#unless some other softwares have something similar. in which the same thing applies

[carmendeiact2whenplz]

Digital artists who only use a few brushes for their fully rendered artwork scare me. Wdym you don’t have several gigabytes of brushes that you barely use. What do you mean you use the same five brushes for everything. What do you mean there is such a thing as enough brushes??? You’re obviously wrong, there is never such thing as enough brushes.

[yourgamemasterthewhiterabbit]

I am from Northern Canada and speak a dialect actually called "unaccented" so it's still an accent, but no one comments on it, no one here notices, and when I spoke to Americans from all over the states from the call center, they couldn't place my 'accent' as anything but a -very- broad area. They couldn't even tell I was from Canada specifically until I did something like stick 'eh?' on the end of my sentences.

So like yeah, everyone has an accent, but mine is considered a 'business standard'. It's like the generic American English you hear on TV and can't place specifically. My dad used to get picked out for diplomatic things because he sounds the way people with English as a second language expect American English to sound. Still an accent.

And when I speak other languages I tend to not have a very strong accent compared to whoever is teaching me to speak? I mean I must have an accent, but when people hear me speak french they place it as Quebec french, because that's where I learned to pronounce things from, and they start asking which language I even spoke first [used to anyway I am rusty as shit]. Any language software I tried to use found my pronunciation to be pretty spot on for everything I tried. It might be an audio mimicry and autism thing, I start to sound like whoever is around me. I also was raised learning french and English in parallel mostly so my accent learn to like code switch basically, so when I speak other languages or try to learn them I seem to have an easier time adapting the sounds played straight, instead of like, trying to force the sounds they are asking for out of the mouth shapes I am already used to... If that makes sense? It's like learning to "do an accent" of the way someone would sound speaking English, and then apply that to the language they are actually getting you to speak, so you are doing the accent of a language in that language, if that makes sense?? It's probably still off, or as off as your fake accent is, but it's way closer than people who don't try to modify the way the form sounds.

I -must- have an accent because everyone does, but also no one has ever used the word accent and me in the same sentence unless I was putting one on or in an altered state... Or fucking up my native accent and dialect for neurology reasons.

The ONLY thing some people notice is i can't actually roll a guttural 'r', I fake it really well with a weird tongue flick and no one usually notices in English, but it's more similar to the r/d sound in Japanese in the way i am forming it. It only stands out sometimes when speaking french but that's less an accent and more one single isolated sound I am physiologically incapable of making, so i would categorize that more similarly to a lisp. Other people who speak my 'accent' of English do not have the same problem, they can roll their 'r' just fine, there ARE rolled 'r's in my native accent and dialect, I am just cringefail at them always.

there is no 'base accent' so like all of this is entirely subjective tbc, just based on what people around you say and how you think you sound

pick whichever language you want to answer in if you're multi-lingual

[jomatto]

Some people are logical while others are free spirits, and then there are those who can be both. I'd like to count myself as one of them. You'd think a freewheeling endeavor such as writing would bear little similarity to something as rigid as coding, but as someone who kind of does both for a living, there's actually a lot of crossover.

Code does not work if you're missing a key element and the same applies to story writing. If you don't take the time to lay down the foundation and build up the thematic elements brick by brick, your big money scene will lack the oomph to really move readers.

As much as I want to sit down, be struck by a bolt of inspiration, and start pumping out pages of content by sheer force of artistic will, some semblance of structure is required to make everything fit together perfectly.

I've used many different writing tools over the years, from an old-school typewriter to my phone, and new tools and software are constantly being developed. While there are enduring masterpieces of storytelling that were born from a simple quill and inkpot, that doesn't mean you can't produce something equally as compelling by taking full advantage of today's technology.

We no longer have to carry around a notebook and pen (unless you're analog like that, which I'm sure some old souls still are) because our phones offer everything we need to put our thoughts into words. However, I'm beginning to feel the limits of my current setup.

I used to use MS Word to write, but ever since it went on subscription, I jumped ship to Google Docs. Then once I got an iPhone, I started using Apple Notes. Still, each of these 3 platforms share a critical weakness insofar as they offer no integrated support for structuring and outlining stories like you could with a good ol' fashioned corkscrew board and index cards.

While searching for better writing software, I landed on an app called Scrivener. I just started the tutorial, but this thing seems quite deep so far, which can be intimidating for some. As a lifelong gamer, digging into the mechanics is something I do every time I load up a new title, so a little learning curve doesn't scare me.

I've always considered myself more advanced than a newbie but not as in-depth as a professional. I've always gotten my skill level to a point where people would come to me for advice even though, in my mind, the things they're asking about are so easy to grasp that even a caveman can do it.

There's a weird disconnect and feeling of imposter syndrome when certain things come easy while other people seem to have the darndest time trying to wrap their heads around it, and it makes you wonder if you're living in a parallel universe where easy shit is hard, and everything else is backwards.

You're only as good as your tools, and depending on what you use, you may get stuck or go even higher. How many peoples' potential have lain dormant because the tool needed to unlock it hasn't been made yet? That's why I'm always looking for something better because there's no reason to think that my current state is the most optimal.

My experience has shown me that the vast majority of people are surprisingly hesitant and unadventurous, and because of that, they risk being left behind. That sort of conservative approach just doesn't cut it these days.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it, they say, but if you can go even faster and harder with less effort, why not give it a shot?

[mooncorebunny]

Notes on a cybersecurity talk

A master social engineer did a talk on the current trends in how hackers target people. I took some notes. This is corporate-oriented, but also applies to individuals. Useful to be aware of!

TL;DR - Hackers are very good at emotional manipulation. Be paranoid of all unexpected phone calls, don't click links in legit-seeming emails unless you're very sure, and don't use the same password in more than one place!

Phishing attacks are more than 80% of incidents now.

An attacker will start by figuring out who and how to target. The goal is to trick the target to:

hand over a password or access (for example asking for remote desktop in a new way)

click on a link

download a file

directly send money or data

Hackers do research using OSINT for precise targeting. Typically using Google and social media. They try to find out who your coworkers are, what software you use, what icon/avatar you have. Any personal likes/dislikes so it sounds like they're someone who knows you already. Anything that they can use to tailor their attack, to seem like it comes from a familiar, trusted source.

Any kind of selfies reveal personal information, but most especially if you foolishly have any sensitive sticky notes or computer screens visible in the background. If they see your screen, they see the icons on your desktop and/or task bar, and so they find out what software you use, and can modify their attack accordingly.

Safest not to reveal anything work-related on social media - projects, coworkers, clients, successes or failures. The more opaque and vague you are, the safer you are from social engineering attacks. LinkedIn is a particular vector for personal information leakage for any corporate employees.

Why would anyone fall for a scam, you may ask. Unfortunately, an attack with the right timing and backstory can trick most people.

Some psychological factors that will be used in an attack:

Reciprocity; if the attacker tells you something, you feel socially compelled to reciprocate and tell something as well. The attacker will use things they know about you and your work to volunteer bits of information, hoping you mention something off-handedly in response.

Commitment and consistency; we are socially conditioned to move from easy questions to hard questions, for example starting with friendly smalltalk and harmless questions, establishing a psychological acceptance of their questions, then follow up with more dangerous questions. But at that point you're already socially committed into answering them, since starting to question the friendly person suddenly would feel awkward and humans are terrified of awkwardness.

Social proof; name dropping of someone you know. Perhaps saying the other person already did this thing they're asking you to do, maybe getting you to feel you've been left out of the loop and should follow suit.

Liking; if you like someone, you want to help them out. Social engineers deliberately try to mirror your behavior, mannerisms, and communication style, to appear similar and likable to you.

Authority; people tend to obey authority. They may pretend to be a boss to get you to follow an order easily. Or they may pretend to be completely without authority, like a confused newbie who needs help and advice and information.

Scarcity; people are more likely to act when there's a sense of urgency. An attacker may use a timeboxed request, which invokes fear. For example, your account will be locked if you don't do this within one hour etc.

Sympathy; trying to evoke empathy by sounding stressed and miserable to get you to do something you wouldn't normally do.

These are combined to form effective attacks. (A lot of these can be avoided by just never taking phone calls, if that's an option. Assume every unexpected phone call is trying to manipulate you.)

The attacker may target someone other than you and trick them to relay a dangerous request to you. The attacker may target someone else through you by getting you to relay a dangerous request.

To hack accounts, all an attacker needs: full name, current or recent address, birthday, email addresses, phone numbers. They can use these to progressively take over your social media and email accounts, sending password reset and change requests.

Google yourself: search for your real name and address. Is it found that easily? Your real name plus phone number? Family member names? That stuff should not be public. It will be used against you. Delist yourself from everywhere.

Google has a delisting tool, free for everyone, might help to deter casual hackers. But delisting from Google isn't enough by itself.

Your social media info can be used to gain access to any company that has your info on file. When you buy something from a company, they will typically record your name and address and other information, and a hacker can easily trick them to hand out all that recorded information, if they already know parts of it. Therefore never reveal which companies actually have your information on record. Don't post on social media about companies you've bought products from.

Hackers can fake a person's voice too, so just because someone sounds like the real person over a phone, doesn't prove anything. Realtime voice modification technology is easily and cheaply available on any app store. Hackers can also easily fake caller id on phones, so when you get a call, you don't know if it's really from the number or person your phone shows it coming from.

Multifactor authentication does help. Also, if an unusual request comes from a normally-trusted source over just one line of communication, use a second channel (sms, whatsapp, teams, slack, email) to double-check the suspicious request is genuine.

Don't click on links in e-mails. Double-check if the URL is the known official legit one. Go directly to the relevant site in your browser instead of via the mailed link. Seeing a green HTTPS lock in the browser URL field does not mean a website is the real one; that's old advice, no longer relevant.

Most common attacks happening now:

Tech support scam; remember, when you need help, you contact them, they shouldn't contact you!

Exec impersonation gift card scams; hi, I need you to send some gift cards to this "client"!

Bank impersonation

Coworker impersonation

IT support impersonation; they may have learned about an IT-related problem you have and say they now have a fix, just log in normally at this friendly URL…

If anyone contacts you and tells you to log in somewhere, it's probably a scam, so don't do it without double-checking the source.

Don't reuse the same password in multiple places. The most important way to protect your accounts. If they gain access to your email, maybe using your password from some other breached service, they can change all your service passwords. Most password dumps from security breaches are openly and easily for sale on the internet, so any reused password is probably available somewhere in there.

52% of people reuse passwords on multiple accounts…

You may think yourself unimportant and unlikely to be targeted. But minimally-personalised scams are mass-sent to hundreds or thousands of targets. You'll get some too.

If you work with sensitive information, you are more likely to be targeted.

If you are customer-facing, you have more attack surface and thus more likely to be targeted.

If you have a lot of access, you are a juicy target; if little access, you can be used to target someone else.

For personal use, some recommended password manager software includes 1password, lastpass, keypass, bitwarden.

The number one thing to do right now - make sure every password you use is different and complex, and use multi-factor authentication everywhere.

[cathoderaysunshinebeaver]

Heretic/Hexen

I love Doom. I’ve never made an attempt to list my favorite video games in a numerical order, but if I did, Doom would likely be one of the highest, if not #1. I’m also a big fan of the “dark fantasy” aesthetic, so discovering the Heretic/Hexen series was a treat, to say the least.

Released in 1994, Heretic was built using the Doom engine by Raven Software, with John Romero himself having helped the team set up their computers and teaching them the basics of how he would make maps for the game. With this in mind, you’d be forgiven for saying what a lot of reviewers said at the time: this game looks like a Doom reskin with a fantasy theme.

This sentiment mostly applies to the first game, Heretic. But in a sea of other “Doom clones” released at the time, it is definitely one of the more competent ones. You play as Corvus, one of the few surviving elves in a world overtaken by the evil Serpent Riders, who have decided to exterminate all the elves because their magical powers make them resistant to the mind control spells the Serpent Riders use to conquer and subjugate realm after realm on their quest for world domination. Unsurprisingly, Corvus is out for revenge, and the end goal of the game is to hunt down and kill the first of the three Serpent Riders, D’Sparil.

The gameplay in Heretic is more similar to Doom than in the later games, but it does the Doom formula well. Most weapons have a distinct counterpart in the game it is based on: the Elven Wand is your pistol, the Dragon Claw is your chaingun, the Ethereal Crossbow is your shotgun, and so on. They are satisfying to use (save the wand, arguably), and look deliciously fantasy-eque, with beautiful spritework. The levels are split into a familiar structure, featuring three episodes with nine levels each (and two more episodes released as an expansion pack). The enemies are varied, with pretty animations and distinct sounds, and play into the Doom experience very well in that the combinations and locations of enemies in each area lends itself to very different strategies (although “run really fast and blast everyone with the crossbow” rarely fails on most difficulties). The two expansion episodes are considerably more challenging, and will require more quick thinking and ammo, sorry, mana conservation. Definitely a fun romp.

The sequel, Hexen, is where the series starts finding it’s own unique twist on the genre, and is the by many regarded as the “classic” that really put the franchise on the map. Again, you’re playing as a vindictive hero on a quest to liberate their realm from the Serpent Riders. This time it’s Korax, the second out of the three. However, now you’ve got to pick a class. This is the first big difference you’ll notice when starting the game. Corvus is MIA from his last adventure, and instead your choice of protagonist is between Baratus the Fighter, Parias the Cleric, and Daedolon the mage. While the game isn’t an RPG, these characters all have different stats when it comes to running speed and base HP. More importantly, they each have access to their own unique set of weapons. Mana is shared between the weapons, which are now split into green, blue and dual mana types, but they all behave very differently. For example, the fighter’s weapons are mostly of the melee variety and consume mana rapidly only for special attack modes, as they can still be swung without mana. The mage on the other hand uses his bare hands to cast a lot of his spells, but they do not burn through mana nearly as quickly. Unsurprisingly, the cleric is a hybrid, and uses both a spiked club and a mix of magical weapons. An “ultimate” weapon is also available to each class, which must be assembled from parts and consumes both blue and green mana, but has really devastating attacks (the cleric’s “Wraithverge” summons ghosts that scream like banshees and tear every nearby enemy to shreds; it’s just as metal as it sounds)!

Beyond the class differences, the level structure is the other major difference between Heretic and Hexen. Instead of a linear series of levels, each episode is now defined by a hub level with many branching areas that can usually be visited in any order. You need to find key items and activate switches in each one to open the way to the next world, and many areas within each sub-level are also locked until you find the right key/switch in a completely different area. As would be expected, this new spin on the level progression comes with both pros and cons. Few players today will be able to complete the game without ever looking at a walkthrough, and based on some comments I’ve read, this is one of those games that many people in the 90s would only dream of beating on their own. That said, there are very few instances where pulling a switch won’t at the very least give you a short message indicating it’s purpose (i.e. “A door has opened in the Wastelands”), and even then those with enough patience will rarely feel completely lost if they’re willing to backtrack systematically through every area over and over, taking note of every single locked door and unreachable area. I doubt it’s something the majority of gamers enjoy doing, but if you’re the type who would rather give up before accepting a hint, I’m happy to report that this game IS beatable even with your play style.

On the other hand, this structure also adds a lot to the feeling of being on a dangerous, epic quest. Metroidvania fans know that there are few things as satisfying as picking up a key and thinking “hey, I recognize this symbol! Now I can finally see what’s behind that door in the swamp!”. Uncovering the world bit by bit in this fashion really lends an air of mystery to the land of Cronos (where Hexen is set), and truly gives you that classic feeling of “pride and accomplishment” when you’re finally able to descend into that forbidding temple that’s been looming on the horizon for so long. And for those of you who are worried you won’t get to blast enough monsters to get your fill, this game still has you covered.

The enemies in Hexen are just as threatening as those in Heretic, and they look even better this time (seriously, if you enjoyed the visual aspect of Heretic, Hexen steps it up tenfold with truly gorgeous sprites, textures, animations and even some environmental visual effects, like thick mist and dead leaves blowing in the wind). You’ve got a fantastic cast of evil wizards, zombies, dog-like orcs, Minotaurs and more types of dragons and dragon hybrids than you could shake a Mace of Contrition at. A good amount of the baddies are initially very similar to those in Heretic, but their attacks are more distinct, varied and dangerous, and there are a whole lot more of these guys this time around. If you have the enemy counter turned on in your automap it won’t be uncommon to see the numbers exceed 400, and some of the weaker enemies will even respawn after a while. Don’t worry though, it’s not frequent enough to be stressful, but instead it really helps the backtracking from getting too tedious. Key hunting is a lot more intense when you never know if an Ettin is waiting around the corner to cave your skull in! However, if you’ve seen any other reviews of this game, you’ve heard a lot of grief expressed in regards to the Minotaurs (and their big brothers, the Maulotaurs). They aren’t the strongest foe in the game, but their shields, their surprise lighting bolts and their sheer numbers can definitely be a pain in the gluteus maximus. On the plus side, it makes killing them all the more satisfying, and you’ll find yourself experimenting quite a bit with your weapons and items to figure out the safest and quickest way to end their existence.

That’s right, I forgot to mention the items. The third and last major difference between Doom and these games is your inventory. The items are largely the same in all the games in the series, and using them can be a bit of a hassle unless you’re willing to fiddle around with your control settings to find a setup you prefer (I would usually bind the item selection keys to the scroll wheel and use them with the right mouse button). Visually, the inventory is similar to that seen in Duke Nukem 3D, and just like in that game, you’ll likely find yourself using some items a lot more frequently than others. Health and mana refills are a major aid, and beyond that you have things such as invisibility, invincibility, flechettes (despite what the name says, they’re more like grenades or mines, depending on your class), and a magical book that gives your weapons a much more powerful firing mode for a short time (although this item is mysteriously absent in Hexen). A special mention also goes to the Morph Ovum/Porkelator/Seal of the Ovinomancer, which transforms an enemy into a chicken/pig/sheep, respectively. A lot of fun to use, and and immense help against some stronger enemies if you’re low on health and/or mana.

If you didn’t find yourself using these items all too much in Heretic or Hexen, the following game might just give you a reason to. Hexen II is the third game in the series, and the final chapter in the Serpent Riders saga. This time you’re in the realm of Thyrion, and the last Serpent Rider, Eidolon, is the one who must be slain to free the land from his curse. In terms of gameplay, Hexen II is a lot more similar to Hexen than Hexen was to Heretic. You’ve got the same type of hub level structure, and you’ll again pick a class at the start, although now your choice has expanded, consisting of the Crusader, Paladin, Necromancer and Assassin, as well as the Demoness in the expansion (yes, all these games have expansion packs and they’re all worth playing in that they’re more of the same, but expanded, duh, and more polished).

The major difference this time around is one you can probably tell immediately from the screenshot: yes, Hexen II goes 3D (and in an exception to the common rule at the time, it is NOT titled “Hexen 3D” despite technically being the third installment). Specifically, the game uses a modified Quake engine. As mentioned, the core gameplay remains largely the same as in Hexen, but the level designers definitely did not waste that extra dimension. The levels are less expansive here, but a lot more complex and full of hidden passages, surprising loops and a whole lot of verticality. Scurring across a courtyard with archers raining arrows down on you from balconies is just as tense as it is satisfying later on to reach the same balcony and return the favor to any ghoul unlucky enough to find themselves below. Overall, the layout and progression in each area feels like it’s been given a lot more consideration and has endured more testing. Most of the time, the key hunting in each area feels more self-contained, and when it isn’t you rarely feel like you have no idea where to go. This is because every lock has been designed to feel more like a puzzle. In practice, your goal is still to find an item and bring it somewhere, but the locks and keys themselves are much more distinct, which helps you remember what to do and where to go. Instead of levers and typical keys, you find yourself looking for artefacts such as potion ingredients that will let you turn metal into wood, pieces of a broken mechanism or symbolic relics that must be placed in the hands of a statue to go in line with a prophecy. There are also more direct instructions in the form of book entries and inscribed stone tablets, which are very helpful in those cases where the puzzle might require a bit more than just item hunting, such as pulling switches in a certain order or lining objects up to create a pattern. It’s still unlikely that you’ll breeze through the whole game without getting confused, but you’ll rarely be at a complete loss; you’ll usually know what you’re looking for or what you’re trying to activate, even if you may need a walkthrough to find a specific hidden passage or to figure out exactly what a contraption does.

Overall, Hexen II feels like a refined Hexen, with more care put into making every area feel very distinct. It is absolutely not any less challenging though. The areas might be smaller in terms of actual units of measurement, and there are definitely fewer enemies on the screen at all times, but this is compensated for in spades. The third dimension adds a thick layer of complexity to every level, and the enemies hit HARD. If you got into a rhythm in Hexen of circle strafing, dodging and picking off targets in an order of perceived priority, you’ll have to learn to dance to a different tune here. Some enemies will close in on you incredibly quickly, and many of them have the ability to turn you into minced meat in a matter of seconds. Now more than ever is when you’ll want to shoot with a steady aim, use your items wisely, keep all the possible paths of retreat in your mental map, and scour every nook and cranny for health and mana to stand a chance against some of the stronger mooks. Hexen II as a whole is a lot more fast paced and tense and also has a more dramatic views and set pieces along with some extra bits of storytelling scattered around the world for those interested.

So, what are my thoughts on the Heretic/Hexen series as a whole? In short, it’s a treat. Combining classic fantasy tropes with the hectic action of Doom (and Quake) was an idea that was bound to happen sooner or later, and in this case, it worked out really well. There are of course other examples of this iconic clash of genres (check out Amid Evil for a totally kick-ass recent example!), but from what I know, the Serpent Riders saga is the one with the most lasting appeal. All the games strike a great balance between frantic, gory FPS action and the slower paced mystery and brooding sense of evil that only dark castles and dungeons can provide, with each game leaning a bit more toward one direction or the other. At a core gameplay level, there is nothing absolutely groundbreaking about Heretic/Hexen, but every element is done well and with care, and the presentation oozes of 20th century gothic fantasy charm, both the visuals and music. If the first paragraph of this review made you go “oh, those are both things I like!” then definitely check these games out. Same goes for anyone who is simply curious about the history of Id software and the impact Doom and Quake had on the gaming landscape. My only warning to you before playing these games is this: keep in mind that these games are from the 90s. There’s a reason many people have memories of booting these games up, getting completely stuck and then never playing them again. That said, as long as you have an internet connection (how else would you be reading this?) and an average amount of patience, there’s a whole lot of fun to be had here. All the games mentioned above are available on Steam (and GoG as well, I believe), and play excellently with modern source ports: gzdoom for Heretic and Hexen, and Hammer of Thyrion for Hexen II are my recommendations.

Finally, there is another game in the franchise. Heretic II returns to the story of Corvus (from the first game) and continues the story beyond the Serpent Riders arc, but due to some licensing issues it is not available on neither Steam nor GoG. Technically you could still buy a physical copy of the game, and I’ve seen mentions of at least one fan endeavor to make the game more accessible on modern computers, but I have yet to check it out. Maybe in the future. For now, I hope you enjoyed this dive into one of the slightly less famous, but still very popular classic 90s “Doom clones”!

[asideofchaos]

I didn't know there was an actual tag and community for this so thank you for that! In other news you have opened the flood gate of my info dumping.

First off, all of the Minecraft series Martyn is in are connected due to his streamer lore, and we know that this applies to both the Life Series and Misadventures. The former features an animation related to his lore during the ending of Limited Life, and in Misadventures, Martyn references Third Life when a sheep asks him for Rendog's head (long story) and he says "Not again", or at least something similar to it, which heavily implies that Misadventures and Life Series Martyn are the same, and thus that Martyn's streamer lore is cannon to his Minecraft series; unless said otherwise.

Misadventures takes place in the same universe as Empires due to both the Season 1 and Season 2 emperors being buirred in the Lost Crypt, it also follow the same Bubbles Lore about her being a multi-dimensional creature that can take multiple forms (as said by Sausage in episode 3.

There's actually another series called Afterlife SMP that as Lizzy made a guest appearance in after the two sides realized the Empires-related one accidentally took the other's name. I don't know if its cannon or not but it might be worth looking into.

I've heard in multiple places that in DSMP, Phil and Techno had referenced SMP Earth during it, but I haven't seen DSMP since around 2022; even then I was mostly watching the recent stuff, so I can't really verify that.

I saw on a similar post that apparently XLife referenced Crazy Craft at some point, I think it was due to Joel but I might be mixing things up. Oli also recently referenced Crazy Craft in at the beginning of his second Misadventures VOD, although I personally doubt that it can be called canon, Oli did frequently use his real life self in Afterlife SMP and Empires Season 2, and in Misadventures he has "black lung" due to him being sick in real life so it very well could be a canon reference.

Last and probably least, I could have sworn that I saw someone somewhere say that Lizzy's pirate trick in Afterlife SMP had a reference to Minecraft Isle in it, but for the love of all that is good I haven't been able to find that comment since despite trying to find it again since then. However, if it is true, then this little thing I've been call the Aphmau Extended Universe (Consisting of Minecraft Isle, Minecraft Diaries, Modmod World, MyStreet, and Void Paradox, and probably more of her stuff) is canon to all of this.

Sorry for such the long post! Honestly I need to catch up on my MCYT lore, but I think I might look into this further, even if its only for fun. Although if your more interested in this, I would recommend using a free chart or design software to keep track of everything.

every week or two someone comes up with a new minecraft smp multiverse theory and all that comes to my mind is this chaotic monstrosity i made in 2023.... i made the original chart with like 10 smps in 2022 and it quickly evolved to whatever this was.... please please pleaseeee update me if i missed any smps (niche references made from one smp about the other counts as long as it was said in character or is considered somewhat acceptable in terms of the lore)

ALSO IMPORTANT- can we all just use the #minecraft smp multiverse tag to keep track of new connections, see everyone's graphs and idk just have fun figuring this out together? just a thought

[stemmmm]

An Animation-Term and Keyword List For People Who Haven’t Studied Animation

I’ve decided it’s time to put my BFA in animation to use and share with you all about 40 terms I could get off the top of my head that I’ve seen confusion and misconceptions about.

If you know a term that was missed here, feel free to add a definition or ask for one! 

Animation (in this context) -- The act of taking a series of images and putting them in a sequence next to each other which is then viewed in rapid succession, thus giving the images the illusion of movement.

Anime -- The Japanese word for “animation”. This term is often used to refer to the style of drawing in the west, but it literally ONLY means “animation”. 

Animatic -- Unfinished visuals and audio cut together into a watchable video format. This is NOT another word for short animation. An animatic would use visuals from a storyboard rather than rough or finished animation

Anticipation -- A slower movement made by a character to lead into action. This is used to great effect in comedy animation and in games like Dark Souls. The posing and buildup makes you expect something is going to happen.

Cel -- A tool for animating. Traditionally, this is a sheet of clear plastic that a frame of animation is drawn on and painted color is applied to. These are set on top of background images and photographed so they can be used in the final animation. The term can also be applied to hand-drawn digital animation. Pre-digital nearly everything was animated in this fashion, like Bugs Bunny cartoons or classic Disney movies. Some Japanese animation is still done like this, but the move to digital has only recently begun there.

Claymation -- A branch of stop motion animation, it is when moldable clay is shaped, photographed, and reshaped in a manner that gives it the illusion of movement.

CGI -- Stands for Computer Graphics Imagery. Any image that is generated by a computer. This applies to all digital artwork, even 2D, but is most commonly used to refer to 3D images created by a computer.

2D -- Flat images such as those you would draw on paper. They have height and width but no depth.

3D -- Images with height, width, and depth. Computer generated images and physical sculptures fall under this category. 3D computer animation and stop-motion animation are 3D.

3D Computer Animation / 3D Animation -- Animation done on a computer specifically using 3D software to either give the image more depth or to make it look more lifelike. It is made by creating digital sculptures of characters which a “rig” is attached to which gives the animator the ability to move the sculpture like a puppet. If you say 3D animation, people will know you are referring to computer animation. Most American movies in the past decade are or include 3D animation.

Digital -- Any animation done on a computer. This applies to 3D animation, 2D graphic animation, and hand drawn animation done on a computer. Most animation has moved to digital formats because of computers ability to automatically in-between--thus saving large amounts of work. Computers also eliminate the need to physically store easily lost or damaged piles of paper and film, and they eliminate the need to manually photograph individual animation frames.

Flash -- Refers to the now mostly defunct Adobe Flash program which gave animators the ability to turn 2D drawings into puppets that could be animated. The similar Adobe equivalent is now called animate. It popularized a style of puppeted animation similar to paper cutouts in a digital format, but while it is known for that, it can be used for hand drawn animation as well. This puppet style of animation has improved dramatically since it’s beginning in Flash, and the same (or similar) technique is used by people who animate with programs like Toon Boom. Shows animated in flash include Johnny Test and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.

Frames -- A single image as part of the whole animation. A picture of a cel on a background would be one frame.

Frame rate/ Frames per second -- How quickly the frames are played back for the viewer. Film standard is 24 FPS, or 24 frames played in rapid succession for the duration of 1 second. Games often play at 30-60 FPS to aid reaction time.

1′s and 2′s -- To animate something on “1′s” means to create 24 distinct frames to play for a full second. 24:24, or, just 1. 2′s--also known as 12FPS--similarly means you do half that amount of work. 24:12. Most things are animated at 12FPS because it is less work and accomplishes approximately the same thing as animating on a full 24 frames. Animations at these rates are still played at 24FPS. Contrary to popular belief, classic Disney movies are mostly animated on 2′s.

3′s and 4′s and so on -- Like 1′s and 2′s, but less. 8 and 6 FPS respectively. These rates are used more commonly in television than movies, but even then rarely. 3′s and 4′s most often exist in conjunction with 1′s and 2′s to both save work and give the animation more expression. These are also always played at 24FPS. Studio Trigger most notably animates like this.

Hand-Drawn -- Animation that is fully drawn by hand and does not involve manipulating a puppet character. Traditional 2D animation is hand drawn, Flash animation isn’t.

Hold -- When a frame or pose lasts longer than normal. A hold can be completely still or have slight movement. They are used to break up action and very often used to create anticipation of an action. 

In-between -- Frames that connect the action happening between keyframes. They change something from a set of poses to actual animation.

Keyframe -- Important frames in the animation, often major poses in an action. These are sometimes taken from storyboards but not always.

Meaningful animation -- Or animation with intent. Parts of an animation that were specifically made to do a certain thing. This comes up in discussions about higher frame rates and whether or not they matter to a work. An action that could be expressed in 8 frames played at 24 FPS does not necessarily need 24 frames, because the additional frames provide too much visual input, could be drawn more poorly, or are a waste of time to do. A computer generated tween is not always meaningful because it was not always intended to exist by the animator. The frames generated when you take an animation at 24FPS and modify it to be 60FPS are not meaningful.

Mocap/ Motion Capture -- When a person wears a silly suit with little balls or other markings on it and acts around a stage, that is for motion capture and animation reference. Motion capture tracks a persons movement and can apply it to a 3D rig, but it is not perfect so animators are still needed to correct the movements and make it work in the final product. This is used in many live action movies that feature CGI and notoriously in The Polar Express.

Mograph/ Motion Graphics -- This is the animation style used in many commercials, how-to explainer videos, and animated company logos. This is the lovechild of graphic design and animation. It is most often 2D, sleek, and heavily design focused as opposed to character focused. Most often made in Adobe After Effects.

Paper cutout -- A form of stop motion animation where pieces of paper are placed on a flat surface and photographed from above. This can be done with light from the front to see the full detail of the paper, or back lighting to give it the effect of shadow-puppetry. The first animated film was done in this style.

Pre-production -- Work that is done before something is animated. Includes character designs, environment designs and layouts, scripting, storyboards, audio recording, and anything else necessary to have done before you begin the arduous process of animation.

Post-production -- Anything that needs to be added after all pre-production and animation is finished. It includes editing everything together, adding effects, and whatever else must be done before you can call something “finished”.

Procedurally Generated Animation -- This is animation made entirely in a computer through use of algorithms. Used more often in games than anything else. Animations are generated in real time to create more variety in the movement. It allows for things that can’t be done with pre-made animations like making characters feet land and/or slip on rocks or track their head and eyes to look at something.

Puppet Rig/ Rig -- A skeleton applied to any type of puppet you want to animate. 3D and puppeted stop motion animations both use this, though in stop motion it is more likely called an armature. 2D animations like Flash animations also use these

Onion Skin -- A 2D animation term. In traditional animation, a person works on paper over a light table which shines light through the paper and lets them see the frames they’re animating between. In digital animation, you press a button and the onion skin will display in either a lighter color or different hue the frames in front of or behind where you’re working to a point you can set and adjust. It’s called onion skin because peeled onions are transparent.

Reference -- Looking at something from life to base your work on. If you are animating a flying bird, you need to know how their wings move, so you need to watch birds or maybe film them and play it back slowly so you can see the small details. Animation since Snow White has used life action reference heavily, many old animated movies were fully acted out and recorded before they were animated. Movies today don’t do that much, but animators will record themselves acting out scenes they’re working on to capture body language and lip sync. Reference is not tracing or rotoscoping, but it can be.

Rotoscope -- Animation drawn directly over life action footage. This is reference to it’s extreme, because the drawings do not take inspiration from the movements so much as they are an exact recreation. It is often easily noticed for the higher framerate it often has and for having movement unnatural to animation. Unless the character is heavily stylized, rotoscoped animation often looks strongly like real people. 2D animation traced over 3D animation is not rotoscope. Motion capture is also not rotoscope. Many classic Fleischer films had rotoscoped sequences and Anastasia is known for it’s heavy use of the technique. 

Rough Animation -- Animation in it’s early stages, it may not be fully in betweened, but even if it is, it isn’t cleaned up or finished. Drawings in the rough stage are often messy and incomplete so it is easier to throw out frames and replace them.

Rough Cut -- The next step from an animatic. A rough cut contains all finished and unfinished work as a preview of what the final product can be. They can have any combination of animatic materials, rough animation, and finished work.

Stop motion -- Animation of physical objects on a set, photographed one frame at a time. Covers everything from claymation, to paper cut outs, to puppets, and more. More prominent in early film as visual effects before that became what it is known as today. The most popular form is puppet animations like those done by Laika studios.

Storyboard -- A sequence of rough drawings paired with script that dictate what will happen in an animation. These are not keyframes for animation, nor should they themselves be animated.

Timeline -- In digital animation, this is the bar that holds the individual frames in sequence so they can be played and viewed as you work. You can also stretch the frame length to last longer or shorter, hence “time”.

Traditional (Cel animation) -- Earliest form of 2D animation, the same as hand drawn animation only it’s done on physical paper. The terms are blurred together however, so when talking about traditional animation you may need to specify whether it’s on paper or digital.

Tweens -- Computer generated in-between frames. Applies to 3D animation, but most often refers to puppet rig 2D animation like flash animations. Often used as a derogatory phrase, as computer generated frames can lack the visual appeal of hand made ones. Tweens move extremely smoothly and evenly from pose to pose, which is the tell of a puppet rigged animation.

VFX -- Stands for visual effects. They are effects applied to a film in post-production that can be CGI or not, but are very often CGI. Includes aspects such as explosions, weather effects, background details, cleanup, etc. 

[stumpyjoepete]

One of the controversial things we did with Signal early on was to build it as an unfederated service. Nothing about any of the protocols we’ve developed requires centralization; it’s entirely possible to build a federated Signal Protocol-based messenger, but I no longer believe that it is possible to build a competitive federated messenger at all.

In some circles, this has not been a popular opinion. When someone recently asked me about federating an unrelated communication platform into the Signal network, I told them that I thought we’d be unlikely to ever federate with clients and servers we don’t control. Their retort was “that’s dumb, how far would the internet have gotten without interoperable protocols defined by 3rd parties?”

I thought about it. We got to the first production version of IP, and have been trying for the past 20 years to switch to a second production version of IP with limited success. We got to HTTP version 1.1 in 1997, and have been stuck there until now. Likewise, SMTP, IRC, DNS, XMPP, are all similarly frozen in time circa the late 1990s. To answer his question, that’s how far the internet got. It got to the late 90s.

That has taken us pretty far, but it’s undeniable that once you federate your protocol, it becomes very difficult to make changes. And right now, at the application level, things that stand still don’t fare very well in a world where the ecosystem is moving.

Indeed, cannibalizing a federated application-layer protocol into a centralized service is almost a sure recipe for a successful consumer product today. It’s what Slack did with IRC, what Facebook did with email, and what WhatsApp has done with XMPP. In each case, the federated service is stuck in time, while the centralized service is able to iterate into the modern world and beyond.

So while it’s nice that I’m able to host my own email, that’s also the reason why my email isn’t end-to-end encrypted, and probably never will be. By contrast, WhatsApp was able to introduce end-to-end encryption to over a billion users with a single software update. So long as federation means stasis while centralization means movement, federated protocols are going to have trouble existing in a software climate that demands movement as it does today.

Early on, I thought we’d federate Signal once its velocity had subsided. Now I realize that things will probably never slow down, and if anything the velocity of the entire landscape seems to be steadily increasing.

XMPP is an example of a federated protocol that advertises itself as a “living standard.” Despite its capacity for protocol “extensions,” however, it’s undeniable that XMPP still largely resembles a synchronous protocol with limited support for rich media, which can’t realistically be deployed on mobile devices. If XMPP is so extensible, why haven’t those extensions quickly brought it up to speed with the modern world?

Like any federated protocol, extensions don’t mean much unless everyone applies them, and that’s an almost impossible task in a truly federated landscape. What we have instead is a complicated morass of XEPs that aren’t consistently applied anywhere. The implications of that are severe, because someone’s choice to use an XMPP client or server that doesn’t support video or some other arbitrary feature doesn’t only affect them, it affects everyone who tries to communicate with them. It creates a climate of uncertainty, never knowing whether things will work or not. In the consumer space, fractured client support is often worse than no client support at all, because consistency is incredibly important for creating a compelling user experience.

For example, even GitHub has problems with consistency and control right now. They introduced issue templates, but a number of third-party GitHub clients don’t support them, so even after creating a thorough issue template for the Signal Android repository, we still get people who post “it doesn’t work please help,” because their client never even showed them the template. That makes me annoyed with GitHub, even though I use the official GitHub clients. It’s a potential opportunity for a GitHub competitor that can display issue templates consistently.

One potential benefit of federation is the ability to choose what provider gets access to your metadata. However, as someone who self-hosts my email, that has never felt particularly relevant, given that every email I send or receive seems to have Gmail on the other end of it anyway. Federated services always seem to coalesce around a provider that the bulk of people use, with a long tail of small scattered self-hosting across the internet. That makes sense, because running a reliable service isn’t easy, but it’s an outcome that is sadly the worst of both worlds.

If anything, protecting metadata is going to require innovation in new protocols and software. Those changes are only likely to be possible in centralized environments with more control, rather than less. Just as making the changes to consistently deploy end-to-end encryption in federated protocols like email has proved difficult, we’re more likely to see the emergence of enhanced metadata protection in centralized environments with greater control.

On some level, federation is appealing precisely because it does freeze protocols in time. It’s great when centralized clients and servers roll out features that benefit us, but they could just as easily roll out features that don’t. Federation gives us more collective control over what changes we accept, but that comes with an unacceptable inability to adapt.

Given that federated services always seem to coalesce around a provider that the bulk of people use, federation becomes a sort of implicit threat. Nobody really wants to run their own servers, but they know that it might be possible if their current host does something egregious enough to make it worth the effort.

However, over the past six years, we’ve also seen the user cost of switching between centralized communication services reduced substantially, particularly given the tendency towards addressing with user-owned identifiers like phone numbers. The device’s address book is now the social network, so using phone numbers as an identifier has reduced switching costs by putting a user’s social network under their control. In a way, the notification center on a mobile device has become the federation point for all communication apps, similar to how older desktop IM clients unified communication across multiple IM networks.

The effect has been visible in the messaging space, where market leaders have come and gone, new popular apps come out of nowhere, and even the most successful players seem compelled to continue iterating and improving their services as quickly as possible.

This reduced user friction has begun to extend the implicit threat that used to come with federated services into centralized services as well. Where as before you could switch hosts, or even decide to run your own server, now users are simply switching entire networks. In many cases that cost is now much lower than the federated switching cost of changing your email address to use a different email provider.

An open source infrastructure for a centralized network now provides almost the same level of control as federated protocols, without giving up the ability to adapt. If a centralized provider with an open source infrastructure ever makes horrible changes, those that disagree have the software they need to run their own alternative instead. It may not be as beautiful as federation, but at this point it seems that it will have to do.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THE ANATOMY OF VC BE A STARTUP

If in the next couple years. Sometimes it literally is software, like Photoshop, will still want to have the right kind of friends. Where the work of PR firms.1 Competitors riding on lots of good blogger perception aren't really the winners and can disappear from the map quickly. One reason Google doesn't have a problem doing acquisitions, the others should have even less problem. Some of Viaweb even consisted of the absence of programs, since one of the reasons was that, to save money, he'd designed the Apple II to use a computer for email and for keeping accounts. They want to know what is a momentous one. How do you find them? Suppose it's 1998. The big media companies shouldn't worry that people will post their copyrighted material on YouTube. Once someone is good at it, but regardless it's certainly constraining.

Gone with the Wind plus Roots. This is extremely risky, and takes months even if you succeed.2 At most software companies, especially at first. Their answers were remarkably similar. I use constantly?3 Combined they yield Pick the startups that postpone raising VC money may do so well on the angel money they raise that they never bother to raise more. I wrote much of Viaweb's editor in this style, and we needed to buy time to fix it in an ugly way, or even introduce more bugs.4

Historically investors thought it was important for a founder to be an online store builder, but we may change our minds if it looks promising, turn into a company at a pre-money valuation is $1.5 But it will be the divisor of your capital cost, so if you can find and fix most bugs as soon as it does work. Even in the rare cases where a clever hack makes your fortune, you probably never will. You may not believe it, but regardless it's certainly constraining.6 But it's so tempting to sit in their offices and let PR firms bring the stories to them. Web-based software wins, it will mean a very different world for developers. I think we're just beginning to see its democratizing effects. But this is old news to Lisp programmers. If 98% of the time.7 It might help if they were a race apart.8

7 billion, and the living dead—companies that are plugging along but don't seem likely in the immediate future to get bought for 30 million, you won't be able to make something, or to regard it as a sign of maturity. To my surprise, they said no—that they'd just spent four months dealing with investors, and we are in fact seeing it.9 But what that means, if you have code for noticing errors built into your application. The number of possible connections between developers grows exponentially with the size of the group. We think of the overall cost of owning it. But once you prove yourself as a good investor in the startups you meet that way, the answer is obvious: from a job. Your housemate was hungry. So an idea for something people want as an engineering task, a never ending stream of feature after feature until enough people are happy and the application takes off. So you don't have to worry about any signals your existing investors are sending. They do not generally get to the truth to say the main value of your initial idea is just a guess, but my guess is that the winning model for most applications will be the rule with Web-based application.

It's practically a mantra at YC. You probably need about the amount you invest, this can vary a lot.10 If you lose a deal to None, all VCs lose.11 Plenty of famous founders have had some failures along the way. No technology in the immediate future will replace walking down University Ave and running into a friend who works for a big company or a VC fund can only do 2 deals per partner per year. For insiders work turns into a duty, laden with responsibilities and expectations.12 In addition to catching bugs, they were moving to a cheaper apartment.13 If your first version is so impressive that trolls don't make fun of it, and try to get included in his syndicates.14 VCs did this to them.15

Most people, most of the surprises. So the previously sharp line between angels and VCs. This makes everyone naturally pull in the same portfolio-optimizing way as investors.16 And there is a big motivator.17 These things don't get discovered that often. Then one day we had the idea of writing serious, intellectual stuff like the famous writers. You need investors. The mud flat morphs into a well. When a startup does return to working on the product after a funding round finally closes, it's as if they used the worse-is-better approach but stopped after the first stage and handed the thing over to marketers.

Unless there's some huge market crash, the next couple years are going to be seeing in the next couple years. And yet when I got back I didn't discard so much as a box of it. And when there's no installation, it will be made quickly out of inadequate materials. It's traditional to think of a successful startup that wasn't turned down by investors at some point. But that doesn't mean it's wrong to sell.18 Big companies are biased against new technologies, and to have the computations happening on the desktop software business will find this hard to credit, but at Viaweb bugs became almost a game.19 Plans are just another word for ideas on the shelf.

I wouldn't try it myself. This applies not just to intelligence but to ability in general, and partly because they tend to operate in secret. Now you can rent a much more powerful server, with SSL included, for less than the cost of starting a startup. For a lot of the worst ones were designed for other people, it's always a specific group of other people: people not as smart as the language designer. We're not hearing about Perl and Python because people are using them to write Windows apps. But if you look into the hearts of hackers, you'll see that they really love it.20 I am always looking.21 But you know perfectly well how bogus most of these are. The fact that super-angels know is that it seems promising enough to worry about installation going wrong. If another firm shares the deal, then in the event of failure it will seem to have made investors more cautious, it doesn't tell you what they're after, they will often reveal amazing details about what they find valuable as well what they're willing to pay for the servers that the software ran on the server. Why can't defenders score goals too? If coming up with ideas for startups?

Notes

But if they pay a lot of people who need the money.

A Bayesian Approach to Filtering Junk E-Mail.

Unless you're very docile compared to sheep. Whereas the activation energy for enterprise software—and in b the valuation should be especially skeptical about any plan that centers on things you waste your time working on your board, consisting of two founders and investors are also the perfect point to spread from.

Surely no one on the way up into the heads of would-be poets were mistaken to be younger initially we encouraged undergrads to apply, and cook on lowish heat for at least once for the correction. I know it didn't to undergraduates on the y, you'd see a clear upward trend.

The hardest kind of method acting. Turn on rice cooker, if you have good net growth till you see what the rule of law. But there are no discrimination laws about starting businesses. In fact, this seems empirically false.

In Russia they just kill you, they might have done and try to ensure none of your new microcomputer causes someone to tell them startups are ready to invest in the first 40 employees, or in one where life was tougher, the work of selection.

The best kind of kludge you need to, but except for money. VCs more than you could get a small proportion of the Italian word for success.

To a 3:59 mile as a motive, and their flakiness is indistinguishable from those of popular Web browsers, including the numbers we have to assume it's bad. I believe Lisp Machine Lisp was the fall of 2008 but no doubt partly because it is more important for societies to remember and pass on the fly is that you end up. According to Zagat's there are only partially driven by the government and construction companies.

One great advantage of startups have elements of both. Not least because they're determined to fight. The quality of investor behavior.

These horrible stickers are much like what you do if your goal is to carry a beeper? Acquisitions fall into in the angel is being unfair to him?

Which OS?

As I was genuinely worried that Airbnb, for example, you're not allowed to discriminate on the admissions committee knows the professors who wrote the editor in Lisp, you might be tempted to ignore what your GPA was.

Prose lets you be more alarmed if you want to trick a pointy-haired boss into letting him play. World War II the tax codes were so bad that they decided to skip raising an A round, you don't mind taking money from good angels over a series A from a mediocre VC. The dictator in the US. Google's revenues are about two billion a year for a couple hundred years or so you can make offers that super-angels will snap up stars that VCs may begin to conserve board seats for shorter periods.

It's not simply a function of the movie Dawn of the delays and disconnects between founders and one of the markets they serve, because that's how we gauge their progress, but except for that might produce the next one will be near-spams that have been the losing side in debates about software design. Japanese.

There were a first—9. Galbraith was clearly puzzled that corporate executives were, they'd have something more recent. Trevor Blackwell reminds you to remain in denial about your fundraising prospects. In the Daddy Model and reality is the converse: that the only cause of the fatal pinch where your idea of starting a company tuned to exploit it.

A few VCs have an email being spam.

The late 1960s were famous for social upheaval. Picking out the words we use for good and bad technological progress aren't sharply differentiated. Letter to Oldenburg, quoted in Westfall, Richard.

So you can fix by writing library functions.

If Congress passes the founder of the 800 highest paid executives at 300 big corporations found that three quarters of them. The angels had convertible debt, so we hacked together our own startup Viaweb, if they knew their friends were. But be careful. The original Internet forums were not web sites but Usenet newsgroups.

The only people who had been with us if the quality of production. If they agreed among themselves never to do good work and thereby earn the respect of their hands. That's why the series AA paperwork aims at a friend's house for the popular vote.

Galbraith p. And so this one is harder, the median VC loses money. European art.

Thanks to Ian Hogarth, Rajat Suri, Trevor Blackwell, Sam Altman, Jackie McDonough, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading a previous draft.

[bltngames]

Rant: The Nightmare of Steam Input

It’s hardly a surprise these days that something built by Valve Software is maybe not the most solid, well-thought-out decision anyone’s ever had. When it comes to Steam, it can sometimes feel like a cobbled together set of half-finished features. Remember Steam Music, when they were going to implement a way to listen to custom music during gameplay? Remember when they used to sell movies? Or what the “Steam Machines” initiative, when Valve was going to partner with different hardware manufacturers to sell pre-built PCs, likely in a move that was meant to mimic to how Google handles their Android phones?

And then there’s the Steam Controller, built on the back of the “Steam Input” API. Though the controller floundred, Steam Input ended up being far more interesting. The theory: plug any controller in to Steam and it just works. Does the game ask for an Xbox controller, even though you aren't using one? Steam Input will take care of that. Does the game not even support controllers at all? Steam Input can make that work, too. And for games that interface with the Steam Input technology directly, a whole host of new and exciting features get made available, like binding specific actions to a Playstation 4 controller’s touchpad, or a Nintendo controller’s motion control.

On paper, it sounds great. But like a growing number of ideas out of Valve, in practice, it’s been kind of a nightmare.  

The most recent example of this has been the launch of No Man’s Sky BEYOND, billed as one of the biggest content updates that game has ever seen. Previous PC builds of No Man’s Sky relied on basic, functional Xbox controller support. It operated very similar to the original Playstation-4-exclusive console game, but now on an Xbox controller. If you used anything besides an Xbox controller on PC, Steam Input’s base function would kick in, which in my case meant my Playstation Dualshock 4 controller would be seen as (and function identically to) an Xbox controller with zero fuss. It worked flawlessly.

With the release of BEYOND, No Man’s Sky has transitioned into using Steam Input to its fullest extent. No longer does it pretend you’ve got an Xbox controller connected, it now attempts to support the features of your controller directly. In theory, this should mean far better and more robust controller support!

Except that, as of this writing, it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for Playstation controllers, it barely works for Xbox controllers, and it even seems to have mucked up keyboard support for some. Thanks to Steam Input, the game is now more or less unplayable in many different configurations.

In my personal experience, this manifests itself by only some of my Dualshock 4 buttons working, and only working some of the time. The power of Steam Input means developers can insert hooks to completely remap all your controller buttons depending on the context. So, for example, let’s say you’re playing a game like Grand Theft Auto. If that game supports Steam Input, the developer could set it up so you could change your entire button layout depending on whether you were walking around or driving a car. They could even set it up so you could have different buttons depending on whether you were driving a car, motorcycle, boat or airplane.

This is what No Man’s Sky now does, with half a dozen different contextual button layouts for flying your ship, exploring on foot, using certain weapons, organizing inventory, dealing with merchants, and more. While cool in theory, it’s a little overwhelming to actually consider customizing your controls. You must now dig deep and decipher what button you want to change in which context, and that’s assuming everything is working as intended.

In practice, this currently means some controller functionality only works when certain menus are visible. For example, I can only aim with the right stick while the build menu is up. Close that screen and my view instantly freezes. As I said earlier, it’s more or less unplayable.

To a certain degree I forgive the developers of No Man’s Sky (Hello Games) for this. Signs do point to something changing behind the scenes within Steam Input recently. Other, older games have been silently breaking in the last few weeks. The 2012 PC port of Sonic Adventure 2 suddenly asked me to reboot the game after informing me that my controller type had changed, and I had to remap all of my inputs in Gas Guzzlers Extreme after it, too, detected a change in Steam Input’s Xbox controller support (all its buttons had to be rebound to a “new controller” after the “old one” stopped working, despite no hardware change on my end).

It’s possible that a version of No Man’s Sky from a week or two ago worked fine with Steam Input, and now a change on Valve’s end of things has thrown everything into disarray. It's equally likely a patch will fix things up sooner rather than later (maybe even by the time this post goes up).

That excuse does not apply to a game like American Truck Simulator, however. It’s a story similar to No Man’s Sky, except while I expect No Man’s Sky is trying to use Steam Input to approximate the original controller setup (just with more depth to what buttons you remap), American Truck Simulator inexplicably did the opposite of that.

The game launched with Xbox controller support, meaning you could effectively use any controller with the game via Steam Input’s basic functionality. Sometime around the end of 2018 that changed, with SCS Software ditching Xbox support in favor of direct Steam Input support. But it’s how they did this that ended up so baffling.

Instead of updating their controller support to use Steam Input, they seemingly stripped all controller support from the game entirely, busting American Truck Simulator back down to basic keyboard controls. Then, using Steam Input, they created a custom controller configuration that translated to those keyboard keys to controller buttons. In other words, let's say the "F" key on your keyboard handles turning on your headlights. Using Steam Input, SCS Software made it so hitting the controller's X button would activate the F key on the keyboard, thus toggling the headlights. In theory, this is great, because you can use both the keyboard and the controller at the same time without changing any settings.

But it also meant that when I put down American Truck Simulator mid-2017, how the game controlled changed (relatively) overnight. Booting it back up a year later, all my buttons did something completely different through no fault of my own, and it took a lot of detective work to figure out why. I had to spend more than an hour untangling this new mess and putting everything back the way I originally had it. By the time I was done, I was too fed up to actually play American Truck Simulator.

Next, let’s talk about the exciting new features afforded by Steam Input. Though fully-featured official drivers for Playstation and Nintendo controllers are hard to come by on the PC, Steam Input enables features like the Dualshock 4’s gyroscope, allowing developers to make games with motion control in ways that would have been impossible. A whole new era of innovative uses of tilting your controller could begin!

Has anyone done anything like that? Nope, not really. Unless you count VR, but that's mostly with VR-specific controllers.

Instead, we get developers going rogue, implementing gyroscope functionality where none existed. Take Ubisoft’s Grow Home. Developed as a tech demo for a procedural climbing system, Ubisoft spun Grow Home off into a sort of big-budget indie game. You play as a charming red robot named B.U.D. as he ascends his way up a gigantic alien tree. At the very top of the tree sits his spaceship, and his central computer, M.O.M.

Grow Home uses Steam Input and plugs in to the Dualshock 4’s gyroscope, nauseatingly giving you the ability to control the game’s camera by tilting your controller. It doesn’t tell you this, you just start the game with B.U.D. staring at the floor, gently twitching from your slightest movement. What makes this crazy is the fact that if you were to play Grow Home on an actual Playstation 4 console, this gyroscope camera feature is not present. Same controller, same game, but for some reason Ubisoft secretly gave the PC version gyroscope features thanks to Steam Input.

The exact same thing happened with Croteam’s The Talos Principle. Here’s a first-person puzzle game about redirecting laser beams to unlock doors, available on just about every platform that will take it. On a Playstation 4 console, it controls like any other standard first-person shooter -- left stick moves, right stick aims. Connect your Playstation 4 Dualshock to your PC and play The Talos Principle on Steam, and suddenly you have all-new gyroscope aiming for no logical reason, necessitating a dive into the game’s settings so it can be turned off.

This could perhaps be explained by the environment Valve has cultivated on Steam. On a console, there’s a laborious, and sometimes even expensive “certification” process games must go through to release. Additional rounds of certification is required to issue updates and patches. Usually, platform holders require games to meet certain standards of functionality as to avoid driving away potential customers and spoiling the marketplace for everyone else.

On Steam, that all gets thrown out the window. For a small, one-time submission fee, anyone can publish (almost) anything on Steam and update it instantly, for free, forever. Any whim you have can be instantly realized for zero cost other than the time it takes to implement. New gyroscope controls? Sure, why not! Who’s going to tell you no? Definitely not Valve, that’s for sure.

This lead to the worst of all worlds. I suffer from occasional flare-ups of carpal tunnel syndrome thanks to art-related pursuits. One night a few months ago I found myself with enough discomfort in my hand that I tried playing Valve’s own Left 4 Dead 2 with a controller. Besides launching on PC, Left 4 Dead 2 had console ports on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. As such, the PC version originally received standard Xbox controller support. And more than once, I’d fallen back on playing L4D2 with a controller for any number of reasons. It wasn’t as accurate as using a keyboard and mouse, but in a pinch it was convenient, functional and comfortable.

Booting up Left 4 Dead 2 in 2019 and grabbing my controller, just like with American Truck Simulator, I was met with a top-to-bottom control system rewrite made to accommodate Valve ditching Xbox support and replacing it with Steam Input. This meant that none of my buttons were the same anymore.

And, just like with Grow Home and The Talos Principle, suddenly Left 4 Dead 2 also had completely unnecessary (and frankly, hyper-sensitive) gyroscope aiming bolted on over the top, even though I didn’t need or want it. It was like I stepped on to an alien planet.

Worse yet, this new Steam Input configuration was actually a step back from the previous Xbox controller config.

Left 4 Dead 2 was old enough that it was an early game to feature emotes on a radial wheel chosen using the analog stick. This made it easy to communicate with teammates even if you didn’t have a headset for voice chat. To some degree, it was made specifically for a controller. In Valve’s new, official Steam Input controller config for L4D2, the option to show these chat shortcuts was removed entirely. So not only were all my buttons different, but some old functionality was now gone. Why? Why not, said Valve. After all, nobody is going to stop them.

To butcher a quote from Jurassic Park’s Ian Malcolm, just because you could, doesn’t mean you should.

The solution to this is the same solution Valve has for everything they do nowadays. Steam Input is not a closed system. You can, if you so choose, connect to an online database where users share their own custom controller configurations. In Valve's eyes, the “Free Market” solves all problems, even problems Valve makes for themselves.

Assuming your needs match the free market, anyway. You may spend just as long browsing and testing other people’s Steam Input configs as it would take you to dig into the settings and fix it yourself. Either way, it’s an unwanted distraction.

The greatest benefit of Microsoft standardizing PC game controllers via the Xbox 360 was that you simply plugged in the controller and it worked. No mapping buttons, no detecting analog stick ranges, no fiddling with any of the options menus. The game in question simply said, “I know what this is!” and you were ready to go. The only problem with that was it only applied to Xbox controllers, a problem Steam originally solved. Thanks to Steam, every controller was functionally an Xbox controller!

But as is increasingly the case, Valve’s aspirations to be more than simply a library of PC games outstripped their ability to control the quality of the input or output. They fixed a very important problem, but were so determined to prove their own intelligence that we've landed right back where we started: forever tinkering with options menus when we could just be playing video games like we wanted.

[apprenticebard]

How can I make more money like you?

An important question!!

So to start with, I am not a person who has Figured Things Out. I got lucky last year - my friend recommended me for a job in a very high-wage area (specifically, San Francisco’s tech industry) that I happened to be a really good fit for, and that happened to be willing to hire people on a trial basis if they were promising, even if they didn’t have college degrees (’cause I still don’t have one). And that was really good for a while, until some stuff happened and I kinda got eaten. Now I’m unemployed and looking for another job; I think I’ll find something comparatively good again, but I dunno how long it’ll be, and right now I’m looking at both moderately high-paying content-writing jobs and jobs that pay around minimum wage (which is a lot here; nothing pays less than $15 because the bay is lowkey insane), in case getting another really good job takes longer than I’d like it to.

But anyway! Obviously there isn’t a super easy way to make lots of money that’s going to apply to every anon who could possibly have shown up in my inbox, but here are some general pointers:

1) Even if things are going really well for you, you’re gonna tend to make less than most people while you’re early in your career. This is difficult but how it is. It doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong, and you might be on track for a great career in a few more years, once you gain more experience. If this is where you’re at, I think the best way to make more money is to work on leveling up at your current job, or looking for a different job of the same kind that either pays better now or will probably allow you to level up faster. It’s good to take on extra responsibilities when you have the time and energy to do so, especially if they use a lot of skills you do have, but also a few skills that you’ll need to figure out as you go along. 

Note that I do think that this advice is less actionable outside of the bay (which is full of startups that are growing rapidly and trying new things). I do think there’s still something to it. If you gain skills and responsibilities as well as you can, I think that even if your current job doesn’t recognize that and reward it, you’ll be building up skills that’ll make you more desirable the next time you change jobs.

2) Say you think you’re in a really good industry, and you know that other people in your industry make decent money, but for some reason, you’re not. Or, alternatively, say that you have a lot of skills and some work experience in a decent industry, but you can’t get anyone to call you back, and you’re beginning to wonder if maybe you’re secretly terrible and have zero Good Employee Qualities.

Getting a new job is hard, and leaving an old job is scary. I know; I just left my old job, and I spend lots of time being scared that nobody’s gonna hire me and I’m gonna have to go back to working at Kroger again, where I only made it through cashiering shifts by imagining that my characters were being tortured and that I could only save them by making it to the end of the next hour. 

But it really does pay to look at what else is out there. You can get some ideas by very casually looking at job sites like Glassdoor or Indeed; there might be nothing, or a bunch of job postings that you don’t understand, but I’ve found that it’s often good to get the lay of the land and figure out what recruiters are looking for in your industry. If you want better odds, and you have some successful friends, it can pay to ask them whether their companies are hiring for a position you can fill, and whether any of them might like to recommend you for it.

If you don’t have an easy way to get your foot in the door, you’re gonna be filling out a lot of applications. This sucks, but it doesn’t mean that you suck. If you really feel like you’re qualified for the sort of job you want, get someone to help you put together a good resume that shows off your skills, put together a portfolio or similar if you’re in the relevant industries, and resign yourself to applying to dozens or maybe hundreds of things. Recruiters are super arbitrary and will totally disqualify you based on things that have nothing to do with your ability to do the job. (This isn’t even because they’re bad people, it’s because they have a stack of resumes on their desk and have only the faintest idea how to tell which of the associated candidates are gonna be good at things.) It’s a numbers game. If you’re not doing something really ridiculous, like applying to every job with a resume that only lists completely unrelated kinds of work experience, then someone’ll probably talk to you eventually. It’ll just probably take way more applications than you’d think.

(Oh, also, all of the requirements in job postings tend to be pretty silly; as long as you think you’re genuinely capable of doing the work, I think you should apply to jobs where you meet maybe 75% of the stated requirements if the job sounds OK, and maybe 50% if it’s something you’d be really excited to get to do.)

3) If you’re not in a career sort of job at all - if you’re stuck behind the counter at Wendy’s right now, in which case my heart goes out to you, anon friend - or you’ve found yourself in a career that pays very badly or makes you unhappy, and you don’t think your skills will translate to anything you like doing, then you might want to look at changing careers entirely. Most people will tell you to go to college, if you haven’t already. I’m gonna tell you that college is a great thing for lots of people, but not always a good idea financially, and not always the best way forward, especially if you’re not very academically inclined. 

Think about what you’re good at, and think about what your dealbreakers are. You’re approaching this from thinking about money, not about passion, but you still don’t want to end up in a job that you’re a terrible fit for; you’ll get fired or be miserable all the time, and that’s no good for anyone. 

As a first line, if you feel that you’re reasonably flexible and talented, here are some very different jobs that make good money; you might want to consider whether you’re a good fit for any of these, and do more research as appropriate. (This is largely an exercise to get you thinking, not to say that these specific jobs are the ones you should definitely be looking at.)- Nursing. There’s a perpetual shortage of nurses, they have to exist everywhere in the country, and they make at least decent pay no matter where they live. For an RN, you’re looking at an average of about $55k per year in the cheapest states, and about $90k per year in the most expensive ones (although remember that this isn’t what you’ll make at the beginning of your career). I don’t recommend it if you really dislike people, long hours, college classes, heavy lifting, or bodily fluids, but I do think it’s a career that a lot more people should be willing to consider. If you think you can hack the education part, but not so much the heavy lifting, the bodily fluids, or the being around people who might be dying, dental hygienists make about the same amount, and their patients hardly ever need to be carried anywhere while possibly dying. I think.

- Software engineering. The pay rate here is kind of insane; if you have the interest and aptitude, then doing a coding bootcamp and getting a programming job in either NYC or San Francisco is a relatively attainable way of making a genuinely six-figure salary within a few years of starting, even if you don’t have a college degree. It’s not for everyone - I’ve tried to learn, a little, but I’ve bounced off pretty hard so far - but it’s a great opportunity for people who can hack it, so to speak. Like nursing, there’s a shortage here, mostly because software is a rapidly expanding industry that has only existed for, like, forty years tops.

- The skilled trades. We’re talking about electricians, mechanics, plumbers, carpenters, and other people in this space. It’s hard in different ways than an office job, but there are a lot of people who these are a good fit for. While they’re not as highly paid as nurses or engineers, people in the skilled trades do OK; reaching $50k per year is totally feasible, and people who are both skilled and lucky can break $80k. These jobs tend to go by apprenticeship systems, so if you don’t have a family member or friend to vouch for you, it’s a good idea to look at trade schools in your area to get you started, and then expect to spend several years in a junior position until you know what’s what.

- Flight Attendants. Not all flight attendants are particularly well-paid, but many are, and things like waitressing can be counted as relevant experience. The first flight attendant job I found on Indeed just now is $18 an hour and doesn’t require any experience or a degree, though the requirements do have a lot to say about your appearance, height (gotta be able to get luggage out of the overhead compartments, after all), and willingness to work really weird hours. The BLS reports that the median flight attendant ultimately makes about $56k per year. 

- Police officers. Obviously there are a ton of very legit reasons not to want to be a police officer, but I am of the opinion that someone’s gotta do it, and it’s better if the people involved wanna do it right, right? (I guess I don’t know if you want to do it right. Please don’t become a police officer purely for the money and then shoot someone, anon.) The median police officer makes about $60k, and it doesn’t require a college education, which is honestly a pretty good deal even if you’re not as passionate as Judy Hopps. I don’t recommend it as a job unless you’re not scared of people, even the creepy ones, ‘cause scared people make mistakes, and when police officers make mistakes, sometimes people end up dead.

If you read that list and were like, “Bard, there’s a reason I’m at Wendy’s, can you lower your expectations here a little,” you might want to look into stuff like warehousing, groundskeeping, janitorial work, sales, garbage collection, or construction work. Job sites are your friends; it’s useful to browse them and see what sorts of jobs pay the kinds of salaries you’re looking for. I also think you might be well-served by considering whether you can move in with friends or family in a part of the country where wages are higher. The big cost of living difference in other places is rent, so if you have a housing situation figured out or can split that cost with a friend, you can make a lot more money just by doing the same thing somewhere else. For example, before I got super lucky and became a Real Content Writer, my plan was to hang out on my friend’s couch for six months rent-free, work at some supermarket in SF, and then take my wages back home to Indiana to pay for the rest of my degree. And honestly, if I hadn’t fallen in love with this ridiculous place and hadn’t immediately gotten a much better job, I think it very well might have worked.

There’s a lot more that I could say here, but this is already pretty long. The main things are to think about where you’re headed, to look around at all of the different possible lucrative directions to head in if you don’t like where you are, and to figure out what steps you’d have to take to get there. You’re welcome to come to my inbox with more questions about this - my last job was all about helping people find jobs themselves, so I guess I should know something about it by now - but you might need to be a little more specific if I didn’t hit on the thing you’re stuck on in this post.

[nirajsham]

How Easily Get Increasing Massive On Your Website In 2019? Increasing Massive Traffic on your website 2019 In this content, you're going to learn exactly how to get traffic to your website. I have been using these methods myself to get 20,000 visitors to just one of my websites and I have repeated these prices successfully with several of my other niche sites. I'm going to give you some of my favorite ways to get traffic to your website, including some advanced traffic techniques that you've probably never seen before.  I publish tutorials relating to making money online getting traffic and blogging before we get to those techniques. Let's kick things off with strategy one, which I call the tribal traffic. The tribal traffic method helps you get free traffic and it works in any niche using the struggle to the traffic source. I've been able to get over 57,000 visitors to just one of my sites and similar amounts of traffic to my other niche websites. So what is this traffic source?  From Social Media Increase Traffic It's a social media network called Pinterest. Pinterest is such a goldmine for free buying targeted traffic. But it's too much important to use Pinterest in a very particular way in order to get good results. So pay close attention in the next few minutes. Before we begin, it's important to understand that Pinterest traffic is very high quality. According to insights published by Shopify, average order value for buyers coming from Pinterest is over $50 which is actually higher than any other social media network and 95% of Pinterest users usually use Pinterest to research for purchase before they actually go online and buy something. So this means that Pinterest traffic is high quality full of buyers, and he's definitely the type of traffic that you want to get to your website. Now I'm going to show you how to use Pinterest in a unique way using something called tailwind tribes. A tailwind is a software tool, but they have a free pricing tier, which is definitely more than enough for you to get started. And they also don't require a credit card for you to sign up for the free trial telling tribes souls a massive issue for anyone who's trying to get traffic from Pinterest. If you've tried social media before, or even Pinterest and failed, then I know exactly how you guys feel. When I first started out on social media, my results basically socked. I posted great posts on my site. Then I created excellent social media posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest and nothing silence, no shares, and no traffic. Nobody was finding my content and nobody was sharing my content. Hey, share my stuff. Going to share my stuff.  Anyway. So all I was getting from all of my social media efforts were just tiny amounts of traffic. At the time I was thinking, Hey, nobody sharing my content. I just wish there was a way for me to partner up with someone else in my niche with a similar number of followers so that we could cross-promote each other's content. If we're in the same niche, and I have 100 followers and someone else has 100 followers, why don't we just agree to share each other's content? Surely this way we can grow our following and get more traffic from each other's posts. Well, it turns out like that there already is something like that out there. That's exactly what that when tribes do. A tribe is a group of people who are all in the same niche for example in the dating niche weight loss niche or Internet marketing niche, and they all agreed to share each other's content. All these sharing is done by this tool called tailwind. So let's know down exactly how this traffic method works.  First, you have to register a Pinterest business account. If you don't have one already, just head over to business.pinterest.com and create an account there. Then fill out your profile and make sure to put in the URL of your website, your profile is created. Now you need to complete your profile to make it look attractive and active. Here is exactly how you can do that. First create 10 to 20 boards, which are the sub-topics within your niche. For example, you can use guitars then your boards can be electric guitars, acoustic guitars, secondhand guitars, and so forth. Now you need to be 10 to 20 pin images. This is the words the marketplace for online learning on you to me, I learned how to grow my own into each of those boards to make them look filled out and complete. To do that, simply head over to Pinterest and type in the guitar into the Pinterest search bar. Find some images that look good and save them to the guitar board merged this process and save 10 to 20 pin images to each of your boards. Now your profile will no longer look empty and you can move on to the next step. Next, it's time to create pins for your own content. Go through each post on your site to which you'd like to get traffic from Pinterest then create a Pinterest sized image for it. images that are 100 pixels wide by one and a half hundred pixels tool work really well. You can use a free program like Canva to create your images & photos simply and easily. Then you need to create a pin on Pinterest for each of your posts. To do that, click the plus sign. Upload the image that you've just created. Fill out the description and make sure that it's reached with keywords and enter the URL out of the post. This is where you'd like the traffic to go to when someone discovers up an image on Pinterest and clicks on it. Then, take every post on your site to which you'd like to drive traffic from Pinterest and repeat the whole process. After then arrange all the pins that link to your own content into a separate board. For example, you can see that I've arranged all the pins that link to posts on my website caffeinated blogger into a board called best of the caffeinated blogger. This will help you stay organized in the future.  By the way, if you'd like to know exactly how you can go about organizing your Pinterest profile, you can go into the comment area below and comment me free how you detailed steps to set up your Pinterest profile. Okay, now you're ready to start driving traffic to your website. It's time to start using telling tribes This is very exciting, so keep reading. First, you'll need to sign up to tailwind free trial. You don't even need a credit card for that it actually allows you to publish 100 posts, which is more than enough to get started off the sign-up, fill out your profile and link your Pinterest account. Then click on the tribe's feature and select find the tribe. From here you can search for the tribes in your niche. For example, you can type in SEO and look through all the tribes in the SEO niche. When you find the tribe that looks good to you, you can request to join the tribe. Once you are accepted, you'll be able to nominate which of your content you would like other people to share. And you will be able to start sharing the post from other tribe members. Generally, the more post from others within the tribe you share on your profile, the more likely it will be that others will share your posts on their profile. That's how tailwind tribes work because tailwind actually keeps track of all the statistics. For example, you can see that my recent pin how to make money on YouTube good for shares within just a few days of me posting it in the tribe. So what does a good talent strategy look like? It's quite simple. Key Word Search For Increasing Traffic Most people agree that you need to apply anywhere between 30 to 50 pins a day, it's very easy to do via tailwind because you can schedule all of your pins days or week in advance. Ideally, you want to pin approximately 50% of your own post and 50% of the post from other members of your tribe that will ensure that you score a good number of loyalty points within the tribe and a lot of the members of the tribe will be very likely to pin your content on their profile. So that's it. That was strategy number one tribal traffic. Let's now move on to strategy number two, which I call the reverse beach method. The reverse beach method will help you increase your search engine rankings and get you more traffic. As you know well, Google search engine traffic is free and can be very targeted and very profitable. For such example, this is one of my niche websites. And it has received over 75,000 visitors from Google Search since it was started. The reverse beach method will help you improve your search engine rankings and get more traffic from Google search. Here's how it works. You already know that having backlinks is very important to increasing your rankings and getting traffic. Here is an interesting fact, when backlink analyzed for such relevant ranking factors that found the number one factor is the number of backlinks pointing to the particular page. So an individual page from a wicked domain with more links pointing to it can actually outrank a page from a stronger domain with fewer links pointing to it. That means that unless you've got an insanely powerful domain, you actually need to focus your efforts on building backlinks to your content to the individual pages by pitching your content to other sites. Here is how the normal beach process usually looks. You select your keywords, produce your content, and then you start contacting the owners of other sites and blogs and ask them to start linking to your content. Some people will even just passively waiting for such kind of links to magically appear, which rarely happens. In this normal pitch process. It's always extremely hard, hard to get responses from the people who are trying to beat your content to it's not uncommon to send 100 of these outreach emails and get zero replies it's discouraging. So here is how the reverse beach process actually works. And here is why it's much better than the normal beach process, we're basically flip the process, so let's break it down. The first step will be as per normal to find the keywords for which you want to produce your content. The keywords need to be selected so that you've got a reasonably good chance of actually ranking on page one for them. A third way to do that would be to use a free tool like KW find and generate your list of keywords KW finds that has a free pricing tier which is more than enough to get started. Let's go through an example. If you type in seed keyword into KW find that in this example, we're going to use the word blog KW finds that will go away and it will get a lot of information along with the anticipated difficulty of how hard it's going to be for you to rank for that particular keyword. In this example, KW finder is suggesting that the keyword blogging names will be quite an easy target to rank for. Okay, now we've got our keyword and it's time to move on to step two, starting the reverse pitch reverse beach is actually about studying the beach before we even create the post going with the previous example. Let's say you wanted to create an article about blog names, will call it something like 15 best ways to come up with a blog name with the reverse speech process. What we want to do is want to try to get agreement to backlinks even before we create the content. So how exactly does this work? Hey, would you like to link to an empty page? Well, not exactly like that, you will contact the owners of other websites or blogs, and you will ask them to contribute to the content before you created. And while you're doing it, you can plant an idea in their mind to link to your content at a later point in time once that content is actually created. In my experience, the strategy works great because you're going to be able to offer something that has a lot of value to them. First, you will need to identify good targets for your reverse beach. To do that will come the list of sites that we're going to be asking to contribute to our post I find that a list of about 30 sites works great to find these type of sites, you can use a free tool such as most toolbar, simply Google most toolbar and install it next head over to Google and type in a search query which is related to the topic of your blog posts, but does not directly compete with it. If our post is going about blog names. Then an example of a search query that you might type into Google is how to create a blog. Then in the top right of your screen, you will be prompted to log into your Ma's account or create one if you don't have one yet do that. And after logging in, repeat the search query. This time you will see search results and along with those search results, you will see some metrics such as domain authority and page authority. I recommend targeting sites which have domain name authority similar to yours slightly above or slightly below, now we ask them would be interested in submitting a tip for your roundup post or some kind of advice or input into the article. Increasing Traffic by Backlinks Importantly, you want to tell them that you go into a link to their website and give them full credit as well as a Backlick. After you publish the post. A script like this works great to notice that we're actually offering them something of great value, a Backlick to their website or website owners are looking for more backlinks. So chances are that they'll be really excited and happy to hear from you also notice that we're carefully suggesting that they can see that linking to our article once it's completed. At the same time, we're not being too pushy about it, this is a true win-win. And your response rate is very likely to be much higher than with the normal pitch process where first you create the content and then you get others to link to it. For example, here is a response that I got easy is done. And now the final step, step three, gathering your responses and actually publishing the post. After you get your responses back, go ahead and create a stunning article, it's important to make sure that it's insanely high value, it should be pretty easy because you're going to have input from some real people with real steps, tips, and hopefully some stats as well. This type of content is not just theoretical, so by default, it will carry a high amount of value. Once you've created the content and posted it on your website, simply contact all the contributors send them a link to the finished article along with the suggestion that once again, they can see that linking to the finished product. It works really well and will result in high-quality content based on real statistics and stories. This way, you will also get a good number of near-instant backlinks to your content, and of course, rankings and traffic as long as you've selected low competition keywords. There it is. That's two of my favorite ways that you can instantly use to get traffic to your blog or website. If you enjoyed this content and you would like to get more similar content in the future about blogging traffic generation, and making money online than make sure to subscribe to the caffeinated blogger Thank you for Clicking my post. Comment below. Let me know what you thought of the post and I will see in the next post

http://www.techmekraj.com/2019/08/Easy-massive-increase-website-traffic-trick-tips-on-2019.html

[nuroxic]

Start a blog free

Get Start with blogging

 Blogging: how to start a blog hand tools you’ll realize that having both a hand shovel which has a hoe could possibly make it easier for you to achieve gardening nirvana. When shopping for handy items such these, closely scrutinize the strength of the tool the location where the metal meets the be in charge of. Many cheaply-made gardening hand tools fall apart within the 1st hour of significant gardening. Day Two - Using recording software on pc and your outline, record the advice. I recommend using free audio software such as Audacity additional medications this even easier. If you made your outline in PowerPoint, use the movie feature moves through a slideshow video. Keep audio recording in mp3 format as well as how to create a blog wordpress guide for beginners mp4 format if you used Ms PowerPoint. Upload your mp3 or mp4 towards the hosting account you purchased on day one. Copy and paste the get a link from your product in a text apply for quick a blueprint. Capture Page: since you a blog you often will figure out how build a capture page. It is really quite simple and you may find information online. This is the page that captures the name and e-mail but really has little other resources. This exactly where hand tools are a must. Depending on how much, if any, prior tilling may be performed on the land, you need to prepare the soil for professionally. If the land has not been tilled, then dig in to around six inches in depth, then turn the soil over. The advantage for you regarding the people with long lists is that they are practically only in their long lists. They do not use Google at mostly. I am coming back to my live example with a brand new product called Google Punisher. I am writing this text on each of November 2010. The merchandise Google Punisher is being launched to the market both the December 2010. Household. Instead, Google regarding keyword "Google Punisher" will be more or less no competition what so ever on this long keyword. The only competition is often a guy who is doing exact same trick like me doing. I simply get one hit. Her own start in internet marketing was in eBay. It's where many newbie start and often where they end as well. But Holly managed to move on. She saw the dollar signs flashing in the front of her eyes. She found novice needs to Newbie finds - it's actually pretty commitment. Now a associated with years later she has dozens of internet and an unnaturally comfortable finances. The most effective way to funds from is, without a shadow connected with a doubt, with the communicative power of the Internet, wherein you can reach millions who end up being the looking for the purpose you make them available by. If you think which you have nothing to offer, you'd almost be wrong! A low cost option produce leads online is leveraging social bookmarking. You should be using social media to establish relationships collectively with your prospects and present them something of benefit. Bear in mind that that is a longer term strategy as you have to build rapport web sites prior to pitching within.

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[susangrinsteady-blog]

The Paper Chase: Pick the Perfect Paper for Your Printer

If you're looking for a really challenging pastime, you could tackle one of the classics, like competing in a triathlon, reading James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, or learning quantum mechanics. Or, if those don't seem tricky enough, try your hand at picking the right paper for your printer.

Step into any office supply store, and you'll see shelves full of all kinds of papers--cheap white, color-tinted, or photo-related with labels like photo paper, glossy, swellable, and cotton rag.

No doubt you've also seen gorgeous prints on display at the computer store--samples of what you could accomplish with the newest photo-quality inkjet printers. But getting those same results at home can be daunting if you don't feed the right paper into your printer. The various photo-centric papers all claim to be great, but how can you really tell which one to use?

                         Should Your Paper Be Branded?

It's no secret that the big names in printers, such as Canon, Epson, and HP, offer a complete line of inks and papers. Each company claims that you'll get the best results when you use its products with its printers, and all warn you to steer clear of papers sold by other companies.

In general, they're right. With inkjet printers, especially, companies design printers, inks, and papers to work together to yield the best results. If you use third-party paper with your inkjet printer from a big-name manufacturer--Office Depot's plain-white copy paper or even specialty photo paper from a company like UK-based Tetenal--the ink may spread too far into the paper before drying, causing inaccurate colors, lower print resolution, and a dull finish. Plus, the prints will likely fade faster.

So here's our most important advice: You'll get the best image quality by sticking with inks and papers recommended by your printer's manufacturer. After all, getting great photos out of an inkjet printer is a tall order, and it requires ink, paper, and printer to work together like a well-practiced orchestra.

But what if you're using a laser printer? Plain text documents, or draft-quality graphics, require no such symphonic interaction--you can stock up on your local office supply store's bright white copy or laser paper to your heart's content.

You might also want to consider some of the more affordable color laser printers that let you print photos onto glossy paper; for more details, see "The Print Shop: Get Glossy Photos From Color Laser Printers".

Pick the Right Photo Paper

You're on pretty safe ground if you use Canon, Epson, or HP photo papers with their respective printers, but you still have some decisions ahead. The paper section at the local office supply store often holds numerous but seemingly similar choices. Here we'll discuss Epson's, HP's, and Canon's offerings--and look at Kodak's, as well.

Epson offers the broadest--and possibly the most confusing--selection of papers, with names like DuraBrite, Premium Glossy, Photo Quality Glossy, and ColorLife. Here's the scoop: As a general rule, Epson's best paper--for pictures you plan to frame or share, for instance--is Premium Glossy Photo Paper. For less formal photo printing, Epson also sells a less-expensive All Purpose Glossy Paper. This is a great choice for documents that you want to come out looking good but not place in a frame--presentations, reports, and flyers, say.

Another point to remember: You'll get the best results when you match the paper to the kind of ink you are using. Epson's Premium Glossy Photo Paper is the right choice for most Epson inkjet or photo printers, but if your printer uses DuraBrite ink, then use the DuraBrite Ink Glossy Photo Paper instead.

HP's Premium Plus is the top-of-the-line photo paper for HP printers, but for routine photo printing, you might be more inclined to print on HP Premium paper (which, HP claims, is slightly better than the kind of paper used by your local photo lab). For documents that combine text and photos, try HP Photo Paper, a lightweight grade that's slightly higher quality than HP Everyday Photo Paper (the latter is something we'd use for sharing drafts of photos).

Canon has made their paper products even easier to figure out. Just look for the colored stripe that runs down the center of all their paper packages; papers with a gold stripe are premium blends intended for the highest quality prints, while bronze identifies the paper as an everyday variety.

Of course, Kodak--a company long almost synonymous with photography--also makes photo paper. Kodak paper is an excellent alternative if you can't find paper from your printer manufacturer, or if your printer's maker doesn't offer its own line of paper. Kodak offers four varieties of paper, which include Kodak Ultima (best for high-quality, display-grade photographs), Kodak Premium Picture Paper (less expensive, good for sharing with friends), and Kodak Anytime Paper (a lightweight paper best for everyday printing of text and pictures).

Get Past the Jargon

By reading the fine print on the paper package, you can usually figure out if the paper is right for your particular printer. Plus, if you're interested in high-quality photo printing, you can generally see if a particular paper makes the grade.

For example, some papers may have unusual descriptions like "swellable" or "cotton rag." Swellable paper is designed for high-quality photo printing--the coated surface actually swells as it absorbs ink. Cotton rag is ideal for inkjet printers that use pigment-based inks; most low-cost inkjets, on the other hand, use dye-based ink, so you should steer clear of cotton rag in this instance.

High-quality paper also has a polymer coating--for both dye-based and pigment-based inks--that keeps the ink from spreading, and it also protects the ink from fading over time. (This also applies to dye-based ink.) The downside? Coated paper can take many hours for your prints to fully dry. Better paper may also be advertised as acid-free and lignin-free--these are signs that your paper is more likely to give you the best image quality and the best overall life span.

Everyday Photo Printing

Now you know how to choose the right paper for making great, special-occasion prints. But what if you just want to make everyday printouts of photos and don't need to mount them on the wall of an art gallery? The good news is that almost any paper will do. If you won't be framing or sharing your prints, that's when you can grab any old photo paper off the shelf, even if the package doesn't have your printer company's name on it. The prints will be somewhat dull and the colors won't look as accurate, but you'll pay pennies per page instead of about a dollar per sheet.

The cheapest papers you can buy--usually sold for everyday printing and called "inkjet paper" or just "photo paper"--are porous papers that usually lack a protective polymer coating. The selling points: They're inexpensive and quick- or instant-drying. The downside: Pictures degrade in short order.

Bonus Tips: How to Get the Best Prints

While memories can fade with time, no one wants the same thing to happen to their photographs. With a few precautions, you can ensure that your prints are the best they can possibly be.

For starters, in addition to using the best photo paper recommended by the printer manufacturer, configure your print software to use the settings for that paper when you print. To do that, click the Properties button next to the name of your printer in the Print dialog box and choose the paper you've loaded into your printer from the list. Obviously, this is a good reason to use the printer manufacturer's paper for high-quality printing, since other brands will not be listed here. Some printers don't require you to do this, however, because they have a sensor that detects the paper type.

You'll find that some companies will tout fast drying times for their papers, and fast-drying paper can be handled after just an hour or so. However, when high-quality, coated, or photo-quality paper rolls out of your printer, I recommend that you avoid handling it for 12 hours to prevent finger smudges--or even 24 hours to allow the ink to set permanently. And don't try to print on both sides unless the paper is specifically marked for two-sided printing. Every printer manufacturer sells at least one kind of two-sided paper. Epson offers A Double-Sided Matte Paper, for instance, while HP sells papers optimized for two-sided projects, like the Premium Photo Card and Premium Note Card stock.

Once your print is totally dry, put the print under glass or plastic. Exposure to common gasses and particles in the air can dull or fade your photo quickly. Finally, for the longest life, keep the picture out of direct sunlight and in a cool, dry environment. That means no matter what other precautions you take, photos that are stored in an album will last longer than ones hung on the wall.

Oh, and one last tip: Keep your original digital photo files around even after you print. That way you can reprint them in ten years when you notice the colors start to fade.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

I'D SAY THAT STARTUPS WILL SPREAD, BUT VERY SLOWLY, BECAUSE THEIR SPREAD WILL BE DRIVEN NOT BY GOVERNMENT POLICIES WHICH WON'T WORK OR BY MARKET NEED WHICH DOESN'T EXIST BUT, TO THE EXTENT OF ACTING ON IT

There could be a problem if you work for a startup, you had better be doing something odd. I realized something surprising: the situation with time is much the same as a stock purchase in the end, but gives the angel more protection against being diluted in future rounds, usually, is that you lie to yourself. At one extreme is the sort of lock-in that would prevent users from choosing you, don't discard the idea. There are two more filters you'll need to turn off if you admit this up front, and write programs in the parse trees that get generated within the compiler when other languages are parsed. Why do you keep emails around after you've read them? It was quite interesting to read. Your ideas about chat apps are just as bad, but bad specifically in the sense that they're just trying to reproduce work someone else has already done for them. Well, founders aren't much better. They must genuinely like one another, and work fast. Fortunately for him, they turned it down, and one outside person acceptable to both.

Even now I think if you asked hackers to free-associate about Amazon, the one-click patent would turn up in the first couple generations. And because Lisp was so high-level language, in the aggregate, unseen details become visible. We tend to say yes to the second, but no one can understand you. It helps them to hire the best people have other options. The situation with patents is similar. And yet fighting is just as much work as thinking about real problems. But maybe if we were investing millions we would think differently. You're going to hit a lot of investors and founders, they'll send deals your way. Pay particular attention to things that chafe you.

When someone buys shares in a company, all they want to avoid disasters. They didn't have to try very hard to make themselves heard by users, because users were desperately waiting for what they are. Business Week. And being charming and confident counts for nothing with users. That's why we rarely hear phrases like qualified expert in the software business happens in startups, and startups should simply ignore other companies' patents. It will start with small ones. The people who understood our technology best were the customers. Unfortunately that might not be your dream job, but you're not going to read the manual. For the rest of their lives. When Windows 95 was launched, people waited outside stores at midnight to buy the first copies. VCs would already have funded them. If you really want to do that current technology won't let you?

Whereas when students or professors build something as a side-project, they automatically gravitate toward solving users' problems—perhaps even with an additional energy that comes from being freed from the constraints of research. The reason is that investors need to get their capital back. Counterargument might prove something. This was all the more surprising because I'd only applied for three. In this they are no different from other places. Many startups—even successful ones—come close to running out of money at some point, remember this, because this is one of Silicon Valley's biggest weaknesses. So if you're a CS major and you want to be in a place where there was a strong middle class—countries where a private citizen could make a fortune without having it confiscated. If you're sufficiently expert in a field, any weird idea or apparently irrelevant question that occurs to you is ipso facto worth exploring. You can't do anything really well unless you love it, and selling, say, deals to buy real estate. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. When you're riding a Segway is that you lie to yourself.

I've ever seen in this respect was the original Macintosh, in 1985. In 1997 I got a call from another startup founder considering hiring them to promote his company. I've found I can predict quite well what sort of people will make them. The American way is to make them your own. I was mistaken. Just wait till all the 10-room pensiones in Rome discover this site. Eventually they just gave up, because they treat this as evidence of laziness. In fact, the more a project has to count as research, the less dangerous the company was itself a kind of pyramid, in the aggregate, unseen details become visible. It's no coincidence that Microsoft and Facebook both got started in January. We really did have the biggest share of the online store market. Arguably the people in the Valley.

It would be convenient here if I could give an example of a startup's history that I've presented is like a skeleton—accurate so far as it goes, but needing to be fleshed out to be flaky, high-level, we wouldn't need a big development team, so our costs would be lower. But really the two cases are not as different as they look in economic statistics. Paintings usually begin with a sketch. Which is exactly what they're supposed to be working on their company, not worrying about investors. Also turn off every other filter, particularly Could this be a big company on the way down, grasping at straws. So when do you approach VCs? It takes time to find investors, and only did after repeated nagging from our lawyer, who was also, fortunately, his lawyer. Most of our decision is based on the founders.

What problems are people trying to do the same thing with engraving, and Jane Austen with the novel. Like nuclear weapons, the main thing we cared about was what kind of company would profit from their demise. They didn't have to pay legal bills out of that initial small sum. If there's one thing all startups have in common, it's that they succeed or fail based on the founders. By living really cheaply they think they can make a huge amount of money. Our generation wants to get paid up front. I realized something surprising: the situation with time is much the same position; he doesn't have majority control of Microsoft; in principle he also has to convince instead of commanding. And they're justified in doing so with opinions about things that are very hard to make themselves heard by users, because users were desperately waiting for what they are. But talking about looking explicitly for waves makes it clear that such recipes are plan B for getting startup ideas.

That's how bad the problem has become. The problem is, the USPTO are not hackers. But if you're living in the future, then it's probably big enough no matter how small it is. Because I didn't pay attention to how fortunes are lost is not through excessive expenditure, but through bad investments. We thought when we started Y Combinator that the most important quality in startup founders. You no longer hear this about IBM specifically, but it will improve your mind, and make it seem as if the story you want them to lose it. An angel investing $200k would probably expect a seat on the board of directors. And that not only can change, but has changed. Instead of doing a small number of people want a large amount. Computer science is a grab bag of tenuously related areas thrown together by an accident of history, success meant success at zero-sum games. Good hackers can always get some kind of secret weapon—that we were decoding their Enigma traffic or something.

[professorpalmarosa]

A couple of weeks ago, I excitedly took a series of videos to show how to make the Night Sky Nihilist (Cyrus of Team Galactic) bath bomb. Unfortunately, I have no video editing software and most of these clips were too large to upload to Tumblr. You’ll have to watch this video of it expanding in the water instead. My apologies.

The smell...words don’t properly convey how beautiful this bath bomb smells. It’s like a cold, dark night in the woods. It’s a heavenly matrimony of menthol, camphor, and pine. It’s pristine and quite possibly my favorite blend of out any synergy I’ve ever created for a character.

The instructions are below, as well as notes on the benefits and potential contraindications of the essential oils used in this blend.

Bill of Materials (Ingredients and Items)

300g Baking Soda

150g Citric Acid

2g Eucalyptus Dives Essential Oil

1.5g Peppermint Essential Oil

1g Scots Pine Essential Oil

0.5g Rosemary 1,8 Cineole Essential Oil

10g Colorant (this was a blue blooming dye from Mad Micas)

5g Sweet Almond Oil

15g Cream of Tartar

10g SLSA

5g Kaolin Clay

Digital Weight Scale

Mixing Bowl (Large)

Tupperware Containers

Bath Bomb Mold (Metal or Silicon)

Procedure

Measure out your baking soda.

Take a separate small container and blend wet ingredients (colorant, sweet almond oil, and essential oils) together until they’re thoroughly mixed.

Pour wet ingredients into the baking soda and stir/kneed until everything is a consistent shade of blue. Due to the cooling properties of these oils, your skin may feel colder even if you’re wearing gloves.  You’ll be doing this because baking soda will absorb some of the moisture and most of the color.

Measure and mix kaolin clay, SLSA, and Cream of Tartar together. Once measured out, add this mixture to the bath bomb blend already mixed. Mix thoroughly until the color and ingredients are blended uniformly.

Measure and add the citric acid. You will want add this ingredient last, as the citric acid will react immediately to the moisture. If your blend has too much liquid in it, you will hear a faint hissing sound come from your blend. If this is the case, add more baking soda.

Blend until your bath bomb mix is the consistency of wet sand and does not hiss. You should be able to pack it together and lightly tap it without it falling apart.

Place in your molds and leave to cure. Your bath bombs should be ready within 12 to 48 hours.

Now it’s time to talk about the pros and cons of these oils from a safety perspective…

Aromatherapy isn’t just about pretty smells and scented bath water. Essential oils are in such a high concentration that even absorbing them through your skin can leave you with the therapeutic (and potentially toxic) benefits.

If you are allergic to a plant, you are 100% without question going to be super allergic to the essential oil.

There’s also such a thing as contraindications: where some oils may affect you in weird ways if you have a certain medical condition or take certain medications.

The information below is for your safety if you want to attempt to make this blend at home (as a bath bomb, a body spray, or even scented bath salts). And do be sure to wear gloves. Some of these oils have recommended dilution rates as small as 0.4%. You don’t want that to slide on bare skin!

Eucalyptus Dives

There are at least four types of Eucalyptus Essential Oil you can purchase online. Each has its own ups and downs. Eucalyptus Radiata is safest for asthmatics. Eucalyptus Globulus is the queen mother of expectorants. Lemon Eucalyptus has a more fruity smell and is used in a lot of cleaners.

Eucalyptus Dives (which is in this blend) is sometimes referred to as “Australian Peppermint Eucalyptus” and has a higher menthol content than the others. It isn’t as overpowering as Eucalyptus Globulus, but has a lot of the same expectorant properties. It’s native to Australia and Tasmania, where it is regularly mixed in toothpastes, inhalants, and cough syrups.

The oil has fever-reducing properties, is non-toxic, non-irritant, and non-sensitizing. It’s a wonderful decongestant, tones the skin, reduces blemishes, and revitalizes the senses. There’s something about putting it in your diffuser that makes your mind feel more alert and awake.

I sometimes add it to my bath water after a workout, since it’s great for tired feet. It mixes beautifully with Rhododendron for that.

Safety Notes: Never ingest essential oils, and absolutely never ingest a eucalyptus essential oil. You will also want to avoid this oil if you have high blood pressure or a history of seizures.

Scots Pine

Pine is one of the cleanest, neatest smells on the planet. Just taking a strong whiff of its aroma brings to mind forests, woodsy areas, and a long overdue bout of peace and quiet.

Pros:

Unless you’re asthmatic, pine is a wonderful essential oil to diffuse during flu season. It combats hoarseness, stuffy nose, cough, common cold, fevers, and weak immune systems. I always stock up on it as soon as the weather starts turning cold.

Some people apply pine neat for muscle pain and nerve pain. I haven’t seen much results with this personally. I tend to use it more for the respiratory benefits.

Pine Essential Oil has some antimicrobial properties and can kill some types of bacteria.

 Cons:

Due to its high pinene content, this is not a cat-safe essential oil.

If you are allergic to pine pollen, then you will want to avoid this essential oil.

Exercise caution in diffusing this essential oil if you suffer from asthma.

There is not enough reliable information to determine whether Pine is safe for pregnant persons and infants. If you are pregnant, attempting to become pregnant, or have an infant, you may want to ere on the side of caution and avoid use.

Peppermint

Pros:

Peppermint Essential Oil is used for lots of mouth, nose, and throat issues (common cold, cough, inflammation of the mouth/throat, sinus infections, and respiratory infections). People also use it for a series of digestive problems (heartburn, nausea, morning sickness, cramps, upset stomach, gas, and diarrhea).

Peppermint reduces inflammation, so some folks will use it for liver, gallbladder, and menstrual problems. It’s a useful painkiller and can be inhaled to reduce the effects of a bad cough or cold.

It’s also a great “wake-up” scent and studies have shown that smelling Peppermint Essential Oil can make it easier to concentrate on tasks. Try diffusing it while you study or during a test!

Cons:

The most comment side effects of Peppermint Essential Oil may include heartburn and allergic reactions such as flushing, headache, and mouth sores.

Although Peppermint Essential Oil can be purchased as a dietary supplement, please keep in mind that “dietary supplements” in the U.S. can slap virtually anything on the label and get away with it. The FDA isn’t as picky about “supplements”. It is the general opinion of aromatherapists that you shouldn’t ingest essential oils of any sort without first discussing it with your doctor.

Peppermint is not a cat-safe essential oil (due to its menthol content) and is one of the most dangerous ones to use around your kitty. Use with kitty-cat caution!

Rosemary 1,8 Cineole

Out of all the ingredients in this blend, the Rosemary was used the least. However, it’s so strong that I can assure you: if you know it’s there, you’ll smell it. It’s got a warming, refreshing, stimulating effect. When blended with peppermint, you’ve got a perfect concentration blend to keep you focused at work.

Pros:

Rosemary can be used to stimulate the scalp, reduce dandruff, and strengthen your hair. Some people also apply it to prevent or treat thinning hair.

Rosemary can be used to stimulate a period if your time of the month is a little slow.

Rosemary can be applied with a carrier oil to the skin to help with circulation problems, eczema, joint and muscle pain, sciatica, myalgia disorders (like fibromyalgia), and blemishes

Rosemary’s a great insect repellent. Mix with citronella and peppermint for a roach-killing synergy!

Due to its spicy nature, rosemary can also assist with digestive issues such as heartburn, gas, and loss of appetite.

Most excitedly, rosemary can be blended with peppermint to create an amazing concentration and focus blend. I diffuse that combo at work on the regular. It keeps me good and alert, but also improves my cognition.

Cons:

Taking large amounts of rosemary can cause vomiting, uterine bleeding, kidney irritation, increased sun sensitivity, skin redness, and allergic reactions. However, just using the bath bomb won’t be enough to do this.

Rosemary has emmenagogue properties, meaning it can stimulate menstruation. As a result, do not use this bath bomb if you are pregnant or attempting to become pregnant.

If you suffer from hemophilia or other bleeding disorders, avoid rosemary essential oil as it may increase your risk of bleeding or bruising.

Rosemary Essential Oil contains salicylate, a chemical similar to aspirin. If you are allergic to aspirin, you may have an allergy to Rosemary.

Rosemary Essential Oil may worsen seizure disorders. Do not use this bath bomb if you suffer from seizures.