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unioncolours · 4 years

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One Majsasaurus Year!

Today is a very special day for me. This day marks the one-year anniversary since I uploaded the very first chapter of my very first fanfiction. It has been one year since I stepped into the Naruto/Boruto fandom as a content creator.

This post is going to be a sappy meta post about my year as a content creator and my relationship to my fanfictions, to my writing and to my fandom and friends.

Please continue reading down below 💕⬇

I began watching Naruto in 2019, and by summer 2019 I had seen Shikamaru’s arc in Shippuden. I was blown away by his character and I was a full shipper of ShikaTema by then. I could not wait until we got to the end of Shippuden, and began googling the next gen characters (and spoiling the end game couples at the same time) and you can only imagine my satisfaction when I found out ShikaTema became canon and they had a son.

Very soon after this I came up with my first fanfiction idea, the one that gave birth to my very first fanfiction Shadows and Sand. I believed that idea had been done before, but after vacuuming through both ff.net and ao3, and I found nothing, I decided to write it myself.

I may have written fanfictions only for a year, but prior to this I was hardcore into the original writing world. I had written two fantasy novels and five full length plays before I wrote my first fanfiction, one of which was published, so the art of writing was something I was fairly used to.

The fanfiction writers I had read and followed to this point were Big Fandom Name writers with strict schedules and lots of readers. Every time they uploaded a new chapter their audience would write comments like “Your spoiling us with these tight schedules” and so on. I really liked the idea of a consecutive schedule and decided to write the whole first fic in its entirety, so I could “spoil” my potential readers with updates.

Shadows and Sand ended up being 35 000 word long, divided into eight chapters. This was the first story in my whole life I had ever written completely in English (and it was not easy). Going back to Shadows and Sand is cringy for me, mainly for the way I expressed myself in English, thought I still think the plot is great.

Here is one of the lines from Shadows and Sand I to this day think is amazing:

“She [Mirai] looked into his eyes, but he [Shikadai] didn’t look back, because he was already staring into a nightmare where his dad was dead because of his mistakes.”

For a totally new fanfiction writer, with no “fanbase” prior to this, I would say I got quite a lot of comments (around 15 in total on the eight chapters) and I was extremely happy for that.

I uploaded the whole thing in a week and a half, satisfied and proud of the result. At the final chapter I got a comment where the commentor wrote something along the lines of “Well written angst and well written fluff”. I pondered about those statements for a long time, thinking, yes, this was actually angst, even if I in the moment of writing – then I was still unused to the tagging system and the tropes of fanfiction, didn’t categorise the fic as angst, because I thought angst could only be chopped off limbs and painful deaths. But this fic had angst as well. Tiny angst, but still. And a rather powerful feeling rose in my chest from that moment. This is what I want to do in the fandom. To write heartfelt stories that make people feel.

One week after I uploaded the final chapter of Shadow and Sand my fingers began to itch. I wanted to write more. Wanted to explore the little grain of world building I had already created. Wanted to write more Shikadai and Inojin kissing.

And thus, To go down with the Sun was born.

I began writing Down with the Sun with only one vision – something epic and an explosion. The plot was evolving as I was writing and the result ended up being just beautiful. And I became obsessed with this story. I wrote it in racer speed, 50 000 words in 26 days (that is madness, I tell you, MADNESS!) and then the rest 30k in 20 days. I could not think of anything but this story and the Next Generation Kids I put through trials and hell. I felt true euphoria while writing this story that unfolded under my fingers like in a dream. It was a mania, and a damn strong one.

The first thing I did when I woke up was writing, the last thing I did before going to bed was writing it. I prioritised writing this story above all in my life.

At the time of uploading, the fic did not get that much recognition. I got about one comment per chapter. When I uploaded the final chapter, I got two comments on that one, which was a tiny bummer, since I had hoped for more. It was a lonely, but lovely job to write Down with the Sun, mostly with my own thoughts as company, since the readers were rather quiet with feedback.

But I loved the few comments I got and I still got kicks from just the single act of uploading a new chapter. Because in the end, I wrote for myself and even more for the characters and plot. Finishing the story was the greatest motivator.

I uploaded the final chapter of To go down with the Sun December 7th, 2019. And I still to this day love the story I created, even if I know that I’d definitely re-write some elements from the story if I’d write it again. But I still love it.

After To go down with the Sun I wrote the fic that I hold the least emotional value to, Earning a weasel’s trust. The story is cute and short (11 000 words). It was a nice little project focusing on Temari’s motherhood to Shikadai that I wrote in a week. It got close to no feedback or attention, but it didn’t make me sad, because I needed to write and share that story and then move on with my life. I am though happy I wrote it.

At this time in my creative process I had been really lonely. It had been me with my own head and the characters. I had no beta reader and no one to bounce off ideas or anything. I had no fandom friends. I am still amazed I had written around 130k words without almost any support whatsoever in the span of four months.

This all changed in late December 2019. I found a Discord Server that I basically begged to get to be part of, and it really changed my fandom experience. Prior to this, my fandom experience had been lonely, and I just produced and consumed content. There was no interaction between anyone, except me replying to commentors.

And now, I found friends. I found people who loved the same pairing and show as I, and it felt almost life changing. This was the time when fandom really felt like… a hobby. A home. Before, it was a creative outlet, now it became a community.

I thrived.

The mod of this server @loknnica, hosted during this time a writing contest, which I eagerly wanted to take part of. I wrote my contest fic, Branded by Love, during January 2020, in which I made Shikamaru betray Konoha for Suna and Temari, and their son Shikadai became the One Tail jinchuuriki. The fic was 10k words long, and OUCH, the backstory I came up with. As soon as BbL was finished I decided that I wanted to write a long version of this canon divergence-world I had created.

In February 2020 I began writing Trial of the Heart, the epic version of Branded by Love. And damn, damn, damn what an epic story was born out of my fingers and brain. I love ToH, I loved what it turned out to be, a heart-wrenching and sad story of Shikamaru, Temari and Shikadai in a world of war.

While writing ToH the writing contest was ending and to my big, big delight, I WON! Branded by Love and I won the contest! This was precisely the boost I needed to really feel validated in my rather specific writing style and choice of plots.

I wrote ToH almost non-stop for four months, and in the beginning of June, the 28th chapter was uploaded. Trial of the Heart ended up being 123 000 words long. In four months, a whole damn NOVEL was created from my keyboard.

The pride, guys. The pride and joy I felt was like a drug injection.

Finishing off works is the greatest, greatest dose of motivation and pride. To write, write, write and finish. And let go of your work, to upload it with a great smile on your face.

During the spring and summer of 2019 three very important friends entered my life.

Vee (@veeganburger on twitter),

Becks (@notquitejiraiya on twitter)

Spooky (@spookymoth on twitter).

These three wonderful ladies really made me feel valid as a writer, and made me love my own work as well. During the spring To go down with the Sun had gained quite a lot of attraction, and the kudos and comments came. All the loneliness I had felt during the autumn was replaced by joy and love of sharing my works. These women have shared their thoughts of my work (and art) to me and I have also in privacy felt secure to talk with these women about nothing and all at once. They never fail to cheer me up.

I love you.

I had also gained the nickname “Shikadai’s tormentor” after multiple times forced that poor boy into horrible situations in my works. The user @shikanaradai’s nickname is Shikadai’s protector and we have an ongoing joke about being archenemies because of this. Ah. The fandom bubble was and is so lovely when you can experience inside jokes with friends. They became my friends, and I gained so much from this.

ANYHOW.

During Trial of the Heart I wrote a friendship between Shikadai and Inojin and I realised I missed writing them as a couple, like I had done in To go down with the Sun. With the support of Vee, who was really, really excited for a new fic where those two boys are a couple, I decided to write a sequel to To go down with the Sun, which I named To dance above the Stars.

In the wait before I began writing that one, I wrote two one shots, 48 hours to live – a next gen focused fic based on a manga chapter from the Boruto manga, and a pure Shikadai x Inojin one shot, I found love in the eyes of a boy, because at that time I knew already I had dug my own grave with that pairing.

I began writing To dance above the Stars in June 2020 and uploaded the first chapter at the end of the same month.

Simultaneously as I wrote Above the Stars I also wrote/edited three fics, one of them called The End, for an application to become a writer to the ShikaTema zine Everything I never knew I wanted. The results of the application came in the middle of July, when I had written a good chunk of Above the Stars.

I WAS ACCEPTED!

I am now officially one of the five writers for that zine!

To dance above the Stars got better recognition that I ever imagined. I was terrified that no one would want to read it, because it was a sequel and had very niched themes. A rare gay next gen pairing in focus and a story with extremely heavy emotional themes. I was so unsure anyone would want to read. The same feeling of loneliness that I had experienced during To go down with the Sun came back a little bit. That it in the end would be only me and my text.

How wrong I was.

To dance above the Stars got wonderful feedback, and more kudos than for example Trial of the Heart got. I received wonderful comments, and even fanart! I was so extremely happy and felt a new powerful emotion. It almost felt like my fic had its own little world in the world of fics, if that makes sense? Like a miniature fandom. During the late summer To go down with the Sun got translated into Russian by a wonderful reader of mine, enabling my texts to a wider audience, which I am extremely honoured by.

As I write this, it is September 2020. One year ago, I was writing Shadows and Sand and struggling through stringing English sentences together and that was also when “my” version of Shikadai was born. One year ago, I was writing what I to this day think is the best fighting scene I have ever written – and I write a lot of fight scenes. One year ago I was listening to “I just want to be brave” from the movie Lion King to get into Shikadai vibes and the mistake he did in that fic, a song I revisit for this reason time and time again.

I remember naively thinking that I will finish Shadows and Sand and then maybe write something else as well. Little did I then, in September 2019 know, that I would one year later have written closer to 400k words of fics, centred around Team 10 or around the Nara family. One year, almost four hundred thousand words.

Now, one year later I had won a writing contest, written three full length NOVELS as fics, been accepted to a wonderful zine, and found lovely, lovely friends. I even got crowned as a “Queen” for the Shikadai x Inojin ship, Shikajin as it is called, since I am one of the like three people who write for that ship, and have to this date written around 180k words for them. Which is a lot, haha!

I feel like I have conquered a tiny corner of the great fandom sandbox, and let me tell you, I thrive in my own corner. I might have few followers on twitter compared to many other creators, but I still want to provide content for those who want to see it. I might write rather niche works, but they filled a space where no fics were, and enriched the fandom in their own ways, even if I haven’t gotten tens of comments on each chapter. I have gotten around four comments each chapter, but it felt like okay.

I might not mod great zines like many of my friends do, something that did for a few months bring great stress into my fandom life. Am I a second-hand fandom member because I don’t want to moderate a zine, was something I often thought about. Am I lesser worth because I don’t do these amazing projects? No, I am not. And I feel very satisfied by just following my friends’ journeys and look at beautiful twitter accounts for zines.

I want to put my energy on writing intriguing plots and difficult fight scenes. Every fandom experience is valid.

In my heart I know my fics and content are good. Maybe not as good as native English writer’s content, but they’ve got a heart and soul on their own, and I really feel like I do have a Majsasaurus genre, trope or theme going on in my fics. And to be honest, I love it, and I accept that other people might not love it as much, or not at all. But it doesn’t matter. What I think of my own content matter.

If any of you, who read this, have commented even once on one of my fics, thank you.

If any of you have ever interacted with me on twitter through comments, thanks you.

If any of you have pressed the follow button on either twitter or tumblr for me, thank you.

If any of you have left kudos to me, thank you.

If any of you have read my stuff but don’t want to comment because of different reasons, or if you feel shy to reach out, thank you for reading and I appreciate you as well.

That was one hell of a Majsasaurus Year. Here’s to the next year. Cheers!

Thank you, all of you. You make my fandom experience complete.

- Majsasaurus Bex

#shikadai fanfiction #shikamaru fanfiction #majsasaurus #meta discussion #fic writing #i love you guys #all of you #thank you for reading and for everything

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riskeith · 3 years

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hi babe, hope you slept well.. ♥️

answering on the phone is just *takes screenshots* *opens tumblr app* *switch between screenshots and answering* do you also put on my messages on the laptop and answering with your phone usually, because that’s what i do lmao sjshdks. thank god for technology.

(I LOVE BEING CALLED BRO.. i believe that i would’ve been a dudebro in another life tbh..) there is? i’m not super immersed in the fandom actually so i had no idea, do you have any examples? ofc only if you wanna talk about it i know these topics can sometimes be annoying to think about. also you’re right! ‘don’t like don’t read’ is the law. follow it. i can’t believe how some people have the nerve to talk about what other people do creatively... yikes

you should if you ever find yourself not knowing what to read! i think their fics were some of my first in the fandom and they set the bar so high hehe. dude i love how oikawa just wants to see kageyama burn it’s so funny..... he’s so cocky about it while kageyama’s just his moody self. speaking of; one of my fave fics of yours is the swapping jerseys one!

WTF 😭 BABY POOLS AND POOL FLOATIES..... razor please come back to us please. sidenote but do you also think that his powers are 5 star level? hes soo powerful it’s so odd how he’s only 4 star haha... or maybe it’s just me being biased.

YEAH! THE SAVING SCENE IS SO AHHHHH. god especially if they have dialogue while person a is hurting and person b just spills all their feelings and becomes so erratic and scared and person a is like holy shit you love me.... and after everything is okay there’s still some awkwardness and tension and aaa.... 💢💔

OOO. sadly the ps5 is always out of stock it’s crazy how fast it sold out. but i mean it makes sense it’s arguably the most popular console so.. hopefully they restock soon. last of us is such a fun game! and the second part is ~gay~ which is always a plus. i’m not sure which memes you mean? tell me 👁 HAHA that makes sense actually omg... lumine and aether reunion won’t happen until like two years if the updates keep coming the way they are (STOP THAT WOULD ACTUALLY BE SO FUNNY.... like hello if you want to unlock the rest of the story you either gacha $pin for it or you imagine it yourself love ♥️😗) talking about this makes me wonder what the other worlds might look like....

your followers are just here to witness us planning our co-op date sjsjdkdjskz. speaking of,,, hehe. i have some fantastic news. i’m at ar level 11 right now and co-op unlocks at level 16... i might just reach that tomorrow (today for you) so i’m just saying hehehehehehehehehehehe.... 😏♥️

BOWL CUT. my cutie little baby. also mullet? sounds nice omg you will probably rock that look... 😳 i’m a non mullet supporter but if cluna has a mullet then call me a yeehaw mullet lover i suppose. can’t believe my wife is a cowboy. OMG YEAH IT MUST FEEL SO NICE your head went bzz bzz. how long did it take for them to accept it? and yeah god ikr some people take hair so seriously which is fair but also i’ve never understood it... like it grows out..? wow you really went from a ballet girl to punk rock style huh. i feel like you’re the both sides of the ‘she was a punk she did ballet’ meme.

memo fic is a jealous fic? mmm smells good. I FIGURED jshdjdkhsjs slow songs are just not your forte, huh? rip. langst is the best yet worst thing ever tbh. and YEAH I DO we’re truly 🤝 ok literally mood sometimes it’s just nice to talk about how much you love a character through another character in a fic yk? so what if this 2k fic contains 1k words about how beautiful oikawa looks? it’s what iwa feels <3 (YOU’RE LEARNING!!!!!!! THATS SO EXCITING!! i guess you just have to drive me around, huh?)

oh i’m in love i’m with that fic my girl. and i knew about that spoiler it’s kind of hard to miss it since it’s everywhere skdhdkdhdk... god, that sounds so good thank you for sharing it. pining iwaizumi hajime >>>>>>>> the air i need to exist 🥺

THE DAY IS SO SOON CLUNA, it’s literally here soooo soon holy shit i just can’t wait. i played for almost 6 hours today in a row like an idiot and now i never wanna see hilichurls again in my life but hey, one step closer to my baby. prepare yourself.. 😏

AWWW i had a feeling you’d be a tea person. but omg tea effects your sleep? how late is too late for you to drink it? what’s your favorite flavors? 👁 and i’m addicted to both shdkdhsks. i say addicted bc i literally have 6 cups of tea per day easily and like.. 1 or 2 coffee cups per day. it’s really bad but i can’t stop so.. 🙇🏽‍♀️

COLLEGE BOYFIES CLUNA. COLLEGE BOYFIES WITH DIP DYE HAIR. imagine them doing each other’s make up and nails before going to concerts together. imagine xiao in euphoria kind of make up. holy shit. here’s something for your overwhelmed heart jsdhjshska. xiaoven soulmates girl, no doubt about it. THE EDIT THE EDIT THE EDIT!!!! they just look so beautiful. we need scenes with them like Asap. the edit is based on a fic... notes down.

can’t wait to see your screenshots. super excited!!

xo, m.a. (i almost wrote my name down in a haste shshskdjdk... although you’ll find it out soon...)

hiya!! i slept alright~ ahaha

:o that’s smart! but no i don’t LOL whether i’m on my phone or my laptop i just continuously scroll up and down fhdskjfkhsdf i think that’s why i come close to missing some paragraphs some times oops. yay for the ~wonders of technology~

(AIGHT NICE AHAHHA fhsdkjfsh does that mean you’re a bit of a tomboy?) actually coincidentally i came across this thread: https://twitter.com/maxatsuomi/status/1350145589296685057 which gives you an idea lmao (also some things on there i wasn’t even aware of wtf) EXACTLY??? it’s even worse when non content creators try to come for content creators like?????????/ um you’re getting all this food for FREE and yet?????? lmfao the nerve of some people

i def will!! FKJSHFDSKJ yeah that do be their dynamic lolol. and thank you!! i too think i snapped on that one 😩😩 glad others agree ahahah

i actually haven’t really seen him in combat... and when we could trial him i was too busy trying to pass the quests to focus on how he fought fhdkfhsdkfjshf but i do think his abilities are cool!! he have wolf above head 🥺

YEAHHH BOYEEEEEEEEEEE god that reminds me of a scene from a drarry fic (What We Pretend We Can't See wink wonk)

oh damn!! hope they restock soon for your sake~ yissss ive watched a playthrough and omg lev.... my Son. i don’t think i can find the memes again but it was just about the bugs like how if you throw a grenade on the highway everyone will run out of their cars like a flashmob or something hfskfhsdjfkds. (LMAOOOOO) there’s actually a trailer with the other worlds! https://youtu.be/TAlKhARUcoY (it has spoilers tho supposedly lol. none we understand rn at least)

hdsfkhjs. omg you absolute legend!!!! but i also hope that you’re taking care of yourself and prioritising the important things too fhsfhdksdhf. but i am excited hehehehehe

AHHAAHKFHDSKJFSD pls... once i saw someone with an actual proper mullet on the bus and i was like “ew... keith would look like this irl?” FJSDHKFSAHKDASHDFSDJFKJFDSHFKJS. but what can i say i got influenced by all the kpop bois 😔 and hmmm idk? i think my dad didn’t care too much but ik my mum did/does fhsfskfsdfhkf so who knows lollllllllllllllllllllllllllllll. IT REALLY DOES GROW OUT LMAO LIKE. fhkshkfsdkj my cousin called me a rockstar when she saw it LOL so you’re prob right 🤪

yeah slow songs really just. aren’t LMAO ‘behind this mask of mine’ was based on a slow bts song and i put it in the playlist i had for it (bc obviously) but i wanted to skip it every time hfksjdhfskjdfhskfdkfhkslfhadksfjsdjhfkashkfjsdh. EXACTLY!!!!!!!!!! you are so correct. (hehehe i was gonna say that too that you don’t need to drive bc it’ll take you around 😏 LMAO)

fhkdsj thank!! legit pining iwa.......... more like pining ME mayhaps i just be self projecting 🤪🤪

lolol dw i can fight the hilichurls for you 😩 also who’s your fave enemy to fight! i used to like fighting the treasure hoarders most but the hilichurls are cute.. FHSKJDHFSDFKJSD plus i need their fucking masks my god why are their drop rates so shit hfsdhjfks

i’m not too sure actually? i’ve never been up early enough to test it but i like drinking tea like after dinner... which is the problem AHAHA. hmm well i like matcha a lot LOL but also chai? and then like black tea.... all the other ones too... i used to drink some fruity ones which were nice but we have a lot of the like basic chinese ones at home too and i enjoy those as well lol. wbu?? omg.... m.a........... dfhksdfkjhfkjshfksjd that’s a lot!!!!!!! do you even need to drink water then HKDSJFHKSDFHDKDSHFJKSDH

omg............. ive never seen euphoria LOL but ............. omg ...................... i cannot process thoughts rn.....

xoxo!! c.r. (you mean bc we’ll be playing co-op? you don’t have to if you’re uncomfy fhdskjf my genshin name was literally ‘aether’ up until yesterday FHDFHSDKFSDFJSHFKSDF)

#marriage anon #wowclunaanswers #long post

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liunaticfringe · 4 years

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Lucy Liu is chuckling quietly on the other end of the phone line as she muses over the question inspired by the title of her new series, Why Women Kill.

"I don't think every woman could be pissed off enough to actually become a killer," the 51-year-old actor says, referring to the SBS series about three women living in different decades who must each decide how to deal with infidelity. "But does it make you think about the times where you've been really angry at someone – like, what it would take? Maybe."

She adds with another giggle, "Obviously I've never gone to that extent, but I've had many opportunities in my career to carry out death sentences. So I guess you could say, for good or bad, I've been able to get it out of my system somewhat!"

Lucy – who recently wrapped a seven-season stint as Dr Joan Watson to Jonny Lee Miller's Sherlock Holmes in the modern-day TV revamp Elementary (2012-19) – is talking to Sunday Life from her New York City apartment, where she's been busy trying to keep her four-year-old son Rockwell amused during the city-wide COVID-19 stay-at-home order.

"New York is usually vibrant, because it's a walking city, but now everyone is wearing masks and avoiding each other," she laments. "It's difficult because Rockwell likes to be moving around all the time. It's just impossible to have him not put things in his mouth when I turn my back!"

Why Women Kill is creator Marc Cherry's latest series to showcase a female ensemble. He started out in 1990 as a writer and producer on the The Golden Girls and its short-lived spin-off, The Golden Palace. He also co-created the female-driven sitcom, The 5 Mrs Buchanans, went on to create the Golden Globe-winning series Desperate Housewives, and followed that up with Devious Maid.

Why Women Kill is a 10-part series detailing the lives of three women living in the same California home over three eras: Beth Ann (Ginnifer Goodwin), a '60s housewife; Simone (Lucy Liu), an '80s socialite; and Taylor (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), a present-day lawyer. There's bisexuality, open marriage, adultery, a closeted spouse, an overdose, a front-yard brawl and a choking incident involving meatloaf – and that's just the first episode!

Ultimately, the show examines how the roles of women may have changed through the decades, but their reaction to betrayal remains the same.

The actor had just wrapped Elementary when Cherry called to pitch her the character. "He said he really had Simone in mind for me, then he walked me through the actual storyline," she recalls. "It definitely changed a little bit from what we talked about at the start, but during the writing we got to know each other more and I felt like he had a great way of telling a story.

"I also loved the idea of Simone living in the '80s with the hair and shoulder pads, and what the relationship to the cheating is for each character, as it has an unexpected ending."

The daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, Lucy was raised in the Jackson Heights neighbourhood of Queens, in New York City, and initially planned to pursue a degree in Asian languages and culture at the University of Michigan.

But she also secretly dreamed of becoming an actor, studying old Charlie Chan movies, and finally raised the nerve to audition for a supporting role in a college production of Alice in Wonderland in her final year.

Lucy was astonished when she landed the lead role, and it was all the encouragement she needed. As soon as she graduated, she broke the news to her parents that, despite her freshly inked college degree, she was moving to LA to become an actor.

After appearing in a string of TV shows including E.R. (1995, three episodes) and Ally McBeal (1998-2002, 79 episodes), she landed film roles in Charlie's Angels (2000), Chicago (2002) and Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003).

Lucy looks back and sees her young self as more guileless than driven, hardly the Asian trailblazer breaking stereotypes in Hollywood that she's become.

"I think I was just too naive and didn't know what was ahead of me or what I was going to be up against," she admits. "I had some idea when I got to LA, because a friend of mine would have 10 auditions in a day or a week and I would have maybe two or three in a month, so I knew it was going to be much more limited for me.

"But then I got really lucky with a few jobs, which put me in rooms for auditions where I looked like no other woman in the room. I thought, ‘I don't even understand why I'm here, but I'm going to give it my all.'

"I think when you are somewhat the black sheep, you don't really have anything to lose, because they are not necessarily looking for you. So you may as well go for it!"

Some reviewers have compared Why Women Kill's catty Simone to uber-bitch Alexis Carrington (Joan Collins) in the iconic '80s soap opera Dynasty. "I didn't really watch Dynasty because I couldn't relate to it as a child of immigrant parents, and I didn't understand that kind of wealth and the claws coming out to scratch you," says Lucy.

"But as you go on in life, you start to understand a little bit more what that pop culture was. When I started doing Charlie's Angels and went back to that era to see the representation of those women at that time, I realised they weren't just all kitschy, but they were also incredibly smart and sexy."

As friendly and accessible as Lucy is, she's also full of pride when asked about her son. Has she used some of their isolation time to introduce him to her voice work as Viper in the animated Kung Fu Panda films? Definitely not, the protective mum replies. "He doesn't know what I do. All he thinks is that I'm an artist and I'm a mommy – and that's enough for now."

Rockwell was born in 2015 via gestational surrogate after Lucy made the decision to become a single parent. "Elementary was the longest job I ever had and it gave me the ability to stay in one place, because we were syndicated and we knew we were going to be making a certain number of shows," she explains.

"So that was also the impetus for me to think, ‘Maybe I can have a family of my own.' It wasn't like I was making bad decisions before that, but I had made the choice to prioritise my career. Then, one day, I just felt like it wasn't enough. I didn't want to look back in 30 years and realise I was still having the same conversations about my job every day. I wanted more."

Lucy gets emotional while talking about how motherhood has changed her. "It's almost become this cellular feeling of connecting to the universe in a way where you understand the idea of the cycle of life and the responsibility of having another being who is a part of you but outside of yourself. It's a very different feeling to doing a project where you know you will finish and move on. This is a life-long decision that changes your life and prioritises things in a very positive way."

Given how candidly she has spoken about going it alone as a parent, it's surprising how little she's volunteered about her personal life. She explains it is all by design: she has never spoken publicly about her relationships, although online stories have flagged a handful of boyfriends, including a three-year relationship with actor Will McCormack that ended in 2008, and a relationship with Israeli-American shoe tycoon Noam Gottesman in 2010.

"I've always been very private and I fly under the radar as much as possible," she says. "I do that in a very specific manner. I don't bring people I'm dating to any public event because it's a big responsibility that I'm not sure anyone wants.

"Your work is your legacy and you want to be able to do more each time, and change so you can continue to have some kind of value," says Lucy, who has also been a producer and director. "You don't want people thinking of you as just someone who dated someone and getting distracted from your work."

For now it seems Lucy Liu's legacy is doing just fine, thank you.Lucy gets emotional while talking about how motherhood has changed her. "It's almost become this cellular feeling of connecting to the universe in a way where you understand the idea of the cycle of life and the responsibility of having another being who is a part of you but outside of yourself. It's a very different feeling to doing a project where you know you will finish and move on. This is a life-long decision that changes your life and prioritises things in a very positive way."Given how candidly she has spoken about going it alone as a parent, it's surprising how little she's volunteered about her personal life. She explains it is all by design: she has never spoken publicly about her relationships, although online stories have flagged a handful of boyfriends, including a three-year relationship with actor Will McCormack that ended in 2008, and a relationship with Israeli-American shoe tycoon Noam Gottesman in 2010."I've always been very private and I fly under the radar as much as possible," she says. "I do that in a very specific manner. I don't bring people I'm dating to any public event because it's a big responsibility that I'm not sure anyone wants."Your work is your legacy and you want to be able to do more each time, and change so you can continue to have some kind of value," says Lucy, who has also been a producer and director. "You don't want people thinking of you as just someone who dated someone and getting distracted from your work."For now it seems Lucy Liu's legacy is doing just fine, thank you.

#Lucy Liu #Sydney Morning Herald #interview #why women kill #Charlie's Angels #dating #motherhood #legacy #July 4 2020

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fluentlanguage · 5 years

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#clearthelist September 2019: The Eleven Languages I Spoke in One Month

Imagine you’re on a long-distance cycling trip, perhaps through all of a country or state. You know the destination and you’re pedalling every day, always pushing ahead even if you know you may not arrive for many days. On a journey like that, what would you be without a necessary stop to find yourself on the map now and then? Can you do it without GPS? I don’t think I could!

Learning a language is a lot like navigating a long trip like that. We often know our destination before we get going and we set off in the right direction. But without regular check-ins, we may pedal and pedal until we fall over.

Here on the blog, I write a monthly check-in like that to keep you up to date with my own language learning goals. It’s part of the #clearthelist round-up hosted by Shannon Kennedy and Lindsay Williams.

Want to try out this check-in process for yourself?

Why not check out my Language Habit Toolkit, an in-depth course designed to help you set useful language goals, track them easily and achieve a new milestone every month.

What Happened in August?

Last month was dominated by my biggest trip of the year, visiting the USA and Canada to participate in two conferences. First, I attended Podcast Movement in Orlando to learn more about how to make great podcasts and support myself well while doing it.

And while I was across the pond, how could I have missed Langfest in Montréal, Canada? Impossible!

The trip in between these two cities was a lot of fun: I took Amtrak to Charleston in South Carolina, having long wanted to try the American train. My impression was…that Europeans love the train even in America, haha!

The Langfest team another excellent language event this year, with so many highlights including meeting the creators of Klingon and Dothraki, and running my own creative writing workshop with María Ortega Garcia.

The Fluent Show

First of all let me say how amazing it was for me to meet so many listeners on the road in August. I’m over the moon to know that the Fluent Show is popular!

This month contained a whole range of amazing episodes so let me share two with you today:

Langfest 2019 captured in audio, with almost a dozen interviews and voices directly from the show

What is the Right Mixture for Language Learning Success?, an episode about why so many methods feel like they’re THE best method

\>_

If you’re not a Fluent Show listener already, you’ll find lots more exciting shows to listen or subscribe to at www.fluent.show.

Language Goals and Progress

I had pretty clear goals for August 2019, so this time I’ll run through them without breaking it down too much into listening, speaking, reading and writing.

Mandarin Chinese

Listen to Mandopop

I neglected this, spending more time on podcasts.

Get 100 Lingqs on the LingQ app

Overall I now have lots of LingQs, the challenge is becoming more about noting and remembering them all! Still enjoying this app and using it in the mornings.

Post 2-3 speaking videos on Instagram

I only posted one, then travel threw me off the wagon. I did learn some more Chinese from a new friend at Langfest though, so I feel positive about my speaking.

Find a new Chinese tutor

So here’s what happened: I wanted a new tutor but felt guilty about ghosting the current one. Then as if by magic, she decided she’s taking a break and sent a messaging saying she won’t be available until December. So yay, I was free for a new tutor.

But then I didn’t book one. Hah! I count this as a goal half achieved 😅

Figure out how to type Chinese characters on the iPhone

Done!

Practice characters by hand every week

In the weeks I was at home, this was done.

Welsh

Book a class to practice speaking

Sadly no, but I still got my speaking practice on one occasion this month in conversation with a Langfest buddy.

Read the book Ffenestri

This book is LOVELY and I’m nearly finished. I’m reading well at all 3 levels, as I should :)

Plan my next trip to Wales

Sadly this fell through as I prioritised visiting my family in Germany first. Chwarae teg, wouldn’t you say?

More stuff!

I can now watch Welsh TV without subtitles! 🎉

Other Languages

It’s impossible to travel without practicing other languages, so August also became an opportunity for me to speak my long-neglected languages.

In bilingual Montréal, I spoke lots of French with people from all over. Québécois French is never 100% comprehensible to me, but as always when I speak French I felt reassured that I’m entirely capable.

I bungled my way through a taxi ride with a lovely Colombian in Spanish, though I never did end up where I originally wanted to be. But I blame Lyft and GPS for that instead of my language skills, haha.

And talking of bungling, I also spoke more Italian than I have done in 20 years. The Italian sounded like that, too. It’s R.U.S.T.Y. and has essentially turned into bad Spanish.

If you're wondering about the number in this article's headline: I also spoke German and English, of course!

Language Goals for September 2019

It’s handy to start setting goals by remembering the time frame available. In other words, the question is “What do you want to achieve in the next 30 days?” - seems a little less intense than wondering how to achieve a lot.

This month I’ve been inspired by intense learning projects and the book Ultralearning by Scott Young (interview coming up on the podcast). What can I commit to that would stretch me, challenge me?

Listening Goals

In Chinese, I’ll look for a tutor and ask them to help me listen, perhaps through some dictation rather than the pressure of conversing instantly.

In Welsh, I’m getting so much better so I’ll keep up what I’m doing.

Reading Goals

I don’t have firm goals here and want to focus on other skills, so I’ll just commit to the tools and say I want to finish Ffenestri in Welsh and use LingQ 4 days a week in Chinese.

Speaking Goals

Here I would like to take it up a notch!

In Chinese I am still fairly shy about speaking - I wish I had a few sample conversations to practice with. Comment if you can recommend any? Meanwhile it’s a good idea to push ahead and find that new tutor!

In Welsh I so want to practice speaking and everything, so I’m going to book myself 3 sessions to speak bad Welsh at people. Yay!

Writing Goals

I’ll go easy on the writing beyond what I usually do, which is to text people. In Chinese I’m also making vocab lists by hand now and writing down set phrases in characters and pinyin.

Here’s an instagram slideshow showing my vocab system in more detail: \

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View this post on Instagram\

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\A post shared by Kerstin Cable (@kerstin_fluent)\\> on \Aug 22, 2019 at 4:20pm PDT\\>\

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I love it because it maximises learning and minimises writing ;)

And that’s it for September’s #clearthelist!

How are You Getting On in Language Learning?

Comment below and tell me how your month of August went! Did you come to Langfest? Would you like to attend it some time? Have you got any strong speaking goals?

Looking forward to hearing from you!

What is the Right Mixture for Language Learning Success?, an episode about why so many methods feel like they’re THE best method

\>_

If you’re not a Fluent Show listener already, you’ll find lots more exciting shows to listen or subscribe to at www.fluent.show.

Language Goals and Progress

I had pretty clear goals for August 2019, so this time I’ll run through them without breaking it down too much into listening, speaking, reading and writing.

Mandarin Chinese

Listen to Mandopop

I neglected this, spending more time on podcasts.

Get 100 Lingqs on the LingQ app

Overall I now have lots of LingQs, the challenge is becoming more about noting and remembering them all! Still enjoying this app and using it in the mornings.

Post 2-3 speaking videos on Instagram

I only posted one, then travel threw me off the wagon. I did learn some more Chinese from a new friend at Langfest though, so I feel positive about my speaking.

Find a new Chinese tutor

But then I didn’t book one. Hah! I count this as a goal half achieved 😅

Figure out how to type Chinese characters on the iPhone

Done!

Practice characters by hand every week

In the weeks I was at home, this was done.

Welsh

Book a class to practice speaking

Sadly no, but I still got my speaking practice on one occasion this month in conversation with a Langfest buddy.

Read the book Ffenestri

This book is LOVELY and I’m nearly finished. I’m reading well at all 3 levels, as I should :)

Plan my next trip to Wales

Sadly this fell through as I prioritised visiting my family in Germany first. Chwarae teg, wouldn’t you say?

More stuff!

I can now watch Welsh TV without subtitles! 🎉

Other Languages

It’s impossible to travel without practicing other languages, so August also became an opportunity for me to speak my long-neglected languages.

And talking of bungling, I also spoke more Italian than I have done in 20 years. The Italian sounded like that, too. It’s R.U.S.T.Y. and has essentially turned into bad Spanish.

I also attended basic workshops on the fictional languages Klingon and Dothraki, as well as Breton and Signed Languages.

Language Goals for September 2019

This month I’ve been inspired by intense learning projects and the book Ultralearning by Scott Young (interview coming up on the podcast). What can I commit to that would stretch me, challenge me?

Listening Goals

In Chinese, I’ll look for a tutor and ask them to help me listen, perhaps through some dictation rather than the pressure of conversing instantly.

In Welsh, I’m getting so much better so I’ll keep up what I’m doing.

Reading Goals

I don’t have firm goals here and want to focus on other skills, so I’ll just commit to the tools and say I want to finish Ffenestri in Welsh and use LingQ 4 days a week in Chinese.

Speaking Goals

Here I would like to take it up a notch!

In Welsh I so want to practice speaking and everything, so I’m going to book myself 3 sessions to speak bad Welsh at people. Yay!

Writing Goals

I’ll go easy on the writing beyond what I usually do, which is to text people. In Chinese I’m also making vocab lists by hand now and writing down set phrases in characters and pinyin.

Here’s an instagram slideshow showing my vocab system in more detail:

\ \

\\\\\\\>\

View this post on Instagram\

\ \

\A post shared by Kerstin Cable (@kerstin_fluent)\ on \Aug 22, 2019 at 4:20pm PDT\ \\\>

I love it because it maximises learning and minimises writing ;)

And that’s it for September’s #clearthelist!

How are You Getting On in Language Learning?

Comment below and tell me how your month of August went! Did you come to Langfest? Would you like to attend it some time? Have you got any strong speaking goals?

Looking forward to hearing from you!

And that’s it for September’s #clearthelist!

How are You Getting On in Language Learning?

Comment below and tell me how your month of August went! Did you come to Langfest? Would you like to attend it some time? Have you got any strong speaking goals?

Looking forward to hearing from you!

#chinese #mandarin chinese #welsh #language Learning #goal setting #goalsetting #goals #language goals #clear #progress

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entergamingxp · 4 years

Text

Riot Games’ Project A is called Valorant, and it plays like a Counter-Strike killer • Eurogamer.net

If there can be only one thing taken from my time at Riot Games’ vast, lavishly fitted LA campus, it’s that the mega-developer is desperately keen to prove they know what they’re doing. Riot’s pitch for Valorant, its upcoming tactical shooter seemingly named after a kind of industrial carpet cleaning fluid, is one based almost entirely on competence: the game will have the best infrastructure, the best attention to detail, the most committed, communicative ongoing support, and the most rigorously balanced gameplay of anything like it – even if it comes at the cost, seemingly, of character and heart and anything else like it. I’ve played about four hours and moment-to-moment it really is brilliant, right across the board. Exacting, oddly approachable, tense. The potential is there for Valorant to be the pinnacle of tactical shooters – but it also feels a bit back-to-front. This is a game that exists purely to excel, like the child of two parents who only agreed to conceive so their kid could ace its homework. A game that’s very good at doing what other games have already done, but better.

Valorant

Developer: Riot Games

Publisher: Riot Games

Platform: PC

Availability: Summer 2020

Perhaps that impression is just a result of the way in which Riot has chosen to introduce Valorant. At times it’s felt almost comically self-conscious, the developer obsessively anticipating every gripe and grizzle before it comes about. Recall the initial teaser reveal, amidst Riot’s multitude of ten-year anniversary celebrations, where lead producer Anna Donlon talked at length about “Project A”‘s ambition to eliminate such essential woes as “peeker’s advantage”, and bless the world with 128-tick servers. Sexy! Dedicated servers are old news, it seems. The schtick of schmucks. Such is the world of games, in this time of subreddit megathreads and so many direct lines from community to creator, that one of the largest developers on earth announces a massive new game by correcting their audience’s complaint-jargon before they’ve even used it.

From the moment you equip your knife to move faster, you know Valorant will feel incredibly familiar to Counter-Strike fans.

Still, Valorant is impressive, and as weird as it is to lead with the technical firefighting stuff, so is that. If you buy it, Riot’s promises are hugely encouraging. In opening presentations at the studio, developers cited twelve games as inspiration, ranging from the obvious, like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive to Crossfire and Ghost Recon: Future Soldier (curiously, and perhaps cheekily: no mention of Overwatch), and the game itself feels like a surgical piecing together of the best of them. Each game’s minor gripe or community grumble extracted and eliminated before it ever came about. To describe it in brief, imagine Counter-Strike in a just slightly more colourful world, with better attention to the little touches, from a nice little ping system to slightly more playfulness in the maps, with things like fixed teleporters allowing for baiting and flanking. Above all though, its standout addition is the highly strategic abilities, each tied to your characters (“Agents”) that sit between the rigid grounding of Rainbow Six Siege’s Operators and the more cartoonish skills of Overwatch.

The abilities themselves are quite Overwatch though, as much as Riot wants to avoid saying the name. The main difference is the intention: with Valorant the aim is to be a “tactical shooter first”, with everything else in service of that. That means all the Agents still deal damage primarily through shooting (disappointingly, with real-world guns, which lead designer Trevor Romleski told me was in order to preserve a sense of inherent, “intuitively satisfying” feel and recognisability), and Agents’ abilities are always in service of that, whether it’s through zoning, or scouting, or debuffing, or just bluntly walling off entrances. Even the Agents that feel especially out-of-this-world or Overwatch-y, such as the Hanzo-like Sova (renamed from Hunter mid-way through my time there), who can fire off a scouting pulse arrow and a larger ultimate that can pass through walls, still rely on gunplay first – and the same guns as everyone else.

Combining abilities ostensibly for one purpose – like that green wall – with position and tactical play like this will be essential for the more advanced players.

Those guns are also at the centre of the in-game “economy”, which is very similar in concept to Counter-Strike again, or indeed the gold-based shopping of League of Legends. Games are played in a first-to-twelve format, which takes a good half an hour, or longer if it’s a close one. Matches are attack versus defence, with one team trying to plant a bomb and the other trying to prevent them. The maps, of which there’ll be four at launch, Riot says, will have a mix of two or three points to attack and defend. You win a round by either killing all five of the enemy team members or successfully planting a bomb and seeing it through to detonation – or defusing it once planted, if you’re on defence. And you play the game in chunks, so you’ll be defending for several rounds then attacking for several and, coming back to the economy, it’s between these individual rounds where you have a chance to buy weapons, armour and – crucially – more charges of your abilities. That economy is intended to be “team-based”, so the better your team does in a round the more money you have to spend before the next one, on those bigger and better guns and the like. In a nice touch that you’d hope would encourage teamwork, you can also ping a weapon from the menu and another teammate can buy it for you with a single click, helping the wealth trickle down from that one ringer on the squad.

As an aside on modes themselves, it’s just this one at launch but Romleski did say the team was “interested in exploring” other, faster or more casual modes, and that the core one’s length may change slightly if the community deems it necessary. Anna Donlon also added it’s “definitely” on the team’s list. “The team has been very focused on the competitive part… The questions we’ve been kind of debating amongst ourselves is: would you hold that back to wait to establish the more casual mode or would you put competitive mode out for the audience we think it’s for, start building that audience and start building a community – and then also at the same time be working on something that could be maybe a little bit more broad reaching or something that you would just want to play to decompress? … Do we wait to launch the game so we have that? I think the answer is probably no. Do we prioritise that work? I think the answer there is probably yes.”

Maps are crisp and readable, but that’s at the expense of them looking a little flat.

Looking for lore

Character and lore might not be the first thing on people’s minds when a hardcore shooter launches, but it’s been a key part of games like Overwatch’s success in particular. So why the silence on that compared to everything else?

Valorant creative director David Nottingham said he’s “a big believer in environmental storytelling”, and so the plan is to introduce it in-game, rather than via the “incredible” CG trailers of games like Overwatch – although they may do something similar “at some point”.

One in-game example: “You’re playing a map and you’re like, “Oh, there’s there’s a billboard up,” it’s maybe a sort of recruitment poster for Kingdom, right? Kingdom is a big faction, a company that exists in this world… and then you come back on a Tuesday and you log in and you’re like “Woah!” – someone’s gone in and defaced it. So for people who are paying attention it’ll be like, “Oh, there’s actually dialogue happening, and things happening within the world that I’m seeing play out in front of me.” And so for those who want to discover that stuff it will deepen their understanding.”

Back to the economy, and successfully gaming it will be what sets the top players apart from the merely skilled. I’d expect deep strategies and metas and all that malarkey to appear pretty fast around what you spend your first bits of cash on and who buys what for the rest of the team. The other side of that, of course, is that I expect the ubiquitous lone wolf players will probably refuse to share. Playing in the cocoon of Riot’s in-house “PC Bang”, on teams of five who speak the same language – and are happy to even use the game’s built-in voice chat in the first place – it would be easy to say that Valorant feels wonderfully tactical, with cooperation and character synergy baked in. The reality is that while, yes, the Agents’ abilities synergise quite beautifully at times, I’m sure that’s also down to having the right people to play with. The ringer on our team was Riot’s David “Phreak” Turley, for instance – a well-known professional League of Legends commentator who mains the support role when he plays. In other words: an unusually supportive, communicative environment off the bat.

Without a squad of chatty friends or some particularly good luck with online matchmaking, it’s very easy to anticipate an issue with toxic communication coming from such an incredibly tense, competitive game with both text and voice chat. As much as it might seem like a laboured point, this is something that many see as inseparable from League of Legends, and that Riot has already had to work enormously hard at combating. It’s arguably failed to really fix the issue, ten years on, and that’s despite League only featuring text chat in-game. Voice chat’s issues, most notably with the exclusionary effect it has on female players in particular, have been well documented. When I asked about this, game director Joe Ziegler promised to draw from Riot’s “centralised efforts” at battling the issue and apply some “specific salves around certain features,” but wouldn’t go into more detail during our chat. You can read more of his thoughts in our full interview with Ziegler and Valorant’s lead producer, Anna Donlon, but a suggestion would be to axe the voice and text chat altogether and go with Apex Legends’ nuanced ping system (something League of Legends itself made good early strides with). It’s also worth noting Riot’s already promised to improve on the pings they have. As Romleski put it, the implementation I saw was “not the grand vision” of the ping system: “we want to make sure players are comfortable if they don’t use voice or they don’t [feel confident in] calling out all the right information at the correct times.” Fingers crossed.

This is one of the zones where you’ll need to plant or defuse a bomb. Riot placed huge emphasis on its work with verticality, sightlines, cover, map-knowledge and more, and they’re all evident here.

Toxicity notwithstanding, Valorant’s intense competitiveness is also one of its greatest strengths. If you do get a good team, or just a good group of pals to play it with, I found there was a remarkable thrill to most of the rounds I played, especially so when we swept ahead to lengthy leads before almost throwing matches at the final round, or clawed matches back from the brink. Games frequently built to a natural climax of tension, and some higher-level plays – last-gasp, “clutch” one-versus-three kills or team-wide strategies coming together – can be incredibly satisfying. The game feels built to surface those particularly vivid, Rainbow Six Siege-style moments in particular, when there’s one player left and somehow they pull it off, turning things around with nothing but spit and hope and a little John McClane gumption.

It’s hard to pin down a single, quantifiable thing that brings that sort of heightened tension about, but Riot would argue it’s all in the basics. To go right back to their initial pitch, this is a game built on competency first, and apparently what that means is a tangible difference to all the little things. The art team emphasised their creation of a “clean zone”, for instance, where anything within the playable height range of the maps was slightly more muted and stripped back, whilst the areas above (roofs, skylines, and the like) was allowed to pop. Other elements are illustrated in accordance with a “readability hierarchy”, where Agents stand out above the playable space, which stands out above the visible parts of your gun, which is above the non-playable stuff altogether. Cover, on the maps themselves, is allocated with great precision, forming a curated spaghetti of “long lanes” of clear sniper paths and intentionally obstructed sightlines. All characters have equal-sized hitboxes. There’s tagging, and specific walls you can shoot through, and on and on and on it goes with a seemingly infinite string of minutiae that Riot has thought about (and talked about) at exhaustive length.

This balcony, and its longer sightlines to and from the room you’re trying to attack ahead, is a key spot for snipers.

Above all of that, though, is a technical effort that on paper sounds quite remarkable. As we all know by now, Riot boldly claims to have eliminated peekers’ advantage, something that I’d expect no-one but the most ardent of CS:GO nerds to have heard of or cared about until now, but makes a demonstrable difference to how long-term players will play the game. In most shooters like Valorant, you can briefly pop out from behind a wall to “peek” at what’s going on and quickly dart back with the shimmy of a button, and do so with no risk of getting picked off, because the delay between you performing the peek and the enemy seeing you is too high. You’re back behind the wall before it’s humanly possible to react and shoot. It’s become a time-old part of playing tactical shooters at a decent level, but in Valorant it no longer flies. Riot seems to have tackled this entirely by cracking open one of those League of Legends coffers, that I imagine they have lying around the place, and simply throwing vast amounts of money at the problem.

To get briefly technical, as I understand it Riot claims to have struck a deal with internet service providers that will route internet traffic directly from you to Riot’s servers, via service called Riot Direct, which it says means an average of 35ms ping for at least 70 percent of players at launch. I can feel the eyes glazing over, don’t worry, so in basic terms: much less lag, regardless of where you are. At the top end of the scale, competitive players and streamers that have been known to move across the continent of North America to get physically closer to servers, so that their ping is low enough for high-level play, can breathe a sigh of relief. For myself and most others, it’s just another quiet reassurance.

As well as the peeker-busting 128-tick servers and promise of super-stable ping for (almost) everyone, Riot’s also built Valorant to be playable on a huge amount of machines. David Strailey, who works at Riot in the netcode and software engineering side of things for Valorant, said that a $120, ten-year-old laptop with an i3-370M CPU (which equates to 88 percent of current League of Legends players) would be able to play Valorant at 30 frames-per-second, while 66 percent of LoL players could play it at 60. Slides were used to show off some apparently remarkable strides to improving the accuracy of hit registration. Riot even showed footage supporting a promise to upscale players with low FPS and lag, through some special server magic, so that even if they jittered about and jumped all over the place on their own screen their movement would appear entirely smooth on yours.

Wind all that back into the important stuff – the gameplay – and it raises interesting questions around where true originality and fun really comes from. Sometimes players coming up with clever ways to work around things that are technically problems or imbalances can actually lead to the most interesting gameplay. To go back to peekers once again, in Romleski’s words: “Let’s say we’re playing against somebody who’s peeking, you might ‘jiggle peek’ yourself as like a counter-way to deal with it, and I think it’s good that players are being ingenuitive and trying to come up with ways to deal with it.” The difference in Valorant, he says, is that Riot wants to build the “tools” for breaking sightlines and using space to your advantage into the game intentionally, so you can “find your own way to break that puzzle of some people holding that position,” rather than relying on server delay to do it for them.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/03/riot-games-project-a-is-called-valorant-and-it-plays-like-a-counter-strike-killer-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=riot-games-project-a-is-called-valorant-and-it-plays-like-a-counter-strike-killer-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net

0 notes

tandridgeclub · 5 years

Text

Message from Sam Gyimah MP to Club Members ahead of this evenings AGM

Several people have contacted me regarding my position on a No Deal Brexit, wanting me to support it as a policy. I thought to send through some further thoughts on my concerns for a No Deal which are born out of my considered worry about what could happen to people and their livelihoods in that kind of world. Do feel free to pass onto anyone who asks. People have argued that we survived the blitz so can deal with anything. Frankly that is an incredibly low bar to set for success of the Brexit project and is a long way from what people were told during the referendum campaign. The Leave campaign painted a bright future for Britain, forging our way in the world with a renewed sense of national pride and unity. Nobody was told to vote leave so that the nation would have to invoke the Dunkirk spirit. That is not to say that I do not believe there are a host of exciting opportunities outside the EU for us as a nation. As Universities and Science Minister I spent a lot of my time looking at options outside the EU. I was the first British Minister to go to NASA in a decade to build a partnership at governmental level for space technology. I was in India championing a partnership in innovation to attract foreign investment here and opportunities for our companies to sell into those markets. Yes, whilst I acknowledge there are fast growing opportunities outside the EU, we maximise our opportunities as a country by doing both. If we want to be a free trading nation we need to be everywhere, and it does not make sense to ignore one on the largest trading blocs in the world that is right on our doorstep. I can’t for example imagine Canada de-prioritising it’s trading relationship with the US at the expense of far flung opportunities or Australia doing the same at the expense of its relationship with China.

On a more substantive note, if our route to prosperity post Brexit is through a web of trade deals then we cannot seriously argue that the ONLY bloc that we do not need a free trade deal with is the one with which we do the largest volume of trade. Further, if we want a preferential trade deal with the EU then we gain nothing by tumbling out to WTO rules and then having to scramble our way back up the hill to a preferential deal under huge time pressure. Especially given that we are a service economy and so being under WTO gives us no benefits, all we do is hand over the initiative in negotiations to the EU.

I have a strong and firm belief that the Conservative party is the party of business or it is nothing. Our political success has been built on understanding and responding to the needs of business. Businesses that employ thousands of people are telling us each day their concerns of a No Deal. For the Conservative party to turn a deaf ear to these concerns could ultimately undermine our reputation as the party of business and economic competence. In undermining them we weaken our own case for how we are going to build our economy and grow jobs post Brexit. These are the businesses we need to invest to help our economy grow beyond Brexit. We cannot on one hand say that our economy will be fine and grow despite the initial shock, however dismiss the torrent of concerns from wealth and job creators as project fear. We have already seen businesses moving overseas and holding off on investment, a No Deal Brexit will only see this increase and the economy shrink as a result. The stakes are so high that they go beyond trade to risking the Union itself. The Scots will use it as a further grievance against the English with a new independence referendum and argue that they can now solve the currency issue by joining the Euro to give their campaign rocket boosters. We have already begun to see the risks it poses to Northern Ireland with the long running debate over the backstop, highlighting how destabilising getting the wrong Brexit deal can be. Whatever the mandate for the referendum, it wasn’t one to break up the country. For that reason, there will be millions of voters who will not forgive the Tory party for a No Deal situation that could put their livelihoods on the line. Unlike in war time where it us verses an external enemy, a No Deal scenario would be the UK govt actively spurning negotiable options in favour of the most extreme option that will cause damage to the country. Of course, in 20 years’ time we may have turned the corner, but my concern is that before we get there, Corbyn becomes PM.

We cannot ignore the fact that it would be incredibly risky for a minority government to navigate its way through the disruption, ministerial resignations and challenges of No Deal without risking an election that could hand Corbyn the keys to Downing Street. In a No Deal scenario on Independence Day, the Prime Minister would not be popping champagne, but convening the emergency COBRA to deal with what would be a large-scale civil contingency – and this would be an active policy choice of the government. One thing I have learnt in my 9 years as a politician is that there is a big difference between people knowing something will be difficult and experiencing it personally. When it actually hits them personally they will blame the government. If you want to know how the public react to pain that they perceive the Government has inflicted on them, look at what happened following the miners’ strike. It may have been for the greater good but today no people in those areas will touch the Tories with a barge pole. Think of applying that to every community across the country. Moving onto the referendum. The referendum solved the question of whether we should leave or not. It did not answer the question of where we should go next. Every person that voted to leave has a different interpretation of what Brexit should look like. Take the differences seen amongst MPs in Parliament for example. An MP that has a large manufacturer in their constituency who needs just in time supply chains interprets leaving as being in a customs union to limit this disruption. A coastal MP will have concerns about fishing and so interprets leave as getting control of our waters and leaving the Common Fisheries Policy. 83% of those employed in East Surrey are so in the service sector, I need to look to safeguard these jobs. It is not that MPs are frustrating Brexit but are looking to deal with these issues. This is no exaggeration, we have been in the EU for 45 years and every single aspect of life in the UK in entwined with the EU. So, whether we like it or not, leaving with no arrangements on the 29th March will have a significant detrimental effect. The law of averages is such that given the scale of what we will be dealing with could impact on people’s lives negatively especially some of the poorest in society. I did not resign because I wanted a second referendum. The last one was traumatic enough and it is incredibly unlikely to happen as only the Government can initiate the process. All I am saying is that if the Conservative party were to pursue No Deal I am very concerned that it would have a damaging effect on the country and we will not be forgiven. We have a responsibility to deliver for the 17.4 million people that voted to leave but also the responsibility to safeguard the livelihoods of the 66 million people across the county. As I have previously said, I would support a deal that takes us out of the EU, that does not damage our interests, protects business and is negotiable with the EU.. Best wishes, Sam Sam Gyimah MP’

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greggory--lee · 7 years

Text

NEO AMA Recap and Analysis

This past Thursday, NEO Founders DA Hongfei and Erik Zhang opened the floor on Reddit for an AMA. This article will serve to recap the questions that were answered on the newly rebranded NEO subreddit (formerly known as Antshares). The new sub has generated considerable buzz this week, even being listed as a trending forum earlier this week.

The NEO subreddit trended on Tuesday of this past week.

Legend

D = DA Hongfei,

NEO Founder, Founder and CEO of Onchain, Key Opinion Leader (KOL) to chinese Blockchain industry

E = Erik Zhang

NEO Founder and core developer, Founder and CTO of Onchain, author of the DBFT consensus mechanism

Can you give us an idea about the size of the China based development team?

D: There are about half a dozen full-time developers here in Shanghai, among them two are core developers. We don’t need tens of people doing protocol level development. Other than that, there are a few dozens more contributing code and ideas as community members, some of them are Onchain DNA developers. Besides we have a few academic researchers serving as technical advisors. By saying Core developer, we mean who has commit permission on GitHub. Bitcoin has 15 core developers as of today.

Do you have a roadmap for future developments?

E: We’ve already finished the features such as digital asset, digital identity, smart contract, complier and dev pack for C# /VB.NET/F#/Java/Kotlin. And in the end of 2017, we gonna finish the yellowpaper and incubat more project of DApp and then we will improve the implementation of smart contract development by Java/Kotlin. At the beginning of 2018, NeoX, NeoFS, NeoQs are our most important works.

Please clarify the rumors regarding NEO’s affiliations with companies like Alibaba and Microsoft. There is much speculation but little in the way of hard facts, can you please expand upon these? (note: much has been made of rumors regarding NEO’s relationship with titan companies such as Microsoft and Alibaba (the number one e-commerce retailer in Asia, in plain, “The Amazon and E-Bay of Asia” some would say). NEO’s June 22nd conference a little over a month ago was held at the Microsoft Beijing office.)

D: There is no direct cooperation between Alibaba and NEO/Onchain, other than their mailbox service is using Law Chain to provide attested email service. In terms of Microsoft, yes we have cooperation with Microsoft China because NEO is built with C# and .NET Core, and NeoContract is the first in the world to support writing smart contract with C#.

Can you give us any indication on how big and where the Chinese NEO community is?

D: There are a dozen of dedicated QQ/WeChat groups and a couple of BBS/forum boards. Personally, I have over 5000 followers on Weibo, the Chinese twitter. I’ll say that there are tens of thousands of people who are loosely the NEO community members. I can share you two pictures taken early this month on a NEO technical meeting. http://imgur.com/a/CWpzthttp://imgur.com/a/ciE9t

Hi. Are you actively working towards getting NEO listed on other exchanges? Increasing the number of exchanges NEO is listed on will improve its visibility, exposure and price potential. Getting NEO listed on Japanese, Korean, European and American exchanges such as:

Kraken Bitfinex Poloniex Huobi Okcoin Bithumb Btce

And many more will help to improve your prospect.

D: At this moment, we are actively working on the network upgrade. We definitely would like to see NEO being listed on more exchanges, especially the one caters different countries. It is up to the exchanges but we plan to reach out to them in the future. As a teaser, Erik and I are travelling to Japan in August.

Hi guys. Any upcoming partnerships we don’t know about yet?

I’m interested to hear what businesses are interested in utilizing the NEO network and its smart contracts.

D: There are no new partnerships to announce yet. But we do see dramatically increasing interests of building dApps on NEO and/or using the NeoContract system. We’ll announce a Seed Project to encourage developers to build dApps and third-party apps around NEO. There are also dApps on other blockchain planning to port to NEO. I believe we will see plenty of dApps/projects built around NEO in the 2nd half of 2017.

How will NEO/OnChain prevent new ICO’s with bad intentions/scams on their platform? Will they check the ICO’s thoroughly? Since ICO’s with bad intentions reflects on the whole NEO as a supporting platform.

D: How to regulate ICO is a hot topic in the Chinese blockchain industry and community. The head of Digital Currency Institute at PBOC (central bank) recently published an article on ICO regulations. He said the regulating authority should rather be the gatekeeper than scavenger. Pre-screening or licensing may huddle innovation, so the regulators should pay close attention to those ICOs but only step in when needed. We think this standpoint is well balanced between flexibility and legitimacy. If any ICO project looks like a Ponzi scheme or scam, we will warn the public and regulators may step in.

China is working on their very own Cryptocurrency. What does/can this mean for NEO?

D: That means digital currency and blockchain/DLT are regarded as neutral technologies that can be utilized to speed up the adoption of Chinese Yuan as an international currency. Therefore, financial institutions will invest in blockchain/DLT which benefits NEO in return. Our team was asked to do training sections for banks and insurance companies for many times in the past.

Both: What are you most excited about in regards to NEO and Onchain in the next 24 months?

Da: Will having Onchain as a parent company cause NEO to be under-prioritised due to the business’ other projects or is it an advantage? Why/why not? (note: buzz in the NEO community about rumors of Onchain being the so-called parent company of NEO has been received with both positive and negative reviews).

D: NEO is a community project. Onchain doesn’t own NEO.

NEO and Onchain are separate entities. NEO is a community driven/funded open-source project, while Onchain is a VC-backed company. The connections are:

(1) Two of the five co-founders of Onchain are also founders of NEO

(2) The consortium version of NEO, namely DNA, shares the same architect and smart contract system with NEO

(3) With NeoX, the cross-chain protocol, we are exploring the possibility of integrating permissionless blockchain (NEO) with permissioned ones (DNA).

I saw that NEO has a lot of development plans, namely: (note: he went on to list 31 plans in development)

My questions:

1) What changes will take place in regards to the size of the team of developers, if any, to make all these plans a reality?

2) When do you expect each of these development plans to be completed?

Nowadays we have hundreds of community developers. In the near future, more and more developers will be involved. So I don’t think it’s a problem.

The core developers will focus on the kernel development. These plans will be finish in 2018. The community developers will focus on the applications such as wallets and blockchain explorers etc. And these applications are becoming abundant day and day so that there is no finishing point.

QTUM has a focus on mobile development and deployment, how does NEO plan to address this market?

D: Blockchain is so young and evolving so fast. At NEO, we don’t think user experience or convenience alone makes up a legitimate competitive advantage at this stage. The early adopter of NEO will be developers and/or the people who believe blockchain technology can change the world. The NEO team will focus on protocol level development and I’ve heard that CoZ and other community developers are working on mobile and mac clients. We will support those efforts to enhance user experience.

E: The essential of mobile development and deployment is light-wallet which is running on something like smart cellphones and this is easy job. Each project of blockchain can do it. I don’t think there is any difficulty.

Is there any scope for a marketing professional to be added to the existing NEO team? I understand the focus is currently on technical development however one could argue the image and content management of NEO could be much improved and is equally as important. Thanks! (note: one of the consistent complaints from western supporters of NEO has been their perceived lack of focus in their marketing approach, specifically in regards to materials in English)

D: Yes. Currently there are a handful of English speaking community members helping us with marketing and materials.

Boxmining (note: a popular Youtube crypto content creator..be on the lookout for this interview. We will post it as soon as it drops on crypto~news.net): I’m in Shanghai and I would love to interview you guys regarding the coin. I have a youtube channel of 31k subscribers who really want to know more about neo. Is it possible to arrange a visit?

E: Sure

What is your main development platform?…

E: https://github.com/neo-project

This may be a difficult question, but I imagine that many of us are wondering: For those of us who are not Chinese citizens, how do you envision the regulation of the Chinese government on cryptocurrencies such as NEO will affect us? How will we be able to operate within our international spaces in ways that help us create a viable product, while still respecting the expectations and directions of the Chinese government?

D: I don’t think it is what we should worry. NEO has digital identity module built in. Everything we do we make sure it is compliant.

In addition, NEO is becoming one of the most internationally known open-source project originated from China. I think the government will love what we did. Besides, Onchain had been providing consulting service for several local governments to use blockchain in society management.

Regarding what is happening right now with BTC/BCC, how is NEO fork-resistant? And what happens, if there are issues where no consensus can be reached in the NEO-core-team or between the NEO-core-team and CoZ? (With the implications of the August 1st potential BTC hardfork approaching, the question naturally to be raised is how to know whether something is truly fork-resistant. NEO’s dBFT- delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance structure goes a long way in preventing the possibility of a fork in the future).

E: The main reason why this situation of Bitcoin at present is because Satoshi Nakamoto left at early stage, that leads BTC community to the fork situation. Same thing happened to ETH. Differently Vitalik did a lot of work to keep the community together. What is a hard fork? It’s a protocol improvement. Upon the improvement necessity, Core Dev should propose the new protocol. If someone does not want to follow, a hard fork happens. That improvement in my eyes is inevitable, but necessary.

D: I misunderstood this question, but will post my answer anyway. The answer is about consensus fork.

NEO’s design favors consistency over liveness. NEO won’t fork if the DBFT safety assumption is met. Under extreme cases (1/3 of the consensus nodes collude), the network will stop immediately when competing blocks at same height emerge.

What are the benefits and requirements of running a book-keeping node?

I read from forums, some say you need 10k ANS, some 1k ANS and some 1k ANC. Truly confused.

Network with good situation and 24 hours on-line. For the benefits, people can get fee of the transitions. However, the fee of transitions is zero so that now no benefits for the book-keeping nodes. But they will receive the fee with the growth times of transitions.

To be a book-keeping node, you should become candidate first. And to be the candidate, you should pay 1000 gas to system. After the voting, the top number of n candidates can be the book-keeping nodes. the “n” should be equal to or more than 7 and also it depends on the result of voting.

Hello. What is upcoming marketing plan for NEO? (note: the emphasis of questions relating to marketing during the AMA speak to the concern of the masses in regards to NEO’s Marketing strategy)

D: The major one will be a NEO DevCon in Q4. Bay area might be a good place to hold the event.

NEO vs GAS (note: Gas comes into being initially as a dividend to holders of the NEO coins) has been the hot topic for the last few weeks. There are many who argue: why buy 1 NEO to generate 1 GAS (in about 22 years) when you can buy GAS right now and for cheaper.

What is your team’s opinion on that view?

E: The NEO holder will get benefits in two ways: one is each block will reward to him so that if he hold 1 neo and keep 22 years so as to get 1 gas. On the another hand, he will get benefits from the gas consuming of the users of NEO system. If no one use the system, he will just get 1 gas after 22 years with 1 neo. But you can imagine if more and more users for the NEO system, how much the NEO holder will get, much more than the first way, right?

What are the three greatest challenges you see for NEO’s future, and how can our open-source community take action to overcome those challenges? (note: NEO’s integrations of common coding languages makes it an attractive platform for mass collaboration as well as future dAPP developments) Thank you.

D: The biggest challenges is to get developers involved. We love to see more Builders emerge from the community.

Can you please explain to us Westerners how NEO’s certificate technology will help the the Chinese government trust NEO as a cryptocurrency? We are especially curious in regards to how NEO solves problems and gains approval of the Chinese government in comparison with other cryptocurrencies that Chinese government discourages, such as BitCoin.

D: If you read the whitepaper you will see that anti-censorship, anonymity, unstoppable applications are not design goals of NEO. That’s why we say NEO is for the smart ECONOMY.

Hi guys! Just 2 questions. 1) Having to send all of your NEO funds to yourself to obtain GAS seems odd. It is also nerve racking for those of us who have a LOT of NEO. Will future wallets allow us to simply obtain GAS without claiming in this way? 2) Can you state whether any new exchanges will be added soon? Thanks!

auto-claiming will spam every block with tens of thousands of transactions modifying GAS balance for every address holding NEO.

it’s up to exchange to list NEO, but we will reach out and are glad to provide technical support.

When do you expect NEO to be introduced to more exchanges?

D: It’s always ongoing

Who do you see as your biggest competitor at the moment, and what do you think about your own project in comparison to those? Both positive and challenging things.

E: I think Ethereum should be our biggest competitor at the moment. They have the first mover advantage and the complement community. For NEO, at lease we have three kind of advantage:

1. the better architecture: it help us to make a better future

2. more developer-friendly smart contract： it can be easy for us to construct the ecosystem.

3. digital identity and digital assets: help us to combine with the real life easily.

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These questions and answers were taken directly from NEO’s first AMA with their Reddit community. The AMA, by no coincidence, was scheduled on the same week as their anticipated re-branding from Antshares to NEO. The AMA ended up spanning over 500 comments from the NEO Reddit Community. If you’re interested in reading the entire AMA, follow the link below. NEO is generating a lot of buzz in the crypto community as potentially the new frontrunner in taking China’s crypto market by storm. Some pundits have gone so far as labeling it “China’s Ethereum.” No one can say certainly what will happen, but there’s no doubt that NEO has potential to emerge as a dominant force in the crypto economy.

—

https://www.reddit.com/r/NEO/comments/6puffo/we_are_da_hongfei_and_erik_zhang_founders_of_neo/dksac6i/

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Source: http://bitcoinswiz.com/neo-ama-recap-and-analysis/

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