#and ran with it. so really it's just a good combo of factors resulting in me writing 6k words in a single day and 12k after like. 4
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recently I've been looking at the giovanna tech discord again and ran across a conversation the other night that has me reconsidering a lot of how I tend to let my autopilot play out
someone had posted a replay, and the regulars responded to say that it's not a good habit to use meter to just get another turn. their train of thought was that since sepultura is already a safe blockstring ender, it's not efficient to rc it to get another turn, because then you've turned a situation where you're pretty safe into one where you're going to have to do a higher risk or lower reward mixup instead. you would be better off spending the meter earlier in the blockstring doing a safe and rewarding mixup, and then relying on stagger pressure and rps to stay in or get out
and my initial thought was, well, the situation after a blocked sepultura is technically safe but you're still stuck either playing pretty bad rps or letting someone else have a turn anyway, so spending the meter there saves you a headache. meanwhile the mental stack is usually a little crowded when I get my turn on oki, so half the time I open with basic gatlings. I relayed this story to lite after it happened, and he basically agreed. using meter to stay in makes sense.
but thinking about it more, the tradeoff becomes spending 50 meter to do two bad mixups (or even just the canned string) or spending 50 meter to do something up front they have to respect and has good reward, so I do get the math. the other thing is that the balance between gio's neutral and mixup ability is weighted towards really committal mix and really low risk neutral, whereas lite's character i-no is all fuzzy overheads but has to commit really hard in neutral. since gio struggles to open people up safely but can play neutral confidently, it makes some sense to allocate more meter towards doing mixups and less towards skipping neutral than other types of character.
either way I figured the next step was to look at a bunch of match footage and analyze how the high level gios I play were spending meter... and the result was that they were almost always using it for combo extensions, super wallbreaks, or metered mixups, and not to rebuy pressure (with defensive uses mixed in here and there ofc.)
so the next stop was the lab. the most basic metered mixup is obviously tap dust rrc, which is not meaningfully reactable, has good reward and lets you continue pressure afterwards. since this is already a really high standard, I had kind of filed every other contender away as "flashy but impractical" for a while, but I do know that having a variety of throw setups helps a lot to attack the mental stack, so presumably it's worth working some of these in. the other factor that got me to revisit things is kouhide's 4 overhead brc setup, which has a much better economy of high/low moments to meter spent than tap dust rrc.
...however, that blockstring kind of sucks, man. the notation would be something like cs -> jump cancel -> low brc forward -> jp -> land -> jump-> jp -> jh -> jd -> regular blockstring. the first issue is that the execution is pretty tight. if you don't nail the timing on the two jps, the slowdown will end before the jh can connect and the opponent will be out of blockstun and can just duck it. and the other issue is that since the timing is really tight, you don't really have any room to pause and hitconfirm the first jp. at higher levels this might not be as much of an issue since you *can* see the jp coming, but where I usually am people get clipped and then the combo drops. I think it may have some practical utility as like an extra layer to simpler things.
cs -> low aerial brc forward -> air buttons is a pretty classic type of mixup though. I'd previously seen it as brc -> jh jd -> grounded blockstring, but annoyingly it only seems to get both buttons out higher off the ground and ends up being inconsistent. however, with the tradeoff of worse scaling, gio can just hit jp twice on the way down like sol does in the bandit revolver rc setup and accomplish the same thing more consistently. this also sets up conditioning for people to block the first hit and lets gio do the kouhide string more confidently.
there's also the weird looking brc instant overhead setup you get out of backdash (technically? I think? I don't know exactly why the physics on this one work the way they do) which is a single hit but looks weird and that's kind of cool. it's about equivalent to tap dust for way higher execution though.
putting aside the high/low stuff, gio can also do cs -> dash cancel -> brc -> cs -> cv.trovao which gets her a guard crush moment for stronger strike/throw... but stronger strike/throw is still much riskier than the above totally safe blockstrings. it's good but I feel like probably when I'll be using it the most is when I misinput a low aerial brc when trying to do something else.
anyway in addition to all the new combo theory and oki setups I've been trying to integrate, these are all pretty high priority. ideally this will result in more ergonomic meter usage and be better for consistency across the board... but man I already have a ton of spaghetti to sort through just with the patch stuff.
#there's also sol poente and sol nascente rc things but they're kind of boring and this is already a really long post#but they do like work#another thing is that I can use wa to get my turn back and then do a metered mixup from there#which is still not very efficient but probably better anyway
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re: the last tag you put on that post you recently reblogged abt carrds
i think it's a combo of 1. the expectation that to comment on an issue you must be affected by it yourself, 2. the rise in young people (esp young teens) turning to the internet when they can't find friendship or possibly people who even remotely give a shit abt them irl, and 3. "stranger danger internet bad" type teaching encountered from adults who are or are perceived as tech illiterate backfiring hard
agreed on every point. i think the issue isn’t really “people are teaching young people to be like this” (like i thought off the top of my head) as much as it is “young people are learning/developing this behavior as a reaction to the world around them”.
like, the expectation that only people who are affected by certain issues are allowed to comment on them and that everyone else needs to Shut Up And Listen has been a thing in SJ culture for years, so it makes some sense that people would start listing everything that makes them privileged/marginalized, both as a way to be transparent with their followers and as a way to hold themselves accountable. after all, if only a certain group is “allowed” to comment on something, and someone with no personal info listed comments on that thing, how would you know whether they’re part of that group or some horrible person who can’t Stay In Their Lane?
turning to the internet as possibly one’s only source for companionship is definitely a factor, especially taking into account how many young people suffering from abuse or who are otherwise traumatized seek community on here (and twitter which i’m including since that site basically is just tumblr now). i can see how it would seem like a good idea to be as open about yourself as possible to make connecting with other people easier
internet safety education as taught to young people is (as far as i know) is suuuper outdated, i remember how even when i was that age (*thinks back to when i was a preteen just starting out on this site*), i was learning that it really is possible to have healthy friendships with people online, and that they’re not all sweaty weirdos looking for kids to exploit. i think people kind of ran with that, and assumed that since most internet users are just regular people who could very well be your friends, it’s not so dangerous to be open about your identity after all... i also think sites like facebook where you’re encouraged to use your real identity contributed to this
anyways i didn’t mean to write a whole essay BUT essentially, young people who are more online than ever are growing up in an atmosphere where it’s not just okay, but encouraged to show your whole self to the world, and the culture and behaviors that’ve been built up around that are a result of several different factors that go back a pretty long time. it’s a very nuanced situation that i could go on about forever, but i’ll stop here for now!
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Name: kelsie
Writing Blog URL(s): @lovingyong
Age: 22
Nationality: american
Languages: english, some sign language and spanish
Star Sign: libra
MBTI: INFJ
Favorite color: pink
Favorite food: taco bell (lol)
Favorite movie: pride and prejudice, kill bill, gone with the wind, or the handmaiden
Favorite ice cream flavor: green tea
Favorite animal: otter
Coffee or tea? What are you ordering? tea or hot chocolate. never coffee because i’m allergic
Dream job (whether you have a job or not): human rights attorney or writer
Go-to karaoke song: never gonna give you up - rick astley
If you could have one superpower, what would you choose? teleportation
If you could visit a historical era, which would you choose? mmm hard to say bc i enjoy my rights as a woman so i guess probably the 90s
If you could restart your life, knowing what you do now, would you? Only starting at the summer before high school
Would you rather fight 100 chicken-sized horses or one horse-sized chicken? horse sized chicken but i could not explain why. It’s just my gut instinct
If you were a trope in a teen high school movie, what would you have been? I was the floater/nobody for sureeeee
Do you believe in aliens/supernatural creatures? yes aliens allll the way lets go
Fun fact about yourself that not everyone would know? I only type with two fingers on each hand but can still type 60 wpm
What fandom(s) do you write for? nct but i want to also start writing for haikyuu soon
When did you post your first piece? july of 2018
Do you write fluff/angst/crack/general/smut, combo, etc? Why? I like a good combo. Life is never completely fluffy or totally angsty. It’s good to have a balance to make it all seem more realistic and immersive
Do you write OCs, X Readers, Ships...etc? x reader right now but when i write for haikyuu, it’ll be ships
Why did you decide to write for Tumblr? I think it was just… there and available. Ao3 is fun but there’s not a lot of chances or opportunities for interaction so i decided to go back to the hellsite
What inspires you to write? Oh goodness, anything and everything. Oftentimes it’s music. I hear a song and i’m immediately like i need a story for this asap
What genres/AUs do you enjoy writing the most? Mafia and crime. It’s such a guilty pleasure of mine
What do you hope your readers take away from your work? I just want it to be a temporary escape and provide at least some form of enjoyment
What do you do when you hit a rough spot creatively? Read more or watch anime just because both of those are enjoyable things for me but can also give me the inspiration to create again
What is your favorite work and why? Your most successful? you may regret this is literally my baby. It’s not my favorite, but i think taeyong’s spin off story, a way out, is because it's everything i wanted for ymrt, i just didn’t have the same skills at the time. Another favorite of mine is hanakotoba because it’s literally my heart and soul in a story and i’ll always have that deep personal connection to it. My most successful is white knuckle tight which is truly still fascinating for me because it was an idea i got on a random tuesday during christmas break and i just ran with it. I think it’s an alright story but it’s far from my favorite. I lack the emotional attachment that i have to other pieces.
Who is your favorite person to write about? taeyong. Writing him is almost like second nature to me. His character is always the easiest for me to construct and i think people will find he’s the most consistent character throughout stories. There’s not as much variation.
Do you think there’s a difference between writing fanfiction vs. completely original prose? Yes and no. i think writing kpop fanfiction is much more similar to original prose because you don’t have a world to build around. You only have a person. In fact, you don’t even have that. You only have an idea of a person to construct into a character. I think the only difference is that you can get away with a lot more unreasonable plot lines.
What do you think makes a good story? Good characters and enough emotion to create an attachment to the plot. I want to care about what’s happening and the best way to do that is by leading me to some sort of connection to the characters
What is your writing process like? Very chaotic and sporadic. I’ll come up with ideas at 3 am, make a random note about it, and then do my best to bring it to life when i’m actually awake. I don’t plan. I just have snippets of scenes i would like to include. So much of it is just writing whatever comes to mind while im writing it
Would you ever repurpose a fic into a completely original story? I’m doing so with one right now, though 8-% of it is getting scrapped and changed. There’s nothing wrong with that though. Having good bones is what matters and i think this story has exactly that
What tropes do you love, and what tropes can’t you stand? I love enemies to loves if it’s done right. Exes to lovers is another classic. Mafia is a given. Hanahaki and soulmates always does something to my heart. I can’t stand hybrid and a/b/o fics idk why i just have never been able to get into them. Yandere like tropes are also really hard to do right so i usually avoid those as well
How much would you say audience feedback/engagement means to you? It means a lot. I’m sure any writer can tell you that but it’s truly the reason i still write fanfic and haven’t just given up and written only original prose.
What has been one of the biggest factors of your success (of any size)? Timing. It’s always about which member is really getting to people at the moment and which trope is gaining traction. 85% of writing on tumblr is kind of just dumb luck
Do you think fanfic writers get unfairly judged? Yes. i think it just comes from lack of understanding
Do you think art can be a medium for change? Without a doubt. Art pieces as well as writings have made significant impacts in my life in a variety of ways. It’s a medium of awareness and recognition
Do you ever feel there are times when you’re writing for others, rather than yourself? Not really because i kind of just do whatever the fuck i want (sorry for my language lol) but i usually come up with totally self indulgent ideas and then just do it.
Do you ever feel like people have misunderstood you or your writing at times? No… not yet. I expected someone to with shattered memories but it seemed to do and say what i wanted to
Do your offline friends/loved ones know you write for Tumblr? My roommates. My friends know i write they just don’t know what
What is one thing you wish you could tell your followers? I’m doing my best and i wish i could put stories out more often
Do you have any advice for aspiring writers who might be too scared to put themselves out there? Just go for it. You have to try if you want to see any sort of results. Plus these people don’t know you so what’s the risk
Are there any times when you regret joining Tumblr? nah
Do you have any mutuals who have been particularly formative/supportive in your Tumblr journey? Kai, jewel, and abbey for sure. They were some of my closest mutuals when my blog really started to take off
Pick a quote to end your interview with:
You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go… - dr. seuss
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Yesterday a series of stories ran in major news outlets describing "a miracle cure for cancer" that would be "available in one year's time". This is nonsense. Obviously. And it speaks to a failing of our science reporting system and is a disservice to patients and researchers alike.
Yesterday, the Jerusalem Post ran a story with the headline: A cure for cancer. Israeli scientists say they think they found one: “we believe we will offer in a year's time a complete cure for cancer.". The NY POST, FoxNews, Forbes, multiple Murdoch TV outlets and more ran similar articles. Even on reddit, the post was heavily upvoted in subreddits ranging from r/futurology to r/worldnews to r/the_donald.
Frankly, the ability of unpublished research from a no-name company to garner this type of attention stunned me. And really made me angry. I had two relatives reach out to me asking if I had heard the good news. Injecting this kind of hype into science is good for no one. It gives patients false expectations. It gives researchers perverse incentives to sensationalize their findings. It makes the already hard business of developing effective medicines more difficult than it needs to be.
I think, intuitively, many of us rejected the article as likely to be false. Claims of curing cancer in a year seem preposterous, to anyone with a bit of familiarity for how drug development works. And many of us have internalized the idea that 'cancer isn't one disease, it is a collection of related diseases' and were appropriately skeptical that one drug could cure them all.
That said, people have been asking for a more specific breakdown of the story. I am a bit loathe to give it more attention, but since it is already trending, it might be worth helping generate a discussion about the specifics of what is wrong with this story.
At its core, the basic premise of the research here is that:
sometimes tumors evolve resistance to drugs with single targets, so let's use our platform to develop drugs with multiple targets
On the face of it, it sounds good. Combination therapies have worked wonders in the viral and bacterial spaces. So why not cancer?
The truth is, we already do use combination therapies across all sorts of cancers. Chemo + targeted therapy (say, R-CHOP) has worked wonders for some blood cancers, for example. There are a myriad of other examples. Some are amazingly effective. Some are modestly better than the previous standard of care. Some combos involve chemo. Some don't.
But, we still haven't cured cancer. It's a tricky SOB.
Now let's try to dig a bit more into the specifics of the company's 'miracle cure' claims:
The research tools described in the article and on the company website give little to suggest that they will overcome the factors that have limited the success of other targeted approaches (toxicity, resistance, identifying good targets etc.). Essentially, it looks like they are using a fairly standard drug discovery phage display platform to find peptides that bind tumor cells. Their plan is then to link these peptides to a chemotoxin and thereby more specifically deliver toxic drugs to tumors.
A few things:
This basic technology already exists in the form of multiple FDA approved drugs (Adcetris for certain blood cancers; Kadcyla for breast cancer) with more under development. These are good drugs. But in neither case would anyone call them 'cures'.
The article highlights that the researchers use 'Nobel prize winning' phage display technology as if to connote that the research they are doing is particularly impactful. This is nonsense. The technology won the Nobel because it is so broadly used. Sometimes it yields amazing results. Sometimes it yields crap. The fact that the researchers are using phage display to generate peptides is close to meaningless.
The real challenge in this approach of using peptides/proteins to more specifically deliver toxins to tumor cells is finding targets that are adequately specific to the tumors of interest. The researchers gave no indication that they have made a breakthrough on this front. And I cannot imagine what a target that broadly marked all tumor types and no essential normal tissue would look like. That is a holy grail type target in the field.
A few things too about how the results are described that drove me crazy:
The article states they have "concluded its first exploratory mice experiment, which inhibited human cancer cell growth and had no effect at all on healthy mice cells". THIS MAKES PERFECT SENSE! Mice are not humans. Human-target-specific peptide will recognize human epitopes on the tumor xenograft cells, but possibly not the mouse epitopes. That's why lots of drugs look awesome in mouse models - highly specific binders to implanted human cells with low mouse off-targets of course minimizes target-related toxicity.
The article quotes: “Our results are consistent and repeatable.” Umm.. what? YOU JUST SAID THEY FINISHED THE FIRST EXPERIMENT!
The articles did a terrible job getting outside opinions to reality check these extraordinary claims. To me that is shoddy journalism.
Sorry for the rant - but this one really bothered me! Happy to take any more questions about this story/drug development!
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"Yesterday a series of stories ran in major news outlets describing "a miracle cure for cancer" that would be "available in one year's time". This is nonsense. Obviously. And it speaks to a failing of our science reporting system and is a disservice to patients and researchers alike."- Detail: Yesterday, the Jerusalem Post ran a story with the headline: A cure for cancer. Israeli scientists say they think they found one: “we believe we will offer in a year's time a complete cure for cancer.". The NY POST, FoxNews, Forbes, multiple Murdoch TV outlets and more ran similar articles. Even on reddit, the post was heavily upvoted in subreddits ranging from r/futurology to r/worldnews to r/the_donald.Frankly, the ability of unpublished research from a no-name company to garner this type of attention stunned me. And really made me angry. I had two relatives reach out to me asking if I had heard the good news. Injecting this kind of hype into science is good for no one. It gives patients false expectations. It gives researchers perverse incentives to sensationalize their findings. It makes the already hard business of developing effective medicines more difficult than it needs to be.I think, intuitively, many of us rejected the article as likely to be false. Claims of curing cancer in a year seem preposterous, to anyone with a bit of familiarity for how drug development works. And many of us have internalized the idea that 'cancer isn't one disease, it is a collection of related diseases' and were appropriately skeptical that one drug could cure them all.That said, people have been asking for a more specific breakdown of the story. I am a bit loathe to give it more attention, but since it is already trending, it might be worth helping generate a discussion about the specifics of what is wrong with this story.At its core, the basic premise of the research here is that:sometimes tumors evolve resistance to drugs with single targets, so let's use our platform to develop drugs with multiple targetsOn the face of it, it sounds good. Combination therapies have worked wonders in the viral and bacterial spaces. So why not cancer?The truth is, we already do use combination therapies across all sorts of cancers. Chemo + targeted therapy (say, R-CHOP) has worked wonders for some blood cancers, for example. There are a myriad of other examples. Some are amazingly effective. Some are modestly better than the previous standard of care. Some combos involve chemo. Some don't.But, we still haven't cured cancer. It's a tricky SOB.Now let's try to dig a bit more into the specifics of the company's 'miracle cure' claims:The research tools described in the article and on the company website give little to suggest that they will overcome the factors that have limited the success of other targeted approaches (toxicity, resistance, identifying good targets etc.). Essentially, it looks like they are using a fairly standard drug discovery phage display platform to find peptides that bind tumor cells. Their plan is then to link these peptides to a chemotoxin and thereby more specifically deliver toxic drugs to tumors.A few things:This basic technology already exists in the form of multiple FDA approved drugs (Adcetris for certain blood cancers; Kadcyla for breast cancer) with more under development. These are good drugs. But in neither case would anyone call them 'cures'.The article highlights that the researchers use 'Nobel prize winning' phage display technology as if to connote that the research they are doing is particularly impactful. This is nonsense. The technology won the Nobel because it is so broadly used. Sometimes it yields amazing results. Sometimes it yields crap. The fact that the researchers are using phage display to generate peptides is close to meaningless.The real challenge in this approach of using peptides/proteins to more specifically deliver toxins to tumor cells is finding targets that are adequately specific to the tumors of interest. The researchers gave no indication that they have made a breakthrough on this front. And I cannot imagine what a target that broadly marked all tumor types and no essential normal tissue would look like. That is a holy grail type target in the field.A few things too about how the results are described that drove me crazy:The article states they have "concluded its first exploratory mice experiment, which inhibited human cancer cell growth and had no effect at all on healthy mice cells". THIS MAKES PERFECT SENSE! Mice are not humans. Human-target-specific peptide will recognize human epitopes on the tumor xenograft cells, but possibly not the mouse epitopes. That's why lots of drugs look awesome in mouse models - highly specific binders to implanted human cells with low mouse off-targets of course minimizes target-related toxicity.The article quotes: “Our results are consistent and repeatable.” Umm.. what? YOU JUST SAID THEY FINISHED THE FIRST EXPERIMENT!The articles did a terrible job getting outside opinions to reality check these extraordinary claims. To me that is shoddy journalism.Sorry for the rant - but this one really bothered me! Happy to take any more questions about this story/drug development!. Title by: SirT6 Posted By: www.eurekaking.com
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Jumboking Digital Marketing Strategy
Jumboking – A Digital Marketing Strategy by Owais Chasmawalla
Ever walked past a bright red and yellow signboard at a metro station, likely above a store that smells like something good cooking? Then you’ve probably already encountered Jumboking, my friend. Capitalising on public areas like metro stations, Jumboking has been catering to the masses by selling low-priced burgers, vada pavs, soft drinks and other travel-friendly snacks for years now. And the public have been loving it! A hygienic solution to when you wake up in the morning and don’t have time to eat breakfast, staying at work late, and too tired to cook dinner at home, Jumboking has made its way into the hearts of commuters—corporate employees, students and entrepreneurs alike.
But how did they do it? And more importantly, can they grow further than this? One of IIDE‘s student, Owais Chasmawallah, answers these essential questions in his digital marketing report of the company that we’ve included down below. Read on to find out more about Jumboking Digital Marketing Strategy!
About Jumboking
With its very first outlet opening outside Malad railway station in Mumbai in August 2001, Jumboking is nothing if not a testament to the perseverance and success of its owner and founder, Dheeraj Gupta.
At the age of 25 and with two business degrees in his pocket, he set out with the goal of establishing a sweets business that made mithai as accessible and resaleable as chocolate. He borrowed money from his father and brother (already running a successful sweetshop) to give a jumpstart to his idea. However, within a mere five months, his first business plummeted.
But Gupta did not wallow in his loss. Instead, he picked himself back up and built Jumboking from scratch. Learning from the mistakes he made the first time around, this venture was infinitely more successful than the last, and eventually earned Gupta profits which would libertae him from his debt.
His first outlet was called Chaat Factory (Snack Factory) and sold the humble vada pav for a mere Rs. 5. Gupta had observed the Burger King business model on a visit to London and had decided that it would work very well in India, which is what he was trying to emulate at first. Compared with other vada pav sellers across the city, Jumboking’s vada pavs were produced in hygienic and safe conditions, which set them apart from all other possible competition in the same price range.
Now, Jumboking serves numerous variations of the vada pav. It has grown to own more than 300 outlets in the country , with 30 outlets in Mumbai alone. Truly, Jumboking has risen above its humble beginnings. But can it grow further? Let’s see what our student has to say on the matter. Lets check out their Jumboking Digital Marketing Strategy!
Social Media Marketing
One of the key factors towards the success of any business these days, especially those in the food industry, is, of course social media. And after 17 years in the industry, Jumboking has certainly learned this.
Jumboking has a presence on Facebook, Instagram, Zomato and Twitter. They have 218k likes on their Facebook page, 616 followers on Instagram and 1.3k followers on Twitter.
In order to truly make their presence online, Jumboking has adopted a few strategies, like making use of certain campaigns like #OnTheGoSnacking, in which the brand has posted creatives of things you can do while eating a vada pav. For example, an edit of two people doing garba while one eats a Jumboking vada pav.
At the same time, #VadaPavDay was a campaign that Jumboking used before their self-proclaimed Vada Pav Day—celebrated on the date of their anniversary (23rd August) which intended to get people to eat vada pavs from Jumboking on that day, as well as to create brand awareness and brand recall.
Another interesting campaign was regarding #ChotiBhok in which Jumboking spread awareness about vada pavs serving the purpose of a small snack between meals.
A few strategies that Jumboking could further follow in order to fully grow their social media to its potential could be #JumboChampionship, which would involve a vada pav eating contest at malls in Mumbai and Pune. A couple of malls where this suggested contest could take place could be High Street Pheonix in Mumbai and Pheonix Marketcity in Pune. The registration form should be online so that people may be encouraged to check out Jumboking’s website and social media before registering. The prize for this contest could be gift vouchers or a Jumboking offer booklet. There would be two separate competitions, one for males and one for females.
#MeraWalaVada is another clever campaign Jumboking could use to increase brand awareness, would be to ask people to share recipes of their favourite vada pavs online on the brand’s website. A deadline would be announced and after the deadline 30 best recipes would be selected. These recipes would then be published in a booklet which would be available for purchase at all Jumboking outlets. A copy of this booklet, along with Jumboking vouchers, would be delivered to each of the 30 chosen cooks. The best recipe out of these 30 would then become the new Jumboking launch. This campaign not only increases Jumboking’s interaction with their followers but also helps them find a delicious new addition to their menu! This Jumboking Digital Marketing Strategy was found to be very successful.
Competition
Jumboking’s main national competitor is Goli and international competitor is Burger King.
When comparing their social media following, Burger King has 1.5 million followers on Twitter, whereas Goli has 948. Jumboking has only 1.3k Twitter followers. On Facebook, Goli has 152k page likes, Burger King has 8 million page likes and Jumboking has 218k page likes. On Instagram, Jumboking has 616 followers, whereas Burger King has 1.1 million followers. Goli does not have an Instagram account.
Burger King uses several campaigns to maintain their social media pages, one of which is #HatersGonnaLove in which they retweet year-old tweets that gave feedback for the Burger King Crispy Chicken Burger that was … let’s just say, less than glowing. The brand then gave the tweeters a free and updated Crispy Chicken Burger, stating that it was now ‘dressed to impress’. This campaign ran only across Twitter in the month of March 2017.
Goli, too, uses several clever strategies in order to up their social media following, like #GoliAwesomeness, a hashtag used to create hype for their vada pavs. This ran across all social media platforms on which Goli had a presence and involved showcasing an item from their menu with the help of a creative and encouraging customers to buy it.
There is no doubt about the fact that Jumboking needs to improve their social media game in comparison to Burger King, its international competitor. However, with Goli on the home turf, it quite obviously has a superior digital presence.
Target Audience
Jumboking tries to cater to audiences of all genders who are from a middle-class background and are between the ages of 15 to 35. Their customers are students and working professionals who often commute or take the trains and metros. They belong to fast moving, urban cities.
Search Engine Optimisation
Search engine optimisation refers to the usage of particular keywords in order to ensure the maximum amount of traffic on a brand’s website. These keywords are those that have the highest search rates on Google from their target customers. If a website is able to optimise itself based on the search engine’s keywords, then it is certain that they will be able to reach the maximum amount of relevant people.
Some of the most popular keywords for Jumboking are jumboking, jumboking menu and jumboking vada pav price. This means that whenever someone searches for these terms online, Jumboking’s results are the first that pop up.
Often, brands bid on certain search terms to ensure that when users search these particular terms on the internet, the particular brand’s page pops up as one of the first results. This may be useful for Jumboking in reference to other words that it could really capitalise on if they were able to be one of the top results.
Some of the suggested bid words for Jumboking are vada pav, vada pav in mumbai and on the go snacks. This ensures that when someone searches for the said terms online, they are bound to encounter Jumboking’s website as one of the first results. This makes the website more accessible to the people looking for joints that serve vada pav near them, which is ultimately the group of people Jumboking wants most to reach out to. Developing an SEO Strategy has surely benefited Jumboking Digital Marketing Strategy
Blog Ideas
Another way to engage your customers and ensure that they stay on your brand’s website for a longer duration of time is to provide them with interesting blogs to browse through.
Jeb pe sasta, dil pe hasta—why Jumboking is Mumbaikars’ favourite choice and Are you a hygiene freak? Jumboking is the right place for you! are examples of articles that the brand could create to ensure that website visitors spend more time with Jumboking online!
An example of listicles that Jumboking could post on their blog could be 5 experiences that make you a Mumbaikar and Great Indian delicacies. Listicles are extremely entertaining and captivate the reader’s attention, and at the same time subtly encourage the reader to visit Jumboking. In this case, the readers might want to eat vada pavs at Jumboking just for a chance to see what all the hype is about!
Email Marketing
An email marketing system that strategically targets Jumboking’s prime customers is the need of the hour. Our student has come up with a strategy he feels would be of benefit. He has devised an email marketing system that includes:
Intro for the championship competition
Rules for event/reminder for the event
Post event winner mail/variety of combos at Jumboking
Jumboking offer of the day/variety of offers Jumboking has
Membership mail
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing refers to collaborating with social media influencers to promote your brand. As influencers have a large following on social media, they are an excellent method of reaching your target audience and maximising your brand’s reach.
Jumboking could conduct influencer campaigns in which it approaches influencers to attend Jumboking’s event, review Jumboking on Zomato and write a post about the Jumboking vada pav of the day. For example, thehungrymumbaikar on Instagram (70k follwers), thebigbhukkad on Instagram (25k followers) or Mumbai Foodie (240k followers on Instagram).
Online Reputation Management
A few online platforms that could be of use to Jumboking’s ORM could be Zomato, Burrp, Quora and Mouthshut. These online reputation management platforms help the customers share their reviews of Jumboking’s food and therefore spread the word!
Platforms like Quora and Yahoo Answers often include questions like ‘Where can I get the best vada pav in Mumbai?’ and other similar queries. It has to be made sure that Jumboking is mentioned in such answers! This increases the likelihood that, when someone searches stumbles across such questions, they have a positive impression of Jumboking.
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Text
Powell Stimulates Nonstop; When Voltron Meets Hoth
Powell Stimulates Nonstop; When Voltron Meets Hoth:
The Most Stimulating Man in the World
You want stimulus?
You can’t handle all the stimulus the Federal Reserve is pumping out right now.
In a move that almost lifted the markets into positive territory this morning, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell announced unlimited stimulus — yes, unlimited.
“Aggressive effort must be taken across the public and private sectors to limit the losses to jobs and income and to promote a swift recovery once the disruptions abate,” the Fed said in a statement.
I think it’s safe to say that Jerome Powell is the most stimulating man in the world right now. I’m glad at least someone in Washington is taking COVID-19 seriously. But what are the details?
As part of its effort to save the U.S. economy, the Fed will purchase an unlimited amount of mortgage-backed securities and Treasurys, offer $300 billion in new lending programs and set up three new emergency lending programs:
The Primary Market Corporate Credit Facility will issue new bonds and loans.
The Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility will keep liquidity in corporate bonds.
The Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility will allow securities backed by auto loans, credit card loans, student loans and Small Business Administration loans.
The Fed even announced that it would expand its Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility to aid local governments and municipalities.
That’s a lot to take in, so here’s the short story: Debt and credit, for both the government and businesses, is all a-fluster … and the Fed set up a few groups to handle the $*%# show.
The Takeaway:
It certainly seems like the Federal Reserve covered all its bases. This level of action is unprecedented — even in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis. I mean, unlimited stimulus? It’s unheard of.
So why, then, did stocks go from green to red once the market officially opened?
Because, while the Fed clearly has its head in the game and understands the severity of the problem, lawmakers do not.
The thing is, you can throw money at Wall Street all day long, but that only treats the problem’s symptoms. And investors know one crucial thing that Washington has yet to grasp: Viruses don’t care about money.
Yes, shoring up businesses is important. However, if consumers can’t leave their homes, go to work or take care of themselves in the midst of this crisis … what good is that money?
Perhaps a better way to put it is this: If the stimulus is to help cover missed rents, late mortgage payments, late bills, et cetera, for how long is this money good?
Easing up on the stay-at-home advice from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention won’t fix this problem. In fact, it may make things much worse.
We need a solid plan to test, quarantine and treat COVID-19 sufferers. We need solid support for regular Americans … the average Joe, if you will … the people who make the U.S. economy turn.
When Washington finally pulls its head out of the partisan sand pit…
When it finally passes legislation that treats the COVID-19 problem and not the symptoms…
When it reassures people that it has their best interests at heart, and not corporate bailouts…
Only then will the markets finally begin to find a bottom. Until that day, we must take matters into our own hands.
Remember this: It’s you, me and the average Joe next to you keeping America ticking forward to a better future.
If Washington won’t look out for the guy on the street, you can bet that Great Stuff does. We won’t leave you out on your own.
As we speak, the groundwork for America’s future is being laid — petty partisan politics aside. In fact, Banyan Hill expert Paul Mampilly has been screaming about a “rebuilt America” for weeks now, even in the midst of this volatility.
Paul believes America will emerge from the coronavirus stronger than ever … no matter how long it takes. And the mega trends that he follows (such as 5G and precision medicine) won’t die to market panic.
Click here to learn about Paul Mampilly’s vision for a new, rebuilt United States — America 2.0.
The Good: Testing … 1, 2, 3?
In order to treat COVID-19, you have to know who has it. And that means testing. Lots and lots of testing. But tests can take hours or even days at overworked labs, exacerbating the problem.
Over the weekend, we heard that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a 45-minute test for the coronavirus. But Aytu BioScience Inc. (Nasdaq: AYTU) has a test that’s even faster.
The biotechnology company announced this morning that the FDA approved its COVID-19 IgG/IgM Rapid Test. How rapid is this rapid test? Professional care providers can get results in between two and 10 minutes!
That’s faster than the drive-thru at McDonald’s Corp. (NYSE: MCD)!
Aytu said that it expects to deliver its first 100,000-test shipment this week. With the demand for COVID-19 testing skyrocketing as the U.S. deals with continued virus spread, Aytu could be sitting on a gold mine.
The Bad: As Cold as Ice
When I ran across news about Hoth Therapeutics Inc. (Nasdaq: HOTH) and its deal with Voltron Therapeutics Inc., my ’80s pop culture meter went through the roof. I mean, we’re leveraging Star Wars and Voltron here … what ’80s pop geek wouldn’t love this combo?
After reading through the news, however, I’m considerably less jazzed. Hoth entered a joint deal with Voltron to develop a self-assembling vaccine (SAV) to prevent COVID-19. That sounds impressive … most impressive. SAVs sound just as futuristic as Hoth and Voltron.
But … SAV technology is still in the “proof of concept data” phase, according to the report. In other words, if this technology proves viable, it’ll be great … someday. But not today.
As I’ve warned before, it’s all too easy to fool investors with vaccine promises these days. Despite the companies’ longer-term outlook, HOTH shares surged on the news today.
Don’t buy into this hype. Your portfolio will freeze before you reach the first profit.
The Ugly: Unlimited iPhones?
Last week, Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) announced that it would limit the number of iPhones consumers could purchase via its online stores. The company was concerned it wouldn’t be able to meet demand due to a slow ramp-up at its Chinese production facilities.
However, those concerns appear to have fallen by the wayside. Today, Apple dropped the two-device limit across the board on iPhones. (Some devices remain limited, however, such as certain MacBook models and iPads.)
The question is this: Are Apple’s Chinese supply lines really near full strength? Or did demand fall off a cliff to where limits don’t matter anymore?
As in all things, its probably a combination of both factors. Supply probably ramped up enough to cover the weak demand that Apple sees for iPhones right now.
Apple has yet to comment on the lifted limit. But let’s be real here: U.S. consumers are far more worried about finding toilet paper and hand sanitizer right now than buying iPhones.
I can’t jump in front of the microphone and push him down. OK, he said it. Let’s try and get it corrected for the next time.
— Dr. Anthony Fauci
If you’re not familiar with Dr. Fauci yet … what rock have you been living under?
(Seriously, what rock? Because that sounds like a really safe place to ride out the coronavirus … I’ll bring the drinks if you have toilet paper.)
For those who haven’t come out of their safe place, Fauci is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He’s also a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force.
Fauci recently interviewed with Science Magazine, where he addressed questions ranging from “How are you managing to not get fired?” to “We’ve had all this pandemic preparedness. Why did this fail? What went wrong?”
If you’d like a better insight into the COVID-19 situation and President Trump’s reaction — as told by the No. 1 virus expert in the country right now — this interview is an excellent read.
Great Stuff: Catchin’ up With Y’all
Last week, I asked you your thoughts on bailouts, buybacks and stimulus — oh my!
I’ll say this: If the Feds can’t deliver in this trying time, you sure do, dear reader. With how many emails flooded the Great Stuff inbox over the weekend, you’d think millions of Americans were stuck at home looking at their screens or something. Wait…
(I know, I know … not all of our readers are stateside — I see you writing in from the great white North, Ashley H.!)
I just wanted to take a second today to thank all of you for writing in to share your thoughts on the U.S. viral reaction. Keep writing in! Great Stuff appreciates every email we read … and yes, we do read every last one of them. That said, our overflowing inbox is sure to make for rip-roaring Reader Feedback later this week. Just you wait!
In the meantime, write in to [email protected] if you haven’t already. We’d love to hear your thoughts on the market volatility, the Fed fun house and the quarantine in your neck of the woods.
And if you need some reassurance or an extra bit of positive oomph, remember to check out Paul Mampilly’s vision for a new, rebuilt America 2.0 — viral markets be damned! (Click here.)
Otherwise, you can always check Great Stuff out on social media: Facebook and Twitter.
Until next time, good trading!
Regards,
Joseph Hargett
Editor, Great Stuff
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Link
The Most Stimulating Man in the World
You want stimulus?
You can’t handle all the stimulus the Federal Reserve is pumping out right now.
In a move that almost lifted the markets into positive territory this morning, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell announced unlimited stimulus — yes, unlimited.
“Aggressive effort must be taken across the public and private sectors to limit the losses to jobs and income and to promote a swift recovery once the disruptions abate,” the Fed said in a statement.
I think it’s safe to say that Jerome Powell is the most stimulating man in the world right now. I’m glad at least someone in Washington is taking COVID-19 seriously. But what are the details?
As part of its effort to save the U.S. economy, the Fed will purchase an unlimited amount of mortgage-backed securities and Treasurys, offer $300 billion in new lending programs and set up three new emergency lending programs:
The Primary Market Corporate Credit Facility will issue new bonds and loans.
The Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility will keep liquidity in corporate bonds.
The Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility will allow securities backed by auto loans, credit card loans, student loans and Small Business Administration loans.
The Fed even announced that it would expand its Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility to aid local governments and municipalities.
That’s a lot to take in, so here’s the short story: Debt and credit, for both the government and businesses, is all a-fluster … and the Fed set up a few groups to handle the $*%# show.
The Takeaway:
It certainly seems like the Federal Reserve covered all its bases. This level of action is unprecedented — even in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis. I mean, unlimited stimulus? It’s unheard of.
So why, then, did stocks go from green to red once the market officially opened?
Because, while the Fed clearly has its head in the game and understands the severity of the problem, lawmakers do not.
The thing is, you can throw money at Wall Street all day long, but that only treats the problem’s symptoms. And investors know one crucial thing that Washington has yet to grasp: Viruses don’t care about money.
Yes, shoring up businesses is important. However, if consumers can’t leave their homes, go to work or take care of themselves in the midst of this crisis … what good is that money?
Perhaps a better way to put it is this: If the stimulus is to help cover missed rents, late mortgage payments, late bills, et cetera, for how long is this money good?
Easing up on the stay-at-home advice from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention won’t fix this problem. In fact, it may make things much worse.
We need a solid plan to test, quarantine and treat COVID-19 sufferers. We need solid support for regular Americans … the average Joe, if you will … the people who make the U.S. economy turn.
When Washington finally pulls its head out of the partisan sand pit…
When it finally passes legislation that treats the COVID-19 problem and not the symptoms…
When it reassures people that it has their best interests at heart, and not corporate bailouts…
Only then will the markets finally begin to find a bottom. Until that day, we must take matters into our own hands.
Remember this: It’s you, me and the average Joe next to you keeping America ticking forward to a better future.
If Washington won’t look out for the guy on the street, you can bet that Great Stuff does. We won’t leave you out on your own.
As we speak, the groundwork for America’s future is being laid — petty partisan politics aside. In fact, Banyan Hill expert Paul Mampilly has been screaming about a “rebuilt America” for weeks now, even in the midst of this volatility.
Paul believes America will emerge from the coronavirus stronger than ever … no matter how long it takes. And the mega trends that he follows (such as 5G and precision medicine) won’t die to market panic.
Click here to learn about Paul Mampilly’s vision for a new, rebuilt United States — America 2.0.
The Good: Testing … 1, 2, 3?
In order to treat COVID-19, you have to know who has it. And that means testing. Lots and lots of testing. But tests can take hours or even days at overworked labs, exacerbating the problem.
Over the weekend, we heard that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a 45-minute test for the coronavirus. But Aytu BioScience Inc. (Nasdaq: AYTU) has a test that’s even faster.
The biotechnology company announced this morning that the FDA approved its COVID-19 IgG/IgM Rapid Test. How rapid is this rapid test? Professional care providers can get results in between two and 10 minutes!
That’s faster than the drive-thru at McDonald’s Corp. (NYSE: MCD)!
Aytu said that it expects to deliver its first 100,000-test shipment this week. With the demand for COVID-19 testing skyrocketing as the U.S. deals with continued virus spread, Aytu could be sitting on a gold mine.
The Bad: As Cold as Ice
When I ran across news about Hoth Therapeutics Inc. (Nasdaq: HOTH) and its deal with Voltron Therapeutics Inc., my ’80s pop culture meter went through the roof. I mean, we’re leveraging Star Wars and Voltron here … what ’80s pop geek wouldn’t love this combo?
After reading through the news, however, I’m considerably less jazzed. Hoth entered a joint deal with Voltron to develop a self-assembling vaccine (SAV) to prevent COVID-19. That sounds impressive … most impressive. SAVs sound just as futuristic as Hoth and Voltron.
But … SAV technology is still in the “proof of concept data” phase, according to the report. In other words, if this technology proves viable, it’ll be great … someday. But not today.
As I’ve warned before, it’s all too easy to fool investors with vaccine promises these days. Despite the companies’ longer-term outlook, HOTH shares surged on the news today.
Don’t buy into this hype. Your portfolio will freeze before you reach the first profit.
The Ugly: Unlimited iPhones?
Last week, Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) announced that it would limit the number of iPhones consumers could purchase via its online stores. The company was concerned it wouldn’t be able to meet demand due to a slow ramp-up at its Chinese production facilities.
However, those concerns appear to have fallen by the wayside. Today, Apple dropped the two-device limit across the board on iPhones. (Some devices remain limited, however, such as certain MacBook models and iPads.)
The question is this: Are Apple’s Chinese supply lines really near full strength? Or did demand fall off a cliff to where limits don’t matter anymore?
As in all things, its probably a combination of both factors. Supply probably ramped up enough to cover the weak demand that Apple sees for iPhones right now.
Apple has yet to comment on the lifted limit. But let’s be real here: U.S. consumers are far more worried about finding toilet paper and hand sanitizer right now than buying iPhones.
I can’t jump in front of the microphone and push him down. OK, he said it. Let’s try and get it corrected for the next time.
— Dr. Anthony Fauci
If you’re not familiar with Dr. Fauci yet … what rock have you been living under?
(Seriously, what rock? Because that sounds like a really safe place to ride out the coronavirus … I’ll bring the drinks if you have toilet paper.)
For those who haven’t come out of their safe place, Fauci is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He’s also a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force.
Fauci recently interviewed with Science Magazine, where he addressed questions ranging from “How are you managing to not get fired?” to “We’ve had all this pandemic preparedness. Why did this fail? What went wrong?”
If you’d like a better insight into the COVID-19 situation and President Trump’s reaction — as told by the No. 1 virus expert in the country right now — this interview is an excellent read.
Great Stuff: Catchin’ up With Y’all
Last week, I asked you your thoughts on bailouts, buybacks and stimulus — oh my!
I’ll say this: If the Feds can’t deliver in this trying time, you sure do, dear reader. With how many emails flooded the Great Stuff inbox over the weekend, you’d think millions of Americans were stuck at home looking at their screens or something. Wait…
(I know, I know … not all of our readers are stateside — I see you writing in from the great white North, Ashley H.!)
I just wanted to take a second today to thank all of you for writing in to share your thoughts on the U.S. viral reaction. Keep writing in! Great Stuff appreciates every email we read … and yes, we do read every last one of them. That said, our overflowing inbox is sure to make for rip-roaring Reader Feedback later this week. Just you wait!
In the meantime, write in to [email protected] if you haven’t already. We’d love to hear your thoughts on the market volatility, the Fed fun house and the quarantine in your neck of the woods.
And if you need some reassurance or an extra bit of positive oomph, remember to check out Paul Mampilly’s vision for a new, rebuilt America 2.0 — viral markets be damned! (Click here.)
Otherwise, you can always check Great Stuff out on social media: Facebook and Twitter.
Until next time, good trading!
Regards,
Joseph Hargett
Editor, Great Stuff
0 notes
Text
I know tomorrow’s ep is gonna ruin me
so I might as well start a ~thoughtful post~ about it ahead of time.
Specifically, the thing I anticipate wrecking me the most is that Tohru's "let's go home" speech to Kyou isn't a love-and-acceptance speech.
It's a fuck-you speech.
I wanted to do a meta post about this because while this is a very powerful moment and gives me very powerful feels, I've also always kind of not got it? Like what makes this moment with Tohru special? Because she's scared? Other people were scared too, the fact that they tried to deny it kind of proves how scared they were. And Kyou said she didn't have to love everything and she kind of basically said "too bad I love everything anyway" so how was that a compelling argument? Everyone else here (Kazuma, Kagura) has behaved selfishly so why does Tohru's selfishness fix the problem?
Like with that Hiro post, I figure if I just keep pondering and typing eventually I'll figure it out and go "oh snap Takaya's brilliant"
Anyway.
I've always been tempted to read Tohru's "let's go home" speech to Kyou as a love-and-acceptance speech. Which is a waste of a good resource, and a huge disservice, because thinking that way tends to reduce Tohru to the Mary Sue stereotype that Hiro accuses her of being--all Tohru has to do is stand there and say a few nice things and suddenly everyone's problems melt away? Seriously?
((Doing more skimming research later in this post, it turns out I'd completely forgotten that Akito and Kyou literally have a whole conversation about this, where Akito's like "wow St. Tohru is unreal" and Kyou's like "you literally missed the point tho." My bias for Yuki as favorite character instead of Best Boy Kyou is unfortunately strong, guys.))
Which is probably why I find the True Form arc to be a bit forgettable when I don't have it open in front of me. And also why I've always found it a little illogical. While I love the end results, why is this particular love-and-acceptance speech, at this specific time, actually effective for Kyou?
Kyou's received a lot of love-and-acceptance speeches in his life, and to be quite honest he doesn't believe them. He has no faith in them. And he's got logic here.
Kyou's mother always told him she loved him, she loves her son, she's proud of her son, you're not a monster you're just...under an evil spell temporarily, and I'm not scared at all. She talked the talk, but Kyou was always sensitive to the fact that her actions didn't necessarily match her words (she was always, always scared, I think. Maybe a bit of Kyou, but mostly of her husband). And when it became too much and she gave up on herself and her future and took her own life, well. Kyou knew exactly how empty "love and acceptance" was.
Kagura was the first one to play with Kyou when they were kids, and she's devoted her life to telling Kyou that she loves him, she loves everything about him. But when she saw Kyou's True Form she ran away, kept her distance for a while, and then came back and pretended nothing had ever happened and restarted her dating campaign with a vengeance. It's not clear to me whether Kyou ever realized that Kagura started paying attention to him out of pity, but I suspect it's something he's pretty good at picking up on.
Kazuma adopts Kyou out of a mix of pity and an attempt to atone for his past behavior, like Kagura, and honestly I'd forgotten that Kyou literally says a couple of times that he suspects pity was a factor. But their relationship grows beyond that pity, even Kyou is sensitive to that, and it's not something he holds against Kazuma. So I'm sure Kazuma gives Kyou plenty of earnest love-and-acceptance speeches, given that he loves and accepts his son. But even so it's complicated for Kyou, and those speeches can't make Kyou love and accept himself.
Tohru, of course, gives all the Soumas plenty of love-and-accepting speeches, and Kyou is no exception, Kyou you have a plum on your back. This doesn't serve to make Kyou like himself so much as it serves to make Kyou like her.
This time, though. This time that's not the kind of speech Tohru gives Kyou. Look at Tohru's face, right as she turns around. She's determined and she's pissed.
This is a good character development for Tohru! I think this is her first real, stubborn attempt to be selfish without someone having pushed her towards it first.
Kyou has just hurt Tohru, physically and emotionally. Get the fuck away, he tells her. I can't stand you, he tells her. I don't ever want to see you again, he tells her, and if I do I'll take my claws to your face next time.
And Tohru starts to go. This whole thing is overwhelming and it's only been like 10 minutes and she hasn't processed at all yet. She's hurt, she's really hurt, but most of all she doesn't want to be a bother, she doesn't want to be a burden, she doesn't want to be hated, Kyou has clearly expressed his feelings and she should respect that.
And then Tohru stops and draws herself up and makes that face.
And runs back.
And grabs Kyou and tells him, fuck you, what about my feelings, come home. I literally don't understand what the fuck is going on, I'm sick and I'm scared and come home. I don't want you to give up on yourself, but you don't get to give up on me before you've even given me a chance to process this and decide if I'm okay keeping you in my life. And guess what, fucker, I still want you in my life so come home because I don't want to live in a house that doesn't have you in it. You told me to tell you that so listen. You have to return the favor and tell me when you're upset and let me care about you so just come home.
Obviously Tohru phrases it differently but I feel like that's the accurate gist of the hysterics lol.
Tohru doesn't say "oh it's okay I love you it's not...it's not that scary! Trust me!", which is a thing Kyou has learned not to trust.
Tohru says "I know this sucks but bitch what about me" which is, honestly, one of the things Kyou feels in regards to his mom that he's yet to unpack, so this really resonates with him. This is real.
(It's real and it's raw and Laura Bailey is going to destroy me and I can't wait to actually be debilitated by the True Form arc.)
I don't have a good transition but now I wanna talk about Kyou's relationship with pity
Pity in regards to Kyou is something that comes up a lot throughout the series. Kagura befriends Kyou out of pity so that she can feel good about herself. Kazuma pities Kyou after seeing the shit the Cat has to go through and takes him in. Kazuma worries that Tohru might only be with Kyou out of pity, like his grandmother towards his grandfather. I believe Shigure tells Tohru at one point "seriously did you really think we don't all know about Kyou and we aren't all pitying him and saying 'thank god it's not me, I'm getting off great compared to the Cat' to ourselves in secret?" And of course, Kyou himself says that he doesn't want or need Tohru's pity during the True Form confrontation.
Pity can be condescension and looking down on someone. Pity is something unequal, compared to compassion, something that might imply insult, something that's embarrassing to receive because it implies you can't get compassion on your own merits or your own level. And pity is something forced.
Thinking about this, I think Kyou can actually really relate to Rin (which might be part of why he was so jealous that she might take Shishou from him when Kazuma got concerned about her welfare, that similarity, in addition to the obvious fact that Kyou has just got a good thing and it's his good thing and don't take it from him). Rin's parents, presumably out of some combo of pride and pity and status, decided to force themselves to make a good show of being a happy family. And because they forced themselves to "love" Rin, it went to hell in a bullet train when it broke.
Kyou's mom went a similar-enough way. She tried to put on a show of normalcy, tried to force herself to be okay and say all the right, loving things to Kyou while her husband kept telling her that she'd shamed him, bad enough to have a cursed child but of all the Zodiac you gave birth to the cat monster, you should have died rather than have that child, we'd all be better off if you'd do us a favor and just die. And when the pressure got to be too much, she did just that.
So I think it's not unreasonable that Kyou might have separately come to the same conclusion that Rin does. Pity--forced love--breaks people. People who feel compelled to love you will get burnout and possibly explode and definitely have their lives ruined. (This is why Rin doesn't want to rely on Haru, doesn't want Yuki to rely on Haru, doesn't want anyone to rely on Tohru.)
This is, I think, half of why Kyou distances himself from people. Half of it is to protect himself, because obviously he doesn't like getting hurt. But half of it is to protect other people, because he doesn't want them getting hurt.
He does it with Tohru, trying not to get close to her (he already killed her mom, the least he could do is just never get involved with her again), trying to run her off during the True Form arc by hurting her so badly that she won't regret having nothing to do with him again. He does it to Kazuma, yelling "He's not my dad!" so people will stop saying the shit they associate with Kyou to Kazuma as well (directly after the True Form, Kyou levels up his character development and tells Kazuma that one day he'll be worthy of calling Shishou his dad in public, which is good, although the fact that Kyou still thinks he is currently not someone Kazuma can claim as a son without shame is a development Kyou will have to work on later).
And, ohhh shit, I'm pretty sure Kyou does this with Kagura too. Kagura says that Kyou is the first one to pull back after their own True Form incident (she later admits to herself that no, actually, the first one to pull away was her because she never invested herself in their friendship in the first place because pity). And that is probably, again, partly because Kagura freaked out and ran off and just left Kyou there, and Kyou doesn't want any further rejection from her. Partly because it probably got around, and Kyou's dad made sure Kyou's mom heard about it, and Kyou's mom tried to make peace by keeping a tighter rein on Kyou.
But before the incident, Kyou and Kagura are really good friends, and Kyou really enjoys being with her. After the incident, after they mutually avoid each other, after Kagura comes back around and pretends that nothing happened, after Kagura reaffirms that she loves Kyou no matter what, that's when Kyou starts pushing back for her to leave him alone.
Maybe it's just Kyou's usual touchiness and I'm reading too much into it. It's not terribly long after the incident that Kyou's mother ends her life, and Kyou's being blamed for it instead of being allowed to grieve, and he blames himself, and after that he's a different kid and he's really prickly and quick to anger around everyone except Shishou.
But I don't think it's unreasonable to put forward that Kyou still liked Kagura as a friend, and he saw how Kagura reacted, and pretending nothing was wrong was part of what killed his mom, and if he still likes Kagura as a friend then the best thing Kyou can do for her is to shove her forcefully away from him, over and over, until she stops associating with him and getting hurt because of it. Before she gets hurt badly.
Like I put somewhere in an earlier post, Kyou doesn't like Kagura romantically. He certainly doesn't like having his space violated and his feelings ignored. But he (grudgingly) lets her get a way with a lot that speaks to a certain tenderness towards her. Especially later, during Kagura's confession--he's not warm and he's not close and open to her, but he also listens to Kagura, he forgives her, he says thank you, and when she runs to him he lets her cry into his shirt until she's through. You aren't that accommodating to someone you don't care about.
(On the flip side, it occurs to me that--for all that Kagura is a jealous rival of Tohru for Kyou's love--Kagura doesn't come around and act like it much. As Tohru points out, Kagura's really been holding back. I think that Kagura's being honest when she adds at the end of her confession that she really did come to love Kyou after all. It's unrequited, and she's always known that, and she's been struggling with it since Tohru came into the picture. But I think deep down she does like Kyou enough to want him to be happy, and she's realizing that he might be able to be happy with Tohru in a way he can't be with Kagura, and it's super embarrassing and painful to have to admit that to herself, but she's been working on letting go even though she herself doesn't want to be doomed to a life of unloved loneliness, which is what she believes will happen if she lets go of Kyou. Kagura, like Hiro, has character development struggles that are mostly internal.)
Things I only just realized about Kyouru
I have talked before about the fact that Kyou and Tohru's relationship works because they can get to the heart of each other and really see each other and connect on the same level in a way no one else does with them. What I did not really think of, at the time, is that Kyou and Tohru are actually very similar. They actually have a very similar problem.
Which just goes to show my intense Yuki bias, because Kyou has flat-out said over and over again that he believes himself to be a burden and I guess I didn't notice??
And I've just spend so much time saying that this is Tohru's biggest anxiety.
They differ a bit in the execution. Tohru considers herself as starting off at a net zero, basically: she doesn't exactly think her existence is problematic, but she doesn't feel that she offers any worth or value to compensate for the efforts she takes from other people, so she's terrified of being a burden and thus causing people to resent and hate and reject her.
Kyou considers himself as starting off at a negative: he has nothing of any worth to offer to people around him, and he believes that just being around him is actively detrimental to other people, so he just assumes people naturally hate him and avoids everyone and pushes away people who try to get close to him, especially people he loves. (He makes some exceptions when he really really loves, like keeping Shishou at arm's length in some regards but basking in his dad the rest of the time, and giving into his fondness for Tohru even though he knows it's going to go bad.)
Tohru's had her worldview reinforced by being abandoned by a young and grieving Kyouko. Kyou's had his worldview enforced by being told that people who are kind to him die of it.
Kyou's mom loved him more than anyone; Kyou's mom died for him/died because it's his fault. Kyouko was nice to Kyou; Kyou's secret is safe at the cost of Kyouko dying from that car. The beads that keep sealed the Cat's true form are made from the bones and blood of a priest; the way people retell the story implies that Kyou straight-up murdered this guy ages ago, or at least that Kyou's taking advantage of a sacrifice that was forced and not willing. (I mean honestly it could go either way, but lately I've been thinking that it seems unlikely you'd go murder some holy guy to make some beads to seal up a cat monster that you hate when you could just murder the cat monster, don't tell me olden days Souma wouldn't just find that simpler; it seems to me like the sort of effort you'd go through for someone you actually cared minimally about, and that the priest probably devoted himself to holiness for just such a reason, probably offered to have a holy death and create a protective relic. Not that that would make Kyou feel any better.)
This probably ties back into the whole pity thing...Kyou doesn't want people to feel compelled to love him, to force themselves to love him, because not only do they not get any benefit but he has actively negative worth and it hurts people to be around him. Kyou, like Tohru, finds it hard to accept that people might not see it as a burden or a harm to be kind to him. That they might want to be kind to him and enjoy his presence. These children can't just let themselves take the damn donuts.
And that's probably the why of why Kyou, specifically, and not Yuki, is so good at noticing Tohru's issues and actively pushing her to be selfish. It's hard to help yourself, but it can be easier to see yourself in others and give them the advice that you yourself won't take. Let yourself be selfish and live a life that makes you happy. Complain when you need to. Let yourself have some donuts when donuts are being handed out, even if you don't think you deserve them/some jerks have told you you don't deserve them and you're a fake for taking a donut.
(I'm not sure Kyou's ever actually heard this bit, and I don't have time to unpack it right now, but uggghhh I just remembered that Tohru low-key blames herself for her mother's death as well. If she'd been more grateful...if she'd had her priorities straight and her mother was the most important thing in her life, more important than trying her best in school...if she'd just managed to say "Come home safe", then her mom wouldn't have died, and because she was an ungrateful daughter and didn't say it that one time she lost her mom. Nnnn my heart.)
Again I don't have a good transition, but as I think about all this I think I get why Kyou is able to accept Tohru's fuck-you speech as being a real and sincere thing he can depend on instead of instantly assuming it's pity. He's probably not thinking straight enough to realize that Tohru's just taken a level in character development and is being remarkably selfish and open about what she wants from him, not just yet.
But looking at Kyou's past experience with True Form reveals…
Kyou's mom tries to reassure Kyou that everything is fine and normal. She smiles and says all the right things and pretends not to be perturbed. Tohru, as Kyou notes, is clearly not fine about things, she's overwhelmed and sick and scared and clinging to him while shaking and crying. "Can't you see?! Smell?!" Kyou demands when Tohru doesn't instantly run off, but it's pretty clear she does because Tohru isn't smiling, isn't trying to pretend this doesn't bother her. She's undeterred, yes, but she's very bothered.
Kagura's scared too, when she sees, and Kagura runs away. Tohru's scared and she runs toward. Again, Tohru's not hiding her fear even if she's not letting her fear stop her, Tohru's not smiling her serene smile, Tohru clearly would rather run away and go "what the fuck?!?!?!" for a while before dealing with the fallout. Tohru's not a saint, Tohru's just slightly more scared that she'll never see Kyou again after this if she leaves now than she is of Kyou's true form. She's kind of almost passed through the other side of terror into desperation.
Tohru's biggest anxiety is that she'll be abandoned for being a burden, true, but Tohru also is terrified of being preemptively abandoned because the other person has decided they're a burden for Tohru. That's exactly what Hana tried to do in middle school. Hana tried to give up on Uo and Tohru.
"Give up on" isn't a phrase used in the True Form arc, but it comes up plenty elsewhere. Momiji says much later that he's done giving up on the Cat. More specifically, when Kyou's unpacking his complicated feelings about his mom and her death, he says at one point that he wishes she hadn't given up on herself and had stayed together with him. And since mom plays into the True Form arc (as does the "being together" sentiment), I feel it's valid to drag the "giving up on" idea into it as well.
Kyou tries to give up on Tohru--decides for himself that she'll reject him, so he rejects her first and pushes her away so she won't force herself to take pity on him and keep forcing herself to love him--and Tohru probably realizes that he's doing it, since she saw it before with Hana. She's determined to go back to Kyou because she's prioritizing her own wants, but I think probably the reason she also looks pissed is because she's realized Kyou's given up on her and she's not gonna let him get away with it.
I think Kyou wishes that he could cling to people, could have clung to his mom and told her not to give up, the way Tohru is clinging to him there. That he could admit that things suck and are scary and painful, but that he wants to keep clinging on regardless and staying together without anyone giving up, the way Tohru is doing right now. Instead of, like everyone else, pretending that shit is fine even though it sucks and it's scary and it's painful and then giving up on the people around him and keeping a distance.
Kyou recognizes what Tohru feels--and that what Tohru feels is sincere--because it's the same feelings he has about his mom. Which is why, even though it sounds a bit like a Saint Mary Sue love-and-acceptance speech, it's a fuck-you that hits Kyou right in the heart and makes Kyou feel accepted and understood for the first time in his life. Not because Tohru is perfect, but because Tohru is flawed and broken and a terrified mess.
#sobdasha fic adjacent#fruits basket#i didn't outline this out to the best effect#or really proofread thoroughly#so hopefully it makes sense#but i spent hours investing myself into this lol and having too many feelings#i stayed up too late to finish this because i know i won't be coherent enough to put anything like this together after tomorrow's episode#this is how good the reboot is though#no longer am i reevaluating my interpretations with each new episode#i'm managing to re-engage with the source material even before new episodes air to give me a new perspective#also the sheer amount of things i've missed that are right there in the manual are...embarrassing
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Can you Game in VR on a Budget?
virtual reality or VR has been hailed as the next paradigm for gaming an immersion ever since it rolled out then rolled over back in the late 90s with early implementations like Sony's Glastron being described by John Carmack as like looking through toilet paper tubes fast forward to 2016 though and the tech was awesome but it still had a big problem the price because on top of the headset gamers in particular needed to shell out for much more powerful hardware than they would need to play the same game in flat mode but there's some good news since that time oculus who sponsored this video has dropped the price of the rift and continued development on some pretty neat invisible mechanisms that work in the background to make VR run on even relatively modest machines and we spent the last week testing to see just how modest a machine you can use and I think you'll be surprised [Music] let's begin with some of the efficiency improvements that are handled by your graphics card because in theory every frame of an image in VR needs to be rendered twice once for each I so technologies like Nvidia's single pass stereo make it so your PC only needs to setup the scenes geometry once and their lens matched shading actually cuts off any pixels which would not be visible anyway due to how the lenses in the headset work pretty neat then we've got the headset specific tech like oculus is asynchronous time warp and space warp which kick in anytime your machine can't maintain the steady 90 frames per second that's required to prevent motion sickness by generating synthetic preemptive frames that act like a sort of suspension mechanism to smooth out the low FPS bumps getting this tech working right was quite a bit of work because GPUs are designed for high throughput but not pre-emptive frame guessing so oculus worked with both GPU manufacturers as part of invidious VR works and AMD's liquid VR initiatives so it's more than a catchy slogan now let's introduce our bare minimum system so we paired up where is it here is a core i3 8100 quad-core processor and a gtx 1050 Ti and ran future marks VR mark which has a neat feature both the rifts minimum and V are ready performance requirements are baked into the results craft and what we found was that even our bottom of the barrel actually managed to meet the minimum spec bar so there you go video done peace out right no yeah no wrong so upon further analysis we actually found that while our rig was outputting 90 frames per second in the basic orange benchmark which matches up with the refresh rate of the head-mounted displays in the rift the actual target is 100 9 frames per second this is because aside from the graphics going on on the screen in VR the system also needs to read sensors and do a bunch of stuff in the background so with the overhead of VR the calculation is that a hundred and nine frames per second in flat mode should correspond to 90 frames per second in VR and superposition basically said the same thing so that setup was only good enough for like the very barest minimum spec so we do need to go a little higher but do we go for CPU or GPU well we were watching our CPU load pattern during the runs and our processor even though it's a measly core i3 well it is a quad core and it didn't look that busy so we bumped our graphics up to a GTX 1060 to see where that would get us usually people would pair such a card with an i-5 class chip but we're focusing on VR here and even with all the trickery it is still mostly GPU bound and check this out so it turns out that I 3 + 10 60 combo here actually looks good to go with a super rating in VR Marc orange room and a full bar in superpositions optimum preset so that puts our total system cost at just over nine hundred US dollars and bear in mind but that is including the Windows 10 home operating system which microsoft recently jacked up to a hundred and forty bucks so if you already have windows or whatever then now you can subtract that of course though those are synthetics so the next step is to go lab rat mode and put this to the test now normally I game in VR at home on a gtx 980ti so i will be able to tell the difference if this doesn't manage to stay as smooth so let's fire up the oculus performance profiler analysis tool and head-up display which should help us pinpoint the cause of any framerate drops that we experience oh cool okay so this is Aki redesigned home interface thing now you've got this control panel here that you can move to wherever it is that you want it to go and then you can go ahead and decide well you know which menu do you want to see oh close them so there's my library there's my explore tab here then you can kind of adjust this one over here Oh neat you can interact with the desktop as well oh that's trippy let's go ahead and look at the other monitor the one that's not capturing my experience right now ah yes hey you can mess with Ivan hey Ivan I am opening your Start menu what are you gonna do about it in fact you oh wait I probably shouldn't open fraps oh that just glitched it out I don't know I don't know what this thing is yeah thank you let's get our you monitors different sizes yep one is 4k one is 1080 dang it Ivan game now right walk around the place somewhere because she didn't mean it social so you can invite people to come over to your virtual home friends currently zero friends online thanks that's why you wanted me to open that isn't it alright what's next I've played VR shooters dang it yeah it's really fun all right well I think that's good I think that's all the evidence I need this is working awesome so for our last trick we're trying out the climb kind of the crisis of VR if you think about it that way like the graphics in this game or especially when it was first released are pretty incredible compared to what else there is now what I just alright oh that's a long way to fall huh this is maximum settings yeah go go go go look at me I'm like Superman oh-oh-oh Superman falls sometimes ok so actually that went surprisingly well but still the point remains that in a massive surprise to no one just because a benchmark gives you a good score and you can run many VR games well on a relatively inexpensive budget does not automatically mean that you can run any game maxed out in VRS I mean same ideas in flat mode right so just like flat mode if you do have some more budget and you're buying a VR gaming rig it wouldn't be a terrible idea to bump your specs a little if you want to play VR versions of flat games like fallout 4 and Skyrim since VR is more demanding but frankly I've actually found that the most fun that I've had is in games that were designed for VR and what's cool is that the climb in my opinion is more of a tech demo than an actual game and that one still ran decently and most of the VR games out there that I've tried some of which are good and free like Robo recall are not nearly as demanding because it's in the developers best interest to reach as many customers as possible with their games so our PC right here and of course we're not factoring in some of the RGB nonsense and stuff like that in our in our cost 4 but our PC here can enable a ton of awesome VR experiences exactly the way it is so thanks to you guys for watching thanks to oculus for sponsoring this video if you guys dislike this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like is anyone wearing an LT t-shirt not no one where's your team spirit like the LT t-shirts that we have and also our community forum which you should totally join
https://youtu.be/8ZG3e_Nn2ps
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TL;DR: Read logs, delete useless shit, maintain the DB clear.
* Warning: An extended learn! *
Oh properly, I feel like a n00b while typing this but that’s how things roll. I’m not positive if I’ve any regular readers left, as to have regular readers one must be a daily writer, which I am clearly not. (Yes, I wish to change.)
Still, when you go back and stalk this blog, you’ll notice that submit frequency for 2018 has been abysmal at it’s greatest. But yes, there’s a cause an fascinating story behind the same. A narrative which might train you a thing or two about hosting WordPress by yourself internet hosting. It has definitely taught me a lot.
So, it began back in January once I began noticing poor loading performance of the location. Being a self-shared hosted occasion, I chalked it up to poor bandwidth or dangerous optimisation by Staff GoDaddy (not a lot constructive about them). Soon I started getting 503 error randomly on the home page, so it was time to research stuff…
Preliminary findings
I logged into GoDaddy account and went into my hosting status page. Immediately I used to be greeted with an orange banner(hyperlink right here) stating I’m reaching the resource limit and I have to improve my internet hosting plan soon to maintain up the graceful operations. I scoffed mildly to their advertising techniques and opened the boot to look underneath the hood.
I opened the CPanel and took a look over on the system panel on the left. To my amazement, virtually all of the parameters have been either terminal pink or warning orange. I appeared up the labels to know the which means of these indicators.
Pink is often my favorite color
Nicely, clearly, I used to be a bit stunned as I have an expertise of operating WordPress since 2006-ish and I have had run pretty complexly themed blogs on my potato local pc (2006 PC, yeah!) utilizing XAMMP on Home windows.
In case you are a backend guy and skim this line above now (in 2018), you will in all probability cringe more durable than you do on Nicki Minaz songs. Every little thing about that line is WRONG (2006, PC, XAMMP).
Anyway, I had a fond memory of WordPress stack being tremendous environment friendly and respectable at dealing with a mere 100+ blog posts with ~15 plugins. Especially once I was not even posting posts commonly and visitors was on a decline.
Something was improper right here.
I referred to as up GoDaddy tech gross sales help and patiently explained my drawback to him only to get his sales pitch – “Sar, I can see the upgrade banner in your account, so can you. Please give cash, we offer you moar resourcez. Oaky?“. Hmm, in all probability not that brash however you get the gist. I (mildly irritated) requested him to escalate my name to his supervisor or someone from *real* tech help.
Properly, they kinda did. A woman (I am NOT a sexist) picked up the decision and I swear to the odin that she was not capable of perceive something about wp-config and the 503 error and requested me if I have cleared my browser cache. I politely requested her to switch the decision to her supervisor.
…
This time a moderately mature sounding guy picked up the decision and ask my drawback. People, I used to be already 3 ranges deep and 20 minutes on the call. I still defined to him my drawback. He opened his admin console, obtained to my box and disabled all plugins (essential) and my custom theme.
The location seemed to breathe for some time and we have been capable of access the same. He informed me plainly that this can be a basic case of resource overutilization and I have to upgrade my hosting from the essential starter plan to at the least their Delux combo something plan. I made the rookie’s mistake of asking the fee for the same as he immediately stated he will simply transfer my name to his gross sales representative. *facepalm* I held up the connection earlier than they might plug me one other degree deep.
I deep down knew that I want to research this myself earlier than throwing moolah on the desk.
Lazy boi excuses; Half – I
This was February 2018. I stored my weekend free and planned to drill down into my GoDaddy shared internet hosting server to seek out the resource drawback. I used to be positive about some bug leaking memory or some infinite loop sucking out my CPU burst cycles. I deliberate to duplicate the setup on AWS t2.micro free occasion and made an account on the same. It does require a credit card on the file before letting to fireside up ec2 situations. My AMEX CC had some drawback because it debits the verification money however nonetheless stated pending for 48 hours. Truthful enough, I assumed I’ll begin in 2 days…
But all of a sudden (a software program engineer approach of shedding joyful tears!), I acquired a huge venture to work on from scratch at my last job @ Shuttl. (Yeah, I have switched career, yet once more). The venture identify rhymed with XMS. I was pretty excited to build a Python Django venture from scratch along with my 2 gifted senior teammates. I used to be completely satisfied that I will get to study a ton and can deploy an entire challenge reside AND……both of my 2 gifted senior teammates left earlier than even the completion of the primary milestone of the undertaking. Yep, just left. And I used to be struck with lots of legacy code to work on, with a little or no concept concerning the framework. I had a great experience with Flask framework but Django had some things carried out in another way.
I slogged at work and the great half was that I was capable of understand most of the code and received fairly good at Django, carried out a ton of APIs and built a primary dashboard UI. Anyway, that sucked subsequent 2 months of my life and I utterly forgot about this blog, the 503 challenge and meanwhile it stored getting worse as it began opening sometimes and stored throwing 503 errors for probably the most part.
Lazy boi excuses; Part – II
Nah, let’s transfer forward. I’ve shared too much personal stuff anyway. 😛
Let’s start recent? Scrap all shit.
It was around Might 2018 and I obtained some interns and a junior to assist me with new tasks that our product group was pumping out PRDs out at a tremendous price. I used to be working continuous on similar however still a window of private time opened up. Meanwhile, we migrated our code repositories to Github from Gitlab and I obtained to know concerning the idea of gh-pages.
Github pages – A neat nifty venture by Github which allows you to host stuff from your repo as easy websites or blogs. Free of charge!
This appeared like a candy chime to my ears as I used to be drained of the non-existent help from GoDaddy and their incompetent tech staff (free-tier a minimum of). I began formulating a plan to nuke bitsnapper altogether and start from scratch and make a easy Martin Fowler-esque blog.
Clear, simple and nerdy.
So, I created a simple website blog on jatinkrmalik.github.io and even posted some posts (perhaps 1). However because of lack of a lot formatting options and skill to customize stuff, was a bummer.
I lost curiosity in Github pages quicker than America did in Trump.
AND soon I resigned from Shuttl and left in July as a result of [redacted] causes.
A new beginning, AWS method?!
In late July, I joined a really early stage startup referred to as Synaptic.io after what felt like a swyamwar of supply letters. (okay, no bragging). I used to be impressed by the product and measurement of the staff which you possibly can rely on one hand. It felt profitable to get into core group, build one thing great and have an opportunity to witness progress from the within.
Anyway, Synaptic being a data-heavy company, we use lots of third social gathering providers and instruments for automated deployment to staging, prod and so on. Naturally, AWS is the spine of our deployment infra. I acquired a brand new AWS account each for staging and prod, so I started reading about the identical and obtained to find out about Bitnami WordPress AMI which comes preloaded with the WordPress stack goodies and one can deploy with a click on. It was time to reactivate my AWS account and hearth this up.
A couple of weeks in the past.
Initially of August 2018, I was lastly capable of authenticate my AWS account by punching a new credit card. I fired up a bitnami WordPress occasion and did a setup for the standard WordPress installation. Now all I had to do was simply again up stuff from GoDaddy servers and restore right here.
Sounds straightforward proper?
EXCEPT.
IT.
WAS.
NOT.
I logged into my good previous CPanel, received the FTP creds, loaded FileZilla and began the switch. The ETA was in the north of double-digit hours as the website’s public_html folder was somewhere round 1.5 GB which is comprehensible as I’ve lots of media information and videos. Truthful enough. However this once more was going to take rather a lot of time as the problem with transferring a folder is that every micro-size file (<100 kb) takes mere milliseconds to obtain however takes it’s personal sweet time to write down on the local disk when downloading from the web. The apparent means was to pack the public_html folder into a zip file and then switch.
I did an SSH into the box and ran the command zip -rv public_html.zip public_html/ to zip the listing, but one factor which I forgot was that even whereas zipping a listing, I’ll hit the identical drawback of the zip program manually iterating over all of the information (together with microsized one) and can take quite a bit of time to attempt to compress every one. I left it for 20 minutes only to seek out it solely 10% via my all information. Enchancment? Positive but I am not a very patient man.
Why is that this so slow? Oh, wait.
I appeared into the log (because of -v…verbose), and came upon that I had quite a bit of information in my public_html folder in my xcloner plugin directory resulting from some failed attempts to take website backup from a plugin. I found more such folders of some plugins which haven’t any lively position in powering up this blog.
Checking the dimensions of information within the plugins directory.
So, I deleted these folders in public_html/wp-content/plugins and tried operating the zip command once more. It was still slow and I gave up in a couple of minutes.
Clear up.Zip them em!
I google about wrapping information in a zipper with out compressing a lot and obtained to study ranges of compression in zip utility which fits from 1-9 with 1 being least compression and 9 being the very best degree of compression whereas it defaults to 6. So, I attempted again this time with butzip -1rv public_html.zip public_html/ quickly realized the iteration over gazzilion information take extra time than compression logic for the CPU.
Simply wrapping.
I learn more and came upon that making a tarball w/o compression is quicker than zip utility, so it was time to attempt that and perhaps let it complete in its own sweet time. So, I fired up the command: tar -caf public.tar public_html and left it operating.
Unsure if it ever completed…
Then I logged into phpMyAdmin (an internet app to handle MySQL occasion) to take a backup of my bitsnapper WordPress DB. I simply clicked on export and the downloaded file was of measurement 48 MBs which was odd as in UI it was displaying a DB measurement of 1.2 GB. I knew SQL backup can compress some knowledge but of this magnitude? WTF. I opened the SQL file in VS code and clearly, the file was incomplete and had some HTML gibberish at the end which on inspection was the HTML for phpMyAdmin. Bizarre?
I attempted exporting the DB as soon as again from the UI and this time the dimensions of the backup.sql file was 256 MBs. I felt this was applicable but my instinct did a proper click on and opened in my editor as soon as again. Certainly enough the file was nonetheless incomplete with that gibberish. Truthful to say, the backup from phpMyAdmin was corrupted.
prime
I did an ssh into my internet hosting box using the creds in my GoDaddy account and tried every little thing from checking the output of system instructions like:prime, ps -ef, free but the box is properly sandboxed by GoDaddy to avoid any unauthorised access. I even tried to do a privilege escalation with intention of gaining extra management over my hosting account and perhaps restart mysqld however all in useless.
pssudo?
I knew about taking direct DB backups from the shell utilizing mysqldump -h -u -p > db_backup.sql so it was time to attempt that. I ran the command and tailed the backup SQL file with tail -f db_backup.sql to look into its content material because it populated. It began exporting DB nicely and as I started feeling badass and went to seize a cup of espresso, the terminal introduced me with the error message:
man mysqldumpFirst try.
I googled about the problem and it had something to do with the max_alllowed_packet variable of MySQL. The one two methods to vary that was either my modifying /and so forth/my.cnf file (which I used to be positive I didn’t have sudo entry to) or run SET GLOBAL max_allowed_packet=1073741824; query within the MySQL console.
Admin? No? Sorry.
Yeah, both of them didn’t work. Obviously. You want respective system admin consumer access for both.
The roadblock was getting stupidly irritating, and I had to get the backup. I googled more and somebody prompt to cross the max_allowed_packet variable with the mysqldump command as.–max-allowed-packet=1073741824 Tried that too, didn’t work.
With –max_allowed_packet
I was tired and needed to sleep, so I terminated my ec2 occasion and slept.
TODAY.
At present I used to be feeling motivated and deliberate to look into the problem from another angle.
As an alternative of utilizing the WordPress AMI, I made a decision to create the whole setup from scratch. I launched an occasion of ec2 with Amazon Linux AMI. The goal was to know if that is actually GoDaddy messing with me or is it some fault in my database which is leading to the entire shebang.
I used this submit as steerage to arrange every little thing from grounds up.
I logged in once more to my GoDaddy account to be greeted by the orange banner urging me to upgrade. I felt weak and was nearly to click improve and throw some dough to get the straightforward means out. But no, that’s towards the hacker mentality I work with.
So, I opened the CPanel, phpMyAdmin and tried taking a backup again. It again downloaded a 250-something MB file with gibberish at the end. I manually eliminated the last half of the file and uploaded it to my ec2 instance by way of scp and imported it into my distant MySQL occasion.
After importing the public_html information, importing SQL backup and configuring wp-config.php file with DB host and creds, I restarted each httpd (Apache server) and MySQL (DB server) and opened http://ec2-instance-url:80 and to my partial euphoria, it did load up my header and footer for bitsnapper however no posts have been seen.
Hmm… something was missing.
I seemed into the tables on phpMyAdmin and my MySQL server on the ec2 occasion and duh, my wp_xxx_posts table and wp_xxx_postsmeta was lacking. Yeah! So, the problem was that my DB measurement has such giant that Godaddy shared hosting limited bandwidth was not allowing me to take a backup of the whole DB. Clearly, I had to repair this.
I wrote a custom python script to take a backup of the bitsnapper DB table-by-table to avoid hitting the max_allowed_packet limit as observed last week however the identical error mysqldump: Error 2013: Misplaced connection to MySQL server throughout question when dumping table wp_xxx_postmeta stored popping up.
I started my intense googling session as soon as again and queried alongside the line of ‘how you can backup DB from GoDaddy shared internet hosting‘ and ‘GoDaddy + shared hosting + mysqldump + error 2013‘ and by some means by a fluke, I landed on the Backup part of my ….drumroll?….. CPanel! *facepalm*
Facepalm second!
It had every thing I was making an attempt to do above with a flick of a click. I ended all my previous efforts and download the complete web site backup which had each public_html folder and DB backup SQL. The whole archive was nonetheless 2.5 GB which was big for a small blog like this.
Anyway, I did a scp to my ec2 instance and tried to exchange the information in /var/www/html with public_html/ and restored mysql backup by way of mysql -u -p < db_backup.sql and this time it labored with out an error. I restarted my mysql and apache http server by service mysql restart; serivce httpd restart; and tried to load http://:80 and presto! the entire website loads up.
The euphoria this time also lasted for a brief burst as within 2-3 reloads the replicated website again began throwing up the same 503 error and my shell session chocked up.
503! Not again.
I fired up a brand new terminal and tried SSHing into the box however the box just turned unresponsive. I went to the AWS admin console to examine my ec2 instance monitoring for the machine parameters and observed an identical sample as with the CPanel (left panel) parameter console. It was all purple and orange as soon as again.
Clearly, GoDaddy’s internet hosting wasn’t the only wrongdoer.
Real IT help == Self-troubleshooting!
It was then once I decided to shed my worry of peeping into the DB tables because it was a gone trigger anyway and I nonetheless had a partial backup from last yr once I migrated the blog from WordPress managed internet hosting to standard shared internet hosting box.
Boys, it was time to run some queries. The first thing I did was to login to the phpMyAdmin and lookup the tables, schema and properties. I used to be assured that the issue is with the DB measurement and that’s the rationale for slow queries which is chocking up the CPU burst time.
I seemed into tables and located table wp_xxx_postmeta to be around 950 MB in measurement with simply 11000 data. This immediately fired up alarms in my head as I have labored with multi-million row DBs during my stint in Adobe & Shuttl and the table measurement was principally in the vary of few MBs solely. A tough again of the notice calculation said a median measurement of 100 kb per report on this table which was weird because once I seemed up the schema for a similar, it simply was storing 4 data i.e. meta_id, post_id, meta_key, meta_value.
Hey DB, you cray?
It was time to prod this table and understand the info inside it. I fired up a simple query:
SELECT meta_key, rely”text” FROM ‘wp_s4w671g0kp_postmeta’ GROUP by meta_key order by rely”text” desc;
Lo behold, the end result was a bit shocking as till now I used to be considering that this desk may include submit revisions or metadata solely but the query outcome was something like this:
meta_key rely”text” _total_views
1895
_view_ip_list
1892
_jetpack_related_posts_cache
1206
_wp_attached_file
1144
_wp_attachment_metadata
1101
wp-smpro-smush-data
1069
_wp_attachment_image_alt
903
_edit_lock
155
_edit_last
140
_yoast_wpseo_focuskw
118
_yoast_wpseo_linkdex
118
_thumbnail_id
116
_yoast_wpseo_metadesc
114
_publicize_twitter_user
107
_wpas_done_all
103
_total_likes
77
_like_ip_list
77
_wpas_skip_3914702
75
_wpas_skip_11104850
72
_yoast_wpseo_title
56
_wp_attachment_backup_sizes
40
_yoast_wpseo_focuskw_text_input
38
_wp_old_slug
35
essb_hideplusone
29
essb_hidevk
29
Do you see it? There are some 1800+ data for _view_ip_list, _total_views, _jetpack_related_posts_cache which is principally nothing however data originated from WordPress personal homegrown fashionable plugin – Jetpack. I googled a bit about security delete for these data, didn’t find anything, took a leap of religion and executed:
Delete from FROM ‘wp_xxx_postmeta’ WHERE meta_key = ‘_view_ip_list’;
Delete from FROM ‘wp_xxx_postmeta’ WHERE meta_key = ‘_total_views’;
Delete from FROM ‘wp_xxx_postmeta’ WHERE meta_key = ‘_jetpack_related_posts_cache’;
It deleted some 4,000 data out of 11,000 data it had and look what happened once I refreshed phpMyAdmin?
All cleaned up!
Yus! My wp_xxx_postmeta table measurement dropped from 900-something MBs to 6.Three MBs by just deleting ~4,000 data. What sick joke is that? My complete DB measurement dropped to 25 MBs from ~1.2 GBs, in all probability because of the cascade effect of overseas key constraints of the data I deleted.
Outcome?
My web site was a breeze once once more. The load time went down considerably, in all probability as a result of of quicker DB queries and even the system monitoring parameters on the CPanel went down from Purple/Orange to Inexperienced. I did some load testing by executing a number of curl requests to my house page by way of terminal, and the server was not breaking
any sweat.
Take a look at that RAM usage! WHAT? Keep in mind once I talked about operating WordPress stack on my 2006 PC with some 128 MB of memory? Yeah!
So fast much wow!
Classes?
Troubleshooting Godaddy is a long-term thing. You’ll be able to either get into the shit and fix it yourself or you can begin throwing money on the display until you escalate to their core tech workforce which I assume might be by no means for shared internet hosting plans. They could have a terrific help for devoted servers though.
AWS is a f##king superb piece of tech. If you understand how to harden servers, by all means, simply drop these legacy internet hosting providers and go on your personal setup. It’s in all probability cheaper, quicker and extra VFM. A easy t2.micro instance will value < ₹700/month. (Perhaps extra, sigh world financial system!).
Typically, being a smartass isn’t good. Most of the occasions, nevertheless, it retains you protected.
All the time examine logs. -_-
The post Back from Dead
0 notes
Text
TL;DR: Read logs, delete useless shit, maintain the DB clear.
* Warning: An extended learn! *
Oh properly, I feel like a n00b while typing this but that’s how things roll. I’m not positive if I’ve any regular readers left, as to have regular readers one must be a daily writer, which I am clearly not. (Yes, I wish to change.)
Still, when you go back and stalk this blog, you’ll notice that submit frequency for 2018 has been abysmal at it’s greatest. But yes, there’s a cause an fascinating story behind the same. A narrative which might train you a thing or two about hosting WordPress by yourself internet hosting. It has definitely taught me a lot.
So, it began back in January once I began noticing poor loading performance of the location. Being a self-shared hosted occasion, I chalked it up to poor bandwidth or dangerous optimisation by Staff GoDaddy (not a lot constructive about them). Soon I started getting 503 error randomly on the home page, so it was time to research stuff…
Preliminary findings
I logged into GoDaddy account and went into my hosting status page. Immediately I used to be greeted with an orange banner(hyperlink right here) stating I’m reaching the resource limit and I have to improve my internet hosting plan soon to maintain up the graceful operations. I scoffed mildly to their advertising techniques and opened the boot to look underneath the hood.
I opened the CPanel and took a look over on the system panel on the left. To my amazement, virtually all of the parameters have been either terminal pink or warning orange. I appeared up the labels to know the which means of these indicators.
Pink is often my favorite color
Nicely, clearly, I used to be a bit stunned as I have an expertise of operating WordPress since 2006-ish and I have had run pretty complexly themed blogs on my potato local pc (2006 PC, yeah!) utilizing XAMMP on Home windows.
In case you are a backend guy and skim this line above now (in 2018), you will in all probability cringe more durable than you do on Nicki Minaz songs. Every little thing about that line is WRONG (2006, PC, XAMMP).
Anyway, I had a fond memory of WordPress stack being tremendous environment friendly and respectable at dealing with a mere 100+ blog posts with ~15 plugins. Especially once I was not even posting posts commonly and visitors was on a decline.
Something was improper right here.
I referred to as up GoDaddy tech gross sales help and patiently explained my drawback to him only to get his sales pitch – “Sar, I can see the upgrade banner in your account, so can you. Please give cash, we offer you moar resourcez. Oaky?“. Hmm, in all probability not that brash however you get the gist. I (mildly irritated) requested him to escalate my name to his supervisor or someone from *real* tech help.
Properly, they kinda did. A woman (I am NOT a sexist) picked up the decision and I swear to the odin that she was not capable of perceive something about wp-config and the 503 error and requested me if I have cleared my browser cache. I politely requested her to switch the decision to her supervisor.
…
This time a moderately mature sounding guy picked up the decision and ask my drawback. People, I used to be already 3 ranges deep and 20 minutes on the call. I still defined to him my drawback. He opened his admin console, obtained to my box and disabled all plugins (essential) and my custom theme.
The location seemed to breathe for some time and we have been capable of access the same. He informed me plainly that this can be a basic case of resource overutilization and I have to upgrade my hosting from the essential starter plan to at the least their Delux combo something plan. I made the rookie’s mistake of asking the fee for the same as he immediately stated he will simply transfer my name to his gross sales representative. *facepalm* I held up the connection earlier than they might plug me one other degree deep.
I deep down knew that I want to research this myself earlier than throwing moolah on the desk.
Lazy boi excuses; Half – I
This was February 2018. I stored my weekend free and planned to drill down into my GoDaddy shared internet hosting server to seek out the resource drawback. I used to be positive about some bug leaking memory or some infinite loop sucking out my CPU burst cycles. I deliberate to duplicate the setup on AWS t2.micro free occasion and made an account on the same. It does require a credit card on the file before letting to fireside up ec2 situations. My AMEX CC had some drawback because it debits the verification money however nonetheless stated pending for 48 hours. Truthful enough, I assumed I’ll begin in 2 days…
But all of a sudden (a software program engineer approach of shedding joyful tears!), I acquired a huge venture to work on from scratch at my last job @ Shuttl. (Yeah, I have switched career, yet once more). The venture identify rhymed with XMS. I was pretty excited to build a Python Django venture from scratch along with my 2 gifted senior teammates. I used to be completely satisfied that I will get to study a ton and can deploy an entire challenge reside AND……both of my 2 gifted senior teammates left earlier than even the completion of the primary milestone of the undertaking. Yep, just left. And I used to be struck with lots of legacy code to work on, with a little or no concept concerning the framework. I had a great experience with Flask framework but Django had some things carried out in another way.
I slogged at work and the great half was that I was capable of understand most of the code and received fairly good at Django, carried out a ton of APIs and built a primary dashboard UI. Anyway, that sucked subsequent 2 months of my life and I utterly forgot about this blog, the 503 challenge and meanwhile it stored getting worse as it began opening sometimes and stored throwing 503 errors for probably the most part.
Lazy boi excuses; Part – II
Nah, let’s transfer forward. I’ve shared too much personal stuff anyway. 😛
Let’s start recent? Scrap all shit.
It was around Might 2018 and I obtained some interns and a junior to assist me with new tasks that our product group was pumping out PRDs out at a tremendous price. I used to be working continuous on similar however still a window of private time opened up. Meanwhile, we migrated our code repositories to Github from Gitlab and I obtained to know concerning the idea of gh-pages.
Github pages – A neat nifty venture by Github which allows you to host stuff from your repo as easy websites or blogs. Free of charge!
This appeared like a candy chime to my ears as I used to be drained of the non-existent help from GoDaddy and their incompetent tech staff (free-tier a minimum of). I began formulating a plan to nuke bitsnapper altogether and start from scratch and make a easy Martin Fowler-esque blog.
Clear, simple and nerdy.
So, I created a simple website blog on jatinkrmalik.github.io and even posted some posts (perhaps 1). However because of lack of a lot formatting options and skill to customize stuff, was a bummer.
I lost curiosity in Github pages quicker than America did in Trump.
AND soon I resigned from Shuttl and left in July as a result of [redacted] causes.
A new beginning, AWS method?!
In late July, I joined a really early stage startup referred to as Synaptic.io after what felt like a swyamwar of supply letters. (okay, no bragging). I used to be impressed by the product and measurement of the staff which you possibly can rely on one hand. It felt profitable to get into core group, build one thing great and have an opportunity to witness progress from the within.
Anyway, Synaptic being a data-heavy company, we use lots of third social gathering providers and instruments for automated deployment to staging, prod and so on. Naturally, AWS is the spine of our deployment infra. I acquired a brand new AWS account each for staging and prod, so I started reading about the identical and obtained to find out about Bitnami WordPress AMI which comes preloaded with the WordPress stack goodies and one can deploy with a click on. It was time to reactivate my AWS account and hearth this up.
A couple of weeks in the past.
Initially of August 2018, I was lastly capable of authenticate my AWS account by punching a new credit card. I fired up a bitnami WordPress occasion and did a setup for the standard WordPress installation. Now all I had to do was simply again up stuff from GoDaddy servers and restore right here.
Sounds straightforward proper?
EXCEPT.
IT.
WAS.
NOT.
I logged into my good previous CPanel, received the FTP creds, loaded FileZilla and began the switch. The ETA was in the north of double-digit hours as the website’s public_html folder was somewhere round 1.5 GB which is comprehensible as I’ve lots of media information and videos. Truthful enough. However this once more was going to take rather a lot of time as the problem with transferring a folder is that every micro-size file (<100 kb) takes mere milliseconds to obtain however takes it’s personal sweet time to write down on the local disk when downloading from the web. The apparent means was to pack the public_html folder into a zip file and then switch.
I did an SSH into the box and ran the command zip -rv public_html.zip public_html/ to zip the listing, but one factor which I forgot was that even whereas zipping a listing, I’ll hit the identical drawback of the zip program manually iterating over all of the information (together with microsized one) and can take quite a bit of time to attempt to compress every one. I left it for 20 minutes only to seek out it solely 10% via my all information. Enchancment? Positive but I am not a very patient man.
Why is that this so slow? Oh, wait.
I appeared into the log (because of -v…verbose), and came upon that I had quite a bit of information in my public_html folder in my xcloner plugin directory resulting from some failed attempts to take website backup from a plugin. I found more such folders of some plugins which haven’t any lively position in powering up this blog.
Checking the dimensions of information within the plugins directory.
So, I deleted these folders in public_html/wp-content/plugins and tried operating the zip command once more. It was still slow and I gave up in a couple of minutes.
Clear up.Zip them em!
I google about wrapping information in a zipper with out compressing a lot and obtained to study ranges of compression in zip utility which fits from 1-9 with 1 being least compression and 9 being the very best degree of compression whereas it defaults to 6. So, I attempted again this time with butzip -1rv public_html.zip public_html/ quickly realized the iteration over gazzilion information take extra time than compression logic for the CPU.
Simply wrapping.
I learn more and came upon that making a tarball w/o compression is quicker than zip utility, so it was time to attempt that and perhaps let it complete in its own sweet time. So, I fired up the command: tar -caf public.tar public_html and left it operating.
Unsure if it ever completed…
Then I logged into phpMyAdmin (an internet app to handle MySQL occasion) to take a backup of my bitsnapper WordPress DB. I simply clicked on export and the downloaded file was of measurement 48 MBs which was odd as in UI it was displaying a DB measurement of 1.2 GB. I knew SQL backup can compress some knowledge but of this magnitude? WTF. I opened the SQL file in VS code and clearly, the file was incomplete and had some HTML gibberish at the end which on inspection was the HTML for phpMyAdmin. Bizarre?
I attempted exporting the DB as soon as again from the UI and this time the dimensions of the backup.sql file was 256 MBs. I felt this was applicable but my instinct did a proper click on and opened in my editor as soon as again. Certainly enough the file was nonetheless incomplete with that gibberish. Truthful to say, the backup from phpMyAdmin was corrupted.
prime
I did an ssh into my internet hosting box using the creds in my GoDaddy account and tried every little thing from checking the output of system instructions like:prime, ps -ef, free but the box is properly sandboxed by GoDaddy to avoid any unauthorised access. I even tried to do a privilege escalation with intention of gaining extra management over my hosting account and perhaps restart mysqld however all in useless.
pssudo?
I knew about taking direct DB backups from the shell utilizing mysqldump -h -u -p > db_backup.sql so it was time to attempt that. I ran the command and tailed the backup SQL file with tail -f db_backup.sql to look into its content material because it populated. It began exporting DB nicely and as I started feeling badass and went to seize a cup of espresso, the terminal introduced me with the error message:
man mysqldumpFirst try.
I googled about the problem and it had something to do with the max_alllowed_packet variable of MySQL. The one two methods to vary that was either my modifying /and so forth/my.cnf file (which I used to be positive I didn’t have sudo entry to) or run SET GLOBAL max_allowed_packet=1073741824; query within the MySQL console.
Admin? No? Sorry.
Yeah, both of them didn’t work. Obviously. You want respective system admin consumer access for both.
The roadblock was getting stupidly irritating, and I had to get the backup. I googled more and somebody prompt to cross the max_allowed_packet variable with the mysqldump command as.–max-allowed-packet=1073741824 Tried that too, didn’t work.
With –max_allowed_packet
I was tired and needed to sleep, so I terminated my ec2 occasion and slept.
TODAY.
At present I used to be feeling motivated and deliberate to look into the problem from another angle.
As an alternative of utilizing the WordPress AMI, I made a decision to create the whole setup from scratch. I launched an occasion of ec2 with Amazon Linux AMI. The goal was to know if that is actually GoDaddy messing with me or is it some fault in my database which is leading to the entire shebang.
I used this submit as steerage to arrange every little thing from grounds up.
I logged in once more to my GoDaddy account to be greeted by the orange banner urging me to upgrade. I felt weak and was nearly to click improve and throw some dough to get the straightforward means out. But no, that’s towards the hacker mentality I work with.
So, I opened the CPanel, phpMyAdmin and tried taking a backup again. It again downloaded a 250-something MB file with gibberish at the end. I manually eliminated the last half of the file and uploaded it to my ec2 instance by way of scp and imported it into my distant MySQL occasion.
After importing the public_html information, importing SQL backup and configuring wp-config.php file with DB host and creds, I restarted each httpd (Apache server) and MySQL (DB server) and opened http://ec2-instance-url:80 and to my partial euphoria, it did load up my header and footer for bitsnapper however no posts have been seen.
Hmm… something was missing.
I seemed into the tables on phpMyAdmin and my MySQL server on the ec2 occasion and duh, my wp_xxx_posts table and wp_xxx_postsmeta was lacking. Yeah! So, the problem was that my DB measurement has such giant that Godaddy shared hosting limited bandwidth was not allowing me to take a backup of the whole DB. Clearly, I had to repair this.
I wrote a custom python script to take a backup of the bitsnapper DB table-by-table to avoid hitting the max_allowed_packet limit as observed last week however the identical error mysqldump: Error 2013: Misplaced connection to MySQL server throughout question when dumping table wp_xxx_postmeta stored popping up.
I started my intense googling session as soon as again and queried alongside the line of ‘how you can backup DB from GoDaddy shared internet hosting‘ and ‘GoDaddy + shared hosting + mysqldump + error 2013‘ and by some means by a fluke, I landed on the Backup part of my ….drumroll?….. CPanel! *facepalm*
Facepalm second!
It had every thing I was making an attempt to do above with a flick of a click. I ended all my previous efforts and download the complete web site backup which had each public_html folder and DB backup SQL. The whole archive was nonetheless 2.5 GB which was big for a small blog like this.
Anyway, I did a scp to my ec2 instance and tried to exchange the information in /var/www/html with public_html/ and restored mysql backup by way of mysql -u -p < db_backup.sql and this time it labored with out an error. I restarted my mysql and apache http server by service mysql restart; serivce httpd restart; and tried to load http://:80 and presto! the entire website loads up.
The euphoria this time also lasted for a brief burst as within 2-3 reloads the replicated website again began throwing up the same 503 error and my shell session chocked up.
503! Not again.
I fired up a brand new terminal and tried SSHing into the box however the box just turned unresponsive. I went to the AWS admin console to examine my ec2 instance monitoring for the machine parameters and observed an identical sample as with the CPanel (left panel) parameter console. It was all purple and orange as soon as again.
Clearly, GoDaddy’s internet hosting wasn’t the only wrongdoer.
Real IT help == Self-troubleshooting!
It was then once I decided to shed my worry of peeping into the DB tables because it was a gone trigger anyway and I nonetheless had a partial backup from last yr once I migrated the blog from WordPress managed internet hosting to standard shared internet hosting box.
Boys, it was time to run some queries. The first thing I did was to login to the phpMyAdmin and lookup the tables, schema and properties. I used to be assured that the issue is with the DB measurement and that’s the rationale for slow queries which is chocking up the CPU burst time.
I seemed into tables and located table wp_xxx_postmeta to be around 950 MB in measurement with simply 11000 data. This immediately fired up alarms in my head as I have labored with multi-million row DBs during my stint in Adobe & Shuttl and the table measurement was principally in the vary of few MBs solely. A tough again of the notice calculation said a median measurement of 100 kb per report on this table which was weird because once I seemed up the schema for a similar, it simply was storing 4 data i.e. meta_id, post_id, meta_key, meta_value.
Hey DB, you cray?
It was time to prod this table and understand the info inside it. I fired up a simple query:
SELECT meta_key, rely”text” FROM ‘wp_s4w671g0kp_postmeta’ GROUP by meta_key order by rely”text” desc;
Lo behold, the end result was a bit shocking as till now I used to be considering that this desk may include submit revisions or metadata solely but the query outcome was something like this:
meta_key rely”text” _total_views
1895
_view_ip_list
1892
_jetpack_related_posts_cache
1206
_wp_attached_file
1144
_wp_attachment_metadata
1101
wp-smpro-smush-data
1069
_wp_attachment_image_alt
903
_edit_lock
155
_edit_last
140
_yoast_wpseo_focuskw
118
_yoast_wpseo_linkdex
118
_thumbnail_id
116
_yoast_wpseo_metadesc
114
_publicize_twitter_user
107
_wpas_done_all
103
_total_likes
77
_like_ip_list
77
_wpas_skip_3914702
75
_wpas_skip_11104850
72
_yoast_wpseo_title
56
_wp_attachment_backup_sizes
40
_yoast_wpseo_focuskw_text_input
38
_wp_old_slug
35
essb_hideplusone
29
essb_hidevk
29
Do you see it? There are some 1800+ data for _view_ip_list, _total_views, _jetpack_related_posts_cache which is principally nothing however data originated from WordPress personal homegrown fashionable plugin – Jetpack. I googled a bit about security delete for these data, didn’t find anything, took a leap of religion and executed:
Delete from FROM ‘wp_xxx_postmeta’ WHERE meta_key = ‘_view_ip_list’;
Delete from FROM ‘wp_xxx_postmeta’ WHERE meta_key = ‘_total_views’;
Delete from FROM ‘wp_xxx_postmeta’ WHERE meta_key = ‘_jetpack_related_posts_cache’;
It deleted some 4,000 data out of 11,000 data it had and look what happened once I refreshed phpMyAdmin?
All cleaned up!
Yus! My wp_xxx_postmeta table measurement dropped from 900-something MBs to 6.Three MBs by just deleting ~4,000 data. What sick joke is that? My complete DB measurement dropped to 25 MBs from ~1.2 GBs, in all probability because of the cascade effect of overseas key constraints of the data I deleted.
Outcome?
My web site was a breeze once once more. The load time went down considerably, in all probability as a result of of quicker DB queries and even the system monitoring parameters on the CPanel went down from Purple/Orange to Inexperienced. I did some load testing by executing a number of curl requests to my house page by way of terminal, and the server was not breaking
any sweat.
Take a look at that RAM usage! WHAT? Keep in mind once I talked about operating WordPress stack on my 2006 PC with some 128 MB of memory? Yeah!
So fast much wow!
Classes?
Troubleshooting Godaddy is a long-term thing. You’ll be able to either get into the shit and fix it yourself or you can begin throwing money on the display until you escalate to their core tech workforce which I assume might be by no means for shared internet hosting plans. They could have a terrific help for devoted servers though.
AWS is a f##king superb piece of tech. If you understand how to harden servers, by all means, simply drop these legacy internet hosting providers and go on your personal setup. It’s in all probability cheaper, quicker and extra VFM. A easy t2.micro instance will value < ₹700/month. (Perhaps extra, sigh world financial system!).
Typically, being a smartass isn’t good. Most of the occasions, nevertheless, it retains you protected.
All the time examine logs. -_-
The post Back from Dead
0 notes
Text
TL;DR: Read logs, delete useless shit, maintain the DB clear.
* Warning: An extended learn! *
Oh properly, I feel like a n00b while typing this but that’s how things roll. I’m not positive if I’ve any regular readers left, as to have regular readers one must be a daily writer, which I am clearly not. (Yes, I wish to change.)
Still, when you go back and stalk this blog, you’ll notice that submit frequency for 2018 has been abysmal at it’s greatest. But yes, there’s a cause an fascinating story behind the same. A narrative which might train you a thing or two about hosting WordPress by yourself internet hosting. It has definitely taught me a lot.
So, it began back in January once I began noticing poor loading performance of the location. Being a self-shared hosted occasion, I chalked it up to poor bandwidth or dangerous optimisation by Staff GoDaddy (not a lot constructive about them). Soon I started getting 503 error randomly on the home page, so it was time to research stuff…
Preliminary findings
I logged into GoDaddy account and went into my hosting status page. Immediately I used to be greeted with an orange banner(hyperlink right here) stating I’m reaching the resource limit and I have to improve my internet hosting plan soon to maintain up the graceful operations. I scoffed mildly to their advertising techniques and opened the boot to look underneath the hood.
I opened the CPanel and took a look over on the system panel on the left. To my amazement, virtually all of the parameters have been either terminal pink or warning orange. I appeared up the labels to know the which means of these indicators.
Pink is often my favorite color
Nicely, clearly, I used to be a bit stunned as I have an expertise of operating WordPress since 2006-ish and I have had run pretty complexly themed blogs on my potato local pc (2006 PC, yeah!) utilizing XAMMP on Home windows.
In case you are a backend guy and skim this line above now (in 2018), you will in all probability cringe more durable than you do on Nicki Minaz songs. Every little thing about that line is WRONG (2006, PC, XAMMP).
Anyway, I had a fond memory of WordPress stack being tremendous environment friendly and respectable at dealing with a mere 100+ blog posts with ~15 plugins. Especially once I was not even posting posts commonly and visitors was on a decline.
Something was improper right here.
I referred to as up GoDaddy tech gross sales help and patiently explained my drawback to him only to get his sales pitch – “Sar, I can see the upgrade banner in your account, so can you. Please give cash, we offer you moar resourcez. Oaky?“. Hmm, in all probability not that brash however you get the gist. I (mildly irritated) requested him to escalate my name to his supervisor or someone from *real* tech help.
Properly, they kinda did. A woman (I am NOT a sexist) picked up the decision and I swear to the odin that she was not capable of perceive something about wp-config and the 503 error and requested me if I have cleared my browser cache. I politely requested her to switch the decision to her supervisor.
…
This time a moderately mature sounding guy picked up the decision and ask my drawback. People, I used to be already 3 ranges deep and 20 minutes on the call. I still defined to him my drawback. He opened his admin console, obtained to my box and disabled all plugins (essential) and my custom theme.
The location seemed to breathe for some time and we have been capable of access the same. He informed me plainly that this can be a basic case of resource overutilization and I have to upgrade my hosting from the essential starter plan to at the least their Delux combo something plan. I made the rookie’s mistake of asking the fee for the same as he immediately stated he will simply transfer my name to his gross sales representative. *facepalm* I held up the connection earlier than they might plug me one other degree deep.
I deep down knew that I want to research this myself earlier than throwing moolah on the desk.
Lazy boi excuses; Half – I
This was February 2018. I stored my weekend free and planned to drill down into my GoDaddy shared internet hosting server to seek out the resource drawback. I used to be positive about some bug leaking memory or some infinite loop sucking out my CPU burst cycles. I deliberate to duplicate the setup on AWS t2.micro free occasion and made an account on the same. It does require a credit card on the file before letting to fireside up ec2 situations. My AMEX CC had some drawback because it debits the verification money however nonetheless stated pending for 48 hours. Truthful enough, I assumed I’ll begin in 2 days…
But all of a sudden (a software program engineer approach of shedding joyful tears!), I acquired a huge venture to work on from scratch at my last job @ Shuttl. (Yeah, I have switched career, yet once more). The venture identify rhymed with XMS. I was pretty excited to build a Python Django venture from scratch along with my 2 gifted senior teammates. I used to be completely satisfied that I will get to study a ton and can deploy an entire challenge reside AND……both of my 2 gifted senior teammates left earlier than even the completion of the primary milestone of the undertaking. Yep, just left. And I used to be struck with lots of legacy code to work on, with a little or no concept concerning the framework. I had a great experience with Flask framework but Django had some things carried out in another way.
I slogged at work and the great half was that I was capable of understand most of the code and received fairly good at Django, carried out a ton of APIs and built a primary dashboard UI. Anyway, that sucked subsequent 2 months of my life and I utterly forgot about this blog, the 503 challenge and meanwhile it stored getting worse as it began opening sometimes and stored throwing 503 errors for probably the most part.
Lazy boi excuses; Part – II
Nah, let’s transfer forward. I’ve shared too much personal stuff anyway. 😛
Let’s start recent? Scrap all shit.
It was around Might 2018 and I obtained some interns and a junior to assist me with new tasks that our product group was pumping out PRDs out at a tremendous price. I used to be working continuous on similar however still a window of private time opened up. Meanwhile, we migrated our code repositories to Github from Gitlab and I obtained to know concerning the idea of gh-pages.
Github pages – A neat nifty venture by Github which allows you to host stuff from your repo as easy websites or blogs. Free of charge!
This appeared like a candy chime to my ears as I used to be drained of the non-existent help from GoDaddy and their incompetent tech staff (free-tier a minimum of). I began formulating a plan to nuke bitsnapper altogether and start from scratch and make a easy Martin Fowler-esque blog.
Clear, simple and nerdy.
So, I created a simple website blog on jatinkrmalik.github.io and even posted some posts (perhaps 1). However because of lack of a lot formatting options and skill to customize stuff, was a bummer.
I lost curiosity in Github pages quicker than America did in Trump.
AND soon I resigned from Shuttl and left in July as a result of [redacted] causes.
A new beginning, AWS method?!
In late July, I joined a really early stage startup referred to as Synaptic.io after what felt like a swyamwar of supply letters. (okay, no bragging). I used to be impressed by the product and measurement of the staff which you possibly can rely on one hand. It felt profitable to get into core group, build one thing great and have an opportunity to witness progress from the within.
Anyway, Synaptic being a data-heavy company, we use lots of third social gathering providers and instruments for automated deployment to staging, prod and so on. Naturally, AWS is the spine of our deployment infra. I acquired a brand new AWS account each for staging and prod, so I started reading about the identical and obtained to find out about Bitnami WordPress AMI which comes preloaded with the WordPress stack goodies and one can deploy with a click on. It was time to reactivate my AWS account and hearth this up.
A couple of weeks in the past.
Initially of August 2018, I was lastly capable of authenticate my AWS account by punching a new credit card. I fired up a bitnami WordPress occasion and did a setup for the standard WordPress installation. Now all I had to do was simply again up stuff from GoDaddy servers and restore right here.
Sounds straightforward proper?
EXCEPT.
IT.
WAS.
NOT.
I logged into my good previous CPanel, received the FTP creds, loaded FileZilla and began the switch. The ETA was in the north of double-digit hours as the website’s public_html folder was somewhere round 1.5 GB which is comprehensible as I’ve lots of media information and videos. Truthful enough. However this once more was going to take rather a lot of time as the problem with transferring a folder is that every micro-size file (<100 kb) takes mere milliseconds to obtain however takes it’s personal sweet time to write down on the local disk when downloading from the web. The apparent means was to pack the public_html folder into a zip file and then switch.
I did an SSH into the box and ran the command zip -rv public_html.zip public_html/ to zip the listing, but one factor which I forgot was that even whereas zipping a listing, I’ll hit the identical drawback of the zip program manually iterating over all of the information (together with microsized one) and can take quite a bit of time to attempt to compress every one. I left it for 20 minutes only to seek out it solely 10% via my all information. Enchancment? Positive but I am not a very patient man.
Why is that this so slow? Oh, wait.
I appeared into the log (because of -v…verbose), and came upon that I had quite a bit of information in my public_html folder in my xcloner plugin directory resulting from some failed attempts to take website backup from a plugin. I found more such folders of some plugins which haven’t any lively position in powering up this blog.
Checking the dimensions of information within the plugins directory.
So, I deleted these folders in public_html/wp-content/plugins and tried operating the zip command once more. It was still slow and I gave up in a couple of minutes.
Clear up.Zip them em!
I google about wrapping information in a zipper with out compressing a lot and obtained to study ranges of compression in zip utility which fits from 1-9 with 1 being least compression and 9 being the very best degree of compression whereas it defaults to 6. So, I attempted again this time with butzip -1rv public_html.zip public_html/ quickly realized the iteration over gazzilion information take extra time than compression logic for the CPU.
Simply wrapping.
I learn more and came upon that making a tarball w/o compression is quicker than zip utility, so it was time to attempt that and perhaps let it complete in its own sweet time. So, I fired up the command: tar -caf public.tar public_html and left it operating.
Unsure if it ever completed…
Then I logged into phpMyAdmin (an internet app to handle MySQL occasion) to take a backup of my bitsnapper WordPress DB. I simply clicked on export and the downloaded file was of measurement 48 MBs which was odd as in UI it was displaying a DB measurement of 1.2 GB. I knew SQL backup can compress some knowledge but of this magnitude? WTF. I opened the SQL file in VS code and clearly, the file was incomplete and had some HTML gibberish at the end which on inspection was the HTML for phpMyAdmin. Bizarre?
I attempted exporting the DB as soon as again from the UI and this time the dimensions of the backup.sql file was 256 MBs. I felt this was applicable but my instinct did a proper click on and opened in my editor as soon as again. Certainly enough the file was nonetheless incomplete with that gibberish. Truthful to say, the backup from phpMyAdmin was corrupted.
prime
I did an ssh into my internet hosting box using the creds in my GoDaddy account and tried every little thing from checking the output of system instructions like:prime, ps -ef, free but the box is properly sandboxed by GoDaddy to avoid any unauthorised access. I even tried to do a privilege escalation with intention of gaining extra management over my hosting account and perhaps restart mysqld however all in useless.
pssudo?
I knew about taking direct DB backups from the shell utilizing mysqldump -h -u -p > db_backup.sql so it was time to attempt that. I ran the command and tailed the backup SQL file with tail -f db_backup.sql to look into its content material because it populated. It began exporting DB nicely and as I started feeling badass and went to seize a cup of espresso, the terminal introduced me with the error message:
man mysqldumpFirst try.
I googled about the problem and it had something to do with the max_alllowed_packet variable of MySQL. The one two methods to vary that was either my modifying /and so forth/my.cnf file (which I used to be positive I didn’t have sudo entry to) or run SET GLOBAL max_allowed_packet=1073741824; query within the MySQL console.
Admin? No? Sorry.
Yeah, both of them didn’t work. Obviously. You want respective system admin consumer access for both.
The roadblock was getting stupidly irritating, and I had to get the backup. I googled more and somebody prompt to cross the max_allowed_packet variable with the mysqldump command as.–max-allowed-packet=1073741824 Tried that too, didn’t work.
With –max_allowed_packet
I was tired and needed to sleep, so I terminated my ec2 occasion and slept.
TODAY.
At present I used to be feeling motivated and deliberate to look into the problem from another angle.
As an alternative of utilizing the WordPress AMI, I made a decision to create the whole setup from scratch. I launched an occasion of ec2 with Amazon Linux AMI. The goal was to know if that is actually GoDaddy messing with me or is it some fault in my database which is leading to the entire shebang.
I used this submit as steerage to arrange every little thing from grounds up.
I logged in once more to my GoDaddy account to be greeted by the orange banner urging me to upgrade. I felt weak and was nearly to click improve and throw some dough to get the straightforward means out. But no, that’s towards the hacker mentality I work with.
So, I opened the CPanel, phpMyAdmin and tried taking a backup again. It again downloaded a 250-something MB file with gibberish at the end. I manually eliminated the last half of the file and uploaded it to my ec2 instance by way of scp and imported it into my distant MySQL occasion.
After importing the public_html information, importing SQL backup and configuring wp-config.php file with DB host and creds, I restarted each httpd (Apache server) and MySQL (DB server) and opened http://ec2-instance-url:80 and to my partial euphoria, it did load up my header and footer for bitsnapper however no posts have been seen.
Hmm… something was missing.
I seemed into the tables on phpMyAdmin and my MySQL server on the ec2 occasion and duh, my wp_xxx_posts table and wp_xxx_postsmeta was lacking. Yeah! So, the problem was that my DB measurement has such giant that Godaddy shared hosting limited bandwidth was not allowing me to take a backup of the whole DB. Clearly, I had to repair this.
I wrote a custom python script to take a backup of the bitsnapper DB table-by-table to avoid hitting the max_allowed_packet limit as observed last week however the identical error mysqldump: Error 2013: Misplaced connection to MySQL server throughout question when dumping table wp_xxx_postmeta stored popping up.
I started my intense googling session as soon as again and queried alongside the line of ‘how you can backup DB from GoDaddy shared internet hosting‘ and ‘GoDaddy + shared hosting + mysqldump + error 2013‘ and by some means by a fluke, I landed on the Backup part of my ….drumroll?….. CPanel! *facepalm*
Facepalm second!
It had every thing I was making an attempt to do above with a flick of a click. I ended all my previous efforts and download the complete web site backup which had each public_html folder and DB backup SQL. The whole archive was nonetheless 2.5 GB which was big for a small blog like this.
Anyway, I did a scp to my ec2 instance and tried to exchange the information in /var/www/html with public_html/ and restored mysql backup by way of mysql -u -p < db_backup.sql and this time it labored with out an error. I restarted my mysql and apache http server by service mysql restart; serivce httpd restart; and tried to load http://:80 and presto! the entire website loads up.
The euphoria this time also lasted for a brief burst as within 2-3 reloads the replicated website again began throwing up the same 503 error and my shell session chocked up.
503! Not again.
I fired up a brand new terminal and tried SSHing into the box however the box just turned unresponsive. I went to the AWS admin console to examine my ec2 instance monitoring for the machine parameters and observed an identical sample as with the CPanel (left panel) parameter console. It was all purple and orange as soon as again.
Clearly, GoDaddy’s internet hosting wasn’t the only wrongdoer.
Real IT help == Self-troubleshooting!
It was then once I decided to shed my worry of peeping into the DB tables because it was a gone trigger anyway and I nonetheless had a partial backup from last yr once I migrated the blog from WordPress managed internet hosting to standard shared internet hosting box.
Boys, it was time to run some queries. The first thing I did was to login to the phpMyAdmin and lookup the tables, schema and properties. I used to be assured that the issue is with the DB measurement and that’s the rationale for slow queries which is chocking up the CPU burst time.
I seemed into tables and located table wp_xxx_postmeta to be around 950 MB in measurement with simply 11000 data. This immediately fired up alarms in my head as I have labored with multi-million row DBs during my stint in Adobe & Shuttl and the table measurement was principally in the vary of few MBs solely. A tough again of the notice calculation said a median measurement of 100 kb per report on this table which was weird because once I seemed up the schema for a similar, it simply was storing 4 data i.e. meta_id, post_id, meta_key, meta_value.
Hey DB, you cray?
It was time to prod this table and understand the info inside it. I fired up a simple query:
SELECT meta_key, rely”text” FROM ‘wp_s4w671g0kp_postmeta’ GROUP by meta_key order by rely”text” desc;
Lo behold, the end result was a bit shocking as till now I used to be considering that this desk may include submit revisions or metadata solely but the query outcome was something like this:
meta_key rely”text” _total_views
1895
_view_ip_list
1892
_jetpack_related_posts_cache
1206
_wp_attached_file
1144
_wp_attachment_metadata
1101
wp-smpro-smush-data
1069
_wp_attachment_image_alt
903
_edit_lock
155
_edit_last
140
_yoast_wpseo_focuskw
118
_yoast_wpseo_linkdex
118
_thumbnail_id
116
_yoast_wpseo_metadesc
114
_publicize_twitter_user
107
_wpas_done_all
103
_total_likes
77
_like_ip_list
77
_wpas_skip_3914702
75
_wpas_skip_11104850
72
_yoast_wpseo_title
56
_wp_attachment_backup_sizes
40
_yoast_wpseo_focuskw_text_input
38
_wp_old_slug
35
essb_hideplusone
29
essb_hidevk
29
Do you see it? There are some 1800+ data for _view_ip_list, _total_views, _jetpack_related_posts_cache which is principally nothing however data originated from WordPress personal homegrown fashionable plugin – Jetpack. I googled a bit about security delete for these data, didn’t find anything, took a leap of religion and executed:
Delete from FROM ‘wp_xxx_postmeta’ WHERE meta_key = ‘_view_ip_list’;
Delete from FROM ‘wp_xxx_postmeta’ WHERE meta_key = ‘_total_views’;
Delete from FROM ‘wp_xxx_postmeta’ WHERE meta_key = ‘_jetpack_related_posts_cache’;
It deleted some 4,000 data out of 11,000 data it had and look what happened once I refreshed phpMyAdmin?
All cleaned up!
Yus! My wp_xxx_postmeta table measurement dropped from 900-something MBs to 6.Three MBs by just deleting ~4,000 data. What sick joke is that? My complete DB measurement dropped to 25 MBs from ~1.2 GBs, in all probability because of the cascade effect of overseas key constraints of the data I deleted.
Outcome?
My web site was a breeze once once more. The load time went down considerably, in all probability as a result of of quicker DB queries and even the system monitoring parameters on the CPanel went down from Purple/Orange to Inexperienced. I did some load testing by executing a number of curl requests to my house page by way of terminal, and the server was not breaking
any sweat.
Take a look at that RAM usage! WHAT? Keep in mind once I talked about operating WordPress stack on my 2006 PC with some 128 MB of memory? Yeah!
So fast much wow!
Classes?
Troubleshooting Godaddy is a long-term thing. You’ll be able to either get into the shit and fix it yourself or you can begin throwing money on the display until you escalate to their core tech workforce which I assume might be by no means for shared internet hosting plans. They could have a terrific help for devoted servers though.
AWS is a f##king superb piece of tech. If you understand how to harden servers, by all means, simply drop these legacy internet hosting providers and go on your personal setup. It’s in all probability cheaper, quicker and extra VFM. A easy t2.micro instance will value < ₹700/month. (Perhaps extra, sigh world financial system!).
Typically, being a smartass isn’t good. Most of the occasions, nevertheless, it retains you protected.
All the time examine logs. -_-
The post Back from Dead
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5 NBA teams that should beat Vegas’ over/under lines
We feel pretty good that Vegas is underrating these five teams.
One of the best ways to see what the consensus view of a team going into the NBA season to consider where oddsmakers set the win total over-under line. This can be a little misleading for some teams with huge fan bases, whose outsized propensity to aim high may push those lines to a bigger number than warranted. But for normal teams — not the Lakers, not the Knicks — it’s a solid indicator of where the majority thinks a team will end up.
Of course, no one really knows. The NBA is ruled by injuries and trades: huge in-season shakeups that tilt the expectations game until it (often) topples over. As such, it’s risky to think you know what’s going to happen in an unpredictable setting. But since injuries happen nearly at random and in-season trades typically have minimal immediate on-court effects, baking in assumptions about those events is impossible. So you just roll with it.
After looking at the current win total over-under lines, here are five teams that look poised to exceed their numbers — barring one of those critical injuries or a surprising trade.
Pistons (37.5 wins)
Why they’ll beat the line: Detroit won 39 games last season despite having Blake Griffin for only 25 games. He’s the best player on the roster, and if healthy, one of the best players in the weakened Eastern Conference.
The Pistons went 8-4 down the stretch once Reggie Jackson returned from injury, with Griffin missing most of those games. Of course, this is not the first time the Pistons finished strong with Jackson after the season was sunk in part due to a Jackson injury. It’s kind of a thing the Pistons do.
The Pistons also have a new coach in Dwane Casey who just might be able to break the spell of mediocrity that has set in. He did it in Toronto years ago. Detroit would beg for that type of playoff disappointment, because it would mean they were back in the playoffs regularly.
What could go wrong: Griffin has missed at least 15 games every season since 2013-14, and he’ll turn 30 last this season. Jackson has suffered costly injuries in each of the past two seasons. Andre Drummond is reliable in terms of health, but it remains to be seen whether a frontcourt starring him and Griffin can be effective in 2018. There is like no shooting on this team. There’s not much depth after the Griffin trade, either.
Rockets (55.5 wins)
Why they’ll beat the line: Houston won 65 games last year! They didn’t need to — they ran away with the No. 1 seed — but they did. And that was with James Harden missing 10 games and Chris Paul missing 24.
If those guys miss more games, then the under on this 55.5-game line is in play. But that’s a big assumption. Otherwise, they won 65 games last year! Trevor Ariza wasn’t that important.
What could go wrong: The other risk to worry over here is complacency. That 41-41 season that preceded Mike D’Antoni’s arrival in Houston — that began with an offseason Harden injury and never got on track — is the stuff of nightmares. Something tells me CP3 won’t let the Rockets wallow in their own regrets if things get difficult, but we’ve seen it happen to Harden-led teams before. It’s something to keep an eye on.
The other risk here is that by the time March rolls around, the Warriors are so far ahead in the race for No. 1 and no one is in sight of No. 2 (like last season), that Houston coasts down the home stretch and finishes with 53, 54, or 55 wins. That’d be tough to swallow.
Spurs (44.5 wins)
Kelley L Cox-USA TODAY Sports
Why they’ll beat the line: This is the craziest line of all. The Spurs haven’t failed to win more than 44 games since 1998-99. That’s 20 years of winning well more than 44.5 games, including 47 last season. Yes, the team traded away Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green, lost Tony Parker in free agency, and lost Manu Ginobili to retirement. But Leonard played just nine games last season, the Spurs picked up an All-NBA guard in DeMar DeRozan in the trade, and San Antonio still has a core of effective veterans in LaMarcus Aldridge, Pau Gasol, Rudy Gay, and Patty Mills.
Plus, there’s the Gregg Popovich factor. He could get a G-League team 45 wins in the NBA.
What could go wrong: If DeRozan struggles to find his flow in San Antonio, without a veteran point guard and trusted co-star to help him along, that could be rough. Aldridge could regress; Gasol could finally look old. (He’s 38.) The point guard situation is a little troubling, though Mills is really quite effective. The Spurs’ margin for error has clearly decreased. The West is even stronger.
But come on. It’s the Spurs!
Grizzlies (33.5 wins)
Why they’ll beat the line: This is a pretty low projected win total for the Grizzlies, but it’s still 11.5 games higher than Memphis’ actual win total from last season. A persistent Mike Conley injury and a locker room implosion turned into a legit tank job for the Grizzlies last season, resulting in a 22-win campaign. Conley is back, though, and everyone seems to like promoted coach J.B. Bickerstaff.
Memphis had 22 wins last season, but had exceeded 40 victories in each of the previous eight. Given the relative roster stability — at least when it comes to the team’s two stars — which do you think is the aberration? The beautiful part about taking the over on Memphis is that they don’t even have to get to 40: only teams that flat-out tanked and the Brooklyn Nets finished with fewer than 34 wins last season. A lot would have to go sideways for the Grizzlies to tank again.
What could go wrong: Marc Gasol is 33, Conley is soon to be 31, and unless Chandler Parsons is back (unlikely), there’s like almost no other offensive firepower on this roster. (They even lost Tyreke Evans!) An injury to one of the stars is devastating on a level bigger than for most other teams in Memphis’ range. So that’s a concern.
Bulls (28.5 wins)
Why they’ll beat the line: The Baby Bulls won 27 games last year while trying to tank. They added Jabari Parker and perhaps the most NBA-ready rookie in Wendell Carter Jr.. Chicago will have a full season (we think) of Zach LaVine. They have Lauri Markkanen! The Parker signing in free agency was a tell that the Bulls aren’t interested in competing with the Hawks for the worst record in the league. The East playoff race is pretty open, and historically the Bulls would rather make the playoffs as a low seed than get a lottery pick. And 29 wins is a really low hurdle to clear.
What could go wrong: What if getting LaVine back for the full season isn’t a net plus? What if Parker continues to struggle to stay on the court? What if the LaVine-Parker combo with Kris Dunn at the point is just a little too anachronistic to work in today’s NBA? What if the Fred Hoiberg era blows up and we get 65 games with an interim coach? What if the start is so rough that this ends up being another tank year? What if Carter plays like a rookie, and Markkanen has a sophomore slump with LaVine and Parker sucking oxygen away?
What if the Bull don’t actually know what they’re doing?
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A 5.3L that shows you don’t need to go broke to enjoy some LS power in your Chevy
The biggest complaint about LS-type engines is they cost a lot of coin to get into. Yeah, the typical LS mill will bleed more cash from your wallet compared to a traditional small-block, but if you’re careful and don’t need a bazillion hp, then it can be more of a flesh wound instead of a gushing flow of Benjamins. You see, not every LS build has to be a dry-sump LS7 or 600+ hp stroked LS3. There are many LS variants out there and some of them are downright affordable. Shop smart and set realistic expectations and you can have modern LS EFI goodness under your hood for not much more than a quality Gen I small-block.
The term to keep in mind is “economy of scale.” That’s to say, you need to think about what is plentiful in the marketplace. If it’s easy to find (large supply) then the prices will typically be less. So, with that bit of Econ 101, the most affordable LS variants on the planet would be the 5.3L and 4.8L examples. Hundreds of thousands of these have been produced and are now easy to find parted out online and languishing in salvage yards.
We decided to try a 5.3L since it’s by far the most common engine out there. Rather than buy a complete engine we opted to build one from various sources. Why? Well, when you buy a pull-out engine you typically end up with a lot of leftover bits and a complete engine tends to cost more than if you buy the components separately. We were going to go this direction with the block, but Summit Racing had 5.3L blocks so cheap it wasn’t worth the effort to hunt one down in a salvage yard. The rest is a combination of new and used parts to end up with a done and ready-to-run engine. Now, if your wallet is a bit light, you can do things even cheaper than we did by going with used parts. But keep in mind that running used lifters or a “broken-in” oil pump does up the risk factor a bit.
As for our goal, it was simple. To make at least 400 hp on the cheapest 87-octane fuel California has to offer. We wanted a ton of vacuum at idle along with smooth performance. Yeah, 600+ hp is cool, but in reality most rides are fine and a ton of fun with 400. Hell, a fifth-gen Camaro barely made over 400 and nobody considered it a slouch. If you need more than the 416 hp we made you can up the camshaft a couple of steps, mill down the heads to boost compression, or maybe treat the heads to massaging. Of course, our engine is only few psi of boost or a sweet shot of nitrous away from knocking down much bigger numbers.
1. Millions of LS engines have been produced, which means that parts are easy to find and pretty easy on the wallet. The “economy of scale” also helps lower the cost of new LS parts like this 5.3L GM block from Summit Racing. It priced out right around $300, which makes it one of the best deals around.
2. The Summit 5.3L block came ready to rock and already honed to the required 3.780 inches. After looking over the block we found that no machine work was needed. By the way, the smaller bores makes for a very strong cylinder wall just begging for some nitrous or boost. The block came bare (but with cam bearings installed) so we picked up an engine plug kit, with the needed oil restrictor plug, from Summit (PN SUM-G1584).
3. 5.3L LS engines are one of the most common ones on the planet and were stuffed into scores of SUVs and trucks. They’ve also been around long enough so there are rotating guts available for cheap at swap meets and online.
4. Of course, some of these parts have been beat down so you need to be careful when shopping. We scored a 5.3L rotating assembly from a friend but found that the crank must have tossed a bearing, resulting in a beat-up crank journal and two bad rods. To fix the crank, our friends over at Rancho Machine, in Rancho Cucamonga, California, were able to turn the crank 0.010-inch. But that still left us two rods short of a full set.
5. Overall, these parts, whether new or used, are pretty cheap so we weren’t too concerned about finding two replacement rod/piston combos, but then luck showed up to the party. David Freiburger of Hot Rod and Roadkill fame was doing a story involving swapping out the rods/pistons of a new 5.3L LS engine. So, instead of finding two used pieces we ended up scoring a full set of nearly new rods and pistons to go with our turned crank. I guess we owe him a favor now.
6. If you’re just building a cruiser and don’t need big power, the heads for your LS engine can be pretty budget friendly. We scored a pair of used early LS1 (1999-’00) 853 heads (GM PN 12559853) for under $300, which is about the going rate. They’re nearly identical to the later 241 LS heads and have 66.67cc combustion chambers and 200cc intake runners. Now, these will drop the compression ratio of our 5.3L since the combustion chambers are larger than what a 5.3L typically fields. If you want max power, these should be milled down a bit. But, we want a cruiser that will be happy on the cheapest gas we can find so we left them as is.
7. With our freshly machined and polished crank back from the machine shop we were ready to start putting it all together. First up, installing the crank using a fresh set of Clevite main bearings (PN CB1776A108).
8. The block came with main bolts but we needed a set of new cross-bolts. For this we picked up a set from Summit Racing (PN SUM-910230).
9. With the crank torqued to spec, we started sliding in our slightly used 5.3L piston and rod combos. The rings were just inexpensive stock-replacement pieces from the local auto parts store. The 0.010-inch undersize bearings were Clevite AL Series (PN CB-663P).
10. Big cams typically make for big power, but our goal here is a 400hp street mill, not a lopey street monster. Our choice was a stick we’ve used before with good results. The Comp cam (PN 54-414-11) spec’d out at 216/220-degrees duration at 0.050-inch, 0.525/0.532-inch lift, and an LSA of 114.
11. After securing the cam with a Summit LS thrust plate (PN SUM-150106) we went ahead and installed the timing set, making sure to line up the dots on the sprocket and timing gear. The sprockets we had and the timing chain was a new replacement from Summit (PN SME-143012).
12. Oil pumps are pretty critical, so resist the urge to reuse an existing one. We’ve had great luck with these new ones from Summit (PN SUM-121170) and, at just $70 it’s cheap insurance.
13. Our block came to us bare so we needed hydraulic lifters and a set of the plastic guide trays. The easiest route was a kit from Summit (PN SUM-HTLSKIT) that included 16 lifters, four trays, and even the four specialized bolts needed for installation.
14. Rancho Machine went through our 853 heads, cleaned them up, and surfaced them just enough so we would be assured of a good head gasket seal.
15. We also installed a fresh set of Comp springs (PN 26918-16), retainers (PN 774-16), Viton valve seals (PN 511-16), and spring seats (PN 4705-16) that matched up with our new camshaft.
16. After sliding on Fel-Pro replacement head gaskets, we put the heads in place and bolted them down with a torque-to-yield head bolt kit from Summit (PN SUM-910210).
17. To be honest, we have tons of used LS rockers laying around, but we doubt you do. So, we picked up a wallet friendly set from Summit (PN SME-K-143021) along with the needed bolts (PN SME-143005 x2). We had a set of stock GM pushrods on hand (7.400-inch), but if you need some, the part number for a set from Comp is 7955-16, or you can get a complete set from Summit for a hair over $30 (PN SUM-G6400-LS).
18. We then sealed up the 5.3L mill with a used top valley cover and a new front cover (PN SUM-G6320). The front cover was only $30, but we had to fork out another $25 for the required gasket (PN MRG-61030G) and $10 for some bolts (PN MRG-60900G) from Mr. Gasket.
Intakes can really eat up a large chunk of your budget. You could go with a carb, but by the time you buy the carburetor and the intake you’re well over a grand. And, while you won’t need an ECU to run the engine, you’ll still need a box from MSD to fire the coils. Given all of that, we opted to go with a factory-style EFI setup. The intake we chose is a new offering from Dorman. In testing, we found it to be better than a GM LS1 or even LS6 intake manifold. As a bonus, it came with bolts, gaskets, and new fuel injector O-rings. Ours ran $400 from Summit (PN RNB-615-901).
19. The fuel rail and injectors are actually used GM stuff from an old LS1 project. We’re looking at just over 400 hp, so even smaller fuel injectors will work. Just make sure they are the right height to work with your fuel rail.
20. Our early Gen III 5.3L LS uses a cam position sensor that mounts in the rear of the engine, just behind the valley cover. This one from Summit (PN RNB-917-715) set us back $34. Be sure to factor in the cost of sensors and such when budgeting your LS engine build. If you’re a bit of gambler, you can score used ones at salvage yards for pennies on the dollar. After all, most of the cars drove themselves to the accident.
21. Coils are another item that you could scrounge up at a salvage yard, but we opted for a new set from Accel (PN ACC-140043K-8). The LS valve covers and coil racks were left over from a Week To Wicked project. We did have an interference issue with the LS1 fuel rail and the more modern LS3 valve covers and coil pack rails. Our solution was to notch the coil pack rack a bit and flip the one coil forward using two small spacers (or a stack of washers in a pinch) to help the coil clear the coil rack.
22. We completed our budget 5.3L mill with a used GM oil pan and damper (both from the same Week To Wicked project as our valve covers) and added a set of Hooker long-tube headers. The Dorman intake accepts a four-bolt throttle body so we ran a Holley 90mm piece. Our guesstimate is that you could, with careful shopping and a few trips to the local boneyard, duplicate this build easily for under $3,500.
23. After some tuning, the best pull, with 29-degrees of timing, was 416 hp at 6,100 rpm and 394 lb-ft at 5,700 rpm. Best of all, the torque curve is fairly flat with over 300 lb-ft from 2,900 rpm on up. That’s great power from a budget engine that roughly displaces 327 cubic inches.
Sources
Clevite
662.893.2860
us.mahle.com/mahlemotorsports
Competition Cams – COMP
800.999.0853
compcams.com
Don Lee Auto
donleeauto.com
Fel-Pro
felpro-only.com
Holley / Hooker / Accel
270.781.9741
holley.com
Summit Racing
800.230.3030
summitracing.com
Westech Performance
951.685.4767
westechperformance.com
The post A 5.3L that shows you don’t need to go broke to enjoy some LS power in your Chevy appeared first on Hot Rod Network.
from Hot Rod Network http://www.hotrod.com/articles/894713/
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