#i have many part 2s to be writing apparently | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

spaceysoupy · 3 months

Text

So apparently it’s that time of year again where I have to post about this.

On lesbianism, white queerness, and 2S identity

Text below readmore

I am a two-spirit. My identity is specific to my Tribe and Clan, and even more specific to my family. I am not a man, I am not a woman, and I am not nonbinary; I am not defined by what I am not.

I am a two-spirit and I am a lesbian. That's not debatable.

But I am not a non-man.

There's an idea of two-spirits that we are just the ethnic version of non-binary

We're not. The reason you're so comfortable calling us nonbinary is because your idea of queerness is centered around the binary&what you are not: you're not cishet, you're not the oppressor, etc

White queers like to speak about 2S identities constantly as if we are monolith. "It's just a gender" "it's not a gender"

"they're not trans" "they're not queer" "they don't belong here"

The community tries to decide for the individual and that's so weird to me.

So much of white queerness is inherently about exclusion.

You need strict labels to exclude the people you fear. You write your definitions around your fear of intruders and by consequence you exclude the people that need your support the most.

You need people to "prove" they are queer before you let them in. You're like a fortress and you let vulnerable people drown in the moat; ignoring that the real oppressors don't need to be a Trojan horse to do damage, ignoring they are actively burning down the castle.

It's very sad to me, because it's ultimately tearing the community apart even further.

I've never felt very welcome in white lesbian circles and they've never understood my experience of gender, but it's gotten worse in the past 5 or so years.

As TERFs start to revive gold star lesbianism and center hatred of men as their definition of lesbianism, you start to get these younger lesbians that don't know history that start to parrot the rhetoric. First it's "non-men loving non-men" then it's "you're too close to Man™"

For many two-spirit lesbians like myself, this is very concerning. White lesbians are historically not the ones targeted by radfems.

Now we've gotten to the point that there are people denying that lesbian is an spec (multispec) identity while including (white) nonbinary people

White nonbinary people (usually AFAB nonbinary people) are seen as woman lite and are welcome in white lesbian spaces while queer Indigenous people are considered dangerous because white lesbians can't understand their gender.

When did understanding become a requirement?

We're getting very dangerously close to "lesbianism is ONLY attraction to women" and very close to "lesbianism is only attraction to *a very specific type of (white) woman*" and I really need young white lesbians to read about political lesbianism so they can see this

I don't want to hear "not all lesbians" or "well then they aren't welcome" because every time this rhetoric goes unchallenged you are actively welcoming these people to continue it and make it more and more extreme. Yes, even the kind that seems to have nothing to do with racism

Almost all of your exclusionary rhetoric is based on the racist ideas of political lesbianism and I do not know why you all cannot see that they want to move goalposts. It wasn't just bi lesbians, it wasn't just he/him lesbians, it wasn't just nonbinary lesbians. It's a tactic.

It really feels like young lesbians are not only letting us go backwards, but encouraging it. And that's thanks in part to the historical racism of political lesbianism, but many of these people ARE old enough to think critically and talk to people who've been through this.

So far I've seen this in younger lesbian spaces; the ones with older generations (the ones that don't welcome TERFs) have been pretty welcoming even if not totally understanding, because they at least recognize that you don't need to understand someone's experience to validate it.

But I'm really concerned for the young Indigenous lesbians who don't feel comfortable around older people and are going to these younger lesbian spaces only to be indoctrinated with thinly veiled TERF rhetoric. It makes me very concerned for our spaces as well.

So I'll say again

I am not a non-man and I am not a non-woman. I'm not defined by what I am not. I do not ascribe to your binary-centric definitions of queerness. I experience queer attraction to women. I'm a lesbian. You do not get to use community to decide my individuality.

Thread by ~Alitsanosga

Pronouns: hi'a/vsgina/utseli/uwasa

#two spirit #two-spirit #2slgbtqia+#2 spirit #lesbian #white queers #white queerness #racism #colonialism #political lesbianism #inclusion is survival #indigeneity #indigenous rights

75 notes · View notes

poisonheadcrabsalesman · 3 years

Text

More therapy thoughts part 1/?

Behavior Theory Frameworks/Conditioning and What the fuck does Master Chief talk about in therapy?

Ramblings below - like a lot, like I spent too much time writing this and you should not read this

Behavioral Theory could work well as a framework with rehabilitating Spartan IIs if the case worker focused on Operant Conditioning Theory and Cognitive Social Learning Theory, which I talked about in this ask because I think I’m funny and this blog is an archive of me applying human behavior theories to video games.

Spartans have always been taught the mission comes first! Always! The 2s are indoctrinated from age 6-14 and then have that reinforced the rest of their lives. From the beginning they are taught to push themselves to the limits, earn their food by winning, form bonds with teammates but be ready to sacrifice them for the mission. The whole lives wasted vs spent conversation between John and Mendez after the augmentation surgery!

What the UNSC/ONI wants comes before their lives, the lives of other soldiers, civilians, AI etc. This constant conditioning of expectations and rewards has created the norms cemented in their minds. This becomes standard operating procedure.

Spartans are also an entirely separated social group, other people have made really great posts on how they are Othered and have their own way of communicating with body language. ODSTs hate Spartans, marines see them as cyborgs or saviors, and while they’re allies, Spartans are not seen or treated as human, by literally everyone. They are a means to an end, with the original goal being to maintain the UNSC’s position of power and crush the insurrectionists in the outer colonies, but uh oh Aliens!

Maybe the 2s aren’t as expendable as the 3s but the mindset and reinforcement of “mission first, people second” being repeated their entire lives is going to stick. So is the constant mistreatment and abuse from their fellow soldiers and handlers.

Addressing the cognitive distortions that come from their upbringing while also balancing the fact that Spartans are so fundamentally different from the way they developed to survive would be so much work, especially considering how much information on them is given to their therapist. The main distortion I would apply is minimization, making large problems small and not properly dealing with them, and specifically for John, personification, accepting blame for negative events without sufficient evidence.

Like these are grown ass super soldiers who can kill you in less than a second and calculate the amount of gravity in a room on the fly but then also can flounder when trying to comfort civilians or make small talk because their experiences and values are so alien to adults who had more developmentally “normal” lives.

Literally applying therapy to Spartans would be like, what was done to you was wrong, the ends do not justify the means, you were children and the adults in your life failed to protect you. You are a human person who is fallible and did the best you could with what you had. And the Spartan would say, “sounds fake but okay, can I pass my psych eval and go back to war now please?”

Jumping back to Behavior Theory

Different approaches to therapy under the Behavior Theory umbrella help modify negative behaviors with treatments like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Dialectical behavior therapy that teach individuals adaptive coping like emotional regulation, distress tolerance, cognitive distortions, and interpersonal communication. And that’s just one framework under the umbrella of human behavior theories.

Social work therapy is different from psych as it approaches individuals with heavily researched, evidence-based theories and frameworks in a holistic viewing of person-in-environment, instead of a strong focus on internal psychology.

Social work looks at all the interacting systems, environment, history, and internal and external factors affecting an individual. One of the most useful frameworks is the Biopsychosocial-Spiritual Frameworks (BPSS) when helping a client. It helps with identifying all the intersecting factors, both risk and protective, that shapes a client’s lived experiences. The most important thing to remember is that the individual is an expert in their own life, they know their experiences best.

The hardest part is applying this to Spartans because they Are So Fucked, their lived experiences, their environments and systems and institutions interacting with them, and the amount of their personal information that is probably so classified.

BPSS is a tool to help social workers assess individuals and their situations by collecting info that is related to the presenting issues and current and past circumstances. Info like medical history, hospitalizations, substance abuse, mental illness, personal relationships, family history and background, culture and norms, education, legal history, spirituality and participation etc. is all under this framework.

For Spartan 2s most of this info is lost or classified and helping someone who has repressed every negative emotion they've had for the sake of the mission would be so much to unpack but that’s also why you’re reading the mad ramblings over an over caffeinated nerd on the internet.

Life Course Theory which looks at developmental milestones and the individual’s experiences versus the socially expected markers, how do you apply that to children who were taken and have lived such different lives?

While early adolescence is when “normal” development of thoughts of self and identity take place alongside the physical changes of puberty, Spartans were being turned into emotionless calculating weapons. Sorry John, no forming a sense of identity and peer bonds for you, go kill that Watts guy who betrayed us and joined the insurrectionists.

And now that I’ve gone this insane and opened 2 whole textbooks up, let’s get to Master Chief thoughts. If you’ve read this far thank you, I swear I’m normal, 2020 has just been a weird year.

Why the fuck did I think I could write a therapy fic on a guy with 20 minutes of actual dialogue across almost 2 decades of games?

I make fun of him and call him a himbo, but he’s smart, he knows he’s being used and there is resentment there that’s been building for years.

There’s also decades of trauma and combat experience, physical, and emotional abuse, the lack of a support network, lack of an identity, the biological factors and aftermath of the augmentations and injuries he’s received, a whole lot of grief and self-inflicted guilt.

The loss of a third of his peer group with the augmentation surgery, Sam’s death, the loss of Reach (the only place he’s considered home), Keyes, the Pillar of Autumn crew, Miranda Keyes, Johnson, Cortana. He cares about the marines who fight with him!!!

He just stands there and takes it and rarely snaps, and even then it’s just small cracks on the surface with fissures running deep. The few details I will pull from Halo 5 are Blue Team’s reactions to John pushing himself so hard from the beginning of the game, and the literal crack in his armor from the fight with Locke. Like dude.

John’s a leader and will get the mission done but he tugs on the leash. He’s earned enough of a reputation and uses it to get his way.

Halo 2’s “Permission to leave the station” with Mr. “I’m going to hand deliver a bomb to the fusion reactor of a covenant supercarrier and hope my friends catch me”.

Halo 4 is when we see him say no to a superior officer and then 5 is him going AWOL. Palmer literally points out that no one is going to stop him.

Halo 5 kills me for many reasons but John bringing up Halsey and what she did to him and also pointing out that he knows Halo 5 Cortana is trying to manipulate him with psychological tactics hurts.

He knows what’s been done to him!

I cannot remember which book it was but John isn’t used to working alone. He literally takes fire because he was expecting someone to have his back!

He’s lost without Cortana! She was in his brain! Y’all! I played Halo Combat Evolved on the original xbox when I was like 8 and I knew these two were meant to be together. From the moment they met they had great chemistry and relied on each other! Cortana literally goes after people who have it out for John! John wants her approval and shows off for her in one of the books.

I’ve already written too much here but like all of the games have John showing off for Cortana, making dry jokes, jumping out of things he shouldn’t.

The whole point of this rambling is to try and get my thoughts about how to approach John’s character under control.

And that’s the thing. He’s lost control. He’s lost people, he’s losing his position and being phased out as an aging spartan, a relic. John’s used to following orders and making some decisions on the battlefield but it was always short term.

He has no identity beyond being a weapon. Complete the mission, clear the LZ, get put in cryo. Rinse, repeat.

The timeline of the games are what I'm most familiar with but with the comics and books too it’s one long run from Halo 2 to Halo 4. Cairo station to the Dreadnought to the crash landing to Forward Unto Dawn to Requiem to “The Didact is Dead but not really but we’ll deal with him off-screen”.

I know Hood apparently gave John R&R orders before Halo 5 that he ignored and kept running himself into the ground. This is a man who has to keep moving and keep being useful.

I imagine him giving in and seeking help as a last resort to fix any problems he has with performing his duties rather than helping himself be healthier.

Any professional he sees is going to have to approach him like they’re approaching a self sacrificing feral cat, with lunch meat and quiet. This man needs to have his support network closer, set up long term goals, and do some serious, and most likely incredibly painful, self reflection on where he’s come from and where he wants to go. Get him out of that tin can and into therapy. I don’t have a nice neat ending because this was a ramble and also therapy is not neat and tidy. Thanks for reading my words about mr halo

#this is not coherent but it needs out of my brain #John - has different characterizations based on what media he's in #Me - my writing must be in character or I Will Die #also me - we don't talk about halo 5 but i will loot its corpse for bits of lore I like #im sorry for being like this #my writing #Therapy time #John 117 #this is not a halo blog #haha this was peer reviewed nonsense #thanks yall for enabling me #i have even more ideas for the infinity sitcom folder now

46 notes · View notes

ginnyvos · 4 years

Text

Dear GM, do not build your world

(Let the players to it for you)

As a gamemaster (GM) and dungeon master (DM), I take utter joy in building my worlds.

I love figuring out the way it fits together, laying down the lay of the land, designing the socioeconomic and cultural landscape, making up prominent figures and hidden treasures. I can spend hours and hours writing, imagining, lovingly building and developing every aspect of it. I’ll strive for an inner logic and consistency, a thematic unity that leaves open space for the characters to tell their own stories in. Pages and pages and pages of notes, maps, pictures and statistics.

I love these pet worlds of mine. Love playing in my sand boxes and building my sand castles all on my own. It’s one of the reasons I was drawn to GMing in the first place and I don’t think I’ll ever stop doing it.

And yet here I am, telling you not to do it.

Build the bare bones of a world instead, just enough to inspire your players, and let them fill it up.

Hell, if you do it right, you don’t even have to make up the Big Bad Evil. Your players will do it for you instead, and will be all the more invested because of it.

Let me expand on that.

I joined a really cool discord server for a podcast named “DMs Treehouse” in January. People would run tabletop roleplaying games (ttrpgs) on the server. A bunch of us ended up playing Masks, a teenage superhero ttrpg. The base premise is simple: Halcyon city is a city full of superheroes where every superhero comic cliché holds true. You play a teenager who, for whatever reason, is one of those heroes.

It started with one GM: Jonah. He ran a number of interconnected one shots, different players in different combinations. Then another person GMed and we decided that his one shot, too, took place in that world. Then I GMed, and another person, and another. Everyone added their own unique spin on it, but it all somehow worked together and didn’t contradict each other at all.

It worked because it wasn’t the GMs that built the world; it was the players. With each character that got created, more lore was added: One player made a character that was the mayor’s son, and so suddenly the city had a mayor that hated superheroes. I created a character that came from a long line of very well known superheroes, and suddenly everyone in this world knew and had an opinion about the Skybrights. Another created a connection to AEGIS (the Masks version of SHIELD) and suddenly, AEGIS had a face and a lead agent.

And so it went on: there is an orphanage and a group home for superpowered kids, two newspapers that are in constant competition, a music scene, a building that has a sideways circus tent sticking out of it, a line of products branded after a big shot superhero with a taste for publicity. There are several branches of AEGIS and there’s the HCPD (Halcyon City Police Department), and those don’t play well together at all. There’s an evil science corporation and an underground fighting ring. Add to that a race of sentient alien garden gnomes, a really good BBQ restaurant and an assortment of aliens, robots and teenage superheroes and you have a city that is alive, thriving and full of conflict.

This is the most vibrant, creative, multifaceted, interesting world I’ve had the pleasure of GMing, and I hardly made any of it up myself! The things I did make up mostly built on the backstories the players gave me.

More than that, the world feels real and lived in like no other, despite being a super weird, cliché, gimmicky superhero world. That’s because it didn’t all come from one person’s imagination. Different people with different experiences, different perspectives and different interests all added their point of view to this world, and that makes it feel real. All I do as a GM is take everyone’s backstories and find the places where they intersect. That’s where I play.

The best part of it all is that everyone feels ownership of this world. Everyone adds to it. Everyone feels invested. If the villain you’re fighting is your sister, or your teammate’s sister, it’s so much more impactful than when they’re just some Very Evil Person the GM came up with. That makes it personal. I will never forget the moment I found out that my character’s sister was the one attacking my teammates, and I wasn’t even playing in that game!

Look on as slowly, lovingly, the world gets filled in. And if some parts aren’t filled in, who cares? Apparently those aren’t that interesting to your players. If there’s anything missing, you can add it together. So many of the best, most memorable parts of our world were added just because, in game, the players decided to go to a place that didn’t exist yet.

“So you walk away from Duke’s house, his father yelling at you from behind the door. Where are you going?”

“Is there some kind of… underground fighting ring in this city? I need to blow off some steam!”

“Sure, absolutely!”

“Alright, we go there! What does it look like?”

“You tell me. What does this underground fighting ring look like and how does Ray know about it?”

“Oh! Well… It’s in this old warehouse in a rundown part of town and it looks like-“

So if you’re a GM, try it. Come up with a theme, the bare bones of a world, just enough to give your players inspiration… and let them fill it in. Be interested in your player’s characters and backstories and ask them questions. Help them develop and integrate their characters into the world, or take what they came up with and secretly integrate it yourself. Then sit back and enjoy their reactions as they discover how they are now a part of the larger narrative… and how their backstories are biting them in the ass. Grin as they accuse you of being evil, of giving them trauma, and tell them (quite happily) that they did all of it themselves.

Honestly, most game prep these days feels more like the players hand me the clues and all I have to do is take my little ball of red string to connect the dots and make my murder board. I find that I make a pretty decent conspiracy theorist.

Thanks to all of the folks over on the DMs Treehouse server, you all rock!

Jonah (check out his podcast 2s Company!), Scott (check out his podcast, Reckless Rollers, as well!), Peach, Fran, Arca, Johnny, Cameron (from the DMs Treehouse podcast), Fishy, Alex, Gigi, Reid, Cam (also from DMs Treehouse), Patrick (also from 2sCompany), Lychee, Lime, Chey, Pikro and Jack, thank you for building this amazing world with me and just being really cool players and people!

#ttrpg #dnd #masks #dming #gming #dm #gm #dms treehouse #worldbuilding #I adore worldbuilding #don't get me wrong #And I love the worlds I've made and will probably make many more #But this game really made me think about the way I prep games #And changed it a lot

23 notes · View notes

soybeeftacos · 5 years

Text

The Problem With CoreXP

So, I played in the Core Experience tournament that NISEI threw over the weekend. It was... interesting. I went 5-5 on the day; I swept the first round, got swept the second, split the third, swept the fourth, got swept the fifth. How’s that for a variety of results? Overall, 5-5 was a fine enough performance for me by my standards, but it was unfortunately quite an unenjoyable experience regardless of the results.

I had initially thought that a “single core” experience in this format — with the interesting System Core 2019 lists — would provide some degree of variety. Unfortunately, it certainly didn’t seem like that was the case during the tournament. Yesterday, I faced four Replicating Perfections and one Making News, as well as three Leelas and two Gabriel Santiagos. On Sunday at least, HB and NBN were hardly to be found, and Anarch wasn’t particularly successful either. I gather there was some success by a few of the Weylands (Blue Sun mainly) and also some marginal success by a couple of Kit players, but that’s just not a varied enough experience for me, I suppose. I was on Replicating Perfection and Leela myself (yes, I’m part of the problem!), but single core formats are pretty easy to solve pretty quickly, after all, so I was following the herd.

The big issue for me was the role of Paper Trail. I’d discussed this card in a previous post as one that I was particularly excited to see in the System Core 2019 list, as it was (1) more interesting than Private Security Force and (2) had potentially-fun interactions with Kati Jones, Professional Contacts, Bank Job, Armitage Codebusting, Scrubber, etc. For a format that leaned into Connections and Jobs for Runners, having an agenda that Corps could use to battle this seemed like such a great idea!

Except it was totally not fun for me at all.

Every game turned into one that hung on whether or not Paper Trail was scored early, scored late, or was taken out of the game before it got scored. The scoring of a Paper Trail was either a huge scoring window opener (six credits at least), or was a Runner economy destroying board wipe. In every game that Paper Trail was scored — both when I was Running or Corping — the card led to bad feels. Bad feels when I was Corping because, frankly, it’s not all that joyous to destroy an opponent’s econ in one fell swoop, it just feels mean. Bad feels when I was running because, shockingly, one can’t really come back from most Paper Trail scores with only two Kati Jones in SC2019. Kati is essential in Core Experience, Paper Trail is required of all Corps in Core Experience, and so this interaction which might have seemed fun and interesting at first, became tiresome and overdone when played in a tournament.

So, what is there to do about Core Experience? As a format, it’s probably already solved, and it’s also clearly been limited by these neutral agendas. You can’t make a Corp without Paper Trail, so your gameplan has to rely on seeing it or doing something with it, at least to a small degree. That’s a definite improvement over the often-blank Private Security Force, but now Paper Trail seems to have been designed around too much. NISEI’s honestly wonderful idea was to vary the Core every year, but its big problem is that it’s currently stuck to some of the limited agenda choices that plagued all of the FFG cores. As with many things NISEI has chosen to do in its first year (including Organized Play models and approaches), NISEI has stuck to what FFG did before it as a starting point.

I get the idea and am somewhat sympathetic. You want to keep the game familiar for older players, and rock the boat as little as possible at the beginning of your management of this game. You also want to just be able to tell a new player to combine all your agendas with the neutral agendas, and, voila, they don’t have to worry their heads by making any agenda decisions. But without making deck design decisions, Core Experience as a format feels both too predictable and too reliant on variance at the same time. One can’t add that third NIsei Mk II or, god forbid, a third Priority Requisition because of the hard 2x included in SC2019, and so you know exactly what to expect of the Corp’s agenda suite. As a Runner, you know exactly what to expect, and as a Corp you can’t create more consistent decks.

This isn’t to say that there isn’t room for some creative experimentation in Core XP and that perhaps we haven’t solved everything yet (I love that Jonas Wilson was playing around with Notoriety in Leela, even if it might not have been great). But it is to say that this “single core” format will need some tweaks to keep folks coming back to it. While the tournament was very well run and organized, it didn’t feel like this had enough fun variability or flexibility to sustain a format. I can’t imagine playing Core Experience as a format again without more degrees of freedom in deck design.

With the Core sets being revised once a year (presumably, based on the name), my hope is that a larger, broader set of testers will help to not just revise the card set for SC2020, but will help to redesign the format a bit more. Give us more options for neutral 4/2s (Show of Force could be fun?) — or even alternate 5/3s (the Fragments). Why not give us a bunch more 1x cards for extra spice and flavor? Giving us additional parameters to design decks around should be the priorty because, let’s be honest, telling new players to shuffle in all the faction and neutral agendas together isn’t going to be a big concern because, uh, there aren’t new players. Core Experience should be designed for those of us who are experienced and want a new format to play with, and not in order to try to keep things simple for new players that frankly don’t exist.

....

Oh, and one more thing. As you might remember, I was very excited to be a part of NISEI and announced that a few months back. You might have noticed that I haven’t used “we” or “us” in this or any other posts recently because I’ve been on the outs with that group for a while.

After I started writing this up last night, I found out that I was finally kicked out of NISEI — booted from NISEI’s internal Slack and now from their Trello and even their playtester forums. The reason given to me by “RealityCheque” was because I was “bad mouthing [NISEI] on Twitter,” which I suppose I was to some extent, depending on your definition of “bad mouthing.” Follow this thread, and I’ll let you judge for yourself how “bad mouthy” it was.

In general, I think it’s a good idea for everyone involved in this game to have respectful and constructive criticism around the game, and I thought I was doing that here. Like in this blog post, I questioned whether or not the Core Experience Paper Trail interaction had really been tested sufficiently. That was apparently the straw that broke the camel’s back as far as my NISEI club membership goes, and I’m honestly a little surprised at that. I mean, many people have said and thought much worse about NISEI than echoing someone else’s criticism about how well a set was tested, but that was the reason provided to me.

These things happen in fan-run projects all the time. Like I said, I’ve been expecting a boot from them for a while after I had internal conflicts with a few of the members of that organization and, as a consequence, had chosen to step away from the project beyond writing a few pieces of promotional copy. I really don’t care if I’m a part of NISEI any longer, as I contributed very little to the group and didn’t find myself in line with many of their approaches to collaborative work.

I’m more worried about NISEI’s approach to public criticism by its members and the way it (or maybe just a few individuals) view the activities of NISEI members outside the comfy confines of their private Slack. NISEI is a wonderful and ambitious venture, and one that is still getting its footing. I’d like to hope that, in the future, they’ll be better equipped to understand the ups and downs folks have with their products, including those of us ostensibly on the “inside” of the project. There should ideally be a better process to tease apart the criticisms that are intended to damage them from the ones that are about active discussions of what works well and what doesn’t in the game. We’re all still players who care about the game and often want to talk with others online about it. And if NISEI volunteers can’t feel like they can validate or echo others’ criticisms of the NISEI game without facing punitive measures like this, then I just don’t know how they’ll continue to attract anyone but those who already agree with their existing perspective on the game.

I wish them well. I’ve got a NISEI Store Championship kit on the way to me and I will probably still actually run it, though I’m unsure of that at the moment. I’m hopeful that the future of NISEI as it evolves will iron all out the kinks in their process, create some new and exciting variability in the game, and give us more reasons to play. Even if I’m not enjoying their current game, there’s always tomorrow.

#netrunner #byenisei #corexp #papertrailsux

2 notes · View notes

suzanneshannon · 4 years

Text

Review of the Surface Book 3 for Developers

I was offered a Surface Book 3 to use as a loaner over the the last 5 weeks. I did a short video teaser on Twitter where I beat on the device with a pretty ridiculous benchmark - running Visual Studio 2019 while running Gears of War and Ubuntu under WSL and Windows Terminal. I have fun. ;)

Hey they loaned me a @surface book 3! So...I threw EVERYTHING at it...Visual Studio, Gears of War, Ubuntu/WSL2/Windows...*all at the same time* because why not? LOL (review very soon) pic.twitter.com/FmgGCBUGuR

— Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) May 14, 2020

Size and Weight

My daily driver has been a Surface Book 2 since 2017. The new Surface Book 3 is the exact size (23mm thick as a laptop) and weight (3.38 and 4.2 lbs.) as the SB2. I have had to add a small sticker to one otherwise I'd get them confused. The display resolutions are 3000×2000 for the 13.5-inch model and 3240×2160 for the 15-inch one that I have. I prefer a 15" laptop. I don't know how you 13" people do it.

Basically if you are a Surface Book 2 user the size and weight are the same. The Surface Book 3 is considerably more power in the same size machine.

CPU and Memory

They gave me an i7-1065G7 CPU to test. It bursts happily over 3.5 Ghz (see the compiling screenshot below) and in my average usage hangs out in the 2 to 1.8 range with no fan on. I regularly run Visual Studio 2019, VS Code, Teams, Edge (new Edge, the Chromium one), Ubuntu via WSL2, Docker Desktop (the WSL2 one), Gmail and Outlook as PWAs, as well as Adobe Premiere and Audition and other parts of the Creative Suite. Memory usually sits around 14-18 gigs unless I'm rendering something big.

It's a 10th gen Intel chip and as the Surface Book 3 can detach the base from the screen, it's both a laptop and tablet. I gleaned from Anandatech that TDP is between 10 and 25W (usually 15W) depends on what is needed, and it shifts frequencies very fast. This is evident in the great battery life when doing things like writing this blog post or writing in Edge or Word (basically forever) versus playing a AAA game or running a long compile, building containers, or rendering a video in Premiere (several hours).

FLIP THE SCREEN AROUND? You can also when docked even reverse the screen! Whatever do you mean? It's actually awesome if you want an external keyboard.

All this phrased differently? It's fast, quickly, when it needs to be but it's constantly changing the clock to maximize power/thermals/battery.

SSD - Size and Speed

The device I was loaned has a Toshiba KXG60PNV2T04 Hard Drive 2TB NVMe M.2 that's MASSIVE. I'm used to 512G or maaybe a 1TB drive in a Laptop. I'm getting used to never having to worry about space. Definitely 1TB minimum these days if you want to play games AND do development.

I ran a CrystalBenchmark on the SSD and it did 3.2GB/s sequential reads! Sweet. I feel like the disk is not the bottleneck with my development compile tests below. When I consulted with the Surface team last year during the conception of the Surface Book 3 I pushed them for faster SSDs and I feel that they delivered with this 2TB SSD.

GPU - Gaming and Tensorflow

The 13.5-inch model now comes with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Max-Q GPU with 4GB of GDDR5 memory in its Core i7 variant, while the 15-inch unit features a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q with 6GB of GDDR6 memory. When running the Gears 5 Benchmark while plugged in (from the Extras menu, Benchmark) is has no issues with the default settings doing 60fps for 90% of the benchmark with a few dips into the 57 range depending what's on screen.

It's not a gaming machine, per se, but it does have a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti so I'm basically able to 1080p 60fps AAA games. I've played Destiny 2, Gears of War 5, and Call of Duty Modern Warfare on default settings at 60 fps without issue. The fan does turn on but it's very manageable. I like that whenever we get back into hotels I'll be able to play some games and develop on the same machine. The 15" also includes an Xbox Wireless Adapter so I just paired my controller with it directly.

I was also able to run Tensorflow with CUDA on the laptop under Windows and it worked great. I ran a model against some video footage from my dashcam and 5.1 gigs of video RAM was used immediately and the CUDA engine on the 1660Ti is visible working in Taskman. The commercial SKU has an NVIDIA Quadro RTX 3000 that is apparently even more tuned for CUDA work.

Developer Performance

When I built my Intel i9 Ultimate Desktop 3.0 machine and others, I like to do compile tests to get a sense of how much you can throw at machine. I like big project compiles because they are a combination of a lot of disk access and a lot of parallel CPU work. However, some projects do have a theoretical maximum compile speed because of the way the dependences flesh out. I like to use Orchard Core for benchmarks.

Orchard Core is a fully-featured CMS with 143 projects loaded into Visual Studio. MSBUILD and .NET Core supports both parallel and incremental builds.

A warm build of Orchard Core on IRONHEART my i9 desktop takes just under 10 seconds.

My 6 year old Surface Pro 3 builds it warm in 62 seconds.

A totally cold build (after a dotnet clean) on IRONHEART takes 33.3 seconds.

My Surface Pro 3 builds it cold in 2.4 minutes.

I'll do the same build on both my Surface Book 2 and this new Surface Book 3 to compare. I've excluded the source folders from Defender as well as msbuild.exe and dotnet.exe. I've also turned off the Indexer.

A cold build (after a dotnet clean) on this Surface Book 3 takes 46 seconds.

A warm build is 16.1 seconds

A cold build (after a dotnet clean) on my Surface Book 2 takes 115 seconds.

It's WAY faster than my Surface Book 2 which has been my daily driver when mobile for nearly 3 years!

Benchmarks are all relative and there's raw throughput, there's combination benchmarks, and all kinds of things that can "make a chart." I just do benchmarks that show if I can do a thing I did before, faster.

You can also test various guesses if you have them by adding parameters to dotnet.exe. For example, perhaps you're thinking that 143 projects is thrashing to disk so you want to control how many CPUs are used. This has 4 physical cores and 8 logical, so we could try pulling back a little

dotnet build /maxcpucount:4

The result with Orchard Core is the same, so there is likely a theoretical max as to how fast this can build today. If you really want to go nuts, try

dotnet build -v diag

And dig through ALL the timing info!

Webcam Quality

Might be odd to add this as its own section but we're all using our webcams constantly right now. I was particularly impressed with the front-facing webcam. A lot of webcams are 720p with mediocre white balance. I do a lot of video calls so I notice this stuff. The SB3 has a 1080p front camera for video and decent light pickup. When using the Camera app you can do up to 5MP (2560x1920) which is cool. Here's a pic from today.

Ports and Power and Sound and Wi-Fi

The Surface Book 3 has just one USB-C port on the right side and two USB 3.1 Gen 2s on the left. I'd have liked one additional USB-C so I could project on stage and still have one additional USB-C available...but I don't know what for. I just want one more port. That said, the NEW Surface Dock 2 adds FOUR USB-C ports, so it's not a big deal.

It was theoretically possible to pull more power on the SB2 than its power supply could offer. While I never had an issue with that, I've been told by some Destiny 2 players and serious media renderers that it could happen. With the SB3 they upped the power supply with 65W for the base 13.5-inch version and a full 127W for the 15-inch SKUs so that's not an issue any more.

I have only two Macs for development and I have no Thunderbolt devices or need for an eGPU so I may not be the ideal Thunderbolt consumer. I haven't needed it yet. Some folks have said that it's a bummer the SB3 doesn't have it but it hasn't been an issue or sticking point for any of my devices today. With the new Surface Dock 2 (below) I have a single cable to plug in that gives me two 4k monitors at 60Hz, lots of power, 4 USB-C ports all via the Dock Connector.

I also want to touch on sound. There is a fan inside the device and if it gets hot it will run. If I'm doing 1080p 60fps in Call of Duty WarZone you can likely hear the fan. It comes and goes and while it's audible when the fan is on, when the CPU is not maxed out (during 70% of my work day) the Surface Book 3 is absolutely silent, even when running the monitors. The fan comes on with the CPU is bursting hard over 3Ghz and/or the GPU is on full blast.

One other thing, the Surface Book 3 has Wi-Fi 6 even though I don't! I have a Ubnt network and no Wi-Fi 6 mesh points. I haven't had ANY issues with the Wi-Fi on this device over Ubnt mesh points. When copying a 60 gig video file over Wi-Fi from my Synology NAS I see sustained 280 megabit speeds.

The New Surface Dock - Coming May 26th

I'm also testing a pre-release Surface Dock 2. I suspect they wanted me to test it with the Surface Book 3...BUT! I just plugged in every Surface I have to see what would happen.

My wife has a Surface Laptop 2 she got herself, one son has my 6 year old old Surface Pro 3 while the other has a Surface Go he got with his allowance. (We purchased these over the last few years.) As such we have three existing Surface Docks (original) - One in the kids' study/playroom, one in the Kitchen as a generalized docking station for anyone to drop in to, and one in my office assigned me by work.

We use these individual Surfaces (varying ages, sizes, and powers) along with my work-assigned Surface Book 2 plus this loaner Surface Book 3, so it's kind of a diverse household from a purely Surface perspective. My first thought was - can I use all these devices with the new Dock? Stuff just works with a few caveats for older stuff like my Surface Pro 3.

RANDOM NOTE: What happens when you plug a Surface Pro 3 (released in 2014) into a Surface Dock 2? Nothing, but it does get power. However, the original Surface Dock is great and still runs 4096 x 2160 @30Hz or 2960 x 1440 @60Hz via mini DisplayPort so the Pro 3 is still going strong 6 years out and the kids like it.

So this Surface Dock 2 replaces the original Dock my office. The Surface Dock 2 has

2x front-facing USB-C ports (I use these for two 4k monitors)

2x rear-facing USB-C ports

2x rear-facing USB-A 3.2 (10Gbps) ports

1x Gigabit Ethernet port

1x 3.5mm audio in/out port

Kensington lock slot - I've never used this

First, that's a lot of USB-C. I'm not there yet with the USB-C lifestyle, but I did pick up two USB-C to full-size DisplayPort cables at Amazon and I can happily report that I can run both my 4k monitors at 60hz plus run the main Surface Book 3 panel. The new Dock and its power supply can push 120 watts of power to the Surface with a total of 199 watts everything connected to the dock. I've got a few USB-C memory sticks and one USB-C external hard drive, plus the Logitech Brio is USB 3, so 6 total ports is fine with 4 free after the two monitors. I also Gigabit wired the whole house so I use the Ethernet port quite happily.

Initially I care about one thing - my 4k monitors. Using the USB-C to DisplayPort cables I plugged the dock into two Dell P2715Q 4ks and they work! I preferred using the direct cables rather than any adapters, but I also tested a USB-C to HDMI 2.0 adapter I got in 2018 with some other Dell monitors in the house and that worked with the Surface Book 3 as it had previously with the Book 2.

SURPRISE NOTE: How does the super-thin Surface Pro X do when plugged into a Surface Dock 2? Amazing. It runs two 4k monitors at 60 Hz. I don't know why I was shocked, it's listed on the support page. It's a brand new device, but it's also the size and weight of an iPad so I was surprised. It's a pretty amazing little device - I'll do another post on just the ARM-based Surface Pro X another time.

One final thing about the new Dock. The cable is longer! The first dock had a cable that was about 6" too short and now it's not. It's the little things and in this case, a big thing that makes a Dock that much nicer to use.

Conclusion

All in all, I'm very happy with this Surface Book 3 having been an existing Surface Book 2 user. It's basically 40-50% faster, the video card is surprisingly capable. The SSD is way faster at the top end. It's a clear upgrade over what I had before, and when paired with the Surface Dock 2 and two 4k monitors it's a capable developer box for road warriors or home office warriors like myself.

Sponsor: Have you tried developing in Rider yet? This fast and feature-rich cross-platform IDE improves your code for .NET, ASP.NET, .NET Core, Xamarin, and Unity applications on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Review of the Surface Book 3 for Developers published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/

0 notes

philipholt · 4 years

Text

Review of the Surface Book 3 for Developers

— Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) May 14, 2020

Size and Weight

Basically if you are a Surface Book 2 user the size and weight are the same. The Surface Book 3 is considerably more power in the same size machine.

CPU and Memory

FLIP THE SCREEN AROUND? You can also when docked even reverse the screen! Whatever do you mean? It's actually awesome if you want an external keyboard.

All this phrased differently? It's fast, quickly, when it needs to be but it's constantly changing the clock to maximize power/thermals/battery.

SSD - Size and Speed

GPU - Gaming and Tensorflow

Developer Performance

Orchard Core is a fully-featured CMS with 143 projects loaded into Visual Studio. MSBUILD and .NET Core supports both parallel and incremental builds.

A warm build of Orchard Core on IRONHEART my i9 desktop takes just under 10 seconds.

My 6 year old Surface Pro 3 builds it warm in 62 seconds.

A totally cold build (after a dotnet clean) on IRONHEART takes 33.3 seconds.

My Surface Pro 3 builds it cold in 2.4 minutes.

A cold build (after a dotnet clean) on this Surface Book 3 takes 46 seconds.

A warm build is 16.1 seconds

A cold build (after a dotnet clean) on my Surface Book 2 takes 115 seconds.

It's WAY faster than my Surface Book 2 which has been my daily driver when mobile for nearly 3 years!

dotnet build /maxcpucount:4

The result with Orchard Core is the same, so there is likely a theoretical max as to how fast this can build today. If you really want to go nuts, try

dotnet build -v diag

And dig through ALL the timing info!

Webcam Quality

Ports and Power and Sound and Wi-Fi

It was theoretically possible to use pull power on the SB2 than it's power supply could push. While I never had an issue with that, I've been told by some Destiny 2 players and serious media renderers that it could happen. With the SB3 they upped the power supply with 65W for the base 13.5-inch version and a full 127W for the 15-inch SKUs so that's not an issue any more.

I also want to touch on sound. There is a fan inside the device and if it gets hot it will run. If I'm doing 1080p 60fps in Call of Duty WarZone you can likely hear the fan. It comes and goes and while it's audible when it's one, when the CPU is not maxed out (during 70% of my work day) the Surface Book 3 is absolutely silent, even when running the monitors. The fan comes on with the CPU is bursting hard over 3Ghz and/or the GPU is on full blast.

The New Surface Dock - Coming May 26th

I'm also testing a pre-release Surface Dock 2. I suspect they wanted me to test it with the Surface Book 3...BUT! I just plugged in every Surface I have to see what would happen.

So this Surface Dock 2 replaces the original Dock my office. The Surface Dock 2 has

2x front-facing USB-C ports (I use these for two 4k monitors)

2x rear-facing USB-C ports

2x rear-facing USB-A 3.2 (10Gbps) ports

1x Gigabit Ethernet port

1x 3.5mm audio in/out port

Kensington lock slot - I've never used this

Conclusion

Review of the Surface Book 3 for Developers published first on http://7elementswd.tumblr.com/

0 notes

xavidotron · 7 years

Text

Chuubo’s Book 1 Thoughts

Quests

Quests! Quests are great. I love quests. A++, would quest again.

I guess I should probably say more than that.

Storyline quests are this brilliant evocative point of conveying worldbuilding/feel through symbolism and narrative elements without getting bogged down in specifics. Finding a spring of clear water or telling stories about the death of the sun or whatever helps establish a certain part of the Chuubo’s feel, but is also super-flexible so you don’t feel like you’re tied to some railroad tracks of the True Jenna Story.

Anytime quests were cool too, but less distinctive from other systems I’ve played.

Pacing was a bit weird for quests relative to our natural progression of play. One of my players said “For Chuubo’s I thought that the lack of convergence between the quests we had and the events in the story was a problem in that there wasn't any reason for a quest to end when we achieved what we were working towards in-story or vice versa.” The first arc quests seemed a bit long, in that they stopped being interesting before we hit XP targets. The second quests ended up being the other way around, where we hit XP targets before the quest felt narratively complete. (I don’t know if we just got better at generating XP or what.) Obviously in this second case being on more quests at once is an option, but it still ended up feeling a bit weird narratively.

It does make me wonder how the XP targets for storyline quests are determined, other than the “about half of XP can come from major goals” guideline. They seem pretty variable and arbitrary. It also makes me wonder if it’d make sense to have XP targets/totals for arcs but not individual quests, and move onto the next quest based on narrative appropriateness.

(I also have vague ideas for a quest progression more general than the eight arcs, but that’s for another time.)

Issues

Issues I’ve had a lot of trouble with. They’d hang around for a while, and it wouldn’t seem like it was ready to move to the next step yet, and then they’d get lost track of. Or the next step wouldn’t seem to make sense, like “It Never Stops” requiring making commitments for some reason despite the summary making it seem like it was more about irrational stuff happening to you.

Part of this might be that I should’ve been using Issues for smaller stuff, not for major Book plot stuff. Honey’s Calling issue got stuck because her relationship with Fairyland was a major, long-term plot that’s been gradually evolving, not something that should be pressed to resolve quickly. Maybe discussing smaller and/or more pastoral stuff for issues would’ve worked better.

But also, I think a lot of my trouble was that I was treating the cards as if they should be sufficient information for how to play the issue, like they are for quests, when actually the guidance from the book would’ve helped me conceptualize things a lot better. (I also had the “Which Issue Should I Give?” table on a reference sheet, but that didn’t prepare me for later levels of an issue either.) I’ve prepared one-pagers for issues that I’m going to try for Book 2, hopefully those will help things go more smoothly.

Issues are also weird in that they play in a similar space to Quests, but in a different way. They remind me of the Bond/Affliction dichotomy in that respect. For example, if a character gets poisoned and eventually finds a way to turn that into a source of strength, is that the Sickness Issue or a quest like Poisoned? It’s not necessarily bad to have two different mechanics for a character’s narrative progression, but I think this helped make Issues, in some ways the more general/less tailorable/less active mechanic, harder to grasp for me.

Issue timing is also a bit weird for me. I was attempting to use the “Simplified Implementation”, as recommended for tabletop games focused on in-character play, which has you assign Issues once per chapter or natural breakpoint. In practice for us, this mostly meant between sessions. This worked weirdly with the “Lowering an Issue” rules, which would have each player also lose a point from some issue after each session. I pretty much ignored lowering issues, mainly because it seemed like it’d result in an issue that didn’t feel ready for, say, Level 4 ping-ponging between levels 2 and 3, which would generate lots of MP but not make a lot of sense. Certainly there are some issues that should’ve gone away at this point that I’ll probably clear for book 2, though.

Intentions

Intentions I was familiar with from Nobilis. That doesn’t mean I’m actually good at them. Largely we formed intentions backwards: a player says “I want to convince the Duke to set the rabble rousers free and have them accompany me as ambassadors.” and I look at the ladder and figure out what level of ladder success that seems to need and any relevant Obstacles and say “well, you’d probably need an intention N”. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with this, but it doesn’t really use the full expressiveness of the ladder, and it doesn’t seem to be the intent.

Also, I’m really bad at remembering the “get 1 Will back when you succeed or fail” rule.

Miraculous Arcs

Arc powers were really cool in an evocative metaphysics way, providing flexibility while also giving you lots of guidance and idea seeds. They also have lots of hair. I think we definitely used miracles less than we otherwise might because that meant paging through the arc printouts, finding the relevant power (possibly among several versions), reading the text to make sure it applies properly, and trying to remember how many times we’ve used this power and how long ago that was. I definitely feel like simpler cost structures would make it easier to use arc abilities in play. (Or at least, if cost structures tended to work the same way for different powers, it’d be easier to remember.) And I still like the idea of simplified “playbook” reference sheets so it’s easier to find a power and quickly get an idea of what it does.

That said, the miraculous arcs definitely added a lot to the game narrative-wise. At Arc 3, it creates a feel of “the PCs can solve pretty much any problem, but it’ll be interesting to see how they do it”, which I quite enjoyed. But it seems like it would have played similarly with more simply-worded and -costed abilities.

Genre

When I went into this game, I had the intention of trying to stick closely to the Pastoral genre, as it seemed the most different from what I’ve played in the past and it reminded me of, like, Ghibli movies, which I love. I was… partially successful? In practice, we ended up swapping into another genre, maybe Adventure Fantasy, periodically. Our miraculous powers and the arc baggage, plus the ambient excitement in the setting, plus our natural inclinations made it easy to get into exciting situations that didn’t want to play out over the course of weeks with Pastoral actions. But I do feel like having the default be “two XP actions a week, skip time between scenes” really helped me get a handle on pacing for tabletopping, which is something I’ve struggled with before, and that default structure, the festival calendar, and the other incidentals made us hew much closer to a Pastoral feel then we’d have gotten otherwise, even if we didn’t stick strictly to it.

(I’m inclined to formalize the genre split for Book 2, though I’ll see how the players feel.)

For a bit, I was trying to be more aggressive about bonus XP for in-genre XP actions, because the Quest 1s felt like they were taking too long to complete. But it ended up feeling intrusive and disruptive to play to prompt players with the bonus XP conditions, so I gave up on that. The Quest 2s felt too short, and XP actions work fine without paying attention to the bonus XP conditions, so I feel like leaving them out entirely is totally fine.

Despite it being helpful, I’m still a bit mixed on the strict week schedule. It lead to pretty strict tracking of what week of Spring it was and what day of the week, which felt a bit out of place; in Steven Universe or Totoro you have time passing and seasons progressing, but you don’t pay attention to exactly how many days have passed. Having chapter transitions vary between “it’s several days later” and “some weeks have passed and it’s now the night before Celdinar Day” and “some months pass, and the days are getting longer, and the flowers are blooming on the cliffs by Big Lake” seems potentially more evocative and natural, but possibly harder to systematize.

Also, particularly in the Adventure Fantasy sections, tying XP action refresh to Will refresh seems a bit weird. Being out of XP actions is comparatively boring, so I’d be tempted to call a new chapter even if exciting stuff was in the middle of going on. But, that could make a character go from “exhausted and battered” to “doing pretty well” without in-game passing, which is pretty uninspiring. One option that might work for this game structure is that you only get Will/MP refresh at the start of a Pastoral chapter; if you’re off storming the Bleak Academy you can take lots of Wicked and Decisive actions but you’re not going to get your Will back until you get home and get a good night’s sleep, or at least find time to have some Slices of Live or Shared Reactions in the shadow of the Bleak.

(Another concept I had was, rather than having XP Actions be a resource, just have a dinosaur or something you pass around with the person with the dinosaur next in line for an XP action. I feel like this tears out the structure supporting Pastoral timeskips, though. A related concept is doing bonus XP actions at or during genre-shifts.)

Another thing that I think would’ve worked well with a Pastoral feel was more focus on little problems somewhat easily solved but with emotional content or other significance. Lost kids, outside storms, a confused fire elemental. Stuff not necessarily or obvious connected to a Big Book Plot. We did some of this (Honey going to Fairyland to get Hope Flowers for the school festival, Nicholas getting Sessily enrolled in School), but maybe in my habit of trying to tie everything together I missed out on opportunities for more stuff along these lines.

With this, something that felt missing because of my preconceived notions of Chuubo’s was system support for things going wrong and unintended consequences. If you’ve got Chuubo as a PC, his MWGE has built-in ways and parameters for wishes to backfire, but the Chuubo's rules as written generally seem to assume that miraculous abilities will work according to your intention by default. Having mechanical support or incentive for powers to go wrong, have unintended consequences, or complicate things in general seems like it’d work well with Pastoral Chuubo’s’s juxtaposition of simple, honest life and reality-breaking powers. It'd give lots of opportunity for simple Pastoral exploration of the consequences of over-the-top things. At least, it seems like you should get an MP discount when you use your powers in a way that makes things worse. (To be fair, we did a fair amount of this anyways with Honey’s involuntary uses of her Called Away powers to get her into trouble.)

(Hmm, maybe this is part of the concept of how Frantic is supposed to go? I don’t think our Frantic PC ever used it.)

On an unrelated note, one thing I like doing is having players whose characters aren’t in a scene temporarily adopt NPCs, particularly NPCs they have a connection to. Having XP actions be explicitly a player-level so you can use them even when acting as an NPC or whatever could be interesting support for that, though it’d also be a little weird, and it doesn’t seem like it’d come up enough to be important.

Narritivism

One thing that I really liked that might be more subtext than actual text in Chuubo’s is player-driven scene framing. The XP actions and quest stuff motivates players to sometimes say “can we have a scene where X happens?” instead of focusing just on in-character actions, and I quite liked that collaborative approach.

Beyond that, and mostly outside the system, we ended up with some “dictated scenes” (a term from Microscope) where one player talks about what happens when they’re off on their own, including the environment and what NPCs do. This most notably happened with Honey, in part because her player has a much clearer concept of Fairyland than I do, but I think Nicholas did something similar at some point, and I as HG did a similar thing a few times as a sort of “cut scene” to bridge to a scene I actually wanted to play.

Rituals and Transitions

Rituals are a good way of advancing the plot when no one has a predefined power that does what you want and are fun and collaborative. The rituals we used tended to be improvisational one-offs, rather than set predefined things, but that was fine. I certainly could’ve used them more, but with the amount of miracles we were throwing around and not being Full Techno there didn’t seem to be much need to. Like, we could’ve done the Sailing Big Lake ritual every time we went through Big Lake, but it seemed like it’d slow things down in a way that wasn’t quite right for Nicholas’s implausibly-effortless approach to sailing.

Transitions I often ended up in one of two situations: not having appropriate material prepared when I wanted to do one or forgetting to use my material when it would be appropriate to have a transition. I mean, I prepared all this Charon stuff before the first session and never used it despite all the Charon-flavored Underworld nonsense we got up to! But it’s all good. I feel like they’re cool conceptually, but also not all that different from a more standard described transition (which has some conceptual overlap with “cut scenes”).

Conclusion

Chuubo’s has a lot going on and has certainly given me a lot to think about. It’s certainly up there with Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist in opening new venues of thought on game design for me. While I’m sure sooner or later I’ll try to abstract some of my favorite parts into something simpler, the mechanical elaborateness hasn’t kept it from being amazing, and it’ll be interesting to see where Book 2 goes with perhaps a bit better understanding of things.

#cmwge #tabletopping

3 notes · View notes

teritcrawfordca · 5 years

Text

Business Tax Issues to Consider with the New Tax Law

Every week as SmallBizLady, I conduct interviews with experts on my Twitter talk show #SmallBizChat. The show takes place every Wednesday on Twitter from 8-9 pm ET. This is excerpted from my recent interview with Eva Rosenberg @TaxMama. Eva is the Internet’s TaxMama®. She answers tax questions, provides a TaxQuips podcast and a wealth of books and webinars to help you deal with your personal and business tax issues. Her latest book, The Trump Tax Cut: Your Personal Guide to the New Tax Law, is a practical explanation of the key tax provisions that affect you and your business. For more information, check out www.TaxMama.com .

SmallBizLady: We got a new tax law at the end of 2017, but very little other tax legislation. Does that mean this will be an easy tax filing season?

TaxMama: I wish I could deliver good news. Sadly, this will be the worst filing season ever – for many reasons.

The IRS is still trying to write up procedures for many of the law changes in the TCJA (Tax Cuts and Jobs Act).

Congress never passed their annual “extender” bill – so many tax breaks were not extended to 2018.

The government shutdown has severely impacted IRS services and access to information and help.

SmallBizLady: Tell me something easy – especially for small businesses – what are the mileage rates for 2018?

TaxMama: Thanks for an easy question. The 2018 mileage rates are:

54 cents per mile for business miles driven.

18 cents per mile driven for medical or moving purposes.

14 cents per mile driven in service of charitable organizations.

25 cents per mile is the depreciation on the vehicle.

While we’re at it, here are the mileage rates for 2019, so you can work on this year’s expense reports and vehicle planning.

58 cents for every mile of business travel driven.

20 cents per mile driven for medical or moving purposes.

14 cents per mile driven in service of charitable organizations.

25 cents per mile is the depreciation on the vehicle.

SmallBizLady: You mentioned that there was a good reason to put business tax returns on extension. Why wait?

TaxMama: Several reasons.

As ever, companies are still scrambling to get all their W-2s and 1099s filed and sent out on time. So expect them to be late.

Since the IRS is clarifying procedures, one or more of their announcements might be to your benefit.

As I mentioned, we didn’t get an “extender bill” yet. But we probably will – and it could affect your tax returns.

And, since there were major flaws in the new tax law, it’s quite possible that Congress will issue some legislation to correct those flaws.

SmallBizLady: Why not just file now and amend later?

TaxMama: Those 1040Xs are scrutinized by people, instead of just being processed by computers. An IRS reviewer might see other issues in that amended return – and it could turn into a full-blown audit. If you’re confident that everything in your tax return is correct, amending is just fine.

SmallBizLady: You mentioned that we should wait for the extenders. Let’s see if they are worth waiting for?

TaxMama: These tax provisions expired as of 12/31/17. It’s quite likely that only the first two items on the list will affect many individuals.

Mortgage insurance premiums treated as qualified residence interest.

Above-the-line deduction for qualified tuition and related expenses.

The $500 deduction for the non-business energy credit.

The credit for new qualified fuel cell vehicles.

The credit for 2-wheeled plug-in electric vehicles.

Exclusion from gross income of discharge of qualified principal residence indebtedness.

Special write-offs for certain television and live theatrical productions.

Certain Empowerment Zone tax incentives.

SmallBizLady: Last year, we talked about a new problem for employees with unreimbursed business expenses. Apparently, with the new tax law, they can no longer take any deductions. Did you come up with any solutions?

TaxMama: You’re right. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act eliminated all miscellaneous itemized deductions that are normally reduced by 2% of adjusted gross income. This year, Form 2106, Employee Business Expenses, has been eliminated altogether. Who’s affected? All outside salespeople, as well as people who use their own tools and supplies at work, and all employees who pay for these kinds of expenses, out of their own pockets: meals, entertainment, travel, supplies, education, computers, office in home, even union dues. The good news is, these deductions are not eliminated for businesses or entities – folks reporting income on Schedule C, LLCs, partnerships, S corporation and C corporations, and trusts.

SmallBizLady: For employees that will lose these deductions, is there something they can do? After all, losing deductions for, say, $25,000 of unreimbursed employee business expenses can mean extra federal and state taxes of $6,000 or more.

TaxMama: Yes, there are still three options for an employee:

Re-negotiate their job with their employers, so the employer does reimburse them for their expenses. A good way to handle this is to use an “accountable plan” where they submit their mileage and receipts to the employer. Then the employer reimburses them. The employer gets all the deductions – and the employee doesn’t pay tax on any of those reimbursements. I have an on-demand course to teach you how to do this and how to make the increased wages fair to the employer available at http://taxmama.com/tax-quips/webinar-the-trump-tax-plan/.

Negotiate an arrangement where they can become freelancers, under contract to the employer. That means the employee goes into business for him/herself. This can make all the expenses deductible – but the employee could lose so very much in the process. I have information about this at http://taxmama.com/tax-quips/switching-from-employee-status-to-independent-contractor/.

Get another job with an employer who will be cooperative with step #1.

SmallBizLady: I hear with the new tax law we can’t deduct entertainment expenses anymore. What’s going on?

TaxMama: Yes. Effective January 1, 2018 – everyone, including business owners, loses all deductions for entertainment expenses. That means no concerts, no plays, no sporting events, etc. Not even if it’s part of a business meeting or discussion. Having Apple buy up a stadium and bring a big-name entertainer to a convention – not deductible.

SmallBizLady: What about meals? We still get to deduct those, right?

TaxMama: There are some changes to the deductions for meals. We still get to deduct our meals when we go out with a client. If we just send them out to dinner on us – no deduction. We must be present with them.

We got one carrot – when it comes to entertainment events. If you separate out the cost of the meal, you can still deduct that part of the cost. Be sure to get a separate invoice from the facility’s provider.

Another thing we lost with the new tax law: employers who provide on-site meals (lunches, breakfast, dinner for late workers, etc.) used to get a 100% deduction for the cost of those meals. That has been cut to 50%. But if we have a special event, like the occasional company picnic, that’s still 100% deductible.

SmallBizLady: Let’s get back to businesses – some people are talking about becoming C corporations with that new low 21% flat tax rate. Is that a good idea?

TaxMama: For some people, especially those with a long-term plan for their businesses, corporations might be a great idea. With the right planning and finessing, the amount of profit, retirement benefits, wages, and dividends, you could end up paying less tax than you have been paying for the business.

For someone who’s planning to take their business public, C corporations are the best way to go, for many reasons. But the tax reason? If you do it right, you can avoid paying taxes on up to 10 MILLION DOLLARS of capital gains when you sell your stock. However, if you don’t set it up correctly from the very beginning, you’ve blown this special benefit.

If you enjoyed this interview, please join us live on Twitter every Wednesday from 8-9 pm ET. Just follow the hashtag #Smallbizchat, and don’t forget to follow @SmallBizChat on Twitter.

Click here for directions to join the weekly conversation.

The post Business Tax Issues to Consider with the New Tax Law appeared first on Succeed As Your Own Boss.

from Teri Crawford Business Tips https://succeedasyourownboss.com/business-tax-issues-to-consider-with-the-new-tax-law/

0 notes

takenews-blog1 · 6 years

Text

Pixel 2's Now Taking part in Characteristic Turns into Unresponsive With Phrases With Mates 2 App, Customers Report

New Post has been published on https://takenews.net/pixel-2s-now-taking-part-in-characteristic-turns-into-unresponsive-with-phrases-with-mates-2-app-customers-report/

Pixel 2's Now Taking part in Characteristic Turns into Unresponsive With Phrases With Mates 2 App, Customers Report

Some Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL customers declare that the Phrases With Mates 2 app breaks the default ‘Now Taking part in’ music recognition function. The brand new difficulty, as reported by customers on Google Product Boards, silently disables the preloaded function that was designed by the search large to counter Shazam, which additionally affords an analogous music recognition function by means of its app.

First noticed by expertise weblog PiunikaWeb, a lot of Google Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL customers have reported the problem on Google Product Boards. The affected customers have discovered that after uninstalling the Phrases With Mates 2 app, they’re able to allow their Pixel 2 fashions to recognise the music taking part in within the background. “I simply found that the app Phrases With Mates causes now taking part in to cease working. Works completely all day except I open the Phrases With Mates app,” one of many customers who found the problem after some preliminary postings on the product boards wrote.

It seems that the Phrases With Mates 2 app has some conflicts with the software-centric ‘Now Taking part in’ function on the Pixel 2 household. The affected customers are at present really helpful to reboot their handsets after accessing the Phrases With Mates 2 app to make use of the music recognition function. Uninstalling the conflicting app can even resolve the problem. Nonetheless, Google is intrinsically engaged on a repair that may attain your Pixel gadget quickly. “[T]hese experiences have made us conscious of this difficulty, and we’re engaged on a repair. We actually recognize you coming right here to share what you have discovered,” a Google group supervisor writes in response to the invention of the brand new flaw.

Final week, the Pixel 2 XL was within the headlines for some speaker distortion points that have been reported by its customers on Google Product Boards. A number of customers even noticed earlier this month that the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL are dealing with points with bundled headphone adapters. Most apparently, the arrival of Android eight.1 Oreo on the Pixel 2 XL few weeks again even slowed down its fingerprint sensor for some customers.

#Android #Apps #Google #Google Pixel 2 #google pixel 2 xl now playing music recognition feature becomes unresponsive with words with friends 2 app pixel 2 #Mobiles #Pixel 2 #Pixel 2 XL #Words with Friends 2

0 notes

taxadvicefl-blog · 7 years

Text

New Post has been published on Tax Advice

New Post has been published on http://taxadvicellc.com/tax-preparation/professional-tax-software-reviews-2015-turbotax-review/

Professional Tax Software Reviews 2015 - Turbotax Review

Choose your corresponding product. Saving a number of money on taxes was probably worth the few dollars more spent day on this software VS competition.

With up to 4 e filings per purchase you usually can file taxes for the family, turboTax is our #one pick.

p that with good customer tax, a professional audit and support consultant service and you’ll look for TurboTax is always complicated to beat. That’s the reason why they were probably our choice for better tax company. Program seamlessly integrates with the specific state’s tax filing systems. Consequently, plus 1040EZ filings usually were free. You wait all year to do it and once you’re done, So there’s this feeling of accomplishing something.

It’s like spring cleaning. I am strange enough to virtually get a sick satisfaction out of doing taxes. To file taxes and catch any potential one of the problems. Error checks are a crucial part of tax filing for any software user. That is interesting right? Most reputable tax products these weeks offer error check maintenance. Oftentimes we spend a lot time working on our taxes that we may neglect to notice even the most obvious mistakes so it’s crucial to have a second line of defense to minimize a IRS risk audit. After these minimal requirements been met.

You said that HR Tax Cut 2013 lacks forum support and no professional audit defense or professional tax consulting.

Apparently you have been getting the information from the TurboTax web site which states this information.

HR Block’s web site says they offer this right on their front page. By the way, the software that I have in hand says merely opposite. They probably were all really the stores and price appears to be entirely difference but now I see likewise are these 2 extremely unusual but look, there’re so a few more options. Yuck! For years I was making an attempt to find out how turbo tax and tax cut have been unusual. A well-prominent fact that was usually. Now time to practically do my taxes. Good comparisons with the edges and drawbacks. Now let me tell you something. Beware of TurboTax if you choose to pay via the tax refund.

They will charge you an extra $ 34 dot 99 bank processing fee in addition to whatever you paid to file, that in my case was $ 34.we just clicked right past that fee and submitted. Still feel a little cheated, that was my fault for not looking at it close enough. While everything seemed big and first service met my needs, at their. Basically, quickly, I was looking at paying over $ 100 to prepare my taxes. These rates put a strain on my visa card and sent me in search of another company, as a college student and parttime writer. As my taxes turned out to be more complicated, the rates got higher and higher. I turned to HR Block, when I started my career in freelance writing. Therefore this was something I actually could not afford. HR Block offers ‘worry free’ audit support, that is practically appealing to me. I will have to deal with a LLC filing, I started a side business this year. On p of this, I’ve narrowed my search down betwixt Turbo Tax and HR Block.

Does anybody have experience with more advanced tax software features?

Anybody have any suggestions?

HR Block’s ‘Premium’ option has been slightly cheaper than Turbo Tax’s ‘Home Business’. It’s next to impossible to think that I’m again thinking about 2012 taxes. So price was perfect and site was good to use. Let me tell you something.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soBHT8onxF4

I consequently began using company. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure I would still be using TaxAct if it hadn’t been for last tax form, 1099I searched for it impossible to find out how to enter this information without it looking like we was making twice as much as they virtually was. With that said, this led me to TurboTax. Besides, they ranged from $ 138 to $ That’s a nice difference for me to trust, they all said they owe state. January 13, 2016 we donno who was usually best -I see we did four exclusive programs and while they have been all extremely close on ministerial, State numbers were all over block. Return was dropped off at the CPA this afternoon! Oftentimes direct deposit may not be a must have feature on our list but if you were probably looking for a reputable tax company to go with, chances are that they offer it as an option.

And so it’s a lot faster way of receiving a tax refund and most tax firms these months choose it, direct deposit may not seem like this kind of a huge deal.

Not all filing software provides opportunity to file state returns in addition to ministerial returns but these months lots of do offer this feature there actually is no excuse for not offering it.

Besides, a state return feature makes filing our taxes a lot easier and more streamlined process and lets you get everything taken care of in a single session with less hassle. Visit Website TaxSlayer may have rates that you are looking for wheneverit gets to filing our own taxes but So there’re a few areas where this service tumbles pretty short. Anyways, TaxSlayer could have been a decent option for you… unless you were always a huge business, if you aren’t looking for a wealth of customer support options and if you aren’t concerned with audit defense.

Many big features that lack in this service includes customer support.

I looked for options to Turbo Tax this for a while being that and switch which will push me to premium for what used to work in deluxe and I’ve in no circumstances liked the way it works Besides, a massive question for me was usually will we import all my investment 1099s. For instance, visit Website explore our full review of eSmart Tax ExpressTaxRefund ReviewVisit Website Of tax all products compared here on this website, ExpressTaxRefund offers solutions least amount for among the greatest fees. Basically, expressTaxRefund isn’t the service for you if you have been a vast business, a rental property owner or looking for consultation from a tax professional in advance of filing our taxes. I may try one more place or do it by hand to doublecheck whether.

I went over that section multiple times.

They said they owed hundreds.

Either there’s something they overlooked or didn’t do right, or that I did my taxes on TaxAct and they seemed to have calculated everything correctly and said they will get a refund. I tried HR Block and they tally screwed up my Self Employed Health Insurance Deduction. That’s where it starts getting practically interesting. I haven’t filed yet. Normally, visit Website FreeTaxUSA for a while because being since their 100 free governmental tax filing. Now this service provides an automatic refund calculator. Basically, liberty Tax is one of solely 2 solutions we reviewed here that doesn’t offer free governmental filing for the 1040EZ, and its different editions usually can get over-priced according to our own filing needs. Liberty Tax outsourcing usually was a great, respected public company. For instance, liberty Tax is a massive, respected public company sothere reputation must offer some comfort that they have been trusted and safe. That’s where Liberty Tax’s strengths lie, So if you’re looking for lots of customer support options.

Liberty Tax offers live option, email and telephone chat support, unlike most of the various different outsourcing.

Do not do it.

Do not fall for latter email scam to get you to click on a spammy link. Save 10 off on eSmart tax returns when you click on this link and use the coupon code ESTOFFER10 during checkout before Tax 2013, Day as good as April 15th. Seriously. I think the first company we ever used was Tax Slayer. Thus my taxes happened to be more complicated, it was essential to use a tax preparation company, as I got older. Likewise, they looked with success for that it wasn’t a perfect option when they proven to be selfemployed, while service is gorgeous for your general needs. It was plain easy to file my own taxes, when we was 16. I started offworking at 16 age, that means I’ve had more than enough time to try out a few tax preparation solutions.

There may be no question that a tax service provides the opportunity to file governmental returns.

As a matter of fact, business taxes are due in a lot of states in midMarch!

Tax time was always here and so are your own ‘W 2s’ or 1099s since most employers sent them out to arrive by January end. It’s time to get started and get rolling, specifically if you have been due a refund check. So there’re you’d better often look out for whenever it boils down to picking the right tax product for you, not all tax product offerings are identical. Below we will cover most of features that almost any rewarding tax software should offer. Most vast tax service providers offer opportunity to electronically file our own taxes. There’s more information about it here. In technology age, utilizing electronic filing was probably nearly identical to utilizing direct deposit refund outsourcing. fort lauderdale tax preparation services – visit this link if you need more read. A well-prominent fact that is. Makes it plain simple to file the taxes, with dreaded ‘1099 Sure’, I hate paying more than we was paying with TaxAct, but it’s worth it to be particular I’m doing my taxes correctly, turboTax usually was an excellent service that has a road middle price range.

With intention to can be better for you this year, we have put gether a tax service comparison table that highlights every basic tax features company’s offerings gether with their advantages and disadvantages.

When tax season comes around any year for the most part there’re those who usually go with a name they see, those who go straight to an accountant and those who were always willing to shop around.

We will point out any tax product company and on p of that share our choices for best to I’m sure that the ability to complete your taxes using a service prior to paying for it shows that the company has confidence enough in their product to allow you to try it out in advance of paying their fee and provides you hands on evidence as to why it’s a good idea to have confidence in it as a result. So this oftentimes means not having to pay until the taxes have been filed. Customer Service has responded to me that you must run no higher than about 1360 x 760, big if you have a 19 inch monitor.

Huge problem with Taxcut is that if you run a resolution of 1920 x 1080 on your monitor, forms occupy entirely about 1/ screen three and are barely readable. So this program is unusable -hope their moneyback ‘guarantee’ works. Please let’s see if for the most part there’s anything you have questions about and thank you once again for getting this to our attention. Thank you for getting it to our attention. When we updated our article we missed updating our 2nd place paragraph where these items you listed were written out. You will now see the improve information in 2nd place paragraph with HR Block section. Sorry for the confusion. Now regarding aforementioned fact… Tried Tax Act online kept having to log back in and wait for processing.

Tried Tax Act download and looked with success for it worked big and looked straightforward but it does not offer imports from largest mutual fund firms and brokerages.

Nowadays plenty of tax methods were usually introduced and these days some software as well developed for tax paying.

By using this software we may readily reduce them. That’s a rather nice method to all people any business have more CA with them for their tax related queries. You may find more information about this stuff on this site. We are therefore this year I used TaxAct.

TT would have been $ 80 with Fed, State Prop Tax.

TaxAct was the cheapest for me.

By the way I don’t remember from previous year, in order to be honest. State was always special where TA has state included, tT has big sales. Most reputable tax software provide the opportunity to check the status tax return online, so this makes that tax filing process a lot easier by giving you a complacency. That said, it is pretty good when you want to better budget when any refund monies going to be coming into the credit card. Filing taxes has been a stressful process and it could be really frustrating not understanding our own status tax return. We have built a review process over past 5+ years that works to provide an overview of almost any review we will understand there on the given pic we have been discussing to provide the most all-round and unbiased reviews out there, while we do not often have time or ability to review everything ‘first hand’ ourselves.

Explore our full review of TurboTax HR Block Tax ReviewVisit Website Don’t let the vast brand name scare you off, it’s a solid tax program and was probably our number 2 choice with a price tag that was probably complicated to beat.

HR Block tax software supports all entities looking to file taxes but they offer line p support outsourcing with user exception forums.

Otherwise HR Block’s taxfeatures were usually akin to TurboTax and come at a lower price.a single thing this software lacks usually was filing cost state returns. We will do our best to continue to add to this table as we look for special businesses, and update the current software listed as they add modern features. Of our huge size tax product comparison table, we usually were placing it on a separate page so you will reference it more effortlessly.

Please visit our tax software comparison table for feature tax details products that we review in here.

You must pay the fee and register if you are always will be filing taxes for anyone aside from yourself.

That’s always not a massive deal, So if you make some good income. Generaly, permit you to file for free, they make you to a bit of these programs. They probably charge you to practically file taxes, programs could be used for free. Therefore if you have been in lower income bracket, you will look for to get free advantage filing service you may get if you search for the program through IRS website or our own state treasurer’s website and use their free file links. You apparently look for to do your own governmental taxes with the more advanced tax software, so use a less advanced one for your state taxes, for ages being that the state taxes.well they merely aren’t as taxing.

I used another tax program this year for my state taxes, I’m almost sure I generaly use Turbotax. Keep that in mind when choosing your own tax program, So if you look for to use free efile option. Since I’m this type of a frugal soul, To be honest I signed up with a whole next company, since I used Turbotax for my ministerial taxes, I could have paid to use it for my state taxes. You practice about this through our state’s website and IRS website. On p of that, here’s the thing. I thought this should want to see about so they could save a few dollars. Actually I didn’t have to pay a fee to get them filed, real, Know what guys, I had to manually enter my information while not importing it. I see it costs more but not getting audited makes it worth any penny. Interesting to see lots of free options though. Determining which tax stuff to use has usually been alwaysbso confusing. Thanks for helping me make the better choice this year with turbotax. You actually must visit this website: payroll. So, key to finding right service for you has been identifying the one that suits your own biggest needs and you are comfortable using.

We really have identical process for categories all and niche areas that we cover across our all the company, as for our review. Whenever collating or collecting all the reviews we usually can search for or experience ‘firsthand’ into one cohesive review on any given topic, we focus on organizing. I’m pretty sure I would like to hear more about actual process. The question is. Did the reviewer merely compare any sell sheets product, or did they purchase every and do a mock return to see what the software did and didn’t catch, and similar?

That’s a massive concern.

Delete email immediately.

Do not open attachment and do not forward the email. So if you get an email that appear to be from TurboTax stating that ”the State Return Has Been Rejected” pleases understand that it is NOT from TurboTax or your bank. Software type you use shouldn’t be a single thing you consider, when you visit file your own taxes. It is I’m usually attempting to show them how to file their taxes from home to save money and time. Essentially, I understand a great deal of people that go pay to have their taxes done when they could merely do them in the apartments using this kind of software. For instance, now you fill in text boxes, and you usually can for ages way if need be.

It’s not like you practically have to do math any more.

This program has a lot to offer at an ideal price, if you are not looking for if a tax filer discovers others has filed a return using their information. Needless to say, explore our full review of HR Block Tax TaxACT ReviewVisit Website This always was another reputed program that you may get at a competitive price. TaxAct tumbles merely above the road middle due to its extreme affordability and ability to file taxes no matter what entity you have been filing as, making it our #three pick. TaxAct may fall shorter in customer help and support with a lack of help forums but in all various different aspects we considered, it offers a lot for the price.

#payroll #professional tax software reviews 2015

0 notes

type2diabetestreatments-blog · 7 years

Text

MannKind Sponsors New Diabetes Reality TV Show, 'Reversed'

New Post has been published on http://type2diabetestreatment.net/diabetes-mellitus/mannkind-sponsors-new-diabetes-reality-tv-show-reversed/

MannKind Sponsors New Diabetes Reality TV Show, 'Reversed'

In what appears to be the first-of-its-kind, a new reality TV show focused specifically on diabetes will be airing this summer on the Discovery Life Channel.

Created by celebrity chef Charles Mattocks, a type 2 himself since 2009 who happens to be a nephew of the late great reggae music legend Bob Marley, this new "docu-series" features five PWDs (people with diabetes) with both type 1 and type 2 aiming to change the way they think about their health.

What makes this even more unique and intriguing for our D-Community is that it's also a first in bringing on a diabetes industry player as the sole sponsor. Yep, California-based MannKind Corp. that makes inhaled insulin Afrezza, is the sponsor of this reality show, which will include featuring the company's late founder Al Mann on the TV show's website. We'll get into those details in a moment, but first let's have a look at this upcoming show itself.

The kicker is the show's name, Reversed.

(insert PWD sighs and eye rolls here)

OK... We totally get it what a controversial concept that is in our Diabetes Community -- invoking all kinds of baggage related to "reversing" and "curing" diabetes, the T1-T2 distinction conflict, and all the medical science debates over what we know and don't know about diabetes overall. But before you tune this out based on the name alone, we urge you to take a step back and keep an open mind.

As D-peep and show creator Mattocks says himself:

"This show is about people with diabetes who will change their lives -- emotionally, physically, and spiritually. It's not so much about reversing diabetes, as it is about changing one's lifestyle and attitude, changing who we are as people, and bringing out the best in all of us."

Meeting Charles Mattocks

First off, it's important to know about the man behind this show. Here's a quick intro:

Aside from his family connection to Marley, Mattocks is known as 'The Poor Chef' for his love for cooking affordable, healthy meals. Through the years, he's been featured in films (like the 90s movie Summer of Ben Tyler with James Woods where he played the title character) and on TV ranging from CNN to the Dr. Oz Show and The Today Show. After his T2 diagnosis in 2011, Mattocks began touring the world to meet and interview people with diabetes globally, taking on a range of D-advocacy roles from becoming an International Diabetes Federation Blue Circle Champion, to helping write an ADA cookbook, to producing The Diabetic You documentary film, and even developing a gluten-free chocolate snack dubbed the "Charles Bar."

He's certainly done quite a lot, and while his brand of advocacy may not be everyone's style, you can't argue that he's really made some waves in the diabetes world over the past six years, leading into to this new show.

Really, Diabetes Reality TV?

Yup, Mattocks describes it as a docu-series reality show that is "part of his journey." Take a look at this video promo just released in late April.

To be clearn, this is not the first time a reality TV show has dabbled in life with diabetes -- from the MTV TruLife episode back in 2012 that featured three T1 PWDs, to a T1 teen mom, and the American Idol competition in 2015 featuring Adam Lasher, a T1 nephew of Carlos Santana. Apparently, even rap legend Dr. Dre (who lives with T2D himself) has been talking about creating his own D-related reality show, given his complication-ridden T2 that's led to him losing his vision.

But Reversed does appear to be the first national reality show 100% dedicated to diabetes and its management.

What you'll be watching is five PWDs in a house surrounded by beaches and palm trees at the Milbrooks Resort island retreat in exotic Montego Bay, Jamaica.

The idea for Reversed started taking shape three or four years ago, with some early teasers and promos aired back in 2014 with a completely different set of PWDs featured. As his own D-advocacy and personal diabetes story evolved, Mattocks continued looking for partners, and late last year got what he needed to bring this dream of his to life.

He's now teamed up with MannKind Corp. as the sole sponsor, began production early this year and just wrap up this past month, to start final editing before the show airs in July. The introductory season will feature 10 episodes.

We're urged not to think of this as a competition-style reality show, like Survivor or American Idol where someone's voted off at the end of each episode. Mattocks remains a bit coy on exactly how it will play out to avoid spoilers, but he says pretty much everyone will finish the way they're supposed to -- by achieving some health milestones, or just learning more about about how they can best care for themselves.

Mattocks says he thinks of it like recipe-sharing -- you see a dish that looks good and add that to your repertoire, and maybe by sharing it more widely you can inspire others to adopt some of the ingredients into their own lives -- whether it's better BG testing, healthier eating or exercise habits, or just changing how we think about life.

The show will feature a host of experts: cooking and diet professionals, a diabetes educator who lives with type 1 herself, and a yoga instructor and other health professionals to handle the more "offiical" medical issues covered.

What About the Term "Reversed"?

“When you look at the definition of ‘reversed’ in the dictionary, it’s about slowing down the physical progress of something. That’s what this is," Mattocks says. "When we talk about where (the show participants) were when I first met them to where they are now, they have reversed the direction they were going – not necessarily diabetes, but they've turned around how they think about themselves. To see them do a 360-degree reversal of where they were, that inspires me.”

Hmmm. So it's a philosophical reversal they're after?

“Yes, we’re seeing a reversal in mindset, that’s what it's about. We get caught up on that word, and it’s really holding us back and hindering us from where we could be. Because it’s not about reversing diabetes at all,” he says.

Certainly an interesting train of thought...

In a recent podcast, Mattocks talked with three of the PWDs who participated in thes show -- two type 2s, and a T1 who just started on Afrezza after being on the show. Interestingly, during the 15-minute podcast, the trio talked about how they didn't expect the show to be as life-changing as it was, helping them acheive better D-management and health habits. One of the T2s named Jerome said it's "exactly what he needed" to change his mindset and since the show's production wrapped up, he has not only lost weight and felt better, but with help from his doctor he's managed to dramatically cut down his insulin intake and other medications.

They all agreed the show wasn't keyed in on or overbearing on messages of weight loss, low-carb or plant-based eating, but rather about finding what works best for each of them in making healthier choices. The T1, a woman named Felice, spoke on the podcast about her 43 years with T1D and how she was "heading into the deep hole of D-burnout" before going on Reversed, and since then she's been able to change her attitude and perspective. She started Afrezza in mid-April, which she says has translated to only one basal injection per day instead of seven multiple daily injections, fewer hypos and much more stable BGs.

These personal PWD accounts were certainly very convincing that the show has merit.

Beyond this introductory season, Charles is pondering future options -- a live-recorded version, celebrity cast, and even going beyond diabetes into other health conditions.

"We think we have something special here, and we do think we're going to be changing lives," he said.

Sponsored by Afrezza / MannKind Corp.

As noted, MannKind is currently the show's sole sponsor, so they get fully play, including a display ad on the show's website with an image of the late Alfred Mann, who created the company and passed away in early 2016.

MannKind's Chief Operational Officer Mike Castagna tells us that as sponsors, they have no involvement in the show's development or content. While one participant will be using and demonstrating Afrezza on the air, that wasn't a requirement and was not even intentional product placement.

Castagna says they've created a storyboard for a commercial -- something that show coordinators say will be 1-minute long, rather than 30 seconds as the FDA usually mandates for pharma ads. (We mentioned this in our recent coverage of MannKind's wish to become "the Uber of diabetes.")

Whether this helps MannKind's business with Afrezza is anyone's guess. But you can't fault the company for thinking outside the box here.

Castagna recognizes that the word "reversed" is controversial, particularly when you have celebrities such as Halle Berry and Drew Carrie who've used that word to essentially claim erasing their disease. He says it's clear that diabetes can't be erased, and it's about educating the PWD masses on management basics.

"How many shows focus on diabetes? I can't think of any," Castagna says. "We have shows focusing on plastic surgery, emergency rooms, on pain, but there's nothing out there like this to raise awareness. That's why it's important that somebody does something, and why MannKind is sponsoring this. We can debate the word 'reversed,' but I don't think that's the right debate to be having -- even though I wouldn't argue it shouldn't be used. But the debate should be why we aren't we raising awareness about achieving better health outcomes? That's what I hope comes out of the show."

Hopes, Fears and Reality (TV) Checks

It's an interesting concept and we're certainly going to check it out this summer. Will the show really be educational? Or will it just serve to fuel misconceptions? We're a bit nervous about exercise and eating themes that can turn into blame for PWDs about why we don't all just "reverse" our diabetes with simple lifestyle choices.

For his part, Mattocks isn't worried. He's convinced it will be all positive reinforcement.

I think to be able to open that door and explain all of this is a benefit for the public that just doesn’t understand diabetes. That discussion is what we want. Charles Mattocks, T2 celebrity chef and creator of "Reversed"

Meanwhile, our team is rooting for Afrezza to do well on the market; Amy and I both currently use it, so we're making no bones about the fact that we think it's a good drug that can help many PWDs.

If all goes well, this show could be a win-win for everyone. We shall see...

It deserves a chance, if nothing else. So keep an eye on your TV listings this summer, D-Friends.

Disclaimer: Content created by the Diabetes Mine team. For more details click here.

Disclaimer

This content is created for Diabetes Mine, a consumer health blog focused on the diabetes community. The content is not medically reviewed and doesn't adhere to Healthline's editorial guidelines. For more information about Healthline's partnership with Diabetes Mine, please click here.

Type 2 Diabetes Treatment Type 2 Diabetes Diet Diabetes Destroyer Reviews Original Article

#Diabetes Mellitus

0 notes

suzanneshannon · 4 years

Text

Review of the Surface Book 3 for Developers

— Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) May 14, 2020

Size and Weight

Basically if you are a Surface Book 2 user the size and weight are the same. The Surface Book 3 is considerably more power in the same size machine.

CPU and Memory

FLIP THE SCREEN AROUND? You can also when docked even reverse the screen! Whatever do you mean? It's actually awesome if you want an external keyboard.

All this phrased differently? It's fast, quickly, when it needs to be but it's constantly changing the clock to maximize power/thermals/battery.

SSD - Size and Speed

GPU - Gaming and Tensorflow

Developer Performance

Orchard Core is a fully-featured CMS with 143 projects loaded into Visual Studio. MSBUILD and .NET Core supports both parallel and incremental builds.

A warm build of Orchard Core on IRONHEART my i9 desktop takes just under 10 seconds.

My 6 year old Surface Pro 3 builds it warm in 62 seconds.

A totally cold build (after a dotnet clean) on IRONHEART takes 33.3 seconds.

My Surface Pro 3 builds it cold in 2.4 minutes.

A cold build (after a dotnet clean) on this Surface Book 3 takes 46 seconds.

A warm build is 16.1 seconds

A cold build (after a dotnet clean) on my Surface Book 2 takes 115 seconds.

It's WAY faster than my Surface Book 2 which has been my daily driver when mobile for nearly 3 years!

dotnet build /maxcpucount:4

The result with Orchard Core is the same, so there is likely a theoretical max as to how fast this can build today. If you really want to go nuts, try

dotnet build -v diag

And dig through ALL the timing info!

Webcam Quality

Ports and Power and Sound and Wi-Fi

I also want to touch on sound. There is a fan inside the device and if it gets hot it will run. If I'm doing 1080p 60fps in Call of Duty WarZone you can likely hear the fan. It comes and goes and while it's audible when it's one, when the CPU is not maxed out (during 70% of my work day) the Surface Book 3 is absolutely silent, even when running the monitors. The fan comes on with the CPU is bursting hard over 3Ghz and/or the GPU is on full blast.

The New Surface Dock - Coming May 26th

I'm also testing a pre-release Surface Dock 2. I suspect they wanted me to test it with the Surface Book 3...BUT! I just plugged in every Surface I have to see what would happen.

So this Surface Dock 2 replaces the original Dock my office. The Surface Dock 2 has

2x front-facing USB-C ports (I use these for two 4k monitors)

2x rear-facing USB-C ports

2x rear-facing USB-A 3.2 (10Gbps) ports

1x Gigabit Ethernet port

1x 3.5mm audio in/out port

Kensington lock slot - I've never used this

Conclusion

Review of the Surface Book 3 for Developers published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/

0 notes

type2diabetestreatments-blog · 7 years

Text

What Twins Can Tell Us About the Causes of Diabetes

New Post has been published on http://type2diabetestreatment.net/diabetes-mellitus/what-twins-can-tell-us-about-the-causes-of-diabetes/

What Twins Can Tell Us About the Causes of Diabetes

Stacey Divone sees double every time she looks in the mirror. She’s the slightly older of a pair of identical twins born on Christmas Eve 1976, and when she was just 5 years old, Stacey -- just like her father -- was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.

The Divone twins

Thirty-five years later, her genetic double is still diabetes-free.

“It fascinates me that we share 100% of the same genes, developed in the exact same womb and grew up in the exact same environment, eating the exact same things, having the same father who had type 1 -- yet one of us has (T1D) and the other doesn’t," Stacey says. "The human body is a mysterious thing sometimes.”

So how common is it for one identical twin to have diabetes, and the other not to? The first line of the first study I dug into to answer that question read, “Monozygotic twins are usually discordant for type 1 diabetes.”

Let me translate that into English for you: When it comes to identical twins, usually only one gets diabetes.

How many sets of twins both have diabetes? About a third, according to the literature.

If your identical twin (should you have one) has type 1 diabetes, your risk for developing type 1 yourself is “only” 35%. That's still a pretty high risk -- and there plenty of stories about twins sharing diabetes, like Amylia Grace Yeaman and her sister in Iowa, Ashley and Emily in Pennsylvania, and the Tale of Two Twins in Massachusetts -- but it’s by no means a slam-dunk, and two-thirds of sets of identical twins have a D-sibling and a sugar-normal sibling.

Despite the scientific knowledge that type 1 is basically genetic, diabetes researchers have long known that identical twins don’t have the identical risk of developing type 1 diabetes; and this fact has long fueled theories of environmental causes as the root source of type 1 diabetes.

But not so fast. It turns out that identical twins are not so identical after all. We have cancer researchers to thank for this insight, not diabetes researchers.

You Look the Same

Monozygotic twins, commonly called identical twins (like Stacey and her sister) are a pair of babies that came from one egg and one sperm cell. In the womb a pair of such embryos have always been viewed as carbon copies of each other, sharing an identical genetic blueprint. And they do.

At least in the beginning.

But in recent decades, genetic research has shown that the DNA of identical twins diverges over time. These so-called epigenetic changes are powered by environmental factors, and drive the twins farther apart genetically as they explore the world on their separate paths.

But wait, that’s not all.

Once published, each of our individual "books of DNA" mutates all on its own, independently of the epigenetic changes, via so-called somatic mutations, a.k.a. copy errors. Something goes wrong during cell division and the DNA changes.

So the older the twins get, the less identical they become, due to these two types of genetic changes. This is why younger identical twins look more the same than older sets—because the younger pairs actually are more identical.

But it’s more than just looks. Somatic changes have a larger impact on the DNA blueprint than epigenetic changes do, and while most somatic changes seem harmless, it’s now believed that most cancers can be traced to somatic mutations.

Thus the interest in somatic mutations on the part of cancer researchers.

So when do somatic changes start happening? Apparently long before birth. One recent study found that the average pair of identical twins actually has more than 300 genetic differences at birth.

Not so identical after all. Yeah, twins can still pull the wool over elementary school teachers’ eyes with the old switch-a-roo in math class, but apparently diabetes isn’t so easy to fool.

Back to the Drawing Board?

So where does that leave us? Does the fact that identical twins aren’t fully identical make twin research worthless in the diabetes arena? Quite the contrary. Identical twins are still very similar. Consider that a human being has something in the neighborhood of 24,000 genes, and typically around 30% of those differ between any two people. That’s 7,200 differences between you and me, while our “identical” twins might only vary by 300 genes or so, at least at birth. In short: There are a lot fewer differences to sort out between twins. If type 1 diabetes turns out to be purely genetic, looking at the differences between not-quite-identical twins may be the fastest way to find the genes causing type 1 diabetes.

So twin studies continue. In fact, the prestigious Barbara Davis Center for Diabetes at the University of Colorado is currently recruiting D-twins and their “unaffected” co-twins for a study. And beyond trying to sort out the root causes of diabetes itself, researchers at the Barbara Davis Center are also studying other autoimmune diseases that appear in conjunction with diabetes. They are investigating how genes might affect an individual’s response to “preventive agents or treatment aimed at preserving insulin-producing cells.”

Exciting stuff.

Fraternal Twins, Unite!

Just to be clear here, the genetic research to date has not focused on fraternal twins, because they are actually two different individuals who came from two separate eggs, but just happened to be in the womb together. As separate individuals, their risk of sharing diabetes would be the same as any (non-twin) siblings.

The Singer twins

But of course being born and growing up in lockstep, fraternal twins still have a very special bond with each other.

We know many of these pairings in the Diabetes Community, including the famous Singer Twins, Mollie and Jackie, who happen to have a mom and aunt by the same names who are also twins and happen to all be part of a country band, MJ2. Mollie is the T1 peep diagnosed at age 4 and has a blog called Cure Moll, while her sister Jackie is a sugar-normal. For the record, they're fraternal twins.

In response our query about her twin relationship, Mollie shares the following:

"I think this is an important topic to write on. Even though we're fraternal and not identical twins, Jackie has gone through extensive testing over the years to see if she carried the R Protein. She's also always been one of my strongest advocates, which is why we started the Diabetic Angels community together, and have always been a team, even though she doesn't have diabetes. But maybe because we're twins, Jackie is very knowledgeable about diabetes and stays informed regarding new management techniques and research. She always says if she were ever diagnosed, she wouldn't be overly concerned because she knows exactly what to do and how to do it... meaning she would be right on a CGM and pump. The other thing Jackie has said since she was a child is that if she could, she 'would take my diabetes for me.' That really is very much a 'twin thing.'"

Twin Type 2s

Meanwhile, diabetes twin research isn’t limited just to those of us with type 1. Swedish researchers recently published the results of a study that followed over 4,000 pairs of twins over a six-year period starting in 1998. They selected identical twins with different BMIs to try to understand the effect of increased weight on health. At the study’s end they announced that they had confirmed one long-held belief about weight and health, and made one confounding discovery.

Not too surprisingly, they say, the heavier twins had increased risk of type 2 diabetes, but the lighter twin actually had a higher risk of heart attack, overturning the long-held belief that weight is an independent heart attack risk.

But is type 2 really as simple as the right genes plus weight? Maybe not.

A smaller study (also from Sweden) suggests that T2D isn't that simple after all. The study looked at 14 sets of twins, in which one in each pair had type 2 diabetes and the other did not, focused on the genes. It found there were differences in the genes that control fat and glucose metabolism between the twin with type 2 diabetes and the sugar-normal twin.

Not Clones, After All

It may turn out that the subtle differences between “identical” twins will be more valuable to our understanding of both types of diabetes than if identical twins were truly identical. While the early differences between “identical” twins may prove over time to weaken the environmental origins theories behind the cause of diabetes, modern twin studies looking at subtle differences between the genetic blueprints of similar people might allow us to determine the role that genes play in the development of diabetes.

For example, take the diabetes research that the Divone Sisters have been a part of.

In 2012, Stacey and her twin signed up for the groundbreaking diabetes genetic project Trialnet to get a better understanding of their "identical," yet not identical DNA.

The Divone sisters with their dad

“The test results confirmed what we already knew: my sister and I are identical twins," Stacey shares. "We were also tested for a number of auto-antibodies for things like type 1 diabetes, celiac disease and Addison’s disease. My m1AA auto antibody level was way elevated, obviously since I have type 1. Everything else for me was at normal levels, thankfully. My sister showed normal levels for everything, including type 1.”

Like the majority of “identical” twins, Stacey’s sister was just different enough from Stacey, genetically, to duck the diabetes bullet. Even though their dad had lived with type 1, only one of the sisters have followed in those pancreatically-challenged footsteps.

“This was such a relief, I’m sure to both of us, but for me especially,” says Stacey, who blogs over at The Girl With The Portable Pancreas. “Even though I’ve lived with it for 35 years, I never would want to see her have to live with it, too.”

I guess twins don’t really share everything after all. Which is heartening, in some ways...

Disclaimer: Content created by the Diabetes Mine team. For more details click here.

Disclaimer

Type 2 Diabetes Treatment Type 2 Diabetes Diet Diabetes Destroyer Reviews Original Article

#Diabetes Mellitus

0 notes

type2diabetestreatments-blog · 7 years

Text

Ask D'Mine: Exploring False Lows, Going Aggressive on Fasting Numbers?

New Post has been published on http://type2diabetestreatment.net/diabetes-mellitus/ask-dmine-exploring-false-lows-going-aggressive-on-fasting-numbers/

Ask D'Mine: Exploring False Lows, Going Aggressive on Fasting Numbers?

Got diabetes? Need advice? Of course you do! And you came to the right place: Ask D'Mine, a weekly Q&A hosted by veteran type 1, diabetes author and community educator Wil Dubois.

Need help navigating life with diabetes? Email us at [email protected]

Wil goes deep this week on blood sugar control issues. Enjoy!

Liz from Oklahoma, type 2, writes: I get lightheaded and shaky even after eating a good meal. My blood sugar is around 118 before the meal—my primary doctor insists on this and feels I don't yet need to go to the Joslin Center. I have been told these episodes may be "false lows." I'd like your input. Thanks!

Wil@Ask D'Mine answers: Your blood sugar is OK before the meal, but what's your blood sugar after the meal, when you start feeling shaky? Common wisdom holds that after-meal numbers are generally higher, but that's not always true. You need to test after a meal to find out what's really going on.

Here's why: early in the course of type 2 diabetes, your body is totally freaking out. Nothing is quite working to design specifications. In some cases the pancreas over-reacts to food. It produces a huge wave of insulin and can actually cause a low. This is particularly common with high-carb meals. Picture the pancreas getting a telegram that a Grand Slam Breakfast is on the way. Lights flash. Alarm bells ring. In commmmming!

In fact, episodes of hypoglycemia are one of the warning signs that can lead to a diagnosis of diabetes. So you need to check your blood sugar when the lightheaded shakies hit to see if you are actually going low after meals. If so, use the speed-dial to call your doc.

As to the issue of you having "false lows," I doubt it. The term false low, in med-speak called "relative hypoglycemia," is something that happens to people who have been high for a long time, once their blood sugars start to normalize.

The human body is a real champ at adapting to its environment, both external and internal. If your blood sugar has been at 350 night and day for months your body starts to think that's normal. If you take a med that quickly lowers you to, say 200, your body flips out. It only knows you just dropped 150 points and that can't be a good thing; it's forgotten it was too high to start with. All of the hypo warning signs and symptoms are triggered, even though you are still critically high.

So you can feel like you're hypo even if you are nowhere close to it.

But I doubt you are experiencing this because you told me you are running 118 before meals. Relative hypos really only happen when your blood sugar has been elevated all the time for an extended period of time. Ups and downs between normal readings and higher readings won't trigger the effect.

Still, something is causing your symptoms. Check your blood sugar after eating. If nothing unusual crops up, look next to your blood pressure... then your vitamin B or D... then your thyroid... and then...

I hope when they dx'd you they remembered to tell you that having diabetes is like playing a supersized version of Clue... only with higher stakes.

Natalie from Nevada, type 1, writes: My BGs are usually in a reasonably good place — running around 120 fasting and overnight, and 140-180 postprandially. I average about 35u of insulin a day, with 18u of that as basal. I've had diabetes for 20 years, and have no complications. My A1Cs are usually in the 6s. My BMI is 24.0. I do have some insulin resistance, though apparently mild. My question is, is it worth the extra insulin to try get my fastings lower, say in the 80-100 range, and PP's below 140 (per the AACE)? Is there any solid evidence that hyperinsulinemia contributes to cardiovascular disease? Is it better to run somewhat higher than normal BGs or to use more insulin to get them lower?

Wil@Ask D'Mine answers: Now wait a cotton pickin' minute.

You have a perfect A1C... for two decades.

Your insulin usage is nearly perfectly split at 50% basal and 50% fast-acting.

You have a trim and sexy Body Mass Index.

Your postprandial numbers are nothing short of totally astounding.

Are you really sure you have diabetes?

I'm not convinced.

At the very least, you're making the rest of us look bad. If you keep this up, we may have to kick you out of the family.

So, yeah, OK, your fasting numbers could, in theory, be a little lower. But if the sign says "Danger: thin ice" would you go skating? Frankly, for type 1s, a fasting of 80 makes me queasy. Don't forget that AACE guidelines are for all people with diabetes: both type 1s and type 2s. They are blanket guidelines to cover all the bases. You need to individualize these targets for both you and your diabetes. For T1s like us, 110 or 115 fasting is considered golden. You're pretty darn close.

In terms of complication risk, average blood sugar and blood sugar variability are

both major players. And both are arguably equally damaging. On top of that, recent research, like the ACCORD study, is beginning to point fingers at hypos possibly causing more longer term damage than previously believed.

Why am I blathering on about this? Well, shooting for a fasting of 80 ups the ante on your hypo risk. Given your low average and tight range in the first place, I don't see any significant benefit to you in trying to get it even better.

But of course, that didn't really answer your question, which is about whether hyperinsulinemia, a.k.a. high levels of insulin, might be damaging to your heart. You asked if there's any solid evidence.

(Insert sound of person laughing hysterically to the point of passing out)..... Let me refer you back a few weeks to this column where we discuss that fact that "solid" evidence doesn't exist for anything in medical research. I can't even find any solid evidence that medical research even exists in the first place.

Anyway, forgetting the whole concept of solid evidence for the moment, the role of high insulin levels as a risk factor in cardiovascular disease is one of those things that scientists politely call "controversial." Some studies have shown no link at all. Some studies have shown there's a link. Some studies show maybe there's a link sometimes, in some cases, but a small one.

But a link is only an association. Association doesn't necessarily imply a cause.

Here's the problem with trying to figure out if insulin screws up your heart or not: High levels of insulin are most commonly found in only one place in nature: early-to-mid stage type 2 diabetes where the pancreas is working triple time and nights and weekends to try to overcome the disease's signature insulin resistance with wave after wave of insulin. The problem is, and please don't take offense all you type 2s, there's also a whole lot of other metabolic dysfunctions taking place at the same time. It starts to get very chicken and egg trying to sort out the complex interrelationships between the various markers, much less assign cause and effect to any of them.

And even if it eventually turns out to be true that hyperinsulinemia is a cardiovascular risk factor, it would be a moot point for you. You're literally sipping insulin—35u really isn't that much. A frickin' vial is lasting you a whole month, for crying out loud. Even if you were inclined to fine tune your fasting numbers (a modest increase in your basal would do the trick), I doubt you'd be taking more 45u per day.

Consider that many type 2s use 100u to 150u per day.

You, my dear, don't even qualify to enter the hyperinsulinemia marathon.

And making it double moot is the following: even if hyperinsulinemia is a cardiovascular risk factor, and even if you injected at ton of insulin, you're still talking cats and dogs, apples and oranges. Taking a lot of insulin isn't really the same thing as being hyperinsulinemiaic. If anyone has actually studied the role of injected insulin as a possible cardiovascular risk factor, I'm unaware of it, nor have I been able to find any trace of it on the internet.

The bottom line for everyone is: even if in the future solid evidence for hyperinsulinemia causing heart trouble is discovered, I think it would still be a hell of a stretch to apply that discovery to injected insulin as well.

Bottom line for Natalie is: I don't think more a little more insulin would put your heart at any more risk; but at the same time I think your blood sugar control is already beautiful. I don't think it matters much which way you choose to go.

This is not a medical advice column. We are PWDs freely and openly sharing the wisdom of our collected experiences — our been-there-done-that knowledge from the trenches. But we are not MDs, RNs, NPs, PAs, CDEs, or partridges in pear trees. Bottom line: we are only a small part of your total prescription. You still need the professional advice, treatment, and care of a licensed medical professional.

Disclaimer: Content created by the Diabetes Mine team. For more details click here.

Disclaimer

Type 2 Diabetes Treatment Type 2 Diabetes Diet Diabetes Destroyer Reviews Original Article

0 notes

type2diabetestreatments-blog · 7 years

Text

Ask D'Mine: Understanding GERD, Which Vitamins to Choose?

New Post has been published on http://type2diabetestreatment.net/diabetes-mellitus/ask-dmine-understanding-gerd-which-vitamins-to-choose/

Ask D'Mine: Understanding GERD, Which Vitamins to Choose?

Maybe it's your stomach gone awry, or maybe you're just totally confused about which dietary supplements actually matter... either way, we've got you covered.

We answer all sorts of diabetes-related queries here at Ask D'Mine, our weekly advice column hosted by community educator and author Wil Dubois (also a veteran T1 PWD).

Need help navigating life with diabetes? [email protected]

Lisa from Nevada, type 1 writes: I'm trying to get my head around which vitamins or minerals are especially important for diabetics to take on a daily basis. I hear so many conflicting things. I've been taking magnesium, fish oil, vitamin D3, and calcium. Are these the best choices, or are there others?

Wil@Ask D'Mine answers: You hear so many conflicting things because no one knows which vitamins or minerals anyone should be taking on a daily basis, much less which ones PWDs should be taking.

In theory, we'd get all we need from our natural diet and environment. But of course, McDonalds did not evolve with our species in the Great Rift Valley, so we modern humans could easily be missing out on some things nature would normally provide. I believe that our overly-processed diet does lack trace minerals and vitamins we need; but how much of which ones are missing is waaaaaaaay beyond my intelligence, so I just opt for the duck hunting approach.

OK, so I've never been duck hunting.

But my grandfather used to, and he told me he used a shotgun. The reasons for this are twofold. The first is that it's illegal and apparently un-sportsman-like to shoot a duck sitting on the water where it would be easy pickings. I guess that's where we get the expression "like a sitting duck." The second reason is that no one is a good enough shot to pick off a flying duck with a single shot from a rifle. Instead, a shotgun sends up a cloud of pellets that only need to be in the vicinity of the duck to drop it from the sky to your dinner table. In point of fact, most of the pellets will miss the duck—but enough will hit to do the job. (According to assorted hunting sites on the internet, 3-5 pellets out of 88 in a typical shell will hit the duck—so it looks like 95% of the pellets go to waste.)

So my shotgun for my modern human diet is a multi-vitamin. I'm hoping that that 3-5 of the vitamins and minerals I need will hit their target, while the other 88 I don't need won't hurt me. Too much of some of these trace things can be as bad as too little, and I think some people go waaaaaaaaaaay overboard on vitamins and supplements.

As to the ones you're taking now, how did you make those choices? Fish oil is well studied and has some impressive data supporting its ability to lower cholesterol if you need to. Vitamin D is an important supplement if you are deficient, which takes a lab test to determine. Vitamin D deficiency can cause mind-numbing fatigue, bone pain, and can ultimately lead to rickets—a weakening and softening of bone. This is one of those fun medical adventures I've been on myself and don't recommend—bone pain is amazingly maddening. Calcium is actually the most abundant mineral in the body, and is common both as a native component or as an additive in many foods. So unless you know you're low... And the same holds true for magnesium; I'm not sure you should take more unless you know you don't have enough.

Looking at a "silver" multivitamin you can see that a single tab contains a quarter of the recommended daily magnesium, 100% of your vitamin D, 20% of your calcium, and zero percent of your fish oil. But where on earth do these recommended daily guidelines come from? As best as I can tell, nutrition experts from the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences get together every couple a' years, ingest hallucinogenic mushrooms, and kick around some new numbers. But are they right? Who the hell knows? It's anyone's guess. And other counties have adopted different standards than we have here in the U.S. It reminds me a bit of the medical consensus standards we discussed a while back.

Got some time on your hands? You can dig deeper into what is known and not known about supplements at this multi-agency federal site here.

And speaking of taking too many pills...

Ranelle from Nebraska, type 2, writes: I have type 2 diabetes and neuropathy, and have just been diagnosed with something called GERD and put on yet another pill. I was only told that it is a stomach reflux thing. I'm worried about taking so many different pills... Where can I learn more?

Wil@Ask D'Mine answers: Like I always say, diabetes doesn't like to play alone: it brings all its buddies over to party in your body. For those of you who don't know, GERD stands for gastroesophagel reflux disease, which you can't say ten times really fast, which is why we call it GERD instead. It's a very wicked form of heartburn where digestive juices irritate or damage the esophagus.

The mechanics of GERD involve the lower esophageal sphincter, a ring of muscle fibers that serve like a cork to keep the top of your stomach closed when you're not eating. If it gets lazy, stuff from the stomach can take a wrong turn and head back up-stream. GERD is amazingly common, affecting around a third of Americans once per month, and plaguing around 10% of folks on a daily basis.

I couldn't find any clear statistics that indicate how much more common (or not) GERD is for people with diabetes, but it's associated with obesity. Not to be insensitive, but most type 2s are... ummm... you know... fluffy. And before everyone starts flaming me, I hasten to point out that a great number of us type 1s are overweight, too, along with about a third of the country. Be sure to check out the cool full color animated Fat Map... and watch Colorado be the last state in the Union to fall to fat!

For many people, GERD can be treated with lifestyle changes or over-the-counter meds. On the lifestyle front, things that make GERD worse include citrus, chocolate, alcohol, fried food, fatty food, spicy food, and tomato-based foods. Holy crap. That's, like, the whole food pyramid! Oh yeah, smoking can make GERD worse, too; and avoid taking aspirin and ibuprofen. Sounds like GERD is almost as much work as diabetes. On top of all of that, a host of prescription meds can make GERD worse, including beta-blockers, calcium channel blockers, some asthma meds, some antidepressants, and—ironically—the anti-seasickness family of medications called anticholinergics.

Of course if someone's condition is advanced beyond what can be accomplished with lifestyle changes, there're pills to take — and I know from your letter that this has happened to you. I sometimes get a lot of flak for being an advocate of the just-take-your-damn-medicine camp. But I think you should in this case. Here's why: you told me you have neuropathy. So we know that at least some of your nerves have been damaged by high blood sugar in the past. It's possible that there's also nerve damage to your digestive system that's causing the GERD or making it worse, and that can put your condition outside the scope of what can be fixed with even extreme lifestyle changes. Ya' might have to take a pill.

The GERD medicine cabinet has three different prescription approaches: proton pump inhibitors (PPIs), coating agents, and so-called promotility agents.

PPIs are stomach acid stompers. Think Tums on steroids (metaphorically). The PPI group includes the high-profile purple pill Nexium.

Coating agents are designed to help heal the damage to your esophagus from the renegade stomach acids. Think Pepto on a grand scale.

The promotility agents are supposed to help batten down the hatches by tightening the sphincter muscles and make the stomach empty faster. I understand that they're not too popular with the White Coats as they're side-effect-intensive, don't seem to work as well for most people as the PPIs, and don't play well in the sand box with other medications. Still, they can beat heck out of the next GERD treatment alternative: surgery.

In terms of where you can learn more, I poked around some of the hidden corners of the medical internet for you, and found a group of articles at Emedicinehealth that have received the blessing of the GERD docs. You can learn a lot more about GERD there.

I can understand you not wanting to take more pills, but if your pills keep you healthy and make you feel better, isn't it worth it?

Disclaimer: Content created by the Diabetes Mine team. For more details click here.

Disclaimer

Type 2 Diabetes Treatment Type 2 Diabetes Diet Diabetes Destroyer Reviews Original Article

0 notes