#they even included a slideshow with proof

[pedripics]

😭😭😭

[antiroadkill]

[The following text is what was contained in Auzu's rambling google slides thing as of March 28th at 12:58am. The original can be found here, assuming it is still up. All text has been copied directly, not even egregious typos have been edited. Where it is mentioned that "videos" are included, I have only included screenshots from the slides. I could not play the videos as it says I needed to request access and the last thing I'm giving this person is my google account.

This is being transcribed for preservation, proof, and accessibility. The slides were next to impossible to read on mobile. Also because, for some bizarre reason, Auzu insisted images couldn't be posted to Tumblr?]

I’m not the “Roadkill Fairy(RKF)”

Hello everyone, Im Auzu (He/Him). This slideshow is to address the allegations that I own and use the accounts used by the “roadkill fairy”. I am here to say that I DO NOT own or use any of these accounts and I have no idea who is responsible for all of their disgusting acts. This slideshow is to debunk all of the “proof” that @roadkillcallouts on Tumblr ( run by [redacted] on Tumblr ) has posted. Names of RKF (Tumblr) *These are only names I can remember/seen, there may be others* - @stupiddogking - @jadecallouts - @teddybeargf - @boldydeafeningfury I have been harassed for the last week and half now due to someone impersonating me on Tumblr. I hardly use Tumblr so I wouldn’t have even known about any of this going on if a mutual of mine hadn’t brought to my attention on Instagram which is my main social media platform (stupid.dog.auzu). They were spoken very poorly to and assumed it was actually me prompting them to reach out and alert me about everything going on. Harassment like this with fake accounts has been ongoing for 3 years now since my interaction with one specific user on Instagram, that would be Jade who at the time was : [accounts omitted for privacy] There will be a separate google doc coming out specifically about Jade herself with evidence debunking false narratives she has spread about me as well as her harassment, but this slideshow is not about her. Her introduction is only important for the context of this situation and why it is even happening. Debunking “Proof” So my biggest piece of evidence I have is my own device. There has been altered screenshots being used as evidence that I am the owner of the initial account used to harass Jade and people within her tumblr community. I however have screen RECORDINGS, proving that evidence was false. See below. On the left is an altered IG follower count by the RKF. On the right is their “proof” it really was me, saying it had to because the account center.

As seen on the left, ones of these is a screen recording of my account center on my Instagram showing not only my other IG accounts, but also my person Facebook account. On the right is screen recording showing my ONLY Tumblr account. I use the browser mode on Safari because I cant even be bothered to have the app.

These were also posts to “prove” the account was mine. One of the members of this chaos was claiming to have my IP address and all my personal info. Their information however is wrong an out-dated. The area they’re claiming I have been using the account from is an place I haven't lived at in months.

[Censoring provided by me, details were left uncensored in the slides. Also, location matching just a state is utterly useless. And matching IP addresses to a Tumblr user is guess work at best. I am not associated with roadiestoadies]

Misc Thoughts Quite literally where do I start with all of this? I feel like at this point I’ve made it very clear the RKF accounts are not mine and my image is simply being used because of my very public beef with Jade in the past and it is someone who is very mentally unwell and has deep rooted issues with Jade that they need to sure out. I would like to point out that all of the RKF accounts have been deactivated as well as ALSO HARASSED ME ??? I have never had to deactivate my account because I do not feel guilty for anything because I have not done anything. I’m sorry to everyone who was affected and hurt by this person, I am ALSO a victim of the RKF and it is disgusting the things they have done. I wish I had answers or leads to whom it may be but Im not active in the ear community like I was years ago and it would be someone from the ear community as that's the only space me and Jade ever interacted. I cant understand how people came to the conclusion that it HAD to be me when the account mainly used has also changed names multiple times as well as photos to impersonate other people. For some reason though I'm the ONLY person it could be when an entire community had a problem with Jade (which makes me suspicious of everyone in this witch hunt, kinda funny how heavily I was harassed but w/e). What I don't understand is how no one who was being harassed actually bothered to reach out to me and see what was happening. My accounts typically all pop up first even if you just google Auzuraya or “stupid dog auzu” . I still do not know or care to know anyone who was targeted by RKF but what I've noticed is a lot of the most interacted accounts are therains which is a community, again I’m not part of. ALso the account using my photos was blatantly targeting me as well only using photos from accounts that aren't private. It's why my weight and my onlyfans got brought up. If it were me why would I speak that way about myself there but not that way on LITERALLY ANY OTHER SOCIAL. The lack of critical thinking in this entire situation is actually dire. I was even berated for NOT reaching out to them anyone in this even though I reached out to the main account reblogging and archiving this entire situation @roadkillcallouts at the beginning of all of this drama when it was first brought to my attention. They were upset I responded to fast, but would you not be responding fast if you just found out you were being impersonated online and that person is sending other gore/p0rn harass people including minors? This is the conversation I had with @roadkillcallouts as soon as I was they were the main person interacting with the RKF account as well as seeming like they wanted to get the account deleted/banned. Naturally I reached out immediately explaining that I would appreciate if they would report the account and let others know and that I suspected the account was Jade as again we have had a rocky past. As soon as I brought this up not realizing this was one of Jade’s mutuals they instantly shut down. So please don't say I NEVER tried to explain or talk to you about it.

[Included was a video I cannot view of what I assume was our conversation. I have included screenshots of it here]

As for the actual harassment itself, it wasn't such a big issue for me until I saw those trying to blame me being transphobic and insisting they use she/her pronouns for me and dismiss my gender identity because someone using my photos hurt harassed their friends.

[Included is a screenshot of a small portion of this post. From boldlydeafeningfury's "YOU FOLLOW HIM YOU STUPID THUG" to the same person's "No you're committing it only. It's not illegal in your state". Why this is noteworthy is I was referring specifically to Roadkill who when asked gave pronouns, as referenced in the post. To say this was referring to Auzu is to admit they are Roadkill]

In Conclusion That is all for this. I hope this helps people understand I am not the “Rodkill Fairy”. I am not, have not, and will not be involved with ANY of the RKF accounts and refuse to take responsibility for the disturbed actions of an anonymous individual. I feel for anyone affected by this person and I hope they are able to heal from the mental anguish this person has created. I will be putting out a doc about Jade, it will take time as I am not the only person who was harassed by her being discussed in it. I want to make sure all of my evidence is time stamped and correct. I do not know when exactly it will be out but it will be posted to this account (stupid-dog-auzu on Tumblr) and ONLY this account. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns feel free to message me on any of the following platforms : [accounts omitted for privacy] If you are seeing anything posted by  “me” but isnt any of the above listed accounts, please reach out to me on one of these and report the account.

[And here are all of the slides in their original format, censored for personal information]

This is not debunking. It is not proof. Only 3 out of 14 slides are an attempt at providing something resembling proof. Auzu has a fundamental misunderstanding of what proof even is. They even included a screenshot of me outright saying the instagram screenshot was obviously edited.

Again, I can't view the videos. But going "see, these are the only accounts I have!" is not proof of anything. Facebook and Instagram have nothing to do with what is happening. And the accounts harassing people here are not subaccounts. They are top level accounts able to follow and send asks, so if you are logged into a different account, those would not appear. Especially if they've all been deleted.

"So please don't say I NEVER tried to explain or talk to you about it." I have never claimed such a thing, and that conversation is part of my evidence that you are the Roadkill Fairy. I have said as much and have posted the full conversation several times.

The rest of the slides, especially the last 7 or so, is a lot of rambling in the vein of "it's totally not me, cause I said so. I just took offense to the things you said to the person who is totally not me!"

I continue to await that "proof" you keep promising about your accusations against Jade. Or was that just "Rodkill" pretending to be you and making up lies?

[modernbusinessmarketing1]

Google Ads vs. Facebook Ads: Which One is Right for Your Business in 2025?

In 2025, paid advertising continues to be one of the most effective ways to reach new customers and grow your business. Among the most popular platforms for online advertising are Google Ads and Facebook Ads. Both offer unique benefits, but deciding which one is best for your business depends on your goals, audience, and budget.

Let’s compare Google Ads and Facebook Ads to help you determine which platform will give you the best return on investment (ROI) in 2025.

Google Ads: The Power of Intent-Based Advertising

Targeting Users with Specific Intent

Google Ads allow you to target users who are actively searching for products, services, or information related to your business.

This form of advertising, known as intent-based advertising, means that the people who see your ads are already interested in what you offer, increasing the chances of conversion.

Broad Reach with Search and Display Networks

Google’s vast network reaches millions of websites and apps, allowing you to display your ads on search results pages, partner websites, YouTube, and more.

Whether you choose search ads or display ads, Google’s network ensures a wide range of opportunities to get your message in front of the right audience.

Measurable and Trackable

Google Ads offers detailed analytics and reporting tools that help you track performance, set budgets, and optimize your campaigns for better results.

You can measure key metrics like impressions, clicks, and conversions to see exactly how your ad spend is impacting your business.

Facebook Ads: The Power of Targeting Based on Interests and Demographics

Highly Granular Audience Targeting

Facebook Ads allows you to target users based on interests, behaviors, demographics, and even job titles.

With advanced targeting options, you can hone in on your ideal customer and create hyper-targeted ads that speak directly to them.

Visual Ads for Engaging Content

Facebook is a highly visual platform, making it ideal for businesses with strong visual content, like photos, videos, and graphics.

Ads that use rich media are more likely to engage users, and Facebook’s carousel, slideshow, and video ads allow you to showcase your products or services creatively.

Strong Social Proof with Engagement

Facebook Ads often include social proof—likes, shares, and comments—making your ads feel more authentic and trustworthy.

Engagement with your ads can lead to a higher click-through rate (CTR) and a more involved audience.

When to Choose Google Ads vs. Facebook Ads

Choose Google Ads if:

You want to target users with high purchase intent who are actively searching for solutions.

You are promoting services that people often search for, such as local services, retail products, or professional expertise.

You want to reach a large, global audience and are comfortable with performance-based pricing.

Choose Facebook Ads if:

You’re targeting a specific demographic, interest group, or location.

You want to create engaging visual content that can tell a story or showcase a lifestyle.

You aim to increase brand awareness or engagement and build a community around your business.

Conclusion

Both Google Ads and Facebook Ads have their place in your marketing strategy. Google Ads is ideal for businesses looking to capture high-intent traffic and drive immediate conversions, while Facebook Ads is great for targeting specific audiences and building brand awareness. The key to success in 2025 is understanding your business goals and choosing the platform that aligns with them.

To make the most out of your online advertising efforts, it’s often beneficial to use both platforms in tandem, targeting the right customers at the right stage of the buyer’s journey.

If you’re unsure which platform to choose, or need help setting up and optimizing your campaigns, consider working with an expert in Google Ads and Facebook Ads to maximize your ROI.

Modern Business Marketing 1317 Edgewater Dr, Orlando, FL 32804, United States

Want to book an appointment? Visit our website: https://modernbusinessmarketing.com/

[jcmarchi]

20+ Best Slideshow & Photo Gallery Templates for DaVinci Resolve – Speckyboy

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/20-best-slideshow-photo-gallery-templates-for-davinci-resolve-speckyboy/

20+ Best Slideshow & Photo Gallery Templates for DaVinci Resolve – Speckyboy

Slideshows and photo galleries are a great addition to any video presentation. They serve as a storytelling vehicle and a way to keep viewers interested. You can also use them to transition to a new scene.

These segments work wonderfully as the star of the show or as a bit player. Their flexibility is handy for product videos, documentaries, event recaps, and more.

Creating a slideshow or gallery from scratch can be time-consuming, though. Constructing a scene for your photos and adding effects will slow down even experienced video editors.

That’s why we love these DaVinci Resolve templates. All the hard work has already been done for you. They offer professional-grade effects and are easy to customize.

Add your photos and perhaps a bit of text. The result is a top-notch presentation that is sure to impress.

Look below and see which templates can improve your next video project.

Here’s a fun way to display your photos. This template includes an elaborate scene featuring your images hanging from a clothesline. It’s a unique effect that will have viewers talking. It is a perfect choice for family photo albums.

Show off your best work with a portfolio video slideshow template. Inside, you’ll find a place to list your skills, biography, and contact information. There’s also space to add examples of your work.

This video template is designed to help you relive the best moments of your vacation. It’s also a great choice for travel bloggers or hospitality companies. It features vintage film effects and sunny transitions.

Use this flexible template to recap a recent event or create a corporate presentation. Its clean, modern style also works well for video introductions. You’ll find plenty of color and bold typography here.

Here’s a slideshow that blends modern and classic looks. Polaroid-inspired photos scroll by – complete with social media icons as decoration. Beautiful lens-flare effects are included to add a professional touch. Add your travel or family photos and enjoy.

This template features a simple and beautiful layout in a square viewport. Photos are highlighted with a variety of border shapes and backgrounds. You’ll also find plenty of smooth animations and fun special effects.

Are you looking for a unique effect? This template includes awe-inspiring 3D parallax animation. It adds depth and a new perspective to your static images. Choose from three macro presets to create just the right look.

Bring a retro vibe to your videos with a Polaroid slideshow. Place your photos within the iconic frame and evoke memories of good times. Use it for family photos, reunions, or anywhere else you want to spread cheer.

This wedding slideshow template will help you share memories from a special day. The package includes stunning reveal effects and a place for captions. The happy couple, friends, and family will be amazed at the results.

Introduce your team via this slick corporate slideshow. The template is modular and easy to customize with photos and text. The included vertical and horizontal versions help you target mobile and desktop devices.

This vintage slideshow template adds a classic cinematic look to any photo or video. The effects and typography used here are perfect for celebrating the past. It’s like a bit of Hollywood magic is within your reach.

Want to add bold colors to your video? Check out this eye-catching magazine template. See colorful blocks come together as your images and text are displayed. There’s a lot of modern charm for viewers to admire.

Here’s proof of how powerful a filmstrip can be. Add your photos to this template with vintage film effects and frayed borders. A gentle scrolling effect is easy on the eyes and creates a classic presentation style.

Fun and unique, this slideshow template will add personality to your photos. A mix of geometric shapes and exciting animation effects make a compelling result. There’s also plenty of space for adding custom text.

Parallax effects are popular in web design but also great in video production. This video slideshow template makes adding the effect to your photos easy. You’ll find three versions included with room for dozens of photos.

Use this template to feature your action shots or adventure videos. It’s a fast-paced presentation that goes well with sports, outdoor lifestyle, or health-related presentations. There’s enough energy here to inspire viewers to get up and moving.

Historical photos are a perfect fit for this photo gallery template. The included effects evoke the past with film textures and dreamlike animations. You might use this one for a video timeline or family history project.

Those looking to add dramatic flair to their photos should look no further. This cinematic slideshow includes top-notch professional effects that keep viewers glued to their screens. Use it for introductions, closings, or teaser videos. The possibilities are pretty much endless!

Share your good times with the world using this social media template. It features a vertical viewport for easy viewing on mobile devices. There are also fun shapes and effects for dressing up your images.

This template is built to help you share your company’s history. Create a beautiful timeline, complete with professional animation and an easy-to-read layout. It would make a great feature on your website’s “About Us” page or as an introduction to a corporate presentation.

An Easy Way to Add Custom Galleries and Slideshows

You don’t need to be a pro to create a high-quality video gallery or slideshow. The templates in this collection offer a range of styles in an easy-to-edit format. Everything from classic to modern is available.

Choose your favorites from our collection and download them. You may find yourself using them again and again.

More DaVinci Resolve Templates

Related Topics

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[seriously-mike]

Working Awkward Bass

Well, kids, more AI bullshit incoming. This time, we'll be looking at an open-source project called PaintsUndo: it's supposed to generate a work-in-progress video of the supposed creation of your AI-generated image. And I wouldn't be myself if I didn't go and turn it inside out.

You know this one. I drew it long ago, by hand, based on a photo I found on DeviantArt. Not the finest piece of art, but it's mine. Now, let's try and see what keyframes for the "work in progress" video PaintsUndo created:

Hold on, stop, what the fuck. Why is it anime? I can't draw anime for shit, I don't even particularly like anime, and here you're starting off with something that doesn't even look like the drawing in question?!

I mean, look at the first one. We're dealing with a shot that's framed slightly below the waist at its lowest point and for some reason the faked WIP video starts with a knees-up 3/4 shot that has nothing to do with the end result and gets redrawn into the waist-up frontal shot about a quarter of the way in? Why in the fuck would you even over-egg the custard like that?!

The second one is the "getting redrawn" stage. So the right hand and the weird roundish scribble around it are everything that's left from the 3/4 shot. Nonsense. That right hand will be erased anyway, so nobody cares, but still. Also, look at the hair. It's combed back. It's not parted to the sides like I drew it, there's not even a hint of the strand falling on Lex's face, it's a clear hint that there's a lot of bullshit going on here.

The third one is the "almost ready" stage. So fucking what that the tattoo designs that should be in place by then don't look like anything even barely adjacent to the final ones, it's not like anyone's gonna care, right? The video is going to be a jittery slideshow anyway.

And as for the video, um, well... The online version refuses to generate it, claiming that all available attempts were used up and I'll get new ones in -1 days. Which, in computer programmers' parlance means never. Like LOL, get fucked, you can get a bad image-to-prompt based on booru tags (and like I said, booru tags are for the mentally deficient), you can get a couple of "work in progress" sketches that don't make sense, but you're not getting a video. You can try running it on your PC, but, uh...

The inference is tested with 24GB VRAM on Nvidia 4090 and 3090TI. It may also work with 16GB VRAM, but does not work with 8GB. My estimation is that, under extreme optimization (including weight offloading and sliced attention), the theoretical minimal VRAM requirement is about 10~12.5 GB.

MOTHERFUCKER WHAT. 24 GB of VRAM is fucking overkill for something that obviously runs on Stable Diffusion 1.5, and you're telling me that this is just a proof of concept that needs to be "optimized"? Get the fuck out with that bullshit.

[drewandareview]

My Top Ten Favorite YouTube Channels

Originally published July 23rd, 2013

Sometimes I feel inadequate because I don’t have any “underground interests".  But other times, I realize I definitely have underground interests.  I’d say my most solid proof of this is my devotion to Internet entertainment.  I don’t know of many people who take it quite as seriously as I do, and I have as much passion for watching it as I do making it.

So to shed a little bit of my “hip side" unto you, here are my top 10 favorite YouTube channels with brief descriptions of why I picked them.  (Disclaimer: I have the right to include my own channels if I want to.  But I’m not going to.)

10. nigahiga   I actually started out on YouTube before the thing was even two years old.  At the time, I viewed it as a place for amateur auteurs.  Where one person can make everything herself.  I thought that was fascinating, and that’s largely the kind of content you would find on YouTube at the time (2007).  But, as with all good ideas, YouTube expanded and grew business-oriented. I have no resentment toward this because I understand it.  I’m jumping onto that boat myself.

But I still have deep veneration for the people who truly do everything themselves, and for that, I have to include Ryan Higa on the list, the man behind nigahiga.  He’s been doing this YouTube thing for even longer than I have and while he’s seen much success and popularity, he still has that old-school “YouTube touch" where he does everything himself.  In addition to some clever yet juvenile comedy, you can watch the progression of a person refining his craft.  It’s a fun ride.

9. vlogbrothers The premise is simple: Two brothers send vlogs to each other, one vlog from each brother for a total of two vlogs a week.  And my are their brains something to be admired.  They’re very honest with who they are and what they feel and even in the face of their popularity, they’re more committed to cultivating artistic growth and promoting identity than doing things for money or fame.  It’s admirable to see two vloggers not only with compelling chemistry, but also an earnest love for who they are as people.

8. SecretAgentBob He’s more popularly known as FilmCow, and even more popularly known as “the guy that made Charlie the Unicorn".  His animation is crude and unpleasant, even more so than South Park, but the complete dive into maddening, aimless comedy is a breath of fresh air in a sea of videos with poor aim.  Jason Steele and his team of loyal friends are a truly funny bunch whose effort to making no-shits-given content is as satisfying as it is needed.

7. CGPGrey Not everything popular on YouTube is comedy.  What’s particularly refreshing is to see a surge of interest in channels revolving around education.  By far my favorite of these channels is CGPGrey.  It’s one guy making animated slideshows that illustrate a point of interest.  He seems like “just a normal guy", but the level of research and detail he exerts just to make sure he doles out the right information shows not only a propensity for knowledge, but a respect for those learning from him.  His videos are as amusing as they are beneficial and for someone you never see in person, his presence as a teacher is something remarkable.

6. sxephil Most newscasts are boring.  It’s industry standard to read the news without attachment or much personality.  Which is why Phillip DeFranco is really something unique.  He’ll tell you the news, but only the news he cares about and in the way he wants to.  This could be an annoying trip were he an annoying person, but Phillip DeFranco has an enrapturing view of the world accompanied and a blunt sense of humor that collectively, you just can’t help but dig.  Hopefully his shtick might inspire a wave of more subjective newscasters so those looking to get the scoop can have some variety as well as some personality.

5. StarKidPotter Meet Team Starkid, a contemporary theater troupe of cult status yet all the talent deserving of full-throttle stardom.  While the members of the troupe rotate, each one brings to its productions the finesse of an adult paired with the unadulterated imagination of a kid.  Their videos mainly consist of recorded footage of live shows and while low on budget, they’re written with great humor and sincerity.  The music always soars, the performances always dazzle, and the theatrics of Team Starkid always vibrate with vibrancy.

4. MW10T It’s hard to really place what Mike Peterson is all about.  A low-end member of the film business, Man With 10 Toes really shines with his overt nonsensicality that he heavily breathes into anything he creates.  His greatest attribute is his shameless disconnection from inhibition and embracement of his wholly bizarre mein.  No matter how effortless his work, it’s always labeled with the undeniably engaging mark of his strangeness.  Manwith10toes is the fucked-up fruit on the tree that tastes absolutely amazing.

3. titleofshow It’s not a very active channel anymore and certainly not something a modern YouTuber would gawk over.  It’s the home to “the [title of show] show", a documentation of the process it took to get the musical [title of show] onto Broadway.  The concept is already rich as Broadway is a place with many secrets and any look into its process is worth the time.  But these four friends are wonderful, chromatic people to take this journey with.  Each has a distinct personality, but they all emanate with an honest passion for what they do and an authentic appreciation for their audience.  It doesn’t hurt that the show they’re trying to put on is one of the greatest shows I’ve seen.  It’s a fantastic series: Informative, funny, and even a touching reminder of the great things that can happen when you follow your dreams.

2. BriTANickdotcom BriTANick is sketch comedy at its absolute finest.  Comprised of duo Brian and Nick, their videos exude everything the perfect sketch could have.  They’re inventive, well-paced, unexpectedly well-acted, and culminate into a perfect laugh batch that no fan of comedy should miss.  Their only agenda is to bring out the best in humor.  They’ve had some misses, but when they hit, they hit to sink.

1. 5secondfilms It’s a delight to see so many people (to the point where you lose count) all coming together to make something that on the surface seems pretty trivial.  5 Second Films are exactly what you think: People that make films that are five seconds.  And after nearly five years of uploading five videos a week, they haven’t missed a beat.  5 Second Films gives you the best way to waste your time while simultaneously showing just what kind of gold you can strike when you don’t waste a second.  Relentlessly bold and ostensibly gifted, 5 Second Films delivers short content with a long reach.

The Internet is only a medium.  But it’s a medium that’s brought forth enriching content that I hardly see in any other medium.  When you do things for the Internet, you’re taken much less seriously than when you do things for television or the big screen.  But the Internet, despite being largely embraced by the world, still manages to be one of the best-kept secrets when it comes to entertainment.  While I certainly hope this doesn’t last forever, I’ll embrace the hippness that comes with beaming over something so in the dark.

[tittyinfinity]

I slept for 10 hours last night. Longest I have in quite a while. I think I took 2 of my seroquel on accident lol

Welp. Here's another seroquel dream

So, my uncle is looking to rent out more bedrooms at his place. I'm thinking, wait, the only unused room in his house is the basement, which still has all of my uncle's and furniture. Did someone clean it out?

(IRL my brother, his gf, and his friend live there and rent the 2 bedrooms – my uncle is NOT a landlord btw – he has rented the place himself for almost 40 years, and his landlord is letting other people to move in to pay the rent while my uncle takes care of our disabled cousin)

I ask my uncle about this because I'm looking to move. He says he renovated the basements. "Basements?" I ask.

"Yeah, I added more."

I go to look and I can't find any other doors to any other basements, but when I go down to HIS basement, there's a door in the corner of the room now.

It goes down into an even lower basement.

I go into the lower basement, which has a door to ANOTHER, lower basement. How far does this place go underground??

There were 3 more levels of basement after that, meaning there were 5 levels of basement total. Each time you go down, the basement is bigger. The bottom one has its own kitchen.

I tell my friends – who for some reason happen to be the friends I had 10 years ago – and one of them immediately moves in while I tell some other friends. She rented out the second basement.

About a week later (I assume, since the dream cut to just me running errands for days; that happens in my dreams a lot bc it's all I ever do IRL) my friend and I decide to throw a party. It's bangin. We got a mixture of old and new friends. We get drunk, my ex shows up in my dream like usual, we fuck in the bedroom, someone walks in on us, we fall asleep and wake up the next morning to see windows had been installed and you could see outside for some reason. I'm confused because my uncle's house is not on a hill.

Later that day, I end up giving tours to potential new renters for the rest of the basements. This is when I get an actual good look at them.

The first basement is just my uncle's regular basement with all his stuff in it.

The second one has two rooms, a bedroom and a living room. It only has my friend's bed in it. That's where we partied.

The third one had an even bigger bedroom and living room.

The fourth one had 2 bedrooms and a living room.

The fifth one was like an actual full apartment. It was furnished and looked a lot like my aunt's house.

I'm taking a large group of my friends through each one, kinda feeling gross about it because I felt like a real estate agent or a landlord. We get down to the bottom floor, where the (included) TV is playing a slideshow of pictures and videos.

They're SURVEILLANCE pics and videos, taken up in high places. They were recordings of all parties my friend had thrown in her basement apartment, including the one I was at (apparently she had a party every day of that week, but that's accurate for how my friend was 10 years ago.) It included pictures of people drunkenly dancing half naked, videos of people having sex, videos of girls grinding on each other, and pictures of alcohol bottles.

We discuss this for a few minutes. Did the landlord set this up? Did my uncle do it? Is it to have "proof" that my friend was being irresponsible so they could kick her out, or were they taken for perverted reasons? The partying had basically never ended, so there wouldn't have even been a chance for them to record anything BUT parties.

I start looking around the basement apartments for surveillance equipment. I find many cameras in hidden locations. This freaks me out.

I take them to my uncle, who has NO clue why they were there. It actually makes him wonder if the rest of the house is rigged.

We check around, and nope – the cameras were only in the new basements.

We go to the bottom basement, where there is now a door leading to the outside. A GLASS door. And you can see outside clearly. In a basement that's 5 levels underground.

We open the door. A bright, blinding light replaces the outdoorsy scene in our vision. We hear a loud, booming voice.

"You thought those were all special underground basements, but they're alternate universes, and I control them all."

I turn and ask my uncle, "did you know about this?"

He says "oh no, I accidentally painted them all with the cursed paint."

I wake up.

[despazito]

Complete list of all problems known so far in Pokemon Sword and Shield with data and/or proof for each problem

[I am copying this post from the pokemon subreddit from u/Terotu]

Seeing as there's a lot of people that don't quite know the extent of the issues and that there's no real compilation of the problems, I feel like everyone needs a list with info and sources of each and every current problem with the games, it's a long list but I've tried to put it all together, it's not just dexit people. I will post everything that is 100% confirmed and known so far, there's potentially other problems, but this is made as a somewhat "quick" digest with info that has been 100% proven, for anyone out of the loop that wants to know exactly what's happening with these games.

1. The number of usable Pokemon has been cut, only less than half are now usable, known as Dexit, it means that you won't be able to use these pokemon in the new games, you won't be able to transfer them in, and you won't be able to do anything with them sans sticking them in home for the foreseeable future (Home will probably be a paid only subscription based service just like its predecessor), for all intents and purposes, these Pokemon are basically removed from the main games franchise and they will take probably years to come back, if ever. An image with the cut/not cut pokemon can be found here, pokemon in green are confirmed to be in, pokemon in purple have galar forms, pokemon in yellow are in the data, but there's nothing for them, they could be leftover data like the items and other things, could be giveaway/event only, could only come from other games, etc, there's no way to know what's the plans for them at the moment, if any, pokemon in red are cut. The excuse GF used for this culling was that it let's them work on delivering better animations and a more carefully crafted game, since they don't have to put more time and effort into redoing the models. This is complete BS as the game polish is worse than ever, and the models seem to just be somewhat edited XY models.

2. Just like the Pokemon cut, about 144 moves were removed, 99 moves excluding the let's go and other outlier moves, this includes extremely important and used mainstay moves like Hidden Power, return/frustration and Pursuit, on top of extremely old moves that have been there since gen 1, some of these moves were important for the viability of several Pokemon, which may cause them to be way less effective if not way worse when it comes to battles, on top of this, it also removed some SIGNATURE MOVES of certain Pokemon. The full list for deleted mainstay pokemon moves can be found here Attempts at transferring Pokemon with these moves will apparently get this message: "This move can’t be used. It’s recommended that this move is forgotten. Once forgotten, this move can’t be remembered."

3. Short game, the first streamer beat the champion at around the 14 hour mark, while he did this by skipping a fair amount of trainer battles, other streamers are clocking in about 16-20 hours, seems like the average will be about 18 hours to beat the game. Here's one of the many streamers, he's right before champion and clocking in at 14:34.

4. The graphics are extremely mediocre, it constantly looks worse and less polished than LGPE, the textures are often inexcusable. Examples of the bad graphics seen here 1 2 3 4 5 6 A comparison with LGPE can be seen here and here Here's a game recently released for switch, another picture found here, the difference is unreal.

5. There's constant graphical issues, not just low quality graphics, pop in is present at all points of the game due to bad coding, trainer models will also disappear mid battle when an attack with a high number of particles is used, this also happened in SM, however, SM moved the camera away to avoid people seeing it, they didn't even try this time. This means it's either a carry over from SM and they just copy pasted most of the code, or they somehow have to remove the trainers to avoid a switch from somehow getting fps drops. The pop-ins can be evidenced here and here. Trainers dissapearing mid battle can be evidenced here

6. Animations, one of the main reasons why GF cut pokemon, at least in the interviews, are as shoddy as ever. There's extremely lazy animation all over the game, from normal attacks to key moments in the game, such as the encounter with the box legendaries. Most of the animations are also completely copy pasted from older games, one example seen here with Hau(the entire character of hop is basically a copy paste of hau.) Most of the animations for the camp are also copy pasted from xy amie, evidenced here. Pokemon battle animations are just as bad as before, if not worse, pictured here is a pokemon headbutting with its feet. Another example found here, THE MAIN BOX ART POKEMON CINEMATIC, THIS IS THE GAME CLIMAX, another example on the other version found here In fact, it could be considered way worse if compared to the last gen, example of upscaled USUM cutscenes. (Notice the graphical change isn't that big, the only difference here is increasing the resolution)

7. Cutscenes and restrictions, like previous Pokemon games the cutscene and story forcing and restrictions are insane this time around, seems to be even more intrusive and in your face than before at times, while keeping the same level of cutscene intrusion than past gen. The video for this point was taken down, but if you wish to see this you should be able to find it by searching the gameplay clips/streams online

8. The difficulty, just like the cut scene problem, this carries over from earlier games and it's even worse.There were constant heals, to the point where in the first routes you're not able to go beyond 3 trainer fights without getting a full heal. The first streamer avoided fights and didn't train at all, it still was one shotting gym leader dynamaxed ace pokemon.This can be seen here.

9. Post-Game is almost non-existant, as usual since masuda-Ohmori started directing, there's no frontier, there's also no frontier like facility. The post game consists of battle tower and a very short sequence of missions where you beat some dynamax pokemon for your rival to catch the other legendary. Not only this, but the battle tower is also an inferior version of past towers, it doesn't have super single nor super double battles, it has no triple battles and there's no "tower bosses", it's just random trainer npcs after another.

10. Problems with game design and behavior, beyond difficulty and progression, there's other problems in the overall game design. Examples of this is not being able to catch Pokemon in the wild areas until you got a badge allowing you to do so, which usually covers your current level. Meaning if you find a level 31 shiny or a level 31 pokemon you really want, you won't be able to catch it until you go and beat the next gym. For shiny hunters, this one is gonna be really important, you cannot see if your Pokemon is gonna be shiny or not in the overworld, this means that on top of the badge limit, you also got this potential problem. Evidenced here.

11. Removed past features with virtually no new additions, seems like this is a mainstay in Pokemon, removing older features so they become one of a time gimmicks, but unlike earlier titles this new game doesn't adds anything new except dynamaxing, which is limited to gyms only. This particular gen removes Mega Evolutions and Z moves, mega evolutions in particular were a huge deal and seeing them suddenly removed means that there's little reason to get involved with any new addition, no matter how mainstay or how much GF forces it when it will very soon be gone. A list of these removed features can be found here.

12. No scaling whatsoever, models are the same sizes of XY (giving more plausibility to them not really redoing the models).Any argument against this is thrown out of the window when dynamaxing exists, since the models seem to be edited XY models then the problem remains. Here's the non scaled model in sword and shield. Here's an scaled model, released in a game that came out 15 years ago for a the Nintendo Gamecube, something way less powerful than the switch.

13. No GTS, retera thread on the discovery found here, the only strings that refer to the GTS are leftovers from Let's Go code, as seen here and here. This is most likely due to Home(this means that you will have to pay for switch online+home for services older games already included) Thanks to /u/c_will for pointing this one out and gathering the info.

14. A 20 dollar price increase for less content than earlier 3DS games, with subpar graphics and removal of features, an overall shoddy release for a higher price point.

15. Performance, game is locked to 30 fps, and while that's not a big issue by itself, this is coupled with slowdown at certain moments such as dynamaxing, it can drop fps to the floor and turn the game into a slideshow for a while. Evidenced here. Still gathering more info on this one, as it's a relatively new occurrence that hasn't happened to all users, take this one with a grain of salt

16. The overall lack of quality, polish and effort put into the game, this is all the minor/somewhat minor but still very telling problems with the game. This is apparent in many ways all throughout the game, things like the wrong backgrounds or just voids for pokemon battles. Two example of the wrong backgrounds seen here and [here] (https://clips.twitch.tv/FriendlyCleanOstrichArsonNoSexy) One example of the void background seen here (these happen on indoor fights and some non indoor but scripted battles)Examples of backgrounds on indoor and everywhere else in both LGPE and colosseum, seen here and here. Then there's complete lack of music in the game story most important moments, seen here. Starters are also shiny locked. The entire world freezes when using certain objects, as seen here. To this, you add up the emptiness of the wild area and the badly implemented weather changes that don't make much sense, both seen here No animation for flying, no elite 4, no victory road, etc, this is added to all the other problems that show the lack of effort put into them.

This franchise deserves better.

You deserve better.

These games are not only a huge step down from earlier titles, but it goes beyond what used to be already barely  tolerable standards to way below standards, keep in mind this is the biggest, most profitable franchise on earth.

This is the first time a pokemon main game is released on console, people were excited for game freak to finally do whatever they wanted and it's been done with the most minimal of  efforts, all the money you've spent on Pokemon didn't went on making this a better game, it went straight into the pockets of the people in charge, those that made sure this was made with the most minimum effort and those that cut  corners.

Companies that made games decades ago on hardware less powerful than the switch shouldn't be doing a better job than game freak, and companies doing work in the switch have completely obliterated game freak when it comes to developing a video game.

Keep in mind that your purchase of these games causes this:

Continue the yearly release cycle that makes the games rushed and forces the devs to insane crunch time, creating the low morale problem

Tells them that you're ok with these problems, and they will keep lowering the bar and cutting corners on development

Your money will continue going into the pockets of those responsible for these problems

I implore you to be a smart consumer, I've played Pokemon since I red, ever since I was a child, I can no longer support this franchise, I probably won't buy a Pokemon product ever again if this is gonna be how they're gonna treat the games and its fans.

[dragonrajafanfiction]

Lineage

“In the world of dragons, All dragons are the offspring of the Dark King, directly or indirectly. The Dark King is the source of all dragon lineage, Yanling and Hybrids in the world. It is said that his wings can obliterate the sky and cover a mountain and the realm of his Yanling could cover half the planet.” 

Professor Guderian lectured his class “Dragon Lineages 101” in the largest hall in Cassell, able to seat up to 80 people, but this class was comparatively small, about 25, and composed entirely of Freshmen. It’s also the oldest hall. The original frescos still lined the top of the domed ceiling, with scenes of war, men bearing spears, bows bent back with arrows and fire breathing dragon opponents that dwarfed them.

These scenes and Guderian’s words convinced Tigre that he’d seen the actual Dark King in his vision - that voice that could shake the ground and shake his bones from the inside out, those wings that obscured the moon in the sky. When he stood on the throne, a great flock of dragons surged up and he was caught up in it.

This simple lesson was already taught to him, but in pictures.

He rested his cheek in his hand, looking up at the ceiling. On the first class of the first day of school, he had already convinced himself that he was right where he needed to be. He sighed, dreamily contented.

A sharp elbow interrupted his euphoria. Porsche brought his attention back to the lesson.

“Dragons are grouped by their generations.” Guderian switched on a slideshow of a chart. “Generally speaking, the closer a dragon’s lineage is to first or second generation, the smarter, stronger, and more capable it is, and the higher tier Yanling it has. The Dark King is Generation Zero, above the the first generation.” 

“The known first generation includes the Light King and the Four Lords that were directly created by the Dark King. The Four Lords control the four classical elements of Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water, and the Light King controls the fifth element of Spirit. Each of the Four Lords are actually twins of dragons who can combine their bodies to attain their ultimate powers. The Light King may have been a set of twins as well but evolved to transmit her genes via parasite. Next slide.”

“The Second Generation is far more numerous, created by the Four Lords and are called ‘princes’. A very high class prince is called a ‘lord’, not to be confused with the Four Lords. All prince-level dragons are recorded by their names and there are a few dozen of them. Next slide.”

“The third generation and below are exponentially weaker. They’re still stronger than humans but it’s easy for humans and the modern Hybrids to deal with them with weapons and manpower.”

Outside the lecture hall, umbrellas bloomed like black flowers under the steady rain. The students without the foresight to bring umbrellas dashed through the rain with their backpacks over their heads.

“I wonder what lineage I am.” Tigre mused, walking alongside the sisters.

“Given your high level of ranking on the test? First Gen for sure. Only First Gen can reach S level. The lower generations don’t resonate as well because they don’t have as much access to those high level genes needed to rank that high. Cassell wants the strongest hybrids here. So they really want the high quality first generation genes to fight in the war. That’s why the 3E is important. If you want to kill the Dragon Kings, you need Dragon King level lineages for hybrids.” Ruby helpfully explained as she walked alongside her sisters.

“You’re rank A. So that means you’re first generation as well?” Tigre asked.

“That’s correct, though our family lineage dramatically improved in one generation. It’s quite interesting. We had a few A-ranks in our family, my mother is A-ranked, married to A-ranked in the hopes of getting one A-ranked child, but she got three. Some would say that the appearance of more high level hybrids from around the world at Cassell College, from areas where previously few or none existed, is a bad sign. A sign that the awakening of the Dark King will happen very soon.” Celeste said softly.

“I don’t really see the connection.” Tigre scratched his head.

“There was one S-ranked student before Lu Mingfei around twenty ago but now we have two within 3 years and the ratio of A-rankers has increased as well. The voice of the Dark King could span the world and suppress every dragon within it. It would makes sense that the stirring of the Dark King could cause a reaction in those who are already attuned. They call it “Blood Call Theory.” Of course, this is just a theory with no proof.”

Tigre went quiet. The only person who called him was Chu Zihang. Before seeing that man, he never felt a special kinship with anything. He didn’t understand the existence of dragons until he heard the words through the speaker at the 3E test. This ‘Blood Call’ theory didn’t seem to apply to him.

At the same time, when he heard the recording through the music, he recognized and responded immediately and without question. Something had been there all his life, but he had no point of reference. Even if he had been called, he couldn’t respond.

He couldn’t remember anything outside that basement. He wasn’t born there was he? People should have fathers and mothers be they dragons or humans. Everything he learned at Cassell, he associated it with his 3E vision. But he was an adult, alive for two decades. Beyond the 3E, there was only the hospital and the dark cave-like cage where he fought and ate and slept. No parents, no childhood.

“Penny for your thoughts?” Ruby asked. “You look upset about something.

Tigre lifted his head and looked at the three girls who stared at him in rapt attention. “Oh… I was just trying to understand.”

“Do you feel like something is calling you?” Celeste asked carefully.

“No. I was trying to remember if I heard something like a Blood Call. But I… I don’t remember anything.”

“Don’t remember anything? Do you have amnesia?” Porsche who had been texting contentedly as she walked suddenly caught up from where she’d fallen behind.

“Amnesia…”

“It’s when you lose your memories. Like you hit your head or something and you can’t remember your past. Tigre is a weird name. That’s probably not your real name.” 

“Porsche.” Ruby interrupted. “I think maybe we should change the subject.”

“Why?” She put her phone away, tilting her head to look up at him. “Tigre. Aren’t you interested in where you come from? You were saying that you wanted to know which Lineage you had. Who gave you the name Tigre?”

“I don’t know. That’s just what people called me…” The shadowy figures that opened the cage. They called him and woke him up and opened the cage and let out the monsters to feed him. They called ‘Tigre’ and told him to ‘come and get it’. That was the extent of his human contact that he could recall. He felt a pain in his heart, like it was being squeezed.

“What people?”

“Porsche stop! You’re upsetting him.”

Tigre wiped at his face and smiled. “It’s just the rain. Don’t worry.”

[hatari-translations]

Skattsvik Development Group - review

Yesterday I went to see Skattsvik Development Group. It was pretty great!

It’s less of an actual play per se and more of an artfully presented, frank account of an act of performance art: these five guys taking their paychecks for the production (standard monthly pay for artists in Iceland, times five) and attempting to hide it from the tax man using the sorts of schemes used by shady millionaires. The outcome is satirical, educational and often just plain hilarious.

Before the show even starts, in the stairwell leading to the small room where the performance took place, they’ve hung up a bunch of the actual documents that they prepared for all this; I took a couple of pictures that I included below.

The guys start by introducing themselves; none of them know all that much about money or taxation, but one does really enjoy making spreadsheets in Excel. Matthías in particular talks about how in doing this he discovered there are a lot of polite, helpful people out there willing to assist you with this sort of thing; one way or another, everyone believes in what they do.

They explain the basic idea of the scheme, as seen in the video I translated the other day: living in country A with a ~40% tax rate, you want to pay ~0% taxes on it, like in country C. Preferably, though, you’d need a double taxation agreement between the countries, which may not exist - so instead you need a country B, with maybe a ~20% tax rate, that has double taxation agreements with both A and C. Then, once the money is in country C, you get an anonymous credit card from the bank in country C, bring it to country A, and withdraw money from the card using an ATM (discreetly, so that you personally can’t be connected to the account).

Two of them go over the various options that they had for countries B and C on a slideshow while the other three dance behind glass. Cyprus sounded great, and they got an offer from a company in Cyprus that handles this sort of thing... only for them to calculate (in an Excel spreadsheet, of course) that setting it up would cost more than the taxes they would’ve paid on their paychecks in the first place. (The total amount they’re paid isn’t that much money, all considered - some ~2 million ISK. Convert to your currency of choice.)

Just the slideshow going over the options is revealing (and delightfully sarcastic). Dubai is amazing; you don’t pay taxes on anything except oil or banking... but you have to actually relocate to Dubai, and they just didn’t have time or money for that. Other places you don’t have to live there but you do have to show up in person to found the accounts and they had to rule it out. They ended up settling on Ireland as a country B and Panama as country C - Ireland has a double taxation agreement with both Iceland and Panama.

Then they go over the process of founding an Irish company. Luckily, there’s a company in Ireland called “Sigtax” that’s all about helping foreigners get through the legal hurdles of founding a company in Ireland, complete with microscopically detailed instructions on exactly how to fill out all the various forms. You have to submit CVs for the founders; the guys worried surely their CVs as random Icelandic artists would set off some alarm bells when they suddenly want to found an Irish IP consultancy company, but luckily Sigtax included CV templates suggesting useful terms to use, such as “entrepreneur”. (Matthías added “positive attitude” under his skills, not because it was on the template but because it’s true.)

Also, you’re supposed to explain the structure of the company, with Sigtax helpfully noting that you can draw it; Matthías filled it in like this:

Possibly the high point of the show is the thoroughly photographically documented day that they mailed out the documents to their contact at Sigtax, where they have various misadventures, as they think there’s a post office in the mall where the theater is, only to discover there isn’t one, get some ice cream for their trouble, stop for some kids who want selfies (presumably having recognized Matthías despite the suit; it was Ash Wednesday, which is the day Icelandic kids dress up in costumes, and they mentioned feeling it was appropriate that they were wearing costumes too), head to the actual post office, buy an envelope and seal it only to discover you can’t send courier mail through the regular post office, so they have to go to DHL instead, only when they get there that’s only an office and not an actual DHL location, so they have to take yet another trip.

Once they’ve mailed the documents, they wait for an answer, only to be told that they’ve been rejected... because they can’t have “Group” in the company name when it’s not an actual group of companies. Sigtax suggests “Skattsvik Development Limited” instead. They do that and mail the documents again; this time it’s fine. They officially own an Irish company.

Following this, they manage to buy a shell company in Panama as well, through another company specializing in this sort of thing. They offer a list of pre-established companies you can buy (defunct ones that they bought); it costs extra to change the name of the company, so they bought “Eldest Fire, Ltd.”, which is just extremely metal.

Unfortunately, though, founding an actual bank account in Panama is a bit more difficult. The company they bought Eldest Fire from does have a bank they work with, but something goes wrong there - it’d take more time than they had, or they needed more money in the account than they had, or something (I can’t recall exactly what it was). In the meantime, they’re trying to found an Irish bank account with the Bank of Ireland, but to do that they need to prove that they’re, you know, an actual company operating in Ireland and not some Icelanders’ tax haven shelf company. Luckily there is also a company that will assist you with that! So they get a physical address in Ireland, some random building, and even a landline phone that just forwards everything to one of their Icelandic mobile phones, providing them with a utility bill (meant to be provided as proof that they really are operating an actual business at this address). Even then, though, they’re informed they have to show up in person to open an account - so they instead try to get an account with Fire.com, an online bank, which would not require that. They, too, want proof that they have a legit business - and ask for a website to show this. The guys quickly set one up with a Wix template, very professional-looking apart from the big Wix banner at the top... but unfortunately Fire.com does not take the bait.

That’s when another bank gets in touch with them, though, one with branches in both Ireland and Panama. This bank insists on a video chat, so the guys raid the theater’s prop department for anything they can think of that’d be at an office (printer, table fan, half-full bottle of Coke, potted plant...), dress up in their suits again, project a Reykjavík skyline onto the wall... and talk to the guy.

The bank guy seems noticeably a little awkward after they tell him very frankly that the point of this exercise is to avoid paying high taxes - but he still advises them, and explains what they’ve got set up is actually unworkable (largely because they used their actual real names to found the Irish company), but they can totally make it work legally by going through the US instead. The guy wants to meet up in London to continue making arrangements, and suggests a date after the slated premiere of the show - but even here they’re going to need a lot more money.

In the end, then, they don’t actually manage to complete the scheme, but there’s every indication they totally could have if they weren’t trying to do this with the paltry amount paid to five guys putting together a play in four weeks. Matthías also ventured to ask the guy, at the end of the chat, just how much money is being handled this way, and he answered that 70% of the world’s capital is held in offshore accounts.

There was a Q&A afterwards, where I asked how they responded to the guy about the London meeting. They hadn’t; “We just ghosted him.” They also added that any further meetings or video chats with him would’ve been several hundred pounds per hour. My husband also asked what would’ve happened if they had successfully pulled it off - to which Matthías explained that they talked to a couple of lawyers, including his father, and this performance would not constitute legally valid evidence of tax evasion, because it’s a play. It’s not tax evasion if it’s for the art.

Overall, I learned a lot about the particular shameless absurdities of global capitalism, and had a thoroughly good time in the process - and so did my husband, who was initially very ehhh about coming along. Definitely recommended... although I don’t expect most of you guys are in any position to see the final performance tonight.

[dicecast]

Blast to the Past: What is the Appeal of Fallout

Ok so last time we covered why people are really into the Baldur’s Gate series, which sort of invented most of the CRPG genre (Ultimia is very sad right now).,  Now for the other major Isometric game series, which launched one of the most influential series in Gaming history, I speak of course of Fallout.  

Now I haven’t played Fallout since I was a kid because I remember the interface being extremely frustrating compared to BG (which like...that is saying something) but what people love about Fallout is primarily the story and the roleplaying.  So what makes Fallout 1 so appealing 

1) The post Apocalyptic genre, Fallout and Road Warrior probably define the aesthetic of that genre more than any other, and if that is your jam, then Fallout is for you, it is not just post-apocalyptic but it is deeply interested in the tropes and conventions of that genre.  Now Cards on the Table this is actually a minus for me, I’m more of a fantasy man myself but diversity of genre is good so this likely makes fans of the genre very happy, especially since this game has done more for the genre to anything since Road Warrior 

2) Classless system.  Fallout doesn’t have classes, instead it has a very elaborate system of mechanical perks, stats, traits and skills, each of which can change a lot in how you play the game and express your character.  You have a low more flexibility in building your character than the more rigid focus of Classes+stats+skills of D&D, though personally I prefer Character from Mechanics rather than Mechanical from character.  However you want classless roleplaying, Fallout starts the Computer trend 

3) Social as a real option.   I think today people overestimate this in regards to fallout and seem to imagine that you can talk every enemy down, and that really isn’t the case, but certainly  for the time Fallout was far more evolved in terms of social dynamics than Baldur’s Gate, and a social character is entirely viable.  Critically you can defeat the final boss entirely through dialogue options.  

4) Dialogue options are more like puzzles.   Hbomerguy pointed this out in an earlier critique of Fallout 3 but I think it is worth repeating, in Fallout winning at dialogue options isn’t as simple as just finding the option with “Speechcraft 67″ written next too it.  If you want to defeat The Master, you don’t just need a high Speech, you also need to have found the information necessary to change his mind (specifically that the Super Mutants are sterile), external evidence of said proof, and you also need to carefully pick the dialogue options to do so. Your high Speech and Int only open the door for you to be able to defeat him, you still need to have done your own research, asked other people questions, and brought evidence with you, which makes choosing the right option much more satisfying than just saying “you are wrong and I have 100 Speechcraft) 

5) Variable play experience.  This is true of all RPGS, if I play a male Dwarf Cleric in BG II and a male human wizard I am going to have different interactions but most of fights will be similar.  But if you choose the “Jinxed” Trait at the start of Fallout, which basically dramatically increases everybody’s chance of Critical failure (including your enemies) the entire game is utterly different and a horrific  tragicomedy   of needless violence.  But if you take this combined with 9 or 10 luck, then you will fail less and everybody else will fail more.  It totally changes the nature of the game.  If you choose the Empathy Perk, then bad dialogue options are highlighted in Red so you know not to pick them.  If you choose Mysterious Stranger perk, a Clint Eastwood ripe off will sometimes show up to help you out in combat out of no where and then leave just as quickly.  

6) Negative effects from stats.  If you have a 3 charisma in BG, your party members will fight more, you will get worse rewards for quests, and you will get worse prices, but your dialogue options will largely remain the same.  You won’t get the special bonus dialogue options open to high charisma characters, but you basically have the “default” dialogue options at all times.  If you aren’t a caster, there really isn’t too much of a downside for having a low Int in BG, you are much weaker to mindflayers, as logn as you have some smarties in the party you should be fine.  Not so in Fallout.  If you play a low Int character, you are barely capable of speech so you have unique dialogue options and the game is totally different.  Its objectively worse and kinda sucks but there is a lot of comedy gold in playing an absolute moron.  Later games will pick up on this more, with New Vegas taking the cake with your own brain attempting to quit from you in protest.  

(This is from fallout II but the point is the same)

7) Random Encounters.  In BG, random encounters are all roughly the same, a different type of enemy shows up and attempts to murder you until you murder all of them.  There are a few of those in Fallout but you also have much more inventive random encounters.  just to list a few from the first game 

You can find a wandering singer who will perform for you and increase your charisma by 1

A unique merchant named Duc, who if you kill, you will trigger a random encounter where his men seek revenge.  

A random wounded Peasant which will give you some kind of prophecy 

A Brotherhood of Steel person who will give you some information 

Walk into a fight between two different factions (lots of variants of these) 

Corpses which you can loot

Some travelers who can give you directions or info

And a fucking crashed Alien Spaceship which you can loot 

Seriously far better random encounter design than most RPGs ever

8) Ideological conflict. This doesn't actually make Fallout better than BG, whose overall themes are more mythic than ideological but it makes it different, Fallout is effectively a story about adaptation, about society, technically and what does it mean to relate to the past.  The Vault wants to effectively deny the outside world and pretend WWIII never happened, The Brotherhood of Steel is creating this weird dogmatic elitist technology cult in response to it, the Master wants humanity to evolve to a new species to solve the problem, and what will be the New California Republic wants to recreate the pre War United States.  Different ideologies existing in opposition to each other is a core part of this series and Fallout starts it 

9) The Aethetic.  Fallout has a very unique look and feel which is so iconic that other video games keep ripping it off, and that I have been to multiple fallout themed bars in my life.  This isn’t really evident in the game-play graphics which I think are objectively uglier than BG’s painted backgrounds, but more in the objects, interface, and interactions, like the claymation models you can talk to 

10) Ending slides.  Fallout starts the tradition of having a slideshow at the end that shows exactly how each of your actions changed the world in a different way.   

12) This one doesn’t count because it didn’t really work but Purely turned based combat.  Fallout uses the Action Point system rather than the semi real time/Turn based of BG.  Now....this is more of a hypthoetical benefit because the turned based combat in Fallout doesn’t really work at all, so BG is just objectively better, but if it was polished it could be a radically different way of playing the game.

12) Dogmeat the Dog 

There is a reason why this game is so beloved to this day, it brings a lot of very radical mechanical innovation to the table, even though it is borderline unplayable at times.  

[amiweightloss-blog]

What a 5% Weight Loss Can Do for Your Health

You don’t have to slim down to your high school size to get real health benefits. Losing just a few pounds makes a big difference. Five percent of your body weight -- 10 pounds for a 200-pound person -- can improve all kinds of health problems, and make you feel better, too. Talk to your doctor about whether it might help you.

What Can 5% Do for You?

You don’t have to slim down to your high school size to get real health benefits. Losing just a few pounds makes a big difference. Five percent of your body weight -- 10 pounds for a 200-pound person -- can improve all kinds of health problems, and make you feel better, too. Talk to your doctor about whether it might help you.

Ease Up on Joints

Just 10 extra pounds add 40 pounds of pressure on your knees and other lower body joints. That can wear them out quicker. Extra fat can also cause inflammation -- when chemicals in your body damage your own tissues over time, including your joints. Losing even a little weight can ease these effects. If you keep it off, you’re much less likely to get arthritis later in life.

What Can 5% Do for You?

You don’t have to slim down to your high school size to get real health benefits. Losing just a few pounds makes a big difference. Five percent of your body weight -- 10 pounds for a 200-pound person -- can improve all kinds of health problems, and make you feel better, too. Talk to your doctor about whether it might help you.

Ease Up on Joints

Just 10 extra pounds add 40 pounds of pressure on your knees and other lower body joints. That can wear them out quicker. Extra fat can also cause inflammation -- when chemicals in your body damage your own tissues over time, including your joints. Losing even a little weight can ease these effects. If you keep it off, you’re much less likely to get arthritis later in life.

Cut Your Chances of Cancer

One study showed that older women who lost at least 5% of their body weight lowered their chances of breast cancer by 12%. There’s no such clear proof that losing weight protects you from other types, but some changes that happen when you shed pounds hint that it might. For example, overweight people who slim down have lower levels of some hormones linked to cancer, like estrogens, insulin, and androgens.

Prevent Type 2 Diabetes

If you’re more likely to get the condition, weight loss is one of two ways to prevent or delay it. The other is moderate exercise -- 30 minutes on 5 days a week. If you weigh 160 pounds, you could lose just 8-12 of them to get the benefit. If you already have diabetes, losing that weight can help you take less medication, keep control of your blood sugar, and lower the odds that the condition will cause other health problems. Source: https://www.webmd.com/diet/ss/slideshow-five-percent-weight-loss Read the full article

[braincoins]

She looked up in surprise when the elevator dinged and smiled when she saw who it was. She rolled her eyes as he approached her desk, and shared a look with Lance.

“Damn, you definitely did it right if he’s coming back for more already,” Lance commented.

Shiro stopped and sighed. “You had to?”

“Of course I had to!” Allura said.

“I left her no choice,” Lance declared. “Besides, she was just sitting here, grinning like an idiot.”

“Well, I suppose that’s fair enough,” he said, “since apparently my phone call with Lotor was on speakerphone for the whole print division to hear.”

Her eyes widened and she groaned. “Oh no, Shiro...” She dropped her head into her hands.

“It wasn’t my idea!” he protested. “Blame Lotor!”

Allura felt her cheeks heat and raised her head again. “You are supposed to be working. BOTH of you,” she said, including Lance in that.

He just chuckled and turned back to his computer.

Shiro leaned in and said quietly, “I need to talk with you. Something’s come up.”

“Didn’t take long at all,” Lance said.

“Not that,” Shiro growled.

The hairs on the back of Allura’s neck stood up. “Okay, first of all, growl like that when we’re alone, will you?” 

He blinked and blushed. “Allura...”

“Second of all, roof?” she asked as she rose from her chair.

“Yeah, probably a good idea.”

“Don’t spend too much time making out up there,” Lance warned. “The TV news guys in the traffic copters like to watch.”

“We’re not going to be making out,” Shiro said.

“Pity,” she said with a grin. “Come on, then.”

He stayed quiet as they walked up the stairs. “I get the feeling I’m not going to like this?” she asked.

“Unlikely,” was all he said.

“Better than the last time we went to the roof?”

He seemed to consider that before replying. “Well, I’m not ragingly jealous this time, so... yes?”

“You admit you were jealous last time?”

“I was insanely jealous. I mean, I couldn’t date you because you were my boss, but Lotor’s your boss and yet you were out with him, and...”

“It wasn’t a date!”

“I know. I knew that then, I was just... feeling hurt and betrayed and I was being an idiot,” he said.

She got the door for him and wedged it with the brick once he was out. It was a bright day, sunny and warm. “So?” she asked.

He glanced around, even though they were alone, and pulled her away from the door a little more. He stayed close to her to say, “Lotor’s pissed at me. He says that our relationship is proof that your judgement regarding me is compromised and he gave me a puff piece to work on today.”

She rolled her eyes. “Annoying, but I’m not sure why this warrants...”

“He also said that if he catches me working on anything other than what he assigns me, I’m fired.”

That caught her attention. “I haven’t told him anything about the Galra story you’re working on.”

“I know, I believe you. But he knows I’m working on something and that I won’t tell him what it is. And he’s suspicious about it.”

“So you’re going to have to tread very carefully.”

He grinned a little. “Not going to tell me to drop the story?”

“Have I ever?” she asked, mirroring his grin back to him.

“You told me not to investigate Starlight.”

“Not the same thing; I told you not to start that story. I’ve never told you to drop one.”

“You didn’t want me investigating Galra.”

“I didn’t want you avoiding investigating Paladin,” she replied. “And that’s still not telling you to drop a story. Besides, I agreed with your investigation. And I still do. Especially after the other night.”

“There has to be some way we can prove what they’re doing without blowing our own cover,” he said. “I just have to figure it out. I can afford to pay my hacker friends for a little more, but without funds from the paper, there’s only so much I can manage.”

“We’ll figure it out,” she assured him. “But please be careful.”

“I will be,” he agreed. “For today, I guess I have the morning to myself. He’s assigned me to cover the Tulip Festival this afternoon.”

She snorted. “Knowing you, you’ll find evidence of some sort of wicked, floral-based scheme going on.”

“Heh, well, don’t hold your breath. This is no dog show.”

“Oh, can I send Lance with you?” she asked. “He’s a good photographer, and we could set up a slideshow of the pretty flowers! It’d brighten the website up a bit.”

“None of those flowers are anywhere near as pretty as you,” he said, leaning in to kiss her.

She turned away to let him kiss her blushing cheek instead. “Stop that,” she protested, not meaning it in the slightest. “Can I send Lance with you or not?”

“Sure. But have him meet me there. Since I have the morning off, I’m going to swing by Galra HQ.”

“What?!” She felt her heart jump. “No! Are you mad?!”

“Relax,” he said. “It’s just for my arm. I still have this kind of... weird sense about it, and the doctor who attached it said to contact him if it’s being strange. I’ll call ahead, see if he’s busy, and hopefully he can take a look at it today.”

She frowned. “I don’t like the idea of you going in there alone.”

“I’m not Paladin right now,” he reminded her. “I’m just one more person in their prototype study. And I’m not even trying to get anything. I’m honestly just going so Dr. Ulaz can look at my arm.”

“Please, please be careful,” she pleaded, latching onto his arms and looking up into his eyes. “I just got you; I can’t stand to lose you again this quickly.”

“You won’t,” he promised, and when he bent to kiss her this time, she let him have her lips. She slid her arms around him and held him close to her. Even after they broke, she didn’t let go.

“Keep in touch while you’re there,” she said sternly. “I want texts every five minutes, or I’m getting my costume on and showing up.”

“Now that is something you definitely should not do,” he shot back.

“Try and stop me,” she challenged him.

“You seriously want me to text you every five minutes?”

“Yes.” She looked him dead in those dark, rich eyes of his.

He relented. “Fine. Every five minutes while I’m there. And I’ll text you when I’m leaving so you can send Lance out to meet me at the Tulip Festival. Civic Square Center; starts at 2. I’d like to get there no later than 1:30, see if I can talk to people while they’re setting up. Maybe I’ll buy you a little something.”

“Don’t,” she said. “Save your money for your hacker friends.”

“I suppose I prefer these two lips,” he said, giving her a quick kiss, “to any others anyway.”

She laughed. “You’d better, buster. Come on; Lance already thinks we’re not doing anything but making out up here.” She pulled away.

...or she tried to. He held onto her arm to keep her from leaving. “Well, if that’s what he already thinks...”

“Shiro...”

“...and he’s going to think it anyway...”

“Takashi,” she warned him. Her wide grin was ruining the effect.

“...then let’s show the TV news guys in the traffic copters how it’s done, hm?” 

She laughed just before he kissed her again.

{The Adventures of Starlight & Paladin}

[digitalown-blog]

The 14 Best Premium WordPress Portfolio & Gallery Plugins in 2018

If you are a designer, professional photographer, artist, and businessman if you want to show your work on your own website. So that your customers are attracted to your work and want to work with you. So you should create your own website, in which you can show your work very well. And for this, you do not need any kind of coding knowledge. While searching for a lot of WordPress Plugins we have collected the best WordPress Plugin for you, with the help of which you can show your work portfolio on your site and will also look at your portfolio and you will be able to deal with business to your customer. Now, in this case, We want to say that you should choose any plugin of your choice from the given portfolio and gallery plugins, and create your own beautiful portfolio website, which will make it easier for you to increase your business.

1. Go Portfolio

Go portfolio plugin is one of the famous portfolio WordPress plugins that offer you plenty of awesome features and assist you to produce stunning portfolio pages. You can also produce new custom post varieties or use your existing blog posts, custom post type posts, Video thumbnails, lightboxes or products. It’s very simple and quick to produce amazing portfolios and integrate them into your WordPress website exploitation Admin Panel. you'll sure notice the one most acceptable for you, which might be custom-made in an exceedingly few seconds. Advanced post query options to show posts, setting the limit and order of the posts, filtering by taxonomies and terms. This Go Portfolio Plugin is fully compatible with drag and drop plugin of Visual Composer. You can mix these two plugins to create a beautiful portfolio with drag and drop functionality. It comes with 35+ superb ready to use premade design with demo data which can assist you plugins start right away. It offers you a limiteless variety of colors to decide on from, 600+ Google fonts to vogue your portfolios. More Info / Download

2. GridKit Portfolio Gallery

GridKit Portfolio Gallery is one of the best multipurpose WordPress Gridkit Portfolio user-friendly plugin for Portfolio, Photo or Video Gallery creation. It can be mainly used for Photographers, designers, Online Image Sellers, Businessman, web developers etc. The Wordpress gallery plugin offers you to customize any portfolio & Gallery grid with custom style designs. This will helps you to create multiple gallery formats like Portfolio, Photo Gallery, eCommerce Product Gallery, Photo Album, Youtube Video Gallery, Vimeo Video Gallery Client & sponsors portfolio, Team members gallery, Popups/Lightbox, Social share buttons and much more. Now we would like to inform you that these Grikit portfolio gallery plugin will help you to make beautiful galleries and portfolios according to your need. You can also see the more demo. More Info / Download

3. Essential Grid Gallery Plugin

Essential Grid Gallery could be a premium plugin for WordPress that provides you to display numerous content formats in an exceedingly extremely customizable gallery grid. This is a very powerful and extensive WordPress plugin that offers you tons of features which will assist you to create your stunning portfolio websites. Also, it provides you to create your own skins using a drag and drop visual editor. With Essential Grid, you can easily Import & Export your Grid, Skin, Meta Data for usage in WordPress Themes or for easily moving them to another WordPress Installation. The plugin offers Boxed, Full-Width, Full Screen Layouts, Adaptable Column/Spacings, WooCommerce products, blog posts, Images Youtube & Vimeo Video, iFrame Content or 20+ premade skins option and a lot more. More Info / Download

4. Ultra Portfolio

Ultra Portfolio is a Powerful WordPress plugin to build amazing portfolio layouts according to as per your requirement. it will offers you Grid, Masonry, Carousel Slider, Lightbox integration, Single slide, classic blog style, Full-width layout, outer content, Above media content and multipurpose portfolio can be easily built. Ultra Portfolio is a fully responsive gallery plugin. You can create any number of columns of gallery layouts. It is compatible for any device. This plugin comes withWoocommerce integration. Your portfolios can display price and add to cart button of your product allow ease. You will have unique & creative CSS effects for your portfolios to form them look even additional enticing. you furthermore may have Google Fonts with this plugin in order that you'll be able to vogue up the typography of the portfolios to form them look higher. More Info / Download

5. Easy Media Gallery Premium WordPress Plugin

Easy Media Gallery Pro is a completely unique and creative portfolio & Gallery plugin perfect for display multipurpose portfolio layouts. You can add galleries, Photo albums, image slider, images, video and audio to a portfolio layout. Easy Media Gallery plugin provide you to add items with a few clicks. It is also easy to use positioning, Unlimited color schemes and add special effects to items in your gallery. This plugin also supports various type of lightboxes. The plugin is fully responsive and compatible with any size of the screen. More Info / Download

6. Amazing Portfolio

Amazing Portfolio is a beautiful and fully responsive plugin for WordPress. You can create unlimited portfolio theme effect with this plugin. You can choose the number of columns you would like for the portfolio section and might choose the planning of the portfolios still. Easy to use filter choice can certify that the plugin is beneficial to your users also. The plugin offers unlimited colors, beautiful CSS & CSS3 effects, Images, video and audio support for portfolios, Responsive Portfolios, display Filterable portfolio with controllable animations and tons of more features. More Info / Download

7. Media Grid

Media Grid is a unique and versatile responsive premium portfolio Plugin that allows you to build beautiful, filterable, paginated portfolio, responsive grid columns layout using a visual grid builder you just have to add items, size and sort them. The plugin represent a powerful solution for any type of media Youtube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, self-hosted videos (lightbox and inline). Both if you need inline or lightbox contents. It's offers big product filter can be aligned on grid sides, a perfect solution for products filtering. You can also create grids using products. This plugin also compatible with WPML multilingual and Polylang plugin. You can also use Unlimited portfolio overlays using Overlay Manager add-on and Unlimited filters using Advanced Filters add-on. More Info / Download

8. Envira Gallery

Looking for the best Portfolio & Gallery plugin for your site? Envira Gallery is the most popular WordPress plugin to create great-looking and eye-catching galleries on your website. It's provides you Drag & Drop builder that you can create beautiful photo and video galleries with just a few clicks. The plugin has big pre-built templates to customize the appearance of your gallery, Photo Album, Video Gallery, Slideshow, Fullsreen Display, Pagination, Responsive Lightboxes, Social sharing, Image deep links SEO Friendly, Optimized for Speed and Responsive gallery. Envira Gallery plugin also provides Unlimited Add-ons (Albums Addon, Social Sharing Addon, Video Addon, Watermarking Addon, Slideshow Addon, Deeplinking Addon, Pagination Addon, Proofing Addon, WooCommerce Addon, Lightroom Addon, Tags Addon, Instagram Addon, Featured Content Addon, NextGEN Importer Addon, Fullscreen Addon, Dynamic Addon, CSS Addon, Zoom Addon, Printing Addon) so that the plugin addon will help you to create your beautiful stunning gallery page. More Info / Download

9. PhotoMosaic

PhotoMosaic is a very clean and intuitive WordPress photo gallery plugin. The plugin is perfect to create any type of portfolio & gallery pages. With PhotoMosaic, everything is possible. galleries can be made from a listing of pictures, photos attached to a post/page, and categories and tags in any taxonomy (default and custom), plugin alternatives web page to effortlessly configure all your image galleries, Fully Responsive, Masonry Layout, Customizable columns, width, padding, and much more! More Info / Download

10. Grid FX

Grid FX has a modern and creative gallery WordPress Plugin, Created to be gallery pages, It has helpful image galleries options, videos, product features, portfolios, Image Filters, Transition Effect, Image Effect, Different Grid Styles, Social integration, Mixed grid, unlimited color styles, Sort and search feature, Different Navigation Styles, light or dark color schemes, custom title animations, and effects. There are like 80+ options that may be custom designed effortlessly to provide you full manipulate of your gallery. You can display your product using a beautiful grid using the grid fx woocommerce help. It will also represent you Woocommerce Integration Unlimited theme Options, Flexible Layout style, Custom Effects, and Likes System. More Info / Download

11. Awesome Gallery

Awesome Gallery is a Multipurpose WordPress Plugin to display Photo albums, exhibit Images, like posts, attachments, pages, custom post types including WooCommerce products. It uses flexible layout modes, easy to use admin interface, Unlimited Colors, powerful built-in lightbox, Light and dark lightbox themes, Customisable filters and CSS3 image effects. With this plugin, You can create Flickr Gallery, Instagram Gallery, Facebook GALLERY, NextGEN Gallery, and even Rss feed. Moreover, the plugin is responsive permitting easy animation on mobile gadgets too. More Info / Download

12. Wonder Portfolio Grid

The Wonder Portfolio Grid is a best WordPress Gallery Plugin. Like the help of this plugin, Gallery Effect and Features like Overlay on Portfolio Items Showcase different categories in the portfolio items, and can show all types of audio, video, and text on the image lightboxes. And you can also show a caption on the image. This plugin is completely responsive whenever you look at the mobile or any kind of device, it will show according to the any device. Click on the given button for more information. More Info / Download

13. WP Auto Grid

WP Auto Grid is a fully responsive WordPress Gallery plugin. But this is a slightly different gallery plugin. This is a Wordpress plugin that scans a folder in your Wordpress installation and its subfolders containing images. The subfolders are going to be the categories that may display at the top, and therefore the plugin can create a grid responsive gallery with the pictures. You only need to drag and drop images into the folder. And then you have to put a shortcode to post to the gallery and show it on the page. More Info / Download

14. FooGallery

FooGallery is the very flexible and user-friendly gallery plugin ever made. This will allows you multiple features like Media Categories, Gallery filtering and sorting, advanced filtering, Drag & Drop Reordering features, big Gallery, options, Image Lightbox support, Visual editing Features, Video gallery option, One-click gallery page creation and so much more. While you'll change design each galleries and albums with CSS, you'll additionally like better to accompany the inbuilt gallery templates that area unit bundled with the plugin. More Info / Download Conclusion As the result! Our real motive was that you could easily make your favorite portal and gallery page your website without any technical knowledge and without any effort. That's why we have prepared the best gallery plugin collection for you after watching all the portfolio & gallery plugins. So you can easily show your beautiful work portfolio on your own website. Mainly designers, artists, web developers, and businessmen can create their beautiful portfolio with the help of the above portfolio and gallery plugins. Read the full article

[brew-maths]

Brandon Woodruff has pitched extremely well in Spring Training. It seems the 26-year-old is tapping into his potential at the perfect time. BREW MATHs utilizes film study to explore Woody’s progress as he competes for a spot in the 2019 rotation…

  CAREER TRENDS

As you can see, all the advanced metrics paint a pretty clear picture.

While Woodruff has not pitched many innings on the Big League level, his sample size is large enough to give us some confidence in what we are looking at:

Pretty impressive since every one of these metrics measures something slightly different. Early in our analysis, it appears that ‘the maths’ are on Woody’s side. Even when we factor out the environment (i.e. ERA-), all signs point to Ace-in-the-making.

He also is improving across the board when you consider his more basic rate stats. Keep in mind, that things like K, BB and HR rates are directly reflective of things a pitcher can control. If there is improvement in these areas (over healthy sample size), it is fairly predictive of good things to come. When we graph these trends, your eyes cannot deny what they see (even if you are A Cubs Fan):

This shows us that his walk rate has been steadily near the league average. Specifically, Woodruff has averaged 2.96 BB/9 while the MLB average is typically around 2.9 BB/9.

On the other hand, the blue line is rapidly rising. This graph shows us that the sharp rise we saw in his K/BB rate is a byproduct of striking more guys out (as opposed to walking less). The MLB Average is typically around 7.7 K/9… Woodruff has gone from 6.70 in 2017, up to 9.99 last year.

If we examine the plate discipline of the batter’s that Woody has faced, there are some trends to note:

Opposing hitters are swinging less at Woodruff’s pitches. This goes for both pitches inside the zone (Z) AND pitches outside the zone (O). Overall, there was a 5.9% decrease in opponents swing percentage.

At the same time, they are missing more which is evident in opposing batter’s contact percentages. 82.7% of swings at ‘Woody pitches’ resulted in contact in 2017. Last year, that number fell to 77.6%.

MANUFACTURING POOR CONTACT 

Here, if you watch the slide show flip back and forth between 2017 and 2018, a colorful trend announces itself:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Woodruff has added a 2-Seamer (Sinker) that strengthens his overall repertoire

He is not JUST relying on blowing hitters away anymore…

Woody is throwing less ‘grooved pitches’ and is working the edges of the zone more efficiently

The slider and change-up are being thrown outside the zone more. In 2018, he is using these to actually strike guys out. In his rookie year (’17), they were used more often as set-up pitches.

OVERALL TREND: Adding the sinker makes for a more colorful distribution. He is working lower (and glove-sided) in the zone than in the past. This minimizes risk.

AHEAD in count

BEHIND in count

LEFT: AHEAD in the count; strategically avoids the strike zone. He now uses his offspeed stuff to generate whiffs and this is occurring at an increasing rate.

RIGHT: BEHIND in the count; Woody’s top-shelf control is on display. While he still catches too much of the zone at times, he has gotten better at working the edges.

When we look to see how this has translated to run prevention, the proof is in the pudding:

Whiff rates (or swing-and-miss %) have gotten better with every pitch in his arsenal. This has occurred at a steady rate for the four seamer, slider and change-up. So, The Brewers have a guy who can brush 100 mph on the gun and is now learning to refine his craft… A scary thought for the rest of the NL Central.

The addition of the sinker (2-Seamer) has expanded his pitch distribution on every count, except two. Not so surprisingly, the two counts he avoids the new pitch are 0-2 and 3-0. Thus, he is not using it as a ‘strike-out’ pitch (instead as a set-up pitch). It is promising that he is using the other three pitches to strike batters out. It implies he is growing more confident with his repertoire. The relatively even distribution of these pitches on 0-2 counts reinforces that.

These adjustments force hitters to guess more frequently. In 2018, the only count they can depend on seeing a four-seamer is 3-0. Outside of that, a batter never knows which pitch will be coming, how fast it will be or how it will move. This minimizes the reaction time of the guy in the batter’s box and expands Woody’s toolbox. This deception is reflected in how opponents launch angles (LA) fell from 9.1 (’17) to 5.3 degrees (’18). The MLB League Average LA is typically around 11 degrees.

A lower LA leads to weaker contact, more grounders and ultimately, less guys on base. Woodruff has a 54% ground ball rate, while the league average is 45%. The importance of LA is reinforced by how it tends to follow wOBA:

A CLOSER LOOK AT HIS ARSENAL

*** ALL VIDEO VIA MLB / BASEBALL SAVANT ***

We have already alluded to the fact that Woodruff has expanded from a three pitch arsenal to a four pitch arsenal. Specifically, he has added a sinker to his repertoire which already included a four-seamer, a slider and a change-up.

Four-Seamer: Has risen exactly one mile per hour from 94.3 to 95.3 mph over the past year. Generates a much higher ground ball rate than MLB Average.

wOBA: 0.298

LA: 4 degrees

QOPA: 4.86

Whiff%: 20.9 (25.7 K%)

Here, Woody blows it right by Bryce Harper:

Slider: Also slightly increased in velocity and now comes in at 86.5 mph. Of note, the spin rate also jumped up from 2148 to 2229. This implies he is learning to make it dance more. Despite this, hitters tend to turn these into fly balls much more than his other pitches.

wOBA: 0.295

LA: 11 degrees

QOPA: 4.42

Whiff%: 32.9 (24.4 K%)

Since this pitch does not have a lot of movement, it is heavily dependent upon placement and sequencing. If hitters guess it is coming or it catches too much of the plate, Kike Hernandez shows us what happens:

Change-Up: Has not changed since entering the league. It has always come in around 84.7 mph and the spin rate is the same. What makes it difficult to hit is its arm-sided fade. It leads to a lot of ground balls.

wOBA: 0.278

LA: -2 degrees

QOPA: 4.80

Whiff%: 28.3 (26.3 K%)

When his change-up is sprinkled in it fosters an imbalance that limits quality of contact, as follows:

Sinker: His fastest pitch, coming in at 96 mph, leads to more fly balls when compared to MLB average. The newest pitch in his repertoire was added in 2018. It is thrown less than 3% of the time but is effective in setting up the other pitches.

wOBA: 0.139 (Translation: Impossible to hit)

LA: 3

QOPA: 4.91

Whiff%: 28.6 (33.3 K%)

Here is a look at Woody’s nastiest pitch… “and please, drive home safely”:

SUMMARY / CONCLUSION

Brandon Woodruff’s improvements have been linear and rapid across the board.

VELOCITY: Increasing with every pitch except the change-up

PLACEMENT / CONTROL: Woodruff is using more precision when attacking hitters. He is learning to minimize risk and is hitting the edges more.

SEQUENCING / DECEPTION: By adding a fourth pitch, Woody has been able to keep hitter’s off-balance more readily. Specifically, he is using a more measured approach and is consciously setting hitter’s up to fail. Prior to 2018, he was much more prone to try to blow it by you.

CONFIDENCE: The 26-year-old is using all of his pitches on just about every kind of count. This allows him to feel more confident venturing outside the strike zone. Despite hitting the zone less, he is getting hitter’s to miss more. Woodruff is definitely putting it all together…

Regardless of the metric you chose and no matter how advanced it is… Woody is getting better at everything. Literally. If a couple of numbers or a few stats tend to cluster in the same direction, it might mean something… maybe not. However, when we see every single stat line-up to tell the same story… well, then you are onto something.

All four of Brandon Woodruff’s pitches are effective but some disparities surface upon comparison:

FOUR-SEAMER: Very fast with a lot of natural movement… this combo makes it very hard to catch up to, and then locate.

This pitch is far-and-away used more than the others (61%). While this exposes his power pitcher roots, he is developing into much more than that…

SLIDER: Not a lot of movement but compliments the rest of the arsenal nicely

When he misses with this one, it usually is hit hard

That said, how much it moves is improving (i.e. spin rate)

CHANGE-UP: A reliable source of ground balls and is used about 10% of the time. The fact that this comes in 10 mph slower than his fastball and sinker leads to a lot of weakly hit / topped balls. It also fades as opposed to the other three pitches.

SINKER: Nasty… just nasty. One of the fastest 2-Seam pitches in the league. This has become the pitch he will throw by someone in a pinch. Opposing hitters rarely hit it and when they do, it does not lead to production.

Finally, and by far, most importantly…

BRANDON WOODRUFF BELONGS IN THE 2019 MILWAUKEE BREWERS ROTATION

(And we didn’t even mention how he handles a bat…)

Woody's Aresnal: Sabermetric Film StudyBrandon Woodruff has pitched extremely well in Spring Training. It seems the 26-year-old is tapping into his potential at the perfect time. BREW MATHs utilizes film study to explore Woody's progress as he competes for a spot in the 2019 rotation...

[successlomo]

Uninstall tubecast windows 10

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We can download it to our local disk and easily watch a 360p video. It is a good fit for various types of apps where you can cast, starting from Smart TV, AirPlay, Internet box, DLNA, Chromecast, Google Tv, Amazon Fire TV including Xbox One & 360 and PS4 cause’ why not! If you are looking for any apps that would help you to cast YouTube videos on any other devices, then you would be amazed to hear that this would fit you the best. Anyways, if you are lucky you can get it for free, it depends from time-to-time.Īgain, this is one of the best YouTube apps for Windows 10. But it’s worth giving a try with all these sick features so go ahead and give it a try. However, you need to purchase it ($0.99). You just need to create a room and send the password to those whom you want to watch with.

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You would get a good user-friendly vibe through its carefully designed interface.If you want to watch a specific film or movie or anime or anything in general with any of your friends or family it has a feature named ‘room’ where you and your close ones can spend your quality time. Right now the app seems like little more than a proof of concept.Unlike the official YouTube interface, you won’t get much distracted from this interface. Hopefully Tube Cast or other apps will add more functionality in the future. Still, it’s pretty nifty to see proof that you can use a Windows Phone device to control a Chromecast at all. All it does is start a video. And you’ll need to disable mobile data on your phone in order for it to even find the Chromecast on your WiFi network. You can’t use it to pause, stop, fast forward, or rewind a video. Unfortunately Tube Cast is pretty rough around the edges. You can use it to select YouTube videos and tell you Chromecast to stream them straight from the internet - then you can set aside your phone, run another app, or turn it off entirely because the video is streaming from the web, not from your phone. Like most Chromecast apps, Tube Cast is basically a remote control for your TV.

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But the makers of Tube Cast have figured out how to use a Windows Phone handset to stream videos from YouTube. Google’s Chromecast officially lets you stream content to a TV by using Android and iOS apps or by casting videos from a Google Chrome browser tab on a PC. That includes apps like photo slideshow viewer Dayframe, and surprisingly enough at least one Windows Phone app called Tube Cast. Now that Google has released tools developers can use to add Chromecast support to their apps, we’re starting to see developers offering new ways to use Google’s $35 media streaming device.

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Tube Cast is the first Chromecast app for Windows Phone (YouTube video streamer) - Liliputing Close Search for: Search