,” he whined, “c’mon, I need you. I miss you.”

“How can you miss me? I’m right here.” You didn’t look up from your computer.

“Pay attention to me, I’m horny!” He demanded, stomping his foot.

“Something’s off with these numbers,” you said, determined to block him out.

“Baby, I need you to come over here and help me,” he pleaded.

“Oh… I see what happened. Someone in accounting messed up.” You shrugged. “S’okay… It’s easily fixed.”

“You know what’s not easily fixed? The tent in my pants,” Logan chirped, humping upwards into the air, “You see that? That’s something only you can fix.”

You ignored him, clicking a few keys before sitting back. Technically, your part of the project was done. There was still more that needed to be edited, but your job was finished. You could give Logan the attention he so desperately needed, or…you could tease him a bit more. “You know what,” you said, clicking random keys, “this might take longer than I thought. Maybe I should go back to the office.”

“What?” Logan was standing on the couch when you looked back. “No—you promised we’d stay in all day!”

“Yeah,” you turned back to the computer, “but this is starting to look worse than I thought. I need to give this my full attention.”

“If you loved me, you’d pay attention to meeeee!” He cried.

You rolled your eyes, turning around with a deadpan look on your face. “Guess I don’t love you then.”

You watched Logan deflate in a matter of seconds. He plopped back down on the couch, big dark eyes wide and hurt. He didn’t say anything, just turned and curled up on the couch, back to you.

“Logan?” You stood, concern clear in your voice. “Hey, come on, baby, I didn’t mean it.” He didn’t say anything back. You walked over to him and frowned when you saw the sad look on his face.  “Baby?” You sat down next to him and put a hand in his hair.

Logan looked back up at you with the saddest pout on his sweet face. “You don’t love me?” He whimpered.

You felt a pang in your heart, and you ran your fingers through his thick hair just the way you knew he liked. “I was joking,” you explained softly, “I’m sorry, baby.” You leaned down and kissed his forehead. “You know I love you.”

Logan looked up at you, mouth still set in an adorable frown. “That’s not a good joke, princess.” He muttered. “Don’t stop,” he adding, grabbing your hand and putting it back in his hair.

“I know,” you agreed easily, pulling lightly on the strands, “I’m sorry, baby. How can I make it up to you?” You saw the wheels turning in his head and smiled. “How can I show you I love you?”

He sat up quickly, fighting to keep a smirk off his face. “I don’t know…” He murmured. “Maybe a kiss?”

You crawled into his lap and but both arms around his shoulders, holding him close. You could feel his hard-on beneath you, and you wiggled on top of him a bit, making him groan. “My sweet Logan,” you sang, rubbing his nose with yours, “I love you so, so much…” You kissed his cheek. “I’m sorry I ignored you, baby.” You pecked him on the lips, quick and light. “Let me make it all better…” You kissed him again, much slower. He hummed happily as you slipped your tongue in his mouth. His hands went down to grip your ass, and you smiled as you pulled back, eyes on his. “Better?”

“Worse,” he answered, voice husky and eyes low, “I’m hard as a rock, baby.”

“Hm,” you said, reaching down to unzip his jeans, “I think I can help with that…” You slipped your hand inside his briefs, gripping his hard cock. You both groaned at the feeling; he was so hot and hard in your hand, you kissed him again as your hand moved up and down between you.

“That’s good, princess,” he whispered into your mouth, “Really good…” He lowered his mouth and sucked on your neck, making you moan as his tongue and teeth grazed your skin. You felt one of his hands crawl up your back and underneath your shirt, unclasping your bra and caressing your back sweetly. He kissed your neck, and you wiggled closer to him.

“I’m not done,” you said with a smile. You gave him another lingering kiss before getting off of his lap and lowering yourself to your knees. Logan watched you greedily, licking his lips as he grinned down at you. You made a show of pulling his pants down, and he lifted himself up to give you aid. You kept one hand on him, pumping him slowly, before you finally leaned down and kissed the tip of his cock, eyes still on his. “I,” you kissed it again, “love,” you licked around the head, closing your eyes at the exquisite taste of him, “you.”

“I love you, too,” he huffed out, staring down at you. You could see—and feel—how excited he was, and you clenched your thighs together. Without another word, you lowered your mouth on him and took as much of him in your mouth as you could. You moaned when he put a hand in your hair, pushing you further down on his cock. “Fuuuuuck,” he sighed, leaning his head back, “so good, princess, so good…”

You hummed happily. You swallowed around him, making sure to make the wet noises that you knew he adored, and wrapped a hand around his cock, running it up and down as you sucked him off. Your other hand went between your legs, and you heard Logan chuckle when he saw what you were doing.

“That’s it, baby,” he instructed gently, “Touch yourself for me.” You obliged happily. “Mm,” he went on, “add another finger in. And move your panties down, let me see what you’re doing.” You followed his directions, shifting slightly so he could see your hand lodged between your legs. You groaned on his cock as you slid another finger inside yourself, and Logan moaned in response. You watched him reach up and pull his shirt off, and you stared up at his broad, bare chest as it heaved at your actions below him. He pulled your head back by your hair, keeping your mouth on his cock, but making it so he could look into your eyes. “Very good,” he praised you, “You’re doing… such a good job, sweetheart.”

You pulled back, taking a breath as you twisted his cock in your hand. “Baby,” you breathed out, “I need more.”

His grin was all teeth. “Come and get it.”

You climbed back on top of him after tossing your pants and underwear to the side. Logan lifted your shirt off of you and threw it. He removed your bra with his teeth. You threw your head back as his teeth grazed your breasts, and you gripped his hair as his beard brushed against your sensitive skin.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Logan cooed as he stuck three fingers in you at once, making your back arch, “I love you so much,” he peppered kisses down the side of your neck as you moaned and gasped. His long fingers curled in and out of you quickly, and the friction was driving you insane. You pulled on Logan’s thick hair and scratched at his back, silently begging him to keep going. “I know,” he said, smiling into the juncture between your neck and collarbone, “You’re so close, baby. But what if I just stopped…” His fingers froze inside you.

You stared down at him, eyes wide. “Logan…” You said slowly, a warning in your voice.

“I mean,” he buried his face inside your neck again, “it’s only fair. You ignored me…”

You rolled your hips, and you felt his fingers twitch inside you. “Logan!” You hissed, digging your nails into his shoulders. “Come on!”

He pulled back and looked at you, dark eyes glittering with mischievous. “Ask nicely.”

Now it was your turn to pout. You put your arms around his shoulders and played with his hair. “Please, Logan,” you said softly, jutting out your lower lip, “Love of my life, my sweet Logan, please let me cum.” You kissed him. “I’m begging you.”

He grinned. “No need to beg,” he said lightly, “Of course I’ll give you want you want, princess.” And with that, he thrust up in you, making you scream with pleasurable surprise. You threw your head back, gripping his shoulders again, as he pounded upwards into you, laughing the whole way. Logan leaned his head down and bit you between your collarbone, lapping at the sweat that was gathering there as his hips continued humping up into you. You closed your eyes and rolled your hips, moving in time with him.

You pulled at his hair and kissed him, keeping his mouth on yours as you both moved together, wrapped up in each other with only the sounds of heavy breathing and skin-on-skin passing between you. You wanted to tease him. You wanted to tell him you loved him, you wanted to say he was doing a good job, but all you could do was moan and cry out as he hit you in all the spots that made you shiver.

“You’re close,” he whispered into your mouth, eyes and smile wide, “aren’t you, baby?”

“Yes,” you moaned out.

Logan’s hands both went to your hips, pushing you down on him just as he was thrusting up. You screamed as his cock hit you perfectly. “This is better than work, isn’t it, princess?”

“Yes!”

“You want me to make you cum?”

“Yes, Logan, yes!”

He chuckled before gritting his teeth. Logan pushed up into you with new purpose, and all you could do was moan and scream as he pounded into you. You held him close, buying his head against your chest as you bounced on top of him, letting him fill you to the brim. Your legs quivered as you wrapped them around his waist, wanting him even closer, and you bit your lip as you felt that familiar feeling deep in your stomach… You called his name as you came, and Logan, feeling you twitch and pulsate around him, came closely after, spilling himself inside of you with a gleeful laugh and harsh groan.

You collapsed against him as he shifted below you, pulling out and laying you down in his lap so he was rocking you like a baby. Logan bent down and kissed you sweetly, and you smiled into the kiss. “I love you,” you said into his neck, “even though you’re an annoying brat.”

He chuckled, rubbing your back with his hand. “Love you too, princess,” he said back, kissing the side of your head. There was a moment of comfortable silence where he just held you, and you felt your body grow tired in the comfort of his touch. “Do you need to get back to work?” He asked softly.

“No,” you said back, smiling up at him, “I’m all done.”

“Good,” he kissed you, “Now I can have you all to myself again.”

“When do you not have me?” You chuckled, caressing his bearded cheek with your hand. “I’m yours, Logan. All yours.”

He grinned. “Let’s go to bed,” he said, “you need to rest up.”

“Okay,” you agreed as he picked you up and carried you to the bedroom, “But don’t let me sleep too long.”

“I won’t,” he promised, “If you sleep too late, I’ll wake you up.”

“With sex?” You asked as he laid you onto the bed.

Logan smiled, kissing you on the nose. “With sex,” he answered, “So hurry up and go to sleep so I can wake you up.”

*******************************************************************************************

Tagging @propertyofpoeandbucky as well! Thanks for the request!

Taglist: @floralpeaceofmind @delicatelilyflower @dylanobrusso@ladyblablabla@banditthewriter @something-tofightfor @starsfragments@blackcoffeeandgreenteaforme@hisgirlwednesdayaddams@fictionwillneverdie @maria-beretta @sadnessxvodka@ymariejp @sunnycolors @moonlightsay @its-all-o-kay @damagelove @keyeluh @itsmylife98 @funerals-with-cake @littlemermaidprobz@teacuplotus @king4thesirens@mrsjaxtellerfan @thebabblingbook @tartelette-aux-fraises @madamrogers @charlylama @iaintnofurry @k-buggz2001@whitewolfslittlesilverfox @drinix @elanor-of-imladris @blah-blah-fuckit-shit @julliiaaq@holamor @ymariejp@shadowhunterscloset@songtoyou @anabella-baby @sssilverssserpent @heyitslexy @luminex3@sithskywalkers

[andrewuttaro]

New Look Sabres: 2019 NHL Draft

Rasmus Dahlin is a hard act to follow. I think part of the reason Alex Nylander went through such Sabres popular opinion hell was because he was the first round pick the year after Jack Eichel’s Draft. Maybe that’s me projecting because my little Sabres heart hadn’t been broken for a while at that point. I really only jumped on the Sabres wagon at the beginning of the decade so my biggest lived disappointment in this team was the 2011 First Round against the Flyers. Picking Alex Nylander was a curve ball that year and he didn’t pan out immediately. That failing to hit on high draft picks was part of then-General Manager Tim Murray’s undoing and part of what ruined rebuild 1.0. That’s not to mention how bad GMTM was for Nylander’s development thrusting him right into the AHL. You couldn’t put all that on Nylander. I hoped so hard going into this Draft that whoever gets drafted the year after Dahlin isn’t under that kind of microscope right away. Nylander had a tiny little renaissance during his callup last season but he’s still not quite there yet. He’s about to enter what-the-hell-are-you territory but to be very honest his name coming up in trade talks made me a little angry. Hold back your snide tweets, apparently they’re informing the real insiders! I can’t imagine anything like the Nylander Saga repeating itself, but this is the Buffalo Sabres we’re talking about.

The Draft last year felt like a coronation for Sabres fans but just because we’re not getting a generational talent this go around doesn’t mean this draft isn’t ripe for drama. Rewind back about a month and Buffalo was once again the home of the NHL Combine. The event that now will be in Buffalo for several years to come saw the genesis of a few Draft narratives for the Sabres. The most notable one is the Alex Turcotte story. Apparently Sabres brass interviewed Turcotte and… his dad? The reports were conflicting but Turcotte definitely represented a big blip on the radar. The young Mittelstadt-color-palate-swapped center is from Chicagoland and was probably not likely falling any further than 7 – Buffalo’s first pick. Turcotte was a popular choice to go to the Blackhawks in many mock drafts because of the Chicago connection. Jason Botterill and the funky bunch also interviewed one London Knights forward Conor McMichael. Sabres bloggers smarter than I say he was an intriguing option for the other first round pick... that’s if we have that second first round pick because with other teams wheeling and dealing for a week plus going into the Draft Jason Botterill was quiet. There had been rumors galore connected to Buffalo from Tampa to Vancouver which made the lack of movement that much more peculiar. Add onto all this the debut of a Vegas Gold look for the Sabres “Golden Season” instead of royal blue and it was a wild week going into the Draft.

Jack Hughes and Kappo Kakko went first overall as expected. The Alex Turcotte watch was short lived, but he didn’t go third overall to Chicago as many predicted. He had to wait all the way to number 5 when the LA Kings scooped him up. Conor McMichael went 25th overall to Washington but this is a Sabres blog so you’re probably waiting for some Sabres talk. With the 7th overall pick the Buffalo Sabres selected WHL center Dylan Cozens. Once again, smarter bloggers than I say that selection was solid because the first round of this draft was really three tiers: the top two, two through about ten and then everyone else. The Red Wings threw a curve ball and selected Disney Channel star Moritz Seider throwing off everyone’s top ten but for the most part there weren’t many surprises. I was on the Cole Caulfield bandwagon, but he probably wasn’t a wise choice at seven. When he began to drop I even entertained the idea of Botterill trading up with that second first rounder to get him, but this was not one of those drafts and he went 15th overall to… Montreal. Ugh. How about something funny? The Panthers picked goalie Spencer Knight with their 13th overall. That was funny too, but this joke is a Sabres joke: Cozens is the first WHL draft pick in Jason Botterill’s time as General Manager of the Buffalo Sabres. This is a real, deep-cut Sabres joke but there is some humor to that. I think the social media guy for the team knew it too because one of the first photos from them after his pick was Sam Reinhart greeting him. Sam is the last WHL guy to be drafted onto the Sabres. Again, it’s deep cut joke about how Botts hates the WHL so it’s not going to get the whole room but there you go: Humor. I’m not going to pretend to know how to project out Cozens because again, I’m not the smart guy in the room; but I will say it is great to start to replenish the center depth in the organization which dropped off a cliff only a few guys down the depth chart.

The Sabres used the 31st overall pick to… just make a pick. No trades in the first round. As Day One wound down the swell of energy that it may happen dissipated and they picked USHL Defenseman Ryan Johnson. I am all for picking lefthanded D to help build up that side of the defense but the buzz around the pick was a guy with a Russian name who will certainly make me regret not knowing his name. Johnson could’ve easily fallen into the second round, but the pick was in and another defenseman is in the pipeline. Trades, at least the variety from the Sabres, were scarce in the remaining rounds on Saturday. The Sabres traded some late round picks but no real consequential trades on Draft weekend for Buffalo put a little bit of a damper on it all for me. I don’t really subscribe to the idea the yet-to-be-announced salary cap number is really what’s stopping trades. PK Subban got traded to the Devils for a bunch of no names and low picks while we wondered if Sabres 3rd round pick goalie Erik Portillo is in fact named after a type of pepper. The lack of movement right now isn’t something worth panicking about but if we’re sitting here next Monday on Free Agency Day wondering if we’re crazy I’m not going to blame anyone for hitting the panic button. Botterill has signaled a renewed faith in Rasmus Ristolainen probably egged on by the new coach so… you can fall either way on whether the OG Rasmus needs to go. I lean toward trade him but that doesn’t have to be right now. We’ll address all this stuff in the free agency blog so let’s take a look at who else was picked. I mentioned Portillo and we won’t see him even in Rochester for a couple years but that’s fine, the goalie depth was beginning to get shallow. Botts said openly he doesn’t want to rush Ukko Pekka-Lukkonen who will probably make his Rochester Americans debut this coming season. That is smart and frustrating because goalies take a long time to develop when you do it right but… uh… did you watch the second half of last season? Part of that collapse was the goalie tandem coming back down to earth hard. Folks were clamoring for UPL, probably a little too hastily but that’s what eight years out of the playoffs will do to you. I am not particularly jazzed about the other three guys we got. You take flyers on guys that far down in the draft and the chances are better than not all three of these guys I am about to mention don’t make the NHL: Aaron Huglen, Filip Cederqvist and Lukas Rousek. Hopefully one of them is a diamond in the rough. Perhaps it’s unfair for us to be so underwhelmed. Sean Tierney at Charting Hockey placed the Sabres in a top six of teams who did well at the Draft. He’s worth follow if you want to understand how you can make a graph of average likelihood to make the NHL because Lord knows I can’t explain that.

Like, share and comment on the New Look Sabres blog. It’s great to be back at it. You can expect the post on the 2019-2020 NHL Schedule later this week. By the sounds of it that will be released by the league either tomorrow or Wednesday. We already have the preseason, season opener and home opener but I’ll save all that analysis for that blog. Then later on next week you can expect a Free Agency Recap. Normally by the fourth of July the action quiets down. Jeff Skinner happened in August last summer but hey, I’m not psychic. Thank you to everyone who responded kindly to me dropping off the map for a couple days. My wife and I had a family emergency that we needed to address so we put everything on hold. We’re back now and things are going to be alright. Your support means a lot to me and I hope if you ever need something I can be there for you as well. To lighten the mood: let’s hope we don’t need to be here for each other after a worst-case scenario offseason! Pieces are moving and for all the rumors the Sabres are in on this guy and that guy there hasn’t been a lot to actually talk about. I guess we’ll see. It wouldn’t be fun if we knew the ending, eh? Let’s Go Buffalo!

Thanks for reading.

P.S. That Moritz Seider was shocked to go as high as he did. The gif of his reaction is some precious draft video for the ages.

[aikungfu]

Editor’s Note: The following blog is a special guest post by a recent graduate of Berkeley BAIR’s AI4ALL summer program for high school students.

AI4ALL is a nonprofit dedicated to increasing diversity and inclusion in AI education, research, development, and policy.

The idea for AI4ALL began in early 2015 with Prof. Olga Russakovsky, then a Stanford University Ph.D. student, AI researcher Prof. Fei-Fei Li, and Rick Sommer – Executive Director of Stanford Pre-Collegiate Studies. They founded SAILORS as a summer outreach program for high school girls to learn about human-centered AI, which later became AI4ALL. In 2016, Prof. Anca Dragan started the Berkeley/BAIR AI4ALL camp, geared towards high school students from underserved communities.

Before I Started the Program

When I discovered AI4ALL during the spring semester, I was curious to learn more. I knew that AI had the potential to change everything and that it was something I’d love to be a part of. To prepare for the program, I read up on the BAIR faculty and checked out the BAIR student profiles. I watched Stuart Russell’s TED talk “3 principles for creating safer AI.” The people were all so highly accomplished. And their ideas seemed either super technical, or at the other end of the spectrum, they sounded more like topics from the philosophy department than the EECS department. I realized I had no idea what to expect but decided just to give it a try and get started.

The First Day

After logging into my first day of AI4ALL on Zoom, I was pleasantly surprised by the number of eager and welcoming faces. Among them were Tim Hurt, Eva Chao, Rachel Walsh, Ben Frazier, and Maya Maliviya. They were all there to help us feel comfortable and succeed!

We started off with a quick ice-breaker introduction activity. This particularly resonated with me because it wasn’t like the typical type you’d have on the first day of school. Instead, we were divided into virtual breakout rooms and asked to find as many similarities among our peers as possible. The program was already off to a great start! Within just a few minutes, I learned that five other people in the room have a sibling, have taken chemistry, like pizza, and had a quarantine haircut just like me! It was a great way to encourage collaboration and bonding.

Next, we were joined by BAIR lab professor Anca Dragan for a talk about AI. The presentation was hard to forget because of her passion, her curiosity, and the depth of her knowledge. Anca kickstarted the talk by explaining some examples of AI in real life. This was already so useful because it immediately cleared up the misconceptions about AI. In addition, it allowed everyone to have common, shared learning and not feel excluded if they didn’t know as much about AI before starting the program.

Another element of Anca’s presentation that stood out was her description of an AI game. The game is simple: a robot is positioned in a grid and gains points for reaching gems and loses points for falling in fire pits. Anca walked us through the AI “backstory” of the game. The robot’s goal is to maximize the points earned. As the game’s allotted time decreases, the robot takes less cautious paths (ex: avoiding fire pits) and places its primary focus on gaining points. We learned that this idea of optimization is a core part of all AI systems.

By the end of the day, we were immersed in a Python notebook while conversing with peers in a Breakout Room. AI4ALL equipped us with Python notebooks through Google Colab so we would all be on the same page when talking about code. I really enjoyed this part of the program because it was open-ended and the material was presented in such a clean and convenient fashion. As I read through the content and completed the coding exercises, I couldn’t help but also notice the amusing GIFs embedded here and there! What a memorable way to begin learning AI!

Midway Through the Program

Early on Day 3 of the 4 day AI4ALL program, I began to really understand the significance of AI. Through the eye-opening lecture presentations and discussions, I realized that AI really is everywhere! It’s in our YouTube recommendations, Spotify algorithms, Google Maps, and robotic surgery equipment. That range of applications is part of what makes AI so promising. AI really can be for everyone, whether you’re a developer or a user — it’s not limited to people with mad coding skills. Once I got acquainted with the basics of the subject, I began to see how almost any idea can be reshaped with AI.

I also learned that AI is often different from the way it’s presented in the media. Almost everyone is familiar with the idea of robots taking over jobs, but that isn’t necessarily what will happen. AI still has a long way to go before it will truly “take over the world,” as hypothesized. AI is a work in progress. Like its creators, it has biases. It can unintentionally discriminate. It has adversaries and struggles to find insights with incomplete data. Still, AI has the power to change basic aspects of our world. This is why it is so important to have people from as many backgrounds as possible involved in AI. Introducing people from many different backgrounds into the field allows for a better range of ideas and can help reduce the number of missed “red flags” that might later have a big impact on the lives of real people.

By the End of the Program…

The last two days of AI4ALL sped by in a blur. I couldn’t help but notice how well the program was organized. There was a balanced combination of lectures, discussion, and individual work time for coding and collaborating. I also loved how the content at the end of the program reinforced the content from the start. That aspect of the program’s structure made it so much easier to ask questions, remember ideas, and apply to future activities.

I particularly saw this idea of reinforcement demonstrated in Professor Kamalika Chaduri’s presentation about AI adversaries. She explained how AI algorithms could be manipulated so that an image correctly identified with 50% confidence as a panda would then identify the same image with 90% confidence as a gibbon. On the previous day, Professor Jacob Steinhardt explained how images that appeared similar to the human eye can be tweaked to disrupt AI’s algorithm. In another example, Kamalika described how image pixels could be stored as training data in the form of vectors. This idea built off of Tim Hurt’s earlier point that training data is a result of an input being translated into computer language (e.g. a vector $x$), and then mapped to a label output ($y$).

After most of the lectures were done, we began working on our group projects. We were divided into five groups, with each group under the instruction of a Berkeley Ph.D. student. I chose to be in the “Overcooked” group, which was with first-year EECS student Micah Carroll. Micah walked us through the game he’s been using in his research, called Overcooked-AI. Simply put, Overcooked-AI is all about getting the most number of onion soups delivered while cooking in a cramped kitchen.

Once again, we used Colab Notebooks to learn and experiment with the game’s code. Micah patiently took us through the basics of imitation learning, reinforcement learning, decision trees, and graph fitting/displays. He was so open to questions and never hesitated to help! The hours we spent together breezed by, and soon enough I found myself crafting up a final presentation recapping all that I learned. Time really passes when you’re enjoying and learning.

Final Thoughts

In less than a week, the AI4ALL program has shaped my view of AI and my learning process. The lectures, advice panels, and project groups came together to make an unforgettable experience. Beyond learning what AI is and how it works, I now realize that everyone has the potential to explore AI. All you have to do is start. And so, the next time you hear someone say “AI will change the world, but who will change AI?”, you can say with confidence “we will!”

Thank you so much to everyone who made AI4ALL possible!

from The Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Blog https://ift.tt/3g7CnAQ via A.I .Kung Fu

[sheminecrafts]

Zuckerberg misunderstands the huge threat of TikTok

“It’s almost like the Explore Tab that we have on Instagram” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in leaked audio of him describing TikTok during an all-hands meeting. But it’s not. TikTok represents a new form of social entertainment that’s vastly different from the lifelogging of Instagram where you can just take a selfie, show something pretty, or pan around what you’re up to. TikToks are premeditated, storyboarded, and vastly different than the haphazard Stories on Insta.

That’s why Zuckerberg’s comments cast a dark shadow over the future of the Facebook family of apps. How can it beat what it doesn’t understand? He certainly can’t ignore it. Facebook’s copycat Lasso has been installed just 425,000 times since it launched in November, while TikTok has 640 million installs in the same period outside of China. Oh, and TikTok has 1.4 billion total installs beyond China to date.

TikTok

Casey Newton of The Verge today published two hours of audio and transcripts from two internal-only all-hands Q&As held by Zuckerberg at Facebook in July. His comments touch on the company’s plan to fight being broken up by regulators, especially if Elizabeth Warren becomes President. He thinks Facebook would win, but on resorting to suing the government, he says “does that still suck for us? Yeah.” Zuckerberg also describes how Facebook is working to launch a payments product in Mexico and elsewhere by year’s end as Libra deals with regulatory scrutiny.

But beyond his comments on regulation, it’s his pigeonholing of TikTok that’s most alarming. It foreshadows Facebook failing to win one of the core social feeds that its business depends on. Perhaps his perspective on the competitor is evolving, but the leak portrays him as thinking TikTok is just the next Snapchat Stories to destroy.

Zuckeberg’s Thoughts On TikTok

Here’s what Zuckerberg said about TikTok during the internal Q&A sessions, (emphasis mine):

So yeah. I mean, TikTok is doing well. One of the things that’s especially notable about TikTok is, for a while, the internet landscape was kind of a bunch of internet companies that were primarily American companies. And then there was this parallel universe of Chinese companies that pretty much only were offering their services in China. And we had Tencent who was trying to spread some of their services into Southeast Asia. Alibaba has spread a bunch of their payment services to Southeast Asia. Broadly, in terms of global expansion, that had been pretty limited, and TikTok, which is built by this company Beijing ByteDance, is really the first consumer internet product built by one of the Chinese tech giants that is doing quite well around the world. It’s starting to do well in the US, especially with young folks. It’s growing really quickly in India. I think it’s past Instagram now in India in terms of scale. So yeah, it’s a very interesting phenomenon.

And the way that we kind of think about it is: it’s married short-form, immersive video with browse. So it’s almost like the Explore Tab that we have on Instagram, which is today primarily about feed posts and highlighting different feed posts. I kind of think about TikTok as if it were Explore for stories, and that were the whole app. And then you had creators who were specifically working on making that stuff. So we have a number of approaches that we’re going to take towards this, and we have a product called Lasso that’s a standalone app that we’re working on, trying to get product-market fit in countries like Mexico, is I think one of the first initial ones. We’re trying to first see if we can get it to work in countries where TikTok is not already big before we go and compete with TikTok in countries where they are big.

We’re taking a number of approaches with Instagram, including making it so that Explore is more focused on stories, which is increasingly becoming the primary way that people consume content on Instagram, as well as a couple of other things there. But yeah, I think that it’s not only one of the more interesting new phenomena and products that are growing. But in terms of the geopolitical implications of what they’re doing, I think it is quite interesting. I think we have time to learn and understand and get ahead of the trend. It is growing, but they’re spending a huge amount of money promoting it. What we’ve found is that their retention is actually not that strong after they stop advertising. So the space is still fairly nascent, and there’s time for us to kind of figure out what we want to do here. But I think this is a real thing. It’s good.

To Zuckerberg’s credit, he’s not dismissing the threat. He knows TikTok is popular. He knows it’s growing in key international markets Facebook and Instagram depend on to keep user counts rising. And he knows his company needs to respond via its standalone clone Lasso and more.

Lasso

But while TikToks might look like Stories because they’re vertical videos, and TikTok might algorithmically recommend them to people like Instagram Explore, it’s a whole ‘nother beast of a product and one that may be harder than it seems to copy.

To crystallize why, let’s rewind to Snapchat. With the launch of Stories, it started to blow up with US teens. Facebook’s attempts to clone it in standalone apps like Poke and Slingshot never gained traction. In fact, none of Facebook’s standalone apps have succeeded unless they splintered off an already-popular piece of Facebook like chat and users were forced to download them like Messenger. It wasn’t until Zuckerberg stuck his clone of Stories front-and-center atop Instagram and Facebook that Snapchat’s user count went from growing 18% per quarter to shrinking. There, Facebook used the same strategy laid out in Zuckerberg’s comments — push its good-enough clone in countries where the original isn’t popular yet.

But Facebook was fortunate because Stories really wasn’t that dissimilar to the content users were already sharing on Instagram — tiny biographical snippets of their lives. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel had originally invented Stories as a vision of Facebook’s News Feed through the lens of an ephemeral camera. All users had to know was “I take the same videos, but shorter and sillier, posted more often, and then they disappear”. The concept of Instagram and Facebook didn’t have to change. They were still about telling friends what you were up to. Choking off TikTok’s growth will be much more complicated.

Why TikTok Is Tough To Clone

TikTok isn’t about you or what you’re doing. It’s about entertaining your audience. It’s not spontaneous chronicling of your real life. It’s about inventing characters, dressing up as someone else, and acting out jokes. It’s not about privacy and friends, but strutting on the world stage. And it’s not about originality — the heart of Instagram. TikTok is about remixing culture — taking the audio from someone else’s clip and reimagining the gag in a new context by layering it atop a video you record.

That makes TikTok distinct enough that it will be very difficult to shoehorn into Instagram or Facebook, even if they add the remixing functionality. Most videos on those apps aren’t designed to be templates for memes like TikToks are. Insta and Facebook’s social graphs are rooted in friendship and augmented by the beautiful and famous, but don’t encompass the new wave of amateur performers TikTok elevates. And since each post to the app becomes fodder for someone else’s creativity, a competitor starting from scratch doesn’t offer much to remix.

That means a TikTok clone would have to be somewhat buried in Instagram or Facebook, rebuild a new social graph, and retrain users’ understanding of these apps’ purpose…at the risk of distracting from their core use cases. This leaves Facebook hoping to grow its standalone TikTok clone Lasso which TechCrunch scooped a year ago before it launched last November. But as we’ve seen, Facebook struggles growing brand new apps, and that effort is further hindered by its increasingly toxic brand and sheen of uncoolness. Nor does it help that Facebook must divert development resources to comply with all the new privacy and transparency obligations as part of its $5 billion FTC fine and settlement.

The Next Feed

Facebook’s best bet is to assess the future value of the ads it could run on a successful TikTok clone and apply some greater fraction of that grand sum to competing directly. It’s already made some smart additions to Lasso like tutorials for how to remix and the option to add GIFs as sections of your video. But it’s still failing to gain serious traction in the US. While typical TikTok homepage videos have hundreds of thousands of Likes, the top ones I saw in my Lasso feed today received 70 or fewer.

I had Sensor Tower run some analysis comparing TikTok with Lasso since its launch last November, and found that Lasso gets 6 downloads for every 1000 for TikTok in the US. Some more stats:

US Total Downloads Since November: Lasso – 250,000 // TikTok – 41.3 million

US Downloads Per Day Since November: Lasso – 760 // TikTok – 126,000

Average US Google Play Social App Chart Ranking: Lasso – #155 // TikTok – #2

Beyond the US, Lasso has only launched in one other market, Mexico in April, where it’s been faring better but could hardly even be considered a competitor to TikTok. They won’t even coherently fit together on a graph. Facebook needs to lean harder into Lasso:

Mexico Total Downloads Since April: Lasso – 175,000 // TikTok – 3.3 million

Mexico Downloads Per Day Since November: Lasso – 1,000 // TikTok – 19,000

Zuckerberg may need to find a coherent place for TikTok style features inside Instagram and potentially Facebook. That could be another horizontal row of previews like with Stories and/or a header on the Explore page dedicated to premeditated content. Certainly something more prominent than a single button like IGTV that still no one is asking for. One opportunity to best TikTok would be building a dedicated remix source browser into the Stories camera to help users find content to put their own spin on.

Facebook will also need to buy out top TikTok creators to make videos for it instead, and even quasi-hire some of the most prolific video meme or challenge inventors to give users trends to jump on rather than just one-off clips to watch. Its failure to offer IGTV stars monetization has led many to ignore that platform, and it can’t afford that again.

If Zuckerberg approaches TikTok as merely an algorithmic video recommender like Explore, Facebook will miss out on owning the social entertainment feed. If he doesn’t decisively move to challenge TikTok soon, its catalog of content to remix will grow insurmountable and it will own the whole concept of short form performative video. Snapchat’s insistence on ephemerality makes it incompatible with remixing, and YouTube isn’t nimble enough to reinvent itself.

If no American company can step up, we could see our interest data, faces, and attention forfeited to an app that while delightful to use, heralds Chinese political values at odds with our own.

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://ift.tt/2nqeOxP via IFTTT

[technicalsolutions88]

“It’s almost like the Explore Tab that we have on Instagram” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in leaked audio of him describing TikTok during an all-hands meeting. But it’s not. TikTok represents a new form of social entertainment that’s vastly different from the lifelogging of Instagram where you can just take a selfie, show something pretty, or pan around what you’re up to. TikToks are premeditated, storyboarded, and vastly different than the haphazard Stories on Insta.

That’s why Zuckerberg’s comments cast a dark shadow over the future of the Facebook family of apps. How can it beat what it doesn’t understand? He certainly can’t ignore it. Facebook’s copycat Lasso has been installed just 425,000 times since it launched in November, while TikTok has 640 million installs in the same period outside of China. Oh, and TikTok has 1.4 billion total installs beyond China to date.

TikTok

Casey Newton of The Verge today published two hours of audio and transcripts from two internal-only all-hands Q&As held by Zuckerberg at Facebook in July. His comments touch on the company’s plan to fight being broken up by regulators, especially if Elizabeth Warren becomes President. He thinks Facebook would win, but on resorting to suing the government, he says “does that still suck for us? Yeah.” Zuckerberg also describes how Facebook is working to launch a payments product in Mexico and elsewhere by year’s end as Libra deals with regulatory scrutiny.

But beyond his comments on regulation, it’s his pigeonholing of TikTok that’s most alarming. It foreshadows Facebook failing to win one of the core social feeds that its business depends on. Perhaps his perspective on the competitor is evolving, but the leak portrays him as thinking TikTok is just the next Snapchat Stories to destroy.

Zuckeberg’s Thoughts On TikTok

Here’s what Zuckerberg said about TikTok during the internal Q&A sessions, (emphasis mine):

So yeah. I mean, TikTok is doing well. One of the things that’s especially notable about TikTok is, for a while, the internet landscape was kind of a bunch of internet companies that were primarily American companies. And then there was this parallel universe of Chinese companies that pretty much only were offering their services in China. And we had Tencent who was trying to spread some of their services into Southeast Asia. Alibaba has spread a bunch of their payment services to Southeast Asia. Broadly, in terms of global expansion, that had been pretty limited, and TikTok, which is built by this company Beijing ByteDance, is really the first consumer internet product built by one of the Chinese tech giants that is doing quite well around the world. It’s starting to do well in the US, especially with young folks. It’s growing really quickly in India. I think it’s past Instagram now in India in terms of scale. So yeah, it’s a very interesting phenomenon.

And the way that we kind of think about it is: it’s married short-form, immersive video with browse. So it’s almost like the Explore Tab that we have on Instagram, which is today primarily about feed posts and highlighting different feed posts. I kind of think about TikTok as if it were Explore for stories, and that were the whole app. And then you had creators who were specifically working on making that stuff. So we have a number of approaches that we’re going to take towards this, and we have a product called Lasso that’s a standalone app that we’re working on, trying to get product-market fit in countries like Mexico, is I think one of the first initial ones. We’re trying to first see if we can get it to work in countries where TikTok is not already big before we go and compete with TikTok in countries where they are big.

We’re taking a number of approaches with Instagram, including making it so that Explore is more focused on stories, which is increasingly becoming the primary way that people consume content on Instagram, as well as a couple of other things there. But yeah, I think that it’s not only one of the more interesting new phenomena and products that are growing. But in terms of the geopolitical implications of what they’re doing, I think it is quite interesting. I think we have time to learn and understand and get ahead of the trend. It is growing, but they’re spending a huge amount of money promoting it. What we’ve found is that their retention is actually not that strong after they stop advertising. So the space is still fairly nascent, and there’s time for us to kind of figure out what we want to do here. But I think this is a real thing. It’s good.

To Zuckerberg’s credit, he’s not dismissing the threat. He knows TikTok is popular. He knows it’s growing in key international markets Facebook and Instagram depend on to keep user counts rising. And he knows his company needs to respond via its standalone clone Lasso and more.

Lasso

But while TikToks might look like Stories because they’re vertical videos, and TikTok might algorithmically recommend them to people like Instagram Explore, it’s a whole ‘nother beast of a product and one that may be harder than it seems to copy.

To crystallize why, let’s rewind to Snapchat. With the launch of Stories, it started to blow up with US teens. Facebook’s attempts to clone it in standalone apps like Poke and Slingshot never gained traction. In fact, none of Facebook’s standalone apps have succeeded unless they splintered off an already-popular piece of Facebook like chat and users were forced to download them like Messenger. It wasn’t until Zuckerberg stuck his clone of Stories front-and-center atop Instagram and Facebook that Snapchat’s user count went from growing 18% per quarter to shrinking. There, Facebook used the same strategy laid out in Zuckerberg’s comments — push its good-enough clone in countries where the original isn’t popular yet.

But Facebook was fortunate because Stories really wasn’t that dissimilar to the content users were already sharing on Instagram — tiny biographical snippets of their lives. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel had originally invented Stories as a vision of Facebook’s News Feed through the lens of an ephemeral camera. All users had to know was “I take the same videos, but shorter and sillier, posted more often, and then they disappear”. The concept of Instagram and Facebook didn’t have to change. They were still about telling friends what you were up to. Choking off TikTok’s growth will be much more complicated.

Why TikTok Is Tough To Clone

TikTok isn’t about you or what you’re doing. It’s about entertaining your audience. It’s not spontaneous chronicling of your real life. It’s about inventing characters, dressing up as someone else, and acting out jokes. It’s not about privacy and friends, but strutting on the world stage. And it’s not about originality — the heart of Instagram. TikTok is about remixing culture — taking the audio from someone else’s clip and reimagining the gag in a new context by layering it atop a video you record.

That makes TikTok distinct enough that it will be very difficult to shoehorn into Instagram or Facebook, even if they add the remixing functionality. Most videos on those apps aren’t designed to be templates for memes like TikToks are. Insta and Facebook’s social graphs are rooted in friendship and augmented by the beautiful and famous, but don’t encompass the new wave of amateur performers TikTok elevates. And since each post to the app becomes fodder for someone else’s creativity, a competitor starting from scratch doesn’t offer much to remix.

That means a TikTok clone would have to be somewhat buried in Instagram or Facebook, rebuild a new social graph, and retrain users’ understanding of these apps’ purpose…at the risk of distracting from their core use cases. This leaves Facebook hoping to grow its standalone TikTok clone Lasso which TechCrunch scooped a year ago before it launched last November. But as we’ve seen, Facebook struggles growing brand new apps, and that effort is further hindered by its increasingly toxic brand and sheen of uncoolness. Nor does it help that Facebook must divert development resources to comply with all the new privacy and transparency obligations as part of its $5 billion FTC fine and settlement.

The Next Feed

Facebook’s best bet is to assess the future value of the ads it could run on a successful TikTok clone and apply some greater fraction of that grand sum to competing directly. It’s already made some smart additions to Lasso like tutorials for how to remix and the option to add GIFs as sections of your video. But it’s still failing to gain serious traction in the US. While typical TikTok homepage videos have hundreds of thousands of Likes, the top ones I saw in my Lasso feed today received 70 or fewer.

I had Sensor Tower run some analysis comparing TikTok with Lasso since its launch last November, and found that Lasso gets 6 downloads for every 1000 for TikTok in the US. Some more stats:

US Total Downloads Since November: Lasso – 250,000 // TikTok – 41.3 million

US Downloads Per Day Since November: Lasso – 760 // TikTok – 126,000

Average US Google Play Social App Chart Ranking: Lasso – #155 // TikTok – #2

Beyond the US, Lasso has only launched in one other market, Mexico in April, where it’s been faring better but could hardly even be considered a competitor to TikTok. They won’t even coherently fit together on a graph. Facebook needs to lean harder into Lasso:

Mexico Total Downloads Since April: Lasso – 175,000 // TikTok – 3.3 million

Mexico Downloads Per Day Since November: Lasso – 1,000 // TikTok – 19,000

Zuckerberg may need to find a coherent place for TikTok style features inside Instagram and potentially Facebook. That could be another horizontal row of previews like with Stories and/or a header on the Explore page dedicated to premeditated content. Certainly something more prominent than a single button like IGTV that still no one is asking for. One opportunity to best TikTok would be building a dedicated remix source browser into the Stories camera to help users find content to put their own spin on.

Facebook will also need to buy out top TikTok creators to make videos for it instead, and even quasi-hire some of the most prolific video meme or challenge inventors to give users trends to jump on rather than just one-off clips to watch. Its failure to offer IGTV stars monetization has led many to ignore that platform, and it can’t afford that again.

If Zuckerberg approaches TikTok as merely an algorithmic video recommender like Explore, Facebook will miss out on owning the social entertainment feed. If he doesn’t decisively move to challenge TikTok soon, its catalog of content to remix will grow insurmountable and it will own the whole concept of short form performative video. Snapchat’s insistence on ephemerality makes it incompatible with remixing, and YouTube isn’t nimble enough to reinvent itself.

If no American company can step up, we could see our interest data, faces, and attention forfeited to an app that while delightful to use, heralds Chinese political values at odds with our own. If only Twitter hadn’t killed Vine.

from Mobile – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2nqeOxP ORIGINAL CONTENT FROM: https://techcrunch.com/

[slrlounge1]

The Sony FE 135mm f/1.8 GM, …Ready For 8K Video? | Lab Test & Opinion

Lensrentals.com has apparently tested the resolution (sharpness) of more than 300 different lenses. In fact, they usually test ten copies of a given lens, just to check if there are any inconsistencies, and ensure that the results from one lens aren’t just a fluke, good or bad.

So, when I tell you that the new Sony FE 135mm f/1.8 GM is the sharpest lens they’ve ever tested, that ought to be worth ten thousand Youtubers or Instagrammers who have ever said this-or-that lens is, simply, “very sharp”…

I mounted the first [lens], sipped my coffee and then lost my mind and started shouting various expletives…I hadn’t broken anything; I just saw MTF curves higher than anything I’d ever seen in a normal-range lens.

Now, for those of you who don’t know who Roger Cicala is, he is a rather hard person to impress when it comes to lenses. His optical testing method, known as OLAF, is likely the best in the business when it comes to cameras and photography.

Aspects Of Image Quality

DISCLAIMER: Of course, sharpness isn’t everything; there are so many other characteristics that make a lens great. Such a caveat must indeed closely follow such bold, high praise as, “sharpest lens ever tested”…

With fast-aperture telephoto lenses, two other aspects of lens performance besides sharpness immediately come to mind: autofocus reliability and bokeh. If those two factors let you down as a photographer, then sharpness alone cannot be enough reason to spend $1,898 on a lens. (You can currently preorder it; expected delivery is some time in April 2019.)

Needless to say, here at SLR Lounge we’re certainly looking forward to reviewing the new Sony 135mm! Initial reports are that it is indeed a great option in those other areas of autofocus and bokeh, so we’re eager to take it out for a spin at some weddings and portrait sessions, as well as potentially some other creative ideas. But, more on that later. Let’s look at the test graphs, since that’s likely the reason you clicked on this post in the first place. We’ll keep it simple and explain what you’re looking at.

Sony FE 135mm f/1.8 GM Lab Test Results

So, just how sharp does “sharpest lens ever” look, in an actual sharpness graph? Alone, the following graph may not mean much, because MTF charts don’t mean very much unless you actually understand the numbers.

I would try and explain exactly what the numbers mean, but here’s the thing: even camera companies themselves don’t use the exact same scales on their own MTF charts, and likely not the same testing methods either, meaning it’s just not very useful to look at one chart and assume you can deduce how sharp it actually is, relative to other lenses.

In other words, forget the numbers themselves, and just know this: the higher the colored lines are, the sharper the lens. The left edge of the graph reprsents the dead-center of an image, and the right edge of the graph represents the edge(s) of an image frame. So, as you might expect, a lens is usually sharpest at its center, and it gradually gets a little softer as you approach the very edges. That’s the important thing here.

Sony FE 135mm f/1.8 GM versus other 135mm prime lenses

Since a single MTF chart isn’t very useful to the average photographer, here’s how the Sony 135 GM performs against the Sigma 135mm f/1.8 Art, a lens which is already known to be incredibly sharp indeed, even on high-megapixel full-frame sensors:

In this MTF graph, the centerline in the middle represents the center of both lenses, and the outer edges of the graph represent the edges of each lens. The Sigma 135 Art is on the left, the Sony is on the right.

By the way, the colored lines, again in simplified terms, just represent various frequencies of fine image detail.  Just remember that the higher the lines, the sharper the lens.

As you can see in the above graph, the two lenses are actually similar at the very edges, however, the Sony is just unprecedentedly sharp in the center of the image.

Here is the Sony 135mm GM versus the Zeis Batis 135mm f/2.8, another modern, very sharp 135mm prime lens:

  The Zeiss Batis is, on average, a touch sharper at the very edges, but again, the Sony pulls ahead towards the center. But again, keep in mind that all of these lines are ridiculously high up on the graph. A “decently sharp” lens, in many cases, still has its lowest (purple in this case) lines just barely halfway up the graph, even in the center. Both of these lenses have crammed all possible forms of measurement into their upper ~1/3 of the graph. Simply put: both lenses are astonishingly sharp.

Okay, that’s enough graphs and lab tests. For even more geekiness about “lp/mm” and observations from Roger Cicala and OLAF, read the full article here.

What we should ask ourselves now is, what does all of this really mean?

What we’re seeing is the next generation of lens, that is ready to handle the next generation of high-megapixel sensors. Indeed, you could probably expect this lens to still “look great” on a 75-megapixel camera body! Which does imply that we’ll be seeing such cameras in the coming years.

There’s something else to keep in mind, though: if you’re shooting with “just” a 20, 24, or 30-megapixel camera, to be totally fair and honest, all of these recent lenses are going to seem jaw-droppingly sharp. Sony, Zeiss, Sigma, and Nikon have all delivered exciting new 135mm and/or 105mm prime lenses in the last few years that, in an effort to balance out the geekiness of MTF charts, I should probably jsut describe as “bonkers sharp”.

Would you still see a difference in sharpness between this lens and a much older 135mm prime lens, even on a ~24 megapixel sensor? Of course, but only if you’re using truly perfect shooting technique, but that is the case with any photography scenario where you’d like to see a difference in sharpness.

Why Does This Lens Need To Be So Sharp?

If the Sony FE 135mm f/1.8 GM is so sharp that it easily out-resolves the highest-resolution sensor Sony currently offers, (the 42-megapixel A7RIII, our final review of which is coming shortly!) …what is its real purpose?

In short, this lens is future-proof. Not only is it ready to handle an inevitable higher-megapixel sensor, but it’s also likely ready for 8K video! Maybe we’ll see a Sony camera body that offers 8K video in the coming years, who knows. (Note: we don’t have insider information, nor are there any rumors; this is just an observation on what such a high-resolution lens will be good for.)

Nobody should buy a lens for its future potential only. However, it has always been a good idea to invest in glass that can last you 5-10+ years, if you take good care of it. This indeed appears to be one of those lenses.

What’s Your Creative Idea For A Fast, Sharp Telephoto Lens?

All in all, camera gear is just mean to help you achieve a creative vision. Things like increased sharpness are only meant to allow your equipment to “get out of the way”, and let you do something really cool. The question is, what creative ideas do you have?

Since lab test charts aren’t very exciting to look at, I’ll share an image with you that has been in the back of mind for nearly 5 years now. It’s a still photograph, however, I really wanted to create a timelapse of what was happening at this moment. And that is, the Andromeda galaxy was rising in the night sky, and passing very close to the dramatic, iconic lip of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park. This is something I’ve been wanting to re-shoot with a “flawlessly sharp” telephoto lens:

Andromeda Galaxy & Halfdome, Yosemite National Park Sharpness and low noise were achieved in this image by stacking multiple exposures and blending the sky exposures with a single ultra-long exposure of Half Dome. To learn about photographing our own Milky Way galaxy, and nightscape photography in general, be sure to check out our Milky Way Workshop!

  Andromeda approaching Half Dome, GIF animation Nikon 85mm f/1.8, cropped to ~135mm. Unfortunately, this lens has severe color fringing in addition to its relative softness, and was unsuitable to create a good timelapse. I hope to re-shoot it someday, with a lens such as the Sony 135mm f/1.8!

  So, I’d love to hear your thoughts on all these amazing new ultra-fast telephoto primes that we have been seeing lately! What creative idea would you pursue, if you had an “insanely sharp” 135mm f/1.8 (or 105mm f/1.4) at your disposal? Low-light portraits, astrophotography, or…?

Take care, and happy travels!

from SLR Lounge https://www.slrlounge.com/the-sony-fe-135mm-f-1-8-gm-sharpest-lenses-ever/ via IFTTT

[webanalytics]

Smarter Career Choices #3: Solve for the Global Maxima!

Today, a simple lesson that so many of us miss at great peril. In fact in your role, at this very moment, your company is making a mistake in terms of how it values your impact on the business.

The lesson is about the limitation of optimizing for a local maxima, usually in a silo.

We are going to internalize this lesson by learning from Microsoft. It is a company I love (am typing this on my beloved ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 5, using Windows Live Writer blogging software!). I bumped into the lesson thanks to their NFL sponsorship.

If you were watching the Oakland Raiders beating the hapless New York Giants (so sad about Eli) this past Sunday, you surely saw a scene like this one:

Quarterback Geno Smith using his Microsoft Surface tablet to figure out how he added two more fumbles to this career total of 43. Or, maybe it was him replaying the 360 degrees view of the three times he was sacked during the game.

The Surface tablet is everywhere in an NFL game. Microsoft paid $400 million for four years for the rights, and just renewed the deal for another year (for an as yet undisclosed sum).

For all this expense, you'll see players and coaches using them during the game (as above). The Surface branding also gets prominent placement on the sidelines – on benches, on movable trollies and more. It is all quite prominent.

Here’s one more example: Beast mode!

I adore Mr. Lynch’s passion. Oh, and did you notice the Surface branding?

Now, let’s talk analytics and accountability.

NFL ratings are down, but an average game still gets between 15 m – 20 m viewers. That is a lot of pretty locked-in attention, very hard to get anywhere these days.

The question for us, Occam’s Razor readers, is… What does the Surface Marketing team get for all this money?

If the Surface Marketing team is like every other team at every other company engaged in sponsorships and television advertising, it’ll measure the same collection of smart metrics like everyone else.

First one will be Reach. The Surface team is likely measuring it with deep granularity (by individual games, geo, days, times of days, and a lot more).  I’m confident that their analysis will show they are getting great Reach.

The team will rightly be congratulating itself on this success.

Next on the list, having spent enough of my life with TV buyers, I can comfortably say that the Surface team is also expending copious amounts of effort measuring one or more dimensions of Brand Lift metric. Ad Recall, Brand Interest, Favorability, Consideration etc.

Brand Lift is most frequently measured using surveys.

Given the number of times Microsoft Surface, or its branded presence, shows up in a game (52 times in my count in the OAK – NYC game), I believe the Surface team is getting very positive reads from its post NFL ad-exposure surveys.

After 52 times most people would recall the ad, surely answer the survey with some interest in the brand, and everyone (except Coach Belichick) seems to like using the tablets, a favorability that will surely transfer to a whole lot of viewers.

This would, indeed should, result in more congratulations in the Surface team.

The two-step approach above reflects the most common approach Marketers, and their Agencies, use to measure success. Did we reach a large audience? Do they remember anything?

The answers to these two questions power job promotions, bonuses and agency contract renewals with higher fees.

I believe this is necessary, but not sufficient.

I believe this approach optimizes for a local maxima (the media buying bubble) and does not create the necessary incentives to solve for the global maxima (short or long-term business success).

Let me illuminate this gap.

Here’s the global maxima question: How many Surface tablets have been sold due to this near-blanket coverage in NFL games via precious undivided attention?

That was the question that crossed my mind during Sunday’s game.

I had one data point handy.

According to TripIt I’ve visited 156 cities across 32 countries in the last few years. During these trips, meetings and meetups, I've never seen a Microsoft Surface tablet in the wild. Not one.

That’s not completely true. I have seen one frequently. The one I bought for my dad four years ago.

One data point does not a story make.

To assess a more complete answer, we turn to our trusty search engine Bing…

The picture above starts 12 months after Surface inked the $400 million NFL contract. The Surface's share of shipments is so small, it does not even show up in a graph.

Not being content with just one view of success, I tried other sources. 

The data from IDC, shows no meaningful Surface anything. Statcounter provides an interesting view as it measures actual use the Surface when accessing the two million websites that use Statcounter. Surface is at 0.29% share.

This is a bit hyperbolic, but in the grand scheme of things… No one is buying a Surface.

Local maxima view of success: The Surface team’s NFL contract is a smashing success. The team is getting great Reach and great Brand Lift. Contract with NFL renewed for another 12 months.

Global maxima view of success: Microsoft is losing.

[Key caveat: The data Statista and IDC provide capture shipments. It is possible that the Surface is being sold directly in a way that neither of these two sources would capture those sales. Perhaps some kind of B2B sales. To overcome this possible issue I’ve used the Statcounter data to capture usage. Still, there is a possible scenario where none, or not enough, of the Surfaces sold visit those two million sites.]

Sadly, Microsoft is not alone in this local maxima focus. Most companies function in a similar manner. Yours. Mine. Other people’s. Our collective mistake is that we don’t think critically enough about what we really are solving for. Our company’s mistake is the incentive structure they put in place (which almost always rewards the local maxima).

Let me give you two examples of this sad local maxima obsession that crossed my desk just this morning. All in the space of one hour.

Local – Global Maxima Example 2: Gap Inc..

A report has been published on The Age of Social Influence. Its goal is to aggressively recommend the strategy of marketing via Social Influencers. Here’s the publishing company’s intro of themselves: “We are a powerful data intelligence tool that combines the knowledge and insights you need to deliver a successful celebrity and social influencer marketing strategy.”

Their claims of this wonderful Social Influencer strategy is based on a survey of 270 respondents. 270. It seems like an oddly tiny choice by a powerful data intelligence tool company (PDITC).

They have all kinds of numbers from the 270 survey sample showing glory.

The very first example in the report of a brand winning hugely with a Social Influencer strategy is Gap.

Here’s a screenshot from the report…

While we all love Cher, seriously she is special, this is a classic local maxima let’s only look at what will make us look good to pimp stuff we want to strategy.

What would be a global maxima if you are going to use a company as a poster child?

Here’s Gap’s financial performance over the last five years…

Gap Inc. has been struggling for years, flirting with financial disaster recently in every facet of its business.

I invite you to explore other financial data on the eMarketer Retail website. Look at Revenue, Earnings, Margins, Employment… Everything is super sad. For an additional valuable lesson, click on Digital as well. It shows the social performance of Gap (illustrating even the local maxima is quite suspect).

I dearly wish the Gap survives, they make good quality clothes.

I also wish that the powerful data intelligence tool company would have chosen to focus on looking at the global maxima success before using Gap, and the other examples in their 40 page report. That would have made their drum banging for Social Influencers more persuasive. It would also have resulted in fewer clients of powerful data intelligence tool company shuttled in the direction of spending money on something that mostly likely will not produce any business results.

Local – Global Maxima Example 3: Amazon

A celebration was shared with me for 31 custom gifs created by Giphy for the up and coming retailer Amazon.

Here’s a non constantly looped, to ensure you’re not annoyed, sample…

The celebration was based on the fact that the total view count for these 31 custom gifs was 31 million.

[Sidebar: Always, always, always be suspicious of numbers that are that clean. 31 gifs being viewed a clean 31 million times is cosmically impossible. Seek the faq page to understand how views are measured. Identify that there is no clarity. Now, be even more suspicious.]

I’m afraid in my book views don’t even count as a local maxima. Even if they are in yours, I hope you’ll agree they are a million miles away from a global maxima.

I wanted to share this example from Amazon because you can’t use the global maxima of overall business success I’ve used above. Even if Jeff Bezos goes around hitting people with feather dusters, Amazon will keep selling more and more products. They have already reached perpetual motion.

What do you do when it is difficult to identify the global maxima from a super-tactical animated 31 gifs with 31 million views effort?

Try to move four steps up from wherever you are. Global maxima lite.

In this case, here’s a great start: % of Users who shared the gif who are not current Amazon customers.

So much more insightful than Views, right?

We are shooting for a deeper brand connection, by an audience that holds business value for us. Sure these people are annoying their friends, but hey at least as Amazon we can remarket to them – and friends (!) – and convert them to Prime customers!

I’m sure you can think of others that are five, six and eight steps above Views. (Share them in comments, and earn admiration.)

It does not always have to be revenue or profit. But, please don’t pop the champagne on views, impressions and other such primitive signals of nothingness.

On the topic of measurement, let’s go back to Microsoft and brainstorm some strategies for their unique use case.

What should Microsoft have measured?

Purely as an academic exercise I’m leaving aside the possibility that the Surface is simply not a good tablet. That would certainly impact sales – marketing or no marketing. But, since Microsoft went back for year five, it is safe to assume at least they believe it is a good tablet.

Ok? It is a good tablet.

Again as an academic exercise I’m going to ignore the four year horizon. There is no question that at the end of year two Microsoft had overwhelming proof from a multitude of data points that the NFL contract was not selling any Surfaces. They did not need Big Data or Artificial Intelligence to come to that conclusion. If they could not get out of the contract, at the end of year two a better use of $100 mil spend per year would have been to change the covers on the Surfaces to Xbox green, and change the numerous printed brand opportunities on the sidelines to Xbox as well. A great selling product, with a much bigger overlap with the NFL audience than the Surface.

Ok? We are not looking after year two.

During the first and second year, what could we have measured as Microsoft if we wanted to do better than the local maxima? Better than Reach and Brand Lift metrics?

Let me plant three ideas (please add yours via comments).

An enhanced survey would be a good start. Along with measuring ad recall etc., they could also ask how likely are you to choose the Surface over the iPad as your next tablet?

It is a tougher question than do you remember the ad or what tablets can you name. It is going head to head with the thing people usually say when they mean tablet. And, you are looking for switching. A strong behavior shift, a harder yes to get when I’ve done surveys. All this brand exposure, if its working, should shift that key intent signal.

Really easy to do. And, you can easily get thousands upon thousands of responses – you don’t have to settle for 270. It would have given the Marketing team a leading indicator that no one is going to buy the Surface as a result of the NFL partnership. The signal could have been received even a couple months in, and certainly by the end of year one.

Time series correlations would have been a great start right after the first week of the contract. How many people are visiting the Surface website on Sundays? Is that materially significant compared to weeks prior or weeks where there were not as many games? Was there an improvement on Sundays in digital sales? How about retail sales on Mondays?

This is simple stuff. Even visits to the site would have been a nice low level signal.

As the season went on, we could look for test and control opportunities. The NFL always has blackouts in cities/states where the stadiums don’t have enough attendance. This past weekend it was in two states, complete blackout of free broadcast games. Is there a difference in site visits, online conversion rates, offline sales, between states that had one game broadcast on Sunday, two games broadcast on Sunday and no games broadcast on Sunday?

A little more complicated. The site stuff is easy to segment. For store sales Microsoft could easily get data from its stores in malls, and likely also from retailers like Best Buy with a little arm twisting. This data would have shows Microsoft, a few months in, that the global maxima might not be reached.

If you don’t have this type of ubiquity, Matched Market tests are also fabulous in these cases to discern if a specific marketing strategy is having a business impact.

Three ideas that I hope will spark many more in your mind when you shoot to measure the global maxima.

I want to briefly touch on one refrain I often hear about these long term efforts, or short term efforts that are not working but are looking at a longer horizon: So what if the results are not there. This is a long term brand building play, Apple did not become a beloved brand in one year.

There is a kernel of truth there, brand building take time. There is a kernel of BS there as well, Apple is Apple primary because of its innovative products.

Let’s not talk about Microsoft in context of the above statement as even if we assume there was some long term brand building happening, it did not translate into business success.

When you hear a statement like that, after you launch a new underwear, cooking range, VR headset or whatever… Obsessively measure more than the local maxima to discern signals in the short term that illustrate that the long term brand building play is not just an excuse to flush a lot of money. Both the Gap and Amazon examples have ideas to inspire you.

Or consider that even your long term brand building play, in the short term should cause you to take noticeable amounts of market share. It won’t be 80% in the short term, but neither is that statement a reason to spend more money if all you got is 5% in year one and 10% in year two.

Don’t settle for opinion.

Use data.

You have data.

Bonus: The real winner of the Microsoft NFL contract?

The NFL of course.

Microsoft makes great hardware. To make it work for the NFL, Microsoft surely wrote lots of custom software for the NFL’s specific use cases. Microsoft likely invested in tens of millions of dollars of camera equipment, wifi/networking upgrades in every stadium, deployed a small army of Microsoft employees to do on-site tech support before, during and after the games in every single stadium. And, more and more and more.

The NFL should be paying Microsoft $110 million a year to upgrade the ability of its coaches, players and teams to have access to this state of the art technology to compete more effectively every Thursday, Sunday and Monday!

The NFL is slated to make $14 billion in 2017, they can surely afford to give $110 mil a year to Microsoft.

Back to the real world… Even when you measure short term success, please do not be satisfied with a local maxima. Even in the short term you can measure something better. On the long term, you have all the elements you need… Definitely measure the global maxima!

Do this because it is the right and smart thing to do for your company. But, a tiny bit, do it because in my experience (across the world) global maxima solvers progress exponentially faster in their career. Turns out, delivering business results matters. :)

As always, it is your turn now.

Do you have a suggestion for what Microsoft or Gap or Amazon should measure as their global maxima? If you’ve been successful getting your CEO to focus on the global maxima, what approach really worked? If you were the role of the Chief Scientist of powerful data intelligence tool company, how would you measure the impact of Social Influencers in a more intelligent manner?

Please add your powerful ideas, brilliant critique and innovative strategies in comments below. I look forward to hearing from you.

Thank you.

Smarter Career Choices #3: Solve for the Global Maxima! is a post from: Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik

from Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik http://ift.tt/2A6kjCA #Digital #Analytics #Website

[nathandgibsca]

Smarter Career Choices #3: Solve for the Global Maxima!

Today, a simple lesson that so many of us miss at great peril. In fact in your role, at this very moment, your company is making a mistake in terms of how it values your impact on the business.

The lesson is about the limitation of optimizing for a local maxima, usually in a silo.

We are going to internalize this lesson by learning from Microsoft. It is a company I love (am typing this on my beloved ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 5, using Windows Live Writer blogging software!). I bumped into the lesson thanks to their NFL sponsorship.

If you were watching the Oakland Raiders beating the hapless New York Giants (so sad about Eli) this past Sunday, you surely saw a scene like this one:

Quarterback Geno Smith using his Microsoft Surface tablet to figure out how he added two more fumbles to this career total of 43. Or, maybe it was him replaying the 360 degrees view of the three times he was sacked during the game.

The Surface tablet is everywhere in an NFL game. Microsoft paid $400 million for four years for the rights, and just renewed the deal for another year (for an as yet undisclosed sum).

For all this expense, you'll see players and coaches using them during the game (as above). The Surface branding also gets prominent placement on the sidelines – on benches, on movable trollies and more. It is all quite prominent.

Here’s one more example: Beast mode!

I adore Mr. Lynch’s passion. Oh, and did you notice the Surface branding?

Now, let’s talk analytics and accountability.

NFL ratings are down, but an average game still gets between 15 m – 20 m viewers. That is a lot of pretty locked-in attention, very hard to get anywhere these days.

The question for us, Occam’s Razor readers, is… What does the Surface Marketing team get for all this money?

If the Surface Marketing team is like every other team at every other company engaged in sponsorships and television advertising, it’ll measure the same collection of smart metrics like everyone else.

First one will be Reach. The Surface team is likely measuring it with deep granularity (by individual games, geo, days, times of days, and a lot more).  I’m confident that their analysis will show they are getting great Reach.

The team will rightly be congratulating itself on this success.

Next on the list, having spent enough of my life with TV buyers, I can comfortably say that the Surface team is also expending copious amounts of effort measuring one or more dimensions of Brand Lift metric. Ad Recall, Brand Interest, Favorability, Consideration etc.

Brand Lift is most frequently measured using surveys.

Given the number of times Microsoft Surface, or its branded presence, shows up in a game (52 times in my count in the OAK – NYC game), I believe the Surface team is getting very positive reads from its post NFL ad-exposure surveys.

After 52 times most people would recall the ad, surely answer the survey with some interest in the brand, and everyone (except Coach Belichick) seems to like using the tablets, a favorability that will surely transfer to a whole lot of viewers.

This would, indeed should, result in more congratulations in the Surface team.

The two-step approach above reflects the most common approach Marketers, and their Agencies, use to measure success. Did we reach a large audience? Do they remember anything?

The answers to these two questions power job promotions, bonuses and agency contract renewals with higher fees.

I believe this is necessary, but not sufficient.

I believe this approach optimizes for a local maxima (the media buying bubble) and does not create the necessary incentives to solve for the global maxima (short or long-term business success).

Let me illuminate this gap.

Here’s the global maxima question: How many Surface tablets have been sold due to this near-blanket coverage in NFL games via precious undivided attention?

That was the question that crossed my mind during Sunday’s game.

I had one data point handy.

According to TripIt I’ve visited 156 cities across 32 countries in the last few years. During these trips, meetings and meetups, I've never seen a Microsoft Surface tablet in the wild. Not one.

That’s not completely true. I have seen one frequently. The one I bought for my dad four years ago.

One data point does not a story make.

To assess a more complete answer, we turn to our trusty search engine Bing…

The picture above starts 12 months after Surface inked the $400 million NFL contract. The Surface's share of shipments is so small, it does not even show up in a graph.

Not being content with just one view of success, I tried other sources. 

The data from IDC, shows no meaningful Surface anything. Statcounter provides an interesting view as it measures actual use the Surface when accessing the two million websites that use Statcounter. Surface is at 0.29% share.

This is a bit hyperbolic, but in the grand scheme of things… No one is buying a Surface.

Local maxima view of success: The Surface team’s NFL contract is a smashing success. The team is getting great Reach and great Brand Lift. Contract with NFL renewed for another 12 months.

Global maxima view of success: Microsoft is losing.

[Key caveat: The data Statista and IDC provide capture shipments. It is possible that the Surface is being sold directly in a way that neither of these two sources would capture those sales. Perhaps some kind of B2B sales. To overcome this possible issue I’ve used the Statcounter data to capture usage. Still, there is a possible scenario where none, or not enough, of the Surfaces sold visit those two million sites.]

Sadly, Microsoft is not alone in this local maxima focus. Most companies function in a similar manner. Yours. Mine. Other people’s. Our collective mistake is that we don’t think critically enough about what we really are solving for. Our company’s mistake is the incentive structure they put in place (which almost always rewards the local maxima).

Let me give you two examples of this sad local maxima obsession that crossed my desk just this morning. All in the space of one hour.

Local – Global Maxima Example 2: Gap Inc..

A report has been published on The Age of Social Influence. Its goal is to aggressively recommend the strategy of marketing via Social Influencers. Here’s the publishing company’s intro of themselves: “We are a powerful data intelligence tool that combines the knowledge and insights you need to deliver a successful celebrity and social influencer marketing strategy.”

Their claims of this wonderful Social Influencer strategy is based on a survey of 270 respondents. 270. It seems like an oddly tiny choice by a powerful data intelligence tool company (PDITC).

They have all kinds of numbers from the 270 survey sample showing glory.

The very first example in the report of a brand winning hugely with a Social Influencer strategy is Gap.

Here’s a screenshot from the report…

While we all love Cher, seriously she is special, this is a classic local maxima let’s only look at what will make us look good to pimp stuff we want to strategy.

What would be a global maxima if you are going to use a company as a poster child?

Here’s Gap’s financial performance over the last five years…

Gap Inc. has been struggling for years, flirting with financial disaster recently in every facet of its business.

I invite you to explore other financial data on the eMarketer Retail website. Look at Revenue, Earnings, Margins, Employment… Everything is super sad. For an additional valuable lesson, click on Digital as well. It shows the social performance of Gap (illustrating even the local maxima is quite suspect).

I dearly wish the Gap survives, they make good quality clothes.

I also wish that the powerful data intelligence tool company would have chosen to focus on looking at the global maxima success before using Gap, and the other examples in their 40 page report. That would have made their drum banging for Social Influencers more persuasive. It would also have resulted in fewer clients of powerful data intelligence tool company shuttled in the direction of spending money on something that mostly likely will not produce any business results.

Local – Global Maxima Example 3: Amazon

A celebration was shared with me for 31 custom gifs created by Giphy for the up and coming retailer Amazon.

Here’s a non constantly looped, to ensure you’re not annoyed, sample…

The celebration was based on the fact that the total view count for these 31 custom gifs was 31 million.

[Sidebar: Always, always, always be suspicious of numbers that are that clean. 31 gifs being viewed a clean 31 million times is cosmically impossible. Seek the faq page to understand how views are measured. Identify that there is no clarity. Now, be even more suspicious.]

I’m afraid in my book views don’t even count as a local maxima. Even if they are in yours, I hope you’ll agree they are a million miles away from a global maxima.

I wanted to share this example from Amazon because you can’t use the global maxima of overall business success I’ve used above. Even if Jeff Bezos goes around hitting people with feather dusters, Amazon will keep selling more and more products. They have already reached perpetual motion.

What do you do when it is difficult to identify the global maxima from a super-tactical animated 31 gifs with 31 million views effort?

Try to move four steps up from wherever you are. Global maxima lite.

In this case, here’s a great start: % of Users who shared the gif who are not current Amazon customers.

So much more insightful than Views, right?

We are shooting for a deeper brand connection, by an audience that holds business value for us. Sure these people are annoying their friends, but hey at least as Amazon we can remarket to them – and friends (!) – and convert them to Prime customers!

I’m sure you can think of others that are five, six and eight steps above Views. (Share them in comments, and earn admiration.)

It does not always have to be revenue or profit. But, please don’t pop the champagne on views, impressions and other such primitive signals of nothingness.

On the topic of measurement, let’s go back to Microsoft and brainstorm some strategies for their unique use case.

What should Microsoft have measured?

Purely as an academic exercise I’m leaving aside the possibility that the Surface is simply not a good tablet. That would certainly impact sales – marketing or no marketing. But, since Microsoft went back for year five, it is safe to assume at least they believe it is a good tablet.

Ok? It is a good tablet.

Again as an academic exercise I’m going to ignore the four year horizon. There is no question that at the end of year two Microsoft had overwhelming proof from a multitude of data points that the NFL contract was not selling any Surfaces. They did not need Big Data or Artificial Intelligence to come to that conclusion. If they could not get out of the contract, at the end of year two a better use of $100 mil spend per year would have been to change the covers on the Surfaces to Xbox green, and change the numerous printed brand opportunities on the sidelines to Xbox as well. A great selling product, with a much bigger overlap with the NFL audience than the Surface.

Ok? We are not looking after year two.

During the first and second year, what could we have measured as Microsoft if we wanted to do better than the local maxima? Better than Reach and Brand Lift metrics?

Let me plant three ideas (please add yours via comments).

An enhanced survey would be a good start. Along with measuring ad recall etc., they could also ask how likely are you to choose the Surface over the iPad as your next tablet?

It is a tougher question than do you remember the ad or what tablets can you name. It is going head to head with the thing people usually say when they mean tablet. And, you are looking for switching. A strong behavior shift, a harder yes to get when I’ve done surveys. All this brand exposure, if its working, should shift that key intent signal.

Really easy to do. And, you can easily get thousands upon thousands of responses – you don’t have to settle for 270. It would have given the Marketing team a leading indicator that no one is going to buy the Surface as a result of the NFL partnership. The signal could have been received even a couple months in, and certainly by the end of year one.

Time series correlations would have been a great start right after the first week of the contract. How many people are visiting the Surface website on Sundays? Is that materially significant compared to weeks prior or weeks where there were not as many games? Was there an improvement on Sundays in digital sales? How about retail sales on Mondays?

This is simple stuff. Even visits to the site would have been a nice low level signal.

As the season went on, we could look for test and control opportunities. The NFL always has blackouts in cities/states where the stadiums don’t have enough attendance. This past weekend it was in two states, complete blackout of free broadcast games. Is there a difference in site visits, online conversion rates, offline sales, between states that had one game broadcast on Sunday, two games broadcast on Sunday and no games broadcast on Sunday?

A little more complicated. The site stuff is easy to segment. For store sales Microsoft could easily get data from its stores in malls, and likely also from retailers like Best Buy with a little arm twisting. This data would have shows Microsoft, a few months in, that the global maxima might not be reached.

If you don’t have this type of ubiquity, Matched Market tests are also fabulous in these cases to discern if a specific marketing strategy is having a business impact.

Three ideas that I hope will spark many more in your mind when you shoot to measure the global maxima.

I want to briefly touch on one refrain I often hear about these long term efforts, or short term efforts that are not working but are looking at a longer horizon: So what if the results are not there. This is a long term brand building play, Apple did not become a beloved brand in one year.

There is a kernel of truth there, brand building take time. There is a kernel of BS there as well, Apple is Apple primary because of its innovative products.

Let’s not talk about Microsoft in context of the above statement as even if we assume there was some long term brand building happening, it did not translate into business success.

When you hear a statement like that, after you launch a new underwear, cooking range, VR headset or whatever… Obsessively measure more than the local maxima to discern signals in the short term that illustrate that the long term brand building play is not just an excuse to flush a lot of money. Both the Gap and Amazon examples have ideas to inspire you.

Or consider that even your long term brand building play, in the short term should cause you to take noticeable amounts of market share. It won’t be 80% in the short term, but neither is that statement a reason to spend more money if all you got is 5% in year one and 10% in year two.

Don’t settle for opinion.

Use data.

You have data.

Bonus: The real winner of the Microsoft NFL contract?

The NFL of course.

Microsoft makes great hardware. To make it work for the NFL, Microsoft surely wrote lots of custom software for the NFL’s specific use cases. Microsoft likely invested in tens of millions of dollars of camera equipment, wifi/networking upgrades in every stadium, deployed a small army of Microsoft employees to do on-site tech support before, during and after the games in every single stadium. And, more and more and more.

The NFL should be paying Microsoft $110 million a year to upgrade the ability of its coaches, players and teams to have access to this state of the art technology to compete more effectively every Thursday, Sunday and Monday!

The NFL is slated to make $14 billion in 2017, they can surely afford to give $110 mil a year to Microsoft.

Back to the real world… Even when you measure short term success, please do not be satisfied with a local maxima. Even in the short term you can measure something better. On the long term, you have all the elements you need… Definitely measure the global maxima!

Do this because it is the right and smart thing to do for your company. But, a tiny bit, do it because in my experience (across the world) global maxima solvers progress exponentially faster in their career. Turns out, delivering business results matters. :)

As always, it is your turn now.

Do you have a suggestion for what Microsoft or Gap or Amazon should measure as their global maxima? If you’ve been successful getting your CEO to focus on the global maxima, what approach really worked? If you were the role of the Chief Scientist of powerful data intelligence tool company, how would you measure the impact of Social Influencers in a more intelligent manner?

Please add your powerful ideas, brilliant critique and innovative strategies in comments below. I look forward to hearing from you.

Thank you.

Smarter Career Choices #3: Solve for the Global Maxima! is a post from: Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik

from SEO Tips https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/smarter-career-choices-solve-for-global-maxima/

[cabotcreekuniversity]

Dear Faiza Nimr as portrayed by Lulu,

Congratulations! On behalf of Cabot Creek University, I am pleased to announce your admission for Fall 2017!

The academic and personal accomplishments reflected on your application for admissions are exactly what Cabot Creek University embodies and represents.

We cannot wait to greet you this coming school year.

Please [ check here ] for further instructions on accepting the offer of admissions. We look forward to working with you.

Name, Age, Timezone, Pronouns: Lulu, 18, GMT +1, she/he

✯ IC Questionnaire ✯

Character name: Faiza Nimr

List some jobs they had before coming to Cabot Creek University: Faiza had two jobs before coming to Cabot Creek. The first was as a babysitter when she was a teen, working from when she was 17 to around the time she decided to continue schooling in the states. She adores kids, and with two younger siblings, Faiza was perfect for the job. Fond memories and great stories remain with her from the time. The second was an internship at a hospital pharmacy department in D.C., the very internship that made her realise that she wanted to be a professor. Now, the job itself was wonderful. Her mentors taught Faiza everything she needed to know, tips and tricks, lessions she still carries close to heart. But she found that something just wasn’t there, no feeling of “hey, this is my dream job.” Faiza later saw that what she enjoyed most was tutoring, helping others with chemistry and pharmacy, and her friends would constantly tell her that teaching was her calling. With the support of her professors and those around her, Faiza eventually decided to go down the path of a professor. She never looked back.

Briefly describe their teaching style and/or philosophy: Faiza’s lessions require silence. She is aware that the subject she’s teaching is not a simple one, so with discipline and strictness, she encourages her students to listen to what she is saying, to pay attention. Faiza is always happy to answer questions, if they are relevant to the subject at hand. She doesn’t tolerate pranksters, or someone chatting during class, disturbing her lession. She will usually give one warning, and often that’s enough. When it’s not, however, she doesn’t hesitate to take action. Extra assignments, or being called forward to explain something to the class are her usual methods. She may come across as strict, but she is only doing it for the good of the students. Most of the time, she will use pictures, graphs and videos to bring the lession to life, and she tries to be as clear as possible with her lecture. Furthermore, if a student is having trouble in class (or in general), they are always welcome to ask for help

Does your character have any family that they currently live with?: No, just her munchkin cat, Brownie

Answer the following questions IC about your character. Feel free to use a gif to respond if you’d like:

What is an issue you feel most passionate about?: ”Only one? Well…you will find this incredibly predictable, as I am a professor, but education. There are thousands of children around the world who never get a chance to get an education, some because of a conflict or war which is, of course, another major issue. As the incredible Malala Yousafzai pointed out, education can change the world. Where would we be if the greatest inovators, poets, painters, doctors hadn’t gotten an education? I can tell you, we wouldn’t be as advanced as we are. It breaks my heart that somewhere out there, a child cannot go to school, it’s important that we realize what potential we are loosing. There is no easy way to solve this problem, but we can urge governments to fund schooling, even donate so more schools can be opened in under-developed areas. We can encourage teachers and educators to go out there, teach children. Because it is absolutely unacceptable that schooling is considered a privilege these days.”

Describe your thoughts on social media?: “Honestly, there’s not much to say, I’m not that into social networks. I only have a Facebook and an Instagram profile, but I do see how those can help teenagers connect and maintain a bond. Yes, naturally talking to someone in person greatly differs from talking online, but if you have friends scattered all around the world, like I do, social media is a great way to keep in touch. I mean, how else would I talk to my friends from Egypt, Palestine, Taiwan? Okay, I’m writting letters to one but still…Ah, I’m getting off topic now.”

What is your favorite fandom or movie or TV show or book series (choose one)?: “Only one, again? Okay then…Mary Poppins is the first one I can think of. The songs are so catchy, and there’s something so charming about it. You just can’t help but sing and dance along!”

Opinion on love and romance?: “Oh, that’s a tough one. I’m actually quite open to the idea of romance and dating. Love can be a scary thing, yes, but sometimes we need a little push to get to that happy ending, you know? It sounds cheesy, but sometimes I do think the one is out there for me, for everyone really. I still do have hope in love and romances, and, well…love is precious. There’s different types of love, but let’s not get into that, or else I’ll just ramble too much.”

Optional Extras:

Headcanons and plot points (aka general rambling about the character)

Faiza has many friends all over the world, she even exchanges snail mail with a few. Her caligraphy is neat and she just finds this sort of charm in writting letters, she thinks it can be quite intimate

I did have one plot idea for her: A student that really challenges her. Perhaps someone with no inspiration whatsoever, maybe even the rebelius type. Whoever it would be, Faiza would refuse to give up on them, trying to push them into the right direction, eventually developing a soft spot for them

Faiza Nimr is the first born to sunni muslim parents, Hamdhy and Masooma. Hamdhy came from Palestine to London when he was sixteen, Masooma attended graduate school there, having previously lived in Egypt. The two hit it off instantly.

The family moved to Cairo, Egypt when she was five due to her father being offered a job at Arab open university. Her mother worked at a hotel as a receptionist.

They moved again when Faiza was ten. The university had been firing some employees, Hamdhy was one of the ones they let go. The family ultimately moved to Salfit, Palestine, where her mother got a job as a hospital receptionist, while her father was employed at Al-Quids Open University as a professor.

Faiza rmembers Egypt and Palestine as wonderful. With Egypt, she mostly remembers the big city life in Cairo, there was always something exciting going on, new streets to discover, new treats to try. Her most favourite place to go to was the park. With Palestine, she mostly remembers the calm morning walks around the city with her mom, and the sweetest neighbours who would always bring amazing deserts for her to eat. It’s when she first decided she wants to try and bake

Faiza’s twin brother and sister were born when she was eleven. She loved the two to death and promissed them she’d be the best big sister ever. She would constantly help care for them, read books to them, and especially watch american cartoons with them

Eventually, when Faiza was fourteen, the family came back to UK, where they decided to stay permanently.

Faiza has an adventurer’s spirit. Ever since she got her first bike, there’s no other way she’d want to spend the morning than riding through the town, discovering anything new, and mostly just enjoying herself and getting her mind off things

She tends to worry a lot, much more than needed. She tends to occupy herself when she’s in such a state, be it by prayer, baking, reading a book, really anything,

She’s an open person and loves learning about other languages and cultures. She herself is quite proud of her culture and past, she’ll gladly talk about her experiences with you

She’s not judgemental and makes an effort to understand a person.

Of course she’s an amazing cook, and a great baker as well.

She likes to be informed, so Faiza can often be found checking the news. She attempts to be up-to-date with what is happening in the world, but with so much happening, who can really blame her if she misses anything?

She has a very motherly additude to her students- she loves them and tries to inspire them in any way she can.

She never throws away her old clothes and rarely throws away food. Instead, she donates to homeless centers. It gives her this fufilling feeling she can’t quite explain. She also volunteers at the homeless center whenever she can

It’s her desire to help people that first made her interested in pharmacy. The girl always had a talent for chemistry, so to use it in a way that could aid people with their illness sounded ideal for her.

Though another dream of hers was to become a ballerina, and was taking classes while in the UK and Egypt, but eventualy the dream died out once she reached high school.

She began wearing the hijab when she was thirteen and loves it

She’s quite fashionable too, knowing what colors to pair and how while still keeping the modest look.

[technicalsolutions88]

“It’s almost like the Explore Tab that we have on Instagram” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in leaked audio of him describing TikTok during an all-hands meeting. But it’s not. TikTok represents a new form of social entertainment that’s vastly different from the lifelogging of Instagram where you can just take a selfie, show something pretty, or pan around what you’re up to. TikToks are premeditated, storyboarded, and vastly different than the haphazard Stories on Insta.

That’s why Zuckerberg’s comments cast a dark shadow over the future of the Facebook family of apps. How can it beat what it doesn’t understand? He certainly can’t ignore it. Facebook’s copycat Lasso has been installed just 425,000 times since it launched in November, while TikTok has 640 million installs in the same period outside of China. Oh, and TikTok has 1.4 billion total installs beyond China to date.

TikTok

Casey Newton of The Verge today published two hours of audio and transcripts from two internal-only all-hands Q&As held by Zuckerberg at Facebook in July. His comments touch on the company’s plan to fight being broken up by regulators, especially if Elizabeth Warren becomes President. He thinks Facebook would win, but on resorting to suing the government, he says “does that still suck for us? Yeah.” Zuckerberg also describes how Facebook is working to launch a payments product in Mexico and elsewhere by year’s end as Libra deals with regulatory scrutiny.

But beyond his comments on regulation, it’s his pigeonholing of TikTok that’s most alarming. It foreshadows Facebook failing to win one of the core social feeds that its business depends on. Perhaps his perspective on the competitor is evolving, but the leak portrays him as thinking TikTok is just the next Snapchat Stories to destroy.

Zuckeberg’s Thoughts On TikTok

Here’s what Zuckerberg said about TikTok during the internal Q&A sessions, (emphasis mine):

So yeah. I mean, TikTok is doing well. One of the things that’s especially notable about TikTok is, for a while, the internet landscape was kind of a bunch of internet companies that were primarily American companies. And then there was this parallel universe of Chinese companies that pretty much only were offering their services in China. And we had Tencent who was trying to spread some of their services into Southeast Asia. Alibaba has spread a bunch of their payment services to Southeast Asia. Broadly, in terms of global expansion, that had been pretty limited, and TikTok, which is built by this company Beijing ByteDance, is really the first consumer internet product built by one of the Chinese tech giants that is doing quite well around the world. It’s starting to do well in the US, especially with young folks. It’s growing really quickly in India. I think it’s past Instagram now in India in terms of scale. So yeah, it’s a very interesting phenomenon.

And the way that we kind of think about it is: it’s married short-form, immersive video with browse. So it’s almost like the Explore Tab that we have on Instagram, which is today primarily about feed posts and highlighting different feed posts. I kind of think about TikTok as if it were Explore for stories, and that were the whole app. And then you had creators who were specifically working on making that stuff. So we have a number of approaches that we’re going to take towards this, and we have a product called Lasso that’s a standalone app that we’re working on, trying to get product-market fit in countries like Mexico, is I think one of the first initial ones. We’re trying to first see if we can get it to work in countries where TikTok is not already big before we go and compete with TikTok in countries where they are big.

We’re taking a number of approaches with Instagram, including making it so that Explore is more focused on stories, which is increasingly becoming the primary way that people consume content on Instagram, as well as a couple of other things there. But yeah, I think that it’s not only one of the more interesting new phenomena and products that are growing. But in terms of the geopolitical implications of what they’re doing, I think it is quite interesting. I think we have time to learn and understand and get ahead of the trend. It is growing, but they’re spending a huge amount of money promoting it. What we’ve found is that their retention is actually not that strong after they stop advertising. So the space is still fairly nascent, and there’s time for us to kind of figure out what we want to do here. But I think this is a real thing. It’s good.

To Zuckerberg’s credit, he’s not dismissing the threat. He knows TikTok is popular. He knows it’s growing in key international markets Facebook and Instagram depend on to keep user counts rising. And he knows his company needs to respond via its standalone clone Lasso and more.

Lasso

But while TikToks might look like Stories because they’re vertical videos, and TikTok might algorithmically recommend them to people like Instagram Explore, it’s a whole ‘nother beast of a product and one that may be harder than it seems to copy.

To crystallize why, let’s rewind to Snapchat. With the launch of Stories, it started to blow up with US teens. Facebook’s attempts to clone it in standalone apps like Poke and Slingshot never gained traction. In fact, none of Facebook’s standalone apps have succeeded unless they splintered off an already-popular piece of Facebook like chat and users were forced to download them like Messenger. It wasn’t until Zuckerberg stuck his clone of Stories front-and-center atop Instagram and Facebook that Snapchat’s user count went from growing 18% per quarter to shrinking. There, Facebook used the same strategy laid out in Zuckerberg’s comments — push its good-enough clone in countries where the original isn’t popular yet.

But Facebook was fortunate because Stories really wasn’t that dissimilar to the content users were already sharing on Instagram — tiny biographical snippets of their lives. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel had originally invented Stories as a vision of Facebook’s News Feed through the lens of an ephemeral camera. All users had to know was “I take the same videos, but shorter and sillier, posted more often, and then they disappear”. The concept of Instagram and Facebook didn’t have to change. They were still about telling friends what you were up to. Choking off TikTok’s growth will be much more complicated.

Why TikTok Is Tough To Clone

TikTok isn’t about you or what you’re doing. It’s about entertaining your audience. It’s not spontaneous chronicling of your real life. It’s about inventing characters, dressing up as someone else, and acting out jokes. It’s not about privacy and friends, but strutting on the world stage. And it’s not about originality — the heart of Instagram. TikTok is about remixing culture — taking the audio from someone else’s clip and reimagining the gag in a new context by layering it atop a video you record.

That makes TikTok distinct enough that it will be very difficult to shoehorn into Instagram or Facebook, even if they add the remixing functionality. Most videos on those apps aren’t designed to be templates for memes like TikToks are. Insta and Facebook’s social graphs are rooted in friendship and augmented by the beautiful and famous, but don’t encompass the new wave of amateur performers TikTok elevates. And since each post to the app becomes fodder for someone else’s creativity, a competitor starting from scratch doesn’t offer much to remix.

That means a TikTok clone would have to be somewhat buried in Instagram or Facebook, rebuild a new social graph, and retrain users’ understanding of these apps’ purpose…at the risk of distracting from their core use cases. This leaves Facebook hoping to grow its standalone TikTok clone Lasso which TechCrunch scooped a year ago before it launched last November. But as we’ve seen, Facebook struggles growing brand new apps, and that effort is further hindered by its increasingly toxic brand and sheen of uncoolness. Nor does it help that Facebook must divert development resources to comply with all the new privacy and transparency obligations as part of its $5 billion FTC fine and settlement.

The Next Feed

Facebook’s best bet is to assess the future value of the ads it could run on a successful TikTok clone and apply some greater fraction of that grand sum to competing directly. It’s already made some smart additions to Lasso like tutorials for how to remix and the option to add GIFs as sections of your video. But it’s still failing to gain serious traction in the US. While typical TikTok homepage videos have hundreds of thousands of Likes, the top ones I saw in my Lasso feed today received 70 or fewer.

I had Sensor Tower run some analysis comparing TikTok with Lasso since its launch last November, and found that Lasso gets 6 downloads for every 1000 for TikTok in the US. Some more stats:

US Total Downloads Since November: Lasso – 250,000 // TikTok – 41.3 million

US Downloads Per Day Since November: Lasso – 760 // TikTok – 126,000

Average US Google Play Social App Chart Ranking: Lasso – #155 // TikTok – #2

Beyond the US, Lasso has only launched in one other market, Mexico in April, where it’s been faring better but could hardly even be considered a competitor to TikTok. They won’t even coherently fit together on a graph. Facebook needs to lean harder into Lasso:

Mexico Total Downloads Since April: Lasso – 175,000 // TikTok – 3.3 million

Mexico Downloads Per Day Since November: Lasso – 1,000 // TikTok – 19,000

Zuckerberg may need to find a coherent place for TikTok style features inside Instagram and potentially Facebook. That could be another horizontal row of previews like with Stories and/or a header on the Explore page dedicated to premeditated content. Certainly something more prominent than a single button like IGTV that still no one is asking for. One opportunity to best TikTok would be building a dedicated remix source browser into the Stories camera to help users find content to put their own spin on.

Facebook will also need to buy out top TikTok creators to make videos for it instead, and even quasi-hire some of the most prolific video meme or challenge inventors to give users trends to jump on rather than just one-off clips to watch. Its failure to offer IGTV stars monetization has led many to ignore that platform, and it can’t afford that again.

If Zuckerberg approaches TikTok as merely an algorithmic video recommender like Explore, Facebook will miss out on owning the social entertainment feed. If he doesn’t decisively move to challenge TikTok soon, its catalog of content to remix will grow insurmountable and it will own the whole concept of short form performative video. Snapchat’s insistence on ephemerality makes it incompatible with remixing, and YouTube isn’t nimble enough to reinvent itself.

If no American company can step up, we could see our interest data, faces, and attention forfeited to an app that while delightful to use, heralds Chinese political values at odds with our own. If only Twitter hadn’t killed Vine.

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2nqeOxP Original Content From: https://techcrunch.com

[slrlounge1]

The Sony FE 135mm f/1.8 GM, …Ready For 8K Video? | Lab Test & Opinion

Lensrentals.com has apparently tested the resolution (sharpness) of more than 300 different lenses. In fact, they usually test ten copies of a given lens, just to check if there are any inconsistencies, and ensure that the results from one lens aren’t just a fluke, good or bad.

So, when I tell you that the new Sony FE 135mm f/1.8 GM is the sharpest lens they’ve ever tested, that ought to be worth ten thousand Youtubers or Instagrammers who have ever said this-or-that lens is, simply, “very sharp”…

I mounted the first [lens], sipped my coffee and then lost my mind and started shouting various expletives…I hadn’t broken anything; I just saw MTF curves higher than anything I’d ever seen in a normal-range lens.

Now, for those of you who don’t know who Roger Cicala is, he is a rather hard person to impress when it comes to lenses. His optical testing method, known as OLAF, is likely the best in the business when it comes to cameras and photography.

Aspects Of Image Quality

DISCLAIMER: Of course, sharpness isn’t everything; there are so many other characteristics that make a lens great. Such a caveat must indeed closely follow such bold, high praise as, “sharpest lens ever tested”…

With fast-aperture telephoto lenses, two other aspects of lens performance besides sharpness immediately come to mind: autofocus reliability and bokeh. If those two factors let you down as a photographer, then sharpness alone cannot be enough reason to spend $1,898 on a lens. (You can currently preorder it; expected delivery is some time in April 2019.)

Needless to say, here at SLR Lounge we’re certainly looking forward to reviewing the new Sony 135mm! Initial reports are that it is indeed a great option in those other areas of autofocus and bokeh, so we’re eager to take it out for a spin at some weddings and portrait sessions, as well as potentially some other creative ideas. But, more on that later. Let’s look at the test graphs, since that’s likely the reason you clicked on this post in the first place. We’ll keep it simple and explain what you’re looking at.

Sony FE 135mm f/1.8 GM Lab Test Results

So, just how sharp does “sharpest lens ever” look, in an actual sharpness graph? Alone, the following graph may not mean much, because MTF charts don’t mean very much unless you actually understand the numbers.

I would try and explain exactly what the numbers mean, but here’s the thing: even camera companies themselves don’t use the exact same scales on their own MTF charts, and likely not the same testing methods either, meaning it’s just not very useful to look at one chart and assume you can deduce how sharp it actually is, relative to other lenses.

In other words, forget the numbers themselves, and just know this: the higher the colored lines are, the sharper the lens. The left edge of the graph reprsents the dead-center of an image, and the right edge of the graph represents the edge(s) of an image frame. So, as you might expect, a lens is usually sharpest at its center, and it gradually gets a little softer as you approach the very edges. That’s the important thing here.

Sony FE 135mm f/1.8 GM versus other 135mm prime lenses

Since a single MTF chart isn’t very useful to the average photographer, here’s how the Sony 135 GM performs against the Sigma 135mm f/1.8 Art, a lens which is already known to be incredibly sharp indeed, even on high-megapixel full-frame sensors:

In this MTF graph, the centerline in the middle represents the center of both lenses, and the outer edges of the graph represent the edges of each lens. The Sigma 135 Art is on the left, the Sony is on the right.

By the way, the colored lines, again in simplified terms, just represent various frequencies of fine image detail.  Just remember that the higher the lines, the sharper the lens.

As you can see in the above graph, the two lenses are actually similar at the very edges, however, the Sony is just unprecedentedly sharp in the center of the image.

Here is the Sony 135mm GM versus the Zeis Batis 135mm f/2.8, another modern, very sharp 135mm prime lens:

  The Zeiss Batis is, on average, a touch sharper at the very edges, but again, the Sony pulls ahead towards the center. But again, keep in mind that all of these lines are ridiculously high up on the graph. A “decently sharp” lens, in many cases, still has its lowest (purple in this case) lines just barely halfway up the graph, even in the center. Both of these lenses have crammed all possible forms of measurement into their upper ~1/3 of the graph. Simply put: both lenses are astonishingly sharp.

Okay, that’s enough graphs and lab tests. For even more geekiness about “lp/mm” and observations from Roger Cicala and OLAF, read the full article here.

What we should ask ourselves now is, what does all of this really mean?

What we’re seeing is the next generation of lens, that is ready to handle the next generation of high-megapixel sensors. Indeed, you could probably expect this lens to still “look great” on a 75-megapixel camera body! Which does imply that we’ll be seeing such cameras in the coming years.

There’s something else to keep in mind, though: if you’re shooting with “just” a 20, 24, or 30-megapixel camera, to be totally fair and honest, all of these recent lenses are going to seem jaw-droppingly sharp. Sony, Zeiss, Sigma, and Nikon have all delivered exciting new 135mm and/or 105mm prime lenses in the last few years that, in an effort to balance out the geekiness of MTF charts, I should probably jsut describe as “bonkers sharp”.

Would you still see a difference in sharpness between this lens and a much older 135mm prime lens, even on a ~24 megapixel sensor? Of course, but only if you’re using truly perfect shooting technique, but that is the case with any photography scenario where you’d like to see a difference in sharpness.

Why Does This Lens Need To Be So Sharp?

If the Sony FE 135mm f/1.8 GM is so sharp that it easily out-resolves the highest-resolution sensor Sony currently offers, (the 42-megapixel A7RIII, our final review of which is coming shortly!) …what is its real purpose?

In short, this lens is future-proof. Not only is it ready to handle an inevitable higher-megapixel sensor, but it’s also likely ready for 8K video! Maybe we’ll see a Sony camera body that offers 8K video in the coming years, who knows. (Note: we don’t have insider information, nor are there any rumors; this is just an observation on what such a high-resolution lens will be good for.)

Nobody should buy a lens for its future potential only. However, it has always been a good idea to invest in glass that can last you 5-10+ years, if you take good care of it. This indeed appears to be one of those lenses.

What’s Your Creative Idea For A Fast, Sharp Telephoto Lens?

All in all, camera gear is just mean to help you achieve a creative vision. Things like increased sharpness are only meant to allow your equipment to “get out of the way”, and let you do something really cool. The question is, what creative ideas do you have?

Since lab test charts aren’t very exciting to look at, I’ll share an image with you that has been in the back of mind for nearly 5 years now. It’s a still photograph, however, I really wanted to create a timelapse of what was happening at this moment. And that is, the Andromeda galaxy was rising in the night sky, and passing very close to the dramatic, iconic lip of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park. This is something I’ve been wanting to re-shoot with a “flawlessly sharp” telephoto lens:

Andromeda Galaxy & Halfdome, Yosemite National Park Sharpness and low noise were achieved in this image by stacking multiple exposures and blending the sky exposures with a single ultra-long exposure of Half Dome. To learn about photographing our own Milky Way galaxy, and nightscape photography in general, be sure to check out our Milky Way Workshop!

  Andromeda approaching Half Dome, GIF animation Nikon 85mm f/1.8, cropped to ~135mm. Unfortunately, this lens has severe color fringing in addition to its relative softness, and was unsuitable to create a good timelapse. I hope to re-shoot it someday, with a lens such as the Sony 135mm f/1.8!

  So, I’d love to hear your thoughts on all these amazing new ultra-fast telephoto primes that we have been seeing lately! What creative idea would you pursue, if you had an “insanely sharp” 135mm f/1.8 (or 105mm f/1.4) at your disposal? Low-light portraits, astrophotography, or…?

Take care, and happy travels!

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