According to Tapology Shana Dobson's win over Mariya Agapova is officially the biggest upset in UFC history, surpassing the odds of Rousey vs Holm at UFC 193. While Agapova was a similarly sized favourite (-1400), Dobson was a +950 underdog compared to Holm's +830, meaning the gap between the two was larger.
It also surpasses Barber vs Modaferri as the biggest bookmaker upset of 2020 and is the fifth biggest in MMA history, the biggest remaining Sokoudjou (+1250) vs Little Nog (-2000) in 2007.

Bannerlord is a great game that is currently plagued by some serious issues, from glitches and bugs to simply not bothering to explain its own mechanics. Without any mitigation or forewarning, these little problems can really snowball and ruin your experience. I've compiled this list of tips and tricks to help other players get around some of these problems and also to maximise your fun while the game remains in early access.

I've separated everything up into categories so that you don't have to dig through too much to get to the stuff you're interested in. Also, stuff that's relevant to new players only is marked with a [NP] in front of it, so you can skip that if you already know the basics.

Edit: Wow, I hit the 40000 character limit so now I have to add more tips as comments instead!

How Stats, Skills and Perks work

[NP] Your character's progression consists of increasing stats, skills, focus, perks and levels. Stats govern your base aptitude in a set of three skills. For example, the Vigor stat affects your aptitude with one-handed, two-handed and polearm skills. Skills represent your ability with that particular skill. For example, the Bow skill affects your aim with the bow and the Steward skill directly affects how many members you can have in your party. Perks are essentially special abilities that are awarded at specific skill levels, e.g. 25, 50, 75 and 100. Sometimes you will get to choose between two perk options. Make sure you check whether a perk is implemented before you choose that perk! (See paragraph below) Lastly, focus points allow you to increase your max skill level with a skill and also provide an exp multiplier, making you gain skill points faster. Note that if you try to train a skill that's reached its limit, it will grow very slowly and eventually stop growing altogether. Thus, you need a constant investment of both stats and focus points to max out a skill. Since your stat and focus points are limited, I suggest you prioritize only a few skills to max out, and accept that the rest will never be fully completed.

[NP] In the character creation screen, the various skills are grouped by stats (in bold, above the individual skills) and each specific skill can have up to 5 focus points assigned (the vertical bars). Each skill you can learn is limited to a max number which is determined by the combination of stat and focus points you have for that skill. With full focus (5 bars), you will need about 6-8 stat points in a skill to allow you to completely max it out. Furthermore, the perks available for each skill are only partially implemented. This means that investing points into some skills is currently useless. To see which perks are implemented, I recommend using a site like https://www.bannerlordperks.com. At the time of writing this post, the entire "Cunning" stat has zero perks implemented, making it virtually useless to you. If you're new, I highly recommend getting points in Social, Vigor and Endurance. Social (specifically the charm skill) allows you to convince nobles to marry/join you more easily and improves your troops' morale (leadership skill). Vigor is your basic melee combat stat, which you will use a lot in the early game and especially in the arena. Lastly, endurance allows you to improve your movement speed (riding/athletics) and is necessary for smithing (skill), which is a really useful mechanic that I highly recommend you try. Another good choice is Control, if you wish to be a ranged character.

So how does leveling work in Bannerlord? Well here's what the Skills screen looks like using the character (C) menu Using skills with slowly increase your ability with them. The more focus points you have in a skill, the faster it's skill points will go up. Furthermore, your character will gain "exp" every time he/she gains skill points. Or more accurately, exp in this game IS skill points. That is to say, training the various skills is the only way to level up. NOT killing enemies, as you might have first thought. This means you can level up just by trading, smithing, running around, or leading armies. You don't even need to fight simulated battles mostly, though doing so will award you with tactics points and some combat skill points. Every level you gain will award you with either a stat point, a focus point, or both. You can spend these points to increase the relevant stat or skill focus bar. When you have points to assign, they will show up on your character screen. In the earlier screenshot is your NPC brother who you always start with, though his name and appearance is randomized. Because I chose the "assign perks myself" option, I can choose his perks right away (represented by little numbered shield icons next to his skills that tell you how many perks are available to choose). You'll note that to the left and right of the "Skills" table there are weird icons with the number 0 next to them. The left number represents stat points to assign, and the right number is focus points. Your new character will start with 1 free focus point to assign. To assign a focus point, select the desired skill and click the "+" sign. REMEMBER: No choices will be saved unless you click "Done", and you can revert all changes made so far by clicking the curved arrow between "Done" and "Cancel". To assign perks, click on the shield icons in the banner in the middle of the skill page and a popup will appear. Click on the perk you wish to choose - again making sure it's actually implemented first - and then when finished click "Done" to finalize your choices. Don't forget that you can use the left/right arrows to assign skills and perks for your NPCs too!

One more thing about perks. The "Governor" perks DO NOT APPLY to your character, because you can't be the governor of any of your cities/castles. Thus, don't pick governor perks for your main hero unless they also come with side-abilities that you want.

Starting the Game and the Main Storyline

[NP] The various factions each come with a special ability. You can use all troops from all factions, so don't worry about being shoehorned into any particular troop type by your choices. Instead, focus on the ability you'll get. Not all abilities are made equal and not all factions are equal either. Currently, the Khuzait faction is kind of OP due to the AI being too dumb to figure out how to handle horse archers, so select them for an easier early-game. Vlandia gets bonus troop exp, which means you can promote veteran troops faster than others. Empire skills are building-focused, which means you need to own fiefs to really gain any benefit from using them. Sturgia are... faster in snow. Also their troops are supposedly weaker than normal (this will eventually change), so pick Sturgia if you're a masochist. Battania are kind of situational with their forest boost (so maybe don't pick them either), and Aserai get trading bonuses, so pick them if you want to be a merchant or just like money.

[NP] Clicking the various family options will show you the potential change in stat points and focus points that you will gain for that choice. You will have about 7 different choices to make before your character is ready to play. Try to pick choices which focus on your ideal stats and skills while minimizing the other ones. Here's a sample character I generated using the stats I recommended earlier. Don't worry too much about making perfect choices here, since you will gain many more stat and focus points throughout your game too. Plus, you'll use most of the stats/skills at one point or another. After this, your brother will ask if you want to do the tutorial. The tutorial only teaches you how to fight, so if you already know that you can skip it.

If you follow the story you will play through a storyline quest for a while until you've rescued your siblings and experienced the execution mechanic in action. Then you will have to chase down a bunch of clan leaders and lie to two special characters who will never interact with you again once you've made your final choice. However, and this is something I want to emphasize heavily: You do NOT need to make a choice about what to do with the dragon banner immediately. In fact, I strongly recommend you do NOT make a decision until you're very well situated in the game. Why? Because it starts a doomsday timer that you cannot slow down or affect in any way, and when it runs out 3 factions will declare war on you all at once and try to grind your entire faction into the dust. Instead, forget about the story quest and just enjoy the game at that point until you are extra powerful and ready to take on the world. Once you succeed at that quest I'm pretty sure you win the game, and if you start it before you're ready you'll be in for a world of hurt.

The Campaign Map

The game has a really useful feature called the "Encyclopedia". Press 'N' to open it when in the campaign screen. If you want to track down a notable figure, you can search their name or clan in the search bar and it will tell you where they were last seen. Anytime you speak to another noble or visit a settlement, town or castle, it will update the rumours of where that noble was seen most recently. This will allow you to track down anyone with ease. You can also see if they were taken prisoner, got pregnant, or switched allegiances recently. Furthermore, you can use the Encyclopedia to check nobles' relations with you or each other, allowing you to single out the nobles who hate their liege and are ripe for conversion to your kingdom. You can also use the encyclopedia to check troop upgrade paths, details about cities/settlements, and info on minor factions, who are like secret clans that you can recruit if you choose to be your own kingdom. All in all, it's incredibly useful for planning your next move.

There's a circle next to city/settlement names in the overworld and the encyclopedia. Clicking that circle "bookmarks" the city/settlement, which means you can easily find it on the map. Clicking it again removes the bookmark.

[NP] If you hover over any of the symbols at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, you can get detailed info on how the values are calculated. The symbols are, from left to right, money, influence, HP, troops, food and morale. The money icon will show you your daily income vs daily expenses. Influence will show your influence gain/loss over time. HP is your own health and recovery rate. Troops shows what troops you have in your army. Food shows how much food you have and morale shows what's affecting the mood of your soldiers. Using these icons helps you figure out what you need to do to make their values go up instead of down.

Fighting Battles

Against minor enemies like looters, it's usually relatively safe to use "Send Troops" instead of going in there yourself. You won't gain tactics skill from this, but your troops will gain all the exp instantly instead of spending 5 minutes fighting first.

[NP] You can issue commands to your troops by using the F keys. F1 is the movement menu, F2 is the direction menu, F3 is the formation menu, F4 is whether or not to use ranged weapons, F5 is mount/dismount for cavalry, F6 enables AI control, and F7 allows you to split your groups up and assign the split members to other groups. (e.g. split infantry and assign half to "heavy infantry"). You can also use the number keys (i.e. 1,2,3 etc) to select specific groups of troops to give orders to. 1 is infantry, 2 is archers, 3 is melee cavalry etc. Any non-mapped number selects all troops. This allows you to have fine-grained control during combat. HOWEVER for the most part the numbers and relative experience of the two armies is the deciding factor in how a battle goes. Sometimes you can use the terrain to your advantage, but mostly your tactics will do very little to actually affect the battle's outcome, especially in sieges where taking control of the AI will completely break their ability to use siege equipment and attack or defend properly.

Some basic strategies for manually commanding troops during simulated battles are as follows:

The lazy way: Immediately press 0 and then F6 at the start of a battle. Your troops will do their own thing and you can just run/ride around increasing your combat skills without having to worry about managing battles.
The terrain way: Place infantry in front of your archers and put your archers on high ground. The archers will pick off lots of enemy troops before their infantry get close enough to do any damage, and your infantry will protect the archers when the troops finally do arrive.
The big brain way: Research your opponents' army composition and culture by riding close (but not too close!) to their army to scout them. For example, Sturgians generally will have lots of shield infantry while Battania will have a lot of ranged folks. Figure out the counter infantry type (e.g. for shielded infantry it's heavy 2-handed weapon infantry. For heavy 2-handed infantry it's archers. For cavalry it's spear-throwers. For archers it's cavalry, etc) and fill your army with those units. Engage in wholesale slaughter. Note: This works best when you have a fief garrison you can switch veteran troops in and out of, because rookies get rekt even with a "type" advantage.
The OP way: Get just zillions of horse archers, select them at the start of the battle and press F6. The horse archers will run up to the enemy, fill them with arrows, then run away again and repeat. Currently there's no really effective AI counter to this and they will just bleed troops while you sit there wondering why you're even there.
The "No 'I' in team" way: If you're helping another noble in combat, their troops will automatically be on F6 mode. And you can't do anything about it, either. If you don't want their troops to get completely wiped out, it's best to set yours to AI mode (0 then F6) too. Otherwise they WILL charge the enemy archer wall with their 15 sturgian recruits...
The "Actually, my troops are more valuable" way: Conversely, if you are helping a noble but don't actually need their troops to win (i.e. you have a huge numbers advantage), don't auto send your troops and use whatever your usual strat is. They'll get wiped out but at least you won't lose your precious troops!

You can cheese simulated battles by abusing the "Retreat" command. Hold "Tab" to bring up the stats menu, and press middle mouse button to get your cursor back. Then you can click "Retreat" to teleport your entire army safely out of the battle. Then you can restart the battle with the number of troops remaining from before, but both armies are placed far away from each other again. Combine this with a lot of archers, and you can whittle the enemy numbers down before they reach your army and then simply retreat and start over again until the odds are solidly in your favour. This lets you overcome basically any odds so long as you ensure your opponent takes more losses than you do each time.

Levelling up your troops can be tricky as the experience system isn't very clear as to what gives the best troop exp. However, the following things seem to work fairly well: * Some of the Leadership perks grant lots of free exp over time. In particular, Raise the Meek will rapidly turn all of your lowest-level troops into higher-level ones over time, and the level 225 one, Companions, basically gives you the Vlandian empire troop exp bonus, which stacks with actually being Vlandian * Steamrolling fat groups of looters using "Send Troops" is relatively safe and usually awards a handful of troop upgrades each time * Beating nobles' armies when you have about a 2:1 ratio of your troops to theirs is also usually pretty safe and the higher-level troops they have with them yield much more exp * Winning a siege will be extremely costly in terms of deaths, but the troops who survive will gain tons of experience. Defending a siege will be less costly due to having the home turf advantage, but it's harder to engineer those to occur * Doing hideout raids and taking along a group of only archers is a great way to level up those 9 archers, so long as you don't aggro the entire hideout at once. Just make sure you use F4 frequently to enable/disable "Fire at will" or they WILL try to shoot bandits at the other end of the map and summon the wrath of god down on you * Keep your troop morale high by buying lots of different varieties of food. I'm not sure if morale is fully implemented yet, but you won't have the awkward issue of your troops all running from a difficult battle at least

Building your Clan

[NP] Your clan has a ranking in the clan screen (press L), shown at the top right. Earning renown increases this ranking, and every new level adds more soldiers to your armies and other useful clan perks to your arsenal. Max clan rank is 6, but you won't get there for a very long time. The easiest way to gain renown is through winning large battles, so battling lots will quickly raise that renown score.

The game doesn't tell you this anywhere, but you can have your family join your party by visiting them in whatever city they are hiding in and talking to them (or left-clicking their portrait in that city). Your brother in particular is basically a veteran soldier right from the start of the game, so adding him to your party will give you a huge early-game boost. His high steward score also increases your party size by a lot, so having him around lets you field more soldiers until your own steward score catches up. Later on, set him up as governor of your best city/settlement to give it a huge boost.

You can recruit companions at taverns in major cities. Not all companions are created equally, so I recommend using a companion guide to figure out which ones have skills that you want. You can also manually check their skills by right clicking the character's portrait from the city screen or searching them in the encyclopedia. That way you'll know what they are good and bad at before you go through the long dialogue with them. I personally find the tacticians/stewards most valuable as you can make them lead armies for you (more on that in a bit), and the ones with high trade are helpful because you can create caravans with them for bonus income during peacetime. You can only recruit your clan level +1 companions at a time, (e.g. 2 at clan level 1). This means you should be very picky about who you hire.

If you have joined a kingdom (or started your own), you can persuade other factions' nobles to betray their current faction and join yours. For this you need three things: High charm, luck and money. Save your game. Speak to the noble and say you have something to discuss. Ask about their liege. This will lead to a skill challenge where you have to get 4 successes in 4 attempts (either 100% successes or at least 1 critical success). This is entirely RNG, so choose the highest % options and pray. Or load back a lot. If they hate their monarch you'll have a very high chance of succeeding in at least 1 of the 4 challenges. Once you've successfully convinced them, you then need to bribe them. The bribe usually is about 100k denars, but can go all the way to more than a million denars if they own lots of land (because your team gets the fiefs too when they convert). Unless you're insanely rich, use the encyclopedia to find the poorest, most disenfranchised nobles and you'll discover that you might be able to pay them even a single denar and they'll happily convert. Beware, others can convert YOUR allies too, so try to make sure you give every noble at least one castle to keep them happy and on your side. Also if you save a lot and see the message that a noble has left your kingdom, you can load back and often they won't leave the second time.

If you release a noble whom you beat in combat instead of taking them prisoner, you will get a 6-7 point relationship increase with everyone in that noble's clan. Doing this is an excellent way to butter them up for future conversion to your kingdom.

Convert the head of a clan to your kingdom and their entire clan will also convert along with them!

You can use your influence points to put policies in place that suit you before adding others to the clan. In the Kingdom menu (K), you can go to the policy tab and scroll through the various policies there. Basically, most policies either benefit only the ruler, benefit only the vassals, or adjust your kingdom's rates (e.g. tax rate and growth rate). If you're going to start your own kingdom, take this chance to vote in all the royalty-favouring policies before you add people who disagree with you. Conversely, if you're a vassal, you want to add more vassals to the clan and THEN vote in all the vassal-favouring policies. Both of these strategies will not only increase your influence gain rate, but also make it much harder for a rogue AI to steal powecities from you later on in the game. It will also prevent you from getting disliked by other nobles from voting against their wishes since they won't even be in your kingdom yet.

As a male character, you can marry a noble to have her join your clan. I'm not sure if it's the reverse situation for female heroes or not (i.e. you join their clan). This provides two main benefits. One, you gain another party member to bring along in battle, and two, you can make babies (heirs) who will inherit your stuff if/when your character dies. If you end up playing for enough time you can also eventually add those heirs to your party once they've grown up enough. To woo a noble, simply profess your love to them then return and visit them a few times. You'll have to pass charm checks to woo them properly, so as always, save beforehand! Eventually they'll tell you to talk to the clan leader, and then you'll barter for their hand in marriage. Usually it's pretty cheap.

Kingdom/Clan Management

Did you know that war declarations can be avoided (by sort of cheating)? If you save often and then suddenly get war declared on you (or by your kingdom on someone else), just load back to that save. It's a (low) random chance for war to be declared so there's a strong likelihood that the next time you get to that point in time literally nothing will happen. This allows you to avoid all wars that you don't want! Since the game AI is so bad right now, sometimes this is the only way to save your kingdom from utter annihilation.

You can equip the companions in your party with awesome gear too! This took me 40 hours to realize, but on the Inventory (I) or trade screens, there are arrows at the top that let you select a different character to equip. This works with the Character (C) screen too, allowing you to assign perks or stats/skills to your companions.

In your clan management screen (L), under the parties tab, you can assign your companions to various roles within your party. Generally, this causes the game to act as if your own skill with that particular role is the same level as the assigned companion. For example, if you assign a companion with 80 medicine skill as surgeon, the game will cause you and your troops to heal as if you had 80 medicine skill. Keep in mind that if you don't assign a party member to a role then you will gain the exp for doing that role. In other words, it's a trade-off between gaining free experience and having your party be more effective on the campaign map. The one role in your party you definitely don't want to assign a companion to is Quartermaster, because that trains the Steward skill which you want to raise as high as possible.

You can create separate parties under your clan management screen's "Parties" tab. This allows you to send companions off to raise armies and gain exp all on their own without your intervention. You can also assign them to their own personal role within that party (even the Quartermaster role!) for bonus exp and it won't affect your own exp. Parties have three major benefits that make them very useful. Firstly, they will recruit their own troops for you! The max party size is dependent on the companion's steward skill and your clan rank. This means that with enough time you can create an allied party that's virtually equal in size to your own army. Secondly, those parties can be summoned to your army on a whim (click the flag icon down the bottom right of the screen - you must be in a kingdom to do this) and it costs 0 influence! Thirdly, the parties automatically will go around fighting battles for you and increasing your own influence and reputation. I highly recommend creating at least a few parties. There's a few downsides to be aware of, however. Firstly, you pay all the troop wages for the other parties. This can get VERY expensive if you're not at war and constantly defeating armies for money. Secondly, like any roaming entity, your companions can get attacked and captured by enemy armies. If that happens, you have to wait for them to escape or be ransomed and then track them down in whichever city they end up in to reclaim your companion. This can be very annoying. Lastly, if you're a vassal, your liege can actually summon your companions to their army, thereby using your hard-earned troops for their own personal gain! That's the price of being a vassal though.

Sometimes you cannot assign roles to party members through the clan screen. This tends to happen if you assign a companion to a role and they die in battle. If this happens, instead select them in the party screen (P) and talk to them. You can assign them roles from the conversation menu instead.

Making Money

[NP] In the early-game you will find the tournaments in city arenas to be almost impossible to win. However, with the power of save/load and determination, you can win big in tournaments by betting on yourself every round. If you win the tournament, not only will you get a sweet prize but you will also be several thousand denars richer. At least until your reputation catches up to you and they start offering less and less money for your bets.

The best way to make money in Bannerlord is smithing (once you've unlocked enough recipes and have about 140 smithing skill). Early on, the stuff you produce is worthless, but as you start making tier 4 and higher weapons you will discover combinations that create weapons work up to 100k denars in value! Make a handful of these and you can go around from city to city, buying up all the expensive armor while still walking away with 20k+ more denars each time. There are many guides to smithing that can be found elsewhere, but here's a few minor tips:

Try not to sell anything you make that's worth less than 10k denars. Otherwise you will encounter these items as arena prizes which will generally make it harder to get the rare arena prizes (e.g. special horses and armour). Instead, smelt it down.
2h swords and javelins seem to be a great money maker once you hit T4+
Smelt the weapons you loot from battles if you need the materials for smithing. Even worthless rusty iron spathas can be broken down into huge amounts of valuable materials.
No matter how many days pass from traveling, none of that will allow you to be able to smelt again once you've hit the limit. This means that even if you come back 3 months later, if you haven't rested in any villages or settlements in that time, you will not be able to continue smelting. You MUST click "Wait here for a while" and just sit around for a day or so to get all of your smithing stamina back.
Weapons worth 100k make decent bribes for bringing nobles over to your side, but expect about a 30% value loss when using them this way. If you just straight up give them money it's cheaper overall.
Smithed weapons are not necessarily better than the ones you can buy. Sometimes they will be, but smithing mostly gives you the ability to trade off damage types and attack speed on weapons. For example, you can increase a sword's length and swing damage but it will reduce it's swing speed and thrust. In other words, smithing is useful for making very specialized weapons, but not for making some OP magical sword of head-lopping.

The second-best way to make money is by thrashing other nobles in combat. If you're at war, target every enemy noble you see whom you can easily beat and trounce them. Not only do you get money and items for beating them, you can also ransom them at taverns for even more money. You also get money when you capture cities in sieges. Naturally, when you're at peace, you'll find it much harder to make money this way.

You can purchase workshops in cities and have them produce goods for a small profit (around 75-125 denars per day). It generally costs about 13k denars to buy a workshop, so it won't become profitable for approximately 140 days. Because of this, if you wish to use workshops you should select cities which you are unlikely to be at war with for a long time (e.g. your own faction's cities!). After all, if you end up at war with a faction, all of your workshops in that faction are stolen from you. To buy a workshop you must physically walk around town. If you hold alt you will see three semi-random workshops throughout the city (e.g. wine press, brewery, smithy). If you walk to one of these shops during the day you will find NPCs loitering around nearby called "Shop Worker". Talk to the shop worker and tell them you want to purchase the workshop.

To decide which workshops to build in which city, examine the fiefs which feed into that city. You can also use a workshop guide, but I find these aren't always correct due to frequent patches. The bottom line is this: Pick a city which has at least one source of workshop materials (e.g. grain, sheep, hardwood) in its settlements. More than one source is even better. Next, buy a workshop and select the type that uses that material. For example, grain is used by breweries, and wood is used by a wood workshop etc. Then, you wait. You can check the workshop's profitability from the clan tab (L), but remember, don't expect it to become super profitable anytime soon. These are long-term investments.

Another way to make money is caravans. Caravans are more profitable than workshops, but come with significant risk, especially if you're at war with anyone. Basically, you assign a companion to manage a caravan (which costs 15000-25000 denars to make depending on the troops you assign), and the caravan will travel from city to city buying and selling goods. Companions with high Trade skills are essential here. While travelling, the caravans can be attacked by looters, bandits, and worst, enemy armies. If the caravan is captured, you'll have to go rescue your companion or wait for them to be released. Then you'll have to spend another 15-25k to get the caravan going again. Basically, don't do this if you're a warmonger. Anyway, to form a caravan, talk to any merchant in a city and choose the "I want to form a caravan in this city" option. Caravans will net you varying amounts of money, and the income will not be every day, but in my experience they are more profitable than workshops and much more annoying to keep track of.

If you have a high trade skill, instead of making caravans you can be a caravan. Load up on sumpter horses which increase your max load, and then use trade rumours (talk to civilians hanging out in town markets) to determine the best places to buy and sell stuff. Buy low, travel, sell high. If you make 30 denars per sale and sell 100 trade items, that's 3k of profit. If you make 100 denars per sale, that's 30k profit! Again, keep in mind that cities generally only keep 20k-30k denars on them at a time, so if you take too many goods you will not be able to sell them all.

Siege Warfare

Holding the alt key highlights both important people and weapons that are lying around. You can use this during sieges to replenish ranged ammo and locate nearby interactible things.

You can use the siege weapons that your army/city has built. This will train your throwing skill and also open some neat opportunities. For example, you can use catapults to smash siege towers! It takes 4 hits to achieve but boy is it worth it!

Catapults and trebuchets can be aimed left and right but also have a red gauge on the side which affects the distance that your shots travel. You can change this bar using W/S to choose how close or far to shoot. Generally you want the distance to be less than half the red bar because your targets are a lot closer than the range on the siege engines.

When defending a city you will notice piles of rocks (called merlons) lying around upstairs in the gatehouse. You can take these rocks and drop them on enemy troops for massive damage (400+). You can also use them to smash the battering ram with a few good throws, thereby protecting your gates.

You can place your troops before a siege by pressing the numbers (e.g. 1 for infantry) and then clicking where you want them to go. However they just run back to where the AI would have put them anyway, so it's not worth it right now. But someday it might actually work as intended!

Is the castle you were staying in being beseiged by overwhelming numbers? You can sally forth to attack, use archers to pick some troops off, and then retreat from battle before their enormous army starts hacking your party apart. Repeat this about a dozen times and you'll have a much more manageable enemy to fight, with very few casualties on your side. For the love of god though save before you try this. Also note that, due to a bug, when you sally out of the castle you'll be plonked onto the overworld map when you retreat and won't be able to get back in without sacrificing troops.

Misc

Save often. Make multiple save files so that you can jump back in time up to half a year if need be. Sometimes bad decisions (e.g. a war with a much stronger faction) take a long time to bite you in the ass.
Buy lots of (non-sumpter) horses. As long as you have at least a 1:1 horse to troop ratio, your campaign movement speed will be hugely increased, allowing you to chase and catch foes must more easily.
- Although the tutorial teaches you to buy grain, don't just buy grain. Instead, buy even amounts of every food you can find. That means grain, dates, beer, cheese, butter, oil, meat, fish etc. This will do two things: Grant you huge amounts of Quartermaster exp every day, and also keep your troop morale maxed out, meaning they won't run like cowards from a difficult fight
- If you can get your leadership to 125, you can unlock the "Disciplinarian" perk. This allows you to promote bandits into regular military units, which at the minimum makes them as useful as recruits. Some bandits, however, can become very powerful military units, such as bushwhackers, freebooters and forest bandits turning into the much-beloved Battanian Fian Champions!

THINGS NOT TO DO

Don't give anyone the dragon banner before you're ready to fight the whole world. That also applies to founding your own kingdom by completing the relevant quest.
Don't put companions in the Quartermaster role of your party. Otherwise you deprive yourself of an easy way to gain Steward exp, which increases your troop size.
Don't buy workshops in cities you plan on warring with anytime soon, because once war is declared you automatically lose those workshops.
Don't make caravans if you want to go to war a lot. The enemy nobles will target your caravans mercilessly.
Don't leave siege weapons you've built out in the open to get destroyed one by one. Instead, click on the weapon immediately once it's finished and choose "Send to reserve". Once you have 4 weapons built, place them all simultaneously and watch the mayhem unfold!
Don't fight battles where your army strengths are similar (unless it's really important to do so e.g. you're defending your own fiefs against a siege). You will lose a lot of good troops this way, and if you instead fight easy battles you'll get way more rewards with way less casualties in the long run.
Don't execute nobles unless you want to make the game harder on yourself. They breed like rabbits and everyone hates you when you execute someone. Plus there's a good chance they'll execute you too if they capture you in a fight after that. Releasing other nobles grants the most benefit to you by far, even if it's not as satisfying.

And... that's it for now! I'm sure I forgot some tips but I'll edit them in as I remember. At the very least it should open up some new gameplay avenues for some people, and maybe make things a little less stupid for others. If you made it to the end of this very long post: well done!

TLDR: I've been scraping political betting sites since 2019 to allow a quantitative approach to investing based off beliefs in the outcome of the upcoming election

Motivation

Sites like PredictIt give you the ability to directly bet on 2020 election outcomes, but have unfavorable fee structures and restrictive limits on how much money you can put in. I wanted to take a quantitative approach in determining which stocks to buy based on my 2020 election predictions.

Background

I define "Trump Beta" as the correlation between a stock's daily prices changes and the daily changes in Trump’s election odds. Presidential election odds are calculated based off of trading on the PredictIt betting market, where over 100,000 users are buying and selling contracts on the outcome of this next election. I’ve been scraping the PredictIt website every day since June 2019, to get a complete picture of how each candidate's election odds have evolved over time. Of course, both stock market prices and PredictIt election odds are noisy numbers, and correlation does not necessarily indicate causation. However, I believe that political beta is still a powerful tool for quantifying the potential stock market impact of different election outcomes.

Insights

Health Technology and Health Services
Most companies in both the health technology and the health services sectors have had a high positive correlation with a Trump re-election. The effect of the election on health technology and health services stocks will likely depend not only on who wins the Presidency but also on whether or not Republicans maintain control of the Senate. If Democrats win both the White House and the Senate (and maintain control of the House) you’ll see revived efforts to pick up the pieces of the Affordable Care Act and continue to transform the U.S. healthcare system. This transformation is likely to come at the expense of private healthcare companies' bottom lines. On the other hand, Republicans maintaining control of the White House and/or Senate would likely result in a divided government, with no significant legislation on healthcare being passed.
Cannabis
Not surprisingly, most major cannabis stocks have a very low Trump Beta, meaning I think they are more likely to perform well if Biden is elected. Canopy Growth Corp ($CGC) has a Trump Beta of -0.20, GW Pharmaceuticals ($GWPH) comes in at -0.29, and Cronos Group ($CRON) has a Trump Beta of -0.31. Though Biden took a tough stance on federally controlled substances back in the 1980s and 1990s, he has recently embraced a platform of decriminalizing marijuana. Additionally, running mate Kamala Harris is known as an advocate for legalization. As a junior senator in California, she sponsored the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act, which the Democrat-controlled House Judiciary Committee passed last November. The bill hasn’t gotten anywhere yet, but many suppose that a democratic sweep this November could lead to marijuana legalization. On the other hand, cannabis legislation has not been a priority under Trump, and there is no reason right now to believe that this will change during a second term.
Large-cap Tech Companies
Companies in the technology services and electronic technology sectors have an average Trump Beta of 0.12 and 0.15, respectively. This is primarily driven by the large-cap tech companies that dominate their industries, with Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Adobe all showing strong positive correlations with a Trump re-election. Despite having been part of the tech-friendly Obama administration, Biden is expected to support stricter antitrust oversight of tech companies, which could pose a major threat to tech giants such as Google and Amazon. Trump’s current regulatory scrutiny around tech companies centers around allegations of anti-conservative bias (free speech concerns) and attempts to block Chinese-owned companies (TikTok, WeChat). Despite antitrust investigations into Google and Facebook during Trump's 1st term, there has been little serious action taken so far against major tech companies. Big Tech has enjoyed record business success so far during Trump’s presidency. Under Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), passed in December 2017, taxes on cash repatriated from overseas were lowered, allowing tech executives to bring back hundreds of billions of dollars which were passed on to shareholders via buybacks. At the same time, the reduction on the corporate tax rate, from 35% to 21%, gave tech companies a serious boost to earnings.
There's obviously a lot of things which determine whether stocks go up, down, sideways, or in circles, and I don't intend for this data to be used alone in making trading decisions. That being said, I hope you find it useful.

Main account to D2
Second account to D1

Preface

I'm just an average dude with average aim and average scores. This isn't a pro guide, just a compilation of tips and observations I made for myself that can help regular players with very average skills such as myself. You can skip the history part if you're not interested.

History

I've never really been great at FPS in general. I never played any cs, but I played lots of BF4, BF1 and Apex. I played a little Overwatch and some COD Warzone as well but all these games seemed to lack something. That something, I found in Valorant. When I got in the Beta, I was super excited until I realized... I sucked.
I started out as Iron 1 and it took me a month to get out of Iron. I then somehow quickly made it all the way to gold 1 before the end of beta. I then flopped around between gold 1 and plat 1 all throughout Act I. During this act, I started climbing more and more consistently, from gold 1 at the start, to diamond 2 currently (with my act rank as D1 currently).
Also, I should mention I used to always play with my friends, most of the time duo queuing but also stacking up to five regularly. Out of all my friends, I was never the best, they were always the ones top-fragging and popping off more than I ever did BUT I also rarely bottom fragged. About a month ago, I stopped playing with them and only ever solo queued from then on. After that, I noticed a significant improvement in my gameplay and my rank followed along as I went from gold 2 to diamond 2 which is like going from the 55th percentile to the 95th percentile.
Finally, I made a "smurf" account in Act I for when I wanted to play alone. That account has been exactly the same rank as my main since the start of Act II even though it has 10x fewer games. I also kept playing on my "smurf" after ditching my friends but only when I was feeling like I was having an off-day and didn't want to sink my rank on my main but somehow both my ranks evolved at the same pace and both hit diamond within 4 days from one another.
Anyway, here's what I learned:

General advice

Try to solo queue. Every player has habits, and this often causes people who duo regularly to get used to each other's playstyle, which leads them to cater to each other's habits. This locks you down in a certain playstyle and very often prevents you from trying new strats or simply developing new skills which makes you less flexible and causes you to get absolutely smashed when someone figures you out. By solo queuing you'll be forced to play along with more different types of players without having the option to rely on your friend for whatever reason.
Don't think you have to carry every game. This is the reason I included both my screenshots. You can clearly see that I VERY RARELY top frag, yet manage to win very consistently. I'll talk about it in the macromechanics section because a part of this success is in how I play, and the other part of it is in the mindset. This is all about the attitude. We've all had moments where we get absolutely shit on for 5 straight rounds and it feels like we've excreted our will to live but this is not a reason to give up or start trying to play funky games. Keep trying. Legit close your eyes for 15 seconds during the buy phase, take deep breaths and let go of your attachment to the outcome. Which leads me to my next point:
Stop paying attention to the scoreboard. I personally do this, and I know a lot of people also do this. You'll look at the scoreboard and see yourself sitting at 0-6 and tilt, or you'll see yourself at 6-0 while your sentinel is on 1-7 and tilt. Stop. Don't. Your score, or someone else's score, isn't an indication of how useful you/they are. Even if you're "playing like shit" because you're not hitting your headshots, doesn't mean you can't be useful.
Don't be toxic. I know right? Like that needed to be said! Well, I think it needs to be said. Too many of you are toxic without realizing it. That's because you don't go nuclear, but instead just sneak in passive-aggressive remarks that intoxicate your teammates and make them tilt. There's no need to sarcastically congratulate your teammate for finally getting their first kill on 7th round. They know more than you what went wrong and you pointing it out only antagonizes them, it distracts them (as they think of what snarky comment they can make next time you die) and makes them spectate you every time they die (so like, every round) just looking for what mistakes you can make that they can burn you for. It's always better to say something positive and reassuring like "good job, don't worry about the early game, we got this" than something inflammatory. This makes a huge difference in your odds of winning. Playing 5v5 is a whole lot easier than 4v5.
Communicate. Pass the info along, let your team know what you see, tell them your intention. Way too many times do people stay silent and say things like "look at your minimap, are you blind?". This isn't a moba with a low TTK like LoL, here, you often have to hold angles where if you even get your eyes off your crosshair for just a quarter of a second, you're dead. In a tactical shooter like this, for equal skill, the team with the better coms will win 99% of the time. The more useful information your team has, the better their decision-making is going to be.
Dodge. I know this one is going to be controversial but it has to be said. Don't be afraid to dodge lobbies that don't feel quite right. The quickest dodge? 4-stacks with large rank disparities. They are not a good bet, ever. First of all, because they're highly likely to be on discord just talking with each other and not sharing info with you. Secondly, because they're unavoidably going to be toxic towards you the minute something goes wrong. And finally, because (as far as I know) the system assumes that 4 stacks are supposed to be more coordinated, it'll place you against a better team of solos overall. But 4-stacks suck. They're not coordinated, they're just friends that decided to play together and who are kind of just doing their own thing anyways.The other times I dodge is when I'm alone at three divisions above everyone else. These are usually kill-race duels between you and the other team's highest rank, just competitions of who can carry the hardest. Also, and this isn't confirmed info but pretty much all elo systems in the world work like that: being the highest rank means you're a candidate for lesser elo gains on a win and greater elo losses in defeat. It's a high-risk, low-reward situation, it's boring and I'm so glad that they announced that they will restrain the rank division gap that people can queue with in ranked because I cannot stand another Diamond 1 player telling me "it's ok bro, trust me he's gold 1 but he's really good for his rank".
Get the right mindset. You're not better than your rank shows, winning doesn't mean you played well and ranking up doesn't mean you're better overall. Assume you can improve and focus on improving - not winning. Caring more about the outcome than about the process won't get you anywhere.

Macromechanics

Pay attention to the scoreboard. I know I literally just told you the opposite, but this time it's for different reasons.A) Look at the money and make sure to manage your team's econ (e.g. if someone is about to bust the 9k limit, have them buy for a teammate with low money). This probably seems obvious to most of you, but managing your econ is something I've seen diamonds do much better at than golds. Even plat players will sometimes be selfish and not say anything even if they should offer to drop someone. This isn't a major game-changer, but it definitely helps and it's super easy to implement.B) Look at the enemy team's econ. You can eventually predict who's gonna have a shotgun, when Jett's gonna ult, which opponent has util, etc. This will help your decision making down the road and can easily win you rounds.
Don't think you have to carry every game part 2. As shown above, I rarely top frag, yet consistently win. This is because I always play for the round, not the frags. I do my best to look for plays that give my teams opportunities, space, time or info. You can do things such as splitting up the opposing team with util, forcing someone to watch the flank, creating distractions, scouting, flanking, etc. Each of those techniques probably could have their own youtube tutorial and I'm sure there are a bunch out there, but I mostly learned these from watching pros and asking myself why they do what they do.The one thing all these techniques have in common is they require you to stay alive. If you're trying to flank and aggressively challenge enemies and go for kills and die, you're giving the opposing team opportunities to win. If you see a hard push coming to your site and decide to stand your ground and die without being traded, it's bad even if you get a kill. It's (almost) always better to retreat and use util to delay the push until someone can support you. I won't go through every situation, but the general idea is STAY ALIVE and give your team a chance to support you or at least trade you/utilize your death.
Play for the round, not the frags. I mean as a duelist, enter on site first and create space for your team, even if that means dying. As a sentinel or controller, make sure to follow your duelists, support them and place yourself in situations where you can trade them when they go in.Stop trying to get free kills on the rotation while your team is trying to take a site, all it does is pad your kda and boost your ego. It doesn't mean you can't look for rotation kills or flanks while your team fakes a site, but if they commit to a site you need to stop sitting in a corner trying to get a free kill from across the map. Especially if you're the duelist or breach that the team needs in order to enter on site.
Learn how to play for retake with your specific character. Very often, you can secure half the site for your team, which creates space for your team to retake the site after a plant. For example, if you're Brimstone on bind A site, smoking off u-hall and mollying the entrance as the opposing team commits to site almost guarantees that you can keep control of it while they plant, which significantly reduces the number of angles your team has to check before going for the defuse. Similar plays are available for a lot of champions, the key is staying alive and holding the amount of ground you can. It's very often better than to peek, maybe get a kill and then die and force your team to retake blindly while having to check every angle possible.

Micromechanics

There's a million small things like don't run after faking the defuse because it'll tell your opponents that you didn't stick it, or don't slow peak around key corners, or don't not hit your shots, etc. But honestly, I suck. I'm not good at micromechanics.
The one thing I started actively practicing which has significantly improved my results is crosshair placement. This is something that I feel is the biggest most significant improvement most people can make in a very short amount of time that will net them a lot more kills. Just put your crosshair where you think the adversary is going to be before you peek around a corner instead of slowly turning around the corner. When holding an angle, put your crosshair where you think the adversary's head is going to be when he peeks out of a corner. You'd be surprised how many more kills you get just by using pure reflex instead of having to actually aim.
Anyway! I hope this helps someone!
Edit: Woah that's a whole lot of awards! Thank you guys, I didn't expect that!
Something else I should mention that I forgot: Don't overplay. I rarely do more than 3 games a day and I take at least 5-10 mins between games. This is a rhythm that works for me, maybe it's more or less for you, but chaining back-to-back games for hours on end never yielded great results for me. Just getting up and getting the blood moving a little bit helps a lot.

This happened several years ago and to date is the most abrasive interaction I have had with other folks in public regarding my service dog (who is now retired.)
EM: Entitled Mom, EK: Entitled kid, SD: Service Dog, Me: self explanatory
I was maybe about 21 at the time and was in the beginning stages of really learning to be an adult on my own at the time. I had just moved out of my parents house and I to an apartment with a friend. Before this, I still lived at home with my parents and usually just went to school, work and didn't often go places alone because I'm kind of a homebody. So between school, work and the odd outting with my parents or friends everyone usually around me was really respectful and familiar with my service dog and my general rules about her. I didn't have issues usually And if I did, someone less anxious and more assertive was usually there to help me. This was no longer the case after I moved out.
I was out and about running some errands on my own (which I was beginning to enjoy doing!) with my service dog at my side. Along the way, I realized I hadn't eaten in a while and decided to stop at the food court of the mall I was in right then for something quick and tasty. I got my food, found a seat, and began to get my SD focused and prepared to go through our usual process so I could get started on my meal.
I'm not secretive or anything personally and usually I'm down to discuss my dog and educate if I have the time or energy with someone who is polite and well meaning. I have a really intense food allergy so that's what she is for. She also knows how to bring me a handfull of objects on command like an epipen, inhaler, or just lay down next to me to give me access to meds carried on her harness. It's really important that she not be disturbed while I have her check things because a missed alert can be life or death for me, not to be dramatic or anything. Breathing tends to be important.
So I'm about to go through the process of having my dog do a check for me when I see a child making a beeline for my SD. She is harnessed, clearly and boldly marked and not facing this little girl. That doesn't matter though because the child is clearly too young or excited to read.
EK: PUPPY!
I placed a hand out instinctively just in time to keep her from touching my dog, who is still set to do her check thankfully. I try to be understanding with kids but I have a few hard and fast rules. I never reward attempts to touch without asking. I will stop and thank polite children tho. Each situation usually gets a conversation from me about how important working dogs are. However, even with polite children I do not stop my dog mid task for my own safety.
Me: Oh no, Honey. Please don't touch the puppy. She has a really important job and she is working right now.
This is usually a good enough explanation for most children about 2 and up. Not this one though because she immediately starts crying. I am talking full on pouring tears and a red face as she screamed loudly in the busy food court. I looked around for a parent and locked eyes with a round, blonde woman who was apparently staring icy daggers at me.
EM: Why are you touching my child?!
EK: Puppy! I WANT THE PUPPY.
EM marches over to me from her table and demands that I just let her child pet my dog. I could feel the heat on my neck I was so embarrassed at all the staring faces.
Me: I'm sorry, I really can't do that. This is my service dog and she's working right now. If I let her get distracted during her task, I can get really sick or even worse.
EM: Service dogs are for disabled people! You obviously aren't blind and you dont look sick.
Me: Thanks. That means she's doing a good job.
EM: Whats wrong with you then? Just let her pet the dog.
The child is carrying on incoherently during this exchange and has now thrown herself on the floor. My SD is not engaging her but is fond of children so she is looking at her with concern. I get more irritated because I will have to wait longer to eat now.
Me: That's none of your business. Nobody is petting the dog. Can you please leave me alone? Your kid shouldn't be running at large dogs she doesn't know anyway.
EM: I bet you're just faking it! I don't think pit bulls can even be service dogs.
Me: Any breed can be a service dog, lady. Please go away and take your daughter with you.
EM looks like I just slapped her in the face. She could tell I wasn't going to budge. She picked up the small screaming child, walked back to her table and put her in a stroller. She gathered her stuff and left. I breathed a sigh of relief and decided to check my phone for a minute so my SD could forget the ordeal and reset. I figured it was behind me and I could go back to what I was doing. Oh how wrong I was!
Just a few minutes later, I could hear the screech of an EM heading back into battle. The child was still crying and this time she was accompanied by a security officer.
EM: There! That animal bit my baby!
My eyes probably looked like they were going to fall out of my head. I knew people had weird hangups about breeds but this lady had JUST been demanding her kid be allowed to pet my dog. I couldn't believe it!
This particular security guard looked like he didn't want to be mediating between adults at all. He asked me if it was true and I of course said it wasn't. I told him that the child had run up to my dog and the mother was mad I wouldn't let my dog be pet. He asked if she was a service dog. I confirmed she was. He asked if she was trained to do a task to mitigate a disability. I confirmed she was.
EM: She's lying! That mutt but my daughter and made her cry.
EK: Puppy! (The child is visibly reaching for the dog)
The security guard is clearly having none of her crap at this point. My SD is calmly sitting next to us during the whole ordeal, watching me. She doesn't exactly look viscious and is actually quite a sissy.
At this point a girl (Nice Girl, NG) around my own age chimes in.
NG: This lady and her kid were bothering OP. That child was never bitten. You have cameras right?
The security guard confirms there are indeed cameras and says we will all need to follow him so he can check the footage due to the severity of the accusation.
SG: Either I have to call animal control or the police. Harassing a service dog is a felony and a dog biting a child is a pretty big deal. Either way, someone is in trouble.
EM looks panicked and starts to back pedal and says she's willing to drop it and everyone can go their own way. Her precious baby is fine after all.
Me: I'm not willing to drop it. You lied about me. Let's go.
Three more security guards show up and we all get escorted to the security office. Sure enough the footage shows that the kid never even got within arms reach of my dog and EM was harassing us. They ask me if I want to press charges and I say that I do. Police show up within a few minutes and I happen to know one of the officers because he's my ex boyfriends dad (we split amicably before we graduated high school). He knows me. He knows my dog. He loves my dog and has said she's one of the best trained dogs he's ever met. I usually wouldn't be petty but I excitedly greet him. He smiles and asks if it's ok to pet SD at the moment. I thank him for asking permission and say of course. EM looked like she could just throw something. The other officer takes my statement.
In the end, the officers see the footage, EM gets arrested and extra charges thrown on for resisting arrest and assaulting an officer. It was pretty wild. And my first real experience with entitled people on my own. The charge for harassing my SD ended up getting dropped but the other two charges stuck. I didn't care too much about that but hopefully she learned a lesson. I also did eventually get to eat.

So this morning I woke up to this response to an ask on the Blogatog blog. And just like that Maro manages to put into words a problem that I didn't even notice I had.
There is a laundry list of problems with the current Secret Lair going on. I don't need to add to them and I'm sure very few of you want to hear them repeated. That being said though a lot of these are compounded because of how all of this stuff was handled so I want to focus on one thing that honestly might be the most relevant because it's something that we know will come up when the Dungeons & Dragons crossover comes out but might fly under the radar as it’s less of a dumpster fire than everything else getting attention. That thing being how IPs are handled even when Hasbro isn't looking to take every last cent you worked hard to earn (as rare as that seems).
Every character in Magic, regardless of card type, has both a mechanical and a story identity. Both of them are extremely important because without the former there's no reason to have cards for them and without the latter there's no reason to care about them. One of my favorite Drive to Work podcasts in recent memory is when Rosewater just goes over each and every planeswalker and describes a little bit of their story and a lot about how R&D represents the magic they use in that story in the cards depicting them (Link). Sometimes these identities are in step with each other and sometimes they are at odds but together they make up the Magic characters we know and love (or sometimes tolerate). While some characters start as a story idea and become cards and some characters start as card ideas and become stories, eventually the two have to meet. I honestly think the best representation of this is in the Shadows over Innistrad block with its depictions of Nahiri and Tamiyo (This has nothing to do with my opinions about the block because I wasn't even playing Magic during that specific time period, I just think these specific cards help prove my point).
Both of these cards introduce a brand new color into the color identity of the planeswalker they represent but they do it for precisely the opposite reasons. Nahiri is red-white here as opposed to mono-white like before because it represents how the actions she's taking during this block are volatile, short-sighted, and driven almost entirely by passion and rage. It is a mechanical reflection of an in-story reality. Tamiyo is the exact opposite though. She was put in the story already because she filled a specific role but she wasn't going to get a card because the set was already at its limit for planeswalkers and there were bigger players to represent. The reason she got through is because design realized there was mechanical space for another planeswalker as long as it had a tri-color identity, and then worked with the story department to see what added colors best fit Tamiyo (Source). The card was the primary concern and the reason why Tamiyo as we know her today has the potential to be Bant instead of just Simic or plain mono-blue is because it fit the needs of the set. These two examples demonstrate a simple truth about characters in Magic: no one card or even collection of cards will represent the entirety of a character and nor does it even attempt to. A card only represents a character in that specific instance and that is all it is ever trying to do, anymore and it would be hypothesizing about a truth that is uncertain.
This I believe is actually a wonderful boon of Magic. It creates a kind of feedback loop. The mechanical flexibility of a character allows them to appear in more sets, which allows more cards that can depict more aspects of them, which means we are more endeared to them because they are more familiar and more explored, which leads to them being put in more stories, which requires more cards and more mechanically diverse cards to explore each facet of that character. It's a blessing in disguise that allows us to get a more full picture of what a character is like. That planeswalker podcast I mentioned has multiple moments where Rosewater discusses characters that have never explored a color that he believes they definitely are and it just hasn’t been shown because of the limitations of the cards printed for them up until that point. Two examples being the fact that he believes both Tibalt and Ob Nixilis are black-red even though ironically one has only ever had red cards and one has only ever had black cards. For two planeswalkers that are decently popular (whether it be for good or bad reasons), they have literally never explored more than half of the potential color identity.
So how does this relate to the ask above or external IPs in general? Well, it's simple: crossovers are by their nature temporary. They have to be because if they weren't it wouldn't be a crossover, it would be the status quo. That means they do not have the flexibility every other legendary creature or planeswalker is provided. They can't do the Omnath thing of slowly acquiring colors as the plot and the sets demand it. They can't be like Teferi where in the story he is consistently white-blue but has just as many mono-blue cards that explore his long history as a mage. Every card has to be treated as a one-off because there's no expectation of a follow-up. The cards have to be static. Is Glenn a white-blue character? Sure, I don't know, I didn't watch the show because statistically it seems highly improbable that the kind of person who likes a fantasy trading card game where you duel as a wizard would also like a gritty gory live-action zombie show well past its prime. But his card definitely isn't. And in a Magic set it probably wouldn't be. Because he's a legendary creature they would know they can afford making a card that doesn't fully explore him because later down the line they can make another card that truly does his Azorius parts justice. And if they couldn't they'd make a card that is truly Azorius or scrap the idea the character is a white-blue character. They could always just make a new card or even character for that design if they really like it after all.
You can't do that in a crossover. You have to provide a color identity that not only correctly explores the character but also appeases the IP holders. And you can’t make a new character to fit new design space since every character belongs to an IP you don’t own. Color identity is no longer one part mechanical truth, one part snapshot of the character's current existence, but instead just a fun little pop philosophy question. No different than a Hogwarts house, character alignment, or any of the million other "pick a side" ticket drivers pop culture has.
To a certain extent, it's always been that way. But at the very least there was a mechanical backbone to it and it was fluid enough that if you disagreed with that specific reading of a character it wasn't permanent. Heck, at this point Sarkhan Vol has been in literally every color but white and four different color combinations to boot. Even Garruk eventually moved back to mono-green. And because it was fluid the card would have to have a mechanical throughline to justify the change or it wouldn't have been made. I personally do not understand right now why Nissa is Golgari. I won't pretend that I understand it or that I agree with it but I also won't pretend that I think it's a bad decision from a game design standpoint, a color break, a character betrayal or an immutable constant. It honestly makes more sense to me than when she was Simic, both looking at her character as a whole and the current state she was in then and now. But even if I never come to understand it, the card feels Golgari and if it turns up in Modern a couple years down the line after it's rotated out I won't think it's forced because even if I don't understand or remember the context for why Nissa became black-green, the card only represents a facet of her at a specific point in time so I'm not going to think it says anything about any of the dozen or so other Nissa cards that exist and represent other facets of her at other points in time. The card wasn't forced to be mono-green because "it's Nissa, Nissa is mono-green" and it definitely wasn't given purely mono-green mechanics and made Golgari because "this character is black-green right now, this is a card that has to be black-green regardless of what it does."
This is all without even considering the other hand Wizard has to balance. The key reason why new properties are even coming into Magic is to attract people who otherwise do not care about the game enough to buy into it with a product that they will do so for. That's why Adventures in the Forgotten Realms is replacing a Core Set. It will obviously be around the same level of mechanical simplicity and newcomer friendliness. It's to get people who wouldn't jump into Magic at that point to do so. And since gold cards are innately more complex to design than single color cards, and since that complexity directly correlates to more nuance which is important to mapping what complex characters, both in real life and fiction, feel and do, it is likely we are going to get more Glenns. More multicolored cards because of character backgrounds and philosophies, but with mono-color mechanics to create simplicity that allows new players to pick up and play. For the good cards they will mash together one mechanic of each color but for many cards they won't have the space because it will take a bunch of reminder text and we'll be stuck with a blue card that is clearly blue that has white not even because it has a life gain rider but because of a book, movie, or comic you didn't read since it isn't relevant to Magic.
In summary, the concerning thing here is that even when Wizards isn't trying to put less-than-scrupulous principles ahead of its players they're still somewhat failing the game. For crossover IPs color is no longer a reflection of what the character is doing, believing, and experiencing at the moment that they are being represented in by the card, but a summation of all of their experiences, actions, and philosophies. Color is doing a lot more than it was ever expected to do and it's doing it for cards that are going to be simplified to entice newcomers so at a time when color is leaning to be as multicolored as possible to reflect as much as possible, it is going to have mechanics that are likely to be very mono-colored in nature. At the best of times we're going to get keywords shared by the colors represented but often we're probably just going to get cards that don't deserve the colors they have, and don't even use hybrid because that can be confusing and we sure don’t want that. Also, I splurged about how I realized how much I really like that the mechanical space and the thematic space of legendary cards, especially planeswalkers, actually empower and embolden one another and how that's kinda ruined by the broad strokes crossover cards have to paint those they represent with (Probably should have used less planeswalkers now that I think about it but they're the easiest characters to search and categorize on scryfall; if I ever make a follow-up you bet your ass that Niz-Mizzet Reborn is getting used as an example). Basically, remember how Urza, Headmaster just kind of slapped WUBRG on it because he's a very old character that could fit in many different color combinations and the mechanics of the card were so complex that they literally couldn't fit on a single card (or really collection of cards)? Well picture that but it's black-border, the card isn't as fun but just generically good, and the complexity isn't even that worth it.
Thank you for reading.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-23/robinhood-traders-will-have-fun-until-they-get-wiped-out
One time when I was sitting in my college dormitory, I heard a whoop of joy from down the hall. My dormmate announced that he had just made $500,000 trading in the stock market, after having invested only a few thousand dollars. When I asked him how he did it, he grinned and simply said: “Call options.” I spent the rest of the day reading about how this marvelous financial instrument could be used to make a fortune in a day with just a small initial stake.
Of course, my lucky dormmate doubled down on his investment and ended up losing most of his money when the dot-com bubble burst a couple of months later.
This saga illustrates the danger of day trading, especially with leveraged instruments such as options. After the 2000 tech bust, day trading declined, but the coronavirus pandemic seems to be driving something of a renaissance. Goldman Sachs Investment Research reports that the percent of trading volume in the stock and option markets from small trades has increased a lot since January, while discount brokerage TD Ameritrade reports that visits to its website teaching people how to trade stocks have nearly quadrupled. Robinhood, a trading app that offers zero-commission trades and a simple, video-game-style interface, had 3 million new accounts opened in the first quarter. Half of its new customers are first-time investors. Many online communities are filled with the standard elements of day-trader culture -- stories of fabulous fortunes gained, hot tips, trading systems and theories and so on.
Coronavirus probably isn’t the only reason for the boom in day trading. Brokers realized that they could offer zero-commission trades and make up for it with interest earned by lending out their cash balances. Mobile apps made trading easier and more fun than ever, and allowed new traders to start off with small amounts of cash. A new generation of speculators has no painful memory of the dot-com bust.
But whatever the reasons, the new day trading mania is not likely to result in a happier outcome than the last one. There are many theoretical reasons and a wealth of empirical evidence to suggest that most day traders are wasting their money.
One of the most important concepts in finance -- and yet seemingly one of the hardest to understand -- is that there are two sides to every trade. For a day trader to make money, someone else has to lose money. In the most optimistic case, the loser could be a normal person who needs to put money in or take money out of their retirement account, and who therefore doesn’t worry much about the price at which they buy or sell. But most trades are not this. Instead, day traders are usually buying and selling either from each other, or from algorithms programmed by skilled, experienced financial professionals. If it’s the former, their trading is a zero-sum game. If it’s the latter, human day traders are very likely to lose because the people who program trading algorithms are typically very smart, and their computers can spot market-moving developments faster than people can. This is why professional human traders have been increasingly driven out of the market.
A related problem is the idea of slippage. Day traders might think that because they’re paying zero commission, their trades are free. But when a day trader places an order, a trading algorithm somewhere quickly figures out that they want to buy or sell, and raises or lowers the price accordingly, so that the day trader gets a less favorable price.
Another reason day trading is a bad idea is that people often fail to understand when they’re winning and losing. If the market as a whole goes up (as it has recently), many stocks will be winners. That can make a day trader feel like they won, even if they would have made as much or more money if they had simply bought an index fund and held onto it. This is especially true right now, when correlations between stocks are very high -- in this case, meaning many stocks are rising or falling together.
Finally, day traders often don’t understand the amount of risk they’re taking. Call options of the type my college dormmate bought, for example, are a form of leverage -- you might make fabulous riches, but you’re very likely to lose your money. One young novice investor tragically committed suicide after seeing his account generate large losses; though he probably misread the account statement, this incident drives home the point that investors may not be prepared for how much money they can lose with the trades they’re making.
A large amount of empirical evidence confirms that most day traders lose money. A very large 2004 study of Taiwanese day traders, for example, found that more than 80% lost money. A tiny number -- about 0.03% -- earned consistently large profits, but the odds of possessing this kind of skill are slim. Most studies of day traders in the U.S. and Finland yield similar results -- a few traders are consistently good, but most lose out.
Day trading might therefore be a fun way of gambling for those who are locked inside waiting out the pandemic. But if regular Americans start betting large amounts of their money on individual stocks and options, they’re courting financial ruin. If you want to day trade, the best thing to do is to bet only a small percent of your money to learn whether you’re one of the few who has the skill to beat the market. Day trading should be treated like an expensive video game, not like a way of getting rich quick.

The humans seemed relatively easy to infiltrate. Shave his fur, dye his skin, undergo extensive facial reconstructive surgery... Some would have said that last requirement made infiltration far from easy, but Egil's great-uncle had needed extra vertebrae added to his neck and a prosthetic tail in order to infiltrate the Raquids before their assimilation by the Cultivators' Combine. Egil was shorter and stockier than the human norm, but there was enough variation in the species that he should be able to pass with only the occasional double-take. A species that had obviously never developed the germ theory of disease couldn't possibly have sufficient medical sophistication to detect the internal differences in his anatomy.

That assumption proved to be in error. Every career path that might lead to an inside look at the human military capabilities was barricaded by the need for a physical exam, either to make sure he wouldn't kill himself trying to do the job or else for their "health insurance". Egil escaped detection at the unexpectedly thorough initial exam by feigning a panic attack (apparently these humans regarded phobias as a disability to be worked around rather than a character flaw), but he found himself relegated to the less bureaucratized sections of the human economy.

Even the criminal element proved instructive--but in a way that Egil found most disheartening. The weapons available on the civilian black market were sufficiently advanced to make any ground assault a bloodbath. Presumably these were inferior to what the human militaries possessed. Worse, a non-negligible percentage of the humans he observed in hostile interactions with each other displayed sufficient spite to destroy resources they could not prevent a rival from seizing.

"We have limited time," Egil reported over the hyper-com he'd set up. "They are currently scrambling to preserve the remnants of their system's fourth planet's productivity. Once they realize that the effort is futile, they will almost certainly begin expanding their agricultural efforts on the third. From what i have seen, they will be unwilling to restrict themselves to starvation rations, and the population density is already much higher than we had thought possible based on their current land usage. Although they have not yet fully exploited their potential arable land, we can assume the clock to have started ticking.

"Unfortunately," Egil continued, "despite their minimal space based infrastructure, their suborbital weaponry is sufficient to render a ground assault useful only for population reduction. We also cannot count on orbital superiority to cow them into submission: too many of them score too high for spite. We could exterminate them if we were willing to glass a farm world to do it; we cannot assimilate them by force."

"You look unwell, Egil," the officer taking his report said. "Is it merely fretting over our collective future if we cannot obtain this world and its resources?"

Egil shook his head and answered, "I am unwell. This planet's fungi and bacteria are astonishingly prolific. I had a great deal of difficulty in finding quarters that could be adequately sanitized. I finally had to resort to removing all non-essential wall materials and furnishings, and i've been buying disinfectants in quantities that are getting me odd looks from the neighbors. Despite my best efforts, however, i've developed severe diarrhea, and the antibiotics i'm taking are becoming ever less effective. I'm already taking the maximum unsupervised dosage; i would appreciate an opportunity to consult with one of our medics about whether i should risk going higher.

"I would advise against medical evacuation," Egil continued. "This is not something to risk introducing to the home ships."

The recording officer bowed his head in acknowledgement. "That's an exemplary conduct medal, at a minimum, should the worst come to pass. Obviously the preferred reward would be a long life--but such is not within our power to grant or withhold. I will see about arranging a medical consultation window."

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

Egil awakened in a human hospital bed with multiple IVs feeding him fluids. Three of the humans in the room had dark suits and postures that screamed 'security'; three wore white coats, gloves, and surgical masks; and one wore a business suit and gave the impression of being some kind of diplomat. There were also multiple cameras and microphones and screens apparently intended to allow two way communication.

"He's awake," someone noted.

"Well, Mr. Extra-terrestrial," one of the doctors said, "i don't know whether to thank you for giving us a new class of antibiotics or chew you out for giving us a strain of C. diff that's already resistant to it. Although i suppose the C. diff is doing a pretty good job of that for us."

" 'Already'?" Egil asked groggily. "This resistance to the antibiotics is something you expect to happen?"

"We usually get a year or two after introducing a new antibiotic before resistant strains start turning up in awkward places, but yes, it's inevitable. The resistant strains already exist in trace amounts--even in the one case of a completely synthetic class of antibiotic--they just suffer from sufficient metabolic penalties that they can only proliferate in the presence of the relevant antibiotics."

"I see," Egil said. "You haven't exterminated your microbes because you can't, not because you don't know they cause illness. This explains many of the seeming contradictions. I suppose that putting enough chlorine in your water to kill all the microbes rather than most would exceed your own threshold of toxicity?"

"Precisely," the doctor answered. "That isn't our only reason for not attempting to exterminate all microbes, however. Pathogenic strains are a minuscule minority among microbes; most are harmless or beneficial."

"Beneficial!" Egil said incredulously. "What possible benefit could a parasite be?"

"Some of our gut microbes break down complex sugars that we can't; others produce essential vitamins. Most help inhibit the growth of pathogenic strains; some help regulate our immune reactions. There's a skin bacteria whose whole job is to help calm the inflammatory response to minimize the risk of overreactions. I'd bet that when your people first exterminated their micro-flora, they saw a massive spike in allergy rates."

"I am not a historian," Egil said. "We lose maybe ten percent of our children to severe food allergies, however. Not because we don't know how to treat them but because supporting that many with chronic conditions would jeopardize our ability to support everyone else. We keep hoping it will be bred out of our population--but we've been hoping that for over a thousand years."

"Brutal," the diplomat said. "But based on your research notes, i can see why your people feel they don't have a choice in the matter."

"You know, then," Egil said. "Why go to all this trouble," he indicated the medical equipment, "for a spy?"

"Because we want a channel to open negotiations through before your people's warships arrive. Your comm gear is both bio-metrically coded and password protected, which means we need you alive," the diplomatic explained. "I won't deny that we're all indulging in a little schadenfreude at your diarrhea problem, but we'll be a lot happier if you can convince your people to hand over enough medical data for us to keep you alive." He looked to the doctors. "How hard is that going to be, anyway?"

"Hydration is straightforward enough," a different doctor than the one that had addressed Egil previously answered. "But we're guessing at the electrolyte balance. We can work out the normal nutritional requirements based on his supply of emergency rations and supplements--but what's needed for maintaining good health can be different than what's needed to replenish one's reserves after a major illness."

Egil nodded slowly. "The recommended solution for mild diarrhea is similar to what's in your sports drinks; it's assumed that there's no point in including severe cases in the basic emergency medical training because you can't do anything if you've passed out, anyway. Was that how i was found out?"

"No," the diplomat said. "You were buying household disinfectants in suspiciously large quantities. Large enough to get you on a terrorism watch list. It didn't take long to determine that you were using all that bleach for its intended purpose, and were only in danger of accidentally gassing yourself--but by then it was equally clear that you were spying for somebody, and that you weren't making your reports in any known language. At least that nasty little C. diff infection you've got exonerates you from suspicion of planning a chemical attack."

"Is it untreatable, then?" Egil asked. "If my antibiotics don't work, and yours don't work either..."

The first doctor answered, "The most effective treatment for recurring C. diff infections is a fecal transplant. Although C. diff has a frustrating ability to survive on surfaces and is immune to alcohol based sanitizers, it is fairly weak against competing micro-flora. Unfortunately, we don't know which microbes are harmful and which are benign in your species. Obviously, none are absolutely essential, since you haven't died off from the lack of gut bacteria. You said it's been a thousand years since you exterminated them--that may be long enough that your species has lost the ability to interface properly with mutualistic microbes. On the other hand, since you haven't been able to breed out the susceptibility to fatal allergic reactions, it's possible that your immune requirements haven't changed enough to matter. But trial and error testing on a sample size of one is problematic on both ethical and procedural counts."

Egil nodded slowly. "I fail to see how you could make things any worse than they are now. Even if you decided to send me home, i would refuse to go--i will not risk introducing this pathogen to our ships. But if my condition seems stable, it might be prudent to defer any such experiments until after we have opened channels for whatever negotiations you think are possible."

"Your people need food, correct?" the diplomat asked.

"Yes," Egil said. "All of our home ships and capital warships have extensive hydroponic sections, but that's only enough for starvation rations. A single farmworld can double our food supply to something comfortable."

"Uh-huh," the diplomat said slowly. "How many people do you think our planet currently supports."

"Based on how much of your arable land you're actually using, around five hundred million," Egil answered. "Double that if you're on starvation rations--which from my observations, most of you clearly aren't."

Everyone in the room, security men included, struggled to not burst out laughing. "We passed the one billion mark approximately two and a half centuries ago," the diplomat explained. "We're well past eight billion now; i can't remember if the estimate is flirting with nine billion yet. Figure eight and a half billion plus or minus a couple of hundred million."

Egil sat up so hard that one of the IVs threatened to pull out. "That's impossible!"

"Let me guess," the diplomat said. "Your people took the same kill everything approach to crop pathogens that you did to personal ones, didn't you?"

"Of course," Egil said. "Microbes are dangerous; every civilization exterminates them once they realize how disease is transmitted."

"Many diseases are caused by microbes," the first doctor said. "Not all of them. Some are genetic, some are idiopathic--and some are caused by not having enough of the right microbes."

"And when you wiped out the environmental microbiome," the diplomat said, "you also wiped out the nitrogen fixing bacteria and the fungal networks that share nutrients between plants and the microbes that break down dead organic matter so that the nutrients can be recycled. No wonder your people kill planets so fast."

"To keep a planet productive for a hundred years is a feat we have finally learned to duplicate reliably. It is the pinnacle of multiple civilizations' accomplishments."

"And for how many millennia were these planets fertile before your ignorance touched them?" the diplomat demanded. He practically snarled, "How much do your people need to live--per year, that is."

Egil named a figure, and everyone in the room stared at him in disbelief. Probably wondering how a single planet could supply that much. "That's all?" one of the doctors said, not quite under his breath.

"And how many planets have you used up?" the diplomat asked.

"I'm not sure," Egil said. "Based on the number of species in the combine, it must be over seven hundred. Probably higher, since some did not survive long enough to be absorbed. Sometimes because they refused to assimilate, sometimes dead before we discovered their world, sometimes reason they died off unknown."

"If i thought there was any chance we could make up the tech difference in time," the diplomat said, "i'd tell you all to go to hell. But since there's no way we can pull off space superiority before your fleets arrive, i'll have to settle for a small wager."

"What do you think you have to wager with?" Egil asked.

"Our planet, of course," the diplomat answered. "You advised your superiors against conquest by force just based on an incomplete knowledge of our conventional weapons. You missed the fact that we still have stockpiles of nuclear weapons large enough to go scorched earth in a way that only the microbes your people are so terrified of could hope to survive."

"Nuclear weapons?" Egil asked. "What, like weaponized fission reactors? As good as fission reactors are for power to fuel ratios, we wouldn't risk using them on any ship that might end up in the same system as a farmworld, just from the potential severity of the accidents."

"We deployed two of them in combat," the diplomat said. "Not sure how many got detonated in above-ground testing before we decided that was a bad idea. Doesn't seem to have done any but localized harm, and that for a shorter duration than many of us expected. Mad as it is, mutually assured destruction is the only true strategic defense there is--otherwise some idiot just has to think he has the upper hand to get a lot of people killed trying to take your stuff."

"We cannot risk the possibility that you are not bluffing about your willingness to use these weapons," Egil said. "But we equally cannot afford to leave empty handed. What do you propose?"

"Ten years," the diplomat said. "We give you the amount of food you have stated, and you give us cargo ships and the coordinates of these no longer fertile worlds. If we get these planets producing food again, we keep half of them. If not, we keep feeding you from ours."

"What is to stop you from taking these cargo ships and turning them into warships?" Egil demanded.

"What is to stop you from taking all the worlds we restore, if we do not?" the diplomat returned. "If you could somehow make us all disappear while leaving earth untouched, you would gain only a single planet that you would use up in only a single century. But if you take this wager, you get hundreds of planets to feed from, and the knowledge of how to keep them fertile."

Something had been nagging at Egil, and he finally identified it. "You lie. Your system's fourth planet. You have not been able to save it."

"Save it?" the diplomat asked puzzled. "What do you mean, save Mars?" Then he realized, "You think it started habitable?" The other humans echoed his incredulity. "We're terraforming it. Until we accidentally introduced a few microbes with our rovers, that place was dead as a doornail."

Egil fainted. The idea was just too preposterous.

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

Terrance took a deep breath as he prepared to address the UN general assembly. Despite the alien Combine's bizarre ignorance of basic ecology, he had the feeling that they were the easier group to convince to accept his proposal.

"Fellow humans, for generations we have speculated on the whether might life might exist elsewhere in the universe. For generations we imagined what a first meeting might be like, whether they would find us or we would find them. Whether they would be better than us, or worse; whether they would be like us, or too alien to understand.

"One of the scenarios we imagined was that they might find us as an adult finds a wayward child carelessly destroying the things he needs in order to survive. That they would lecture us on how we have been destroying our environment and teach us how to live better.

"Instead, we have learned that at our worst we barely put our ecosystem into the scratch and dent section, while they have done--this!" The screen behind Terrance changed to display a selection of dramatic views of the aliens' former farmworlds. Some were dust bowls, some were deserts, some looked like the immediate aftermath of a forest fire or volcanic eruption. All were barren.

Terrance continued, "Every one of these worlds was, within living memory, as green as our earth. But these aliens believe that any organism that is not useful is a pathogen or a pest to be exterminated. They believe that any organism with no known use is useless. They don't even understand that grass-eating animals need their gut bacteria in order to digest cellulose! As a result, they destroyed every organism that contributed to the survival of their food crops and animals.

"Having exhausted the last of their worlds, and being able to produce only starvation rations from their ships' gardens, they have turned their attention to our world. Allowed to have their way, they will do to earth just as they have to each of these worlds.

"As you know, space superiority is a well nigh insurmountable advantage: this is why we have treaties prohibiting space weaponization. These aliens are not party to our treaties, nor will they see any reason why they should be. Our only advantage is that they need our world intact, and we can, if we choose, put up enough of a fight to go out with a blaze of glory instead of the slow century long withering away they intend for our world."

Terrance waited for the delegates to absorb the implications and then added, "We do have one other advantage. The amount i was told they require per year to feed their population is only a tenth of our global production."

That got everyone's attention. "So i propose we make a wager with this Cultivators' Combine. We give them the food they need. In return, they give us ships so that we can travel to these worlds they have destroyed and begin restoring them. If we succeed, we keep half the planets. If we fail, better to have us doing the farming here on earth than them. And, of course, we can set aside a small fraction of those ships to reverse engineer to start building fleets of our own--just in case these aliens try to weasel out of their agreement when we win the bet."

Terrance signaled that he was finished, and ready to begin taking questions.

"How many planets are we talking about?"

"Twelve hundred and sixty-seven," Terrance answered. "I left the question of what should be done with the odd one to this assembly's more subtle diplomatic skills."

"How are the worlds to be divided?"

"I made it absolutely clear that their choosing their half first was unacceptable," Terrance said. "Whether it is better to draw a line on a starmap or to play 'i choose one, you choose one' with them is something i defer to your judgement, as well as being a question that may have a different answer after we've been working with them for a decade or so than it does at this time."

"I understand why you think these planets are salvageable--at worst, it can't be any harder than terraforming Mars; but why do you think it can be done so quickly?"

"Invasive species," Terrance said, getting a laugh. "Really, though, these are habitable planets. They still have breathable atmospheres and robust magnetic fields. They just need a planet-sized dose of probiotics. And there are enough of them that we don't have to waste time arguing over the best way to go about it, the way we are with Mars. We can try one plan on one planet, a different plan on another. As long as we aren't exporting seed-stock faster than earth can replenish it, we can't lose."

[Next]
Andelia was proud of herself. In the past 200 years of acquiring contestants and beasts for the Galactic Arena, she had never come across so fine and rare a specimen. The planet she had found him on was in an out of the way “undiscovered” system that she had paid good money for the information on. The initial scan of the species revealed that they had only just left the surface of their planet recently (an honestly impressive feat given their level of technology and punishing amount of gravity). They had been discovered through a scan of background radio waves on a nearby potential colony. Some sensor tech had smudged the results of the scan and sold the original to pay off some debts to some friends in high places. Friends that Andelia happened to share.
So, there she was using those same radio wave transmissions to find herself a good candidate. The problem was they were all so short, high gravity and all that, and she needed some “wow factor,” something that would really pull in the big crowds and give some decent returns on this rather expensive excursion. Lucky for her these little monkeys (calling themselves humans) had many contests of strength and ability, and they LOVED entertainment.
The list of potential contestants kept growing and growing.
She would definitely have to come back if the first one went well.
That was when she found him.
The perfect choice.
He was young but nearing his middle age. He was well known for his prowess but, would not cause an uproar if he mysteriously vanished or died. There was also plenty of footage from his native media which would make for great advertising on his skills and abilities, he even had a stage name!
Andelia specialized in low-impact capture, meaning she could remove a specimen form its environment without drawing suspicion that “aliens come from the sky and steal people!” She used one of the oldest tactics in the book. Faking the specimen’s death. For this particular creature that would be a more difficult, however, not impossible task, as the native species had a large collection of information of their anatomy and medicine from which to construct the necessary toxin.
And so, she killed him…not literally but you get the point.
The Games Master was surprised when Andelia wanted the monkey thrown into the main brackets without testing him first. It was a poor investment to place a rookie with the professionals unless they were fodder for the early rounds. Seeing as though the monkey was laughably small he acquiesced her request and offered her a 15% cut of earning for the match since she was undoubtedly going to lose money on her find and he felt bad for the old reptilian huntress.
The next day they brought the human out of his medically induced coma. They put him in a cell below the arena away from the other contestants at the request of Andelia. She didn’t want any of the veteran fighters selling out her secret to their sponsors. She made sure to bring enough equipment and decoration from the human’s home world, including food, so as not to make him suspect of his current situation. The gravity was only slightly less than his home planet inside the arena, and there was little she could do to change that. She had built translation software based on the media he had been a part of and spoke to him shortly after he awoke.
“Everyone you know believes you are dead,” Andelia said, “you have been brought to this place to fight, to entertain. There is no escape besides victory or death. Prove yourself a champion and freedom may be yours.”
He didn’t move. He didn’t say a word. He simply got out of his cot, sat on the ground with his legs crossed beneath him and started breathing, slowly and rhythmically.
Andelia had watched enough footage of him to know that he was preparing himself. She was gratified beyond words. There wouldn’t have to be beatings to make him fight. No starvation or other torture. She had chosen well.
Pleased with this development, she returned to the Games Master to see who he would be fighting. She knew his prospects weren’t bright given her cut of the profits, and she also knew that this cycle had some big names that had returned to the Arena. When she reached his office all of her earlier gratification had turned to nervousness. She knocked on the real wood door.
“Come in!” he sounded in a bad mood. “Andelia I was hoping you would stop by soon, please take a seat.”
As usual, the proud huntress, despite her age, chose to remain standing.
“Very well,” he continued, “I have good news and bad news. The good news is you will probably make your money back on the first round. The bad news is your little monkey is going up against Champion Al’Xerd.”
Silence hung in the air between them.
She had wasted her time. No one had beaten Al’Xerd in 30 years. The 4-meter-tall champion was a legend having won his freedom twice over, she didn’t know that he had returned again.
“Your right. At least I’ll make my money back.” She left before he could say anything.
Andelia walked solemnly back to the human’s cell, at least he deserved some parting words before the match. When she arrived and looked through the viewing port, the little creature’s peace was obvious. He hadn’t moved. She watched him for a few minutes before keying the speaker to the cell, “Die well little one.” Andelia unkeyed the intercom and turned to leave when she heard him speak for the first time, “As you think, so you shall become.” The human’s cryptic wisdom would not save him from slaughter, she thought as she walked away.
The viewing booth was nice, but not too nice. There were several other hunters and huntresses who all acknowledged Andelia due to her age and experience in the trade. She pulled a seat near the front left corner of the viewing booth, where she could get a good view without being disturbed. Meanwhile the other hunters were talking about how the season would unfold and were placing steep bets on their captures, as was typical.
The Announcer descended from the central viewing booth, reserved for VIPs, into the center of the arena. His voice echoed out across the stone and sand, “WELCOME ONE AND ALL TO THE GRAND GALACTIC ARENA! THIS YEAR BRINGS PROMISE AND SURPIRSE LIKE NEVER BEFORE WITH THE RETURN OF ONE OF YOUR FAVORITES FOR THE FIRST ROUND: CHAMPION AL’XERD!”
The Arena shook with excitement and thunderous cheering as the champion exited from the side of the arena opposite to Andelia. He was a Tar’Meer from their outer worlds, born and bred to fight for the glory of the Arena. Tar’Meer were bipedal, and easily one of the largest species in the galaxy. With a large set of horns upon his mighty head, and tusks that protruded a half meter from his mouth, he was terrifying to behold. His thick skin protected his enormous muscles, which rested upon his massive frame. He was adorned in precious metals and wielded no weapons, at least none that weren’t natural. He had four arms with four fingers on each hand, each finger was capped with a long razor-sharp claw. His tail nearly hung down to his split hooves, which had ended the lives of many contestants. He wore no armor, as his speed was unmatched. The odds were strongly in his favor no matter who fought him.
“May as well go for broke,” Andelia whispered to herself as she wagered all 15% of her earnings on her little human winning, it was good luck anyway.
The human definitely brought a wow factor when he entered…since everyone thought it was a joke. And a funny one at that too. Even the Champion joined in on the taunting and laughing as the little human strode across the floor towards him.
“I GUESS ALL THAT IS LEFT IS COWARDS AND CHILDREN TO FIGHT ME!” Al’Xerd yelled to the crowd, turning his back on the little biped that barely reached the top of his leg. “LET ME GUESS,” he turned around and squatted down to the little human’s height, resting on his massive haunches, “YOU GOT LOST LOOKING FOR YOUR…”
Before the champion could finish, the little human moved faster than the cameras could track and pushed his hand through the Champions throat and pulled his vocal cords out along with his windpipe.
“Showing off is the fool’s idea of glory.” He dropped the champions throat on the ground and with a kick almost as fast as the strike before, sent the champion flying back several meters onto his back where he writhed on the ground choking on his own blood. The Arena fell silent as the little human turned to make his way back to his cell without pause.
The Arena would soon understand the way of the Dragon.

I know, I know, this is going to be super unpopular, but fuck it. I think the Sharks are going to compete this season.
Last year was a shit show. When Pavs left, things fell apart more than the top brass realized it would. And then Jones didn't have his bounce back, and EK65 and several other guys were playing injured, and things just spiraled until the season was cut off early. But a lot of time has passed. Not playing in the COVID season probably helped the Sharks more than any team, because now our top guys are completely healthy. I don't think we fully appreciate this yet. I think EK65 is STILL an Elite player, I know I myself have doubted him a lot, but I bet he is going to bring it this year.
My biggest hope is that the Sharks are going to change up their system, which is drastically needed. I am going to be open, I was a PBD basher. I loved his system in our Finals loss, but after that dumping pucks, playing the boards, and letting Burns take shots from way too far out looking for a tip just didn't work anymore. Our old system needed Pavs, but he is gone. Plus it was getting pretty boring to watch.
I think EK65 is an exciting player to watch (that is part of why DW got him), and we are going to have a new system more centered around him. I think having BB has our coach obviously means we will still be defensively oriented, but I am guessing we are going to turn into more of a neutral zone dominating transition team, instead of dump and chase. I think trading for Donato and signing Labanc at the price he did implies Wilson wants Sharks hockey to be more exciting. And honestly, I know the Sharks can be this team, because when they are winning, they are dominating the neutral zone.
I know people are going to really hate this opinion, but I think Labanc is going to bring it this year. He was one of the players to suffer under PBD's system the most, and I don't think we have seen his potential yet. I also think he will benefit the most from a new team identity, which the Sharks will find this season. Labanc has a stronger work ethic than we all realize, and having Pavs and Burns as role models has rubbed off on him a lot.
Oh god, even more unpopular, I think once the Sharks find their new identity, goaltending is going to have a sharp bounce back. I know, just burn me at the stake now. I think Jones is finally going to come back. Do I personally believe in him? No. But I truly feel like the team does, and the new tandem will somehow work (although only for 1 season). I think having another Vet in there will really help Jones a lot.
Ok, here is what I think they are going to try in our top 6:
Kane - Couture - Donato
Meier - Hertl - Labanc
I know, it doesn't look like a dominating top 6, but I bet it finds a way to work. I really do think Wilson got Donato and plans to put him in the top 6. It is a big risk to have your two top RW as Donato and Labanc, but if we shift from dump and chase to a transitional/odd man rush team, something EK65 is better at, these two guys could end up working. I could also see BB switching Meier and Donato in this scenario and having a hard hitting top line, with a filthy goal scoring 2nd line.
I think the bottom 6 is still way up in the air. I figure Marleau is back, which I agree with, we need his leadership. I am not sure if Big Joe is back. I feel like he might think he has better chances somewhere else. I will admit, I have no idea what our third line will look like. If I am trying to be extra positive, I am hoping that giving so many rookies a taste of the big time last year will mean one or two will really have stepped it up during all this off time, and will be a surprise add. I also feel like many of our younger guys have more middle 6 potential, so having openings on the 3rd line instead of the 4th could end up working out better than we think.
Here is a maybe guess:
Gregor - Big Joe/True - Gambrell
Marleau - Kellman - Noesen
I figure they are going to give Gambrell one more look, maybe he makes it work? Maybe someone else from the depth comes up instead? Gregor has the speed that we are going to be wanting, so I bet he is in at LW or maybe Center if Thornton doesn't come back. I guess they could slot Kellman in on the 3rd line too, but I liked his chemistry with Noesen a lot. The 4th line I have listed looks super good to me.
If DW manages to trade Burns or Vlasic somehow, I could see Donato on the 3rd line if we got another top 6 RW, but I don't see that happening. Trading Burns could mean we can split up Karlsson and Vlasic, but that would also mean we would have to find a shut down D for Vlasic to pair with (and probably move Ferraro with Karlsson?). I am just not sure how a Burns trade can benefit us enough without managing to pick up a partner for Vlasic and a top 6 RW, which I don't think we can get. Trading Vlasic would be far more beneficial for the team, but I don't think we will be able to move him. Our best case scenario is that the healthy EK65 + Vlasic unit actually ends up being the dominating top D pair we want it to be. I bet after all this time off, Vlasic will lose whatever attitude he had, and the desire to win will come back.
Assuming we don't trade someone, I bet D pairs will look like this:
Vlasic - Karlsson
Simek - Burns
Ferraro - ?
I know I sound crazy, but I really think this team is going to bounce back. I think the Sharks have completely lost their identity, but they are going to create a new team this year. Do I think we will dominate the Pacific? No, but I bet we will pull 2nd or 3rd, and be a dark in the playoffs. I truly do think this team has insane levels of talent on it, we just haven't seen everything yet from some injuries and bad attitudes. I truly feel like we are going to see the team gel this year.
Feel free to argue with me, please don't be too mean though. Yes, I am aware I am an idiot, I just love being hopeful with sports, and I think we really do have the talent to surprise.

Hey everyone, I am a former Wall Street trader and quant researcher. When I was preparing for my own interviews, I have noticed the lack of accurate information and so I will be providing my own perspectives. One common pattern I see is people building their own algorithm by blindly fitting statistical methods such as moving averages onto data.
I have published this elsewhere, but have copy pasted it entirely below for you to read to keep it in the spirit of the sub rules. Edit: Removed link.

What it was like trading on Wall Street

Right out of college, I began my trading career at an electronic hedge fund on Wall Street. Several friends pitched trading to me as being a more disciplined version of wallstreetbets that actually made money. After flopping several initial interviews, I was fortunate to land a job at a top-tier firm of the likes of Jane Street, SIG, Optiver and IMC.
On my first day, I was instantly hooked.
My primary role there was to be a market maker. To explain this, imagine that you are a merchant. Suppose you wanted to purchase a commodity such as an apple. You would need to locate an apple seller and agree on a fair price. Market makers are the middle-men that cuts out this interaction by being always willing to buy or sell at a given price.
In finance lingo, this is called providing liquidity to financial exchanges. At any given moment, you should be confident to liquidate your position for cash. To give a sense of scale, tens of trillions in dollars are processed through these firms every year.
My time trading has been one of the most transformative periods of my life. It not only taught me a lot of technical knowledge, but it also moulded me to be a self-starter, independent thinker, and hard worker. I strongly recommend anyone that loves problem solving to give trading a shot. You do not need a mathematics or finance background to get in.
The trading culture is analogous to professional sports. It is a zero sum game where there is a clear defined winner and loser — you either make or lose money. This means that both your compensation and job security is highly dependent on your performance. For those that are curious, the rough distribution of a trader’s compensation based on performance is a tenth of the annual NBA salary.
There is a mystique about trading in popular media due to the abstraction of complicated quantitative models. I will shed light on some of the fundamental principles rooted in all trading strategies, and how they might apply to you.

Arbitrage

One way traders make money is through an arbitrage or a risk free trade. Suppose you could buy an apple from Sam for $1, and then sell an apple to Megan at $3. A rational person would orchestrate both legs of these trades to gain $2 risk free.
Arbitrages are not only found in financial markets. The popular e-commerce strategy of drop-shipping is a form of arbitrage. Suppose you find a tripod selling on AliExpress at $10. You could list the same tripod on Amazon for $20. If someone buys from you, then you could simply purchase the tripod off AliExpress and take home a neat $10 profit.
The same could be applied to garage sales. If you find a baseball card for $2 that has a last sold price on EBay for $100, you have the potential to make $98. Of course this is not a perfect arbitrage as you face the risk of finding a buyer, but the upside makes this worthwhile.

Positive expected value bets

Another way traders make money is similar to the way a casino stacks the odds in their favour. Imagine you flip a fair coin. If it lands on heads you win $3, and if it lands on tails you lose $1. If you flip the coin only once, you may be unlucky and lose the dollar. However in the long run, you are expected to make a positive profit of $1 per coin flip. This is referred to as a positive expected value bet. Over the span of millions of transactions, you are almost guaranteed to make a profit.
This exact principle is why you should never gamble in casino games such as roulette. These games are all negative expected value bets, which guarantees you to lose money over the long run. Of course there are exceptions to this, such as poker or card counting in black jack.
The next time you walk into a casino, make a mental note to observe the ways it is designed to keep you there for as long as possible. Note the lack of windows and the maze like configurations. Even the free drinks and the cheap accommodation are all a farce to keep you there.

Relative Pricing

Relative pricing is a great strategy to use when there are two products that have clear causal relationships. Let us consider an apple and a carton of apple juice. Suppose there have a causal relationship where the carton is always $9 more expensive than the apple. The apple and the carton is currently trading at $1 and $10 respectively.
If the price of the apple goes up to $2, the price is not immediately reflected on the carton. There will always be a time lag. It is also important to note that there is no way we can determine if the apple is trading at fair value or if its overpriced. So how do we take advantage of this situation?
If we buy the carton for $10 and sell the apple for $2, we have essentially bought the ‘spread’ for $8. The spread is fairly valued at $9 due to the causal relationship, meaning we have made $1. The reason high frequency trading firms focus so much on latency in the nanoseconds is to be the first to scoop up these relative mispricing.
This is the backbone for delta one strategies. Common pairs that are traded against each other includes ETFs and their inverse counterpart, a particular stock against an ETF that contains the stock, or synthetic option structures.

Correlations

Correlations are mutual connections between two things. When they trend in the same direction they are said to have a positive correlation, and the vice versa is true for negative correlations. A popular example of positive correlation is the number of shark attacks with the number of ice-cream sales. It is important to note that shark attacks do not cause ice-cream sales.
Often times there are no intuitive reason for certain correlations, but they still work. The legendary Renaissance Technologies sifted through petabytes of historical data to find profitable signals. For instance, good morning weather in a city tended to predict an upward movement in its stock exchange. One could theoretically buy stock on the opening and sell at noon to make a profit.
One important piece of advice is to disregard any retail trader selling a course to you, claiming that they have a system. These are all scams. At best, these are bottom of the mill signals that are hardly profitable after transaction costs. It is also unlikely that you have the system latency, trading experience or research capabilities to do this on your own. It is possible, but very difficult.

Mean reversions

Another common strategy traders rely on is mean reversion trends. In the options world the primary focus is purchasing volatility when it is cheap compared to historical values, and vice versa. Buying options is essentially synonymous with buying volatility. Of course, it is not as simple as this so don’t go punting your savings on Robinhood using this strategy.
For most people, the most applicable mean reversion trend is interest rates. These tend to fluctuate up and down depending on if the central banks want to stimulate saving or spending. As global interest rates are next to zero or negative, it may be a good idea to lock in this low rate for your mortgages. Again, consult with a financial advisor before you do anything.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
It was Friday night. 10 to midnight. I knew that, right now, the newest edition of the Midnight Paper would be hitting my parents’ welcome mat in a few moments. But I wasn’t there.
I’d decided, after last time, that I wasn’t going to be reading the next article. What if it contained something worse than The Hunger? I couldn’t let it become real. I didn’t want any more blood on my hands.
I sat at the rickety table included in my motel room. Every time I hit a key on my laptop, the table rattled, tilting toward its short leg (which I couldn’t identify for the lift of me). I didn’t mind. I was counting the minutes with each time I hit “refresh” on the search page of Herricks High School’s website. On the search bar was the name “Stephanie Carson.”
I got the Midnight Paper with The Ledge Game article on Friday, September 11th at midnight. One week later, on Friday, September 18 at midnight, I had witnessed a girl jumping off a building to end her life. I read the Midnight Paper with The Removal Doctor article on Wednesday, September 16th at midnight. One week later, on Wednesday, September 22nd at midnight, I had first heard about The Removal Doctor on the local news. That means that it takes one week between getting a Midnight Paper and the article in it becoming true.
If I was right, that night, at midnight, Stephanie Carson would become real. She’d suddenly appear in the Herricks High School website as if she was always enrolled there. No memorial service. No news about a tribute or a plaque going up in her honor…just a page or two about the school’s most gifted student.
Midnight. Just as I hit refresh, a heard three knocks on my motel room door. What? No…it couldn’t….but it was. I opened my door and there, on the patch of filthy rug right in front of my room, was a bundle of black paper bound in black twine.
I grabbed a plastic bag that held the snacks I’d bought at a gas station, put on a pair of rubber gloves, and grabbed a pair of grill tongs. The Midnight Paper dangled off the teeth of the tongs, its strange electricity still somehow crackling through the rubber and making the hairs on my hands stand up. I dropped the paper into the plastic bag and tied it into a tight knot. Then I dropped that bag into another two bags for good measure and tossed them into a dumpster by the ice machine.
By the time I got back, the shitty motel internet had finally loaded the page. “10 RESULTS FOR ‘STEPHANIE CARSON.’” I gripped the sides of the shitty motel table. Would I be too late? Was it tonight?
A few minutes later I opened my motel room door cautiously. The patch of filthy carpet was empty. No new Midnight Paper. I smiled. Maybe I’d gotten rid of it entirely. Maybe not reading one was all it took for it to leave you alone. I went right to the dumpster. The bags I’d hidden the Midnight Paper in were still there. They hadn’t mysteriously vanished. I nodded and got in my car.
By the time I got to the right part of town, the night was cold and bright. Streetlights glinted off of every surface, bouncing off a thousand reflective surfaces and zeroing in on my eyes. The migraine was back in full swing. I was a little used to it by now. I chugged a bit more of my soda and narrowed my eyes. I had a long night ahead of me.
I stopped the car and unplugged my phone from its stand on the dashboard. On the screen was something I wasn’t proud of at all: Stephanie Carson’s Instagram account. It had taken me less than an hour to find it. I won’t write it here, but her username was a simple combination of her name and her volleyball jersey number. It wasn’t set to private either. A little scrolling had led me to a photo of Stephanie and her friends in front of a house that could only be described as “excessive.” It was as close to Cinderella’s castle as you could get while still being attached to a sidewalk. I didn’t know the exact address, but there was a photo of her in front of a street sign with the same group of friends, wearing the same clothes as before. It was easy to guess that they had taken the photo in front of Stephanie’s house and the photo of the street sign back to back.
That same street sign was in front of me now…and a few feet away from it was Cinderella’s castle itself…and one of the lights upstairs was on.
I walked around the block more than a few times, trying to get my story straight. I had to warn Stephanie about Mark Bailey, who she already knew about. But then she’d ask me how I knew what I did…and I was still working that part out. I could show her my posts on here, but knocking on a girl’s door and telling her that I’d posted on Reddit about her murder…yeah. No. I’d be in a straight jacket before morning.
Whatever, I didn’t need to make sense. I didn’t even need to tell her about the posts. I could simply knock on her door and tell her that I’d driven by and seen a strange man peering through her windows. She’d think I’d spotted Bailey and would probably call the cops on him. Problem solved. Then why not call the cops myself? Because they’d ask questions…but she would too…
I sighed. There was seemingly no way to do this without looking as creepy as Mark Bailey himself. I walked up to the front door, held my breath, and knocked. The sound seemed explosive in the darkness, but that was probably just the lateness of the hour amplifying every sound times one hundred. Still, no sound or movement or light came from inside. I knocked again, a little louder this time. A few seconds later, nothing had changed. I was out of options. I bit the bullet and stabbed the doorbell with my finger. The electronic chime echoed through the house, about as subtle as a carpet bombing.
One light went on. Two. Then the whole first floor lit up. I heard muted little footsteps from behind the door as if someone was walking on a carpet. Then the latch turned and the door swung open…and something hit me on the head.
“Wake up, creeper,” a girl’s voice said. I opened my eyes. Then shut them immediately. The brief glimpse of the world I’d gotten had been enough. It was white and blurred. Something cold and hard collided with my cheek, shooting fireworks across my vision. “I said WAKE UP!”
I opened my eyes again. This time the world was a little less blurry. I blinked until the person in front of me came into focus. There, holding what looked like some kind of metal sculpture, was Stephanie Carson.
“There you are,” she said matter-of-factly, “I was worried I’d hit you a little too hard. So. Wanna tell me why you’ve been walking outside my house for the past hour and a half?”
“Mark Bailey,” I said, my voice raspy and little more than a whisper. There was a metallic taste in my mouth that seemed to extend into my lungs. Jesus, maybe she had hit me a little too hard.
“Oh, great. My stalker has a friend.”
“No. Not a friend. He’s going to kill you. Tonight.” That had come out a little more clearly. I would have been pleased with myself, but it was around that time that I noticed that I couldn't feel my hands. One look down and I could see why: my wrists were stuck to the arms of a chair with a ridiculous amount of duct tape. Jeez, had she used one roll for each hand?
Then Stephanie said something that made me forget about how my hands were already turning purple: “I know.”
“What?” I asked, my voice sounding distant and slow as if it was coming from a broken speaker on the other side of the room.
“He’s been stalking me for a long time. He broke in last week and I got a restraining order out on him. He’s close to figuring it out, I can tell. He’s close to losing his shit too. It’s gonna get violent. Whatever. I figure if anyone’s going to do it, it might as well be him.”
I thought back to something Mark Bailey had said in the article, something I thought had just been the ramblings of a convicted murderer: Stephanie had gotten loose and had stood next to the kitchen knives instead of running away, like she was inviting Bailey to use them on her.
I cleared my throat “Aren’t you going to stop him? Don’t you want to?”
Stephanie rolled her eyes like I was annoying her. Scratch the “like,” I was annoying her. “I’ll come back anyway. Well, not ‘me’ me, but it doesn't really matter. It might make my parents look back at me, this version of me, twice. Now we just gotta figure out what to do with you. If my aren'ts get back, they’ll get rid of you and stick you in an acid barrel.”
“What? ‘Aren’ts?’"
“They’re what I call the fake parents that live here. Like ‘aren’t my parents,’ get it? They’re drones. Mindless versions. Not the real deal. Do I have to explain everything to you? So, if I cut you loose, will you leave quietly?”
“But what about Mark-“
“Oh, fuck Mark Bailey! What does it even matter? You think I’m the first one of me to die? The first one to want to?”
I was speechless. That was the last thing I expected her to say. “I can’t feel my hands,” I said finally.
Stephanie nodded. She grabbed a pair of scissors from a desk next to her, and that was the first time I thought to look around. The walls were white, clinical, there were tables upon tables filled with lab equipment around us. It was like a high-end research lab, the kind of place that might be responsible for creating a deadly virus or resurrecting dinosaurs…or making multiple versions of the same teenage girl.
Stephanie cut the tape around my wrists. I winced, the blood shooting back through my bruised wrists felt like acid.
“You can’t let Bailey kill you,” I said, rising slowly.
“Who are you anyway, a teacher at Roslyn?”
“Didn’t you go to Roslyn?” I asked.
“No. That was Monica and Natalie. Stupid of them to send two of us to the same school, right? No wonder Bailey lost his marbles.”
“So you’re not the same person?”
“Wow, you’re all questions, aren’t you? You haven’t even answered mine.”
I told her my name, then went about explaining everything I could about the Midnight Paper and my posts online. I let her read through them on my phone.
It was then that I saw it, that “strange intelligence” that Bailey had mentioned. Her face came alive and I could almost see millions of hyper-complex gears turning in her mind.
“Wormhole might explain it,” she said finally, then shook her head. “Scratch that. Simulation. Wormhole was stupid. Only…hmmm. You said you got a paper tonight, right? And that it was still in the dumpster?”
“Yeah,” I said, catching up.
“Let me take a look at it.”
“I don’t-“
“Think that’s a good idea? Neither was touching the fucking thing, breathing its fumes, or trying to burn it,” Stephanie said.
“Yeah, I guess you have a point.”
We moved from one room in the basement to another, and I saw the shelves filled with the occult books that Mark Bailey had mentioned.
“Those are mine,” Stephanie said. “Can’t rule anything out, right?”
I shrugged, not sure what she was talking about. Then I checked my phone…and my heart stopped. 4 AM. Mark Bailey was due any second.
Stephanie didn’t seem to notice, she was moving so fast she was practically a blur. By the time I had gotten to the foot of the stairs, she was already in the kitchen.
That was when I heard it. A man’s voice. Mark Bailey’s voice. “What are you?” he asked, “you’re Monica-“ then, as quickly as it had appeared, Bailey’s voice was cut short.
I rushed up the stairs and slid into the kitchen. There, on the tile floor, Mark Bailey lay in a pool of his own blood. His neck was cut open. Stephanie tossed a bloody knife into the sink.
“Don’t worry,” she said, “my aren'ts will take care of it. Where’d you park your car?”
It was almost dawn by the time we were standing in front of the dumpster. I pulled the plastic bags out and cut them open slowly with the pair of scissors from the lab. Stephanie’s face lit up the second she saw the black bundle roll out.
Before I could stop her, she ripped the twine off and unrolled the Paper…then she frowned. She turned the paper toward me. “Can you read it?” she asked.
I nodded.
“I can’t see anything. Just black paper. No words written in white ink. I bet whoever appears in the articles can’t read them. Because I’m not real. The Paper must’ve created me like you thought.” She was actually smiling as she said it.
“Doesn’t that bother you?”
“No! You fucking kidding me? I’m thrilled! I’d much rather be created by a mysterious newspaper than my fucking parents. Read it to me,” she ordered.
Some of the words were already being erased. But I read the article to her anyway. This was what it said:
———————————————————————————————————————
THE PERFECT BEING? EXPERTS CALL AERIAL PHENOMENON “EASY TO EXPLAIN”
It’s only been two days, but the residents of a small town in upstate New York have already grown accustomed to it. There’s a strange shape in the sky that isn’t going away…and it looks like a person.
The event began sometime after dawn on ———— morning. It’s now ————, and the clouds aren’t going anywhere.
“It’s not just a shape,” says —————— a lifelong resident of ————. “There’s light in there. Like no matter how dark it gets, there’s something in there that’s shining. Like a little sun!”
The apparition is certainly uncanny. It’s a little shape that "looks like a person in the sky.” It has all the parts you’d expect: a head, two arms (complete with their hands), and two legs (plus their feet). The arms and legs are pointed at an angle so that they make an “X” shape. “It looks like the Da Vinci man,” one woman said. She’s not the only one. Many people have drawn the comparison between the man-shaped object and Da Vinci’s iconic Vitruvian Man.
If this was only an oddly-shaped object, it wouldn’t have made as big of an impact on the residents. Indeed, there’s a strange “glow” to it, as if it reflects the sunlight in such a way that the entire human shape is lit up at once. When the sun goes down, the “glow” remains, shining like a big star that often hides behind thick clouds.
This is an age where everyone has a smartphone in their pocket, a gadget that doubles as an expensive camera. So why haven’t you heard of this before? The answer’s simple: it’s too far away.
“It’s about the size of a fingernail,” a resident explained, “just hold your little finger up to the sky and imagine something floating up there that’s as big as the nail.”
That’s not very big at all. A photography expert explained that “most phone cameras aren’t particularly good at taking photos of something that small at a distance, especially against a bright sky.”
As a result, most of the images that have made their way to social media show a blurry speck against a blazing white sky. At night, the results are even worse, at best capturing a circle of light, at worst simply showing a dark sky.
Meteorologists, astronomers, and aficionados of aerial phenomena have indeed regarded the apparition as “a trick of the light.” “I think it’s a kite,” said a local man who owns a high-end telescope, “some kind of man-shaped kite that someone let go of, maybe as a prank.” A meteorologist stated that “it’s easy to explain. It could be any number of things ranging from drones to homemade balloons. It’s nothing natural, though, certainly not a meteor and definitely not a sign of the end times.”
So how exactly did this apparition become known as “the perfect being?” A local news station was interviewing a group of onlookers when they were approached by a “strange” man. “There was something off about him for sure,” stated ———————- a veteran field reporter who isn’t shaken up by “weirdos.” “He just walked up to the camera when we were interviewing another eyewitness and saying that he made it and that it’s the Perfect Being. A weirdo. A kook. We get too many to count. But it caught on. Mostly because people were making fun of the guy.”
The strange aerial phenomenon known as “The Perfect Being” still hasn’t disappeared from the sky. Far from it. It’s actually gotten a little bigger. “It’s like it’s getting closer,” said another resident, “dropping down slowly. Like it’s falling.” Some residents have taken it upon themselves to study this steady rate of decline in a scientific manner. “If it keeps dropping at its current rate, it’ll be down in about a week,” says a young girl who looks about as serious as someone working for NASA, “it won’t drop here, it’ll drop the next town over.”
We’ll just have to wait and see if this amateur astrologer is right on the money.
———————————————————————————————————————-
When I was done reading, Stephanie was smiling again.
“What does it mean?” I asked, already getting used to relying on her superior intelligence.
“Nothing much. Just that we’ve got a doctor’s appointment,” she said.
Part 6

Grips. Let's talk about 'em.
If you've spent any amount of time on this subreddit, you've likely seen at least one post about a Grip case that has fallen apart. Most of you have seen several. We know this because we've seen every single one. We’d like to see less of them. Ideally, none.
Over the past 18 months, we’ve been on an odyssey to fix the underlying problem. What follows is a chronicle of that journey.
Our objectives in writing this post are three-fold. There will be a tl;dr version at the end of this post, summarizing each of the three:

Offer an in-depth technical explanation as to why Grip cases fall apart.
Outline the improvements we've made to the Grip case to mitigate and eventually solve the issue.
Provide some much-needed context as to how widespread the issue truly is, and what our next steps are for affected Grip SKUs.

Since you're still here, you must be in it for the long haul. Assuming an average reading speed of 250 words per minute, this is going to take you nearly 24 minutes to get through. We'll try to make it the most informative 24 minutes of your life. Let's get started.

PART ONE

Why Do Grips Fall Apart?
Most phone cases are made out of a single material. The material itself varies from case to case, though the most common is Thermoplastic Polyurethane (TPU). The Grip case, as a point of comparison, is made of two different materials: an elastomer and a polycarbonate.
The word elastomer is a combination of the words elastic and polymer. That's because it describes polymers that have elastic properties - like the one that forms the outer rim of your Grip case. The elastomer that we use is responsible for two critical properties of the Grip case: impact protection and grip.
If you fell off of a rooftop, would you rather land on a hard plastic surface, or a rubber surface? If you value your life at all, you'd choose the rubber - its elastic properties would absorb much more force from the impact. Guess what rubber is? First one to answer "an elastomer" wins a prize!
Next, imagine you’re a pervert, gently running your finger across every surface of a No. 2 Pencil. Which part of the pencil do you think would provide the most resistance to the tracing of your finger? If you guessed "the eraser," congratulations: you possess a basic understanding of coefficients of friction. Erasers are made of rubber. Rubber has a high coefficient of friction because of its elastic properties.
The Grip case's elastomer isn't rubber - it's our own specially-formulated compound. It's still a useful comparison, as all elastomers share similar properties - provided they have the same degree of Shore Hardness.
One person reading this is asking: “Shore Hardness?” The next section is their fault.

A Beginner's Guide to Material Science
The Shore Hardness scale gauges the hardness of various elastomers. It can be measured with a device called a durometer. You probably don't have one.

Low Shore Hardness = softer, more malleable, less dense, more rubber-like.
High Shore Hardness = harder, less malleable, more dense, more plastic-like.

If you fell out of a building and landed on a rubber surface with a high Shore Hardness, injury or death would be much more likely.
If you used an eraser with a high Shore Hardness, you'd find it wouldn't actually do much erasing.
Now, what if you made a phone case out of an elastomer with a high Shore Hardness? It wouldn't offer much grip or impact protection.
The Grip's outer rim is made from an elastomer with a low Shore Hardness. As a result, the material is grippy and impact-resistant, but much more malleable and thus more likely to deform. That's why we bond the elastomer to a polycarbonate skeleton.
Polycarbonates don't require as much explanation as elastomers: they're a category of plastic. On your Grip case, the back plate is made of polycarbonate. The elastomer rim is bonded to the polycarbonate plate on all sides of the Grip, providing structural rigidity to the elastomer, fighting to keep it from deforming. At least, that's the idea. As we've all seen, it hasn't worked out that way.
Bonding two distinct materials together is much more complicated than gluing them together. Instead, we rely on a thermal bonding process. Basically, that means we heat both of our polymers to a degree which would turn you from “rare” to “well done” in moments. This heat melts the polymers, which we then inject at a pressure which would turn you from “solid” to “paste” even faster.
Once injected, these two materials get fused together along the seams. To further reinforce the bonds, we use a series of interlocking "teeth" to provide a greater surface area on which the bonding process can occur. Consider these teeth the mechanical bond, which exists to strengthen the thermal bond.

Pictured: Bonding mechanic between the elastomer and polycarbonate.
With that out of the way: why do Grips fall apart?
The elastomer rim around the edge of the Grip case is naturally inclined to deform and stretch. The bonding mechanisms we described above are designed to keep that from happening, but it often isn’t strong enough. As soon as the bond fails at any point, it's only a matter of time until a total structural failure occurs.

PART TWO

How Are We Stopping Grips From Falling Apart?
Philosophically, there are two approaches to take:

We can investigate why, exactly, the bond between the elastomer and the polycarbonate is failing.
We can tweak and iterate the thermal and mechanical bond - strengthening it to the point where it's statistically improbable that your case will fall apart.

We tried the first approach - it's the road to madness. The number of variables is irrationally large. What's the temperature like where you live? The altitude? The humidity? Do you bring your phone into environments that deviate from the ambient temperature of your location? Does your school or workplace have extremely dry air? Do you bring your phone into a sauna? What sort of soap do you wash your hands with? Do you have oily hands? What sort of food do you cook? Do you smoke? How hard do you press on the buttons? What's your angle of approach when you actuate a button? How big are your hands? How often do you take your phone out of the case? Do you remove it from the top, the bottom, the sides?
We could follow all of these roads, find out exactly which factors are causing the bond to fail, then implement preventative measures to keep it from happening - but that would take a decade. We don't have that long. Much like you, we want this fixed yesterday.
So, from the moment we received our first complaint about a Grip deforming around the buttons, we've been making structural, thermal, and mechanical improvements to the design and production process of the Grip case - some visible, some not. Every new phone release has brought a new iteration on the core Grip design, with each one reducing the failure rate, incrementally. We'll bring the receipts in the next chapter. For now, let's highlight the most noteworthy improvements.

The Most Noteworthy Improvements
The first signs of trouble were the buttons. Months before we'd received our first report of a Grip case de-bonding, we saw the first examples of buttons that had bent out of shape.

Pictured: Button deformation.
Why the buttons? Because you press down on them. The force from button actuation puts strain on the elastomer, causing displacement of the material in the surrounding area. Through a combination of time, repeated button actuations and the above-mentioned force, the case would permanently deform around the buttons. This concept is called the "compression set" of the elastomer - Google it.
The solution to this problem was two-fold:

First, we increased the compression set of the elastomer. Essentially, we made it as dense as we could, without compromising on the elastic properties of the material.
Second, we added relief slits surrounding the buttons - they're plainly visible on any newer Grip case model. These relief slits are an escape route for the force generated by button actuation. They also had the positive effect of making button actuation significantly more satisfying (read: clicky).

Pictured: Relief slits to improve button tactility and durability.
Another early issue, pre-dating the first reports of total de-bonding, was a deformation of the elastomer along the bottom of the case - where the charging port and speakers are.
Since we've covered the basics on how the interlock between the elastomer and the polycarbonate creates a bond, this is how the interlocking teeth along the top edge of the polycarbonate skeleton of the Grip used to look.

Pictured: First-gen interlocking teeth on the top of the Grip.
...and here's the bottom of that very same Grip case.

Pictured: First-gen interlocking teeth on the bottom of the Grip.
Notice anything? Around the charging port, there is absolutely nothing keeping the elastomer in place. No teeth, no structural reinforcements... it's no coincidence that an overwhelming majority of early Grip deformations happened along the bottom.
Since then, we’ve added a reinforced polycarbonate structure around the bottom of the Grip case. You'll see what that looks like in a bit.
So, why didn't the launch portfolio of Grip cases have mechanical interlocks or a polycarbonate support structure along the bottom?
The answer may or may not be complicated, depending on how much you know about plastic injection molding. We'll assume the worst and explain the concept of "undercut" to you with a ridiculous metaphor.

The Ridiculous Metaphor
Imagine you had a tube full of melted cheese. Next, imagine you emptied that entire tube into your mouth. Rather than swallowing the cheese, you decide to let it sit in your mouth and harden. Why are you doing this? We don't know. Let's just say you want a brick of cheese that's perfectly molded to the contours of your mouth - a very normal thing to want.
So, your mouth is completely filled with cheese. It hardens. You reach into your mouth to remove the brick of cheese. As you're removing it, you encounter a problem: your teeth are in the way. This wasn't a problem when you were putting the cheese into your mouth, but that was because the cheese was melted and could flow around your teeth. Now that the cheese has hardened, this is no longer the case.
In the world of plastic injection molding, this is an undercut. Our concern was that, by molding a structurally rigid piece of polycarbonate around the charging port and speaker holes, we'd find ourselves unable to remove the Grip Case from the mold once hardened. Imagine spending $30,000 on industrial tooling only to get a $30 phone case stuck inside of it.
Once we saw Grip cases deforming along the bottom cutouts, we knew we'd need to find a way to remove the cheese from your mouth without breaking your teeth. To make a long story short: we did it. The cheese is out of your mouth, and you get to keep your teeth. Congratulations! Now, keep reading.
On newer models of the Grip case, the result is a polycarbonate bridge extending around the bottom cutouts, adding both structural reinforcement and interlock mechanisms to promote mechanical bond, much like the ones which line the perimeter of the rest of the Grip case.

Pictured: Newest-gen structural reinforcement on the bottom of the Grip.
On the subject of structural reinforcements, this design revision was around the time we flanked the buttons with some fins, working in tandem with the heightened compression set and button relief slits, detailed above, to further guarantee that button actuation would have no impact on the overall durability of the Grip case.

Pictured: Lack of button fins on the first-gen Grip.

Pictured: Button fins on the newest-gen Grip.
As an aside: Unrelated to the de-bonding issues, we've also made a number of smaller improvements to the Grip case with each new iteration. For instance, we chamfered the front lip of the case to make edge-swiping more pleasant and reduce dust accumulation along the rim. Those raised parallelogram shapes along the sides of your Grip case that create its distinctive handfeel? We made those way bigger for a better in-hand experience. In short: product development is a complex and multifaceted process. Each new iteration of the Grip case is better than the one that came before, and that applies to more than just failure rates.
Speaking of failure rates: all of these improvements were in place by the time we launched iPhone 11-series Grip cases. The failure rate for these cases decreased exponentially... but didn't disappear entirely.

The Even More Ridiculous Metaphor
With these improvements, we achieved our desired outcome: the case was no longer deforming around the buttons or the charging port. Instead, the structure of the case began to fail literally anywhere else around the perimeter of the phone.
Think of it this way… you’re a roof carpenter. The greatest roof carpenter of all time. Like the son of God, but if he was a carpenter. Unfortunately, you’ve been paired with the Donald Trump of wall-builders.
You're tasked with building a house. You spend all of your time and energy perfecting your roofcraft. You've designed a roof that's so durable, it may as well have been made of Nokia 3310s. Nothing's getting through that bad boy.
The wall guy? Instead of building that wall he said Mexico would pay for, he's been tweeting about the miraculous medicinal properties of bleach while a plague kills hundreds of thousands of Americans.
The point here is that you can build the greatest roof of all time, but the walls need to be strong enough to match.
To strengthen the Grip case's metaphorical walls, we needed to re-design the inside of the Grip case from scratch. More specifically, the mechanical interlock between the springy elastomer and rigid polycarbonate skeleton. We took every tooth at the bonding point between the two materials and made them as large as we possibly could. Then, we added more teeth.

Pictured: Polycarbonate teeth on the newest-gen Grip.
To jog your memory: this is how the teeth used to look...

Pictured: Polycarbonate teeth on the first-gen Grip.
If time proves that these changes aren’t enough, our engineers still have a number of ideas on how to improve the bond between the elastomer and polycarbonate. Will we ever need to implement those ideas? Again - that’s a question only time can answer. Each change might be the silver bullet that puts this problem to bed for good... but there's only one way to find out: it involves real-world testing and, with each iteration, months of careful observation.

PART THREE

So, Where Are We Now?
Have the improvements we've made to the Grip case been successful? You bet.
For the sake of comparison: we began shipping iPhone 11 series Grips on September 30th, 2019. Within six months of that date, we had received 52 reports of structural failures - a big improvement over the early days, but still not good enough.
Fast forward two months. We began shipping Note 10 Plus Grip cases on November 21st, 2019. In the first six months of availability, we received exactly eight reports of Note 10 Plus Grips falling apart. Again, a major improvement over the iPhone series in the same stretch of time. If we'd launched the first Grip cases with a failure rate that low, we wouldn't be writing this post right now and you’d have nothing to read while pretending to do work.
How about the Galaxy S20 series, which began shipping on February 10th, 2020? They're the most recent and improved set of SKUs we’ve made to date, leveraging everything we've learned and making further improvements over the Note 10 Plus. No reports so far. Same goes for the iPhone SE and OnePlus 8 series - these SKUs share all the improvements we've made to the underlying design of the Grip case thus far.
Does that mean these numbers will hold forever? Who knows. That's the thing: every improvement we make, we need to wait several months to see how effective it's been. No amount of internal testing can replace the real-world data of shipping cases to hundreds of thousands of users across nearly 200 countries.
We could always just throw in the towel, make the entire case out of rigid plastic, and call it a solved issue... but that would be the easy way out. The Grip case and its unique design properties can't reach their full potential unless we make incremental improvements - then wait and see how they pan out in the real world.
All of which is to say: it's far too early to say the newest set of improvements have officially solved the problem. While the failure rate is still zero, we need to keep watching. We've made a ton of progress, but we're not going to rest until we've killed this issue for good - without sacrificing the unique properties that make the Grip case stand out in a sea of derivative hard plastic and TPU phone cases.
That's probably enough to inspire confidence in someone who's on the fence about buying an S20 Ultra Grip, an iPhone SE Grip, or any Grip we release in the future. But what if you're one of the people who bought an older Grip model?

"I'm One Of The People Who Bought An Older Grip Model!"
We won't sugarcoat it. The failure rates for older Grip models is way higher than we deem acceptable. Why has it taken us this long to publicly address the issue, then?
Easy: it's not as widespread as you might think. Some humans reading this might be looking at their iPhone X Grip, purchased in 2019 and still intact, wondering what all the fuss is about. That's an important consideration: most people who have functioning, still-bonded Grip cases aren't posting on /dbrand about how unbroken it is. The people who've had issues around total product failure are in the minority.
We're not using the word "minority" as a get-out-of-jail-free card here. It's still a way larger number than we'd ever be comfortable with. We simply don't want our transparency and candor in writing this to be misinterpreted as an admission that every single Grip case we've made for older devices is going to fall apart. Statistically speaking, this is an issue for a minority of Grip owners.
Our philosophy at first was that, while it was unfortunate and frustrating that Grip cases were falling apart, dramatic PR action wasn't necessary. Instead, we resolved to:

Quietly and diligently work in the background to improve the underlying design of the Grip case.
Ship free replacements to anyone whose Grip case had failed.

To date, we've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on shipping fees alone for replacement Grips. As you can imagine, that number gets a lot higher once you add in the cost of actually making the thing. We've been fine with writing these costs off as sort of an R&D expense, since every example of a deformed or de-bonded Grip provides invaluable data on how to improve the product.
Where our strategy backfired was in the narrative that began to take root as Grip cases continued to fall apart. Look at it this way: the failure rate of older Grip case SKUs is anywhere between 1% and 20%, depending on how early we released the SKU. Since the improvements we've already made to the underlying design were rolled out incrementally with each new phone release, that number has been on a steady downward trend.
For the purpose of this thought experiment, we'll go with the earliest, shittiest Grip cases - putting us at a long-term failure rate of 20%.
So, 20% of customers for this device have a Grip case fall apart at some point in the product's lifespan. Every single one of those people writes in to our Customer Experience team about the issue. They all receive a replacement, free of charge.
Since this replacement is identical to the first Grip case they'd received, it also has a 20% failure rate. We're now dealing with percentages of percentages. Stop panicking, we'll do the math for you: that means 4% of these hypothetical Grip owners will have a second Grip case fail on them in the long run.
Four percent is a lot better than twenty… but it's also a lot of people who've been burned twice. These people are going to be extra vocal about how shitty the Grip case is. To be fair, they've got every right.
So, we've got four groups of customers for this SKU:

Group A: Has had two or more Grip cases fail (4%).
Group B: Has had exactly one Grip case fail (16%).
Group C: Bought a Grip which has not failed (80%).
Group D: Has not purchased a Grip case (NA%).

Group A is livid about the repeated issues they've had - rightfully so.
Group B, having been burned before, reads about Group A's experience. They take it to mean their replacement will inevitably fail on them as well, and they'll one day get the dubious honor of joining Group A.
Group C, despite not having had any issues yet, reads the experiences of Groups A and B. Then, a significant portion of this group begins to operate under the assumption that it's only a matter of time before their Grip falls apart as well.
Group D reads all of the above and decides they don't have enough confidence in the Grip case to ever purchase one.
A narrative begins to form that this hypothetical failure rate is close to 100%. Worse yet: people with newer phones, unaware that each new iteration of the Grip case has a dramatically reduced failure rate over the last, start to assume their case also has a 100% failure rate. That's where our original strategy - the one where we quietly improved the product in the background while offering replacements for defective units - backfired on us.
This narrative only exists because we've continued to leverage existing stock with too high a failure rate, which, in hindsight, was like pouring gasoline on a gender reveal forest fire of disappointment and regret. This brings us to our next chapter.

Mass Destruction
At this point, you're probably aware that a number of Grip SKUs for older phones have been listed as "Sold Out" on our website, and haven't been restocked since.
We stopped production on these cases because we knew they'd have all the same issues as the original production runs. See, it's not as simple as pushing a "make the Grip not fall apart" button at the factory - we'd need to redesign the case from scratch, implementing all of the design improvements we've made up to this point, then re-tool our existing machinery to produce this new version. We'll have more to say about re-tooling a bit later - for now, focus on the fact that some Grips have been listed as "Sold Out".
If someone's Grip case falls apart while listed as "Sold Out", we don't have any replacements to send them. Instead, dbrand's Customer Experience team has been issuing refunds wherever possible, and store credit otherwise. Just in case you're wondering what we mean by "where possible": PayPal doesn't allow refunds on transactions that are more than six months old. Store credit, on the other hand, can be offered indefinitely.
What we've come to realize is that we're never going to be able to escape this downward spiral until we rip the band-aid off and stop stocking these old, flawed SKUs.
Today, we're ripping the bandaid off. As you're reading this, we're disposing of all of our old stock. All of the flawed Grip SKUs are now listed as "Sold Out".
Head over to our Grip listing and take a look at what's available. Everything that you can currently buy is up to spec with the improvements we've made over the past year - meeting or exceeding the standard of quality set by the Galaxy S20 series, the iPhone SE, and the OnePlus 8 series. In some cases - take, for instance, the iPhone 11 series - this means we've already re-tooled our production lines to meet that quality benchmark.
If a Grip case is listed on "Backorder", it means we've begun the process of re-tooling the SKU to match the improved quality standard you've spent the last five hours reading about.
However, if a Grip case is now listed as "Sold Out", that means no more reshipments.
If you own a sold out Grip case that hasn't fallen apart yet: that's great! Don't assume that your Grip is doomed to fail just because we devoted 5661 words to explaining why it might fall apart. You've still got better odds than you would at a casino.
As always, if you run into any issues with your case, sold out or not, shoot an email to one of our Robots. They'll still take care of you - it just won't be with a replacement case… for now.

Mass Production
Remember when we said we'd talk more about re-tooling a bit later? That's right now.
So, why are so many Grip models not being fixed? Why haven't we re-tooled these old SKUs with all of the quality improvements made to the case's build quality? It's a little complicated.
Taking the improvements we've made to the most recent suite of Grip models and retroactively applying those changes to older SKUs isn't a simple task - it would require us to throw out our existing production tools and create new ones, from scratch. Suffice it to say that doing so is a wildly expensive endeavor.
To recoup that cost, we'd need to produce more Grips than we're likely to ever sell for aging, irrelevant hardware. Let's use the Pixel 3 as an example.
If we replaced every single de-bonded Pixel 3 Grip, that would account for about 3% of the MOQ (Minimum Order Quantity) on a re-tooled Pixel 3 Grip case. Now we're sitting on 97% of that MOQ as overstock. Pixel 3 owners have had their phone for nearly two years now. If they want a phone case, they already have one. They're not looking for new Pixel 3 cases, they're getting ready to buy a new phone. Simply put, it’s no longer a viable market.
Now, say the Pixel 3 was a significantly more popular phone - enough that we'd be shipping out, say, 50% of the MOQ as replacements on day one. Now, that's a lot more tempting to us - we'd still lose boatloads of money, but at least it would go towards some consumer goodwill.
To figure out how much money we'd lose on re-tooling, we gave our bean-counting Robots a giant jar of beans and told them to get to work. They emerged three days later. When asked how many beans were in the jar, they gave us a blank stare. When asked if it was possible to re-tool any of our production lines for old Grip SKUs without losing obscene amounts of money, they said:
"Absolutely not."
Still, we're no strangers to throwing away obscene amounts of money to make the internet happy. Remember Amazon gift cards? Those were the days. The only question that remains is "How much money are we willing to set on fire?"
We can't tell you yet. Why? Because we're currently running a detailed cost-benefit analysis on the subject of re-tooling old production lines, on a SKU-by-SKU basis. That's business talk for "the bean-counting Robots have been given more beans to count."
The objective is to determine the viability of producing new-and-improved Grip stock for older phones: how many units would be tied up in replacements for that model, how many we could reasonably expect to sell to new customers, and how much overstock would be left from the MOQ.
From there, we can determine what the financial impact of re-tooling would be and make the final decision on how much cash we're dumping into the ocean somewhere off the coast of the Seychelles. We'll have our results by early next week.
These re-tooled models, if produced, would feature every improvement we’ve made thus far to the Grip case line, plus a few that have yet to be released. Remember how the S20s, the iPhone SE and the OnePlus 8s haven't had any reported failures yet? Picture that, but for the phone you've got.
If we go ahead with re-tooling production lines for your phone, a few things will happen:

The Grip case for your phone will go from "Sold Out" to "Backorder".
Our Customer Experience Robots will shift their communication strategy from "we no longer support your phone," to "we'll get you a replacement once we've got improved units in stock."

None of these things will happen until we've run the simulations on which phones are getting restocked. Why are we posting this today, then? We could have waited a week and had concrete answers to offer about the future of our out-of-stock Grip cases. Well…

Take Our Survey
This is it: your chance to have some say in how much money we set on fire as a goodwill exercise for this whole R&D clusterfuck.
Those simulations we're running? They'll be great for telling us how much money we're going to lose on each Grip SKU, but it won't tell us anything about how much money our customers want us to lose on each Grip SKU.
To that end, we've prepared a survey for people who have purchased a Grip case. We'll be taking your feedback into consideration during our decision-making process.
We have only one request: don't be a jackass. Answer the questions honestly.
Click here to take the survey.

In Closing...
We're sharing a special moment right now. We're all seeing a light at the end of the tunnel.
For us, that light is "we're almost done with a year-long R&D effort to stop the Grip case from falling apart."
For you, the light is "the end of a 5661-word marathon of a Reddit post."
We just want to take a minute to recognize that we couldn't have gotten this far without your collective support. At any point in the past year, we might have pulled the plug on the Grip project entirely if we'd reached a critical mass of negative sentiment from our customers. Instead, we've got an army of devotees who have no problem paying us for the privilege of being our guinea pigs.
Product development isn't a one-and-done process. It's easy to forget, but our skins weren't always to the world-class, record-setting, Michael-Jordan-in-his-prime standard you expect from us today. If you happen to have an iPhone 4 skin lying around, apply it and let us know how it goes. You'll immediately appreciate how many process improvements we've made. We weren’t born as the greatest skin manufacturer in history. We got there through a process of methodical improvement. Each jump in quality was driven by a bottomless well of user feedback, sourced from millions upon millions of customers. That, and the competition was comically inept.
It's the same story for the Grip case. Your continued support has enabled us to make huge strides in developing a product that's on the cusp of blowing everyone else out of the water. We're going to keep working until it gets there.

TL;DR VERSION

Please note that by reading this tl;dr, you’re missing out on several outlandish metaphors, including classics such as:

Plastic injection molding melted cheese into your face hole.
What if Jesus and Donald Trump built a house?
How to turn yourself from “rare to well done” and “solid to paste”.
Pencil Perverts.

WHY DOES THE GRIP FALL APART?

The Grip case is made from two materials: a polycarbonate skeleton and an elastomer frame.
The elastomer frame provides the majority of the case's impact protection and grip, but is prone to deformation.
We prevent deformation by bonding the material to a polycarbonate skeleton (i.e. the rigid back plate on the Grip case).
The bond between the two materials was not as strong as we'd originally anticipated, causing the elastomer to de-bond from the polycarbonate skeleton and the case to sometimes fall apart.

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO FIX IT?

Through a series of design revisions, we've made countless improvements to promote a stronger bond between the two materials.
These changes have incrementally reduced the failure rate of Grip cases. Our most recent SKUs are yielding extremely promising results.
Each time we improve the Grip case, we need to play a months-long waiting game to observe the real-world effects.

HOW ABOUT THE GRIPS YOU'VE ALREADY SOLD?

Since we're using you as guinea pigs for the purposes of product development, we've been uncharacteristically generous with our warranty policy.
However, that warranty policy only lasts as long as we have stock. Once we're out of Grips, we're out of replacements.
We've finally reached the point where we need to rip off the bandaid and dispose of all of our Grip stock produced during 2019.
If your Grip for any of these older phones falls apart, you can no longer get a replacement.
You should still write in to our Customer Experience team if it happens to you - we'll work something out.
On the bright side, our Grip SKUs from 2020 onwards have dramatically reduced, if not outright eliminated, the failure rate of previous models. We have no reported cases to date.
It's not economically viable to re-tool production lines to apply our improved industrial designs to any of the Grip cases that are currently marked as "Sold Out".
We're probably going to do it anyways.
We're running the simulations right now to determine which older devices will be re-tooled.
Take our survey to help determine which devices we'll be re-tooling.

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