#for the reorder of the main cover to come in | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

snitchcrimsonwrites · 24 days

Text

Maybe pt. 2

Pairing: Norm MacLean X Female Reader or OC

Former friends to a relationship?

Life is pretty easy in Vault 33 until you're trying to rekindle a former friendship and raiders attack. Now, our main characters are trying to navigate newfound feelings all while undercovering the mysteries of Vault 33. Stay tuned. Follows the main storyline of season 1; some events may be reordered for plot.

Some of the conversation feels a little clunky, but we want these two to make up and move on, right?

Part 1 Here Part 7 Here

Part 3 Here Part 8 Here

Part 4 Here Part 9 Here

Part 5 Here Part 10 Here

Part 6 Here Part 11 Here

Norm hates this feeling. Laying in bed, he can feel his stomach twisted in knots. This gut-wrenching feeling has kept him up most of the night, realizing he’s got to make a decision. As far as he’s deduced from his sleepless night of pondering, he’s got two primary options.

Option A. He pretends yesterday’s conversation with (Y/N) never happened, and they continue exchanging small talk, pleasantries, and those awkward neighbor half-waves until the end of time. The scaredy cat in him prefers this option. It avoids confrontation and maintains the status quo they’ve held for the last couple of years. It is simple and lacks any unnecessary entanglements. Things just go on according to plan. He’s done it before, it can easily be done again.

OR he can proceed with Option B to confront (Y/N) about what she said in the cafeteria yesterday. This option has sparked his curious side. Cause that entire interaction was odd, wasn’t it? Norm had so many questions, but are they worth pursuing? Opening that can of worms could lead to more problems, more decisions, and fewer answers. No. He needed to know. Curiosity might just kill the cat, but at least he’d be able to sleep at night.

(Y/N) worked in one of the maintenance labs as Vault 33’s official Pip-Boy Programmer—one of the perks of doing well on the Vault G.O.A.T exams. Norm was eager, planning to stop by the lab first thing before he headed to his desk. Unless someone had major issues with their Pip-Boy, they’d probably have the lab to themselves that early. Alright, it was decided. He threw off the certified Vault-Tec comforter, climbed out of bed, and headed toward the shower to get ready.

—--------------------

You were already at your desk, pretending to be occupied, when Norm MacLean appeared in the doorway of the lab, leaning on the doorframe and fiddling with his Pip-Boy. Truth be told, you were half-expecting him, especially after yesterday. But maybe not this soon. You were hoping he’d stew on this decision for at least a day.

“Good Morning, Norm. Pip-Boy on the fritz?” you ask, knowing full well that the reason he was here had nothing to do with his Pip-Boy. Even if his Pip-Boy was malfunctioning, Norm was more than capable of taking care of that repair without your assistance.

“Yeah, I think I’m having some software issues. Do you think you could do a diagnostic run for me?”

You smile, “Of course. If you wouldn’t mind taking it off and filling out the repair form, I can start right away.”

He complies, handing you his Pip-Boy and taking the clipboard with the attached Vault-Tec paperwork. As he starts on the paperwork, he estimates he’s got roughly twenty minutes of fake errand cover to work with.

You attach the Pip-Boy to the diagnostic cable running from your computer, load up the program, and wait. “It will just be a few minutes to get a full picture of what’s going on,” you reassure him.

“That’s fine. My supervisor knows I was having a few issues with it this morning,” Norm says, barely looking up from the clipboard.

The two of you fall into awkward silence, neither wanting to be the first to break it.

You relent. “Hey, I’m sorry if yesterday made you uncomfortable. I know we haven’t spoken much at all lately, but I heard about what happened from Reg, and I just couldn’t stop myself from coming over. It wasn’t right of me to use your situation as my catharsis, especially since we had that failing out. I should have respected that. We can continue on as we were, friendly neighbors in the same Vault.” The words stuck in your throat on the way out. That’s not what you wanted, but if that’s what Norm came here to say, better get it out of the way sooner.

Oof, now he felt terrible. Norm should have known you’d apologize for thinking you made him uncomfortable. That’s your nature. You’ve always been empathic to the needs of your friends. He needs to come clean.

“I never wanted that.”

I’m sorry. What did he say? He never wanted that. To stop being friends? Your brain was going a mile a minute, swirling with questions, too many to vocalize at once. Thankfully, Norm elaborated before you even tried.

“I never wanted to stop being friends, but the closer we got to graduation, the more effort you seemed to put into exams and passing, being the best in the class. You had ambitions and goals, and (Y/N) you could achieve them. You didn’t need to be dragged down by the Black Sheep of Vault 33.” He tries not to think about his label, and usually, it doesn’t bother him. But right now, it weighs on him; it feels laminated across his forehead, defining him.

“Norman,” you manage to sigh out. “I’ve always admired that about you. That’s what I meant yesterday. I wish I had the confidence to act that way before now; I’m sure I’d be much happier. After my dad passed away, I wasn’t sure how I was going to navigate,” you gesture to the air around you, "everything. I was on my own, and subconsciously, I picked up on the reality that the better I did in that classroom or for the Vault, the more control I thought I could have over my life.”

She didn’t need to explain. He knew exactly what she meant. It is kind of an unspoken rule of Vault 33. Obviously, those who did well on their exams got matched into the most coveted jobs within the vault, but those placements also impacted other situations. Those higher-achieving students had more say in when and to whom they were married, more access to leadership positions, and the list goes on.

“I had no idea how my life would go, but at least I knew I wanted a hand on the steering wheel. I mean, I’m not sure if I actually want to be married or if that’s part of the programming to be in a relationship, but whatever happens, I want it to at least feel as though I made the decision." You pause and add, "Seriously, could you imagine if I got stuck having to marry Chad Johnston?”

Norm snorted. The juxtaposition of his former classmates as a married couple was hilarious. Those two couldn’t be more opposites. “Well, at least he’d have someone to teach him to read,” he managed between laughs.

This garnered a snicker from you as well. “Haha, you’re hilarious,” you say in the most sarcastic tone you can muster. “So, what do you think? Can we act like adults and finally move on? Or do we double down on whatever self-destructive tendencies we’ve got going on here?”

“Hmmm, I don’t know about you, but I’m really leaning into that second one.” He pauses and puts his hand to his chin. “On the other hand, it might be nice to have lunch with someone I’m not related to.”

DING. “Vault-Tec Pip-Boy diagnostic program is now complete, no issues were detected.”

You both smile. “Well, it looks like the software issues seemed to have resolved themselves.”

“Isn’t technology incredible?” Norm asks as he stands to leave.

#norm maclean #norm maclean x reader #norm maclean x oc #fallout #fallout tv series

83 notes · View notes

sineala · 8 months

Text

Fall of X (Steve/Tony Edition)

For anyone else who is a comics Steve/Tony fan who doesn't usually read X-Men comics and is now finding themselves needing to wade through the Fall of X, this is everything I have found that's out now (or coming out very soon) in the order you should read it, that pertains to Steve and/or Tony. This is accurate as of today (September 16); we are obviously not done with the event so this list will not stay accurate, but if you want to hop on now, this is how you'd do it.

Iron Man #7

Avengers/X-Men FCBD 2023

Hellfire Gala 2023

Iron Man #8

Iron Man #9

X-Men #25

Uncanny Avengers #1

X-Men #26

(Uncanny Avengers #2 when it comes out, Sept. 20)

(Iron Man #10 when it comes out, Sept. 27)

(Iron Man #7 is not technically part of this but it does have some lead-up with a subplot involving Rhodey and Feilong. I am assuming you are all reading Iron Man anyway.)

I am also not a regular X-Men reader so it's possible that I've missed some stuff, but this is everything that has Steve and/or Tony or is directly relevant to them that I have found. So this isn't the entire event, but if you're just trying to get through Iron Man comics there are definitely some comics that you want to read.

I mention this because it might not be entirely obvious to anyone just trying to read through Iron Man that there are crucial events in the Free Comic Book Day issue that was released months ago. But there are. And I would like to save everyone else the trouble of getting halfway through Hellfire Gala and wondering why all of a sudden someone has been trying to assassinate Captain America off-panel and thinking that, wow, I really must have missed something somewhere. Which was the experience I had. So, yeah. That was actually depicted in the FCBD 2023 issue. Surprise!

(The most necessary part of the ordering, for our purposes, is Avengers/X-Men FCBD, Hellfire, and then Iron Man #8. There are several important events that we see from various points of view throughout these issues, which all take place on the same night, in that order. Iron Man #8 also assumes you have read Iron Man #182 but I feel like probably everyone has done this.)

Tony is on the main team (although the main Avengers book is not part of the Fall of X event); Steve is currently leading the Uncanny Avengers, which is part of the event. Both Steve and Tony actually appear together briefly in both X-Men #25 and Uncanny Avengers #1 as part of the meetings the remaining resistance is holding against Orchis. I don't know if Tony will be in this week's Uncanny Avengers #2. He wasn't in the preview and he isn't in the character list on the recap page, but that was also the case for both X-Men #25 and Uncanny Avengers #1. I think the character lists only cover the team members in this particular series.

I have reordered a couple of issues from the order they were released in. Uncanny Avengers #1 was released the week before Iron Man #9 but it has to happen in the opposite order. IM #9 takes place the night of the Gala and on into the next day; it picks up immediately after #8 and resolves the cliffhanger there. UA #1, even though it came out before this, takes place weeks after the Gala, as established in the issue. Judging by the preview, UA #2 will (at least partially) take place immediately after UA #1 but as it hasn't come out yet, I can't say for sure.

Similarly, since Iron Man #9 is right after #8, I've put X-Men #25 after that, since it also takes place weeks after the Gala, even though it came out before IM #9. I might end up moving Uncanny Avengers around some more later as well, but this works for now.

X-Men #26 is the X-Men half of the wedding issue along with Iron Man #10. The IM half isn't out yet, so we'll see what happens there.

#posts i actually wrote #comics reading lists

54 notes · View notes

kitconnor · 4 months

Note

https://www.tumblr.com/kitconnor/738913211394473984/usergif-new-year-new-fonts-day-1-layer absolutely loved this set 🩷 how did you make the second gif where it goes from color to b&w?

hello, and thank u !! it's a pretty basic process to follow but it can be effective if you're trying to add depth to something.

this is the gif, but this is the effect we're hoping to achieve:

i'm not going to cover every part of the process (ie. colouring, cropping, setting up your gif and blending skills) simply because i'm just trying to achieve the colour to b&w effect ! if you want a guide on anything else, please feel free to ask :)

please note this will guide you through timeline and not frames !

start by doing your basic crop and colouring and then duplicate one gif onto the other for blending. here you can see i'm about to use the layer mask + brush tool to achieve a smooth blend. the top layer (inej) is set on screen.

so after getting everything into position, i'll add a layer mask and then use both the gradient tool (set to black) and the brush tool (also set to black) to get the right blend.

(note: i went back and re-cropped my kaz layer and reordered my layers. try and blend on empty space and not overtop of the subjects faces !)

depending on which gif you choose for b&w, you may need to clip the black and white layer. for instance in the gif that was in the set:

lucy gray is the top layer, and i only needed to clip it to her. to get a clipping mask, right click on a layer and there should be an option called 'create clipping mask', like below !

but back to the main guide 😭 now that i've blended and decided which gif will go to b&w, add that layer above whichever gif you chose. kaz is the bottom layer in this gif so i don't need to worry about the clipping mask.

at this point now (yes i've added different layers here and there, but that's natural) you need to move your b&w to whatever point you need it to come in. however, don't move it to the very end. somewhere around halfway or 3/4 will work best.

after moving the b&w layer, it comes in halfway, but it's clunky. to fix that you'll use a fade transition. fade transitions are found in this little button (a half grey half white box cut diagonally)

then you'll click and drag the fade transition over the b&w layer and drag on the fade transition (NOT the gif) to alter the duration. that's the transition itself below:

and then it looks like this :)

it might take a few tries to get it into the right timing where it's not too quick or too slow. also note that the transition bumps up the gif size, so keep the gif around 30-40 frames if you're cropping at 540x540 like me !

#*tutorial #ps tutorials #**l.myeditss #*gfx

9 notes · View notes

blackrockbusiness · 1 year

Text

Operating a global grocery store can be difficult, particularly when it comes to controlling sales and inventory. Yet, you can easily streamline business operations and boost sales with Shopify POS. In this video, we'll look at five essential reasons why Shopify POS is essential for any owner of an international food store trying to increase sales and beat the competition. Shopify POS has you covered whether you want to enhance the customer experience, manage your inventory more effectively, or broaden your audience. Don't lose out on these revolutionary advantages, and begin utilizing Shopify POS today.! [fusion_button link="https://www.clkmg.com/UltimatePeter/BRBlog" text_transform="" title="" target="_self" link_attributes="" alignment_medium="" alignment_small="" alignment="" modal="" hide_on_mobile="small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility" sticky_display="normal,sticky" class="" id="" color="blue" button_gradient_top_color="" button_gradient_bottom_color="" button_gradient_top_color_hover="" button_gradient_bottom_color_hover="" accent_color="" accent_hover_color="" type="flat" bevel_color="" border_width="" border_radius="10" border_color="" border_hover_color="" size="large" stretch="default" margin_top="" margin_right="" margin_bottom="" margin_left="" icon="fa-store-alt fas" icon_position="left" icon_divider="no" animation_type="" animation_direction="left" animation_speed="0.3" animation_offset=""]Get Started With Shopify POS[/fusion_button] Seamless integration between online and in-store sales. The seamless connectivity between online and in-store sales is one of the main benefits of adopting Shopify POS for an international food company. Customers can now explore and buy products both in-store and online thanks to this connection, which makes it simpler to grow your clientele and reach more people. You may boost customer happiness and boost revenue by giving customers a seamless shopping experience. For instance, a consumer can easily browse your online store and make a purchase there if they visit your physical store but are unable to find a specific product. Similar to this, a consumer can easily visit your physical store to view a product in person before making a purchase if they are browsing your internet store. You can track inventory levels across all of your locations using Shopify POS, ensuring that you always have the proper products in stock. This is crucial for foreign grocery stores, because the range of products offered makes inventory management challenging. You can prevent stockouts and make sure you always have the products your consumers want by monitoring inventory levels in real-time. Overall, Shopify POS is a game-changer for international food retailers, helping them to increase their reach and boost consumer happiness through the seamless integration of online and in-store sales. Manage inventory with ease. Any merchant may find it difficult to manage their inventory, but an international food store may find it more difficult due to the wide range of products they offer. You can effortlessly manage your inventory across several locations with Shopify POS, making sure that you always have the proper products in stock. This is crucial for international grocery stores that sell a variety of goods from many nations and areas. Real-time inventory tracking and setting up automatic reorder points for each product are simple with Shopify POS. This translates into the ability to prevent stockouts and guarantee that you always have the goods that your consumers demand. ye.commastmastmastmastmastmastmastmastmastmastmastmastmastmas, and. Shopify POS offers robust reporting options in addition to inventory management so you can monitor your sales and inventory levels over time. You can utilize this information to optimize your inventory levels and make knowledgeable business decisions in order to increase sales. Overall, Shopify POS makes it easier for foreign food companies to manage

their inventory, keeping an eye on stock levels and guaranteeing they always have the items their consumers desire. Accept a variety of payment methods. Any merchant must accept a range of payment options, but this is especially true for international grocery stores that serve a diversified clientele. Shopify POS makes it simpler for customers to buy products from your business by providing a variety of payment options, such as credit cards, debit cards, and mobile payments. You may create unique payment options with Shopify POS, such as the ability to accept payments in various currencies. This is crucial for international grocery stores that serve customers from various nations and areas. You can give your customers a more easy and smooth shopping experience by allowing payments in other currencies. This can help you draw in more customers and boost your sales. Shopify POS provides advanced payment security features like tokenization and fraud detection in addition to taking a wide range of payment options. Building trust with your clients is crucial, and this ensures that their payment information is secure and safeguarded against fraud. Overall, Shopify POS provides a strong payment processing system tailored to the requirements of international grocery stores. You can give your consumers a more easy and secure shopping experience by taking a number of payment methods and offering cutting-edge payment security features. This can boost your sales and help you cultivate a following of devoted customers. Personalize your customer experience. Any retailer hoping to cultivate long-lasting client relationships and boost revenues must prioritize personalizing the consumer experience. Create client profiles, keep track of their purchase history, and send them personalized promotions and discounts are just a few of the capabilities that Shopify POS offers to help you customize the experience you provide to your customers. Personalized customer experiences are crucial for an international grocery shop because customers may be searching for unique items from their native nations or regions. You can learn more about your customers' interests and provide individualized product recommendations or promotions by developing customer profiles and keeping track of their purchasing behavior. Moreover, Shopify POS gives you the ability to target promotions and discounts depending on consumer behavior, such as giving a customer a discount on their preferred product or sending them a customized email with product recommendations. You may boost the likelihood of a repeat purchase and create a devoted customer base by customizing your promos and discounts for each unique customer. Overall, Shopify POS offers a potent selection of capabilities for tailoring the client experience, which can aid foreign food retailers in strengthening customer bonds and boosting sales. You may give a more relevant and personalized shopping experience, which can enhance customer loyalty and sales, by comprehending your customers' preferences and providing targeted promos and discounts. Simplify your operations. Any retail firm must prioritize providing exceptional customer service, and Shopify POS provides a number of options to assist international food stores in doing so. The capability of Shopify POS to manage customer support tickets from within the platform is one of its important advantages. This enables you to quickly track and address client concerns and grievances, ensuring that they feel valued and heard. Offering customer loyalty programs is another crucial use of Shopify POS. This enables you to provide your clients special access to products or discounts as a way of saying "thank you" for their support. For international food retailers, loyalty programs can be especially beneficial because satisfied customers are more inclined to shop there again. Along with providing a variety of client connection capabilities, Shopify POS also integrates social media and email marketing.

You may communicate with your clients and notify them about new items, special offers, and events by using these tools. Overall, Shopify POS offers a wide range of capabilities to assist foreign food stores in providing top-notch customer service. You may strengthen customer relationships and enhance customer loyalty by handling customer support tickets, providing loyalty programs, and utilizing customer engagement technologies. This will ultimately result in higher sales and business success. [fusion_button link="https://www.clkmg.com/UltimatePeter/BRBlog" text_transform="" title="" target="_self" link_attributes="" alignment_medium="" alignment_small="" alignment="" modal="" hide_on_mobile="small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility" sticky_display="normal,sticky" class="" id="" color="blue" button_gradient_top_color="" button_gradient_bottom_color="" button_gradient_top_color_hover="" button_gradient_bottom_color_hover="" accent_color="" accent_hover_color="" type="flat" bevel_color="" border_width="" border_radius="10" border_color="" border_hover_color="" size="large" stretch="default" margin_top="" margin_right="" margin_bottom="" margin_left="" icon="fa-store-alt fas" icon_position="left" icon_divider="no" animation_type="" animation_direction="left" animation_speed="0.3" animation_offset=""]Get Started With Shopify POS[/fusion_button] Conclusion In conclusion, Shopify POS gives international food retailers who want to increase their sales and deliver top-notch customer service a potent collection of tools. Shopify POS offers a complete solution to help international food shops succeed, from streamlining inventory management and accepting a range of payment ways to personalizing the customer experience and providing customer loyalty programs. International food retailers can simply manage their inventory across numerous locations with Shopify POS, take payments in several currencies, cater to the needs of each customer, and deliver first-rate customer service. By utilizing these features, foreign grocery stores may draw in more clients, boost client retention rates, and eventually boost sales and revenue. Shopify POS can assist you in streamlining your operations, increasing productivity, and giving your consumers a smooth shopping experience regardless of whether you own a small independent food store or a huge worldwide chain. Hence, if you run a global grocery store and want to grow your enterprise, you can't afford to ignore the advantages of Shopify POS..

0 notes

iraprince · 2 years

Note

hey! sorry abt the confusion, but i could have sworn there were print instructions for the booklet on the itchio page for eyes on the prize but somehow i can't find them anymore, would you be able to post them again? i've never folded a booklet like this before and i'm not very confident i can wing it properly

oh, no worries! now that i think of it they’re kind of hard to re-find bc they’re only set to show up when you’ve navigated to the downloads page — when i get a chance i’ll add them to the main page itself so it’s easier! for now i’ll copy paste them here:

“The "booklet" files are collated so you can print and fold them into a neat little book. For best results when printing these files, please do not reorder the pages, and make sure you have the following print settings active:

PAGES PER SHEET: 2

SCALE: FIT TO PAPER

PRINT ON BOTH SIDES

FLIP ON SHORT EDGE

Note that the page counts in the booklet versions are slightly different than the normal PDFs, due to extra pages added to make sure everything lines up!

The playsheet png can be filled in with an image editing program and/or used for online play using virtual tabletops like roll20, etc.”

and, while this isn’t in the original print instructions (maybe i’ll add it just for clarity): once everything’s printed you just stack them up in the order they printed and fold everything right in half, so the front and back covers are on the outside!

sometimes with this many pages it’s easy for things to get a bit out of order as they come out of the printer, so i tend to do a kind of soft almost-fold first and flip through the pages real quick to make sure everything looks right before doing the real fold/stapling. i hope this helps!!

20 notes · View notes

nevertheless-moving · 3 years

Text

Unnamed Extremely Bad Plan to Defeat Darth Sideous AU - SW AU NO 9

Hopefully writing down this star wars au will help me exorcise the cringe demon that helped midwife it. Time travel au where obi-wan and Anakin come up with an extremely SPECIFIC and UNCOMFORTABLE plan to defeat Palpatine because it unfortunately, would actually work, as it capitalizes on one of Palpatine’s easiest to reach political vulnerabilities. This is not a unique plan- there are other au’s like this, but this one is mine. When searching for ways to explain exactly why this anti-sith strategy inspires such cringe and delight in myself I realized, with sinking dread, I have seen this in an Always Sunny episode...which yeah. I might be over reacting but hey, cringe is a personal phenomenon, everyone’s different.

Anyway! Uh here’s a bunch of plot that will eventually culminate in the plan.

*Too much plot, aaaah*. **All plot actually.** ***Its 1 am and this is still a draft*** ****It’s 2am**** *****This post will be just be background I guess.*****

*******STAR WARS AU NO 9 LAZILY OUTLINED CHAPTER ONE*********

Force ghosts Darth Vader and Ben Kenobi have had time to yell at one another without need for breath, and have more-or-less come to terms with the trainwreck that was their shared life. I wouldn’t call them well adjusted, but they’re more stable then they were the last decade or so of their living existence.

In haunting Luke, they end up encountering an artifact in an ancient Willis temple that offers spirits the chance to fix the mistakes they made in life. It doesn’t truly unwrite what’s been done, but it lets you create an alternate timeline. So this galaxy will still be what it is, but some alternate galaxy somewhere could at least have it better. Its almost never been used, because becoming one with the force usually lets you accept the past, but viewed objectively, Vader and Ben’s lives involved an extreme amount of yikes. They say goodbye to Luke and are flung backwards and sideways.

Anakin is holding his mother as she dies. Obi-Wan is landing on Genosis.

Vader just barely manages to avoid slaughtering the tuskens. To be honest, he doesn’t really get why he shouldn’t- his moral compass is still pretty f-ed up. He’s fairly certain the force is just torturing him, but still he controls himself (for Padme for Luke for Leia).

I’m gonna say well-adjusted!Vader sees murder in general as more of a vice than a sin- on par with having a beer. And really well adjusted Vader is willing to admit to himself that he’s an alcoholic, he seriously cannot regulate, its a problem. He really can’t let himself go, because he’ll just end up spiraling. And so he restrains himself and only seriously maims a few of the adult raiders.

Vader figures he can always come back later and slowly torture them to death if this whole ‘save the future’ thing doesn’t pan out.

Obi-wan leaves his shuttle and hides under a rock for 30 minutes. He calculates thats just enough time for him to pretend he went on an extremely effective and sneaky fact finding mission- just in case anyone checks R4′s records. Gets back in shuttle and gets the fuck out of there, much to Dooku’s chagrin, who lost sight of him after the shuttle landed and is now going to have to switch to one of his alternate start-the-war plans.

On the flight back he reports everything to the council- fallen Dooku and the separatist leaders, the trade federation and the massive droid army, Jango Fett the clone template of the republic army (?) working for the separatists. He briefly comms Anakin, but anyone hacking into their conversations would hear only a nonsensical, rambling conversation. Later, a hacker might turn over the idea that they were speaking in elaborate code, but why would Jedi invent such a thing during peacetime?

The war still starts; at this point in the timeline it was inevitable; the artifact was only designed to give them the chance to correct their own failings, not the galaxy’s. Palpatine still gets his emergency powers.

The same day the armies are discovered, separatist war ships take off to engulf Ryloth. The Jedi are instructed by the senate to lead the clone army and provide immediate relief-this will not be a repeat of the republic’s inaction on Naboo. It’s both better and worse than the first Battle of Genosis. So many more civilians are caught in the crossfire. The first titanic battle is not contained to evacuated droid factories, but rages across an entire populated world. The battle lasts for weeks.

The main reason this fight is less deadly is solely due to the fact that General Kenobi manages to maneuver his way into high command of the entire army.

“I believe assumptions were made since I was the first point of contact with Kamino, Masters,” the Knight explained apologetically to the arriving high council members. “I realize its not quite appropriate, but for right now I am the Jedi most familiar with our forces and the enemies. I would, of course, prefer to cede the role to someone else.”

The assembled Jedi can feel the truth in that statement.

“For better or for worse, advance troops were directed by the senate to land planetside and have met heavy resistance. I managed to redirect them to a more defensible position, where they can provide surface based cover fire for incoming reinforcements. The battle has already begun.” He received a grim nod of approval from Master Windu.

“I feel the need to say now, that if there’s one thing I learned from my time as a general on Melida/Dann, or in working against Death Watch on Mandalore, its that having a clear chain of command is vital for a military to succeed. I don’t need to remind some of you that leadership breakdowns were what ultimately ended both the Stark Hyperspace War and the Yinchorri Crisis,” Masters Koon and Tiin exchanged looks before deliberately sending forth a small force wave of approval, understanding where this briefing was leading.

“I believe that unnecessarily restructuring command before the battle is won here could do far more harm than good.” The reminder of Obi-wan’s unusually militaristic apprenticeship put some of the assembled knights at ease even as it inspired a twinge of guilt in the older masters.

“In command you are, General Kenobi,” Master Yoda finally acknowledged. “A Jedi Master you will be, once done this battle is. Have us do, what would you?”

The battle lasts for weeks, and when its over, the commanding Jedi and Troopers involved will openly acknowledge that had anyone else been in command, it would’ve lasted months, if not years. Facing down logistical, strategic, and tactical problems on a scale unheard of for a thousand years, High General Kenobi does not falter.

Enemy reinforcements seem unending. For all their preparation, every single trooper is new to war, and secretly concerned that should they fall, they will be replaced with cadets who hadn’t even finished their training.

Obi-Wan is putting out fires before they can start. Much to their shock, clone commanders are informed that they will, for the time being, remain in charge of their troops. With a handful of exceptions, Jedi ‘Generals’ were in fact, to be treated as a cross between highly skilled commandoes and advisors with abnormally sourced field intelligence.

“All of you have spent your lives training to lead your brothers into combat. The Jedi Masters and knights who are being assigned to your divisions have not received such training.”

General Kenobi addressed the division commanders, some in person, some over holocomm. All focused in rapt attention as their General reordered the shape of their lives using language they could understand.

“The command structure I am issuing is designed to maximize our ability to utilize our respective strategic capabilities, while minimizing potential loss of your life. It will be our great privilege to serve alongside such an army, and while I fully expect a complementary exchange of knowledge in time, for now, focus on survival.”

The Jedi received similar briefings, tailored for their broader array of combat and military experience. Some, including Jedi Master Pong Krell and Grandmaster Yoda, were pulled aside and tasked with the essential mission of infiltrating and destroying the Droid factories on Genosis. If they were to have a chance of winning this war, they they would need to cut off the seemingly unceasing flow of droid reinforcements.

An elite squadron of Arctroopers and Jedi field operatives were covertly dispatched, Grandmaster Yoda himself in command. Considering Count Dooku had yet to appear anywhere near Ryloth...the grandmaster had the best chance of bringing in the fallen separatist leader alive for questioning.

Shortly after they left, Anakin arrived, having finally turned over Padme’s protection to her regular guard. With the military creation vote past, the assassination risk was considered minimal. The real delay in his arrival came from her repeated attempts to join the Grand Army of the Republic on Ryloth with the intent of coordinating humanitarian assistance. Eventually he managed to convince her that she could do more good in the senate.

After all, he pointed out, someone would need to followup the military creation act with a bill to grant clones equal citizen rights. Otherwise, the legal grey area that cloning fell under and their non-republic origin would inadvertently make the clones slaves.

His borrowed Nabooan cruiser entered the warzone with the grace and efficiency as a small neutron bomb.

Those close enough to see its flaming descent watched in horror, realizing that the high generals own padawan would likely be a war casualty before he ever engaged in combat.

The legion nearest to soon-to-be-ground-zero, under the command of Captain Rex of the 501st, were distracted by heated combat, as the temporary barricade they had put up to defend the civilian population gave way to droidika artillery.

While reloading, several dozen troopers happened to look up to see a speck detach itself from the hull as at spiraled in the lower atmosphere. Hope spread that the Jedi had managed to activate some sort of eject hatch. A skilled shocktrooper could probably control and and survive such a fall with luck, which mean a Jedi almost certainly could.

A few tactical scouts charged with watching the skies confirmed that the speck was indeed a humanoid. No chute was visible, but even 8 days into the war, rumors had already spread about how Master Windu had passed off his chute mid-air to a troopers who had been damaged by suppressing fire, cushioning his free fall solely with the tank he crushed upon landing.

Only one trooper, stationed in the town clock tower specifically to track the Padawan’s arrival and issued with a high-resolution farscope, saw the whole thing. Fortunately for his credibility later, in its current setting, the scope automatically logged photos every 5 seconds, ensuring that for years to come Obi-Wan would have a flipbook as evidence that he was not the crazy one.

CT-3609 or Blink (as he was named after winning the division wide staring contest on Kamino two year prior) forwarded the trajectory of the vehicle to command, who confirmed his analysis that it would impact two clicks out from their makeshift fort and not present a risk to civilian or trooper lives.

As it traversed the stratosphere a figure (desperate repair droid, Blink assumed) emerged from the cockpit to perch on the nose of the ship. As it entered the troposphere, it became painfully obvious that the figure jutting out from the hull of the ship was in fact not a humanoid droid, but an unarmored human. The Jedi stood on the prow of the ship, seemingly impervious to and oblivious of:

air resistance

centrifugal force

normal space gravity

Blink’s slack-jawed bewilderment

the flames engulfing the ship below him

At this range, the smirk on the man’s face was visible (man? boy? kriff is he even through puberty?). Several miles above the surface he leaped, diving towards the ground like a bird of prey.

To the west, the ship made impact with the ground, sending a shockwave that shook the tower just enough for Blink to lose visual in the final moments of descent. Cursing, as while he was confident the Jedi would inexplicably survive, he really wanted to see how. The trooper scanned the droid-engulfed farmland to the north for a crash site, to no avail. Lingering smoke from the burnt countryside negatively impacted visibility low to the ground.

Rather than trying to articulate his report into words, he sent the 50-odd frames the farscope had saved, as well as the coordinates for the jedi’s projected radius of touchdown. A quick radio over to long range electro-ballistics ensured that his landing wouldn’t be marred by friendly fire.

He awaited follow-up questions on the absurd entry method, which, when they came, mostly consisted of variations on “...Is this for real?” and eventually “Can you set the scope to video for a little while?” and finally “Do you think that’s how he got the name Skywalker?”

There was a temporarily lull in fire from the west, likely a ripple effect from the ship’s explosion. From his vantage point Blink could see his batchmates using the opportunity to try and plug the holes in their barricade with broken droid pieces. Regardless of the itch to join them, he knew he couldn’t leave his post until the Jedi actually arrived in camp. Finally, a distant explosion and thick pillar of smoke gave the Jedi’s position away.

He tried to make out details, but the scope had a difficult time focusing through the haze. Manually trying to fine tune the scope’s settings, Blink caught a glimpse of what looked like half a hover tank sailing through the air to impact with a trade federation troop carrier in a fiery explosion. Several more explosions, flying droid artillery, and plumes of smoke were caught on record before visual contact with the source was established. He was mostly visible as a blue blur, lightsaber mowing a meandering path towards their location.

It wasn’t until Skywalker braced himself in place to punch a droidaka into pieces that Blink caught actual sight of the man. Only his eyes were visible, nose and mouth covered by layers of cloth. He blurred, then reappeared on top a massive missile launcher attached to an absurdly heavily armored vehicle. A minute or so of rapid blue flashes passed, the longest he had seen concentrated in one area. Then Skywalker was gone, movement clearly visible as he for once he moved in a straight line, plowing a rapid path away from the launcher.

Less than 30 seconds later, Blink had to wince away from the scope, as a burning white explosion temporarily overwhelmed the direct light filter. The trooper panicked for a moment, thinking he had gone both deaf and blind, but the abrupt, sucking silence ended after a moment with a deafening sonic boom. The shockwave rattled the farscope, nearly knocking it over, but Blink managed to steady it and himself in time.

A cheer emerged from pleasantly surprised vod below. The entire droid legion that had been guarding the missile launcher and apparent ordinance bay was flattened.

It took a moment for the realization to set in that the background noise of missile and and anti-missile collisions directly overhead had slowed pace. With the northern flank gone, artillery were able to redouble efforts to the east, and a second white hot shockwave ensued, signaling that the tide of battle had shifted. It was almost too easy for the republics electro-ballistics to tactically devastate the surrounding forces.

Eventually some sort of win/loss programming must have set in and all forces outside of a certain radius began retreating southward, conceding the scorched land to the republic army. It was cadets work to clean up the final suicidal droid charge.

A commotion ensued as Skywalker leapt the barricade with a mid-air flip. The vod greeted him with cheers, as they correctly assumed his appearance had something to do with the skirmish’s decisive victory.

Blink sent the video of the battle to command and quickly packed up his scope and assorted equipment. Hurrying down the battered tower, Blink thought to himself that this Anakin Skywalker was the best sort of Jedi a trooper could ask for.

uh sorry i got really sidetracked there moving on

Kenobi and Skywalker quickly become the face of the war once again

they grit their teeth a bit, but when they finally have a moment to really plan they eventually agree that to take down Sideous they have to cut off his political power in addition to everything else, and taking advantage of their public personas was the most accessible way to do so (*evil laughter*)

While Dooku wasn’t captured, Yoda heard the truth in his old student’s cryptic warnings about a Sith in the Senate, and the council begins carefully editing their release of tactical plans to the Chancellor’s office in the hopes of ferreting out the spy in their midst.

Pong Krell looses two arms in his duel with Dooku. Obi-Wan successfully hides his smug pleasure at the news. Anakin enjoys makeing comparisons between him and Grievous.

Kenobi doesn’t allow the origin of the clones to go unexamined, although he agrees that if the public were informed that they don’t actually know who ordered them it would probably cause panic.

The ‘inhibitor chips’ are ‘discovered’ early on and Anakin leads the effort to ensure that they are phased out and removed immediately. This consists of reminding every Jedi who even hesitates about how how he as a child slave had some experience with control chips and unless you want to take a leaf out of the hutts books lets start doing brain surgery chop chop mmmkay?

(This isn’t to say that Vader doesn’t still a twinge of shame at acknowledging his slave roots. But it is eclipsed by the burning guilt that he knowingly acted as slave master to his troops for decades after Sideous wiped their minds. He tried to rationalize it to himself, after all he didn’t immediately understand what Order 66 had done to the troopers. But while the morality of murder was more of an intellectual concern than a personal one, treating people as things...)

The Kamonions are a little harder to budge, referencing contracts that they refuse to allow the Jedi to see

Finally Vader snuck into the Chief Medical Scientist’s home while she was sleeping and straight-up threatened to murder her and burn down her lab. At the risk of losing her life’s work, Nala Se complied.

Vader left with the final threat that in the event that Darth Tyranus caught wind and activated Order 66 prematurely, he would kill 100 Kamonians for every Jedi felled by troopers. Shaak Ti was pleased by the cloners sudden change of heart. Tyrannus, and by extension, Sideous, are in the dark.

Obi-Wan frequently publicly confronts Palpatine about the troops citizen status, urging him make use of his emergency powers to grant them citizenship and full pay, with the option to leave the army should they so wish.

Anakin manages to play off his avoidance of the Chancellor as disappointment in his perceived lack of dedication to anti-slavery efforts

Finally Palpatine gives in- regardless of what happens next, the troops will be looked after.

With 2/3rds of the troopers dechipped, Vaderkin is eager to kill Sideous again, but after several intense screaming matches and sparring sessions, the time travelers come to the agreement that even if they succeed in their duel, with things as they were, the perception of the Jedi military coop would cause mass civil unrest. The scattered sith apprentices, while individually weak, were more than capable of magnifying that fear and anger until the galaxy breaks. Darth Sideous wanted to ensure that if he couldn’t have the galaxy, no one would.

(Vader knows this. Sideous enjoyed monologuing, and much of his plotting couldn’t be safely bragged about until after he had decisively won, leaving Vader as the unwilling receptacle for years of pent-up rants and self-satisfied gloats about the inevitability of his victory)

Continued Here

472 notes · View notes

die-comic · 3 years

Photo

DIE returns for its final arc in May. Here’s the full press-release, but the main bit...

KIERON GILLEN & STEPHANIE HANS' BESTSELLING SERIES DIE BEGINS COUNTDOWN TO SINISTER FINALE

PORTLAND, Ore. 2.18.2021 — Bestselling series Die by Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans will kick off its final story arc—ominously titled “Bleed”—beginning with Die #16 out from Image Comics this May. The highly anticipated conclusion for the series will be revealed in Die #20. To go into the dark, you have to get to the dark. They never put a dungeon anywhere accessible, do they? Past sins haunt our party, and future sins permeate the landscape. Die’s closing arc begins as we began: with regrets and screaming. Die has consistently held a seat as one of the top selling Image Comics series with multiple sell-outs at the distributor level and regular reorder activity that’s skyrocketed with each new installment’s release. Perhaps best described as Jumanji with goth sensibilities, the series has stolen headlines since its launch for ushering in a new trend in RPG themed storytelling. “The concluding arc is always bittersweet,” said Gillen. “Sad that the adventure is coming to the end, but the wicked glee of finally being able to reveal all the bleak secrets we've been keeping.” Die #16 Cover A by Hans (Diamond Code MAR210062) and Die #16 Cover B by Alberto Varanda (Diamond Code MAR210063) will be available at comic book shops on Wednesday, May 5. Die #16 will also be available for purchase across many digital platforms, including Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, comiXology, and Google Play.

Coo!

Excited to be back, excited to have Alberto join us for a second cover and excited to bring this home. The plan was always to do 20 issues of this, as the counting numbers on the back cover should have implied, so wrapping up our adventures for now is a whole lot of fun. At least, for a DIE level of fun, anyway.

#cover #diecomic #die comic

256 notes · View notes

jackoshadows · 3 years

Text

@nymerias-heart suggested a while back that we do some TWoW speculation while waiting for the next book.

So I was wondering if ASoIaF readers on here could reblog the character list below with the chapter count they think each character would get in The Winds of Winter. Would be really interesting to see this. If we have enough data we could do some statistics.

ADwD was already a big book with 16 POVs and 73 chapters. Jon had the maximum with 13 and several characters had 1 or 2 chapters. In TWoW, GRRM has to fit in 20 POV characters and cover a lot of ground and story. And we only have two books left to finish the story.

The list is below. Just enter the number of chapters next to character names. You can also enter 0, if you don’t think the character will have a POV chapter.

I’ll go first.

Aeron Greyjoy... 3

Areo Hotah ...2

Arianne Martell ... 3

Arya Stark ...8

Asha Greyjoy ...3

Barristan Selmy ...4

Bran Stark ...8

Brienne of Tarth ...3

Cersei Lannister ...6

Daenerys Targaryen ...7

Davos Seaworth ...4

Jaime Lannister ...3

Jon Snow ...3

Jon Connington ...3

Melisandre ...4

Samwell Tarly ..3

Sansa Stark ...4

Theon Greyjoy ...5

Tyrion Lannister ...7

Victarion Greyjoy ...3

POV chapter count: 86

Prologue: GRRM has mentioned that we will see Jeyne Westerling. Which means this will be in the Westerlands. We may see Edmure Tully and possibly the Blackfish through this prologue.

Epilogue: The Wall and the arrival of the Others.

Location wise split of above chapters:

Essos/Vaes Dothrak/Meereen/Yunkai/Dany landing in Westeros: 21

The North: 12

Braavos/Arya in Westeros: 8

Beyond the Wall: 8

The Wall: 7

Stormlands/Young Griff’s campaign to KL: 6

King’s Landing: 6

Riverlands: 6

Oldtown: 6

Vale: 4

Dorne:2

Total: 88 chapters up from the 73 chapters in ADwD. The chapters could be of shorter length though, if GRRM cuts down on descriptions of feasts and travelogues. This is where his editor could massively help and GRRM has mentioned going back and tweaking things. For example, that Arianne sample chapter from TWoW would have her get to Young Griff instead of spending two chapters just traveling.

If we look at word counts:

A Game of Thrones: 4082 words per chapter (298k in 73 chapters)

A Clash of Kings: 4657 (326k in 70 chapters)

A Storm of Swords: 5171 (424k in 82 chapters)

A Feast for Crows: 6522 (300k in 46 chapters)

A Dance with Dragons: 5781 words per chapter (422k in 73 chapters)

He needs to go back to AGoT chapter lengths and then perhaps the limitations of book binding would not be a problem.

Here is also a link to confirmed POV chapters in TWoW. But note that this may have changed since GRRM did state in a recent notablog post that he was going back and changing things - combining chapters, splitting them, rewriting them etc.

Arya: 4

Tyrion: 3

Barristan: 3

Arianne: 3

Melisandre: 2

Theon: 2

Aeron: 2

Areo Hotah: 2

Cersei: 2

Asha: 2

Jon Connington: 2

Sansa: 1

Victarion: 1

Bran: 1

Daenerys: 1

Davos: 1

Confirmed Chapters: 33

Below the cut I have put in some of my reasoning for my POV counts.

First, I think GRRM needs to refocus on his main story and characters and make his way to the ending. That means more focus on main characters and less time spend on secondary characters. He should be spending time getting Arya, Bran, Jon, Dany and Tyrion etc. to their endgames rather than spend more time world building and telling the stories of secondary characters.

For example, Bran had like 3 chapters in Feast and Dance while Brienne got 8! Who is the more important character here? There are two books left, Bran has to finish training, find out stuff about the Others, explore lands of always winter, return south of the wall, meet back up with Jon and Arya, play a big part in defeating the Others and become King.

GRRM has written material for an entire book with Arya in Braavos. Unfortunately ASoIaF is not about Arya’s FM adventures in Braavos and Arya needs to get back to Westeros. So George has chop, cut, edit and narrow down her story there to like maybe 5 chapters before she leaves.

So either George cuts out a lot of the fat, travelogues, world building and secondary characters or he needs 8/9 books to finish or he can change his endings to suit what he has written now or he can procrastinate and just not write.

Some of the things GRRM has said regarding TWoW.

GRRM teases about events in TWOW in this interview

“I think we’re gonna start out with a big smash with the two enormous battles,” Martin says. Presumably one of those battles refers to the clash between Ramsay’s army and Stannis’s forces in the North (the outcome of which was described in Ramsay’s letter in ADWD—perhaps falsely?—but not actively shown), while the other takes place across the narrow sea when Yunkai attacks Meereen in an attempt to overthrow Daenerys. In addition, Martin says, “We have more deaths, and we have more betrayals. We have more marriages.” Let the speculation begin. As he’s noted before, Martin says the Dothraki are coming back into the story (“in a big way”), and he says “a lot of stuff is happening at The Wall.”

From his Notablog updates:

06/23/2020

Of late I have been visiting with Cersei, Asha, Tyrion, Ser Barristan, and Areo Hotah. I will be dropping back into Braavos next week. Now you will have to excuse me. Arya is calling. I think she means to kill someone.

08/11/2020

Of late I have been spending a lot of time with the Lannisters. Cersei and Tyrion in particular. I’ve also paid a visit to Dorne, and dropped in to Oldtown a time or three. In addition to turning out new chapters, I’ve been revising some old ones (some very old)… including, yes, some stuff I read at cons ages ago, or even posted online as samples. I tweak stuff constantly, and sometimes go beyond tweaking, moving things around, combining chapters, breaking chapters in two, reordering stuff.

08/15/2020

For the nonce, it is what it is. My life is at home, on hold, and I am spending the days in Westeros with my pals Mel and Sam and Vic and Ty. And that girl with no name, over there in Braavos.

Now, there are three things that GRRM just has to get done in TWoW, IMO.

Daenerys Targaryen has to resolve her Essos plot and get to Westeros by the end of TWoW.

Arya has to resolve her Braavos plot and get to Westeros

Bran has to advance a great deal in his plot/Bloodraven/Others etc.

(Note: I suspect this is one of the reasons that TWoW is taking so long. By his own admission, Dany and Bran are the two characters GRRM finds hardest to write and my speculation is that there is a lot of these two characters in the next book.)

So I am going to assign Arya and Bran the most POV chapters - let’s say 8 each since they are the only POVs at their locations. The Essos plot is a complicated mess, but we have other POVs focused on there as well - Tyrion, Barristan and Victarion. And Tyrion will no doubt get a good chunk of chapters because GRRM likes to write for him and finds it easy to write for him.

For Oldtown I am assigning 6 chapters - 3 from Sam’s POV and 3 from Aeron giving us a look into what Euron is upto. Or it could be 4 for Sam and 2 for Aeron.

I suspect not much happening in Dorne until they align with Young Griff. Arianne and Jon Connington with a look into fAegon’s campaign advancing into KL. Some Vale stuff with Sansa and LF.

GRRM mentions spending a lot of time with Cersei and Tyrion. Cersei remains the only POV in KL and that’s an important location. Jaime and Brienne are together so GRRM can use either of them for Lady Stoneheart/the Brotherhood/Riverlands.

Lots happening at the wall. Big battles in the North and the resolution of the Northern plot - Theon/Asha with Stannis and Davos with Rickon/Northerners. I am not sure if Jon will get a POV - so I am giving him just 3 in case. I think the majority viewpoint will be Mel.

39 notes · View notes

blackswaneuroparedux · 3 years

Text

The Scots Greys and the turning of the tide at Battle of Waterloo

They never consider the situation, never think of manoeuvring before an enemy and never keep back or provide a reserve. They’re charging at everything!

- Duke of Wellington reflecting on the charge of the British cavalry after the Battle of Maguilla in 1812

The Duke of Wellington was never pleased with his cavalry. In Spain he condemned them for “charging at everything”, getting cut up in the process or finding themselves on a distant part of the battlefield, horses blown, at the very moment they were needed elsewhere. So at Waterloo the Iron Duke intended to keep the mounted arm on a tight rein.

It was, after all, the first time he would actually face Napoleon in the field, and the situation was not auspicious. He had been taken by surprise. He famously learnt of the sudden appearance of the French on the border with the Southern Netherlands (now Belgium) at the Duchess of Richmond’s ball in Brussels on 15 June. “Napoleon has humbugged me, by God!” The following day his Prussian allies were worsted at Ligny. Hs own troops, rushed forward to nearby Quatre Bras, were badly mauled. He was on the back foot.

But his capacity to anticipate setbacks paid dividends. Some weeks earlier he had chosen a piece of ground on which to make a stand if the French were to come. The ridge of Mont St Jean, a mile south of the village of Waterloo athwart the main road from Charleroi to Brussels. The ridge ran north-east to south-west for about three miles, two-thirds of which Wellington was able to occupy with infantry and artillery. To support these he would post two brigades of light cavalry on the left (east) flank and three on the right. Two brigades of heavy cavalry, including the Scots Greys or, as they were then more properly known, the 2nd Royal (North British) Dragoons, would be in the centre. And to each of the cavalry brigadiers, as well as to the Earl of Uxbridge (later Marquess of Anglesey), the commander of the Allied cavalry and his second in command, Wellington gave strict instructions not to leave their positions without his express order.

The Duke was essentially a general who preferred to choose his ground, make the enemy attack him and then use the superior musketry of his infantry to defeat them. He intended Waterloo to be just such a battle. In addition, for the first time he had the benefit of a strong force of heavy cavalry inclusing the Scots Greys – bigger men, bigger swords, bigger horses – to counter the French heavy cavalry or break up an assault that threatened to overwhelm his infantry. And, indeed, the charge of these two brigades, best known perhaps for Lady (Elizabeth) Butler’s 1881 painting Scotland Forever! depicting the Scots Greys galloping wildly at the French, would be one of the critical actions of the battle, even, some argue, its turning point.

The Scots Greys had been formed in 1681 from a number of independent troops of dragoons (originally men who dismounted to fight with the musket, rather than fight from the saddle with sword and pistol), and known as The Royal Regiment of Scots Dragoons. The “grey” of their later title may at this time have referred to their uniform, for it was not for a dozen years that this changed to red, and there is no record that the Scots Greys used grey horses exclusively.

However, when inspected by King William III (William of Orange) in 1693 it was noted that the Scots Greys regiment were all mounted on greys. Soon afterwards they were being referred to as the “Grey Dragoons” or the “Scots Regiment of Grey Dragoons”. In 1707, after the Act of Union, they were restyled “North British”, as the parliamentary union envisaged Scotland to be. Not until 1877 would their nickname be made official. They became the 2nd Dragoons (Royal Scots Greys), inverted after the First World War to The Royal Scots Greys (2nd Dragoons). They kept this title for 50 years until amalgamating with the 3rd Carabiniers (Prince of Wales’s Dragoon Guards) to form the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards (Carabiniers and Greys).

When Napoleon escaped from Elba at the end of February 1815 to begin his “Hundred Days”, the ill-starred attempt to retake the French crown and continue his imperial ambitions, the Greys were one of a number of regiments rushed to Belgium that had yet to fight “Napoleonic” troops. Indeed, by the time of Waterloo few Scots Greys had seen battle - and they were keen to make up for it.

Their moment came in the early afternoon of 18 June, when it looked as if Wellington’s line at Waterloo would break. The Comte d’Erlon’s corps of three infantry divisions, some 14,000 men, with 6,000 cavalry, assaulted the Allied left wing and centre, which was held by Dutch-Belgian brigades and Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas Picton’s 5th Division, the latter experienced Peninsular troops.

As d’Erlon’s men ascended the slope towards the sunken road that ran the length of the ridge left of La Haye Sainte, driving back the British skirmishers and reaching the thick hedge that fringed the road, Picton’s men stood up, formed into a four-deep line to guard against cavalry attack, advanced and began volleying.

However, the French deployed unusually quickly into line and returned fire. Picton himself was killed after ordering a counter-attack in language profane even by his own legendary standards, and soon his troops were giving way under the pressure of numbers. At two o’clock Napoleon appeared to be winning the Battle of Waterloo.

But Lieutenant-General the Earl of Uxbridge was a cavalry commander of genius. Earlier estranged from Wellington on account of eloping with the Duke’s youngest brother’s wife, he had been disbarred from service in the Peninsula after brilliantly covering Sir John Moore’s gruelling retreat to Corunna. But his cavalry coup d’oeil had not deserted him, nor his moral courage. Despite the Duke’s orders that none of the cavalry was to quit the ground it had been posted on without his express will, Uxbridge ordered his two brigades – the Household Brigade (1st and 2nd Life Guards, Royal Horse Guards and 1st (King’s) Dragoon Guards) and the Union Brigade, so-called for its English, Scots and Irish regiments (1st Royal Dragoons, 6th (Inniskilling) Dragoons, and the Scots Greys) – to charge in support of the hard-pressed infantry.

With a combined strength of nearly 2,500 sabres and led by Uxbridge, the heavies advanced. The Household Brigade was first into the charge, sweeping back the cuirassiers guarding d’Erlon’s left flank. To the Household’s left the Union Brigade surged through the lines of red-coated infantry in the sunken road, where some Gordon Highlanders grasped their stirrups to get at the French, and at the foot of the slope routed the two advanced infantry brigades of General Joachim Quiot’s division, the Royals, capturing the eagle of the 105th Ligne while Sergeant Ewart of the Greys, 6ft 4in tall and a master swordsman and rider, captured the eagle of the 45th Ligne.

Only two eagles were captured that day.

As with the Household, however, the officers of the Union Brigade were finding it difficult to rein in their troops, and the heavies lost all cohesion. With many casualties and still trying to reorder, the Greys now found themselves before the main French lines, their horses blown, though some galloped on to attack the guns of the Grande Batterie. This was too much for Napoleon, who had hitherto left the conduct of the battle to Marshal Michel Ney. He promptly ordered a counter-attack by two cuirassier brigades and Baron Jacquinot’s two Polish lancer regiments (a charge also painted by Lady Butler).

As Major-General Sir William Ponsonby tried to rally his brigade he was captured by Jacquinot’s men, whereupon several Greys galloped to their brigadier’s rescue but the lancers at once killed him and three of his would-be rescuers, who could do nothing to overcome the lance’s reach. The rest of the heavies might also have been speared or sabred had it not been for a counter-charge by Major-General Sir John Vandeleur’s light dragoon brigade and two of Dutch-Belgians from the left flank, who had also disobeyed Wellington’s orders to stay put.

The charge saved the remnants of the Household and Union brigades but their casualties had been heavy, including the Greys’ lieutenant-colonel, James Hamilton, who was killed. The official recorded losses for both brigades that day were 1,205 troopers and 1,303 horses, an extremely high proportion.

However, 14,000 French troops of D’Erlon’s corps had been committed to the attack on the Allied centre at a cost of some 3,000 casualties and irrecoverable time. It was four o’clock before they were ready to advance again, by when, with the Allied line holding along the ridge and Prussian troops beginning to arrive on the field from the east, it was be-coming clear that Napoleon had lost the battle, although there would be another two hours of increasingly desperate, bloody but futile French attacks before Wellington judged it the moment to signal the whole line to advance.

The Scots Greys would later incorporate the image of the captured eagle in their cap badge, and Sergeant Ewart would be commissioned as an ensign (second lieutenant) in the 5th Veteran Battalion of Infantry. The following year he was invited to a Waterloo dinner in Edinburgh, where Sir Walter Scott asked him to speak. But Ensign Ewart begged that he might be excused, saying, “I would rather fight the Battle of Waterloo over again than face so large an assemblage.”

The Battle of Waterloo, the culmination of more than twenty years of fighting in Europe and across the globe, was one of the greatest military defeats in history. Within a matter of hours it would not only result in thousands of deaths, but also in the destruction ofa well-experienced army.

The role that the Scots Greys played in the Battle of Waterloo was, perhaps something of a surprise. Although they had had a long and relatively distinguished history, having fought in many battles from the time of William III in Holland, the group tasked with fighting at Waterloo, the majority having little or no battle experience, proved themselves to be more than adequate on their day. Through sheer courage and determination they entered a bloody battle against all the odds.

Historians continue to debate whether the Scots Greys was the actual turning point of the Battle of Waterloo with as much vigour as they debate the late intervention of Blucher’s Prussians. Be that as it may it remains undeniable that the number of losses, in proportion to their numbers, was very high, yet the impression they made on the battlefield at Waterloo was, and still is, deep and forever remembered.

#scots greys #waterloo #napoleon #eagle #history #british army #war #military history #napoleonic warfare #britain #france #prussia #regiment #duke of wellington

42 notes · View notes

rachelbethhines · 4 years

Text

Tangled Salt Marathon - Hey, What Ever Happened to That Varitas, Guy? (second half of S1 Recap)

So we’ve come to the end of the first season and I’m going to do a quick recap of the second half to summarize what went wrong; because each individual episode is a little too dense to get the full picture.

You can find the first half of S1 Recap here - https://rachelbethhines.tumblr.com/post/622132795910782976/tangled-salt-marathon-to-filler-or-not-to-filler

Episodes covered in the second half are..

Queen for a Day Part 1

Queen for a Day Part 2

Painter’s Block

Not in the Mood

The Quest for Varian

The Alchemist Returns

Secret of the Sun Drop Part 1

Secret of the Sun Drop Part 2

Lack of Context Leads to Confusion

The show doesn’t clearly communicate what’s going on. There’s a lot of reasons for this, episodes aired out of order, poor pacing, an over reliance on exposition, deliberately hiding information for ‘twists”, and trying to skew the audience to root for one character over another ect. The end result is that the audience is now left to piece together what actually happened to Varian through context clues, hints, and single lines of given info. It’s possible to do this, but it's not good writing.

You don’t need to spell everything out to your audience but you still have to keep in mind that an audience is comprised of various different people, with different ways of communicating and absorbing information, and you need to make your story accessible to a wide range of people on a single watch through. That means repeating information in a variety of ways, both visually and auditory.

Think of it like being a teacher in front of a class. You got to show your students more than once the information they need to know, and you gotta do it in different ways since people have different means of learning; visual, auditory, physical, ect.

I’m an auditory learner. I can remember what people say easily, so I can pick up on the one lines of exposition easier than say a visual learner who’s looking for visual cues, like a distinct change in seasons to show the passage of time or something. The fact that I and that visual learner can come to two completely different conclusions on basic information like, ‘how much time has passed’ or ‘why is Rapunzel suddenly not on board with stealing the flower’, is not a good thing. You need everyone on the same page when it comes to things like character motivation because such things drive your plot.

Missed Opportunities

I’ve talked about the poor pacing last time, but let's focus on how all that filler could have been used to actually enhance the story... Just a list of options here..minor tweeks..

Combine Monty and Xavier into a single character and thereby giving Xavier’s presence in the plot heavier episodes more weight

Make Max’s focus episode a Varian episode was well. Have Max be the one tasked with hunting him down for the scroll. This adds tension to the story, better explains Varian’s motivations, and gives Max an actual point of character development and a reason for his own episode.

Have Not in the Mood set up more than just the truth serum; we could have had foreshadowing for season two’s quest, actual worldbuilding, foreshadowing for more Saporian/Zhan Tiri stuff and why Xavier is connected to both ect.

Reorder the episodes back into their intended slots...

Make Arianna’s and Willow’s episode a Lady Caine episode as well. More tension, more focus to three underserved female characters, give something other than a thin parallel to Raps and Cass, build up the Frederic and the royals are secretly awful plot that’s currently ongoing. ect.

And these are just a few suggestions, there’s a whole manner of ways to trim down and streamline the show without sacrificing the core story.

Lopsided Points of Views, Double Standards, and Mixed Messages

I’ve gone into this at great length so I’m just going to reiterate this real quick.

Varian is held to a different set of standards than the rest of the cast. Now, ignoring how questionably moral it is to hold a poor fourteen year old orphan accountable for his mistreatment by the hands of adults; from a storytelling point of view, it means that the show no longer has a clear theme. Whatever it’s trying to tell it’s audience is undermined by the mains contradicting themselves whenever it comes to the character of Varian.

Stealing is wrong; unless you’re a king/father

Drugging people is wrong; unless you’re besties with the mains

Neglect is damaging to children; unless you’re a princess who’s sad about having responsibilities now, then by all means abuse the kid that’s now legally under your care.

There’s also the added problem of showing characters behaving out of character in order make this lopsided narrative work. Along with failing to let the characters admit their faults so that they can learn and grow from it afterwards.

Conclusion

Like I said before, Varian’s arc is the strongest arc in the show. Even with its problems, it’s still interesting enough to carry itself and it still had plenty of time to correct it’s failings in future seasons. But it didn’t, and here we are. So tune in next time in the salt marathon when we start in on season two.

#varian #tangled #anti-tangled #tangled the series #rapunzel's tangled adventure

124 notes · View notes

snitchcrimsonwrites · 20 days

Text

Maybe pt. 4

Pairing: Norm MacLean X Female Reader or OC if you squint

Former friends to a relationship?

Life is pretty easy in Vault 33 until you're trying to rekindle a former friendship and Raiders attack. Now, our main characters are trying to navigate newfound feelings, all while undercovering the mysteries of Vault 33. Stay tuned. Follows the main storyline of season 1; some events may be reordered for plot.

We were supposed to get the big Vault 32 reveal, but this chapter just kept getting longer, so I had to cut it off at some point. Sorry!

Part 1 Here. Part 7 Here

Part 2 Here Part 8 Here

Part 3 Here Part 9 Here

Part 5 Here Part 10 Here

Part 6 Here Part 11 Here

The workday was over, and you were ready to get home and relax. You headed down the Vault corridor toward your residence, your mind already planning your evening. Maybe you’d watch a movie, you thought as you entered the pin code to unlock the door. The pressurized door mechanism opened with a rush of air, revealing your main living space. You immediately noticed something had changed since you left this morning. Huh, I don’t remember leaving you here.

A single book rested atop your kitchen table; you didn’t recognize the cover. Puzzled, you reached for the book and flipped it open, trying to jog your memory; as you did, a folded piece of paper fell onto the table.

The paper read, Courtesy of Overseer MacLean ‘s private library—our little secret. N

You flip the cover over and take a better look. You smile. Of course, it’s a Western.

__________________________

The day of Lucy’s wedding had finally arrived. Most in the Vault couldn’t contain their excitement and curiosity. Everyone was interested to see the results of Triennial Trade. Who was this 32 dweller who would be married to their community? The speculation was endless, but the residents of 33 would have to wait until the ceremony.

Norm, on the other hand, was wrestling with a different conundrum this morning. He picked up the folded paper atop his dresser and opened it to re-read the contents.

Courtesy of Overseer MacLean ‘s private library—our little secret. N

For a sickeningly sweet gesture, I, (Y/N), owe you, Norman MacLean, one activity of your choosing.

You will ask her. Don’t chicken out, he repeats to his reflection in the bedroom mirror above the dresser. Whether to ask (Y/N) to dance at Lucy’s wedding has weighed on him for several days. Does she even want me to ask? Would she be embarrassed if I did this in front of everyone? Then what if I don’t ask? Would she be disappointed? This was all too much. Decision fatigue plagued him. He’d read the room. He'd go for it if she seemed interested and the opportunity presented itself.

------------------------------

The residents of Vault 33 congregated in the atrium's main square, waiting for Lucy to make her grand entrance. Norm could hear little snippets of separate conversations blending into one.

“The decorations look beautiful!” “I’m so glad the sunflowers bloomed in time for the ceremony. We were getting worried.” “Should I have done something different with my hair?” “Do you think he’ll get the hint and ask me to dance?”

He glances around to see if he can spot you among the other vault dwellers; when he does, the room goes silent. Confused, he turns around to see the source of the crowd’s change in demeanor.

Lucy’s appearance in the upper balcony quieted the crowd.

Norm watches as she comes down the stairs into the main square to greet the onlookers. He can see everyone smiling at the sight of the young woman in her wedding dress, including his dad.

“Dad,” she chuckles. Stepping forward so he can admire his little girl.

“My little sugar bomb,” their dad says as he embraces her.

“Gosh, you look just like your mother,” pride exuding from his voice.

“Yeah, I wish she was here.”

“Me too.”

“Were you scared?” “When you married mom?” Norm hears Lucy ask.

“Me?” he scoffs. “Terrified. I’d never set foot outside of Vault 31.”

“When did it go away?”

“The moment I met your mother.”

How Norm wished his mother could be here to see this day. While today is supposed to be happy, her absence creates a veil of sadness he can see behind Lucy and his father’s eyes. She was supposed to be here to witness her daughter get married, to see them both grow up. He tries to push the sad thoughts and focus on the moment. If he cried on her wedding day, Lucy would never let him live it down.

“From that moment on, Vault 31 was a distant memory.” Hank continued.

“Overseer, it’s time,” Betty announces to the pair. They take that as their cue, Hank extending his arm to his daughter and the remainder of the group filing in behind them. Norm takes his spot directly behind his Dad and Lucy. You notice and follow suit a few steps behind.

As the group approaches the vault corridor connecting Vault 32 and 33 opens with a whoosh, and they begin the walk that will change their lives forever.

Norm shuffles ahead quickly to end up beside his sister. He can’t pass up the opportunity to engage in some sibling teasing.

“Must be nerve-racking. Your husband could be anybody.”

“I’m aware,” Lucy retorts. Rolling her eyes at his teasing.

“And as for his looks?”

“Who knows?” she replies. Norm is impressed; she seems remarkably nonchalant in her response. He decides to take it up a notch.

“Big butt? No butt? But of course, they are just superficial concerns. It’s what’s on the inside that counts.”

“That’s right!” their dad affirms, looking back at his children, hoping they will give it a rest today, of all days.

“And in that respect, he could be a cannibal or just like crammed full of tumors.” Norm barely gets the words out before Lucy swats him with her bouquet.

“Norman.” Hank scolds.

“Sorry, Dad,” Norm concedes.

Finally, they’re outside the main entrance of Vault 32. Showtime.

Hank checks his Pip-Boy and gives Chet the okay to open the gate. Norm was surprised at his composure, given the situation. Everyone in Vault 33 knows he’s down bad for his sister. He and (Y/N) expected at least some reaction from Chet today.

Chet connects his Pip-Boy to the mag lock. Nothing happens.

“Honestly…” Chet sighs.” It's a Textbook tumbler jam. It’s going to take some time to fix.”

There is it, Norm thinks. He’s SO not okay with this. Norm snickers internally and turns around to catch your eye. You return his glance as if to say, we SO called it.

Lucy steps over to take control of the situation, and after a few hushed exchanges, Chet relents.

The alarms sound, and the door to Vault 32 rolls back, revealing the residents out from behind its cover.

Norm watched as his dad stepped in front of the group from 33 to welcome their new guests.

“Welcome neighbors from Vault 32.” He says with outstretched arms. “ I am Hank MacLean, Overseer of Vault 33.”

A dark-haired woman steps forward in matching fashion.

“Lee Moldaver, Overseer of 32. Thank you for your hospitality.”

“Oh, we were sorry to hear of Overseer Jackson’s passing in your telegrams.”

“When blight hit our wheat, we lost a lot of good people, but this trade will help get us back on our feet.”

Norm frowned as he heard the words leave the opposing Overseer’s mouth. Why did she have to phrase it like that? Disdain bubbled up into his throat. Moldaver’s words made this whole event seem purely transactional. He means he knows it IS a transaction between vaults, meant to keep those in the vaults surviving, but these were people, and that was his sister. His sister, whom someone loosely compared to a few bushels of wheat. Only he was allowed to comment on his sister that way. When he did it, it was just two siblings mocking one another; when an outsider does it, it’s a step too far.

Norm was so caught up in analyzing Moldaver’s words that he missed the remainder of the Overseers’ exchange. Suddenly, a rather scruffy 32 dweller stood out before both groups—Lucy’s new husband.

Overseer MacLean was the one to break the ice. “Now that we’re acquainted, if everyone can move into the main square of the atrium, we can begin the ceremony,” ushering everyone to move back through the vault entrance.

Norm hangs back from the front of the crowd to walk back with you.

“Lucy seemed particularly happy with her new husband,” you comment.

“Yeah, she's a little too happy. I still hope he has one ridiculously unexpected flaw, like being massively afraid of the dark. So bad he has to sleep with the lights on or maybe a nightlight, just to make things interesting.”

“You’re incorrigible,” you reply, shaking your head.

______________________________

The ceremony was completed, and everyone took their seats at the picnic tables in Vault 33’s atrium. You couldn’t help but look around and admire the decorations. The “outdoor” space always turns out lovely when decorated for weddings. It was the same with Steph’s wedding two years prior.

You continue taking everything in from your seat, focusing to admire the various spots decorated around the Vault’s main space. You spy Norm at an opposing table with Vault 32’s Overseer. You suppose his dad might have placed him there strategically, perhaps as a political test; it wouldn’t be surprising that he’d want his son to follow in his footsteps as Overseer. That would be quite the sight. Norm had the potential without question; you weren’t sure he wanted the responsibility. He catches you staring and gives you an awkward wave back.

You flash him a toothy smile in return. It’s becoming harder to ignore how much your feelings for Norm have grown. In just a few short weeks, you went from hardly giving him a second thought to having him consume your waking thoughts. While you two were generally ignoring each other, it was easy not to notice how much he had grown into his features, and you couldn’t deny you found them attractive. Handsome. Not to mention how he has always made you feel comfortable being yourself around him. No masking, no walls, just you. Would becoming more than friends ruin your dynamic? Was his friendship something you'd risk?

You didn’t get more time to dwell on your feelings as Overseer MacLean started his speech from atop the stage. You redirected your drifting attention.

“Good evening, and welcome to the proud denizens of Vault 32. We are bonded not just as neighbors but by a shared duty. To keep the candle of civilization lit. While the rest of the world has been cast into darkness. Soon, if our measurements are correct, radiation levels on the surface are dropping fast enough that the next generation, Lucy and Monty’s children, will be able to recolonize.”

Your fellow Vault 33 neighbors erupt into cheers and applause while the other Overseer, Moldaver? visibly tenses. Huh. Maybe she’s just as afraid of Reclamation as some of other dwellers. The whole concept is terrifying enough for people who have never left the safety of the Vault.

Overseer MacLean continues as the volume from the crowd subsides.

“After 200 years, we don’t know much about what’s up there: desperation, violence, lawlessness. These survivors will need to be shown a better way. I’ll admit sometimes I’m afraid that mean old world will change us instead. But then I look at my daughter, who’s such a beautiful bride, and her new husband. And I am not afraid. I feel hope. To Lucy MacLean. And to this marriage. And to hope!”

Another round of celebration emanates from the Vault dwellers, and he starts off stage—but not without one final decree: “Let’s dance! Hit it.”

The command stirs the jukebox to life, playing “Some Enchanted Evening,” and the Overseer extends a hand out to Lucy for their father-daughter dance.

♫ Who can explain it?

Who can tell you why?

Fools give you reasons,

Wise men never try. ♫

As you watch Lucy’s tender moment with her dad, you cannot help but feel a tinge of sadness for a moment you’ll never have. They’ve become fewer and farther between, but times like this really make you miss your dad. You continue to watch them pushing out the feelings of jealousy and embracing the joy you felt for your friend.

Suddenly, they break apart. Urging another off to the side to join them. Norm. You see him shake his head disapprovingly but gets to his feet anyway; he knows a losing battle when he sees one. Soon, all three of them are on the dancefloor, embracing and swaying to the music. You think your heart might melt at the sight.

♫ Some enchanted evening

When you find your true love,

When you feel her call you

Across a crowded room, ♫

As the MacLeans start to separate from their family moment, Lucy notices your presence off to the side of the dancefloor and flashes you a “stay here there, I’m coming to you” gesture with her hands as she heads in your direction. You embrace her in a celebratory hug when she makes it to you.

“Congratulations!” you offer up enthusiastically. “You make a stunning bride.”

“Thank you! It’s all so exciting, isn’t it?!” she says, matching your tone. She shifts her position slightly, taking your hands and moving her mouth closer to your ear. In a whisper, she asks, “ I was hoping to ask if you’d do my brother the honor of sharing a dance?” She pulled back into your line of sight, completing the request with a signature Lucy puppy-dog stare. “Consider it my wedding present.”

“How could I say no to that?” you respond with a laugh. Still holding your hands and smiling ear to ear, Lucy ushers you back to her family.

♫ Then fly to her side,

And make her your own

For all through your life you

May dream all alone. ♫

As the two of you approach, you can see Overseer MacLean gently elbow-nudging a mortified-looking Norm.

“I saw (Y/N) by herself on the edge of the dancefloor and thought someone might like to invite her to dance?” Lucy says as she offers your hand up to Norm.

“I’d be happy to,” he replies, taking hold of your hand to lead you onto the dance floor. With a surprising amount of flourish, he pulls the two of you into a traditional slow dance pose, his right hand in yours and left hand resting softly on your waist. Your bodies tucked unexpectedly close against one another.

“Sorry about that,” Norm pips up, shooting daggers in Lucy’s general direction, which she returns, blowing him a kiss back. “You know how she can be when she gets an idea in her head—unrelenting.”

“I don’t mind; I was actually hoping you’d ask. Your sister just guaranteed the odds.”

He looks up at you, and his expression softens. You two fall into a comfortable silence, enjoying the moment and each other’s company. Swaying back and forth to the music, the world melts away behind you. It’s short-lived, though, as the Overseer makes his way back towards you and his son.

“Sorry, I will need to steal Norm away for a second,” the Overseer states as he places a hand on his son’s shoulder. “Just one family photo, and I’ll give him back,” he reassures you with a wink.

“Not a problem,” you manage, hiding your obvious disappointment.

“Find you after.” Norm declares, keeping a loose grasp on your hand as the two of you pull away, clearly not wanting to let go just yet.

You give him a nod, relinquishing his hand.

♫ Some enchanted evening ♫

#norm maclean #norm maclean x oc #norm maclean x reader #fallout tv series

78 notes · View notes

localbizlift · 3 years

Text

Crawl Budget

In today’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Tom covers a more advanced SEO concept: crawl budget. Google has a finite amount of time it's willing to spend crawling your site, so if you’re having issues with indexation, this is a topic you should care about.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a larger version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Happy Friday, Moz fans, and today's topic is crawl budget. I think it's worth saying right off the bat that this is somewhat of a more advanced topic or one that applies primarily to larger websites. I think even if that's not you, there is still a lot you can learn from this in terms of SEO theory that comes about when you're looking at some of the tactics you might employ or some of the diagnostics you might employ for a crawl budget.

But in Google's own documentation they suggest that you should care about crawl budget if you have more than a million pages or more than 10,000 pages that are updated on a daily basis. I think those are obviously kind of hard or arbitrary thresholds. I would say that if you have issues with your site getting indexed and you have pages deep on your site that are just not getting into the index that you want to, or if you have issues with pages not getting indexed quickly enough, then in either of those cases crawl budget is an issue that you should care about.

What is crawl budget?

So what actually is crawl budget? Crawl budget refers to the amount of time that Google is willing to spend crawling a given site. Although it seems like Google is sort of all-powerful, they have finite resources and the web is vast. So they have to prioritize somehow and allocate a certain amount of time or resource to crawl a given website.

Now they prioritize based on — or so they say they prioritize based on the popularity of sites with their users and based on the freshness of content, because Googlebot sort of has a thirst for new, never-before-seen URLs.

We're not really going to talk in this video about how to increase your crawl budget. We're going to focus on how to make the best use of the crawl budget you have, which is generally an easier lever to pull in any case.

Causes of crawl budget issues

So how do issues with crawl budget actually come about?

Facets

Now I think the main sort of issues on sites that can lead to crawl budget problems are firstly facets.

So you can imagine on an e-comm site, imagine we've got a laptops page. We might be able to filter that by size. You have a 15-inch screen and 16 gigabytes of RAM. There might be a lot of different permutations there that could lead to a very large number of URLs when actually we've only got one page or one category as we think about it — the laptops page.

Similarly, those could then be reordered to create other URLs that do the exact same thing but have to be separately crawled. Similarly they might be sorted differently. There might be pagination and so on and so forth. So you could have one category page generating a vast number of URLs.

Search results pages

A few other things that often come about are search results pages from an internal site search can often, especially if they're paginated, they can have a lot of different URLs generated.

Listings pages

Listings pages. If you allow users to upload their own listings or content, then that can over time build up to be an enormous number of URLs if you think about a job board or something like eBay and it probably has a huge number of pages.

Fixing crawl budget issues

So what are some of the tools that you can use to address these issues and to get the most out of your crawl budget?

So as a baseline, if we think about how a normal URL behaves with Googlebot, we say, yes, it can be crawled, yes, it can be indexed, and yes, it passes PageRank. So a URL like these, if I link to these somewhere on my site and then Google follows that link and indexes these pages, these probably still have the top nav and the site-wide navigation on them. So the link actually that's passed through to these pages will be sort of recycled round. There will be some losses due to dilution when we're linking through so many different pages and so many different filters. But ultimately, we are recycling this. There's no sort of black hole loss of leaky PageRank.

Robots.txt

Now at the opposite extreme, the most extreme sort of solution to crawl budget you can employ is the robots.txt file.

So if you block a page in robots.txt, then it can't be crawled. So great, problem solved. Well, no, because there are some compromises here. Technically, sites and pages blocked in robots.txt can be indexed. You sometimes see sites showing up or pages showing up in the SERPs with this meta description cannot be shown because the page is blocked in robots.txt or this kind of message.

So technically, they can be indexed, but functionally they're not going to rank for anything or at least anything effective. So yeah, well, sort of technically. They do not pass PageRank. We're still passing PageRank through when we link into a page like this. But if it's then blocked in robots.txt, the PageRank goes no further.

So we've sort of created a leak and a black hole. So this is quite a heavy-handed solution, although it is easy to implement.

Link-level nofollow

Link-level nofollow, so by this I mean if we took our links on the main laptops category page, that were pointing to these facets, and we put a nofollow attribute internally on those links, that would have some advantages and disadvantages.

I think a better use case for this would actually be more in the listings case. So imagine if we run a used car website, where we have millions of different used car individual sort of product listings. Now we don't really want Google to be wasting its time on these individual listings, depending on the scale of our site perhaps.

But occasionally a celebrity might upload their car or something like that, or a very rare car might be uploaded and that will start to get media links. So we don't want to block that page in robots.txt because that's external links that we would be squandering in that case. So what we might do is on our internal links to that page we might internally nofollow the link. So that would mean that it can be crawled, but only if it's found, only if Google finds it in some other way, so through an external link or something like that.

So we sort of have a halfway house here. Now technically nofollow these days is a hint. In my experience, Google will not crawl pages that are only linked to through an internal nofollow. If it finds the page in some other way, obviously it will still crawl it. But generally speaking, this can be effective as a way of restricting crawl budget or I should say more efficiently using crawl budget. The page can still be indexed.

That's what we were trying to achieve in that example. It can still pass PageRank. That's the other thing we were trying to achieve. Although you are still losing some PageRank through this nofollow link. That still counts as a link, and so you're losing some PageRank that would otherwise have been piped into that follow link.

Noindex, nofollow

Noindex and nofollow, so this is obviously a very common solution for pages like these on ecomm sites.

Now, in this case, the page can be crawled. But once Google gets to that page, it will discover it's noindex, and it will crawl it much less over time because there is sort of less point in crawling a noindex page. So again, we have sort of a halfway house here.

Obviously, it can't be indexed. It's noindex. It doesn't pass PageRank outwards. PageRank is still passed into this page, but because it's got a nofollow in the head section, it doesn't pass PageRank outwards. This isn't a great solution. We've got some compromises that we've had to achieve here to economize on crawl budget.

Noindex, follow

So a lot of people used to think, oh, well, the solution to that would be to use a noindex follow as a sort of best of both. So you put a noindex follow tag in the head section of one of these pages, and oh, yeah, everyone is a winner because we still get the same sort of crawling benefit. We're still not indexing this sort of new duplicate page, which we don't want to index, but the PageRank solution is fixed.

Well, a few years ago, Google came out and said, "Oh, we didn't realize this ourselves, but actually as we crawl this page less and less over time, we will stop seeing the link and then it kind of won't count." So they sort of implied that this no longer worked as a way of still passing PageRank, and eventually it would come to be treated as noindex and nofollow. So again, we have a sort of slightly compromised solution there.

Canonical

Now the true best of all worlds might then be canonical. With the canonical tag, it's still going to get crawled a bit less over time, the canonicalized version, great. It's still not going to be indexed, the canonicalized version, great, and it still passes PageRank.

So that seems great. That seems perfect in a lot of cases. But this only works if the pages are near enough duplicates that Google is willing to consider them a duplicate and respect the canonical. If they're not willing to consider them a duplicate, then you might have to go back to using the noindex. Or if you think actually there's no reason for this URL to even exist, I don't know how this wrong order combination came about, but it seems pretty pointless.

301

I'm not going to link to it anymore. But in case some people still find the URL somehow, we could use a 301 as a sort of economy that is going to perform pretty well eventually for... I'd say even better than canonical and noindex for saving crawl budget because Google doesn't even have to look at the page on the rare occasion it does check it because it just follows the 301.

It's going to solve our indexing issue, and it's going to pass PageRank. But obviously, the tradeoff here is users also can't access this URL, so we have to be okay with that.

Implementing crawl budget tactics

So sort of rounding all this up, how would we actually employ these tactics? So what are the activities that I would recommend if you want to have a crawl budget project?

One of the less intuitive ones is speed. Like I said earlier, Google is sort of allocating an amount of time or amount of resource to crawl a given site. So if your site is very fast, if you have low server response times, if you have lightweight HTML, they will simply get through more pages in the same amount of time.

So this counterintuitively is a great way to approach this. Log analysis, this is sort of more traditional. Often it's quite unintuitive which pages on your site or which parameters are actually sapping all of your crawl budget. Log analysis on large sites often yields surprising results, so that's something you might consider. Then actually employing some of these tools.

So redundant URLs that we don't think users even need to look at, we can 301. Variants that users do need to look at, we could look at a canonical or a noindex tag. But we also might want to avoid linking to them in the first place so that we're not sort of losing some degree of PageRank into those canonicalized or noindex variants through dilution or through a dead end.

Robots.txt and nofollow, as I sort of implied as I was going through it, these are tactics that you would want to use very sparingly because they do create these PageRank dead ends. Then lastly, a sort of recent or more interesting tip that I got a while back from an Ollie H.G. Mason blog post, which I'll probably link to below, it turns out that if you have a sitemap on your site that you only use for fresh or recent URLs, your recently changed URLS, then because Googlebot has such a thirst, like I said, for fresh content, they will start crawling this sitemap very often. So you can sort of use this tactic to direct crawl budget towards the new URLs, which sort of everyone wins.

Googlebot only wants to see the fresh URLs. You perhaps only want Googlebot to see the fresh URLs. So if you have a sitemap that only serves that purpose, then everyone wins, and that can be quite a nice and sort of easy tip to implement. So that's all. I hope you found that useful. If not, feel free to let me know your tips or challenges on Twitter. I'm curious to see how other people approach this topic.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com.

#marketing

1 note · View note

loreweaver-universe · 4 years

Photo

And that’s...the show.

What a clever way to get Lake off the train. On multiple levels! Not only was it clever in-character, but her escape came from her accepting her nature at long last--which was what would have brought her own number down to zero. That’s such an excellent way to end her journey--truly, she was the same as a passenger the whole time.

That was a good finale. Not the action-packed ending that season 1 got, but it didn’t need to be, really. It was different from Tulip’s journey in ways where a bigger action sequence than what we got wouldn’t have been appropriate. In fact, the fight with Sieve feels kind of like an afterthought--it wasn’t obviously, it tied off an important loose end and gave Alan Dracula something to do in the final two episodes, but it didn’t really feel like a proper focus of the episode.

Showing off One-One’s weird blue-and-orange morality system was really cool. Watching him actually get trapped in logic loops was fascinating, and I think he was used VERY well here.

Alan Dracula was a fun sideshow character, but often felt like he was just there for the animators and writers to play around with, rather than an essential part of the team like Atticus and One-One were in season 1.

Jesse was a good deuteragonist! Shut up, Tumblr spellcheck, that’s a word. Jesse’s journey was simple--come to terms with the fact that he and his friends were bullies, and it was very deftly done. The fact that the train reorders its cars and constructs them for individual passengers’ journeys makes it interesting that his final obstacle was confronting the Apex--the train even works other passengers into its plans. Which, ironically, makes the Apex more denizen than passenger. Anyways, Jesse’s journey was simple and well-handled, which is good because he wasn’t actually who the story was about.

That would be Lake. Mirror Tulip. Horseradish, as I’ve been tagging her since season 1. The Chrome Car was my second-favorite episode of season 1, due to excellent character drama, excellent horror, and excellent writing all around. I remember wishing very much that Lake had joined Tulip on her journey--clearly, the people writing the show wanted to keep telling her story, too, because we got a whole season of it. Lake’s journey of self-discovery and self-actualization was a really fascinating one. Watching her slowly come out of her prickly shell until she was finally ready to accept herself for who she was was an excellent journey. I really do think it’s SUCH good writing that she basically got her own number down to zero right when she got One-One to let her off the train.

Mace and Sieve turned out to be excellent villains, as well--Mace more than Sieve, really, but Mace got more focus and had more presence, and rightfully so. My favorite episode of the season focuses on him and Tulip, after all. What an excellent bastard.

All in all, a good season, but not quite as strong as the first one. That’s not a low bar to fail, though. Excellent work all around, and I’m delighted with the ending.

The final episode just wasn’t as strong an ending as season one’s though, and wasn’t the best episode in season 2 by a couple places. The Tape Car was creepier and focused on horror, which I liked a lot, and The Wasteland was just fantastic. It also has to compete with some VERY strong episodes in season 1--which, again, is not a low bar to fail. All in all, I’d place The Number Car at my new #3 for season 2, between The Lucky Cat Car (which was very funny, but didn’t have the emotional or dramatic stuff The Number Car did) and The Tape Car (which I’ve already covered), as well as my new #7 overall, between The Lucky Cat Car and The Cat’s Car, which did drama and horror VERY well.

That’s it for Infinity Train, at least until we maybe get a third season! In a couple days, I’m going to make a post on my Patreon asking for show suggestions for what to replace Infinity Train with in the main slots, and then we’ll have the poll to replace it a few days after that. I’ll keep you posted as to what the results of that are! In the meantime, up next is going to be this month’s Patron Picks--as usual, I’ll be doing Paranoia Agent, Baccano, and then A Place Further Than the Universe. After that, we’ll be getting back to She-Ra for a solid while--I’ll be starting Season 2, so stay tuned for that!

Streamwise, I streamed the first part of my blind playthrough of Transistor yesterday (which you can view here) and will be starting what I think will be the rest of the game shortly. If you want to tune into that live, head on over to my Twitch channel and give me a follow! That should be happening within the hour.

As always, thank you all for tuning in, and thank you very much to the 62 patrons who make it possible for me to do this for a living! I’ll see you next time!

IN OTHER NEWS:

I recently completed my blind playthrough of Transistor! You can see the full playlist of those streams by clicking here!

I recently completed my playthrough of Final Fantasy VII Remake! You can see the full playlist of those streams by clicking here!

I recently completed my playthrough of the second story campaign in Fire Emblem: Three Houses! You can view all the streams of the Golden Deer and Black Eagles routes I have done by clicking here!

If you’d like to help me pay my rent, buy me some food, or help with my bills and medicine, please use my direct donation link! If you’d like to support me per liveblog completed every month, please pledge to my Patreon! Becoming a patron not only allows you to vote on what shows I do whenever I choose a new one, but also grants access to the community Minecraft server to $5 patrons or higher!

You should also go pledge to Gio’s Patreon–our Discord server maintenance tech, creator of Rubybot, and community Minecraft server overlord deserves far more than I can afford to pledge to him by myself.

If you’d like more of me and my content:

My Episode Lists master page, where you can find every show and liveblog I’ve done!

My Discord server, where you can come hang out with me and other fans, check out member liveblogs, and join community gaming guilds!

My Twitch channel, where I stream variety games every so often!

My Youtube channel, where you can check out past streams!

My ask blog, where you can send me questions and comments!

My Twitter, where I make announcements about liveblogs and streams!

It’s your kindness and support that lets me do this stuff, and I wouldn’t be where I am without all of you to do it for. Thank you all so much for your support, and for tuning in every episode!

OTHER PEOPLE YOU MAY ENJOY:

I may have been one of the earlier Steven Universe liveblogs, but a whole community of livebloggers has sprung up over the last five years! I linked to a bunch individually for a few wrap-ups, but honestly, this end-slate is already eight billion miles long, so I’m just gonna link to my links page. Click here if you want recommendations of other livebloggers, or other neat people, or webcomics and podcasts that I recommend.

#infinity train #infinibloggin #bloggin #infinity train episode 20 #inf22 #episode wrap up

49 notes · View notes

parcai · 3 years

Note

hi i don’t even watch shadow and bone but black people have already pointed out to stop bringing us up when talking abt racism that effects other poc “you know who does experience racism in the show?” why do you have to say any of that when u can just start of by talking abt anti asian racism

hello! no i'm not ignoring you lol, i just wanted to look at my post first to remember what i said.

i will firstly say that i never did actually phrase it the way you have in quotes. i do think that changes the tone a bit, but that's a minor point, as i can see how my original version can seem aggressive/accusatory as well.

the main reason i briefly mentioned jesper is because he's the other prominent person of color, and i made a very bold statement by saying that s&b’s theme of racism only applied to asian characters. for an ask regarding just racism overall, i didn’t want people to get the idea that i’m saying only the asian characters are the important poc or that i’m ignoring other races’ issues, but instead i wanted to clarify that s&b simply chose not to focus on trauma of other races, and furthermore i wanted to clarify that this isn’t a bad thing, that jesper should not be required to have a traumatic race-based backstory. in no way was this meant to compare the importance or relevance of racism between any minority groups, and in fact, that’s the point i was trying to make, that there should be no comparison of the struggles of various races.

i do think not separating that paragraph into two could have led to a misinterpretation, now that you’ve expressed your concern, as the piece i’m talking about with the model minority myth afterward had no relevance to my mention of jesper whatsoever (the transition word “furthermore” refers to “it’s asian-specific”), and i will have split that paragraph up, reordered some sentences, and added a few clarification words after answering this ask to appropriately reflect that they are two separate, unrelated thoughts. (i have attached the revised edition of the first paragraphs to the bottom of this post for your convenience).

regardless of my intentions though, i do see that it may have caused you hurt and/or harmed someone else if the idea i was trying to convey didn’t come across exactly as i wanted it. for that, i do sincerely apologize. poc were never meant to be pitted against one another, and while fiction is a small portion of the conversation about racism, fiction and discussing fiction can have real world repercussions, and i fully accept responsibility for that. i hope this clears up any misunderstanding we may have had, and feel free to let me know if you aren’t satisfied with this answer/would like to discuss this further. :) /genuine ← bc the smiley face comes across as fake for unknown reasons lol.

clarified first 2 paragraphs:

shadow and bone’s racism themes revolve entirely around anti asian racism. this point is not made to detract from the trauma of other races, but it is simply meant to point out that shadow and bone made the active decision not to explore racism among other races, for example with jesper fahey. i don’t think it’s a bad thing they’re only choosing to explore racism with one group, as poc should not only have their stories told through trauma, and i’m glad jesper’s happy. <3 but i hope this clarifies my previous and bold “it’s asian-specific racism in ravka” statement.

on an unrelated note, anti asian hate is rarely discussed in media, probably partially because of the absurd model minority myth, and in the american education system (i can’t speak for other countries), it’s almost not covered at all, despite its prevalence and importance in the building of this nation and many others. i was actually intrigued to see anti asian discrimination discussed. i think, with covid 19 and the millionth resurgence of anti asian hate, this is a good time to discuss it in media. however, it was handled extremely poorly, and the version of racism portrayed is a white’s idea of what racism is. the people who face racism are alina (half shu han, which is based on china, and who is played by jessie mei li, who is half chinese) and inej (suli, which is based on south asia, and who is played by amita suman, who is nepalese).

#anon #answered #on posts #long post #<- only bc i added the clarified version in rip

3 notes · View notes

miss-mollys-ballet-blog · 4 years

Note

What makes Ivan the Terrible your favourite ballet?

I don’t even know how to begin hahaha. I personally feel as though this ballet shows the Bolshoi at it’s best, it brings everything that the Bolshoi is to the stage.

First, you have to watch it. There are a ton of recordings, but this is my personal favorite. It’s from 2015 with Mikhail Lobukhin as Ivan, Anna Nikulina as Anastasia, and Denis Rodkin as Prince Kurbsky: https://my.mail.ru/mail/bukasa111/video/_myvideo/49.html

Another great video is from a performance of the original Anastasia and my favorite Soviet ballerina Natalia Bessmertnova: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDQUAezOxNc

When it comes to me, everything I love about ballet is brought into this one ballet. The choreography, the music, the designing, the story, it’s all incredible. You have a man teetering on the verge of insanity (Ivan), the woman who is the only concrete thing he has to hold on to (Anastasia), and another man who not only loves the woman but hates Ivan (Prince Kurbsky). But it’s not depicted as a love triangle, which is awesome. When those roles are danced well, it’s incredible.

The choreography also fits the story down to just the angle of the back. When Ivan is first introduced, he tells a story of how he’s claiming his throne (he was the first man to declare himself Tsar of Russia) which is high up on a podium. As he descends down from his platform you can see his power and glimpses of how he is power hungry, controlling, on the brink of insanity based on how much of a bend in his back he his. The intense choreography when the music picks up requires the dancer to look as though he is just barely holding on to the dancing and could lose control at any time. Ivan’s emotions are all over the map in this ballet which captures the man himself. I also looooove it when pieces of choreography carry over from scene to scene in different ways. For example, when Ivan and Anastasia get married, Ivan stands behind her and crosses his arms one by one over her and she puts her arms over his. There is a part in the ballet where Ivan is at war and Anastasia is praying for his safe return. At one part she crosses her arms over her chest in the same way she did at her wedding and then sinks into a low lunge and sweeps her arms on the floor symbolizing her fear yet acceptance of the possibility of Ivan dying. The choreography in that scene has the same feeling as a prayer, with the main theme of music and steps being repeated while growing louder and more frantic. I love it.

Plus there’s an entire freaking battle scene in the ballet that is more than just a group of men swishing swords at each other. It is about 10 minutes long and is sooooo dope. All the corps pieces are incredible, the entrance of the corps is so powerful. There is also a scene of a vision that has such cool choreography, lighting, music, everything. I love the music too. Grigorovich pulled different parts of Prokofiev’s Ivan the Terrible opera and reordered them which was very controversial at the time, but it works so well.

The costuming, set designs, and lighting were also phenomenal. The set is actually very plain, the main staple being a large box center upstage which is used in some way in almost every scene, including both Ivan’s throne and a mausoleum. To change scenes and give different feelings, there are curtains that come around and look basically like gigantic columns, and the other main stay is a set of “bells” that are played during different times for different reasons. The costumes tell the story perfectly. Ivan the Terrible was the first man to declare himself Tsar and he used God to do so, so on Ivan’s costume there is a large cross; obvious but genius. There are a few parts where it seems as though Ivan has lost his connection to God so the cross is covered up. Anastasia’s costume is also very perfect. It’s very simple, her dress stays almost the same and when she becomes Tsaritsa she adds a kokoshnik with a veil symbolizing her new status. Prince Kurbsky was a general in the Russian army, so his costumes are basically armor. All of them are very simple and very obvious, but they tell the story and characteristics of the characters very clearly.

I have a hard time putting why I love this ballet into words because it’s not just one reason. When I watched it for the first time I was entranced by it, it is a performance with everything coming together. It is one I never grow tired of and can watch all the records over and over.

#ballet ask #ivan the terrible #bolshoi ballet #Anonymous #anna nikulina #mikhail lobukhin #denis rodkin #natalia bessmertnova

11 notes · View notes