#catch me posting at suboptimal times

[evermeet]

I could do more than woo you. I could wow you.

#gale dekarios #gale of waterdeep #baldur's gate 3 #don't look at me i had to get up and walk around while making this #none of these thoughts are in the DSM-V #mine* #mine*bg3 #catch me posting at suboptimal times #ch: gale dekarios

[goopi-e]

Finally got a semblance of free time to play the Recently Released Videogame! No plot discussions happen in this post, I just gush about the little things.

My experience is, uh. Suboptimal. I am grateful my laptop can emulate Switch at all, but when your average FPS is around 5, only gets as high as 12 and has a tendency to go into decimals or freeze, fast-paced combat gets hard.

Despite that, the gameplay is fun! All the abilities are such a blast, and compliment one another nicely: for example, I cheesed one part of a certain shrine by Ultrahanding a platform in one place in the air for a bit, then effectively Stasising it with Recall, then Ascending on top of that still-Recalled platform, and then getting additional height by shield-jumping on a shield fused with a spring. Just for funsies. The intended solution was to essentially shield-surf on a short straight rail.

God I love fusing springs to shields. Revali who. My Bomb Flower count is criminally low, as I haven't figured a way to dupe them w/o exploding, and I don't have consistent source of rockets yet, but the springs are relatively early-game and do their job pretty well!

You know what I love even more than that? Glitches :^). And they're finally easy enough for me, a total noob, to perform. I only duped materials so far, timing a frame-perfect weapon dupe on my suboptimal setup sounds hard... but I wanna try and transfer the legendary MsgNotFound one of these days. I was so lucky to find a diamond in one of the caves tho!

Did you know that the shrine lobby (a tiny area seen through the entry portal) can serve as a cover for your campfire during rainy weather? It made more sense in BоTW, as Shеikah shrines were more material, but beggars can't be choosers.

So far my playthrough fits the "feral Lonk" stereotype. Towns are laggy, so I mostly wander around the wilderness aimlessly. The overall plan is to grind the full second stamina wheel + activate a few towers, then go get the Heart Container from the Great Plateau quest, get the Master Sword, grind shrines for hearts and only then hit a couple of dungeons. After that, joining the Yıga is a must. I'm not even sure I'll be able to fight the dungeon bosses or G-man with how hard even the basic combat currently is, so my only hope is to be able to tank through damage.

I wanted to get the Lobster Tunic so badly, but the guys at Lurеlin keep kicking my ass :^(.

Sadly, it seems you cannot skip the first memory. The puddles just aren't anywhere inside the geoglyphs.

Fujibаyashi-san loves to put the "temporary equipment loss moment" in all of the series entries done under him (except MC), and in TоTK alone there's soooo many. It's a whole shrine subset now, not to mention the dedicated pantsless quest in the gazette storyline. Wonder how's the Еvеntide doing these days - judging by a chasm, it doesn't seem like a similar event will take place here.

Speaking of chasms on the islands... Remember the PH-themed archipelago in the wetlands? There's a chasm on Mercay island. You know. The island where the Temple of The Ocean King is located. Something about the way BоTW/TоTK genuinely appreciates DS games feels very vindicating. First Monster Cake being a chancellor's favourite dessert, then the Phantom armor being one of the most OP sets, and now this chasm.

I saw Flowerblight :з.

Ang got owned by the Floormasters Gloom Hands once. Not touching them with a sturdy-stick-stick before I get s'more hearts, I know what comes after.

The guy with the sign! Such a cute concept, and the rewards are always so generous!

Depths are weird. The flora is super cool, and the landscape is twisted to a degree that merely figuring out how to get from point A to point B becomes a nontrivial challenge. Collecting Poes is fun, and I love getting the uncorrupted weapons from the ghosts of the past. Everything else scares me shitless. Mostly

Catching a Star fragment mid-air feels downright magical. I know they were probably coded with exactly that method of aquisition in mind, but it always feels like such a lucky catch.

Saw Nауdra once. Got the scale. Fused it to a spear. Now the spear looks like a comically large spoon, and I can't keep a straight face when this thing pops across half a screen, so I never equip it, but don't unfuse it either out of respect for the comedy aspect. The only funnier weapon that I've got so far is the honeycomb boomerang I got from a monster camp (the idea is genius, and I have honeycombs to maybe recreate it later), which is currently fused to a surprisingly high-damage Boko arm.

Yeah, I'm not unfusing my comically large Nауdra spon until I get a camera and take a selfie with it.

I always feel bad when fighting the apple-collecting Bokos. They have tiny Boko baskets on their backs :^(. They're just little guys :^(.

PORTABLE COOKING POTS. AND MULTIPLE TRAVEL MEDALLIONS THAT AREN'T LOCKED BY A DLC. YES.

Purаh is the prettiest woman to grace this world.

#totk spoilers #...arguably

[jenroses]

In the past 30 days: I came down with covid and the flu simultaneously Devoting all my executive function to taking covid/flu meds religiously on time led me to be late on my ongoing antiviral once, by 6 hours, so I had a brief flare of both shingles AND cold sores. They calmed back down once i got back on track. And now I have a bladder infection.

You would think, with my history (rheumatoid arthritis and resulting immune suppression and steroid-induced diabetes, asthma, obesity, physical and mental health issues, EDS, fibro, clotting disorders, etc.) that coming down with four viruses and a bacteria in this period of time would be horrible.

But you know what? Modern medicine is a good thing. Antivirals are a good thing. Antibiotics are amazing. I took ONE dose of the antibiotic and my symptoms for the UTI are already loads better. I got over the flu in THREE FUCKING DAYS. The flu used to take me out for 2 weeks, sometimes 3 if I got a secondary infection, and that was when I wasn't on immune suppressants. Tamiflu plus elderberry, taken soon after symptoms start, work like magic. Covid was minor. Yes, I know it's minor for a lot of people but with my risk factors? And getting it with the flu? I took an anti-covid antiviral, and of course was already taking elderberry for the flu. I have a few minor lingering issues but they're basically issues I already have, just kicked from a 6 to a 6.5, ish. Like I used to hate black pepper and then I learned to tolerate it and now I can't tolerate it again. That kind of thing. Sensory stuff is more brittle than it was, suboptimal pants are not an option. But seriously, shingles used to be a mandatory 6 week excruciating ordeal. I noticed the tingle-itch-prickle in that nerve, took my not-today-satan pills (famcyclovir) and it never really managed to get going. Cold sore was a specific prickle and a single small bump, never even scabbed. My kid was diagnosed with both flu and strep today, and he's not very sick either, and I don't even have to get swabbed for strep because the UTI drug will also treat strep. (Cefdinir)

I caught Covid 2 weeks after the bivalent shot, went off my immune suppressing drug, and kicked it to the curb with the help of targeted meds and a little herbal knowledge. I've been miserable for days with this UTI and finally got the executive function to get us to the doctor and boom, better.

I am begging you. If you get sick, and you know you're sick, if you can, get tested quickly and treated quickly. Tamiflu is supposed to cut hours off the flu, but in my experience combined with elderberry, it has taken a 14 day illness and turned it into a 3 day illness, several times now. I've never had a flu shot. (I don't object to them in principle, but my body can have garbage reactions to immune provocation and by the time Covid happened the tamiflu/elderberry=3 days sick thing made the flu shot moot for me. The math on Covid works out well in favor of the covid shot.)

There's no benefit in suffering. Especially with Covid and the flu, which mutate constantly and can bork your immune system permanently (see: triggers for autoimmunity. I have 6 autoimmune conditions, fun times.) Covid, especially, can target the cells which remember Covid. Kick it to the curb, kick it hard, kick it fast, use the tools we have.

I didn't even catch bronchitis from all this, and I ALWAYS used to catch bronchitis. because CPAP.

FWIW elderberry also helps the immune system clear out post-vaccine yuck faster. Without, I had inflammatory flares for a month. A dose ended that cycle. Next immunizations I took elderberry sooner and didn't have anywhere near as bad a time. (It is not "just" an "immune booster", it specifically promotes the production/function of tumor necrosis factor and this makes it specifically good for things like influenza.) My reaction to the bivalent shot was a sore arm for a day and then a couple days of local pain. A minor RA flare, short lived, not severe.

Anyway. Wear a mask. Get your shots. If you get sick, have them swab you for both flu and covid, not just one or the other, and strep too, if you're getting a sore throat, because we are past the days of one or the other. Get the antivirals and take as directed. Hydrate. Rest, and rest an extra day on top of it, more if you can, to give your body a chance to really kick it all the way. Use the tools available to you.

[spicysoftsweet]

HisoIllu at the Amusement Park

Or the one where they put Bungee World out of business. 

For @lonelyinvisibly​‘s ask A/N: Hastily written, probably would have been better as a set of headcanons.

“Sure, I’ll go.”

Hisoka looked at the raven-haired beauty seated beside him on his living room cough in a mixture of confusion and shock. Why was it this easy? What trick did Illumi have up his sleeve?

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Illumi responded now, matching Hisoka’s widened amber eyes. 

“I didn’t expect you to actually agree to coming to the amusement park,” he responded in a smaller voice, turning his attention back to watching Noutube videos of roller coaster rides on his laptop. He leaned back into the couch, raising his arms above his head as if practicing being on the actual ride, a grin on his face.

Illumi went back to picking at his nails.

“It’s excellent training.”

“For what?!”

“Suppressing emotional release. Suspension of fear. Patience. Blending into a crowd. Finding your way with poor directions. Traveling in suboptimal conditions. Money management..,” the list went on and on, and Hisoka regretted having even asked. When Illumi started talking, sometimes it was like a switch that couldn’t be turned off. He flipped to another video, reviewing the food and desserts at the amusement park. This was going to be simply marvelous, he thought, mouth-watering already as he envisioned the mountains of funnel cake, cotton candy and candied apples he would be able to gorge on the entire day.  

---

After a long drive in Illumi’s Mercedes-Benz minivan, they finally made it to the immense park attraction known as Bungee World. Renowned the world over for its colorful mascots, addictive bubblegum pink confectionery (not just gum!), and catchy tunes, Bungee World was the ultimate attraction for children of all ages, the most excited of all being Hisoka.

Hisoka let out a high-pitched cry that pierced through Illumi’s very soul, if he had one, as he ran towards the gates. Illumi, intentionally taking an excruciatingly long time to catch up to him, rummaged through his Rouis Buitton fanny pack for their tickets… and their Fast Passes, their Unlimited Drinks and Dinner passes, Show Passes, Backstage Passes - every pass available, Illumi had bought for the two of them. This was going to be the best day of Hisoka’s life, whether he liked it or not. 

Hisoka made it on the very park attraction he had coveted from the internet the day before, cutting in front of a group of likely middle schoolers in order to get to the front of the line.

“You stupid clown bitch! Didn’t you see we were standing here?” One particularly bold kid yelled from the small crowd.

“Ronald McDonald looking ass, get to the back of the line, old man!!!”

Old man. That struck a nerve. Before Hisoka could react and clear the park - which meant no one would be running the machines - Illumi ran up and presented the fast pass both to the kids and the ride operator. He didn’t realize the dead, voidless look in his eyes was probably enough already to defuse the situation. 

Strapped in, Hisoka was on cloud nine, until the ride started… and then ended.

“That’s it?!”

“Yes.” Illumi responded, flatly. 

“Lame.” Hisoka went off to drown his sorrows in enough cotton candy to wear as an outfit. Then again, that was an excellent idea. He would incorporate that into his next look.

Illumi went off to test his throwing skills at the carnival games and to the dismay of every worker there, was entirely too good at it. 

“Take your pick, Hisoka,” Illumi said, with a small swell of pride. As Hisoka left with the entire set of prizes, the teenagers manning the kiosks prepared for their eventual dismissal. No one would believe this story. 

A few rides and a picture with the Bungee Gum mascot himself, with whom Hisoka forced a picture with Illumi sandwiched in between, Hisoka and Illumi were ready to leave. It was an overall satisfying day. 

It was a good thing they both decided they had outgrown the attraction. A Do Not Admit sign was posted with their faces, the second they decided to leave.

#hisoillu #hisoka #illumi #amusement park shenanigans

[geopolicraticus]

Permutations of Post-Agricultural Civilizations

Industrial, Technological, and Scientific Formations

Having recently written about scientific civilization through the lens of comments by Jacob Bronowski and Susanne Langer, I have been doing more research on the idea of scientific civilization for further posts in the series. This has brought additional material to my attention, but it has also raised questions. Why focus on scientific civilization? Does scientific civilization have a special place in the future of civilization, or ought it to have a special place in the future of civilization?

In particular, what relationship does scientific civilization have to other forms of post-agricultural civilization, or what we might also call modern civilization? One can find “industrial civilization,” “technological civilization,” and “scientific civilization” used synonymously, which raises the question as to whether these ideas are subtly distinct or not. Is there a reason to distinguish between industrial civilization, technological civilization, and scientific civilization, or should we regard them as different names for the same thing?

One way to distinguish these three formations of modernity, and yet show them in relation to each other, is by way of what I call the STEM cycle, which is a tightly-coupled loop of scientific research, technological applications, and industrial engineering which characterizes civilization today. A STEM cycle has long been present in civilization, but in the past the STEM cycle was loosely-coupled, often with generations passing between each stage in the cycle. The combined effect of the scientific revolution and the industrial revolution served to transformed the loosely-coupled STEM cycle of agricultural civilizations (which make intensive use of specialized agricultural technologies, though often in a highly traditional context that discourages innovation) into the tightly-coupled STEM cycle of modern civilization.

There are, of course, many technologies that came about not because of science, but through mere tinkering. It seems that James Watt’s steam engine was the iterated result of the tinkering of many men over a long period of time, so that the central exhibit of the industrial revolution seems to defy my characterization of technology. If one wanted to take the time to carefully select one’s examples, one could assemble a history of technology that almost entirely excluded the contribution of science. I concede this point, but at the same time, I could write a history of technology that was entirely based upon technologies that emerged as a direct result of the dispassionate pursuit of scientific knowledge.

Selective histories aside, all of the most difficult and demanding technologies—nuclear energy, spacecraft, computing, DNA therapies in medicine, and so on—are the result of extensive scientific research, including pure science (Rutherford was doing pure science, but his pure science ultimately made nuclear technologies possible) performed with little or no interest in practical application. This also appears that it will hold good in the future, and the role of tinkering decreases and the role of scientific rigor in the advanced of technology increases. There are thresholds beyond which tinkering cannot pass.

Similar criticisms can be made of each section of the STEM cycle: scientific instruments that advance scientific research that do not come from industrial engineering, and industrial engineering developments that do not come from technology. All of these criticisms are valid, but they do not invalidate the idea of the STEM cycle generally. Also, the definitions of science, technology, and engineering need to be refined considerably in order to consistently make distinctions among these sections of the STEM cycle, which will inevitably have broad areas of overlap. As with my analysis of the institutional structure of civilization, the STEM cycle is an abstraction for use in the analysis of the economic infrastructure of civilization, and any actual processes will be far more complex that this idealized simplification.

For more on the STEM cycle, I have written several posts that examine this idea in detail, including:

The Industrial-Technological Thesis

Industrial-Technological Disruption

The Open Loop of Industrial-Technological     Civilization

Chronometry and the STEM Cycle

The Institutionalization of the STEM Cycle

Secrecy and the STEM Cycle

Given a tightly-coupled STEM cycle as characterizing modern civilization, we can differentiate scientific civilization, technological civilization, and industrialized civilization as each being civilizations that emphasize section of the STEM cycle over the other sections of the cycle. In each, all sections of the STEM cycle are present, but in scientific civilization, for example, the section of the STEM cycle that predominates is scientific research.

Coming at this problem from another angle, given my analysis of the institutional structure of civilization, I can formally identify these three formations of modern civilization as follows:

A scientific civilization is a civilization that takes science as its central project

A technological civilization is a civilization that takes technology as its central project

An industrial civilization is a civilization that takes industrial engineering as its central project

The above formulations are, in each case, what I call a “proper” civilization, with other permutations of these formations following from science, technology, and engineering playing different roles in the institutional structure of civilization. This gives us a way to formally distinguish these three formations, but as I have pointed out in other posts, there are a great many different ways in which a civilization might take science as its central project, so there is room for a great deal of variation even among any one of these formations.

These formulations are entirely consistent with the above formulations that distinguish scientific, technological, and industrial civilizations in terms of an emphasis on one section of the STEM cycle: in each formation, there is a tightly-coupled STEM cycle, but in each formation one section of the STEM cycle either serves as the central project of the civilization, or is integral with the central project of the civilization.

The above formulations, then, allow me to integrate my definition of the institutional structures of civilization with the idea of the STEM cycle characterizing modern civilizations. This degree of integration of the two concepts strengthens both. However, I am lacking an intuitively perspicuous way to differentiate scientific, technological, and industrial civilizations. One way to address this deficit would be to formulate a great many scenarios (i.e., thought experiments, with possible real-world exemplifications, but not necessarily tied to actually existing civilizations in the historical record, which record is very shallow for modern civilizations) that highlighted distinctively scientific, technological, and industrial central projects, and then proceed inductively from these scenarios to generalizations that cover all tokens of the type.  

I am not yet in a position to delineate an exhaustive description of the possibilities for scientific, technological, and industrial civilizations—this would a project for a lifetime, or for a scientific research program with many contributors—but I do have a few telling examples that can shed some limited light on the possibilities.

In Tinkering with the Mind (and the sequels Tinkering with Science and Addendum on “Tinkering with Science”) I discussed the possibility of innovations derived from high technology tinkering without a scientific basis. Such high technology tinkering could only come within an economic infrastructure built up by a tightly-coupled STEM cycle, but in the case of technologies derived by tinkering, the scientific element in the production of the innovative technology in question would be in the background, while technology and engineering would be in the foreground. In the event that a civilization emerged from the proliferation of such technologies of tinkering (another example would be Shawyer’s EmDrive), we could call this a technological civilization or an industrial civilization, but it clearly would not be a scientific civilization.  

Another possibility that is not far from our present economic infrastructure would be a civilization focused on industrial engineering design, to the point that the technology and the science were far in the background, while the design became the focus of interest and development. Here, practical application would run ahead of actual scientific and technological innovation—though “run ahead” might be misleading in this context. Let me explain. Computer technology has been advancing so rapidly over the past several decades that those who use computers have been playing a game of catching up to the most efficient uses of the technologies available. The result has been a number of suboptimal operating systems that all of us present for the computer revolution have passed through in stoic and pragmatic determination. It hasn’t always been enjoyable. Suppose the technological innovations came to an end. One scenario that I have discussed in other contexts would be the collapse of modern civilization leaving a few industrialized enclaves. These enclaves would probably not be large enough to produce new innovations in semiconductor design, but they might be able to keep existing computational infrastructure functioning. Under these circumstances, there would be a strong motivation to use available technology as efficiently and effectively as possible. A real premium would attach to better software applications that could derive better performance from the same hardware.

We have an actual example of this in the Voyager spacecraft, far from us in outer space, indeed, having passed out of the solar system, but engineers on Earth have reprogrammed the spacecraft several times since their launch in order to obtain better results from hardware that cannot be changed. A civilization in which such conditions became the norm could be considered a civilization in which industrial engineering was in the foreground, while technology and science were distantly in the background, being maintained but not improved. If this particular example is to be taken as representative, it may be the case the industrial civilizations sensu stricto only come about after science and technology have faltered, that is to say, in the twilight of scientific civilization or technological civilization. But a generalization of this sweeping kind would require much more study of the problem.

#scientific civilization #industrial civilization #technological civilization #STEM cycle #tinkering

[blaperile]

Homestuck Epilogues - Meat - Page 16 (Epilogue 3 Page 3)

#Homestuck #The Homestuck Epilogues #Meat #Epilogue Three #Dirk #Rose

[layceland]

So, heres a translation of the new villanous animation I did for @zwagyzonk, full of author notes no one asked for uwu Enjoy it <3

Bh Narrator: Welcome, clients desperately waiting for an evil help, to the orientation videos from Blackhat Organization™. Get ready for another season on what you /don't/ have to do, here in the “lost cases of-”

Original The Powerpuff Girls Narrator: “-Townsville!” A city that possesses one of the most diverse and dangerous collection of villains in the-

Bh Narrator: hey hey, wait a minute, who the heck are you?

Ppg Narrator: Me? I'm the narrator.

Bh Narrator: In your dreams, /I/ am the narrator.

Ppg Narrator: What are you talking about?! /I’ve/ always been the narrator of “Townsville!”.

Bh Narrator: but we are /not/ in Townsville.

Ppg Narrator: but, but-

Bh Narrator: get out of here. Townsville! A pacific place, always protected by- Ugh, who cares. Now I present to you, Lord BlackHat!

Blackhat: Welcome, disgusting cockroaches-

Flug: U-uh, sir?

Blackhat: *growling*

Flug: I-I just wanted to say that you look gloriously evil today-

Blackhat: In this occasion, we are analyzing one of the most recognized, disgusting and deplorable villains of Townsville. /Mojo Jojo/. This primate is slightly more developed than the average human.

Flug: sir, he's just a banana lover monkey.

Blackhat: Bah, for me all of you are the same. Anyways, his big mistake is not to hire our Blackhat Organizations™  services. There are some things that only I can do, and I might, and that's the end of it! (I didn't really understand what he meant here either, sorry)

Flug: Um, hold up sir. Mojo is a black diamond platinum member of the organization, and has spent millions in our products-

STAND BYBlackhat: Mojo Jojo, a disgusting and merciless primate, evil genius from “NightmareVille”

Flug: Um, sir, isn't Townsville one of our multiple test zones for our manufactured monsters?

Blackhat: If you dare interrupt me again you’ll hAVE TO MANUFACTURE A NEW HEAD FOR YOURSELF. The attribute that makes Mojo Jojo a specimen more advanced than the average human is his superior intellect!

Flug: But not superior to mine!

Blackhat: He posses a big arsenal of weapons and deadly machinery!

Flug: Almost as deadly as the ones in our catalog, sir! (why is dementia only 1 peso per month, and where do I sing)

Blackhat: an evil hideout on top of a volcano

Flug: That’s not as cool as a giant hat completely habitable!

Blackhat: And a /long/ list of purchases from Blackhat Organizations™  

Flug: Designed and constructed by a true genius.

.

(Okay, there's a joke here that can't really be translated, since depending on what translation of the show you watched (The Latin American or the European one) their name change. In Latin America they're called “Las chicas superpoderosas”=”the super powerful girls”, meanwhile in Spain they are called “Las chicas coquetas”=”the flirty girls”. They're both correct, just from different places so. I dunno how they'll do the actual translation, but the dialog goes something along this)

.

Blackhat: The ones that ruin his evil plans are his arch nemesis, The Flirty Girls.

Flug: They’re the Super Powerful Girls, my lord and master!

Blackhat:... *shoot that bitch*

Flug: AY! Ow my ass!

Blackhat: This Flirty Girls are the defenders of “Trashtown”. And they're not more than three kids, still in kindergarten! I don't need to see the rest, his mistake is to lose his dignity against human children that have not even developed fingers!

Flug: *shaking* he’s a frequent platinum client, a frequent platinum client!

STAND BY

Blackhat: Let's analyze his diabolic plans. Ah, the head of Anubis, one of the oldest and MOST USELESS RELICS IN THE WORLD. The only thing he's gonna achieve is turning everyone in “Shoeville” into dogs! What kind of villain would like to rule over a world full of dogs! Instead, he should have used Quetzalcoatl's (I have no idea what that is) head! Now that's an actual relic~

Bh Narrator: A deadly relic with an offer to die for! Now you can rent Quetzalcoatl's head to incinerate your heroic enemies, and not have to worry about where to put it away when you're done using it! Rent it to destroy your hero, the hero league, your mother-in-law, or-

Ppg Narrator: “-Townsville!”. Don't miss this crushing offer, only for the next 24 hours!

Bh Narrator: Get out of here, this is my show!

Ppg Narrator: Hehehe, doesn't feel so good when they're trying to steal your job now, does it?

Bh Narrator: Get out!

-

Blossom: Not so fast,

Buttercup: Evil

Bubbles: Monkey!

Mojo Jojo: Listen here, PowerPuff Girls, you're not a threat anymore~

Powerpuff Girls: *barking*

-

Blackhat: Ah, I see he's also an enthusiast about kicking cute creatures. But he’ll never outrange my multiversal record of distance traveled in one kick!

5.0.5: *squeal while getting fucking wrecked*

-

Mojo Jojo: Muahaha, you can reach me here!

Buttercup: *bite that ass*

Blackhat: It's obvious that monkey is as pathetic as the rest of the biped creatures that infest this world…

Bh Narrator: If you're so weak then even a group of cute puppies can defeat you, then you need the bottom cover the Blackhat Organization™! (why is the warranty only 30 seconds, BH please) Uh, w-what are you doing here Dementia?

Dementia: I'm here to narrate, duh~

Bh Narrator: Why does everybody want to steal my job today!

Ppg Narrator: You're the one stealing my job! And you didn't even go to narrator school!

Dementia: No, but I found this!

Bh and Ppg Narrator: What?! *get zapped biatch*

STAND BY

Flug: Dementia, and the narrator?! Don't you see they charge by the hour?!

Dementia: I thought you were smart Flug! Isn't it obvious? Now /I’m? The narrator! And I'm here to narrate a... “Dementia Tips!” Hi! It’s me, Dementia, and I'm here to help y'all weak villains that can't even protect your own ass with my Dementia Tips! In this case, if a hero tries to bite your booty, what you have to do is… Open an umbrella in their mouth! Or… Flood their house with raccoons! *ominous* Or you can shoot them… With your silicone pistol! *singing* Tatara, silicone power~

Flug: Dementia! Leave, you’re ruining everything! (here he uses an explanation that I don't know what it means exactly)

Dementia: Nya na na na na *mockingly singing*

Flug: Hawkbots(?), catch her, lethal mode~.

Dementia: You’ll never catch me alive!

TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES

STAND BY

Blackhat: One of the biggest injustices that villains suffer, is that they always have to fight against teams of heroes! To contrarest this factor, a mediocre villain must for his own team of villains. In this case, Mojo Jojo forms an alliance with Fuzzy Lumpkins, Princess Morbucks, and *weird creepy noises*

Flug: hm, why does that happen every time someone says Him’s real name?

Blackhat: When someone says his name, weird things happen, when someone says mine, people die, to each their own~

-

Powerpuff Girls: *screaming*

Him: I got you~

Princes: Yes! Yes! Yes!

Fluffy: Now, to leave them on the floor!

Blackhat: Muahahaha! Yes! Yes! Again! Again! Muahahaha!

Flug: You see, my master? Mojo’s evil alliance looks like it’s gonna be victorious! He managed to crush The Powerpuff Girls more than once!

Blackhat: I’ve been in this world enough to know that feelings are about to destroy this alliance…

Moko Jono?: *Annoying ass noise*

Mojo Jojo: I love you too~

Him: Oh no…

Blackhat: I told you so!

Mojo Jojo: This is the lovely Moko Jono(?), she has great evil plans in mind that we should try~ Imagine people getting desperate because they cant reach their destination in time!

Blackhat: That's not evil, that's just inconvenient!

Mojo Jojo: Stealing articles that are completely white doesn't go against the law, so we are taking them!

Blackhat: If it's legal to take them, then you're not stealing them!

Mojo Jojo: The louder you scream, the more it’ll hurt the ones listening!

Him, Princes and Fluffy: We quit!

Blackhat: And I'm out of here!

Zookeeper: Come here Michelle~

Mojo Jojo: Whos Michelle? Moko, you know who- ah!

Flug: Um... Lord Blackhat had to leave to do… really ugly stuff.

Blackhat: *Playing golf*

Flug: I'm going to continue analyzing this villain, starting with rule 10v3, do not involve your heart, don't be like that. Now, let's see what Mojo is planning this time.

Ppg Narrator: Ah, Mojo Jojo, what are you planning this time?

Bh Narrator: I thought I told you that this is my show! *rewind* Oh, Mojo Jojo, what are you planning this time?

Professor Utonium: Oh, Mojo Jojo, what are you planning this time?

Blossom: If you hurt the Professor-

Mojo Jojo: You think I'd hurt my own dad?

Blossom: What?!

Bubbles: What?!

P.Utonium: What?!

Flug: What? Blackhat’s newspaper: “What?” “Powerpuff girls siblings with Mojo Jojo?”

Mojo Jojo: The substance explosion that created you three did also affect me. My little monkey brain started mutating. Continuously feeling worthless against your physical powers! My brilliant achievements going underrated…

Flug: *crying* That's not fair, not fair. It's too sad, shu, shu. I Understand my “Mojito”, I understand, come on you can do it.

Mojo Jojo: ...Never poor Jojo.

P.Utonium: Mojo, I feel like a tyrant, is there anything I can do to make it up to you?

Mojo Jojo: Give me superpowers as well.

P.Utonium: Okay

The Powerpuff Girls: *little girly gasp*

Flug: In my experience, giving superpowers to beings with suboptimal intelligence never really ends well.

-

Mojo Jojo: ...Dad?

P.Utonium: Son?

Flug: Ah, a classic, he's using his enemies as baseball bats. Lord blackhat loves to do that~

Blackhat: Yes! I do love to do that!

Flug: *Slowly clapping* who would have thought? You're not as incompetent as I thought.

Blackhat: Just wait and see, noob, this always ends with a letdown

Mojo Jojo: So many weapons and evil plans, all worthless! *wreck that shit*

Flug: Ah! What are you doing?! Dementia, stop!

Dementia: Eh? But I’m not doing anything!

Flug: Ah, s-sorry, post-traumatic stress…

P.Utonium: Now that I remember, you were the worst lab helper! And If my memory doesn't fail me, it was that day, when I was working on the formula for the perfect little girl, when suddenly, you pushed me!

Flug: I mean, who in his right mind thinks of having a monkey as an employee? I don't know what you expected.

P.Utonium: That’s the day The Powerpuff Girls were born!

Flug: What?!

Blackhat: WHAT?!

Flug: What? You’re responsible for their birth and the reason of their existence?!

Mojo Jojo: ...What? I am responsible for their birth and the reason of their existence?

Flug: Unbelievable, he made the classic mistakes of an evil genius! This where his mistakes; Number one, you can involve affection into your plans. That disgusting feeling ruins everything.

5.0.5: *weird noises he makes*

Flug: Not now, my beautiful, genetically altered child, dad is working~. Number two, he never shuts up. And after a long list of mistakes, like excessive confidence, wear a cape, and lose against human children, without a doubt his worst mistake was creating his arch nemesis! Who in his right mind is capable of such foolery?! This is unthinkable! There's only one thing I can do to make something better out of this brute.

Mojo Jojo: *shaking, tied with whatever that is*

Flug: from an evil genius to another Mojo, let me tell you, this won't kill you, even tho you might wish it would.

Ppg narrator: and once again, everything is worse than ever thanks to Lord blackhat and Blackhat Organizations™’s orientation videos!

Blackhat: Shut up already!

Ppg Narrator: *scream like the lil bitch you are*

.

.

.

Anyways, it’s my first time translating something this long, so any tip is welcomed <3 

#villanos #villanous #blackhat #dr.flug #505 #5.0.5 villainous #marcus mojo #translations

[metacog]

Stubbornness

Update: I've got a rewrite of this post that is better in every way over at the Commoncog blog. Read that version here: Dismissive Stubbornness.

The Oxford dictionary defines stubborn as "having or showing dogged determination not to change one's attitude or position on something, especially in spite of good arguments or reasons to do so." For the duration of this post, I want to stick to this strict definition of 'stubborn'.

I can't work with stubborn people. This is not a new realisation; it's an old one. I can work with people who disagree with me, who argue loudly with me, and who hold vastly different opinions from me. But stubborn people don't last in my team. I actively find a way to show them the door. At my last company, I iterated on our hiring process in an attempt to catch stubbornness early, and to filter it out.

This is a pretty charged statement, so I want to colour it in. Provide nuance.

One of the most important qualities I look for in a colleague or subordinate is whatever property it is that's the opposite of stubbornness. Call it 'flexibility of thought', if you will. This doesn't mean that you have to agree with me when we disagree. It merely means that you should adopt my position when it is clear my argument is the better one. In return, I promise to hold myself to the same bar: if you present an argument that is clearly superior to mine, I should adopt your position as quickly as possible.

Notice that the condition here demands clarity: it only applies when one argument is clearly superior to the other. An example of this is if I back my argument with data. "Ten people were confused when presented with design A, but none were confused when presented with design B. Therefore we should adopt design B." You'd think that there's no way to argue against this statement, but you'd be surprised. Stubborn people find a way.

Can an argument be clearly superior to another in the absence of data? Yes, it certainly can. "Don't put that tank of water on that ledge by the servers, someone might knock it down as they pass by."

Stubbornness shows itself in how people respond to arguments. A non-stubborn response to the tank of water argument above would be "it's only going to be here for 5 minutes", or "the odds of someone knocking it down is low since nobody comes here anyway". Notice that there's an implicit acceptance that spilling water on servers are bad. A stubborn person's response would be to ignore the argument and its worldview entirely: "I want to put it here because it's closer to the flowers right outside the server farm."

This is the root of some extremely unproductive, frustrating arguments.

"But if the water falls, we'd lose $20k worth of servers and potentially a week of downtime!"

"I want to put the bucket here because I'm tired of always carrying the bucket of water up from the toilets."

"It's too dangerous to put it there, why not put it downstairs, near the stairs instead?"

"That's still too far. I'm sick of carrying the bucket that far." And on it goes, in circles.

If this seems ridiculous to you, replace "don't put the water near the servers" with "don't code that component that way; embedding the model in your view would cause the two to be tightly coupled." A non-stubborn response would accept the implicit worldview in that statement — i.e. that embedding a model in a view results in a tight coupling, and that coupling is bad. So I'm perfectly fine with an argument that goes "we don't have time to code this better, this fix is due tomorrow", or even "I don't see how this causes tight coupling". I may still think it's wrong, but I won't think you're stubborn. We can have a lively debate about it, which means that we're making progress. And if I lose that argument, no matter. It means that the better decision prevails.

The response that I cannot accept: "I think doing it this way is easier." Any response that ignores the main thrust of my argument is one where both parties talk past each other. More often than not, this devolves rapidly into a frustrating circular disagreement, where both parties go round and round unproductively.

I don't really understand why people react like this. Over the years, some of my friends have told me that such stubbornness is caused by pride or insecurity. But frankly I can't be bothered with the underlying reasons. My approach has always been to kick such people out of my organisation if possible, or to minimise the damage they can do.

I strongly suspect stubborn people are incompetent. Their inability to adapt to the realities of the world results in suboptimal decision-making. But regardless of whether it's caused by insecurity or ego, I find it too difficult to help them improve — or at least too difficult in a professional context. And so I avoid them like the plague.

[m13-elenaalexandrapantelimo-blog]

Another day, another week in review!

As i mentioned in my last post, we were working on the qualitative part of the study.  

First i will describe you more this part.

It is expected that the questionnaire survey will provide overall insights into barriers and drivers to vaccination in susceptible population groups. To further explore these insights and obtain a deeper understanding of the reasons behind these factors, qualitative studies in the form of individual interviews were conducted by me and Georgiana, after completion of the questionnaire survey.

The scope and purpose of these qualitative studies will be guided by the questionnaire survey outcomes. The target group were again parents or caregivers of confirmed measles cases in the current outbreak, aged 13 months or older at the time of the onset of measles, and doctors. The discussion guide will further explore the insights from the survey - barriers and drivers to vaccination in susceptible population groups- and obtain a deeper understanding of the reasons behind these factors. It should go deeper into and explore issues related to the three defined assumptions as to the reasons for suboptimal uptake: possible access issues, issues related to traveling and migration and hesitancy related to safety concerns and growing anti-vaccination communication, also online presence.

The discussion guide was developed by the two of us, based on the outcome of the questionnaire survey. It was shared with all stakeholders for review before finalisation. In-depth interviews were organised in Bucharest, Arad, and Timisoara, cities with a high burden of measles cases. Participants, both patients and doctors were selected from those cases included in the survey. All the discussion was recorded.

The qualitative data analysis involved the identification, examination, and interpretation of patterns and themes in textual data. The scope was to determine how these patterns and themes help answer the research questions. After the data was structured, the information, keyword and main ideas were interpreted and classified using different presentation methods such as tables or visual schemes.

On the other hand, i am also very interested to tell you more about the experience that we had during this process.

We start doing our interviews in Arad. We woke up in a morning, ready to spend another day at the office, as we knew that we will leave the city in the weekend for doing interviews. But it was not exactly like that. We were told to go home, because in the evening we will take the train to Arad. So that was the moment when all the hurry and stress begun. Don’t get me wrong, we were more than excited to leave all the noise and stress from Bucharest, but we had nothing prepared. So, very fast, we start looking for a hotel room, for both cities Arad and Timisoara, and out of nowhere we are in train, leaving Bucharest.

After a very, very long night in the train, with around 30 minutes of sleeping we are in the train station, around 7 o’clock in the morning. In a short time we were supposed to start our first interview. We planned at least to go in the hotel room to take a shower, to change our clothes, and then leave together. The interview with the first doctor and the two patients of him was in the country side. Trying to be very positive, we were looking for transportation for going in the rural area. What a surprise?! It was not possible to find a bus going there. After Georgiana spent more than an hour in the telephone trying to find a solution with no positive result, we concluded that the only option was to get a taxi. Which was a very expensive option. In all of that time we were sitting on a bench in the train station. Because i don’t what to bore you with all the details, i will get directly to the part when we finished our first 3 interviews in the rural area. At 6 o’clock in the afternoon we had our second interview, in the urban area. Let me point out that our first meal, was at 9 o’clock in the evening. No meal, no break, no sleep for almost 24 hours. :D. Next day, we woke up at 6 in the morning to catch the train for going in the next city, Timisoara. The experience from there was almost the same, but a bit better. We decided to split, Georgiana left immediately with a car in the rural area to do the interviews, and i stayed in the city to do the rest of interviews. The good part is that we finish early so we had the rest of the day for ourselves. So Georgiana slept until the evening and i went out to meet some of my friends from high school. By the end of the day, we were both felt better. We had a nice evening in one of my favourite cities from Romania.

Some thoughts about the interviews. 

Doing the qualitative part is very exciting for me, as this is my favourite part from a research. For me, a challenging part was the duration of the interview, with both the doctors and patients. We had a target of 1 and a half hour with patients and 40 minutes more or less, with the doctors. In the rural area, the parents we talked to had a limited level of education. They found most of our questions, difficult to answer even if we tried to do them as simple as possible, and easy to respond. They had a hard time in expressing themselves. They seemed to be scared of our presence and of our questions and some of them even asked us at the end of the interview if they will have problems because of their answers and if the police will come to their home. It was very hard to maintain the conversation, and the total time of the interview was a bit too short compared with the given one. I have to say, that i was a bit frustrated because i consider that organisation was not good at all. We had to hurry every second, we had no time to get to know those families better, and also they had no time to get to know us, so they can feel more comfortable in talking to us. Some of the doctors, also, gave us very short answers, didn’t elaborate on anything, and were in hurry all the time, especially in Bucharest. 

All in all, it was a very interesting experience for me, and i consider that i have learned many important things and aspects and i feel more prepared for future tasks on this subject.

#Timisoara Arad adventures whatanexperience work internship

[jodyedgarus]

Who Didn’t Expect This Final Four?

gfoster (Geoff Foster, sports editor): Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s Final Four chat! After the chalk prevailed in the first weekend, the second weekend finally provided some upsets. In the Elite Eight, three of four underdogs won outright, and the fourth, Purdue, probably should have won — but Virginia’s last-second heroics and overtime win make the Cavs the lone No. 1 seed left in the tournament. What was the biggest surprise of the weekend?

jplanos (Josh Planos, contributor): I think we should just cede the floor to Neil, who can discuss his perfect Final Four choices:

Things are looking pretty good for my bracket in the @FiveThirtyEight office pool… pic.twitter.com/SShnREa7pU

— Neil Paine (@Neil_Paine) March 31, 2019

jakelourim (Jake Lourim, contributor): If you look at last week’s chat, that makes Neil Captain Obvious, right?

neil (Neil Paine, senior sports writer): I wish I could say I had a fancy analytical model to make these picks, but I spent an entire podcast segment saying I was selectively ignoring stats and picking with my gut. The most anti-FiveThirtyEight way to get a perfect Final Four possible.

jplanos: I think the big winner is Under Armour getting two Final Four teams, but Duke (the top overall seed) falling probably takes the cake.

neil: Yeah, Duke losing before the Final Four has to be the headline surprise, I think.

Although one could make an easy case that the Blue Devils were lucky to even make it as far as they did…

gfoster: Were you that surprised by Duke losing? That game had the smallest spread of the last four, and Duke had aggressively flirted with death against Virginia Tech and UCF.

jplanos: I wasn’t because Michael Avenatti called it, but the Blue Devils were the Icarus of the tournament. It felt like they trailed at halftime of nearly every game.

neil: This Duke team was fascinating because, in terms of talent, nobody can match that group. And when Zion was taking over, it was difficult to envision how they could lose. Yet they did not consistently play to their abilities, particularly in this tournament. Even in those close wins, they left you wanting more.

jplanos: Shoutout to Alex O’Connell getting the start and finishing with three total minutes. When was the last time a starter finished with less than five minutes played and wasn’t injured or ejected?

gfoster: The story before the tournament was that Michigan State got handed an awful draw because the Spartans won the Big Ten tourney and still got put in Duke’s region. Now I wonder whether it was Duke that got the bad draw.

Can Cassius Winston one-man-army his way to a title? We’ve seen versatile point guards do this before in March Madness.

jplanos: He’s this season’s Kemba Walker. He started off pretty tepid against Duke and then exploded for 20 points and 10 assists, with four steals and one turnover, which, when you consider the ball is effectively always in his hands and he was lined up against an on-ball hound in Tre Jones, is absurd. I came away extremely impressed.

neil: Winston also got some help when he needed it late against Duke. Xavier Tillman had 19 in the game, and Kenny Goins overcame a horrendous shooting game to make a huge shot in the final minute.

jakelourim: Winston really can do it all. He’s had to do so much since Michigan State lost Joshua Langford in December, and through the Big Ten season, Big Ten tournament and then this weekend, I kept waiting for the Spartans to run out of magic. But they haven’t. It seemed throughout Sunday that Winston always knew the right play to make, and Duke didn’t. What was up with Zion not taking the last shot(s) in the final minute?

jplanos: The RJ Barrett Show seemed like a suboptimal approach down the stretch.

neil: People were really killing Barrett for taking so many of Duke’s final shots.

jakelourim: I did think that Michigan State had the best game plan (outside of Syracuse and the 2-3 zone, which is unique) for slowing down Zion. Tillman was outstanding on defense and made himself a lot of money on Sunday.

neil: Barrett also missed the free throw he was supposed to make, and made the one he was supposed to miss.

Sheesh.

After the VT-Duke game, RJ Barrett joked about Ahmed Hill’s missed chance at the end of the game.

Tonight he had a chance to tie the game at the end, but in his own words “he missed it, sheesh” pic.twitter.com/U3Yn40RwWm

— Matej Sis (@MatejS247) March 31, 2019

gfoster: MSU tends to struggle in the third weekend: eight Final Fours now but just one title for Tom Izzo. Is Michigan State essentially the 1990s Atlanta Braves? Loads of playoff success and the one token title to ward off Geoff making Buffalo Bills comparisons.

^ Third-person alert.

neil: I think Izzo was motivated to take back the “best performance vs. seed expectations” crown from Jim Boeheim.

Izzo’s teams have a long history of exceeding expectations en route to the Final Four, but maybe that’s why they don’t win titles. Overachieving can only get you so far.

jakelourim: It has always seemed to me that the talent differential has caught up to Michigan State in some of those Final Fours. I thought it was interesting that Tom Izzo said privately before the 2009 title game that if the Tyler Hansbrough/Ty Lawson UNC team played well, Michigan State would lose. “There’s just more talent there,” Izzo said. (And MSU did lose.) But if the talent didn’t catch up to the Spartans against Duke, when will it happen?

jplanos: Zion was clearly gassed, but he also was unquestionably the team’s best option on offense. And then he … stopped getting the ball. I was surprised that Coach K didn’t dial up any isolations for him over the final possessions or demand some sort of clear-out.

gfoster: At least Duke has Zion and Barrett for three more years where they can continue to grow as upperclassmen and take home multiple championships…….

neil: LOL

jplanos: My question is: Can we still get a Zion cam? Can we watch the kid ink his shoe deal during the Final Four?

gfoster: It is frustrating we don’t get more college Zion. He’s so entertaining.

jakelourim: It’s fair to wonder if/when we’ll ever see another college player like him again, right, with the NBA apparently set to change the one-and-done rule in 2022?

jplanos: I can’t remember seeing a team win an Elite Eight game (or any NCAA Tournament game) having made just two free throws, like Michigan State did. **cue Sports-Reference search**

neil: It’s actually astonishing when you look at the stats of that game in general that MSU won.

Duke shot better on FGs, 3Ps and FTs and had more rebounds. The turnovers were the only main category where Duke lost, and they lost big.

jplanos: Full transparency: I was ready to call curtains when the Blue Devils had that 21-5 run in the opening half.

jakelourim: What was stunning to me was that Duke turned the ball over 17 times. (Back to the point of “If they play well, they’ll win” — they did not play well.) Michigan State is 342nd in defensive turnover rate at 15 percent, according to Ken Pomeroy, and that’s counting Sunday’s game.

neil: Which just lent more credence to the idea that the only team talented enough to beat Duke was … Duke.

gfoster: Let’s talk about what’s not as entertaining: Texas Tech’s defensive domination. The Red Raiders made Michigan shoot like my JV basketball team when the bench had been emptied in the final minutes. Then did a similar suffocation of Gonzaga, holding the Bulldogs and the nation’s most efficient offense to just 69 points.

jplanos: The Red Raiders indeed smothered Michigan and then turned the second half of their win over Gonzaga into a rock fight. To see the nation’s most efficient offense reduced to 32 second-half points and 16 total turnovers was really something.

neil: According to Ken Pomeroy’s ratings, Texas Tech is the nation’s best defensive team. The Red Raiders certainly played like it.

jplanos: If you had told me that Texas Tech would advance to the Final Four on a terrible Jarrett Culver shooting performance (5-of-19 from the field, 2-of-8 from three), I would have laughed in your face.

neil: Or that they would win despite Rui Hachimura having a pretty good game (22 points).

jplanos: It really seemed like the Zags missed the part of the game plan detailing turnovers. Texas Tech ranks 11th in opponent turnover percentage, according to KenPom, and lives by the deflection, especially on entry passes. It seemed like there were 10 bounce passes into the post that were immediate turnovers. YOU CAN’T POCKET PASS THIS TEAM.

jakelourim: (Just finished that sports-reference search, Josh: No team has won an Elite Eight game with two free throws or fewer since at least 2011.)

jplanos: You know who didn’t show up for the Wolverines? Two upperclassmen: Charles Matthews and Zavier Simpson.

Simpson finished 0-5 against Texas Tech with one assist and four turnovers. Not exactly what you’re expecting from a second-team all-conference player. And in the final game of his college career, Matthews had a team-high five turnovers and finished 3-9 from the field and 0-4 from 3-point land.

gfoster: Let’s put it this way and move on: Michigan’s performance in the Sweet 16 was the worst I’ve ever seen a basketball team play.

jplanos: LOL

neil: And you watched that UConn-Butler final from a few years back.

gfoster: I generally don’t like to talk about blown calls. But the Tariq Owens block play against Gonzaga was a pretty bad one to miss at a key moment:

Tariq Owens was out of bounds. Wow. pic.twitter.com/6QD8tK8OWi

— Kyle Boone (@Kyle__Boone) March 31, 2019

It was frustrating that it was never reviewed. Isn’t this exactly what replay in basketball is for?

jplanos: Not a great tournament across the board for officiating out-of-bounds calls.

Hmmm. Purdue’s Carsen Edwards was …

Out of bounds

Fouled

An unwitting co-conspirator in Tennessee getting jobbed#Sweet16 #MarchMadness #BoilerUp #GoVols

pic.twitter.com/yfvEF6Zyr4

— SBR Sports Picks (@SBRSportsPicks) March 29, 2019

jakelourim: Michigan’s loss to Texas Tech generated the Wolverines’ seventh-worst offensive efficiency rating of the KenPom era and fourth-worst under John Beilein.

jplanos: I don’t know what being put in a straightjacket feels like, but I imagine it’s similar to playing the Red Raiders.

gfoster: Virginia is now the betting favorite in the tournament at 3-2. Would you have guessed that the Hoos would be the lone ACC No. 1 seed to make it through? It wasn’t long ago when I was momentarily planning how FiveThirtyEight would react to a UVA loss to Gardner-Webb.

jplanos: I certainly wouldn’t have. If we get a Virginia-Texas Tech national title game, will next year’s NCAA Tournament even be televised? And will it set back college basketball 15 years?

gfoster: First one to 50 points wins!

neil: I think Virginia also benefited from a relatively easy path to Minneapolis. According to our power ratings, the rest of the South contained the eighth, 10th and 16th best teams in the Sweet 16.

jplanos: Considering the moment, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more impressive baseball-style pass than the one Kihei Clark (A FRESHMAN) beamed to Mamadi Diakite for Virginia’s buzzer-beater against Purdue. That was a rocket.

What an incredible finish to regulation. Mamadi Diakite sends us to overtime after time expires, and (1) Virginia lives on against (3) Purdue!

(

: @marchmadness) #MarchMadness pic.twitter.com/1J7YIOJgSI

— TSN (@TSN_Sports) March 31, 2019

jakelourim: Virginia hasn’t been particularly impressive in any of its four games — not like the Hoos were during the regular season — but it does seem like experience and chemistry won out in the regionals after a chalk-filled first weekend. I keep thinking about the moment at the end of the Michigan State-Duke game when Xavier Tillman motioned for Cassius Winston to hurry down the floor and run out the clock. That’s a savvy move.

Watch Xavier give a quick nod to Cassius to "go" before the final in-bounds play. pic.twitter.com/eJciDOIhYb

— Eric Pratt (@MessengerSports) March 31, 2019

neil: (And we can really talk savvy when we discuss Auburn’s Jared Harper…)

jakelourim: Mike Krzyzewski talked all weekend about how minor injuries disrupted the continuity of his freshman-led team, and I could feel eyes rolling out of heads. But does a freshman core that’s only played a handful of games together have the ability to do that? I’m not sure.

neil: Right. It seems like a big legacy of this one-and-done era will be of mostly unmet expectations for these freshman-star-laden teams.

gfoster: We joke about how boring the Cavs are (and make no mistake, they are mostly drying paint basketball), but the Purdue-Virginia game might have been my favorite of the tournament. Before overtime, Carsen Edwards’s game was unreal. It must be discouraging to get that type of performance from your star in the Elite Eight and still lose.

jplanos: Edwards was a one-man wrecking ball the entire tourney and, frankly, it feels unfair that he had to lose. I think there’s a sound argument to be made that it’s less than optimal to have one player responsible for nearly all of your offensive production, but man was it entertaining.

In arguably the two biggest games of his life, Edwards put up 71 points on 47 percent shooting from the field and went 15-33 from 3-point land. The degree of difficulty on most of those shots was superhuman.

Also, long live Ryan Cline. That performance against Tennessee will get washed over because of Carsen and the excitement of the Elite Eight slate, but man…

jakelourim: It really was unfortunate that one of those teams had to lose. Because on the other side, you have Tony Bennett trying to exorcise his Final Four demons and erase the memory of last year. He has made a tremendously successful career out of coaching the pack-line defense and forcing opponents to take shots like the ones Purdue took Saturday night. And then Carsen Edwards goes and does that.

gfoster: Kyle Guy stepped up. If he doesn’t repeatedly answer Edwards’s threes with ones of his own, UVA is gone.

neil: It was unfortunate that Edwards started to run out of gas at the end of OT. He missed a heat check late — which he’d earned the right to take, given the previous bombs — and had a tough turnover on a pass out of bounds in the final seconds. He’d been so brilliant that you expected him to keep making the superhuman look routine.

jplanos: I usually abide by a never-trust-a-man-with-two-first-names mantra, but I’m willing to make an exception for Kyle Guy.

No other Boilermaker had more than 7 points in that game. Yikes.

jakelourim: Good point, Josh. Nobody else even took more than seven shots! And that’s including five extra OT minutes.

neil: Edwards personally scored 56 percent of Purdue’s total — which was the second-most points UVA gave up in a game all season.

jakelourim: He also scored more points than Coppin State and William & Mary did as TEAMS against Virginia.

gfoster: The last team in the Final Four is Bruce Pearl’s Auburn Tigers, who are the lowest remaining seed. A lot of people wrote off their chances of beating UK when Chuma Okeke when down. How do you think they will fare against UVA?

jplanos: I’d like to take this time to apologize for openly scoffing at Geoff picking Auburn to advance out of the Sweet 16. I even wrote it down in my diary and laughed!

jakelourim: This thought stuck in my head all of Friday night and Sunday afternoon: Remember how much of a spectacular mess Auburn was in the final seconds of its first-round game against New Mexico State? I did not watch that team and think, “Yeah, they’ll probably get to the Final Four.”

jplanos: This weekend was a big one for the EVERYBODY COUNTED US OUT crowd. I count all four teams citing it, which means, yep, that slogan remains undefeated.

jakelourim: Yes, we’re deep into “Why Not Us?” season.

neil: To your question Geoff, Bryce Brown and Jared Harper are going to have to keep scoring! The backcourt duo combined for 50 points against UK, with each taking turns taking over the game.

Special props to Auburn, btw, for avenging its 27-point loss at Kentucky from a few weeks earlier.

jplanos: I love that Virginia has to go through Auburn, a team with a style that must be anathema to the Hoos.

gfoster: Also this game served as a PSA against making banners where you openly mock injuries.

jplanos: If only we had known beforehand that Kentucky’s fan base has no limits…

jakelourim: Enjoyed that Bruce Pearl actually admitted to the popular strategy of “We’re going to get the ball to Jared and Bryce, and everyone else get the fuck out of the way.”

neil: It made sense. I am totally enamored with Harper in particular. He just has a sense of where everyone is on the court and what is the right play to make. Such a smart player.

jplanos: I think I fell in love with Auburn’s style this weekend. There was a slow-motion replay in the second half that captured an Auburn player swatting a Kentucky player’s shot at the rim while clearly mouthing “GIVE ME THAT SHIT,” and it was wonderful and emblematic of how the Tigers approach the game on both ends. Every play is a highlight to be made.

jakelourim: I also think this draw continues to favor Virginia. I don’t think Auburn is going to be the team to speed up Virginia in the semifinals, and in the final, neither Michigan State nor Texas Tech is going to bombard Virginia with unmatched athleticism, as Duke did in both of their regular-season meetings.

gfoster: So is that your prediction Jake?

jakelourim: Yes, my champion pick is still alive, so I’m sticking with Virginia.

jplanos: I like Virginia to advance and play Texas Tech, which will be … a game of basketball.

neil: I must keep my original predictions, so I’m taking UVA and MSU, with the Cavs winning it all.

gfoster: I’m riding Auburn!!!!! … for one more game. I think they do shoot their way past Virginia’s defense. And then lose to Michigan State in the final. And we all get our dream fulfilled of seeing more Tom Izzo dancing videos like this:

Tom Izzo… #FinalFour MOOD!@MSU_Basketball

#MarchMadnesspic.twitter.com/kvfGs8WOlO

— NCAA March Madness (@marchmadness) April 1, 2019

Check out our latest March Madness predictions.

from News About Sports https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/who-didnt-expect-this-final-four/

[funnythingshere0-blog]

Self-Driving Cars, Tires, and the Great National Stupidity

New Post has been published on https://funnythingshere.xyz/self-driving-cars-tires-and-the-great-national-stupidity/

Self-Driving Cars, Tires, and the Great National Stupidity

If you want to live an optimal life, don’t make suboptimal choices.

Alex Roy

Do you like being alive? I do. And I try to do as many things as possible to add years to my life. In quantity and quality. When I see a red-hot bbq grill, for example, I don’t lean over and press my face against it. Third degree burns might not be immediately fatal, but you don’t need to be Nostradamus to know the pain and scarring would be suboptimal. 

An optimal life requires common sense. For example, when a friend recently asked me if he should abandon his wife and children, relocate to Las Vegas, rent a Lamborghini, get some coke and a suite full of hookers, I said No, that would be a suboptimal set of decisions. Nothing could stop him, however. So I gave him the best advice I could.

“You will regret leaving your wife and kids,” I said. “And you will eventually go back to them. That would be an optimal outcome for a suboptimal decision. Let me share the advice my mother gave me when I hit rock bottom. Instead of buying cocaine, you should buy the finest scotch you can afford, and savor it. If you must sleep with escorts, never use a condom twice. Most importantly, if you must drive a sports car—especially a rental car—make sure it has the best possible tires, and always check the treadwear.”

My mother is very wise. I know what you’re thinking, how dare she condone such behavior, and how dare I pass on her twisted wisdom? It’s simple. If there were more mothers like mine, there would be fewer broken homes and drug overdoses, fewer STDs brought into relationships, and fewer car crashes due to stupidity.

Yes, stupidity. Let’s face it. When people say, Oh, I had a car accident, they’re lying—or worse, they’re just stupid. There are no car accidents. There are car crashes. An accident is an unforeseen event. The overwhelming majority of car crashes are single car events, which means they were the culmination of the driver’s poor choices. Poor choices lead to suboptimal outcomes.

Safety features are the reason people who have one car accident eventually have two. Or three. Safety features are what ignorant people use to avoid learning how to drive safely.

In my world, the translation is simple: Idiots get what they deserve. 

For example, I just witnessed this winter’s first snow hit New York City. Did I open the secret drawer in my closet, put on a tiger-striped T-shirt and chaps, and go cruising in my Morgan 3-Wheeler? No, I saved that outfit for another time. Also, no one makes snow tires for the Morgan. Even if someone did, I still wouldn’t trust them. Morgan ownership means your family can save money on your casket: A steel chassis wrapped in a wooden frame? Make one mistake and they can just bury you in it. What makes Morgans unique is that they don’t even pretend to be safe. The 3-wheeler lacks any safety options, which is why I’m so cautious in it. Safety features are the reason people who have one car accident eventually have two. Or three. Safety features are what ignorant people use to avoid learning how to drive safely.

Am I being harsh? That snowstorm brought NYC traffic to a standstill. Not me. I put on my winter boots and took the subway. When I got home I got on Twitter and marveled at the stupidity of people. I just bought a Tesla Model 3 with all-wheel drive, tweeted one idiot, and I got stuck in the snow. That tweet should shatter any notion of a correlation between wealth and intelligence. Teslas are expensive cars, but that one can afford a Tesla doesn’t mean one understands physics, the harshest of all mistresses.

In what universe are all-season tires sufficient for all seasons? The one where people trust words over common sense. All-season ≠ good in all seasons. All-season is a catch-all. A compromise. If all-seasons were great in snow, snow tires wouldn’t exist. If all-seasons were great summer tires, summer tires wouldn’t exist. All-seasons are the sneakers of tires. You wouldn’t wear sneakers instead of skis, or snowshoes to the beach. And yet people persist in the folly of using all-seasons through harsh winters. Then they crash. Sometimes they die.

These are not accidents, but inevitabilities. These are the consequences of ignoring common sense, the advice of experts, and trusting in mere words.

Take contraceptive jelly. I once had a girlfriend whose father was a doctor. After many months, I greeted him with Hello, Mr. Werner. He didn’t like that. I didn’t go to medical school, he said, so some boy trying to sleep with my daughter could call me anything other than doctor. He then launched into a tale of why those with actual knowledge deserve respect. Advanced degrees, he explained, are awarded to those who know the meaning of words laypeople use without understanding. That very morning he’d had a patient with an unexpected pregnancy. Why? Because rather than follow his instructions for the use of contraceptive jelly, she had smeared it on her morning toast and eaten it. Why did you eat it? he asked. Because, she said, it seemed easier than using it the other way.

The folly of trusting one’s life to words over the advice of experts is a characteristic of children and fools. Children have an excuse. Adults do not.

Which brings us to self-driving cars. Poor choices are the moral raison d’etre of self-driving cars. Every other justification pales in comparison. I have faith that technology can solve problems, and one of those problems is road safety. Someday, maybe, self-driving cars will work in most places, in most conditions. Between now and then, they will only work in some places, sometimes. The irony is that for self-driving cars to work in more places, say, places where it snows, they will need much better software….and snow tires. If, like our deluded friend in the Tesla, you don’t have snow tires, all-wheel drive isn’t going to help, and nor will self-driving technology. It’s almost inconceivable Tesla could ever enable “Full Self-Driving” in snowy conditions unless snow tires were installed, which would require a tire/car interface I’m pretty sure doesn’t exist on current Teslas.

Tesla’s aren’t magic. They’re cars like any other, and subject to the rules of Mother Physics, like every other.

If you want to drive in winter, buy snow tires. If you want to be driven in winter, whether by a human or self-driving technology that doesn’t exist yet, you will need snow tires. If you’re unwilling to buy them, your self-driving car won’t move in the winter. It won’t be able to, because the self-driving engineers are smarter than people who don’t believe in snow tires and won’t allow their self-driving tech to take the kind of risks idiots do every winter.

Which brings us back to square one. Safety isn’t merely an option one can buy. It’s a state of mind that starts with educating yourself as to the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. Education always leads to better outcomes, ignorance to the suboptimal. It’s the choice between winter driving a Morgan 3-wheeler in chaps or taking the subway, trusting Business Insider over Barrons, a trip to Vegas over family therapy, listening to marketing people over race car drivers, and eating contraceptive jelly instead of…well, you get the idea.

Don’t be an idiot. Death is suboptimal.

Editor-at-Large Alex Roy is also founder of Geotegic Consulting and the Human Driving Association, as well as host of The Autonocast. You can follow him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and buy his book, The Driver.

MORE TO READ

Source: http://www.thedrive.com/tech/24973/self-driving-cars-tires-and-the-great-national-stupidity

[lavadog]

SRMTHFG 20 Day Challenge: Day 3: Least Favorite Character

Okay, so here's the thing. When I saw today's challenge, I thought "Oh! That's easy. I've always disliked Jinmay and hated it when she showed up." But I wasn't just going to say so without explaining why, and I hadn't seen Chiro's Girl since a year or so after the show was canceled when Disney still had reruns of the episodes playing. So I rewatched it to refresh my memory.

But watching it again some ten years later, I found that the episode wasn't as bad as I remembered it being. The episode still has several things wrong with it, of course. But most of those mistakes can be attributed to the fact that it’s the first episode, and as with any show, it’s marked by the Characterization Marches On/Early Installment Weirdness tropes. We have "We can't activate the robot without Chiro" even though it is later established the whole team doesn't need to be there to pilot the robot (They can, just with suboptimal results), and "We don't keep secrets from the team" even though nobody told Chiro about Mandarin or Antauri's masters (And so on). We also have the first instance of the writers trying to balance Chiro the hero, and Chiro the teenage boy, and what better way to distract at teenage boy than a pretty girl? Chiro comes off as uncharacteristically dismissive of the monkeys in this episode, which is honestly pretty jarring compared to later episodes (Hence the Characterization Marches On trope), but also carries the tone of stereotypical teenage rebellion that the writers thankfully moved on from. We also have the the beginning of the off and on again weirdness of just how necessary each member of the team is at any given point in time. The monkeys are shown to be in trouble in this episode without Chiro there to help them out, and this is later reinforced by episodes like Magnetic Menace where Sprx not being there put the team off their game. But then we have episodes like Pit of Doom where the team apparently works just fine without Chiro there to help them out (Granted, there weren't as many formless in Pit of Doom for them to fight at once, but the point still stands).    

Chiro and Jinmay's romance in this episode is filled with almost painfully cliche dialogue, and we have that horribly contrived moment where Chiro is apparently so absorbed in staring at her that he can't hear Antauri calling him for help or see the formless driving by outside of the window, but it isn't as bad as it could have been. Chiro meeting Jinmay is a pretty cute scene, and so is their subsequent shyness when they first start hanging out with each other directly afterwards. The betrayal on Chiro's face when he thinks Jinmay was only hanging out with him to get into the robot hit me pretty hard too. Overall, Jinmay is pretty harmless in this episode, and there isn't really all that much to dislike about her.

But here's the thing. Chiro and Jinmay's romance doesn't age well. Their relationship starts off as a cliche. Chiro sees Jinmay and is instantly in love because Jinmay is a cute girl his age. They hang out for maybe an afternoon or so, and then have no truly significant interactions until perhaps Ghosts of Shuggazoom. And even then, they spend what little time they have together fighting Valina. Afterwards, we have the Hills have 5, but that's ruined by Jinmay being brainwashed for the majority of the episode and the two of them only interacting with each other for less than 30 seconds in the entire episode (When she's not brainwashed). Chiro and Jinmay obviously care about one another, but the majority of their relationship seems to operate on tell rather than show. We get the implication that Chiro and Jinmay hang out a lot off screen, but we don't personally get to see any real relationship form between them. And as such, none of it really counts. How am I supposed to believe in their relationship if I barely see them spend any time together?

Because they don't show it, a lot of the writers attempts to prove to us just how much Chiro and Jinmay care about each other feels presumptuous, especially when the monkeys are on hand. Two specific examples that come to mind are in Savage Lands and Ghosts of Shuggazoom. In Savage Lands, the monkeys finally catch up to Chiro as he is trying to rebuild Antauri, and try to get him to come home because in their minds Antauri is gone and Chiro isn't in his right mind. When they initially fail to convince him, they try to contact Jinmay, like just seeing her is going to make him abandon Antauri and go with them because hormones or something. In Ghosts of Shuggazoom, Jinmay is the one to get through to him once he is turned into a wraith, and it's treated like she was perhaps the only one that could have done it because true love or something (Yes, I'm aware that the monkeys were all passed out at the time, but we've seen them power though this when the situation has called for it in the past). Never mind that the monkeys are there. Never mind that the monkeys are his family and that it’s been repeatedly shown just how much they love each other. Never mind that Chiro would literally move mountains for them and what we've seen them go through time and time again for each other. No, clearly only Jinmay could do it because of that one afternoon they shared with each other that one time.

Back to the matter at hand though. Is Jinmay my least favorite character? Ultimately, no. I think they could have done a way better job developing her relationship with Chiro and her as a character (Like Chiro, we know nothing of her past), and I think she mostly exists to be a plot device (I've gone into this in a previous post), but I don't think she's the worst the show has to offer. I can't even really find it in myself to dislike her all that much.

So who is my least favorite character, then? After thinking about it for some time, I'd have to say that it's Valina, and perhaps Ma and Pa Shinko by extension. Ma and Pa Shinko have to be the most contrived villains the show has ever offered us. I mean really. A cult in Shuggazoom City that worships the Skeleton King, the same guy who has repeatedly tried to wipe them from existence in some way or another? Who did horrible things to them like make them dig the Pit of Doom or turned them into mindless zombies? It doesn't make any sense. The best motivation the writers offer us is that Ma and Pa Shinko want power for some reason. Which, again, they wouldn't have gotten if the Skeleton King had managed to succeed in his plans at any point in time. At best, the only excuse I can think of for this so called Secret Society to exist is to inform the Hyper Force about plans to resurrect the Skeleton King, which kicks off the plot of the last three episodes. But the writers could have done this a number of other ways that didn't involve something this ridiculous.

Valina herself isn't that bad of a character or villain. But she makes for a very weak main villain compared to what we've had in previous seasons. In Seasons 1 & 2, we had the Skeleton King. He has an interesting backstory as the once good Alchemist who created the monkeys to stop the evil being that he was becoming, and is clever/dangerous enough to actually succeed in his ultimate plan despite our heroes best efforts. Said plan is to awaken a Dark One, a member of the same ancient evil race that corrupted him to begin with, and although he ultimately dies in the process of doing so (Or at least, loses his individuality), his success gives us the awakened Dark One as the new main villain of the series for Season 3. After Season 3, I couldn't help but wonder how they were going to top having an ancient evil as the main villain. I imagined something even worse happening, like a portal to the Dark One Dimension being opened and multiplying last season's problem 1000x fold. But instead, we got the seemingly one-shot villain from Savage Lands, and despite being the main villain, she seems to almost be an after thought in her own season. She only appears in 5/13 episodes, and she's only a legitimate threat in 4/5 of those episodes (Mandarin is the one using her powers in Night of Fear). Of these remaining four episodes, only 1/4 has her enacting some evil plan that isn't directly related to her ultimate goal of resurrecting the Skeleton King. When we do finally get to resurrecting the Skeleton King (Which was foreshadowed back when Mandarin managed to save the skull in Season 3), she can't even actually accomplish it on her own without the BS that is Sprx turning evil and basically doing it for her (Which by itself is jarring because it's suddenly as if Sprx is stronger than the rest of the team combined).

As a whole, Valina is a villain that is built up as being very threatening, but in practice is easily defeated when it comes down to a direct confrontation, usually by Chiro. This can be seen in both Savage Lands and Ghosts of Shuggazoom, where Chiro basically has enough of her shit and beats her in one or two shots (Heck, in Night of Fear she's still trapped in her medallion from Ghosts of Shuggazoom). In the end, she was apparently so insignificant that the Skeleton King killed her off, supposedly never to appear in Season 5.

If she wasn't the main villain of the season, I think she would have made for a good regular villain. But as the main villain she's disappointing and leads to a lack of focus in Season 4. Being connected to the most contrived villains of the series doesn't help her, and I can't help but wonder if the lack of focus she brought was what helped get the show canceled before we could get a satisfying conclusion.

#srmthfg #20 day challenge #chiro #jinmay #valina #ma and pa shinko

[smashwerx-blog]

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[maximumstrangerengineer-blog]

a new life resolution

As I write this, it’s just past midnight on the 25th of August. I’m eighteen years old, male, a fresh uni student halfway through his second semester and in the middle of test season. I’m jacked up from a red bull I drank far too late considering I have severe insomnia and I’m here with a fresh tumblr account to do something that hopefully marks a new beginning. This post here is a resolution to make this moment the most important in my life. This moment is where I will turn everything around. What am I talking about?

Throughout my entire, short, privileged life I’ve gotten away with not doing any work. I have been rewarded immensely for doing nothing. In primary school I had nothing particularly special about me until one day I started reading at home. Maths, science, history, all little digestible books until I was devouring one or more a day. I was seven years old at the time, and this instantly put me ahead in school. I am naturally intelligent, I will admit that. My parents are both extremely well educated and have a high enough IQ and a combination of these factors have always meant that I’ve been the smart one. The fact that I had all these books to read should be a sign of the kind of family I grew up in.

All this reading put me on a trajectory that is only just now starting to end. I was advanced an entire year in school and I was still always top of my class. I was put ahead another half year after entering high school and still no change. Between all the books and getting online at a young age I was reading more, writing more, thinking more, and being exposed to more ideas than anyone else my age and it showed. School never showed me anything that surprised me. I took up economics at the end of my high school career and in my first month of studying it, I placed in the top 40 of a nationwide economics test. The reason? It was multi choice. But none of this is to brag.

What this has all meant is that I graduated from adolescence and high school with inflated expectations of myself and no work ethic. I live in a country that’s basically an island with a strong water culture and I don’t know how to swim. The reason? Staying afloat and moving through the water was hard, and as a kid I always just stopped trying whenever there was resistance. It’s that fact and not any of the earlier ones that I fear will come to define me. I have no resilience. I’ve never needed it. I have naturally low neuroticism and even lower conscientiousness, and I have no discipline or work ethic to back it up. Nobody has ever called me out on this.

In my final year of high school I went into exams having done no study or preparation, just like I had done every year. And for the first time, I bombed. Even then, the fact that I had been advanced a half year meant that I graduated with no problems, and one university even offered me a modest scholarship ($8,000) for my efforts. Yet where does this all leave me?

I’m an extremely ambitious person that acts like a deadbeat. I have little emotional range to care about this and I have even less discipline to do something about it. I have not accomplished a single thing in my life that I am proud of. I have let pass by every opportunity, given up on every goal I have made for myself. Now that I’m here in university with student loans building, the hardest workload I have ever had and nobody to watch me, I need to turn things around. I’m still coasting on a B average. I’m not happy with that. It’s not who I’m meant to be. Further complicating that, I don’t know if I can make it through the four years of my degree if I don’t catch a windfall from a scholarship. Finding one with these grades will be impossible.

So why am I writing all this into a tumblr post that no-one will read? This is my will and confession, this is my resolution for a new life. I’ve never stuck to anything before, but I insist on this. This is my only hope to become better, to be the person who I want to be, the person I should be, and the me I can be. I’m rapidly running out of slack on this rope and space in this room so I need to declare this now.

I’m going to start with small changes. This is to prove to myself that I can stay with goals, and to begin building discipline and mastery of my domain into my schedule. I have three goals.

One: I will not take any hot showers for the rest of the year. Cold water only for me. I’ve done this before and I know I can do it. To be honest, I don’t think pure cold water has any advantages at all over starting a shower hot and then turning it cold - In my personal experience, the latter has far more benefits, but this is exactly why this resolution is so important. Getting into cold water sucks. The fact that it’s suboptimal gives me an easy excuse, and this option is distinctly binary. Either I’ve done this or I haven’t. So, this is the first step. No more hot water for me, except when I wash my face in the sink.

Two: I will do one hundred push ups every day. This again shouldn’t be a big deal, I’ve done this before but once again haven’t stuck to it. It has been a while since I last did pushups on this scale. I also have a slight shoulder injury that makes it extremely uncomfortable, even painful to do pushups but I have a feeling that the addition exercise will make this better, not worse. If this exacerbates my shoulder too much I may have to reconsider this, but for now I’ll push through until it becomes a serious issue. This also will be until the end of the year.

Three: Getting my 40XP on Duolingo every day. Another one that’s binary, shouldn’t be overly difficult, and the fact that this tracks it for me is even better. I’ll be “learning” Japanese and Russian. Much like the first resolution, I do have my doubts about how effective this is, but it has another important detail. The fact that Duolingo doesn’t have any teaching, instead just throwing you into quizzes and questions with sometimes glaringly obvious answers means that I will be in a constant state of intellectual discomfort. This feeling is something that I need to embrace and habitually blow through. Having the head start that I did early in life means that I’m too unfamiliar with this sort of resistance and I’m so used to just giving up at the first sign of difficulty. That won’t do. I need to stretch and push myself and grow, and this will be on way of doing this.

These goals are all fairly arbitrary. Making a post on a blog seen by nobody doesn’t really add much in the way of accountability. What that means is that this is all on me.

I know that if I don’t change things I will never be happy. I know that I’m young and I can not only make this radical shift in my lifestyle but also profit greatly from it. But I need this. And it’s this or a lifetime of discontent.

Either this change happens. I refuse to leave myself any other option. I swear by myself that I will see this through. Let’s make this the most important moment of my life.

#self improvement #discipline #student #blog

[ronaldmrashid]

One Of The Biggest Financial Mistakes Early Retirees Make

After five years of early retirement, I realized I made a serious mistake that cost me between $500,000 – $1,000,000. Let me tell you what happened so you don’t do the same.

When I left Corporate America at the age of 34, I thought I was done earning more money for good. Below is the income budget I put together in 2012 to support us for the rest of our lives. Expenses are not listed because we’ve never spent more than we’ve made. But perhaps I’ll do a thorough analysis in a future post.

First passive income projection for retirement 2012

Our base case retirement income scenario was to make $78,000 gross or $54,600 net a year in passive income and live a simple life back in Hawaii for the rest of our lives. If things went really well in the stock and real estate markets, we calculated an optimistic annual passive income scenario of $117,600 gross and $94,080 net.

Related: Which Is A Better Investment: Real Estate Or Stocks?

At the time, we were probably spending about $100,000 a year to live in high cost San Francisco. By moving to a paid off house in Honolulu, we’d have no problem living within our means with a child on a much lower income.

But if we did have a problem living on less or wanted to live it up more, we had fallback options through Active Income and Bonus Income. These were also divided into Base Case and Blue Sky with $15,000/month and $50,000+/month gross totals, respectively. It’s always fun to dream about what could be.

If you’re wondering about the line items in the Bonus Income column, those are all the things I already had, but didn’t count on to make anything extra. For example, my Rich Hot Spouse was there to provide the love she has always provided. Anything more and I classified it as utopia. Aww.

Today, more than five years later, we still live in San Francisco and I’ve done all the things listed in the Active Income chart. Although my income grew in retirement, I did NOT change my investment risk profile. This was a major mistake because a major bull market ensued. 

Early Retirees Should Invest With More Flexibility

If you retire early, know that you have the ability to make more money than you could ever imagine working a full-time job. This surprise is the biggest reason why the fear of running out of money in early retirement is completely overblown. If you have the wherewithal to retire early, you have the wherewithal to lock down your expenses or make a killing pursuing a dream.

From the years 2012 – 2014 I was stuck with a “4% mentality.” In other words, if all I could earn was 4% a year on my retirement nut, I’d be happy because at this rate, I’d never touch principal. By not touching principal, I could leave some money to people in need after I die.

Because of my complacency and fear of having to go back to work, I proceeded to invest much more conservatively than I should have. As a result, my public investment portfolios comprised of stocks and bonds underperformed the S&P 500 by several percentage points per year. For reference, the S&P 500 was up 13.5% in 2012, 29.5% in 2013, and 11.4% in 2014.

Yes, I know I should compare a stock/bond portfolio only to the S&P 500, but I like to compare my performance to the top performing asset class of the two to feel the pain.

Despite my public investments comprising only ~25% of my net worth, I was still unable to invest aggressively like a 28 year old who has only seen a bull market. I kept reminding myself of the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, the dotcom bubble of 2000, and the housing implosion of 2008-2009 as reasons to stay conservative.

Lesson #1: Just because you close your eyes doesn’t mean the world can’t see you. When investing, try to think beyond your own financial situation. The stock market doesn’t care if you are retired. What it cares about is corporate growth and profitability. There are always companies to invest in which because of different phases in their growth cycles can offer much greater returns. Projecting your own financial situation onto other investments may adversely affect your returns.

In Spring 2014 a catalyst for change happened. My 7 year, 4.1% yielding CD was finally coming due and I had to put the money to work. Originally I was going to just reinvest the proceeds in another 7-year CD, but the best 7-year CD rate I could find at the time was about 2.2%. Disappointed, I decided to look elsewhere.

After seeing Blue Sky income growth, I realized that my base income assumption of $78,000 – $117,600 a year in retirement had been too conservative. Thus, I decided to do a 180 and aggressively leverage up. Specifically, I took on a $1 million mortgage to buy a $1.24M fixer upper in Golden Gate Heights while already carrying a $1 million mortgage for my primary residence.

Think about how egregious this move was from a risk management perspective. What I did was akin to buying $1.24M of one stock on $1M margin. If the stock went down 20%, I’d be wiped out. I suddenly believed I was some invincible hot shot who couldn’t miss. Yet I had no job, just a belief that my online business would stay at an elevated level.

The last time I made such a move was back in 2007. Not only did I lose all my vacation property equity a couple years later, but I also suffered through a 50% income haircut as company bonuses were slashed. It’s funny how after a long enough period passes, we dismiss our mistakes.

With this new home purchase in 2014, I figured I could make up for my underperformance the previous three years by taking on leveraged single asset exposure risk, while already having three other properties in the SF Bay Area.

It was only through luck, some self-published propaganda, and a bit of foresight that Golden Gate Heights and the western portion of San Francisco turned out to be a region in high demand three years later.

Lesson #2: When you finally admit that your investment strategy was suboptimal, try not to go crazy by over-investing to catch up. Taking on leverage to invest, co-mingling funds, putting up safe assets as collateral for riskier investment, and aggressively inflating your lifestyle are the main reasons for financial destruction. Instead, slowly increase exposure through at least three tranches over a six month period. Just note that even if you reach an “optimal” investment allocation, there will always be people who make even more. 

I’m currently in the process of de-risking in order to make sure I don’t lose all my gains. The three year double leveraged gamble feels like I went into a casino, found $30,000 worth of chips in a trash can, bet it all on black five times in a row and won each time. With these proceeds, I’m allocating a large chunk of capital towards 3% – 4% yielding, A-rated or better, tax free municipal bonds with 17 – 23 year maturity periods so that the money will be there to pay for my son’s college education and then some.

But here’s the thing. I’m going back to my same super conservative investing style despite my income now being able to easily make up for losses in riskier assets. There used to be a time when my investments made more money than my income. Not any more. Therefore, in a bull market with excess cash flow, I should take more risk.

Lesson #3: You need to talk to someone about your investment plan. Despite being an intelligent, rational human being, investing money is an incredibly emotional and sometimes completely irrational process. We are naturally guided by greed and fear to the point where we go from one extreme to another. Over the long term, talking to a parent, friend, spouse or professional can help you make better investment decisions. Make sure you properly explain your investment thesis to someone. If you can’t properly argue your case, then chances are high you are investing according to your risk tolerance.  

The Biggest Error For Retirees

Poor risk management is absolutely one of the biggest financial errors early retirees make. We often bet too big when we aren’t supposed to, or invest too little when the opportunity is ripe. Steady recalibration is in order. I wish I could turn back the clock and realize in 2012 that just because I was jobless, didn’t mean that everybody else was in a precarious situation as well.

We need to set up an investing system similar to what I wrote in the post, A Better Dollar Cost Averaging Strategy. The problem is, even if you come up with an investing system that works for you, it still takes effort to follow your system!

For three months in 1H2017, I was too stressed to think about anything other than my pregnant wife and newborn. As a result, I neglected to take advantage of any stock market sell offs and follow my asset allocation objective of 50% stocks, 50% bonds for the year. Instead, I focused mainly on paying down mortgage debt and buying municipal bonds at par value because I didn’t have to think as much. I had already invested $250,000 in a real estate crowdfunding fund in January. My lack of focus has already cost me ~3% of performance compared to the S&P 500 in just half a year.

Automation is one of the reasons why so many people have done so well investing in real estate. Come hell or high water, some principal will get paid down each month. Automation is why I have no problems paying a marginal fee to a robo advisor. Life is always getting in the way, which is why renters who say they’ll simply “invest the difference” hardly ever keep up with homeowners.

If you don’t follow any of the three lessons above, then let me offer one catchall guideline for retirees when it comes to investing your money:

Invest 90% of your capital as if your life depends on it, because it does. For the remaining 10%, invest as if you were a 28 year old whipper snapper with your entire life ahead of you.

By following this guideline, you are protected from financial calamity while also potentially gaining exposure to higher performing assets that may supercharge your wealth in retirement.

Retirees, have you committed any of the errors I’ve made in this post? What type of financial errors or miscalculations have you made since retiring? For those who haven’t retired, have you not changed your investment risk profile as you’ve increased your income? I’ll be publishing my 2Q2017 investment review shortly so you can get a look at the numbers. 

from http://www.financialsamurai.com/one-of-the-biggest-financial-mistakes-early-retirees-make/

#Financial Samurai

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5 Hearthstone Best Legendary To Craft [Classic Cards]

Why Go Classic?

Legendary Classic Cards in Hearthstone has become a major topic due to their durability within the game. Other cards will rotate faster, so this small list is biased towards classic cards set. It is in your advantage to have more classic legendary cards. These will fit in most decks for a longer time. Moreover, it will help using your Arcane Dust more efficiently. You will not have to spend new Arcane Dust on every new Legendary and keep losing what you spent on the previous card. This small list of the Hearthstone best legendary cards to craft will also be biased towards neutral cards. It is a list for a broad audience regardless of what is you favourite hero. In my opinion, the more a card can do the better it is for any given set in any given situation. This is why this list of best legendary classics focuses on this kind of cards. Starting from bottom to top here are the top 5 Hearthstone best Legendary to craft:

5. Ysera

It is maybe the best rated card for any control style game. Perfect for late games, Ysera will draw for you card after card with each turn. It can easily make your opponent feel small and for good reasons. Ysera will bring an incomparable advantage to any deck against any opponent. Right after you spawn this dragon it will draw a dream card. You don’t have to wait for a turn and this is one other advantage that places Ysera on the bottom of this best Legendary Classic Cards in Hearthstone.

    4. Bloodmage Thalnos

  A card at a 2 cost per mana and 1/1 attack/defence, Thalnos is not to be judged by the price. No matter what is your deck built for, Thalnos is a must to have in your collection. For a two mana cost, it can actually make a great difference between winning and losing the match. Pulling this card out towards the end of the match is going to offer you the advantage to draw a card upon his killing. This means a card more than your opponent. A card which can bring destruction or at least to help you catch up with your opponent. Beyond that, two mana points out of ten will leave you with enough mana for other cards as well. Even more, he will add +1 to your spell damage. All of these for just two mana points! As you can see, Thalnos is also a valuable card and it deserves its spot on this top hearthstone cards list.

3. Kazakus

A truly unique card with an unique ability. If you are using reno style decks of card, Kazakus is one of the most important cards to add in your deck. Honestly, you just need this card for any deck that you are building regardless of your style or class. I was really amazed how effective this card can be when I first played it. No matter what is the given situation you might find yourself during a match, Kazakus can get you of it. The ability to create a custom spell makes Kazakus one of my favourites. To take things even further, you can actually use things like Brann Bonzebeard to give Kazakus 2X custom potions. Although a card that can fit in most of the cards it will fit best in Reno style of playing and in Spell Caster classes. Kazakus can get you out of difficult situations that can make the difference between winning and losing, and this why it occupies number three on this Hearthstone list for best Legendary cards to craft.

2. Sylvanas Windrunner

Yet, another card that can do so much in so many different decks ad classes. If you have never crafted this card, you have wasted a great opportunity. I believe that 99% of Hearthstone players crafted this card in the course of their Hearthstone journey. She has a solid body of 5/5 and a mana cost of 6. The main ability is to take control of other minions. It can do many stuff to your opponent that you don’t even observe her doing. It can deny them options that can make them make suboptimal plays. Sometimes you don’t even see what Sylvanas Windrunner offers because it’s happening behind the veil of your opponents play. She also helps you steal your opponent’s such as Ragnaros or Tirion Fordring. Her synergy as a Deathrattle card with a lot of other similar cards makes her even better. Sylvanas Windrunner is maybe one of the most recommended cards by Hearthstone gurus and I believe it clearly deserves number two spot on this list Hearthstone best Legendary cards to craft.

1. Ragnaros the Firelord

For good reasons, Ragnaros occupies the podium on this small list of best legendary classic cards. With a mana cost of 8 and attack/defence 8/8, Ragnaros will attack any random enemy on the board without taking any damage. It does this by itself with each turn without you having any control over it. With this kind of advantage over your opponents, it is one of the most relying cards in Hearthstone. Not just that, but it is also one of the most fun and fulfilling cards to throw to your opponent. It gives him a hard time and you know it and he knows it as well. It represent the symbol for the RNG of Hearthstone. For the first place in this list I picked the must fun card to play with. Winning a match is one thing. Winning the match playing Ragnaros out of your sleeve is another kind of victory. It is not only about the card itself, it also about the experience Ragnaros offers for you as a player.

Please let me know in the comments section what are your thoughts upon this small list of hearthstone best legendary to craft. Do you agree with it? I know it is a small list and this why I am planning to make a second list. But I need your help for that so please don’t by shy.

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