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foreverdavidbyrne · 3 years

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David Byrne’s interview in NME magazine

In 1979, David Byrne predicted Netflix. “It’ll be as easy to hook your computer up to a central television bank as it is to get the week’s groceries,” he told NME’s Max Bell, sitting in a Paris hotel considering the implications of Talking Heads’ dystopian single ‘Life During Wartime’.

He predicted the Apple Watch in that interview too: “[People will] be surrounded by computers the size of wrist watches.” And he foresaw surveillance culture and data harvesting: “Government surveillance becomes inevitable because there’s this dilemma when you have an increase in information storage. A lot of it is for your convenience, but as more information gets on file, it’s bound to be misused.”

In fact, over 40 years ago, he predicted the entire modern-day experience, as if he instinctively knew what was coming. “We’ll be cushioned by amazing technological development,” he said, “but sitting on Salvation Army furniture.”

The 68-year-old Byrne says today, “You can’t say that you know,” chuckling down a Zoom link from his home in New York and belying his reputation for awkwardness by seeming giddily relieved to be talking to someone. “It’s crazy to set yourself up as some sort of prophet. But there’s plenty of people who have done well with books where they claim to predict what’s going on. I suppose sometimes it’s possible to let yourself imagine, ‘Okay – what if?’ This can evolve into something that exists, can evolve into something more substantial, cheaper – these kinds of things.”

It’s been a lifelong gift. Byrne turned up at CBGBs in 1975 with his art school band Talking Heads touting ‘Psycho Killer’, as if predicting the punk scene’s angular melodic evolution, new wave, before punk was even called punk. In 1980, Talking Heads assimilated African beats and textures into their seminal ‘Remain In Light’ album, foreshadowing ‘world music’ and modern music’s globalist melting pot, then used it to warn America of the dangers of consumerism, selfishness and the collapse of civilisation. Pioneering or propheteering, Byrne has been on the front-line of musical evolution for 45 years, collaborating with fellow visionaries from Brian Eno to St Vincent’s Annie Clark, constantly imagining, ‘What if?’

The live music lockdown has been a frustrating freeze frame, but Byrne was already leading the way into music’s new normal. Launched in 2018, the tour to support his 10th solo album, ‘American Utopia’, has now turned into a cinematic marvel courtesy of Spike Lee – the concert film was released in the UK this week. The original tour was acclaimed as a live music revolution. Using remote technology, Byrne was able to remove all of the traditional equipment clutter from the stage and allow his musicians and dancers, in uniform grey suits and barefoot, to roam around a stage lined with curtains of metal chains with their instruments strapped to them. A Marshally distanced gig, if you will.

“As the show was conceptually coming together, I realised that once we had a completely empty stage the rulebook has now been thrown out,” Byrne says. “Now we can go anywhere and do anything. This is completely liberating. It means that people like drummers, for example, who are usually relegated to the back shadows, can now come to the front – all those kinds of things – which changes the whole dynamic.”

With six performers making up an entire drum kit and Byrne meandering through the choreography trying to navigate a nonsensical world, the show was his most striking and original since he jerked and jived around a constructed-mid-gig band set-up in Jonathan Demme’s legendary 1984 Talking Heads live film Stop Making Sense.

The American Utopia show embarked on a Broadway run last year, where Byrne super-fan Spike Lee saw it twice and leapt at the chance of turning the spectacle into Byrne’s second revolutionary live film, dotted with his musings on the human condition to illuminate the crux of the songs: institutional racism, our lack of modern connection, the erosion of democracy and, on opener ‘Here’, a lecture-like tour of the human brain, Byrne holding aloft a scale model, trying to fathom, ‘How do I work this?’

“I didn’t know how much of a fan Spike was!” Byrne laughs today. “He’d even go, ‘Why don’t you do this song? Why don’t you add this song in’. We knew one another casually so I could text him and say, ‘I want you to come and see our show; I think that you might be interested in making a film of it’.”

Are the days of the traditional stage set-up numbered? “Yes, I think so,” he replies. “At least in theatres and concert halls the size that I would normally play, yes. The fact that we can get the music digitally [means] a performance has to be really of value. It has to be really something special, because that’s where the performers are getting their money and that’s what the audience is paying for. They’re not paying very much for streaming music, but they are paying quite a bit to go and see a performance, so the performance has to give them value for money… It has to be really something to see.”

How does David Byrne envisage the future possibilities of live performance?

“I’ve seen a lot of things that hip-hop artists have done – like the Kanye West show where he emerges on a platform that floats above the stage,” he says. “I’d seen one with Kendrick Lamar where it was pretty much just him on stage, an empty stage with just him on stage and a DJ, somebody with a laptop – that was it. I thought, ‘Wow’. Then he started doing things with huge projections behind. There are lots of ways to do this. I love the idea of working with a band, with live musicians. ‘How can I innovate in this kind of way?’ It’s maybe easier for a hip-hop musician who doesn’t have a band to figure out. The pressure is on to come up with new ways of doing this.”

In liberating his musicians from fixed, immovable positions, American Utopia also acts as a metaphor for freeing our minds from our own ingrained ways of thinking. As Byrne intersperses Talking Heads classics such as ‘Once In A Lifetime’, ‘I Zimbra’ and ‘Road To Nowhere’ with choice solo cuts and tracks from ‘American Utopia’, he also dots the show with musings on an array of post-millennial questions: the health of democracy; the rise of xenophobia and fascism; our increasing reliance on materialism and online communication; the climate change threat; the existential nightmare of the dating app; and, crucially, the distances all of these things put between us.

“The ‘likes’ and friends and connections and everything that the internet enables,” he argues, “even Zoom calls like this, they’re no substitute for really being with other people. Calling social networks ‘social’ is a bit of an exaggeration.”

Byrne closes the show with the suggestion that, rather than isolate behind our LCD barriers, we should try to reconnect with each other. In an age when social media has descended into all-out thought war and anyone can find concocted ‘facts’ to support anything they want to believe, is that realistic?

“I have a little bit of hope,” he says. “Not every day, but some days. I have hope that people will abandon a lot of social media, that they’ll realise how intentionally addictive it is, and they’re actually being used, and that they might enjoy actually being with other people rather than just constantly scrolling through their phone. So, I’m a little bit optimistic that people will, in some ways, use this technology a little bit less than they have.”

A key moment in American Utopia comes with Byrne’s cover of Janelle Monae’s ‘Hell You Talmbout’, a confrontational track shouting the names of African-Americans who have been killed by police or in racially motivated attacks – Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, George Floyd and far, far too many more. Does Byrne think the civil unrest in the wake of Floyd’s death and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement make a serious impact?

“We’ll see how long this continues,” he says, “but in projects that I’m working on – there’s a theatre project I’m working on in Denver, there’s the idea of bringing this show back to Broadway, there’s other projects – those issues came to the fore. Issues of diversity and inclusion and things like that, which were always there. Now they’re being taken more seriously. The producers and theatre owners realise that they can’t push those things aside, that they have to be included in the whole structure of how a show gets put together.”

“At least for now, that seems to be a big change. I see it in TV shows and other areas too. There’s a lot of tokenism, but there’s a lot of real opportunity and changed thinking as well.”

Elsewhere, he encourages his audience to register to vote, and had registration booths at the shows. He must have been pleased about the record turnout in the recent US election? “Yeah, the turnout was great. Now you just got to keep doing that. Gotta keep doing it at all the local elections, too. It was important for me not to endorse a political party or anything in the show but to say, ‘Listen, we can’t have a democracy if you don’t vote. You have to get out there and let your voice be heard and there’s lots of people trying to block it.’ We have to at least try.”

Will Trump’s loss help bring people together after four years with such a divisive influence in charge?

“Yes. I think for me Trump was not so much a shock; we knew who he is. He was around New York before that, in the reality show [The Apprentice], we knew what kind of character he was. What shocked me was how quickly the Republican party all fell into line behind him, behind this guy who’s obviously a racist, misogynist liar and everything else. But it’s kind of encouraging – although it’s taken four years and with some it’s only with the prospect of him being gone – that quite a few have been breaking ranks. There are some possibilities of bridge building being held out.”

But, he says, “It’s too early to celebrate,” concerned that Senate Majority Leader and fairweather Trump loyalist Mitch McConnell will use any Republican control of the Senate to block many of Biden’s policies from coming into effect. “[This] is what happened with Obama… I want to see real change happen. [Climate change] absolutely needs to be a priority. The clock had turned back over the last four years, so there’s a lot to be done. Whether there’s the willpower to do everything that needs to be done, it remains to be seen, but at least now it’s pointing in the right direction.”

How will he look back on the last four years? Byrne ponders. “I’m hoping that I look back at it as a near-miss.”

American Utopia is as much a personal journey as a dissection of modern ills. Ahead of ‘Everybody’s Coming To My House’, Byrne admits to being a rather socially awkward type. He claims that a choir of Detroit teenagers, when singing the song for the accompanying video, had imbued the song with a far more welcoming message than his own rendition, which found him wracked with the fear that his visitors might never leave. How does someone like that deal with celebrity?

“In a certain way it’s a blessing,” Byrne grins, “because I don’t have to go up to people to talk to them – they sometimes come up to me. In other ways it’s a little bit awkward. Celebrity itself seems very superficial and I have to constantly remind myself that your character, your behaviour and the work that you do is what’s important – not how well known you are, not this thing of celebrity. I learned early on it’s pretty easy to get carried away. But it does have its advantages. I had Spike Lee’s phone number, so I could text him.”

Talking Heads drummer Chris Frantz’s recent book Remain In Love suggests that the more successful Byrne got early on, the more distant he became.

Byrne nods. “I haven’t read the book, but I know that as we became more successful I definitely used some of that to be able to work on other projects. I worked on a dance score with [American choreographer] Twyla Tharp and I worked on a theatre piece with [director] Robert Wilson – other kinds of things – [and] I started working on directing some of the band’s music videos. So I guess I spent less time just hanging out. As often happens with bands, you start off being all best friends and doing everything together and after a while that gets to be a bit much. Everybody develops their own friends and it’s like, ‘I have my own friends too’. Everybody starts to have their own lives.”

The future is far too enticing for David Byrne to consider revisiting the past. “I do live alone so sometimes it would get lonely”, he says of lockdown, but he’s been using his Covid downtime to cycle around undiscovered areas of New York and remain philosophical about the aftermath.

“We’ll see how long before the vaccine is in, before we return to being able to socialise,” he says, “but I’m also wondering, ‘How am I going to look at this year? Am I going to look at it as, “Oh yes, that’s the year that was to some extent taken away from our lives; our lives were put on pause?”’ We kept growing; we kept ageing; we keep eating, but it was almost like this barrier had been put up. It has been a period where, in a good way, it’s led us to question a lot of what we do. You get up in the morning and go, ‘Why am I doing this? What am I doing this for? What’s this about?’ Everything is questioned.”

Post-vaccine, he hopes to “travel a little bit” before looking into plans to bring the ‘American Utopia’ show back to Broadway, and possibly even to London if the financial aspects can be worked out. “Often when a show like that travels, the lead actors might travel,” Byrne explains, “but in this case it’s the entire cast that has to travel. So you’ve got a lot of hotel bills and all that kind of stuff. We wanted to do it. There might be a way, if we can figure that out.”

Once we all get our jab, will everyone come to recognise that, as Byrne sings on ‘American Utopia’s most inspiring track, ‘Every Day Is A Miracle’? “Optimistically, maybe,” he says. “There will be a lot of people who will just go, ‘Let’s get back to normal – get out to the bars, the clubs and discos’. That’s already been happening in New York; there’s been these underground parties where people just can’t help themselves. But after all this it’d be nice to think that people might reassess things a little bit.”

And with the algorithm as the new gatekeeper and technology beginning to subsume the sounds and consumption of music, what does the new wave Nostradamus foresee for rock in the coming decades? Will AIs soon be writing songs for other AIs to consume to inflate the numbers, cutting humanity out of the equation altogether?

“It seems like there’ll be a kind of factory,” Byrne predicts, “an AI factory of things like that, and of newspaper articles and all of this kind of stuff, and it will just exaggerate and duplicate human biases and weaknesses and stupidity. On the other hand, I was part of a panel a while back, and a guy told a story about how his listening habits were Afrofuturism and ambient music – those were his two favourite ways to go. The algorithm tried to find commonalities between the two so it could recommend things to him and he said it was hopeless. Everything it recommended was just horrible because it tried to find commonalities between these two very separate things. This just shows that we’re a little more eclectic than these machines would like to think.”

And in the distant future? Best prepare to welcome your new gloop overlords. Byrne isn’t concerned about The Singularity – the point at which machine intelligence supersedes ours and AI becomes God – but instead believes that future technologies will emulate microbial forms.

“I watched a documentary on slime moulds [a simple slimy organism] the other day,” he says, warming to his sticky theme. “Slime moulds are actually extremely intelligent for being a single-celled organism. They can build networks and bunches of them can communicate. They can learn, they have memories, they can do all these kinds of things that you wouldn’t expect a single-celled organism to be able to do.”

“I started thinking, ‘Well, is there a lesson there for AI and machine learning, of how all these emerging properties could be done with something as simple as a single cell?’ It’s all in there… when things interact, they become greater than the sum of their parts. I thought, okay, maybe the future of AI is not in imitating human brains, but imitating these other kinds of networks, these other kinds of intelligences. Forget about imitating human intelligence – there’s other kinds of intelligence out there, and that might be more fruitful. But I don’t know where that leads.”

His grin says he does know, that he has a vision of our icky soup-world future, but maybe the rest of the species isn’t yet advanced enough to handle it. But if we’re evolving towards disaster rather than utopia, we can trust David Byrne to give us plenty of warning.

December 18, 2020

#david byrne #talking heads #music #new wave #post-punk #art pop #avant funk #worldbeat #interview #nme magazine #2020

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popculturebuffet · 3 years

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Wonder Woman 1984 Review “The Monkey’s Paw Wish of Superhero Movies”

Before we dig in, I just want to properly frame how much of a fucking disapointment this film was to me. It was thanks to the first film that I became the massive Wonder Woman fan I am today. Thanks to that movie and it’s accompanying sale, as Comixology likes to put sales on to tie into things as you’d expect, I tried Greg Rucka’s run on the title.. and quickly bought the second volume and will buy the third which didn’t exist yet at some point, as it’s easily one of my faviorite comics of all time, one i’ll undoubtly cover, and one that throughly sold me on the amazon princess, and throughly defined what she is to me: a compasionate warrior. Someone who WILL fight, who will take on the bad guys without hesitation, and who WILL kill if she has to.. but also someone whose compationate. Who will genuinely try to reform foes, who only kills as a last resort and not as a first option like some adaptations and the new 52 seem to think. She’s someone who in said run went out of her way to help her old friend and currently brainwashed foe Vanessa Kapetlis get cured of being the silver swan. She’s someone whose wholhe purpose for writing a book wasn’t money but simply to spread her people and her gods teachings. Someone whose , kind, noble, badass, smart and easily every bit the pure soul superman is. The run sold me on the character throughly and made me a fan to this day, one currently pouring thorugh both Rucka’s second run, and George Perez’ equally good run and one who hopes the upcoming dc relaunch means she’ll stop swapping writers every few months and get the run she deserves. I just wanted to sell how much I treasured the character now thanks to the first movie and thus how hyped beyond hype I was for this movie. It had a great cast, a great setting, cool trailers.. sure they didn’t show off the plot but it had to be good right? This couldn’t be say.. a giant, overly long mess of tangled plots, padding, terrible pacing, unfortunate implications and pedro pascal devouring the scenery in a manner galactus would be proud of right?

Well that’s what we got. After a year of hoping it’d come out some way this year, after having it delayed and after a year where MANY projects I loved were necessarily delayed due to covid... I got what I wanted. I got the movie i’d been hoping to see for months and months and months... and just like the wishes in the movie itself... it went horribly, horribly wrong. What I expected was something great as the other recent DC Movies.. what I got was a huge disapointing mess capping off a huge disapointing mess of a year. So while i’m a bit late due to contracting Covid and all the “FUN” that comes with that, I still felt like tearing into this film to figure out why I didn’t like it, what good parts it did have, and what the hell went wrong here. Spoilers and full review after the cut.

The Plot: Unlike my usual summaries I do, i’m keeping this one short and susicnt for those who haven’t seen the film: After a cold open flashback to diana’s childhood that was an omen of the boring padding to come, we get our main plot: It’s 1984 and Diana is acting in semi secret and helping out where she can. After some artifact thefts she takes a job at a museum and meets meek nerdy nerdy and office punching bag Barbra Minerva. The two strike up a kind of friendship, with Barbra wishing she could be as cool as diana especially after Diana saves her from being assaulted by a creepy random asshole.

Diana hasn’t moved on from Steve Trevor’s death in the previous film, and thus when encountering a mysterious stone wishes for him to come back. Barbra likewise wishes fto be just like diana. Meanwhile Maxwell Lord, a conman who has sold a bunch of bogus oil plots, plots to steal the stone himself and does so by seducing Barbra, and instead of wishing for more wishes, wishes to GRANT THEM instead, thus overnight making his buisness a sucess and using the inevitible monkey’s paw consequences of said wishes to benifit himself. Meanwhile Diana is reunited with Steve who for some reason has hyjacked someone elses body, and even has sex with Diana in it which is all kinds of creepy and wrong that we’ll get into soon enough. Meanwhile everyone now notices Barbara.. and she’s also gaining Diana’s powers but slowly loosing her empathy. Diana eventually finds out with Barba’s help that the stone is dangerous and it’s wishes backfire horribly, while Max continues to gain power with his as Diana chases after him, slowly loosing her own power as her consequence for the wish. You know instead of the fact her lover took someone elses body and life and they have to live with that. Eventually Max gets the power of a soverign nation and the satilte codes off the president, and plans to broadcast himslef the the world to offset his own wish consequence, his body slowly failing, by taking other people’s health. Steve urges Diana to renounce her wish and give him up to get her power back, she reluctnantly and painfully does so, and then goes after Max. Barbra however has sided with max and has him give her even more power turning her into a cat person as you’d expect. Wonder woman and the now fully cat Cheetah battle, it’s really cool looking, but Diana barely wins. We do get a decent climax with Diana not fighting max, not that she can with how powerful she’s become, but using the lasso of truth to get him to see the damage he’s done, give up and go back to his son. The world is saved Diana is moving on and also Linda Carter is there for some reason.

So now you have general idea of what happens, I can dig into the films faults, and it’s one or two strengths, one at a time, ONE AT A TIME. First off the film’s biggest issue by far and one that wouldn’t come through in the recap Padding and Pacing: THIS FILM DID NOT NEED TO BE 2 hrs 41 min

I said it once before but it bears repeating now:

THIS FILM DID NOT NEED TO BE 2 HOURS AND 41 MINUTES LONG

I am a firm belivier a film should be as long or short as it needs to be. If it’s under the standard 90 minutes, that’s cool, if it’s say three hours like avengers endgame that’s cool too. After the theater it’s easy enough to watch it in chunks, and sometimes a film just NEEDS that space and scope.

This film.. did not need that. This is not the cumilation of 10 years of storytelling, as slapdashidly planned as it was till phase 3, this is a film that feels painfully long to watch due to how padded it is. You could’ve cut those 40 mintues from this film EASILY and while you wouldn’t of had a good film, sadly, you would’ve had a way more enjoyable cheesy superhero movie. I”m tackling this one first because it just.. oozes all over the film. For every great and memorable bit in the movie and every questionable one we’ll get to, for every gloriously so bad it’s good moment... there’s about 10 minutes of scene that did not need to be there. It slows down the film to a crawl and given the original had pitch perfect pacing I do not get how Patty Jenkins screwed this up.

I do think Patty Jenkins is a good director. I did like the first movie, I do think a lions share of the credit goes to her writing and direction for that one. And a LOT of the sequences in this film are utterly goregously shot and fun to watch. I also, even if I don’t like this film, am extastic she forced the stuido to pay her more money to work on the film, as she deserves as much as any male director, it’s bullshit they tried to short change her, and again she was the reason the first film was so good. She deserved equal fucking pay for making Warner money hand over fist.

But I also say this because i’m disapointed in HER. She CAN do better, she already did the first time and the only real down spot, the spotty cgi climax, was not her fault. And hell here she did get the climax she wanted, and wrote one hell of one. I”ll go into it more later but the finale of this movie from the pitch perfect fight with cheetah, dodgy face work nonwithstanding, to the final speech to the world is just gorgeous to watch. Even in this mess of a film there are some really good really tightly shot sequences that i’ll get to.. but their broken up by padding and padding nad more padding. This film is bloated, it needed to be edited down but she clearly REFUSED TO, gunshy after the whole Ares thing last time... and thus shot herself in the foot repeadtly. I sitll have some hope for the next movie and Rogue Squadron, but Jenkins rightfully lost any blind faith I had in her this film would be good just as the directors of it chapter 2 lost it by.. making a terrible sequel to a great movie. Given this happened in the span of a year you’d THINK i’d of prepared myself for that.. but no. Sadly.. no.

But back to the point of this section: the film is just really padded. A lot of it is just scenes going on longer than they need to but there are some specific bits, some recurring others all in one go, that just really get tedious and pad things out. Let’s rattle em off shall we? The Opening: Now the opening is gorgeously shot, and it is nice to see Thymesicra again.. but the sequence is twiece as long as it needed to be, often just devolves into frantic shots of running.. and really dosen’t need to be here. I love Thymesicra, I love Hipolita, I love this damn beautiful island.. but we did not need it for this one. I THOUGHT it was there because the climax would be Max and Barbra invading the island or something.. but no. It has nothing to do with the main plot other than selling the film’s message “Nothing good comes from lies and shortcuts” which is a good message.. but the film already conveys that well. For all it’s flaws it well conveys the fact that the easy way to get what you want ALWAYS comes with a cost. That you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you just might find you get what you need. So we didn’t need 10 minutes of amazons running around just to make a point that the film already makes and it wreaks of Warner wanting to put the amazons in the film because “that’s what people expect.”

Steve Trevor Dinking Around for 20 Minutes: I will admit as dumb as it was.. I really loved the Steve Trevor 80′s fashion show. Oh it was dumb.. beyond belieif.. but it’s REALLY hard to hate a good 5 minutes of chris pine putting on stupid 80′s outfits. I do think like a lot of this film it was longer than it needed to be and it defintely needed a good catchy 80′s tune alongside it, just go full bollocks if your doing this, but otherwise it’s just hard not to joy, even if in a so bad it’s good kind of way, this kind of lunacy in a major stuido film

That goodwill died quckily as the next 15 goddamn minutes, 5 for the fashion show which while i liked it did not need to be in the film as long as it was, were just steve getting used to the new world of the 80′s. While I like the idea of Steve now in Diana’s roll as stranger in a strange land, instead of using it cleverly or having him ruminate over all his friends being dead Captain America style or .. a billion other things we could’ve used this time for if you really needed it, we instead just get Steve and Diana farting around for 20 minutes and Chris Pine making stupid faces. Chris Pine deserved better than this. He seems to be a steerling person in his personal life and I seriously doubt he’s done any movie bad enough to have earned this.. I mean he did do Star Trek: Into Darkness but NONE of those films problems were his fault. It’s just really, REALLY terrible, and even more boring in padded in places than this film but without the good bits or the haminess of pedro pascal to make it even remotely watchable. Point is i’m doing a blind look, and this is blind I just came up with tihs bit while I was writing and have not looked at chris pine’s filmography before, to see if there’s anything really bad enough to justify him being put through this buffonery.

Turns out .. yeah yeah he did. Two films in fact are just bad enough that he did in fact sign on to something bad enough to justify this. There were one or two other contenders but Princess Diaries 2 was earlier in his career, Into The Woods much like Into Darkness was not his fault and honestly if I were offered a part in a glitzy hollywood adaptation of a beloved musical i’d sign on too without heistation, and while Wrinke in Time is kind of a mess, Chris Pine is easily one of the best parts of it. No the two films that make him DESERVE the goofy terrible fish out of water stuff are this means war, a film I saw throughly savaged by Matthew “Film Brain” Buck, which is about two douchey cia agents competing over a woman without thinking that MAYBE the choice is hers, and also setting up CONSTNAT SURVILENCE over her and basically stalking her to sabatoge each others dates. And while I did mention that review, because it did give context.. even from the trailer I could tell this was sexist, bro douchey, and stupid and wanted no part of it. So yeah signing on this this, post star trek’s success where he had his pick of projects and was at the hight of his fame.. is inexcusable. The other is just... the kind of embarassing dtv film a person does before they get famous but is so horrendously premised that I still can’t give it to him. Like I get needing work, I do comissions 10 for movies now and 5 for tv show episodes and issues of comics if you were curious, so I understand that.. but even at his most desperate... why would you possibly take... this?

.. wait is that Stephen Tobowsky in the credits? Good god his career is depressing some time.. but at least unlike chris I GET him being in this as he needs money and despite his long and storied career, has to take what he can get. Wheras Chris was a promsing young star who while needing a break, CAN’T of thought this would be remotely sucessful and can’t of paid that well. But since the poster might not convey the premise.. the premise is Chris is a Blind Man looking for love set up on BLIND DATES.

It sounds like a fucking Adam Sandler film premise. I’m honestly suprised he hasn’t remade this film with himself, david spade, or rob schinder, whose apparently on good terms with him again, god help us all. And DON’T. TELL. HIM. He still hasn’t made that worst film imaginable he promised for getting Snubbed for Uncut Gems. Yes I know, Hubie Halloween came out but that was in production long before the promise and not that bad. Not great, pretty average, but not terrible. Point is do not tempt Adam Sandler to remake this film. He still owes us the worst film he can muster INTENTIONALLY, as Pixels, Rediculous Six, That’s My Boy? That was all him trying to make GOOD movie. Be afraid be VERY afraid. The other point is this premise is just really bad, REALLY offensive to blind people to make being blind into a stupid punchline, and I.. will probably watch this at some point because i’m bafflingly curious about this terrible terrible thing Chris Pine probably wanted us all to forget about, but will now never have that luxury as long as I live. The Fireworks Scene: This one is just..really dumb. Like really dumb. Every bit of this scene was dumb and we could’ve just.. had them get on a plane to egypt like normal people or steal a jet off screen. So to get to Egypt, Diana and Steve steal a jet which Steve can somehow fly despite decades of progress in how planes work at this point and him not knowing what radar is. He also gets shot ot at because Diana FORGOT, somehow, that radar exists and didn’t tell him. They also steal a jet instead of just taking an airliner or her calling in a favor since while it’s been a good few decades and Etta is sadly long dead, the candy family probably knows and loves her well enough and probably still has some military personal who could pull some strings and bring a jet over from london. It’s a stretch.. but not much more than “let’s steal a plane and hope we don’t die. “

Why this is in the padding section is because we then get a way too long bit of the two flying through a field of fireworks.. which also apparently existed LONG before steve was even born, so I donn’t quite get why he’s so shocked. And while i’ts not a bad CONCEPT for a scene the fact the two are being persued by the military for stealing a jet AND have to get to egypt so urgently they had to steal the jet in the first place lest Max do something horrible, which he ends up doing anyway... to take 10 minutes to gaze at the pretty fireworks. It’s just.. a waste of time in a movie that wasted already too much time.

Some of the barbra scenes: We’ll dive more into Barbra in a bit, and this is easily the least offesnive on this list, but a lot of the scnees of her discovering her new power could’ve been compressed. There are seperate scenes of her discovering she dosen’t need glasses anymore and picking up a ton of weight at the gym, while in 80′s workout clothes because of course she is. Both of those could’ve been one, either having her pick up something heavy like nothing casually or just having her glasses fall and break at the gym, have some cute guy help her up to help sell the wish making her feel noticed, and realize she don’t need em. It’s minor in comparison, but a good chunk of her plot badly needed to be streamlined.

And those are just the main offenders. The film’s pacing in general is just attrocious. It takes half an hour for the plot to move along most of the time.. there’ ssome good character stufff but they could’ve better weaved it into the plot and in some Barbra scenes and most of Max’s they DID. It’s just for the most part there’s a lot of repttition of stuff we already knew and figured out and it takes forever for the plot to move to the next phase until the last half hour. And by then my niece was already in the kitchen playing with her new slime having enitrely checked out, my mom was asleep and my brother just wanted this film over already and both of us were only hanging in out of obligation. This film blows most of what little potetial it has taking too damn long to get to the point. As I said it’s fine for a film to be long.. but while Endgame had laggy sections and some of it’s own problems.. it USED the huge runtime effectivey, using the first hour to both show our heroes had truly lost, then to set up the post-time skip world and just what had become of our heroes and their arcs for the movies. The second hour is mostly the time heist, a fun tour through the mcu’s history that also helps progress arcs and the final act is basically one MASSIVE glorious battle featuring every single hero who hadn’t suffered a non-snap related death in one of the best big action scnenes i’ve ever seen. It was well crafted and it’s slower moments were for character stuff and not because they felt the film needed to feel as long as the rest of the year had felt. But while it was the film’s main flaw and the main reason i’ts bad instead of mediocre..there’s one other massive flaw that utterly sinks the damn film and robs of it of a lot of it’s emotional weight The Character Assassination of Diana Prince:

Now we get to the part that really pisses me off one that was already kinda bad while watching but just got worse the more I thought about it: Diana’s Charcterization here. Despite being flawless in the first film.. here it’s just bad. It’s bad and it should feel bad. I can’t fathom how Jenkins lost touch so badly with the character, and I don’t think the Co-Writer Remotley helped. The Co-Writer for this film was Geoff Johns, a dc wunderkind whose reinvented the flash, green lantern, the justice society of america and aquaman, all brilliantly. The last one was even largely the basis for his damn fun movie. I have a lot of respect for the man... but like a lot of creators he’s not immune to screwing up and has made a LOT of mistakes, the biggest being forcing Cyborg away from the titans and into the justice league not for diversity’s sake like he probably claims.. but really because he didn’t want to use John Stewart instead of Hal Jordan, who he has an odd obession with i’ve never gotten, something the incoming writer of Green Lantern, Geoffry Throne, turns out to have complained about for years, as well as apparnetly giving out about Jordan SO MANY TIMES, that an entire artcle was made revealing this... and I’m perfectly fine with that as it should be clear I don’t like Hal Jordan all that much and while he’s been in some good runs, the other earth lanterns are FAR more intersting than him and far more unique. Thankfully the new series seems to be focusing on multiple of them and while hal seems to be getting some focus, Simon and Jessica are the main stars of modern day. So hell yeah to that. Let’s get back to the actual point.

The point being that one of his weaknesses as a writer.. is he really dosen’t get Wonder Woman. He just dosen’t. During Justice League he wrote her as a violent warrior and during Infinite Crisis, as expertly pointed out by LInkara during his review of it a few years back, he had her “not understand what being human is” .. despite this being at the SAME TIME as that Greg Rucka run I mentioned, meaning at the time of Inifnite Crisis, she had her own embassy for her people set up, had written a book, and had just spent a good chunk of that run trying to free an old friend who’d been brainwashed into a psychotic killing machine from her mechanical inhancments killing her and driving her insane. She willingly blinded herself with fucking snake venom to save the world from Medusa’s gaze and avenge a child THEN went on a long and arduous quest for the gods simiply to ressurect said child, with no intent of getting her sight back and only getting it back because Athena willingly gave hers up for being so noble. She is someone who is compatsionate, empathetic and noble. Not a kill happy warrior who loves fighting and blood. She fights because she has to, she does not hesitate and she does kill when needed.. but she is not some weird enigma to humanity. She’s throughly human despite being made of clay and not raised among regular humans. She’s a person, and Geoff just dosen’t get that. He get Superman, the flash, batman, other heroes just fine. He redefined aquaman well like I said. But for some damn reason he just dosen’t get Diana and can’t get a good grasp on her and while a good choice of co writer for practically any other dc movie and a good choice to right the ship for the dceu, he was the second possible worst choice to handle this character and likely is at least partially responsible for her character taking such a nosedive. By the way just in case you think better of him for only being second worst.. this is the worst.

Yes that actually happened.. thankfully not in the main canon and likely because Frank Miller really REALLY needs to get some help.

Point is he was a bad choice and while I still give Patty Jenkins some discredit for helping with this, I do feel Geoff easily could’ve agreed with or came up with some of the worse ideas here without really thinking them through because this simply isn’t a character he cares about what happens to her or knows that well. Things START fine: in present day we get a pretty fun action sequence in a mall with what my brother called Dollar Store Micheal Keaton.. but because Max was already perfectly cast, there wasn’t room for this screen legend. Plus he was probably busy shooting Morbius for.. whatever his role is there. I hope it’s the vulture. My point is DSMK is delightfully hammy and weird and helps kick up an already fun mall sequence.. while I was apparnetly the ONLY one who enjoyed this cheesy but awesome sequence in my family aside from my niece, she hadn’t rightfully checked out at this point, I still love it. It does bring up the slight problem of Diana being active years before... but given The Suicide Squad with it’s vast colorful cast of supervillians and the fact the freaking Justice Society are getting introdcued and given their gimmick even if WWII isn’t involed this time they had to have been active for some time before they presumibly vanished. My point is the whole Zack Snyder thing of “Metahumans are new and you should fear them” has been quitely retconned out and this will all likely be explained with the whole flashpoint thing... (Shudders).. not the retcon the DCEU needs a good coat of paint and unlike the XCU I dont think their going to waste a second chance, I just want a flash film that’s actually about barry and not another adaptation of a storyline few people liked ot start with. Point is that’s not really a huge issue and I prefer DIana being active than the implication she did nothing and her doing small bits of heroisim, like saving a woman from getting hit by a car or resucing pets and bigger ones like the mall just .. fell like Diana. It’s all downhill from there though. For starters there’s Barbra. It starts well: Diana is the only person to not only notice Barbra but treat her nice, and the two strike up a friendship.. which I honeslty wish was more as there was a lot of potetial there and both have great chemistry, not to mention showing Diana’s bisexuality on screen would be a really damn good move forward for representation, but that’s more on me and given how homophobic big companies can be, i’m unsuprised Warner wouldn’t let Patty take that route.

Point is it starts well enough.. but instead of the two actually having a deep freindship and possible relationship that is heartbreaking when it’s broken.. Diana just sort of forgets about her except when she needs her for the plot, and thus what should’ve been an emotionally breaking subplot leading to an utterly heartbreaking fight at the climax.. was just Diana being a dick, taking advantage of someone, and then getting a bit self righteous when the person you basically abandoned and didn’t notice made a wish till it was too late wants to keep the one thing that’s ever made her feel special.

It dosen’t help the comics did this whole thing better and is likely where Jenkins got the inspiration: During Rebirth Barbara Minvera was converted from a vicious ruthless bitch and a half, if still a brilliant character, to a tragic figure: one who while a bit cold and standofish, was genuinely diana’s friend, tricked into thinking she was abandoned, then became the bride of a horrifying god who punsiheed her for the “crime”.. of not being a virgin. While removing the whole cat god thing is understandable.. they removed pretty much everything that made that intresting and Rucka worked hard to make for a cliche “Nerd becomes evil” plot that’s been done a milion times nad makes dsiana look horrible. But while this is bad.. it PALES in comparisoin to the elephant in the room here.

No no elephant sweetie not wild pig. No.. it’s once Diana makes her wish on the magical wishing stone form the trickster god.. and brings steve back. See her bringing him back only for her to have to give him up to save the world.. that’s not bad. It’s a great way to bring chris pine back, ratchet up tension and ultimately give her proper closure for steve so she can move on. The problem.. is HOW steve comes back and how the movie handles that. Steve comes back.. by possesing some random guy. That itself is not a bad idea, as while it’s weird, A) I’m a weirdo and proud of it so i’mf ine with weird and B) it gives us a price to the wish like the other wishes: steve comes back.. but he has to take someone else’s life to do so. Diana has to sacrifice an innocent man she dosen’t know anything about in order to get her happy ending. That could’ve lead to some great drama, with Diana realizing how wrong this is and forcing herself to give him up with Steve’s blessing, as Steve would likewise not feel right about this. He could’ve had family or a girlfriend or something that were jeaporadzied if Diana kept Steve. The problem.. is they handled it horribly. really horribly. Diana and Steve.. almost NEVER mention the fact that he’s basically taken a life. They don’t ask if the guy is dead, they don’t ask who he was and they don’t try to find a way to get him a new body or a dying one or some other ghost can’t do it style shenanigan. And the fact i’m comparing this subplot to ghost can’t do it should tell you this is very bad. And it gets worse as the two have sex.. and whiel I dind’t think about it while watching the movie... afterwords? Yeah.. that’s.. that’s rape. The guy didn’t consent to letting them use his body. Now granted if Steve could leave the body at willand the guy was like “Sure why not” then that’d be fine.. but he has no way of consenting. Sure STEVE did.. but this ain’t his property. This isn’t his body to decide who he fucks. It’s random guy whose body he stole. Hell they didn’t even stop to consider if this guy might be gay which given Diana is bisexual makes no goddamn sense. So that’s another possible layer of wrong on this sundae of what the actual hell. I mean.. how do you bungle writing so bad your main character ends up as a rapist? That’s a special kind of incompetence in 2020 I tell you.

It just turns Diana from a kind noble woman who looks out for everyone.. into a creepy asshole who willingly sacrifices some guy she dosen’t know, something a well written Diana would NEVER do, to get what she wants. This is not diana prince. This is “out of the way sperm bank” levels of charactera assasination” and the fact steve has to talk her into letting him go just makes it worst. Diana here is selifhs, unsympathetic and terrible and it brings the whole film down despite Gal Godot’s best efforts to try and make this work. She fails.. but it’s not on her as an actress, she’s terrific, but on the writing for Diana being so bad. She just comes off as selfish and irredemible and i’ts horrifying to see. As one last note Steve is reduced to more of a cutout this time, so any possible emotinal weight not already destroyed by the rape is entirley missing. Just good god they did Diana dirty for this one. And it dosen’t help her villians.. are done much better. Speaking of..

Barbra: A Mixed Cat Out of a Mixed Bag As the title should make clear Barbra is kind of a mixed bag. On the one hand.. Kristin Wiig is fantastic. Like holy crap I had some small doubts about her being cast in the role but she nailed both the sweet put upon nerd at the start and the ruthless individual desperate to stay special at the end really well and the reason her scenes aren’t as draggy despite a lot being padding are Wiig just really sells the transformation, going from being giddy at a sudden influx of attention to feeling powerful.. to feeling dangerous and being deseprate to do whatever it takes to hold onto her power and being furious when she looses it. The problem is.. it’s all in the acting. Writing wise the story is horribly cliche. It’s why her having feelings for Diana was a suggestion that popped into my head: that’s actually intresting. A put upon nerd who envy’s a hero but ends up instead resenting them and wanting to kill them isn’t new. Amazing Spider-Man 2, which I thankfully haven’t seen but has that plot, Incredibles, and the one that the movie steals from the most.. Batman Returns. While wanting to kill the hero wasn’t part of that one, the whole “blonde whose still attractive even before the makeover has some supernatural thing happen to her and turns into an extrovert with a cat motif who is determined to take what she wants despite the cost.” While i’ts not 1 for 1, mostly becasue Catwoman actually had a romantic relationship with the hero, it’s REALLY hard to ignore just how much it seems to curb from Returns. And I haven’t even seen the movie the whole way through, just about half, really need to, not the point. Point is, it just feels like a rehash of a better done version of the plot. And the sad part is the comics GAVE Patty and Geoff two much better versions that could’ve followed the same path. Pre-Rebirth/Flashpoint, she was a ruthless woman from the getgo and simply could’ve been that, being friends with Diana.. but being too selfish and envious to truly let her in and thus relishing in her new power and showing off who she really was. The other, and better option for the narrative is the previously mentioned rebirth one: A sarcastic and hard but likeable woman who has had to scrape and claw to do what she loves, which is archelogy, despite her father being vastly against it because he’s a dick. Someone who through tragic misunderstanding becomes a tragic monster. That latter version would’ve fit in perfectly, having her like diana and just want to be her.. but a combination of her own inseucrites and the stone strip away her empathy and increase her jealousy and Diana neglecting her could’ve been a concious choice: Diana being too busy with steve and stopping max to see what was happening and thus be heartbroken to fight her true friend. Instead we just get.. catwoman but less good. Wiig tries her best and often succeeds but even she can’t really fix this. It also dosen’t help that selfishness aside.. Barbra is far more sympathetic. She’s contantly put upon and ignored by her cowowkres nad even her boss, who oftne forgets she works there, and finally meets someone who seems to care.. onlyf or that person to ignore her and go off and have adventures and really horribly implicated sex. So she wishes to be like this person, to be confident and loved and able to walk in heels and strong and gets it and slowly looses who she was to it. Hell the moment where she apparently CROSSES THE LINE by possibly killing some guy.. is entirely ruined by picking the wrong target. Instead of it being her boss or one of her co workers who mockeda nd humilated her.. i’ts the same guy who tried to assault her out for revenge. She’s beating up.. a bad person. She’s doing what Diana would do in a good way..

Sure she does take a turn for the evil, after hearing about the wishing stone destroying civilizations.. she sides with max.. but she’s still more sympathetic. Her resintment of Diana which should just be the meta commentary Jenkins intended on relationships between women where it becomes competitive due to societal bullshit, instead comes off justifed. Diana abandoned her, Diana is also being selfish with her wish, diana raped a man, Diana wants Max to stop.. but has to be TALKED into letting her wish go. While Diana is trying to save the world you can’t fault Barbra for not trusting her. For someone who preaches honesty, all Diana is to Barbra is a liar. While she does side with Max who earlier manipualted her by seducing her and stealing the stone... she KNOWS he’s not a great person, and this time instead of being the used, she’s the user. She knows he can make her even STRONGER, knows he can let her keep being who she wants to be if not BETTER, and knows he needs someone on his side.. and knows he won’t screw her over with her wish since he needs Diana off his back to become powerful enough to face her. Barbra comes off as cunning, manipulative and way more likeable than the hero, instead of the tragic villian she was inteded as. If nothing else, if she shows up in the sequel I will watch it even after this one was pretty damn bad and hopefully sh’ell be better written next time to match Wiig’s hard work. Now.. i’ve saved the best for last as while i’ve compalined a lot.. there is ONE aspect of the film that is genuinely good and while I get not everyone liked it.. Is urea s hell did

Maxwell Lord: Perdo Pascal Saves this film by eating the set whole like galactus.

Maxwell Lord.. is the best part of this movie. Easily. Unlike the other main characters, he’s written well, acted well if hammy as all hell, and is true to the comics. Part of this I freely admit is that when I heard Max was a villian here I expected none of his JLI version to survivie. I should explain.. in the comics Max is defined by two diffrent phases of how he was written; The first was in Giffen and Demattis run on justice league, which was more of an action comedy with emphasis on the comedy> There was still serious stuff and villians to face, it’s just our heroes were a bunch of likeable misfits and b-list heroes doing their best while cracking jokes and disfunctionally clashing with one another. It’s good stuff. Max was the heart of that: a selfish manipulative buisness man who grew to like the league and rebelled against the robot intellegence that got him that far, earning him a fair spot on the team. Sure he was a sleazy, shady 80′s buisness man, but he has a good heart underneath the opprotunsitic nature.

Come the run up to infinite crisis despite being a metahuman, he started irationally hating metahumans, claimed to have always hated them, and set up a vast conspriacty to kill em all. He also hyjacked superman, which lead to Wonder Woman being forced to snap his neck and being booed for it by superman despite the fact you know.. she was trying to stop him from killing batman and had no other cohice. The rest of the world got the clip out of context.. but even then she’d already killed months ago for the medusa thing I mentioned before, and despite Medusa only speeking ancient greek, the world, which tihs was broadcast too hence the danger of medusa killing trillions of viewers watching at home, they got the context that Wonder Woman was the good guy and was killing for good reason. It was just.. kind of stupid even if Rucka did his best with it is what i’m saying.

Point is there were two maxes: the sleazy and manipulative but well meaning buisness man and semi-con man and the manipulative but well intentioned master mind. So the movie.. combined both beautifully. He’s a manipulator as always, having set up a ponzi scheme and getitng called out on it by what turned out to be Simon Stagg.. who for some reason is the virtious if assholish buisness man here despite in the comcis being an utterly corrupt asshole constnatly ttrying to prevent his daughter from marrying this guy

This is Metamorpho, the element man, archelogist Rex Mason who thanks to the orb of Ra turned into this guy, an embodiment of the elments who can transmute his body into anything on the perodic table. Why HE hasn’t been in a movie yet his nemisis now has been is beyond me and there are better dc businessmen to have used.

Point is this Max is shady, ambitious and sleazy.. and badly failing his scheme falling around him. But his reason for wanting to be a rich, powerful man after growing up a poor immigrant.. is utterly symapthetic. He has a son in this adaptation and wants to make him proud. I’ts CLEARLY not his only motivation, he also just wants to be proud and the finale reveals hsi father was abusive, and his classmmates alienated him for being an immigrant. He has a chip on his shoulder due to having a rough life and just wanting his moment in the sun. It makes Max relatable: His actions are NOT okay but we get why he merges with the wishing stone: because this is his shot. And most of the people he fucks over with his wishes.. are bad people. he cons some good people sure but Stagg is an asshole and the prince he cons wants to kick foreigners out of his homeland. Max, like Barbra, while not a GOOD person still is more likeable than diana. He just.. feels like Max. He’s what Max could’ve been if he gave into the power instead of fighting against it. If he'd teamed up with the alien robot thing to take over the world instead of resiting it. So while he’s a bad guy like he’s been sadly turned into in the comics.. he feels like a CONVINCING version of Max as a bad guy. Like he genuinely turned evil of his own will and his own ambition.

It also helps he’s written compitently. Unlike Diana, whose entirely miswritten to a point NO amount of good acting and no amount of Gal Godot’s talents could save, and Barbra, whose great but only because her character had too little to be great but just enough to give Kristin Wiig room to work with Gal simply did not have. Seriously I feel terrible for Gal Godot, she’s a genuinely talented actress and a genuinely kind and great person whose a LOT like Diana herself when written properly. But Pedro Pascal? Since his character isn’t too badly written, and he has room to work.. he’s allowed to just be awesome. Since I haven’t watched the Mandolorian yet, I know, I KNOW, trust me.. I KNOWWW. But since I hadn’t this was my first proper exposure to Pedro Pascal..and his talent speaks for himself. In a weak movie, he is the shining star. He’s also hammy as shit, but it WORKS because the film is redicouls. The Wishin Rock plot line and Max merging with it.. it’s bonkers. But he has just the right mix of bonkers hammy acting that’s fun to watch, and actual character work in the ham. He’s eating the scenery hand over fist, utterly devouring it.. but it fits the character as while Max was more of a subtle ham, a guy who just radiated smug and who more got into histornics when things went tits up like the time Blue Beetle and Booster Gold took the JLU’s funds to build an island resort on an island that turned out to be sentient and didn’t like that much and yes, all of that happened and it was as funny as it sounds. Point is being a showman whose always on, always talking and always got a plan.. that’s Maxwell Fucking Lord, and Pascal’s over the top acting fits that kind of character like a glove.

It also fits the film well: the film comes off more like a 2000′s superhero film, one that takes itself super seriously.. but is really, REALLY goofy in places. It honest to god feels like one of the Sam rami spider-man films, ones I REALLY need to revisit and the results of that you’ll likely see, but without the self awarness rami had.. for the first two I mean by the third with the whole saturday night fever sequence, he’d really lost it. Love the guy though, still need to watch Army of Darkness and yes you may boo me. Point is the film is bonkers and cheesy and dosne’t realize it but Pascal does so he just.. has fun with it. His haminess when asking someone for a wish, his great ways of reversing those wishes so he benifits from the consequences, taking them off the board while furthring his own goals. Max is just.. awesome, and so is pascal. He got a life long fan in me from this performance. And of all people he took his inspriation from Nick Cage which is a perfect fit as Cage is fucking great at acting absolutely batshit while still acting his ass off. Pascal really deserves full credit for this film for more than just being lovingly over the top. He’s genuinely good.

And that shines through greatly in the climax. First off the final fight between Cheetah and Wonder Woman is awesome.. just one of the best superhero fights i’ve seen on film and i’ve seen some whoppers. Great back and forth, great coreography and brutal intensitiy the whole way through with Diana being forced to possibly kill Barbra despite not wanting to hurt her. Just a hell of one. But the real centerpice is the wish vortex. Pascal just drops all pretense and goes ultra instinct ham, just letting it all hang out as he ascneds to god hood... but how he’s beaten.. is easily the most brilliant part of the film and one of the few times Gal Godot genuinely gets to show off her talent in this one: Wonder Woman defeats the bad guy not with brute force, not that she can, or some cool fight.. though we did get the cool fight too so that’s nice.. she simply uses her head and her heart. She uses her head by taking advantage of the fact max is broadcasting to the world, as villians tend to, and giving his bogus offers to whoevers listneting. So Diana counters this.. by simply speakking from the heart, enrouging those watching not to give in and to renounce the wish.. so the consequences can be renounced too. Even if it’s hard, even if it costs you.. what your doing will cost others so much more. And she finsihses this by using the Lasso of Truth on max, making him tear down his delusions about himself and see that his actions, which have caused world war III by the way as he maniupated the president.. who for some reason was not Regan. While Regan was a bastard.. that’s exactly the reason I wanted hi mthere as this film would’ve been better had one of the parts of the climax been Diana fighting a 50 foot tall rouge ronald regan. Admit it you’d see that in theaters if it was safe to go.

POint is max sees he’s only HURTING his son, that this is for HIM not for his boy.. and that if he dosen’t let this power go, if he dosen’t just accept a peaceful life and let the world spin the way it’s supposed to and not emplode jus tso he can be a god... his son will be gone. So he gives it up and goes back to his boy in a touching moment. Though for some reason his son somehow got from Max’s office to the middle of a fucking highway. How is he not dead? I dunno we’re almost done here. Point is max is easily the highlight of the film and the reason it’s not ALL horrible along with Barbra. Final Thoughts: Wonder Woman 1984.. is a disapointment. What I thought would be an easy film of the year contender.. instead ended up being an ungodly mess with unfortunate implications, a messy slapped together plot and WAYYYYY too much filler. As I said it had it’ sbright spots especially max and barbra.. but hte ultimate product is WAYYYY less than Patty Jenkins is capable of and since a third film is apparently inevitible, I can only hope next time she learns from this and does better. Also get Pedro Pascal his own Justice League international series as Max’s grandson or something YESTERDAY. Seriously even people who didn’t like this film would love it and it’s not like he can’t do this between seasons of Mando. He did We Can Be Heroes for god’s sake.. which was somehow a better film than this one. I guess 2020 had to disapoint me one last time huh? Well we’re in a new year now... and hopefully the Suicide Squad won’t also be a huge diapointment. If you enjoyed this lnog rant on a movie from a week or two ago, follow me for more. I’m currently doing retrospectives on the life and times of scrooge mcduck, scott pilgrim, grant morrisons new x-men, and i’m soon going to finish up a Darkwing Duck one focusing on Just us Justice ducks. And once they come back this year I plan on reguarlly covering Ducktales, Loud House, Owl House, Amphibia, and Final Space. So keep an eye out for that and until then, Goodbye Goodbye Goodbye.

#wonder woman #wonder woman 1984 #pedro pascal #gal godot #kristin wiig #chris pine #diana prince #cheetah #barbra minerva #maxwell lord #justice league international #dc comics #dc extended universe #hbo max #patty jenkins #steve trevor

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allonsy-yesiwill · 4 years

Text

Tis The Season: The Unspoken Truth

WC: 1400 ish

Pairing: Dean x Y/N

Warnings: a little bit of angst (read is an orphan but it didn’t happen till she was an adult and hit of crap parents) torwards the end but mostly just fluffy goodness

A/N: I tend to treat the English language like a garbage bin, in public I pronounce gym phonetically cause it makes people mad, and me smile. So please if you are an English teacher just pass on all of this... cause my tenses are timey whimy to say the least. That being said if you want to Beta, let me know I could use all the help I can get... hmmm, I guess that’s just a general statement about my life really..lol.

The morning always came too early for, Y/N with Dean getting up around 5:30 to get ready for work. Y/N usually got home around midnight, an hour after the bar closed for the night. On Friday and Saturday Dean usually supported the bar so that he could spend some time with her. The staff even joked that he was their first unpaid employee, helping Y/N stock the bar or take out the trash when needed. For Y/N birthday this year they even made them the official cutest couple on staff, the picture of them still sits on the outside bar.

“Good morning beautiful,” Dean kissed Y/N while she lay in bed. “I am really nervous about all of this and I know you already know this but.”

Y/N instruped, “Oh babe I know you don’t want to fly there. It’s okay I got it. I am off all day, I am going to get out of bed now and I will make sure everything is packed and ready. It’s okay Dean, I will be with you the whole way alright.” Y/N rubbed his cheek with her thumb hoping to help him calm down. They have been talking about this trip for two week because Dean was terrified of flying. He originally wanted to work form home that day so he could help Y/N get everything ready however they both decided that working would be a welcome distraction form the events later in the day.

“Thank you,” Dean said, leaning his forehead against hers.

Y/N spent the day packing and planning making sure she had everything Dean needed for the flight including some legally purchased gummies, that she knew Dean would snack on before getting on the plane. She couldn’t help but chuckle getting everything ready, him talking about flying was the first time she had ever seen Dean scared. It was painfully obvious to her, no matter how much he tried to hide it.

As the afternoon rolled on Y/N hopped in the shower wanting to be as clean as possible before flying, knowing that the she was going to be squished between Dean and some random stranger for a few hours while they traveled to Kansas. She hadn’t flown in sometime but she new the drill, dressing in black leggings, a black tank top, heavy knit christmas and her favorite ugg boots. She was all set the luggage was by the door, Dean jeans along with his red and black flannel were waiting for him upstairs so he could shower and get dressed before they left no later than 5:30.

The plan went accordingly and know they found themself waiting at the gate with 90 mins to kill before the plane left.

“Are these form me or you,” Dean winked at Y/N pulling out the gummies.

“Well they are for both of us but you only get one and then you can eat the rest of these,” Y/N said pulling out a bag of unopened gummies she purchased inside the airport.

“Oh well I see, so should I take it now or wait till I am on the plane? How have I never thought about doing this, I am only in my 40′s and doing something that’s completely legal here,” Dean laughed.

“Ha, well your family seems a little straight-laced so it’s fine, but yes take it now so that way you will be relaxed for take off.”

They continue chatting about the upcoming events till they hear the boarding call for first class and Dean stands up saying, “Merry Christmas baby, that’s us.”

“Dean we talked about this, it was way too much money and you’re going to sleep the whole way.”

“I know, and I am a horrible listener,” Dean chuckled while helping her up.

This the first time Y/N had ever sat in first class there was so much room and it was just the two of them. While everyone boarded the plane they got comfy together waiting for take off. Dean was already starting to feel the gummy, Y/N could tell as he was starting to drift in and out of sleep.

“Alright babe, I am going to need you to eat and drink everything so that we get our money's worth,” He laughed.

“Dean, it’s a 3 hours flight you will have to carry me off the plane if I drink whiskey the whole time.”

“Hmm you’re right maybe champagne for the princess and food get food too. Maybe stash form cookies for when I wake up,” Dean let out with his eyes closed and a smile on his face.

“Okay babe,” she said before kissing him on his cheek.

The flight was very uneventful, Y/N spent some time talking with some of the stewarts. In return they made sure to give her more than a few unopened bottles of champagne while keeping her glass full. They also provided a few packages of cookies for Dean after she shared her story of her day and how nervous he was for this trip.

When the plane landed Y/N softly woke up a sleepy Dean with the promise of cookies. When they picked up their luggage Dean thought about something he had never considered.

“Fuck, what if I am still high. I don’t think I can drive. Could you drive, shit I don't’ want to do that. You don’t know where you are going. Son of bitch, why did I do that?” Y/N couldn’t help but laugh. “Babe, calm down. I spoke with the shop owner, the gummy only lasted four hours maybe five max, you ate one 90 mins before our flight and the time it took for us to get off the plane and get our luggage we are way over the 5 hours mark. PS you’re so adorable when you worry, I don’t want it to be a consistent thing but it’s pretty cute.” “Shut up, you’re adorable,” Dean said with a smile.

Before they left the airport Dean let out a big sigh and looked at Y/N. “Okay so there is one other thing that I need to tell you, before you meet my family. And I want you to know that I love you and that you’re here and this, this all falls on me. I know I should have told them that we are dating but I just haven’t yet.”

“So who do they think is coming with you,” Y/N asked, concerned not because he hadn’t named the relationship, she just wanted to know what you were walking into.

“Well I told them I was going to bring my best friend because she didn't have any family to be with for the Holiday’s and I didn’t want her to be alone,” Dean said, avoiding eye contact.

“First did you tell them that both of my parents are dead, cause I don’t like the orphan word. Both of my parents died when I was a grown ass adult and they weren’t super great at their roles so you know I just don’t want to be someone rich family’s pity project. Second, you know you could have told me this before we left. I get you were scared and I understand that your relationship, especially with your dad is complicated at best. I mean I could have stayed home and made all of this so much easier,” Y/N sighed

“See I knew you would say that and it would have broken my heart to leave you alone for Christmas. And honestly I am being a little bit selfish, I need you to be there by me for this trip. I have tried to tell them that we are dating so many times. I think Sammy knows but hasn’t said anything. I just don’t, want to be a disappointment or for them to not love you as much as I do.”

“Why would you be a disappointment, am I a disappointment?”

“Oh god no baby, never you’re my happiness, my everything. It’s just to them life is more about titles, not love and that scares me so much.”

“Hey, you know I love you right. We can and will get through this together no matter how much of a hot mess hallmark movie this Christmas is going to be,” Y/N said with a smile, “ besides you are going to have the harder job here. Keeping Dean Jr in check.” They both laughed.

“Well you aren’t wrong, you ass in those leggins. When I got home we almost missed the flight,” Dean laughed.

Next Part

You can entertain yourself over here with my other stories

TAGS

@akshi8278

I hope the tags worked I stopped them for a min but when people ask I can’t say no.

#dean x reader #au!dean x reader #dean winchester au #winchester christmas #spn fic #dean winchester fic #dean x you

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williamedwardscoder · 5 years

Text

Slow database? It might not be your fault

<rant>

Okay, it usually is your fault. If you logged the SQL your ORM was generating, or saw how you are doing joins in code, or realised what that indexed UUID does to your insert rate etc you’d probably admit it was all your fault. And the fault of your tooling, of course.

In my experience, most databases are tiny. Tiny tiny. Tables with a few thousand rows. If your web app is slow, its going to all be your fault. Stop building something webscale with microservices and just get things done right there in your database instead. Etc.

But, quite often, each company has one or two databases that have at least one or two large tables. Tables with tens of millions of rows. I work on databases with billions of rows. They exist. And that’s the kind of database where your database server is underserving you. There could well be a metric ton of actual performance improvements that your database is leaving on the table. Areas where your database server hasn’t kept up with recent (as in the past 20 years) of regular improvements in how programs can work with the kernel, for example.

Over the years I’ve read some really promising papers that have speeded up databases. But as far as I can tell, nothing ever happens. What is going on?

For example, your database might be slow just because its making a lot of syscalls. Back in 2010, experiments with syscall batching improved MySQL performance by 40% (and lots of other regular software by similar or better amounts!). That was long before spectre patches made the costs of syscalls even higher.

So where are our batched syscalls? I can’t see a downside to them. Why isn’t linux offering them and glib using them, and everyone benefiting from them? It’ll probably speed up your IDE and browser too.

Of course, your database might be slow just because you are using default settings. The historic defaults for MySQL were horrid. Pretty much the first thing any innodb user had to do was go increase the size of buffers and pools and various incantations they find by googling. I haven’t investigated, but I’d guess that a lot of the performance claims I’ve heard about innodb on MySQL 8 is probably just sensible modern defaults.

I would hold tokudb up as being much better at the defaults. That took over half your RAM, and deliberately left the other half to the operating system buffer cache.

That mention of the buffer cache brings me to another area your database could improve. Historically, databases did ‘direct’ IO with the disks, bypassing the operating system. These days, that is a metric ton of complexity for very questionable benefit. Take tokudb again: that used normal buffered read writes to the file system and deliberately left the OS half the available RAM so the file system had somewhere to cache those pages. It didn’t try and reimplement and outsmart the kernel.

This paid off handsomely for tokudb because they combined it with absolutely great compression. It completely blows the two kinds of innodb compression right out of the water. Well, in my tests, tokudb completely blows innodb right out of the water, but then teams who adopted it had to live with its incomplete implementation e.g. minimal support for foreign keys. Things that have nothing to do with the storage, and only to do with how much integration boilerplate they wrote or didn’t write. (tokudb is being end-of-lifed by percona; don’t use it for a new project 😞)

However, even tokudb didn’t take the next step: they didn’t go to async IO. I’ve poked around with async IO, both for networking and the file system, and found it to be a major improvement. Think how quickly you could walk some tables by asking for pages breath-first and digging deeper as soon as the OS gets something back, rather than going through it depth-first and blocking, waiting for the next page to come back before you can proceed.

I’ve gone on enough about tokudb, which I admit I use extensively. Tokutek went the patent route (no, it didn’t pay off for them) and Google released leveldb and Facebook adapted leveldb to become the MySQL MyRocks engine. That’s all history now.

In the actual storage engines themselves there have been lots of advances. Fractal Trees came along, then there was a SSTable+LSM renaissance, and just this week I heard about a fascinating paper on B+ + LSM beating SSTable+LSM. A user called Jules commented, wondered about B-epsilon trees instead of B+, and that got my brain going too. There are lots of things you can imagine an LSM tree using instead of SSTable at each level.

But how invested is MyRocks in SSTable? And will MyRocks ever close the performance gap between it and tokudb on the kind of workloads they are both good at?

Of course, what about Postgres? TimescaleDB is a really interesting fork based on Postgres that has a ‘hypertable’ approach under the hood, with a table made from a collection of smaller, individually compressed tables. In so many ways it sounds like tokudb, but with some extra finesse like storing the min/max values for columns in a segment uncompressed so the engine can check some constraints and often skip uncompressing a segment.

Timescaledb is interesting because its kind of merging the classic OLAP column-store with the classic OLTP row-store. I want to know if TimescaleDB’s hypertable compression works for things that aren’t time-series too? I’m thinking ‘if we claim our invoice line items are time-series data…’

Compression in Postgres is a sore subject, as is out-of-tree storage engines generally. Saying the file system should do compression means nobody has big data in Postgres because which stable file system supports decent compression? Postgres really needs to have built-in compression and really needs to go embrace the storage engines approach rather than keeping all the cool new stuff as second class citizens.

Of course, I fight the query planner all the time. If, for example, you have a table partitioned by day and your query is for a time span that spans two or more partitions, then you probably get much faster results if you split that into n queries, each for a corresponding partition, and glue the results together client-side! There was even a proxy called ShardQuery that did that. Its crazy. When people are making proxies in PHP to rewrite queries like that, it means the database itself is leaving a massive amount of performance on the table.

And of course, the client library you use to access the database can come in for a lot of blame too. For example, when I profile my queries where I have lots of parameters, I find that the mysql jdbc drivers are generating a metric ton of garbage in their safe-string-split approach to prepared-query interpolation. It shouldn’t be that my insert rate doubles when I do my hand-rolled string concatenation approach. Oracle, stop generating garbage!

This doesn’t begin to touch on the fancy cloud service you are using to host your DB. You’ll probably find that your laptop outperforms your average cloud DB server. Between all the spectre patches (I really don’t want you to forget about the syscall-batching possibilities!) and how you have to mess around buying disk space to get IOPs and all kinds of nonsense, its likely that you really would be better off perforamnce-wise by leaving your dev laptop in a cabinet somewhere.

Crikey, what a lot of complaining! But if you hear about some promising progress in speeding up databases, remember it's not realistic to hope the databases you use will ever see any kind of benefit from it. The sad truth is, your database is still stuck in the 90s. Async IO? Huh no. Compression? Yeah right. Syscalls? Okay, that’s a Linux failing, but still!

Right now my hopes are on TimescaleDB. I want to see how it copes with billions of rows of something that aren’t technically time-series. That hybrid row and column approach just sounds so enticing.

Oh, and hopefully MyRocks2 might find something even better than SSTable for each tier?

But in the meantime, hopefully someone working on the Linux kernel will rediscover the batched syscalls idea…? ;)

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sswwimagine · 5 years

Text

The Swan || Remus Lupin

Original Post: on ssimagines

Pairing: Young!Remus Lupin x reader

Word Count: 3057 (opps this is long)

Summary: You have been playing violin most of your life and in your fifth year, you gain entry to one of the most prestigious violin competitions in Europe. You have to take a short trip away from hogwarts for this trip leaving your boyfriend, Remus Lupin behind.

Warnings: uber over the top fluff, violin playing

Request: Hey could I request a Remus x Reader where he surprises the reader at a violin recital for a competition she won? Fluff to the max would be awesome. Thank you!

Kind Long Note: When you say violin competition, I hope you mean violin competition not fiddle completion because I wrote it as a violin competition. Also I hope this is fluffy enough for you. I really loved writing this hope you enjoy reading it just as much as I did.

The Reader is an assumed Gryffindor, but if you would like that to be different just change McGonagall out for Slughorn (Slytherin Reader), Flitwick (Ravenclaw Reader), or Sprout (Hufflepuff Reader). Though we don’t know if Flitwick and Sprout were really the head of house during the marauders era, They could have been do I used them.

Reader is also a half blood for story purposes

Remus is a Sixth year and you are a fifth year. There is a year gap.This is obviously already been posted, but since I started my smaller blogs, I wanted all my work for each fandom in one place. Instead of just reblogging everything I figured that I would repost it.

Request/Taglist

Masterlist

Your piece for the competition : “The Swan” (From The Carnival of the Animals) by C. Saint-Saëns. I enjoy the way it’s played in the video below. It’s based off of that. The piece is originally a cello piece, but it is so beautiful.

youtube

You had been playing violin since you were a very young child. You had convinced your parents to let you play when you were about four after they had taken to see swan lake and you fell in love with the instrument. For the past eleven years, you had been dedicated to your art. Your father had even helped you enter one of Europe’s most prestigious competitions for the violin per your request. The only problem was that it took place in France in the middle of the school year.

You were determined to go and perform, so before you started your fifth year at Hogwarts, you had talked with Dumbledore and McGonagall about the competition and made arrangements for your attendance. If you were able to keep your grades up for the whole year leading up to the competition as well as get all your assignments in on time, then McGonagall would take you to the competition.

It took a lot of work and you had to get a tutor, but you had done everything you could to keep your side of the arrangement, and somewhere along the way you might have taken a liking to your tutor, Remus Lupin.

He had was a year older than you, but he had been sweet to you. He made you laugh, and he understood where you came from as a half-blood. He knew what it was like living in both the muggle world and wizarding world. It also helped that he was so cute.

All of that was out of mind right now as you stood backstage at the competition waiting to take the stage. One of your competitors was on stage playing Paganini’s Caprice No. 24. It was a very challenging piece and as you listened you became increasingly worried. Not only was the piece nearly six times as long as your piece it also had more diverse selection of techniques throughout it to show a more diverse skill set. The competitor was much older than probably around 37 to 40, and he was balding. You knew he had way more time to practice and perfect his piece. You were sure that you would not be able to do better than him.

“Do you have everything you need?” McGonagall asked beside you. You had forgotten that the professor even stood beside you.

You turned to look at the older woman. She wore a knee length maroon dress and a brown, fleece trench coat. You found her appearance to be strange and hard to wrap your head around because you had never seen her dress like this before. It just seemed out of place even though her attire was actually more common place than what you would usually see her in.

“Yes, I have my violin and bow,” you said as you gestured to your Berl Mendenhall violin and bow, “and I’ve memorized my piece. I am pretty sure I already put rosin on my bow. Oh, shit I can’t remember if I actually rosined my bow. I left my case in the practice room. I have to go back there.”

“Y/N, my dear, you rosined your bow. I watched you,” McGonagall said soothingly. “You have nothing to worry about. You will do great.”

You nodded to yourself and turned back to the stage. The man was nearing the end. In just a short second, your competition made one damning mistake as he fumbled over the left hand pizzicato followed by a minor lapse in play as if he forgot what came next. If you hadn’t heard the piece before you might have missed it, but it was clear as day to you. The man tensed up, and you gained a little hope that you might in fact be able to win this. That little mistake was your in.

You took a deep breath as the man concluded and left the stage with a gracious bow. The people in the audience applauded as he exited.

You offered him a short word of congratulations before you prepared to take the stage. The crowd died down and you watched as the portly announcer take center stage.

“Our final performer today is one of our youngest ever competitors at the age of 15 for the United Kingdom, Y/N Y/L/N,” the announcer spoke loudly projecting their voice into the large crowd. “She [he] will be playing The Swan from The Carnival of Animals composed by C. Saint-Saën. Welcome her [him] to the stage.”

With those words, they calmly walked off. The audience clapped as you made your way onto the stage, violin in hand. You bowed and waited for the clapping to quiet. With the silence slowly befalling you, you brought your violin under your chin and placed the bow on the strings.

The piano accompaniment started and you stood poised and ready. Taking a deep breath, you pulled the bow along the string to let your first note ring out. Anyone who had been talking now silenced as you moved along your piece with confidence and elegance. You lost yourself in the piece.

When you reached the end, you let out a deep breath and bowed again. The crowd clapped as wildly as could be expected. You remained professional as you stood there listening to the crowd. Due to the large bright stage lights, you were not able to actually see the crowd. As they applauded you

Once the clapping had died down you turned walked off stage to where you had previously been before your performance. McGonagall stood waiting for you with a smile on her face and tears budding in the corner of her eyes. You had been so deep into your performance that you hadn’t noticed until this moment that you as well had developed tears; you took this moment to wipe the tears from away as you were out of the view of the audience and judges.

A stagehand directed you to return to your practice room to await the results. Calmly you walked back without saying a word. Professor McGonagall opened her mouth several times to speak, but found she had nothing to say before closing it.

There was nothing more that you could do to change the results now, but you that didn’t soothe your nervousness. Nerves bubbled in your stomach like a herd of elephants. You laid your violin on the table with your bow placed gently beside it. McGonagall had taken a seat against the wall and watched as you paced the room.

Time seemed to pass slower than molasses as you waited. The only sound that echoed in the room was the clock on the wall ticking consistently. There was a knock on the door that cause you halt in your path. You turned to the door as it opened a crack.

The stagehand poked his head in and told you that it was time. Picking up your violin, you followed the stage hand back to the stage with McGonagall just a few paces behind you.

When you reached the stage, you saw the other competitors also stood back stage waiting. The man who had been before you were sweating profusely. His bald spot was glistening with perspiration. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and began wiping his head.

The portly announcer said all the performers names to welcome them to the stage. The balding man quickly shoved the handkerchief back into his pocket, but not fully so it stuck out of his pocket. Half of the poor man’s head was still soaked with sweat. The sight caused you to stifle a laugh and eased your nerves as you made your way onto the stage after him.

There were five violinist who had made it this far and only three distinctions to hand out. Your goal going into this competition was to at least get a distinction. You were already over the moon about making it this far, but being able to “place” at such a young place would reaffirm all the effort and practice you had put in over the past eleven years.

You took a deep breath as you faced the crowd. An envelope was handed to the announcer who took it with a handshake and a smile. Slowly, you watched the announcer open the envelope. You couldn’t believe it could take someone so long to open a single envelope. Finally, announcer took the paper out of the envelope and cleared their throat.

“The distinction of third place goes to,” they said. “Beatriz Olmo,”

The crowd politely clapped a beautiful Spanish woman stepped forward to bow and shake the hand of the announcer. You hadn’t heard her play as she had gone first, but you were now worried for your placing, if you even got one. The crowd died down as the announcer cleared their throat to speak again

“The second-place distinction goes to,” they started again. You could hear your heart pounding in your ears like you were standing by the drum being hit, quickly and regularly. You were holding your breath hoping with everything in you that they’d say your name.

This was your moment of truth. Part of you wished that you could get first place, but you wanted to be realistic about this, so you were shooting for second. If you didn’t get second then it was extremely unlikely to get first. “Rolf Stumpf.”

The balding man looked up with a brilliant smile on his face. He seemed to rush forward to shake the hand of the announcer. The crowd roared as Rolf was now taking his bow happily.

Your thoughts turned dark as you stood their completely devoid of emotion on your face. If Rolf had gotten only second then what did that mean for you? The person who must have been truly amazing. As Rolf went to stand next to Beatriz, the announcer made their way back to the microphone.

Clearing their throat, they started again, “The distinction of first place goes to…”

You forced a smile to your face as you waited for one of the other two people beside you to be called. You looked to see a tall billowy man with an extremely pale face. Beside him stood a short, plump woman who had a hooked nose. Your mind let thoughts of one of their names being called run free as you tried to picture how each of them would accept their distinction.

You were sure that the two people beside you had done wonderfully. You after all would have more opportunities to participate in this competition. You realized that you would survive this, and the fact that you even got to perform today was enough to last a lifetime. Having this on your resume would help you get you into just about any music school you wanted which was your dream for after Hogwarts.

“Y/N Y/L/N,” The announcer’s voice pulled you out of your trance. You looked around to see the other performers standing where they were.

You had won.

You Had Won.

YOU HAD WON.

Containing your excitement, you made your way to shake the hand of the announcer. You bowed to the crowd and kept your head high as you stood beside Rolf and Beatriz. The clapping persisted as the three of you stood facing the crowd.

Time seemed to go by in a blur. You were ushered backstage and into the practice room once again. By now you had become familiar with every inch of this room. You could probably draw it from memory.

You were in a daze as you fained listening to McGonagall. You would nod every once in a while to look like you were paying attention, but you were still struck silent at what had just happened on stage. You had placed your violin in the case a while ago, and now you were just sitting their staring at it sitting on the coffee table in front of you.

You still couldn’t wrap your head around the fact that you had won. Your mind went over every second of the day leading up to that moment. Sure, you had played your piece perfectly, but that you felt that if that was the only reason you had won then you shouldn’t have. Shaking your head, you tried to put those thoughts out of your mind.

There was a knock at the door that stopped McGonagall’s speech. She went to open the door as you just watched.

McGonagall pulled the open door slightly. You couldn’t see who was there as you heard her greet them. McGonagall stepped out into the hall closing the door behind her leaving you alone.

Minutes passed as you just sat there alone. You were glad to have a moment of silence. As you got up from your stop on the practice room’s couch, your body let out a series of pops. You had been sitting on the couch for a while, and your stiff body was tanking you for moving again.

Another knock came at the door. You hesitantly walked to the door and pulled it open.

You felt your jaw go slack as you registered who stood in front of you. Remus Lupin stood in a suit and tie holding a bouquet of scarlet roses. His hair had been pushed back the best he could. It still sat haphazardly sticking up all over his head. The faded scars that adorned his face were hardly noticeable in this lighting.

“Hi,” Remus said quietly. “Can I come in there? I feel awkward just standing out here.”

“Oh yeah of course,” you said stepping aside. He slid past you, and you closed the door.

“These are for you,” he said handing you the bouquet. You took them with a wide smile growing on your face. You placed the flowers gingerly on your violin case before turning to look at the 16-year-old again.

“Remus, what are you doing here?” you asked. You moved closer to him.

“You think I would miss this,” he said as he picked up your hand in his.

Your eyes traveled to your connecting hands. The warmth that he caused made your chest swell with joy. There had been a few times in the past were Remus would walk you to your classes or you would hang out at the black lake with him and his friends, and his hand would find its way into yours. You had never talked with him about it, but it had made you feel over the moon. This was the only time in your life that you were sure meant more than just being friendly.

“This was a big moment for you. I had to be here,” His tone was quieter than it had been before. Your eyes had still been on your hands when he spoke, but as he took a step closer to you, you looked up at him. His eyes were as gentle as his tone had been, and a small smile graced his lips.

“How did you get here?” you said. Your voice was barely above a whisper even though you tried to will yourself to be louder. Remus brought his other hand up to your cheek and softly tucked a stray hair behind your ear. His action brought a blush to your cheeks. They were burning under his touch. Chills had risen all over your arms at his proximity.

“I don’t think you actually want to know that,” he said with a soft chuckle. “Let’s just say that prongs, padfoot, and wormtail are also here.”

With that you let out as small laugh. On several occasions, padfoot had bragged to you that he knew several secret ways to exit Hogwarts. It didn’t surprise you at all that they had helped him sneak out.

“Your laugh is beautiful,” he said to himself. You nearly didn’t hear it leave his mouth as he looked down at you, but now that you had a small smile situated itself on your lips.

Though one of Remus’s hands had left your face burning, the other still hadn’t left your hand. Remus stepped closer again. He was then able to intertwine your fingers together comfortably. Remus’s warmth radiated off him calming the chills on your arms.

“Can I kiss you?” he said softly. When you went to speak, you choked on your own throat, so you just nodded at him. Slowly, he returned his hand to your cheek and oved his lips to connect with yours.

The kiss itself was just as beautiful as you had expected it to be. His lips were rough against yours, but you didn’t mind as they pressed themselves gently into yours. The hand that had been intertwined with yours was now wrapped around your waist. Your hands found their way to rest on his neck without you even realizing.

The kiss didn’t last long, but it had exceeded all expectations you had about. Remus’s breath fanned over your lips as he moved back just little to rest his forehead on yours. Slowly your hands found each other again. The two of you stood there like that for what seemed like an infinity until you heard the door open.

“Remus?” you heard McGonagall call out. Her voice startled both of you from your daze. Your eyes flashed to the woman and then to Remus who was staring at McGonagall.

“Shit,” he said. He pressed a quick kiss against your lips before he left running past McGonagall, out of your sight. McGonagall looked like she was about to go after him when she returned his gaze to you.

“What was Remus Lupin doing here Ms.[Mr.] Y/L/N,” McGonagall used her disciplinary voice. Your eyes seemed to become the size of saucers as you stared at the women. Guiltily, you shrugged your shoulders.

“I- I don’t kn-know,” you sputtered unable to come up with a good excuse. “Well, I think it’s best to not bring this up to Dumbledore when we get back,” she said. It surprised you that she was so calm about it. You nodded rapidly in reply.

“Now we have best get going,” McGonagall said holding her arm out to you. You picked up your flowers and violin before linking your arm with hers. In a blink of an eye, the two of you apparated away.

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papersandkeyboards · 5 years

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5/31 to 6/5: (everything else and) Prom

36th WEEK, MAY 31-JUNE 5, 2016.

English class has always been interesting to me. If I think about it, English class (be it here as a first language, or back home as a second language) is always more fun than Indonesian Language class back home. In my class in Rainier Beach, which is IB English Language and Literature, we read classics and Shakespearean plays and interpret those. (don’t get me wrong, I had to read The Scarlett Letter for English Lang class during my short stop in Houston and it was painful, but something about how English teachers’ way of teaching is so interesting and, of course, not boring)

For the semester’s big project, however, we were told to make podcasts. About anything.

I understand that podcasts aren’t much of a thing in Indo, but the simplest way to explain podcasts in a nutshell is audio lectures, audio books, discussions, serial stories, or anything about a topic. And honestly, it’s not even just lectures. You can talk about anything in a podcast (in my Theory of Knowledge class, we listened to a series of online podcasts entitled “Serial”, which covers a story for each season that is told in an interesting and comprehensive way).

But this time, Mrs. Shaw doesn’t limit us to just audio, but we can put visuals in it as well. So, basically saying, our big project was to make an audio or video file talking about things which has our arguments in it. And we could do it individually or in groups of three, max.

Me, being myself who essentially resents group works can be quite an individualist, of course, decided to do the podcast by myself.

And me, being myself who almost always aims to be anti-mainstream, chose a topic that most people would hate and throw rocks to after the first glance.

I argued that zoos aren’t necessarily inhumane to animals. For a side that believed that zoos are downright cruel and disgusting, I stood against them.

Of course I know people aren’t always going to agree with me, but as a (used-to-be) debater, I tried to smother everything in good wording (and some solid arguments can i get a hell yeah), and at the end, all I need to be satisfied was Mrs. Shaw saying “you got a point.” (aka “hmm iya juga ya”).

It was an enjoyable school task to do. Ehe.

Anyway, the next two days, Wednesday and Thursday, were two sacred days we all students acknowledged dearly as Early Release days. The neverending amazement of Seattle has turned me into somewhat a Dora the Explorer, even though it was clear that I have always been a damn-straight home person back home. Would rather stay home that being somewhere else.

But an exchange student logic was that you’re missing a lot of you spend a lot of time at home.

So Kira and I hit the waterfront and rode the Seattle Ferris Wheel.

And the next day I spent by myself, visiting the Seattle Art Museum and indulging my fangirl side by watching X-Men: Apocalypse.

Remember I mentioned once that it was the time of SIFF—Seattle International Film Festival?

Karen, Eric, and I looked up the showtimes and movies, trying to find anything interesting, and of course the choice went to an Indonesian movie, entitled “Copy of My Mind”, so we watched it on Friday evening.

It never occured to me that films in film festivals aren’t those up the regular theaters. Most of them are months old before the time of the festival itself, some even a year old or more. But I guess that’s the point of having film festivals: as a platform to promote films, because almost all of them don’t include big starry actor names, and all of them aren’t in a franchise.

Copy of My Mind, however, was starred by Chico Jericho and Tara Basro (blame was on me for just recognizing these names for the first time), and soon after the movie started, I got why I’ve never heard of this film before back home: it would never be able to air in Indonesia. Simple as that.

As usual, my movie-goer sense was so much indulged in cheap plots of franchise films where every message is shown explicitly during the film with a mandatory happy ending and a bonus of occasional car explosion, so when I saw the ending of Copy of My Mind, I was disappointed. I didn’t get the message.

(later I googled the film and it turned out to be a hard-core social and political satire towards my own country) (so yeah, go watch it guys) (majukan perfilman indonesia)

On Sunday, I was reminded by the remaining days I have by attending Nouha’s goodbye party. She would leave three days after the goodbye party, which is June 8, and I’m still staying here until the end of the month, but surely it sucks to remember that you have to leave eventually.

But the goodbye party was a fun one—sliders, chips, other typical tasty American barbecue snacks in the backyard, people bringing going-away presents, and of course, pictures.

(I swear the pictures were up somewhere but now I couldn’t find them)

---

Aight. That’s quite a brief (???) summary of how the first 5 days of the week went. Whereas I usually said the fun part comes in the weekend, this WHOLE week was full of fun and things to do (thank God for early release). HOWEVER, though, however,

this weekend was Prom.

That’s right, everyone, you heard it. The infamous American High School Prom.

....

Gitu aja sih. Ehe. OKAY. Prom in Beach... was definitely UNLIKE Proms in other, harshly saying, white rich school everywhere else. But the part where people ask other people to Prom, well, that was done everywhere, I guess.

I was walking the hallway when Rebecca and the others stopped by and Rebecca asked me, “Nabila, who are you going to Prom with?”

“...????? I don’t know??? No one asked me to.”

“It’s America, you can do whatever you want. Why don’t you ask somebody?”

yaela yang bener aja lu dasar ampas kepala.

Jadi gini sih. The way Prom works (or at least in my school) is that only the seniors are invited, unless the seniors ask somebody else from other grades—juniors, sophomores, freshmen, or people from other school—to be their prom date, then those persons are also invited. And I know Kira is a junior, so I asked Kira as my prom date so she can experience prom and everybody is happy. Also because Rebecca and Emily were committees so there are fellow juniors there. yaela padahal karena emang gaada yang ngajak dan akhirnya ngajak temen sendiri supaya tidak garing

I didn’t take too much trouble setting up a promposal—Prom proposal—unlike those who are seriously dating—a friend from Theory of Knowledge class made a poster and got his football team to promposed his girlfriend, it was very sweet—and because I was an awkward unromantic piece of shit, I asked Kira to be my prom date during stretching before softball game.

She was appalled. At least she wasn’t repelled, which was good. Good thing she didn’t expect a canon of flowers or posters or an orchestra playing for her to be promposed.

And that’s the story on how I got my prom date.

Which was totally not unusual, because at Prom night I found out that Alex asked Justin, a junior, so that Justin can experience Prom with his senior fellows too. Zion, who is gay, asked Nina out of friendship. A lot of people do that that night. Many people even went with their squads instead of being in pairs.

When Kira was scrolling through numerous online shops to find a dress, I bought mine in Nordstrom Rack—which was basically Nordstrom but they sell old stuff that were cheaper (because I didn’t feel like spending hundreds of bucks on a dress I’m gonna wear, like, once or twice for my whole life). Not only I bought it in Nordstrom Rack, I also bought it last Febuary, which was before Winter Ball. That being said, I used the same dress as what I wore for Winter Ball. Which was good, because I didn’t want to waste money on dress I would most likely use once. The admission ticket was around $40 anyway, while other schools my AFS friends were in charged around $80-100 for it. sekolah saya miskin emang, tapi asik.

Sementara ada temen-temen saya yang ‘melamar Prom’ pakai poster, bunga, permen karet (dia nawarin sekotak permen karet gitu trus pas dibuka ada tulisannya ‘Prom?’ trus dikasih bunga, lucu abis sih), ada juga temen yang asal ngajak cewek manapun yang kebetulan lewat, dan kalau ditolak, geser dikit trus ngajak cewek lain terdekat. But then again, I didn’t know how significant a prom date is—whether being asked to be prom date equals being asked to be one’s girl/boyfriend, or is it just a one-time occasion thing?

Whatever it was, I do know that at least Prom in Rainier Beach High School doesn’t shun single people. Yay. Nabila can go to Prom without worries.

HOWEVER.

However, around a week before Prom, I found out that Indonesian Students’ Association of Seattle University (ISASU), which was like a couple blocks from my house, was holding some sort of event, and guess who came as a guest star.

....

NO.

I DO NOT LIKE HOW THIS TURNS OUT.

I REALLY DON’T.

After contemplating which one is rarer: to experience a classic American high school Prom night every exchange student wants to be a part of or meet a massive Indonesian dazzling pop-star in person, I did what I thought was best for me: I chose Prom and let go of Raisa, with the arrogance of “I’m Indonesian, she’s Indonesian, we’ll meet again but I only have this one chance for Prom” without realizing that that will least likely to happen.

I came to Kira’s house on Saturday afternoon, June 4, 2016, and ate Indomie for pre-Prom dinner (Prom dinner paling tidak modal sepanjang sejarah manusia). Then we had a photoshoot in which Kira and I look like a happy couple of lovers. Then Laura drove us to the venue. Which was a not-so-big space in SoDo but enough for the whole class lah.

(pic credit to whoever took this)

Long story short, it was fun. At first it wasn’t really because both Kira and I did not know many seniors despite some people I recognize from classes I am in, so we talked with Emily and Rebecca. Then people I know started to show up—Nina, Justin, Zion, Alex, Gretar, and others—and we danced. What was fun about it was that everyone didn’t dance with their dates, but mixed in into big groups of friends and was having a pure hyped-fun time instead of a romantic one. (not to brag but Nina and I did some duets and we were killing it) (kapan lagi bisa hacep dan meliar kaya begini ya)

The King and Queen of Prom, instead of voting, was done by a raffle (maybe so that everyone can get a chance instead of a cliche competition of popularity). Rony got King and Antoneyah got Queen. There was also two photo booths, an elegant one with a sofa and a fun one like a photobox along with hats and fake mustache and other stuff you could use.

(’twas Rebecca, Emily, Rony the playboy, me, and Kira)

(terus baru 3 tahun kemudian AFS menggerayangkan gerakan AFSPride)

(mampos kenapa w pendek sekali, bahkan dalam standar orang indonesia)

(tUH udah naik tangga pun masi lebih pendek)

THEN, the event continued for whoever wants to join everyone to the Seattle Ferris Wheel, while free tickets were provided! We sporadically went to the Ferris Wheel by Uber—some people didn’t come due to curfew and probably an after-party somewhere (I finally convinced Kira to join after many considerations. Since the Wheel was closer to my house, she agreed to crash in my house after).

Lucu banget aih. Anak-anak remaja pakai baju-baju bagus, sebagain berpasang-pasangan, dan sebagian lagi bergerombol kelompok, dan rame-rame masuk ke kereta Bianglala.

(’twas Gretar, Alex, Justin, me, Kira, Zion, and Mohamed)

Kapan lagi kaya gini huhuhu seneng.

It was—I don’t remember—a bit after midnight? After we were done Kira and I took an Uber back to my house, had ice cream in my bed while watching Monsters University, and fell asleep halfway through the movie (and my laptop ran out of battery).

---

Aaaand that’s probably as close I could ever be with Raisa: in the same city, neighboring neighborhood.

But at least, thinking back, I would not trade the experience I just had with anything else.

Salam dari penghadir Prom Rainier Beach High School dengan style hijab paling cantik (karena memang satu-satunya),

Nabila Safitri.

#langkahanakbangsa #rbhs #prom

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bitcoinminershasrate · 3 years

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ROG Strix Radeon RX 6700 XT 12 (GB) Review: Hashrate | Overclocking | Test

Review of the video card Asus ROG Strix Radeon RX 6700 XT Gaming OC (12 GB): Hashrate | Overclocking Settings| Test (proven) checkout all these and more. Object of research : a commercially available 3D graphics accelerator (video card) Asus ROG Strix Radeon RX 6700 XT Gaming OC 12 GB 192-bit GDDR6. Asus ROG Strix Radeon RX 6700 XT Gaming OC (12 GB) Review Brief History- ROG Strix Radeon RX 6700 XT 12 (GB) At the beginning of all reviews of serial video cards, we update our knowledge about the performance of the accelerator family and its competitors. All this is subjectively assessed by us on a scale of five gradations. (This material was prepared prior to the release of the RTX 3080 Ti). Many Read This as well - AMD Radeon RX 6800 vs RX 6800 XT: Hashrate | Specs | Test | Config | Profit In general, the Radeon RX 6700 XT demonstrates its belonging to the number of very productive accelerators such as the GeForce RTX 3070/3060 Ti, falling right between them. Considering that earlier the Radeon RX 6800 demonstrated performance higher than the GeForce RTX 3070 (in games without ray tracing), it was logical to expect that the "middle" level of the Radeon RX 6700 XT will be approximately on the level of the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, and it turned out to be even higher. In practice, this means that the Radeon RX 6700 XT will allow you to play comfortably at 2.5K at maximum graphics settings, but this is all true if we are not considering games with ray tracing. And in the case of such games, the performance drawdown of the RX 6700 XT is such that at high graphics settings you can forget about 2.5K resolution, and you can play comfortably only in Full HD. Features and Characteristics Asustek Computer (Asus trademark) was founded in 1989 in the Republic of China (Taiwan). Headquartered in Taipei / Taiwan. On the Russian market since 1992. The oldest manufacturer of video cards and motherboards. Now it produces a very wide range of products in many areas of the IT industry (including the mobile segment). Manufactured in China and Taiwan. The total number of employees is about 2000 people. Specification - Asus ROG Strix Radeon RX 6700 XT Gaming OC 12GB 192-bit GDDR6 Asus ROG Strix Radeon RX 6700 XT Gaming OC 12GB 192-bit GDDR6ParameterMeaningNominal value (reference)GPURadeon RX 6700 XT (Navi 22)InterfacePCI Express x16 4.0GPU frequency (ROPs), MHzOC Mode: 2568(Boost)—2641(Max)Gaming Mode: 2548(Boost)—2641(Max)2424(Boost)—2643(Max)Memory frequency (physical (effective)), MHz4000 (16000)4000 (16000)Memory bus width, bit192GPU Computing Units40Number of operations (ALU / CUDA) per block64Total number of ALU / CUDA units2560Texture units (BLF / TLF / ANIS)160ROP units64Number of Ray Tracing blocks40Number of tensor blocks-Dimensions, mm320×140×58265×100×40The number of slots in the system unit occupied by the video card32PCB colorblackblackPeak power consumption in 3D, W212190Power consumption in 2D mode, W2020Power consumption in sleep mode, W44Noise level in 3D (maximum load), dBA42,932,7Noise level in 2D (video viewing), dBA18,018,0Noise level in 2D (idle), dBA18,018,0Video outputs1 × HDMI 2.1, 3 × DisplayPort 1.4a1 × HDMI 2.1, 3 × DisplayPort 1.4aMultiprocessor supportthere is no dataMaximum number of receivers / monitors for simultaneous image display44Power: 8-pin connectors21Power: 6-pin connectors01Max Resolution / Frequency, DisplayPort3840 × 2160 @ 120Hz, 7680 × 4320 @ 60HzMax Resolution / Frequency, HDMI3840 × 2160 @ 120Hz, 7680 × 4320 @ 60HzAsus Card Retail Deals Memory The card has 12 GB of GDDR6 SDRAM located in 6 12 Gbit chips on the front side of the PCB. Samsung memory chips (GDDR6, K4ZAF325BM-HC16) are designed for a nominal nominal operating frequency of 4000 (16000) MHz. Comparison with RX 6700 XT Gaming OC (12 GB) and Radeon RX 6700 XT 12 GB Asus ROG Strix Radeon RX 6700 XT Gaming OC (12 GB)AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT (12 GB)front view back view The total number of power phases for the reference card Radeon RX 6700 XT and for the Asus card is the same - 11. The Asus PCB is somewhat similar to the reference card, but there are also many differences. The power supply circuit of the kernel is marked in green, and the memory is in red. PWM controller IR35217 (IOR / Infineon) controls 8 phases of GPU power supply. There is also a PWM controller NCP81022 (On Semiconductor), which controls three phases of power supply to memory chips; it is also located on the face of the PCB. The GPU power converter, built using Super Alloy Power II technology and modern solid-state capacitors (which is traditional for Asus), uses DrMOS Vishay transistor assemblies - in this case, SiC643 for the GPU power phases and SiC654 for the memory power phases, each of which is designed for maximum current 50 A. The board has the usual number of video outputs (4), and the set is no less familiar: 3 DP 1.4 and 1 HDMI 2.1. You can also find a proprietary controller for controlling the backlight on the board. And the well-known ITE processor is in charge of monitoring. It also controls two FanConnect II connectors for case fans, which can work depending on the heating of the video card. The nominal memory frequencies are equal to the reference values. But the boost value of the core frequency is higher than the reference analog, which on average gives a performance increase of 5%. Manual overclocking was tested using the standard AMD utility included in the driver control panel (although possible via Asus GPU Tweak and MSI Afterburner). The maximum possible frequencies for stable operation were found to be 2754/17088 MHz. At the same time, the performance gain relative to the reference card was just over 8.5%. The video card, traditionally for the ROG Strix series, has two BIOS options and a switch on the top of the card. The positions are indicated as P Mode (Performance) and Q Mode (Quiet). The difference lies in different curves of the fan operation setting (in terms of frequencies, everything is almost identical). At low GPU load, the fans always stop. Power is supplied through two 8-pin connectors. The operation of the card is controlled using the well-known proprietary utility Asus GPU Tweak II. Maximum performance mode that should be turned on anyway Default operating mode, GPU frequency 20 MHz below OC Mode Manual overclocking tab Heating and cooling The basis of the CO is a huge two-piece plate nickel-plated radiator with heat pipes soldered to the base of direct contact with the GPU and memory chips. The same heatsink serves as a cooler for some components of the VRM power converters using a small base plate. For the rest of the VRM mosfets, separate radiators are provided, located on a frame bolted to the main radiator. The back plate is made of aluminum with an electrical protective coating and has a dual purpose: it serves as a PCB protection element and through the thermal interface participates in cooling the back side of the card in the zones of memory chips and power converters. As can be seen from the principle of operation of this CO, all hot air remains inside the case, it is blown out partially behind the video card, as well as directly onto the motherboard. This means that you need to have a well-ventilated housing. Above the radiator, there is a casing with three ∅95 mm Axial-tech fans, in which the ends of the blades are connected by a ring for a clearer direction of air flow to the radiator. In addition, the middle fan has 2 more blades than the outer ones. And he also rotates the fan in the opposite direction relative to the extreme, which provides a kind of "gear effect", helping to fight the turbulence of the air flow. The fans stop at low load if the GPU temperature drops below 50 degrees. Of course, the CO becomes silent at the same time. When the PC starts up, the fans run, then they turn off before the OS boots. Then they turn on again for a few seconds before loading the video driver, and after polling the operating temperature, they turn off again. Below is a video on this topic. Fans are turned off at idle with any BIOS option. Thermal Monitoring with MSI Afterburner: BIOS P Mode (Performance): After 6 hours of running under load in OC Mode, the maximum core temperature did not exceed 68 degrees, which is a good result for video cards of this level. The maximum power was recorded at 212 W, and the maximum heating was observed in the center of the PCB. Below is a 9-minute card heating accelerated 50 times. With the described manual overclocking, the card's operating parameters did not change much, but the maximum power consumption rose to 227 watts. BIOS Q Mode (Quiet) In this mode, the core temperature was slightly higher - 78 ° C, but the fans rotated more slowly. Noise The noise measurement technique assumes that the room is noise-insulated and damped, and reverberations are reduced. The system unit, in which the noise of video cards is examined, does not have fans and is not a source of mechanical noise. The background level of 18 dBA is the noise level in the room and the noise level of the sound level meter itself. Measurements are taken from a distance of 50 cm from the video card at the level of the cooling system. Measurement modes: - Idle mode in 2D: loaded internet browser with iXBT.com website, Microsoft Word window, a number of internet communicators - 2D mode with movie viewing: SmoothVideo Project (SVP) is used - hardware decoding with insertion of intermediate frames - 3D mode with maximum load on the accelerator: using FurMark benchmark The assessment of the noise level gradations is as follows: - less than 20 dBA: conditionally silent - 20 to 25 dBA: very quiet - from 25 to 30 dBA: quiet - 30 to 35 dBA: clearly audible - 35 to 40 dBA: loud but bearable - above 40 dBA: very loud In idle, the Performance Mode and Quiet Mode did not differ at all: in 2D the temperature was no higher than 36 ° C, the fans did not work, the noise level was equal to the background one - 18 dBA. When watching a movie with hardware decoding, nothing changed. Under maximum load in 3D, the temperature in Performance Mode reached 68 ° C. At the same time, the fans spun up to 2433 rpm, the noise grew up to 32.9 dBA: this is clearly audible, but tolerable. In the video below, noise was captured for a couple of seconds every 30 seconds. In Quiet Mode, the temperature reached 78 ° C. At the same time, the fans spun up to 1674 rpm, and the noise grew only up to 30.0 dBA: it's pretty quiet. Backlight The backlighting of the card is implemented on the top end, in the inserts near the fans and in the ROG logo built into the back plate. Backlight control is traditionally performed using Asus' proprietary program - Armory Crate. The choice of modes is not very wide, but there is a program Aura Creator, which is also distributed free of charge, and with its help you can create your own lighting scenarios. Scope of delivery and packaging The package, in addition to the traditional user manual and the ROG card, includes small bonuses in the form of zip ties and a branded line. Test results Test bench configuration - Компьютер на базе процессора AMD Ryzen 9 5950X (Socket AM4):- Платформа:- процессор AMD Ryzen 9 5950X (разгон до 4,6 ГГц по всем ядрам); - ЖСО Cougar Helor 240; - системная плата Asus ROG Crosshair Dark Hero на чипсете AMD X570; - оперативная память TeamGroup T-Force Xtreem ARGB (TF10D48G4000HC18JBK) 32 ГБ (4×8) DDR4 (4000 МГц); - SSD Intel 760p NVMe 1 ТБ PCI-E; - жесткий диск Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 3 ТБ SATA3; - блок питания Seasonic Prime 1300 W Platinum (1300 Вт); - корпус Thermaltake Level20 XT; - операционная система Windows 10 Pro 64-битная; DirectX 12 (v.20H2); - телевизор LG 55Nano956 (55″ 8K HDR, HDMI 2.1); - драйверы AMD версии 21.5.1; - драйверы Nvidia версии 466.27; - VSync отключен. Testing tool list All gaming tests used the maximum graphics quality in the settings. - Hitman III (IO Interactive/IO Interactive) - Cyberpunk 2077 (Softclub / CD Projekt RED), patch 1.2 - Death Stranding (505 Games/Kojima Productions) - Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (Ubisoft/Ubisoft) - Watch Dogs: Legion (Ubisoft/Ubisoft) - Control (505 Games/Remedy Entertainment) - Godfall (Gearbox Publishing/Counterplay Games) - Resident Evil Village (Capcom/Capcom) - Shadow of the Tomb Raider (Eidos Montreal/Square Enix), HDR включен - Metro Exodus (4A Games/Deep Silver/Epic Games) To calculate the hashrate when mining Ethereum, the T-Rex miner (0.20.01) was used, the average indicator for 2 hours was recorded in two modes: - by default (consumption limit reduced to 70%, GPU frequency reduced by 200 MHz, memory frequency by default, fans set in manual mode by 70%) - optimization (the consumption limit is reduced to 70%, the GPU frequency is reduced by 200 MHz, the memory frequency is increased by 500-1000 MHz (depending on the card), the fans are set in manual mode by 80%) To test the GeForce RTX 3060, we used the same "leaked" driver version 470.05, in which the protection against mining was disabled. Test results in 3D games Standard benchmark results without hardware ray tracing at 1920 × 1200, 2560 × 1440, and 3840 × 2160 Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Shadow of the Tomb Raider Most games still do not support ray tracing technology, and there are still a lot of video cards on the market that do not support RT in hardware. The same is true for Nvidia's DLSS smart anti-aliasing technology. Therefore, we still carry out the most massive tests in games without ray tracing. Nevertheless, today already half of the video cards we regularly test support RT technology, so we conduct tests not only using conventional rasterization methods, but also with the inclusion of RT and / or DLSS. It is clear that in this case, video cards of the AMD Radeon RX 6000 family participate in tests without an analogue of DLSS (we are waiting for the company to implement the promised analogue and speed up the calculation of ray tracing). Test results with hardware ray tracing and / or DLSS enabled at 1920 × 1200, 2560 × 1440, and 3840 × 2160 Cyberpunk 2077, RT+DLSS Watch Dogs: Legion, RT Watch Dogs: Legion, RT+DLSS Resident Evil Village, RT Shadow of the Tomb Raider, RT IXBT.com Rating IXBT.com Rating The iXBT.com accelerator rating demonstrates to us the functionality of video cards relative to each other and is presented in two versions: - Bitcoiminershashrate.com rating option without RT included The rating is compiled for all tests without the use of ray tracing technologies. This rating is normalized for the weakest accelerator - GeForce GTX 1650 (that is, the combination of speed and features of the GeForce GTX 1650 is taken as 100%). Ratings are carried out for 28 accelerators that we study monthly as part of the Best Video Card of the Month project. In this case, a group of cards for analysis was selected from the general list, which includes the Radeon RX 6700 XT and its competitors. The rating is given in total for all three resolutions. №Accelerator modelIXBT.com RatingUtility ratingprice, rub.06Asus ROG Strix RX 6700 XT OC, overclocked to 2754/1708869046150 00007Asus ROG Strix RX 6700 XT OC, 2568—2641/1600067045150 00008RTX 3070 8GB 1725-1950 / 1400066035190 00009RTX 2080 Ti 11 GB, 1635—1950 / 1400065039168 00010RX 6700 XT 12 GB, 2424—2643 / 1600064043150 00011RTX 3060 Ti 8 GB, 1665—2010 / 1400059033180 000 We have previously noted that, according to the results of gaming tests, the Radeon RX 6700 XT performed between the RTX 3070 and RTX 3060 Ti, being closer to the 3070, while the increased frequencies of the Asus card even allowed it to bypass the RTX 3070 in games without ray tracing. - Rating option with RT included The rating is based on 5 tests using ray tracing technology (no Nvidia DLSS!). This rating is normalized for the weakest accelerator in this group - GeForce RTX 2070 (that is, the combination of speed and features of the GeForce RTX 2070 is taken as 100%). The rating is given in total for all three resolutions. №Accelerator modelBitcoinMinershashrate.com RatingUtility ratingprice, rub.03RTX 3070 8GB 1725-1950 / 140001709190 00004RTX 2080 Ti 11 GB, 1635—1950 / 140001509168 00005RTX 3060 Ti 8 GB, 1665—2010 / 140001408180 00014Asus ROG Strix RX 6700 XT OC, overclocked to 2754/17088906150 00015Asus ROG Strix RX 6700 XT OC, 2568—2641/16000805150 00016RX 6700 XT 12 GB, 2424—2643 / 16000705150 000 If, in the case of RTX 3xxx cards, when switching to games with ray tracing, we somehow manage without epithets like "Achilles' heel", then talking about the Radeon RX 6xxx, we have to drastically change intonation compared to the previous rating. Yes, when you turn on RT, the performance of the Radeon RX 6700 XT drops much more than that of the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti (not to mention the 3070). Alas, these kinds of games are now really a "bottleneck" for new products from AMD. All that remains is to wait for the release of the promised AMD Fidelity Super Resolution technology, which can become to some extent an analogue of Nvidia DLSS and compensate for the performance losses with RT at least to some extent. As for the Asus card, here its increased frequencies and manual overclocking only allowed it to rise slightly against the reference analog, but Nvidia is still far from its rivals. Utility rating The utility rating of the same cards is obtained if the indicator of the previous rating is divided by the prices of the corresponding accelerators. To calculate the utility rating, the retail prices were used conditionally for June 2021 . Attention! For well-known reasons, the prices for all cards have become purely speculative and have dramatically increased significantly relative to the recommended ones. Because of this, the calculation of utility ratings has become meaningless, we present these ratings simply by tradition, but in the current market situation, conclusions cannot be drawn on their basis . - Utility rating option without including RT №Accelerator modelUtility ratingIXBT.com Ratingprice, rub.03Asus ROG Strix RX 6700 XT OC, overclocked to 2754/1708846690150 00005Asus ROG Strix RX 6700 XT OC, 2568—2641/1600045670150 00006RX 6700 XT 12 GB, 2424—2643 / 1600043640150 00009RTX 2080 Ti 11 GB, 1635—1950 / 1400039650168 00021RTX 3070 8GB 1725-1950 / 1400035660190 00024RTX 3060 Ti 8 GB, 1665—2010 / 1400033590180 000 - Utility rating option with RT included №Accelerator modelUtility ratingIXBT.com Ratingprice, rub.02RTX 3070 8GB 1725-1950 / 140009170190 00003RTX 2080 Ti 11 GB, 1635—1950 / 140009150168 00008RTX 3060 Ti 8 GB, 1665—2010 / 140008140180 00014Asus ROG Strix RX 6700 XT OC, overclocked to 2754/17088690150 00015Asus ROG Strix RX 6700 XT OC, 2568—2641/16000580150 00016RX 6700 XT 12 GB, 2424—2643 / 16000570150 000 Test results in mining (mining, hashrate) Hashrate for GeForce RTX 3060 was measured on driver version 470.05, on other versions it is 24/26 MH / s. We perfectly see the tendency that has developed recently that top-end and even mid-range video cards received prices according to their ratings in mining (hash rate). On the one hand, this is very bad for gamers who want those accelerators that give the maximum hash rate. On the other hand, the same Radeon RX 6700 XT in games is only slightly weaker than the RTX 3070, but due to the hash rate, which is not comparable to the 3070, it has a lower price. However, it is extremely wild for me to talk about prices for video cards that have flown far beyond 100,000 rubles, and even 200,000 ... Let me emphasize once again that optimization of the settings for the operation of video cards for mining in our case does not provide for strong overclocking of the video memory, and external blowing of video cards is also mandatory. conclusions The Asus ROG Strix Radeon RX 6700 XT Gaming OC (12 GB) is a kind of hybrid of a top-end accelerator with a mid-level one. Read the full article

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atmfrecruitingformula · 3 years

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How Freelancers Can Catch FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early)

Millennials around the world are facing bleak job prospects and a world economy in near shambles from the COVID-19 pandemic. Naturally, the idea of living off investments sounds pretty good right now. Personal finance has long talked about the idea of becoming financially independent, meaning not owing debt and having your investments cover your living expenses. But now there’s a millennial twist on it: retiring early. Put together, you get FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early)

Once the domain of employees tired of their 9-5 jobs who want to travel more, FIRE is creeping into all sectors of the working world. With more people going into freelancing due to the pandemic – on top of the 55 million+ freelancers that are already out there – it’s high time we had the FIRE conversation from the perspective of freelancing.

What is FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early)?

FIRE is made up of two core principles: becoming financially independent (FI) and retiring early (RE). It sounds simple, but the community is wildly splintered.

The definition of financial independence is largely accepted as having investments producing enough income to cover your living expenses. That could mean simply survival expenses of food and shelter all the way to living a lavish lifestyle – it all depends on the individual.

The definition of retiring early, however, is wildly up for debate. Personal finance guru Erving says she hates the concept of FIRE for this exact reason. She believes it’s a huge mistake for young people to take themselves out of the workforce during what would be peak earning years. Interestingly, though, many FIRE advocates agree with her.

Take Kristy Shen, aka FIRE Cracker from Millennial Revolution, a Toronto engineer who FIRE’d along with her husband a few years ago. She was livid that Orman implied FIRE advocates don’t understand compound interest or never want to work again in their lives. On the contrary, the “RE” in FIRE is often understood not as never working, but only working on what you want to. For Kristy, that’s writing. She and her husband wrote Quit Like a Millionaire and have earned hundreds of thousands of dollars writing over the years since FIRE. So much for never working again.

The origins of FIRE and the unique road of freelancing

“I realized the traditional rulebook of life: 1) get a job 2) buy a house 3) be loyal to a company and work until you are 65 and 4) retire with a pension, was broken,” said Shen. “Jobs are no longer stable, houses are no longer affordable, and jobs with pensions are rarer than unicorns.”a freelancer who hit FIRE at age 25, couldn’t agree more. He sees himself as incredibly risk averse, so FIRE was his way “to make income unnecessary” in his life. Talk about risk reduction.

“I work full time and freelance,” she said. “I freelance to pursue my passions (blogging, podcasting, speaking, teaching) and also to build a business so that I can eventually quit my 9-5.”

FIRE was originally developed by people who hated their 9-5 jobs and wanted financial freedom to work on passion projects. So where do freelancers fit into the mix? It gets a bit complicated when you consider that freelancers have inconsistent income and a different tax situation. Those two seemingly small things can change the whole FIRE formula for freelancers, so it’s critical to look at it from that unique angle.

Step 1: Know what kind of FIRE you want

FIRE fundamentally means having enough income from investments that you don’t need income from labor to live. The implied second part is reaching this milestone as early as possible in life, both to benefit from compound interest longer and to enjoy “retirement” for a longer period of time.

Within the financial independence retire early movement, there are three key categories:

Lean FIRE

Fat FIRE

Coast FIRE

Lean FIRE means you cover your essentials with your investments: food, transportation, lodging, and healthcare. That’s it. People who hit this level of FIRE often quit a job they hate but may choose to continue working on passion projects or, as many like Shen have already, become bloggers about their FIRE journey.

Fat FIRE means having enough tucked away for a comfortable lifestyle involving travel, meals out, and more refined lodgings or transportation. What you put into Fat FIRE entirely depends on your lifestyle choices – for some that means vacations, for others it’s a nice car, and for others it’s fancy steak dinners. It’s your choice.

Coast FIRE means you no longer have to actively put money into your investments in order to reach your retirement goals.. For example, if you have $300,000 in investments at an annual compound interest rate of 5%, it will hit $1,000,000 in 25 years. So if you want to retire at 65, your “Coast FIRE” number and date is $300,000 by age 40.

FIRE advocates will often tell you that a huge part of picking your FIRE strategy is also understanding your debt situation. Then, of course, getting out of debt as quickly as possible.

One FIRE journeyer who runs the account ForBetterOrWorth on Instagram, said that’s where his FIRE journey started.

“Our journey to FIRE started with becoming debt free and then figuring out what to do with all that money that used to be debt repayment,” he said.

Step 2: Identify your FIRE number

This is simple math. Once you know what kind of FIRE you want, you simply have to start the calculations.

Here’s what you do:

A) Make a list of all the monthly expenses you will have

From housing and healthcare to travel and dining out. You can also make different models based on Lean and Fat FIRE, if you want to see how the expenses shake out.

Let’s say this is $5,000 per month.

B) Multiply the total monthly expenses by 12, so you have your annual expenses.

That makes $60,000 per year.

C) Add a cushion just in case – usually 10-25% of the total value.

At 20%, that’s $72,000 per year you need investments to generate.

D) Divide the number by 4% (or 0.04 on a calculator), which is known as the “safe withdrawal rate.” (SWR).

The concept of the SWR is that you can draw that percentage each year without ever touching your investment principal. That means the FIRE fund will last, theoretically, forever (PS, this is how rich people live almost all the time, earning money from dividends and assets instead of their labor).

You would need about $1,800,000 in assets to produce $72,000 in annual income.

This is also when you start to realize how small changes can have a serious impact in your FIRE goals.

Let’s say you reduce monthly expenses by $500 per month – to only $4,500 instead of $5,000. That means your new FIRE number is only $1,620,000 at 4% withdrawal. By removing $500 a month from your expenses, you don’t have to save an extra $180,000! Also keep in mind that you don’t have to budget for putting money into savings, since you will have this covered already with FIRE.

This is why many people who chase FIRE aim for the lowest possible monthly expenses, so that FIRE is easier to hit. Take Brian Groat, for instance, who hit his FIRE number of $600,000. He only needed $2,000 a month for his personal Lean FIRE, which was a key reason he was able to hit it so young in life.

Many others choose $1,000,000 as the start of FIRE. Shen did this when she FIRE’d, and new FIRE chasers like Torres-Rodriguez picked the same number.

For C, the anonymous poster behind ForBetterOrWorth, $1 million is just the baseline.

“Right now, $1.5MM even though it’s up for debate,” he said. “Once we hit the $1MM it will definitely be a chance to level set and see if we need to readjust. It’s definitely going to be a million at least!”

At the end of the day, it’s really up to you.

Step 3: Choose your investment vehicles

Tax sheltered investment vehicles are favored by the rich and by FIRE chasers. It seems whenever a country offers tax-advantaged accounts, FIRE chasers use them.

all Canadian. As such, they used accounts like RRSP (registered retirement savings plans) and TFSAs (tax free savings accounts). Torres-Rodriguez and ForBetterOrWorth are American and use 401Ks and IRAs, the American equivalents.

Other accounts depend on your personal situation.

Kinsella and ForBetterOrWorth both have kids. As a result, Kinsella uses RESPs (registered education savings plans) because the Canadian government matches a lot of your deposits. ForBetterOrWorth uses a 529 plan, the American equivalent of an RESP.

Real estate, on the other hand, is a tense subject in the FIRE community. It can provide a lot of passive income when done but can also cost a lot to maintain. Torres-Rodriguez said she “will be adding real estate to my portfolio this year.” Groat, on the other hand, said he used to dabble in real estate but doesn’t anymore.

Step 4: Prepare for freelancer taxes

Freelancing is more complicated when it comes to taxes, but that provides a unique advantage. One big question to answer, though, is whether to operate as a sole proprietorship or incorporate. While the decision is personal, other freelance FIRE chasers suggest incorporation.

“You’ll get a mix of opinions, but I chose to incorporate right off the bat,” said Kinsella. “Keeping business and personal separate has helped me treat the two the way they need to be. Personal is where I spend time planning for FIRE. The business I treat like I work for someone else. It’s a source of income that I also happen to run.”

“It’s going to be different for everybody,” said Groat. “But you want to look at incorporating instead of being a sole proprietorship when it makes sense for you.”

The next thing is to plan for reducing taxes as much as possible – something that using tax-advantaged investment accounts already helps with.

“As a high income earner, I maximize tax savings by maxing out my workplace and solo 401Ks and HSA [Health Savings Account] to reduce my taxable income,” said Torres-Rodriguez.

While this extra planning can be a nuisance, Shen noted freelancers have a lot more flexibility in the end.

“You have the flexibility of ramping up your earnings and investing more money than an employee could,” said Shen. “You can also write off expenses, which enables you to optimize your taxes.”

Step 5: Track your expenses

Tracking expenses is not necessary, but actively encouraged for FIRE chasers. It’s not just the extra coffee that will derail your FIRE plans, but the fact that it’s easy to let spending get away from you if you don’t keep an eye on it.

As for tools, though, the answer is pretty simple: Excel wins across the board. As Shen put succinctly, “I love spreadsheets.”

For folks that don’t like Excel, Personal Capital and were two tools mentioned by FIRE chasers as helpful for them.

Step 6: Plan for inconsistent income

As mentioned in the tax planning section, freelancers have inconsistent income – it’s a simple reality of freelancing.

For freelancers chasing FIRE, there are two risk mitigation strategies you can use:

Retainer versus growth: Try to find a client on retainer that pays enough to cover your living expenses. Everything else goes to FIRE.

Start an emergency fund: Give yourself 3-6 months of expenses sitting in cash (or a high interest savings account) so if the business goes south for a bit, you won’t have to stop your FIRE contributions.

Step 7: Avoid FIRE pitfalls specific to freelancers

When talking to the FIRE chasers, six key pitfalls came up that are unique to freelancers.

1 – Charge what you’re worth

“Not charging enough or not charging money soon enough,” said Groat, talking about the key pitfalls to avoid. “A lot of freelancers charge an hourly rate, whatever their salaried income was plus $5,” which he says is “disastrous.” He recommends your freelancing rate be double whatever an employee would earn for the same work.

2 – Have a contract

A solid freelance contract gets you out of a whole assortment of problems. It governs work scope, payment terms, deadlines, late fees, and more. Since it’s a legal document, it tends to keep clients more in line than a simple handshake agreement. And if you ever needed to go to court, you have the contract to back you up.

3 – Know difference between cash flow and wealth building

“As a freelancer, you want to focus on cash flow and wealth building as two different things,” said Groat.

Cash flow is the money coming in and going out of your business each month – salary plus other expenses. Wealth building is the money put aside to buy assets. Don’t mistake a good month revenue-wise as getting you closer to financial independence, retire early. The real key is investing as much of your money as possible.

4 – Ignore things and people that detract you from your goal

When you start pursuing FIRE, a lot of people will have a lot of opinions (especially Suze Orman, apparently). But you have to simply ignore and push through.

“People will second guess you and try to talk you out of it,” said ForBetterOrWorth. “But go for it and keep going. It takes time for your investments to compound, but once you start to see that – it’s GAME OVER!”

5 – Make sure you’re disciplined

It’s not just inconsistent income – freelancing is a bumpy ride. There are many things that could derail you or force a pivot. The key is to just be ready.

“That’s why you’ll have to be very disciplined in investing consistently, since you can’t just put in the same amount of money every two weeks like you would with a steady paycheck,” said Chen.

6 – You don’t need to stop freelancing post-FIRE

Freelancing is one of the most free jobs in the world – it’s literally in the name. So after hitting FIRE, don’t worry about needing to send a goodbye email to your clients.

“Just because you’re FI doesn’t mean you have to be RE,” said Groat.

Step 8: Chasing financial independence retire early doesn’t mean ignoring fun

There’s a misconception that FIRE chasers are paupers, scrooges, and otherwise very very cheap people. This is not true. While you can get to FIRE by scrimping every penny, the majority of FIRE chasers realize that FIRE is a marathon. Even the fastest journeys still take years for most people.

“I don’t know about you, but back when I was working towards FIRE, I had a lot of fun spending $5000-$10,000/year on travel with zero guilt,” said Shen. “It’s not about depravity it’s about optimization. Prioritizing your spending towards things that make you happy by cutting back on things like bank fees, portfolio management fees, and spending on things you care about.”

You can also work to make your fun free. As a freelancer, you have the freedom to buy something fun – like a boat – then rent it out part-time to cover the costs of ownership. You can also hack credit card points so your fun is paid for. When you do have fun and spend your own money, you can even turn it into a business opportunity.

“When we go out, we make it count,” said Kinsella. “We spend our money at local businesses because A) it’s the absolute right thing to do to support your neighbours and B) they’re great to include in your network to help with new introductions for your freelance services.”

The key is, like it is for most things, balance.

“We still traveled one or two times a year, but we didn’t shop, we didn’t eat out as much, etc,” said ForBetterOrWorth. “I think as long as you are real with yourself about what you want and what you can live without, you can find the right balance.”

Who wants to catch FIRE?

Financial independence is a dream for a lot of people. The financial independence retire early movement breaks it down into a simple-to-follow plan with a catchy name. But regardless of what you call it, the tenets are the same. Suze Orman and other personal finance gurus call it “financial freedom,” while others call it “being rich.” It really doesn’t matter. What matters is your goal, your money, and your freedom to choose the life that suits you. Everything else is just tactics.

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source http://atmfrecruitingformula.info/how-freelancers-can-catch-fire-financial-independence-retire-early/

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deadcactuswalking · 3 years

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REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 06/03/2021 ("BED”, Digga D, Kali Uchis)

It’s finally a really short filler week on the UK Singles Chart but not one without its importance as we’ve got some real interesting stuff to talk about this week, even if there are only six new arrivals. Olivia Rodrigo’s “drivers license” is at #1, and whilst I may not be able to post this on Twitter because I’ve been locked out – don’t ask why – this is still REVIEWING THE CHARTS.

Rundown

So, a lot of our debuts are gone, including “test drive” by Ariana Grande as well as other bigger hits dropping out of the UK Top 75 – which is what I cover – including “Burner on Deck” by Fredo featuring the late Pop Smoke and Young Adz, “i miss u” by Jax Jones and Au/Ra, Taylor Swift’s re-recorded “Love Story”, “Before You Go” by Lewis Capaldi, “Shallow” by Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper and “Perfect” by Ed Sheeran. There are also a handful of fallers across the chart like Fredo’s continued drops as “Money Talks” with Dave is at #28, “Let’s Go Home Together” by Ella Henderson and Tom Grennan off of the debut to #34, “Love Not War (The Tampa Beat)” by Jason Derulo and Nuka at #36, “34+35” by Ariana Grande at #40, “Good Days” by SZA dropping hard with the streaming cut down to #46, “Mixed Emotions” by Abra Cadabra at #54, “Watermelon Sugar” by Harry Styles at #60, “Didn’t Know” by Tom Zanetti off of the debut to #68, “Siberia” by Headie One featuring Burna Boy at #71 and “willow” by Taylor Swift at #72. What’s probably more interesting are our gains and returning entries, as for returns, we’ve got “ROCKSTAR” by DaBaby featuring Roddy RIcch back at #75, Wilkinson’s 2013 drum and bass track “Afterglow” featuring uncredited vocals from Becky Hill back at #74 for whatever reason, “Higher” by Clean Bandit featuring iann dior at #70 and “Goodbye” by Imanbek and Goodboys coming back strong at #59. Our gains are also pretty unique, as we have some second winds for “Looking for Me” by Paul Woolford, Diplo and Kareen Lomax at #67, “Loading” by Central Cee at #61 and “Roses” by SAINt JHN and remixed by Imanbek at #55. We also have a handful of climbers within the top 40, like “All You Ever Wanted” by Rag’n’Bone Man surging up to #33 off of the debut, which I’m pretty happy about as it’s a really good song. I’m less over the moon about “Little Bit of Love” by Tom Grennan at #27, “Believe Me” by Navos at #25 and finally, “My Head & My Heart” by Ava Max up to #19. There’s not much movement above that however, so let’s get into our new arrivals, starting with something I didn’t think I see here this soon.

NEW ARRIVALS

#65 – “SugarCrash!” – ElyOtto

Produced by ElyOtto

I love doing this show because I find out more about genres I’d usually tend to avoid. I’m not the most knowledgeable person about Afroswing or really, a lot of the house that ends up charting on the UK Singles Chart. I think I know my fair bit about at least the mainstream of a lot of the UK drill stuff, but what I really would consider myself somewhat specialised in is hyperpop. I’m probably too old to enjoy any of it as much as I do but that may just be why I have a connection to this overly online, digital scene of SoundCloud producers and rappers making pretty obnoxiously mid-2000s-influenced electropop, as it really does feel like a retreat to a simpler time with all of the angst of the emo-pop being made around the same time. The hyperpop scene and bubblegum bass as a whole has always felt inclusive, which I think is one of the main reasons why it’s big with teenagers nowadays, because there really isn’t much of a limit in the genre or at least the scope that we’ve found as of yet, whether it be integrating elements of ‘hexd’ or brostep or trance or what have you. Whilst companies may want us to be nostalgic for the 1990s, I think most people are taking a couple steps forward here, and it’s creating some genuinely great music – some of the time, at least. Hyperpop has birthed many SoundCloud-based sub-genres, or I guess micro-genres, including one of which being glitchcore, a glitchier, more off-the-wall brand of cloud rap with a lot of high-energy trap production and nightcore-esque pitch-shifting. I see some brands of infighting amongst people who listen to hyperpop and glitchcore seeing as glitchcore has arguably taken off a bit faster than other more electronic or pop-focused scenes, but I see that as evolution of a scene more than anything. 100 gecs sounds nothing like A.G. Cook, anyway, it’s pointless gate-keeping at this point, especially when TikTok gets their hands on this random kid from Canada. In a genre full of pioneers, this young Canadian guy’s debut single is what gains traction and for what it’s worth I’m happy for the guy but I’m not a fan of the song at all. This does feel like a parody if anything, with its fast-paced gecs impression and admittedly pretty ethereal synth patterns pretty drowned out by lightweight trap percussion and this ElyOtto guy who really isn’t a presence at all, especially if he’s going to pitch himself down and further into the instrumental on the outro... of a song that’s already only one minute and 20 seconds yet runs through two choruses and a verse, of which nothing really is said of substance. People like blackwinterwells and osquinn make similar music especially in terms of lyrical content but there is something to be said about their honesty and somewhat paranoid tones that creep in, whilst there’s nothing really emotionally convincing about this guy’s delivery or content, as while he may make the same semi-ironic references to self-harm, pain medication and Gen Z culture as they do, he doesn’t really have any tact and it feels overly self-aware to the point where I refuse to believe anyone outside of ElyOtto can really enjoy it fully. It makes perfect sense that this started off as a “short soundfont test” and really, it probably should have stayed that way. There’s a lot to be enjoyed in hyperpop but if this isn’t a satire and is a genuine attempt at approaching the scene, I’d be genuinely surprised. That said, his song “TEETH!” is legitimately good with the exact same length, so maybe I’m just full of it. Either way, I’m not a fan. Sorry.

#56 – “AP” – Pop Smoke

Produced by 808Melo and Rico Beats

Another posthumous Pop Smoke single, except this was actually recorded well before his death and probably finished before to boot, as it’s attached to a film, Boogie, that he will actually star in. With 808Melo on production, it’s guaranteed to have at least some hard-hitting drill production and, yeah, I mean, it’s fine. It’s got a pretty eerie vocal sample behind all the murderous lyrics and pretty busy drill percussion with some great 808s, even if it and the sample feels a bit too loud in the mix when Pop Smoke’s rich voice feels buried. It’s just gunplay, really, and a bit of flexing and references to his older songs, as he makes a call and it’s war and he’s off that Adderall. It’s sad that from now on, any material we get from Pop Smoke will be his leftovers and throwaways. That said, this is fine, perhaps a bit too long, and it could be worse – I mean, it originally leaked with a Rich the Kid verse, it REALLY could have been worse. Once again, RIP Pop Smoke and I hope 808Melo gets his YouTube channel back if he hasn’t already.

#50 – “Pierre” – Ryn Weaver

Produced by benny blanco, Ryan Tedder and Michael Angelakos

The UK Singles Chart is changing, and I think that’s what makes this such an interesting week as there is genuinely some stuff here we’ve never seen debut on the chart before – or anything like it – and that’s exciting to me. You probably know Ryn Weaver from “OctaHate”, a brief 2014 viral pop song written by Charli XCX and produced by Cashmere Cat that led to a debut album the next year and thanks to presumably TikTok, a deep cut from said album has now debuted in the top 50. Now I hadn’t heard of her before looking at the chart about an hour ago, so I can’t tell you much of anything at all about the California singer. I’m not really a fan of “OctaHate” but I do have a fondness for that janky electropop production from the mid-2010s – “Gold” by Kiiara is a hill I’d die on – so with production from Michael Angelakos of Passion Pit, I’d hoped “Pierre” would be pretty cool and, yeah, it’s pretty odd, actually. It seems like a pretty ballad but with a very fast-paced, raspy delivery from Weaver and some choppy production that soon tenses in the chorus and I’ve got to say, while I’m not 100% on the mixing, I can get behind the concept here, especially with some multi-tracked vocals from Weaver. The song itself is about trying to run away from her feelings for a lover that never really went away, particularly as she hooks up later with a man called Pierre who speaks in broken English, which gives a lot of reason for the tense pace of the song, even if that is undercut by the production being muddy and awfully willing to kill its momentum in the outro as there’s never really a proper climax. That said, it’s fitting for that final line, “I’ll come around”, which can be interpreted as about moving on or complacency – just coming back to that guy after years of searching for someone else. I do like this – or at least what it’s trying to do – but I feel like it’d enjoy it more with less clutter, particularly in that chorus, which could really elevate this but as it is, it’s fine.

#45 – “telepatía” – Kali Uchis

Produced by Albert Hype, Manuel Lara and Tainy

Okay, so alt-pop all the way from Latin America, that’s also a first... except not really, as ROSALÍA has charted before, if only off of the back of Billie Eilish. Regardless, this is a really high debut for a global hit from Colombian-American critical darling Kali Uchis, someone I’m always glad to hear from. Admittedly I did not check out that last project that was a return to a lot of the Latin American music, including reggaeton, she took early influence from. That debut studio album is mostly an English-language neo-soul record so I appreciate the risks taken, even if I personally didn’t check it out. I probably should though, because this bilingual streaming success “telepatía”, is pretty damn smooth with some of the signature fuzzy keys you’d hear from any Kali Uchis song, somewhat reminiscent of Tyler, The Creator in all of the elegant piano ambiance and soul drums that cut the line thin between live and programmed, but sound quite either way. I especially love the flushes of Latin guitar in the chorus but really, Uchis’ silky voice is what shines here, especially in the subtle, seductive double-tracking and how smoothly it switches from Spanish to English. It’s not perfect, I mean, the transition from chorus to second verse and back again is somewhat awkward, and it does feel like it runs a little short. I was honestly expecting a guitar solo or something but we get very little of anything after that final chorus. Given that I know Tainy mostly from his work with J Balvin – and I’ll admit, also mostly from his work on the Sponge on the Run soundtrack – I’m pretty pleasantly surprised with how this has meshed together and I do really hope this sticks around.

#23 – “Bluuwuu” – Digga D

Produced by Glvck

We didn’t get an album bomb from Digga D, bless the Lord, but we did get this one single and... do American rappers make genuine death threats on their top 40 singles? Just wondering, because this has several references to rival gang members and how he’s going to hurt them in one way or another. That would be fine if it were convincing, but this guy really isn’t, especially if he’s going to do the silly “bluuwuu” ad-lib in the chorus over one of the least interesting drill beats I’ve ever heard. The 808s don’t slide notably, the percussion is like a template and there isn’t any energy to this... which is fine, because it’s very much just about gang violence, half of it censored. That said, it crosses the line from intriguing detail to possibly too detailed in a way that’s just unwarranted over a boring beat and with the tendency to go off-topic with his flexing ever so often. I’d probably rather listen to the posthumous Pop Smoke single over this if I had to choose, at least that beat is, you know, good.

#20 – “BED” – Joel Corry, RAYE and David Guetta

Produced by Giorgio Tiunfort, New Levels, David Guetta and Joel Corry

I thought these guys were literally famous for just being producers, why does a song by two producers need two extra producers and if it really needs them, why aren’t they given a lead artist credit as well? Oh, right: name recognition, even though neither Corry or Guetta have ever made anything worth recognising. This song with RAYE, personality-void guest singer, relies on the line, “I got a bed, but I’d rather be in yours tonight”, because it’s a sex jam in one way or another, even though there are no stakes to that chorus line at all. Yes, I know RAYE has a bed; she probably sleeps very comfortably on it. She probably bought it from Premier Inn. Maybe they were having a sale. There’s no point in clarifying that you have a bed – in fact, a more interesting lyrical turn would to maybe bring some stakes into it by saying that RAYE does not in fact have a home, and the intimacy with unnamed man keeps her afloat in times of hardship. This is really just me stalling because this may be our highest debut but that does not mean it’s worth talking about. “BED” doesn’t really do much more than it’s supposed to. It’s got some vaguely 90s keys, fake hand-claps, a checked-out performance from RAYE and an anti-climactic deep house drop. Do you care? Does that description make you want to hear it? It’s not a negative critique, it’s an unbiased description of what happens. Are you intrigued with that? Do you want to check this out? This’ll go top 10 next week because of the music video, but God, this is just soulless, and that’s coming from someone who talks almost purely about the pop charts. I do like the post-chorus vocal melody for what it’s worth, but, yeah, no, I don’t care.

Conclusion

I don’t even care enough to give it Worst of the Week, as that’s going to “SugarCrash!” by ElyOtto with a Dishonourable Mention for Digga D’s “Bluuwuu”. Best of the Week should be obvious as Kali Uchis’ “telepatía” is the only good song here, but the Honourable Mention I guess goes to the late Pop Smoke for “AP”, even if that’s mostly because of 808Melo on the production. Here’s this week’s top 10:

I predict a lot will change next week, as we’ve got new songs from Justin Bieber, James Arthur, Bruno Mars (with Anderson .Paak!) and an EP from Drake... follow me on Twitter @cactusinthebank if you want in the event that I can use that again, and I’ll see you next week for that snoozefest.

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tipstowritinganessay468 · 4 years

Video

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maximelebled · 6 years

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2017

Howdy! Time for the yearly blog post! There's enough depressing stuff that happened this year, so I want to try and not focus too much on that; talk more about the positive and the personal. (I am looking back on this opening paragraph after writing everything else, and I don’t think that ended up true.)

I find it increasingly harder to just straight up talk about things, especially in a direct manner. I think it comes from continuing to realize that so many things are extremely subjective and everything has so much nuance to it that I feel really uncomfortable saying a straight "yes" or a straight "no" to a lot of questions ("Nazis are bad" is not one, though). Or even just a straight answer.

I always end up wanting to go into tangents, and I inevitably run into not being able to phrase that nuance. You know that feeling, when you know something, you have the thought in your head; it is so clear, right there in your head, it is crystal-clear to your soul, yet you have no idea how to word it, let alone doing so in 140/280/500 characters. Frustrating!

I guess I could just put a big disclaimer here, "I am not a paragon of absolute truth and don't start interpreting my words as 'Max thinks he is the authority on XYZ' because you'd be quite foolish to do so"; but that doesn't help that much. Online discourse, let alone presence, can be so tiresome these days; not to be too Captain Obvious, but, there are quite a lot of people that delight in engaging those they see as their "opponents" in bad faith.

As a white man, I don't have it that bad, but still, I'll continue to tell you one thing: the block button is extremely good and you should feel no shame in using it. It drastically improves your online experience. (There are some very clear signs that make me instantly slam the button. I’m sure you know which ones too.)

Anyway, regardless, it's hard to get rid of a habit, especially one you've unwillingly taken on yourself, so I apologize in advance for constantly writing all those "most likely", "probably", "maybe" words, and writing in a style that can come off as annoyingly hesitant sometimes.

I started watching Star Trek this year. My Netflix history tells me: January 29th for TOS/TAS, March 26th for TNG, June 3rd for DS9, November 9th for Voyager.

TOS was really interesting to watch. A lot of things stood out: the (relative) minimalism of the sets and the directing was reminiscent of theater, and even though that was, generally speaking, because that's how TV shows used to be made, it was still striking. From a historical perspective, "fascinating" would still be an ill-suited word to describe it. Seeing that this is where a lot of sci-fi concepts came from, suddenly understanding all the references and nods made everywhere else... it was also soothing to watch a show about mankind having finally united, having exploration and discovery as its sole goal. I feel like it wouldn't have made as big of an impact on me, had I watched it a year prior.

I've always thought of myself as rejecting cynicism, abhorring it, but it's harder and harder to hold on to that as time goes on. I still want to believe in the inner good of mankind, of people in general, but man, it's hard sometimes. I think what really gnaws at me most of the time is how so many of the little bits of good that we can, and are doing, individually, and which do add up... can get struck down or "wasted away" so quickly. The two examples that I have in mind: Bitcoin, this gigantic mess, the least efficient system ever designed by mankind, has already nullified a decade's worth of power savings from the European Union's regulations on energy-efficient light bulbs. And then there's stuff like big prominent YouTubers being, to stay polite, huge irresponsible fools despite the responsibility they have in front of a massive audience of very young people. It can be really depressing to think about the sheer scale of this kind of stuff.

What we can all do on an individual level still matters, of course! I try my best not to use my car, to buy local, reduce my use of plastic, optimize my power usage, etc.; speaking of that, I've often thought about making a small website about teaching the gamer demographic in general quick easy ways to save energy. There is so much misinformation out there, gamers who disable all the power-saving features of their hardware just to get 2 more frames per second in their games, people who overclock so much that they consume 60% more power for 10% more performance, the list goes on. Maybe I'll get around to it some day.

All this stuff going on makes it hard to want to project yourself far ahead in the future. Why plan ahead your retirement in 40 years when it feels like there's a significant chance the world will go to shit by then? It's grim... but it definitely makes me understand the saying "live like there's no tomorrow". Not that I'm gonna become an irresponsible person who burns all their savings on stupid stuff, but for the time being... I don't feel like betting on a better tomorrow, so I might as well save a little bit less for the far future and have a nicer present. You know the stories of American workers who got scammed out of their own 401k? That's, in essence, the kind of stuff I wish to avoid. If that makes sense.

Anyway, going off that long depressing tangent: something I liked a lot across The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager, was how consistent they were. The style of directing, framing, camera movement, etc. was always very similar. Now, you can argue that's just how 80s and 90s TV shows on a budget, a 4:3 aspect ratio, and smaller SD screens worked, yes, but I do believe there is a special consistency that stuck out to me. I jumped into the newest series, Discovery, right after finishing Voyager (I don't plan on watching Enterprise) and the first two episodes were confusing to watch... shaky cam, a lot of traveling shots, shallow depth-of-field, and the tendency to put two characters at the extreme left and right of the frame.It’s a hell of a leap forwards in directing trends. It all gets better after the first two episodes, though.

youtube

I remember alluding to the King of Pain project in my last yearly post. I'm glad I managed to finally do it. I'd talk about it here, but why do it when I've made 70 minutes of video about it? (And unlike my previous behind-the-scenes videos, it's a lot more condensed, and hopefully entertaining.) Unfortunately for me, I completed the video in late June, with only a month left to the TI7 Short Film Contest deadline. So I ended up making two videos back-to-back. I had to buy a new laptop in order to finish the video during my yearly pilgrimage to Seattle. It was intense! And thankfully, I managed to pull off the Hat Trick: winning the contest three years in a row. I would like to think it's a pretty good achievement, but you know how us artists are in general; as soon as we achieve something, we start thinking "eh, it wasn't that good anyway" and we raise our bar higher still.

While I do intend to participate in the contest again next year, I know I'll most likely do something more personal, that would probably be less of a safe bet, now that the pressure of winning 3 in a row is gone. I already have a few ideas lined up...

... and I do have a very interesting project going on right now! If it goes through and I don't miserably land flat on my face (which, unfortunately, has a non-zero chance of happening), you'll see it in about a month from now.

youtube

I'm pretty happy to have reached a million views on all three of my shorts; a million and a half on the TI7 one, too... it might reach two million within six months if it keeps getting views at the current rate. It surprises me a bit that this might end up being my first "big" video, one that keeps getting put on people's sidebar by the all-mighty YouTube™ Algorithm™. There's often a disconnect between what you consider to be your best work, and what ends up being the most popular.

This reminds me that, a lot of the time, I get people who ask me if I'm a streamer or a "YouTuber". My usual answer is that I'm on YouTube, but I'm not a "YouTuber". I wholeheartedly reject that subculture, the cult of personalities, the attempts at parasocial relationships, and all that stuff. It's just not for me. Now, that said, I do hope to achieve 100k subscribers one day... I'm getting closer and closer every day! The little silver trophy for bragging rights would be neat.

My office was renovated by my dad while I was gone. It's much nicer now, and I finally have a place to put most of my Dota memorabilia. He actually sent me this picture I didn't know he'd taken, behind my back, in 2014; the difference is striking... (I think that game I'm playing is Dragon Age: Inquisition.)

Tinnitus. I first noticed my tinnitus when I was 20. I vividly remember the "hold on a second" moment I had in bed... man, if I'd known back then how worse it'd get. Then again, the game was rigged from the start; as a kid, I had frequent ear infections because my canals are weird and small. What didn't help either was the itching; back then, they thought it was mycosis... and treatment for that didn't help at all. Turns out it was psoriasis! Which I also started getting on my right arm that year. (It's eczema, it's itchy, it's chronic, and the treatment steroid cream. Or steroids.) Both conditions got worse since then, too.

Tinnitus becomes truly horrible when you start the doubt the noises you're hearing. When all you have is the impossible-to-describe high-pitched whine, things are, relatively speaking, fine. You know what the noise is, and you learn, you know not to focus on it. But with my tinnitus evolving, new "frequencies", I have, on occasion, started doubting whether I was hearing an actual noise or if it was just my inner ear and brain working in concert to make it up. So I end up thinking about it, actively, and that makes it come back. I had a truly awful week when, during an inner ear infection, the noise got so shrill, so overwhelming, I lost so much sleep over it. I couldn't tune it out anymore. It was like it was at the center of my head and not in my ears anymore. I wouldn't wish that on anyone. I'm not even sure that I'm in the clear yet regarding that. But, like I said, it's best if I don't dwell on it. Thinking of the noise is no bueno.

Really, the human body is bullshit. Here's another example. A couple months ago, I managed to bite the inside of my mouth three separate times. I hate when it happens, not because of the immediate pain, but because I already dread the mouth ulcer / canker sore (not sure which is the appropriate medical translation; the French word is "apthe"). Well, guess what: none of these three incidents had the bite degenerate into an ulcer... but one appeared out of nowhere, in a different spot, two weeks later. And while mouthwash works in the moment, it feels like it never actually helps... it's like I have to wait for my body to realize, after at least ten days, oh yeah, you know what, maybe I should take care of this wound in my mouth over here. And it always waits until it gets quite big. There's no way to nip these goddamn things in the bud when they're just starting.

But really, I feel like I shouldn't really complain? All in all, it could be much worse, so so so much worse. I could have Crohn's disease. I could have cancer. I could have some other horrible rare disease. Localized psoriasis and tinnitus isn't that bad, as far as the life lottery goes. As far as I'm aware, there's nothing hereditary in my family, besides the psoriasis, and the male pattern baldness. I wonder how I'll deal with that one ten, fifteen years down the line...

Just as I'm finishing writing this, the Meltdown & Spectre security flaws have been revealed... spooky stuff, and it makes me glad I still haven't upgraded my desktop PC after five years. I've been meaning to do it because my i7 4770 (non-K) has started being a bit of a bottleneck, that and my motherboard has been a bit defective the whole time (only two RAM slots working). But thankfully I didn't go for it! I guess I will once they fix the fundamental architectural flaws.

The Y2K bug was 18 years late after all.

Here's a non-exhaustive list (because I’m trying to skip most of the very obvious stuff, but also because I forget stuff) of media I enjoyed this year:

Series & movies:

Star Trek (see above)

Travelers

The Expanse

Predestination (2014)

ARQ

Swiss Army Man

Video games:

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

Horizon: Zero Dawn

What remains of Edith Finch

Uncharted: Lost Legacy

Wolfenstein II

Super Mario Odyssey

Metroid: Samus Returns

OneShot

Prey

Music:

Cheetah EP by James Hunter USA

VESPERS by Thomas Ferkol

Some older stuff from Demis Roussos and Boney M.... and, I'll admit reluctantly, still the same stuff: Solar Fields, the CBS/Sony Sound Image Series, Himiko Kikuchi, jazz fusion, etc. I'm still just as big a sucker for songs that ooze with atmosphere. (I've been meaning to write some sort of essay on Solar Fields... it's there, floating in my head... but it's that thing I wrote earlier: you know the idea, intimately, but you're not sure how to put it into words. Maybe one day!)

I think that's about it this year. I hope to write about 2018 in better terms!

See you next year.

#year in review

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ssimagines · 7 years

Text

The Swan ||Remus Lupin

Pairing: Young!Remus Lupin x reader

Word Count: 3057 (opps this is long)

Warnings: uber over the top fluff, violin playing

Request: Hey could I request a Remus x Reader where he surprises the reader at a violin recital for a competition she won? Fluff to the max would be awesome. Thank you!

Reader is also a half blood for story purposes

Remus is a Sixth year and you are a fifth year. There is a year gap.

SORRY THAT THIS TOOK SO LONG I SUCK!

Masterlist

youtube

You were determined to go and preform, so before you started your fifth year at Hogwarts, you had talked with Dumbledore and McGonagall about the competition and made arrangements for your attendance. If you were able to keep your grades up for the whole year leading up to the competition as well as get all your assignments in on time, then McGonagall would take you to the competition.

“Do you have everything you need?” McGonagall asked beside you. You had forgotten that the professor even stood beside you.

“Y/N, my dear, you rosined your bow. I watched you,” McGonagall said soothingly. “You have nothing to worry about. You will do great.”

You took a deep breath as the man concluded and left the stage with a gracious bow. The people in the audience applauded as he exited.

You offered him a short word of congratulations before you prepared to take the stage. The crowd died down and you watched as the portly announcer take center stage.

The stagehand poked his head in and told you that it was time. Picking up your violin, you followed the stage hand back to the stage with McGonagall just a few paces behind you.

“The distinction of third place goes to,” they said. “Beatriz Olmo,”

“Rolf Stumpf.”

The balding man looked up with a brilliant smile on his face. He seemed to rush forward to shake the hand of the announcer. The crowd roared as Rolf was now taking his bow happily.

Clearing their throat, they started again, “The distinction of first place goes to…”

You were sure that the two people beside you had done wonderfully. You after all would have more opportunities to participate in this competition. You realized that you would survive this, and the fact that you even got to perform today was enough to last a life time. Having this on your resume would help you get you into just about any music school you wanted which was your dream for after Hogwarts.

“Y/N Y/L/N,” The announcer’s voice pulled you out of your trance. You looked around to see the other performers standing where they were.

You had won.

You Had Won.

YOU HAD WON.

Time seemed to go by in a blur. You were ushered backstage and into the practice room once again. By now you had become familiar with every inch of this room. You could probably draw it from memory.

There was a knock at the door that stopped McGonagall’s speech. She went to open the door as you just watched.

McGonagall pulled the open door slightly. You couldn’t see who was there as you heard her greet them. McGonagall stepped out into the hall closing the door behind her leaving you alone.

Another knock came at the door. You hesitantly walked to the door and pulled it open.

You felt your jaw go slack as you registered who stood in front of you.

Remus Lupin stood in a suit and tie holding a bouquet of scarlet roses. His hair had been pushed back the best he could. It still sat haphazardly sticking up all over his head. The faded scars that adorned his face were hardly noticeable in this lighting.

“Hi,” Remus said quietly. “Can I come in there? I feel awkward just standing out here.”

“Oh yeah of course,” you said stepping aside. He slid past you, and you closed the door.

“Remus, what are you doing here?” you asked. You moved closer to him.

“You think I would miss this,” he said as he picked up your hand in his.

“I don’t think you actually want to know that,” he said with a soft chuckle. “Let’s just say that prongs, padfoot, and wormtail are also here.”

“Your laugh is beautiful,” he said to himself. You nearly didn’t hear it leave his mouth as he looked down at you, but now that you had a small smile situated itself on your lips.

“Remus?” you heard McGonagall call out. Her voice startled both of you from your daze. Your eyes flashed to the woman and then to Remus who was staring at McGonagall.

“I- I don’t kn-know,” you sputtered unable to come up with a good excuse.

“Well, I think it’s best to not bring this up to Dumbledore when we get back,” she said. It surprised you that she was so calm about it. You nodded rapidly in reply.

#remus lupin imagine #young remus x reader #young remus imagine #young remus lupin imagine #remus lupin x reader #remus lupin #young remus lupin #hogwarts #marauders imagine #marauders era #marauders

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alexianewsletter · 4 years

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blackhorseint2 · 4 years

Text

Evolution Of Technology from 1G - 5G

First Generation Technology (1G)

The first generation or 1G is the first mobile technology introduced in the 80s and still using analog systems. Generation The first uses a communication technique called the Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA). This technique makes it possible to divide Frequency allocation in a cell for each customer in the cell such, so that every customer when having a conversation has its frequency (principally as in a radio station where one radio station uses only one frequency for the sake of it).

· 1G technology capability: 1G technology capability can only be can serve only voice communication cannot serve data communication in high and big swiftness.

· Weaknesses in IG technology: the use of analog technology in generations First, it causes many limitations such as traffic capacity small number, few customers can be accommodated in one cell, and the use of frequency spectrum is wasteful because the users always use it one frequency channel. Inododulation noise (unclear sound).

*) example of 1G device

· Device manufacture

With a weight of 30 ounces or approximately 800 grams, Generation 1 (1G) cellphones were introduced by Martin Cooper from Motorola Corp. in 1973.

· OS provider

1G uses an analog or AMPS system that uses frequencies between 825 Mhz to 894 Mhz, and operates in the 800 Mhz Band. Also, this cell phone is still regional, so the coverage area is still limited.

· Telco

In 1985, AMPS technology (Advanced Mobile Phone System, using 800 MHz frequency is the forerunner to CDMA at this time) with analog systems began to be introduced, in addition to NMT-470 technology, NMT-450 modification (running at 470 MHz frequency, specifically for Indonesia ) is operated by PT Rajasa Hazanah Perkasa. AMPS technology is handled by four operators: PT Elektrindo Nusantara, PT Centralindo Panca Sakti, and PT Telekomindo Prima Bakti, and PT Telkom Indonesia itself. Current regulations require that basic telephone service providers partner with PT Telkom Indonesia.

· Customer

Mobile phone market share at that time grew from 30 to 50 percent each year.

Even in 1990, 1G technology users around the world almost reached 20 million inhabitants.

Second Generation Technology (2G)

Second-generation technology arises because of market demands and needs for better quality. The 2G generation already uses technology digital. This generation uses the Time Division Multiple Access mechanisms (TDMA) and Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) in engineering communication. 2G technology capabilities: second generation in addition to being used for voice communication, also for SMS (Short Message Service is a service two side to send short messages of 160 characters), voice mail, call waiting. and data transfer with a maximum speed of 9,600 bps (bits per second) That much speed is enough to send SMS, download images, or ringtone MIDL 2G Advantages compared to 1G besides better service, from in terms of capacity is also greater. the sound produced becomes clearer. because based on digital, then before sending an analog voice signal is converted into a signal digital. change allows the repair of sound signal damage due to noise or interference with other frequencies. Repairs were carried out at receiver, then returned again in the form of analog signals, efficiency the frequency increases, as well as the system's optimization capabilities which is demonstrated by the ability to compress and coding digital data. Power needed for a little signal so that it can save battery. so that the handset can last longer than a smaller battery.

The weakness of 2G technology: data transfer speeds are still low. No efficient for low traffic. Network outreach is still unrequited and very depends on the presence of BTS (cellTower)

*)example product of 2G

· Telco

In October 1993, PT Telkom Indonesia began a pilot project on the development of the second generation (2G) technology, GSM, in Indonesia. Previously, Indonesia was faced with two choices: continue to use AMPS technology or switch to GSM which uses 900 MHz frequency. Finally, the Minister of Research and Technology at that time, BJ Habibie, decided to use GSM technology in Indonesia's digital telecommunications system.

· Regulation

through the Decree of the Minister of Tourism, Post and Telecommunications No. PM108 / 2 / MPPT-93, with initial shareholders being PT Telkom Indonesia, PT Indosat, and PT Bimagraha Telekomindo.

· OS Provider

Symbian is a discontinued mobile operating system (OS) and computing platform designed for smartphones. Symbian was originally developed as a closed-source OS for PDAs in 1998 by the Symbian Ltd. consortium. Symbian OS was a descendant of Psion's EPOC, and ran exclusively on ARM processors, although an unreleased x86 port existed. Symbian was used by many major mobile phone brands, such as Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and above all by Nokia. It was also prevalent in Japan by brands including Fujitsu, Sharp and Mitsubishi. As a pioneer that established the smartphone industry, it was the most popular smartphone OS on a worldwide average until the end of 2010

· Device manufacture

Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson

· Customer

The result, the 30-49 years age group (61.51 percent) uses the most 2G mobile phones. Then from their work, non-PNS / honorary village officials (64.29 percent) became the most. The highest education is high school (57.31 percent). Furthermore, the community with the highest level of expenditure of Rp1-2 million (59.33 percent).

Then judging by behavior, 2G mobile users are classified as saving time. The majority of users (58.62 percent) only spend less than an hour staring at their 2G phones.

Third generation mobile telephony protocols support higher data rates, measured in Kbps or Mbps, intended for applications other than voice-centric. The shift from 2G to 3G not only gives users fresh ways to communicate but also a variety of new services such as browsing the Internet, e-mail, instant messaging, video-conferencing and digital television. 3G also makes guidance, presence, and location-based services available to mobile users (e.g., Chevillat & Schott, 2003). In addition, current features of mobile phones such as cameras and personal time management systems are expected to develop. Since 2001 3G trials across the world have shown that the main development from 2G and 2,5G to 3G is faster connection speed (Robins, 2003), referring to wider bandwidth. The main characteristics of 3G are to provide mobile multimedia services at a transmission rate of 144kbps at the high speed, 384kbps at the speed of walking and 2Mbps indoors (Mohr & Konhäuser, 2000; TDSCDMA Forum, 2004). This theoretical maximum (2Mbps) is close to the speed of LAN connections that many households nowadays have. In addition, 3G networks can offer faster data transmission than the slowest LAN connection (256kbps), and GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) that usually offers transfer speed of 40 kbps (Birchler, Smyth, Martinez, & Baker, 2003) to 55 kbps (Sonera, 2004a).

Above shows the various technologies related to 3G and their suitability for mobile users. Beyond 3G, it is predicted that mobile networks and the wireless communication landscape will be based on various technologies, offering seamless mobility with cellular networks (Frodigh, 2001; Honkasalo, Pehkonen, Niemi, & Leino, 2002; Hurel, Lerouge, Evci, & Gui, 2003; Wisely & Mitjana, 2003). Fourth generation (4G) services will enable broadband wireless communication at home, at the office and on the move. In other words, new networks will make the services provided by the Web and the Internet as well as a variety of other services such as multimedia and entertainment available to mobile users

Advertiser

By June 2007, the 200 millionth 3G subscriber had been connected of which 10 million were in Nepal and 8.2 million in India. This 200 millionth is only 6.7% of the 3 billion mobile phone subscriptions worldwide. When counting CDMA2000 1x RTT customers max bitrate 72% of the 200kbit/s which defines 3G the total size of the nearly-3G subscriber base was 475 million as of June 2007, which was 15.8% of all subscribers worldwide. In the countries where 3G was launched first Japan and South Korea 3G penetration is over 70%. In Europe the leading countryfor 3G penetration is Italy with a third of its subscribers migrated to 3G. Other leading countriesfor 3G use include Nepal, UK, Austria, Australia and Singapore at the 32% migration level

Banking

The evolution of mobile communication networks will gradually cause the migration of existing e-services of the interenet to our mobile terminals, exploiting the high communication speeds offered by 3g networks. These new mobile e-banking services will initiate a new customer acceptance phenomenon, where all the existing models and studies should be extended and reestimated in order to include the various parameters that will influence a possible customer for or against using the mobile services. (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235274990_The_marketing_of_3G)

Developer

3G took international collaboration a step further with the formation of 3GPP, and subsequently 3GPP2, collaborative bodies that produced the technical specifications of 3G technologies, for WCDMA and CDMA2000 respectively. The standards are still governed by the regional bodies, ie: ETSI (Europe), ARIB and TTC (Japan), TTA (Korea) ATIS (USA), CCSA (China), and observed by ITU which manages spectrum allocation.

Adoption of the technology in the mass market, depended on compatible mobile phones, and backward compatibility of network equipment with 2G, since 3G and 2G were going to co-exist in the same network for at least a decade, or more. When the operators were getting the network ready, there were few mobile phones that were compatible in the start. Following the internet boom in 1998, the demand for mobile internet had arose. In 3G, with WCDMA or CDMA2000, data rates could go up to 2Mbps for a stationary or walking user, or 384Kbps for users in a moving vehicle. The availability of higher data rates enabled video call and mobile internet. (https://blog.xoxzo.com/2018/08/10/history-of-3g/)

Content Provider

At present two cellular operators, Telkomsel and Excelcomindo Pratama (XL), have provided the service to their customers. Another 3G license operator, Indosat, will hold a commercial service next November.

Although it is not yet clear when Hutchison CP Telecommunication (HCPT), which has obtained Operation Worthiness Test (ULO) and Natrindo Cellular Phones, will enter the market, modern licenses require that by the end of this year all broadband mobile phone license holders should immediately "sell". With so many operators being given the obligation to immediately "sell", competition to get a place in the hearts of users, of course not an easy matter. Including operators who currently have millions of customers such as Telkomsel, Indosat and XL

History of 4G

In March 2008, the International Telecommunications UnionRadio communications sector (ITU-R) specified a set of requirements for 4G standards, named the International Mobile Telecommunications Advanced (IMT-Advanced) specification, setting peak speed requirements for 4G service at 100 megabits per second (Mbit/s) for high mobility communication (such as from trains and cars) and 1 gigabit per second (Gbit/s) for low mobility communication 4G stands for fourth generation .Fourth generation for a mobile telecommunications technology, which come after the 3G. The term 4G is used broadly to include so many types of wireless network access communication systems, that is not for only cellular telephone systems.4G is a fully packet switching based networks optimizing for data transfer. 4G network want to give a 100 mb/s speed while moving. The evolution of 4G form the 3G is a better quality(e.g. video and sound). 4G mobile technologies are perceived to provide fast and high data rate or bandwidth It is designed in 2000 and fully implement in 2010?. It support digital voice .Here TDMA/CDMA used for multiplexing.

What is 4G?

4G, the fourth-generation of wireless service, is an enhancement from 3G and is presently the most extensive, widespread, expeditious and high-speed wireless service. Presently 4G is available only in limited regions. 4G wireless service has been devised to deliver high speed irrespective of the technology which drives 4G. For instance Sprint employs a technology called WiMax for its 4G services, whereas Verizon Wireless employs Long Term Evolution, or LTE. On an average, 4G wireless technology is expected to provide data rates from four to ten times higher than today's conventional 3G networks.

Enhanced Features of 4G Wireless Technology are as

follows:

1. Wider and extensive mobile coverage region.

2. Larger bandwidth - higher data rates.

3. Terminal Heterogeneity and Network Heterogeneity.

4. Smoother and quicker handoff.

5. WLAN for hot spots, an extension of 2G and 3G.

6. Better scheduling and call admission control techniques.

7. Global roaming and inter-working among various other access technologies.

8. Supports interactive multimedia, video, wireless internet, voice and various other broadband services.

9. User Friendliness and Personalization.

Benefits of 4G Networks :

1. Technology Performance Improvement : Deliver higher uplink and downlink throughput besides lesser latency and network capabilities.

2. New Mobile Application Enablement : It enables new mobile applications to enhance the existing ones (Streaming Music).

3. Addressable Device Expansion : Network potentials and chipset scale could expand the connectivity to various innovative gadgets

4. Differentiated Customer Experience : It enables in managing the user expectation and experience with new features and services.

6. Business Model Evaluation : 4G wireless technology will be the key in facilitating the alternative partnership and monetization models.

Challenges of 4G Networks :

1. Security and Privacy : Security measures must be instituted in the development of 4G Wireless Networks which will facilitate the safest possible technique for data transmission.

2. Quality of Service: Regarding the network quality, various telecommunication service providers assure the users for the enhanced connectivity, and the utmost possible data quality which is transmitted across the network.

Ecosystem of business mobile content

1.Advertiser

4G mobile internet speeds will bring a more ‘desktop-like internet experience’ in terms of speed and I’ve asked with industry experts who’ve said the improved networks will reduce latency in campaign reporting.

In a data-led age of marketing, this is likely to yield a little more spend but it’s likely to fall short of the “revolution” many are heralding.

The reason being that mobile advertising is a tough nut to crack in terms of creativity and valuation, therefore unlikely to attract the big advertising dollars until these two problems can be cracked.

2.Banking

In this internet age, data growth in almost all operators must be even higher. Along with the development of data speeds in the 4G era in the banking sector, mobile banking has been launched as a platform that can facilitate customers to conduct transactions.

3.Content Provider/Aggregator

Due to speed, free access to videos with large resolution. Lots of content that can easily also share the results of his creativity on platforms like Youtube

4.Device Manufacture

The company that produce smartphone will be act as device manufacture such as Samsung, Apple, Oppo, and others

5.OS Provider

Operating system that exist in 4G era are iOS, Android, Windows and others

6.Telco

Telecommunication Provider that offer the 4G services to the customer are like Telkomsel, AT&T, Verizon and others.

7.Customer

The customer that have smartphones can access the 4G. So as long as they have smartphones they are customer in 4G era.

8.Regulation

There are improvement in 4G era for regulation such as UU ITE.

*What is 5G:

5G (generation of the period) is the term used to refer to generation as the next phase of cellular telecommunications standards.

*Why 5G?

· 5G has very high data rates, very high capacity and low cost per bit

· 5G supports interactive multimedia, sound, video, Internet and other broadband services

· More effective and more attractive.

· Have bidirectional and traffic statistics accurate.

· 5G technology offers access globally and portable service.

· 5G technology offers high quality services

Ecosystem in 5G

1. Technology Regulation

Device-to-device communication (D2D) technology is a standard feature of the 5G technology Allows direct communication between devices. The existence of D2D technology can reduce eNode B loads as a network access provider. However, the basic features of this 5G technology impact on:

• Loss of call data record so that it can disrupt the ICT forensic process.

• The D2D communication system will affect the billing system and this needs to be regulated regulation.

• Privacy issues, especially to personal devices that function as AdHoc.

• Regulations that allow the use of other devices as relays, other than that of use Other devices as relays will cause battery / energy waste.

2. Developer

The developers themselves come from companies engaged in the telecommunications industry such as Telkomsel, Huawei, etc.

3. Customer

5G technology is becoming a new technology to provide all the desired applications with only using one universal and interconnect device with existing telecommunications infrastructure. Network 5G cellular will focus on developing the terminal customers where the customer terminal will have access to different cellular technologies at the same time and will consolidate various ways from various kinds of technology.

All in all, the ecosystem of 5G is the same as its predecessor. How the activity in banking, advertising will be the same, but 5G provides a faster connection.

Benefits?

· 5G Drone

*) 5G Drone technology

Using the 5G network, drones can be operated remotely and can be monitored directly with HD quality video and AI to track objects. Drones, in this case, are used as smart surveillance in crucial locations such as industrial, manufacturing, government, military, port and airport complexes. The 5G network is capable of sending visual data with low latency enabling live-streaming in HD resolution, facilitating the integration of HD video streaming with artificial intelligence.

· Seamless Gaming

Seamless gaming technology for the creative industry, where high 5G throughput capability enables streaming HD quality video games live with low latency connections, making it lag-free

*)group selfie

References :

Admaja, A. F. S. (2015). Kajian Awal 5G Indonesia (5G Indonesia Early Preview). Buletin Pos Dan Telekomunikasi, 13(2), 97. doi: 10.17933/bpostel.2015.130201

://www.researchgate.net/publication/265014886_4G_Wireless_Technology_A_Brief_Review

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327763959_Comparative_Study_of_2G_3G_and_4G

https://www.ijarcs.info/index.php/Ijarcs/article/view/2800/2788

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6235944

#technology #5g #modern #development

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