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Album of the Year #24: Run The Jewels - RTJ4

Artist: Run The Jewels
Album: RTJ4
Date Released: June 3rd, 2020
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Artist Background
The duo consisting of Atlanta rapper Killer Mike, and legendary underground produceMC El-P, known together as Run The Jewels, originally came together as a result of Adult Swim executive Jason DeMarco who introduced the two in 2011. After his 2011 album PL3DGE peaked at #115 on the US charts, Killer Mike told Jason that he wanted to make his own AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted. Jason informed Mike, “If you want AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted modernized, the only producer I know who comes close to the Bomb Squad-level of production is El-P”. The duo’s chemistry was immediate, as El-P went on to produce all of Killer Mike’s 2012 last solo album R.A.P. Music, and Mike featured on El-P’s final solo album Cancer 4 Cure. Mike and El’s respective albums released within a week of each other in May 2012, and the two embarked on a twenty-city US tour in the following months. After returning from tour, the pair had found a friendship growing between themselves, and made the decision to put other projects on hold and focus on the chemistry that had been sparked. Recording at an upstate NY studio beginning in April 2013, the duo re-appropriated the phrase “Run The Jewels” from the LL Cool J track “Cheesy Rat Blues", and released their self-titled collaborative album, for free via digital download, only a mere 2 months later in June 2013.
36” Chain vs. Pistol & Fist
Run The Jewels discography currently exists in a distinct pairing. With Run The Jewels as their debut, this record set the group's tone as a light-hearted, braggadocious duo with as much confidence in their abilities as swag in their punchlines. Just over a year later, the sequel Run The Jewels 2 took the foundation set from their freshman effort and dialed the insanity up to 11. RTJ2 pushed the boundaries of their aggression and flows to new heights; with incredible energy in their verses, and absolutely impeccable beats, blending El-P’s signature industrial sound with sharp synth arpeggios, chopped Zach De La Rocha vocals, and absolutely bonkers Travis Barker drums.
It was then nearly 3 years before Jamie and Mike followed up their breakout RTJ2, with Run The Jewels 3 being released again ahead of its scheduled release date via free digital download, this time on Christmas Eve 2016. Instead of these two attempting to outdo the pure insanity and in-your-face attitude found in their predecessor, Mike and El decide to evolve themselves as a group. The duo had noticeably pulled back on the swag and dick jokes which made such a splash on RTJ2, instead choosing a more subdued, electronic approach to their beats, as well as a clearly stronger political approach in their lyrics. This change in sound and style is demonstrated in the album cover’s artwork. The first two records featured the distinctive RTJ “Pistol and Fist”, with the fist tightly gripping a chain. The chain, in my opinion, represents the swag and braggadocio that drove the aggressive nature of their first two albums. In RTJ3 the chain is removed, leaving only hands that have transformed from bleeding and bandaged, to a pristine gold.
This brings us to early 2020. It’s been nearly 4 years of living in a post-Trump America, and El-P announces that Run The Jewels fourth record has been completed. Mike and El live-stream the first single “yankee and the brave” on Instagram on March 22nd, 2020. Lyrically and sonically, RTJ4 exists as the successor to Run The Jewels 3, with Mike and El again taking the good from their previous effort and launching it into the creative stratosphere. El-P’s beats are again leaning towards the synthetic, electronic side, this time with the intensity dialed all the way up to 11. From a lyrical perspective, RTJ takes the politically-charged lyrics from their predecessor, and again, up the ante, laying down some of the hardest hitting and politically poignant bars either of these two have ever spit.
Album Review
2020 was a year that none of us will soon forget. An unprecedented global health crisis kept the majority of us inside for months at a time. RTJ4 was announced on May 12th, 2020, with a release date slated for June 5th, 2020. However, with 2020 as the gift that won’t stop giving, the end of May was highlighted by the unjust killing of George Floyd. The phrase heard around the world, “I can’t breathe” instantly became a rally-cry for the oppressed to finally take to the streets to demand systemic police reform, as Floyd’s death was not the first time this phrase was uttered in an unjust police killing. In fact, a 2020 study by the New York Times showed that at least 70 people have died in police custody after using the same phrase over the past decade. As millions of American’s began organizing protests and demonstrations in the wake of Floyd’s death, Run The Jewels made the decision to release their latest chapter two days ahead of the scheduled release. El-P tweeted, just minutes ahead of the drop, “Fuck it, why wait. The world is infested with bullshit, so here’s something raw to listen to while you deal with it all. We hope it brings you some joy. Stay safe and hopeful out there and thank you for giving 2 friends the chance to be heard and do what they love”. In line with all past Run The Jewels releases, the album was made available for free digital download, two days ahead of its scheduled release date, on June 3rd, 2020.
THE RETURN (we don’t mean no harm but we truly mean all the disrespect)
RTJ4 opens with the first single, “yankee and the brave (ep. 4)”. Using the team names from their respective hometown baseball teams, Mike and El use the opening track to prove that they’re not just a hip-hop duo, they’re brothers, for better or worse. El-P kicks this installment off with rapid-fire, machine-gun esque snares, matching Killer Mike’s aggressive flow and tightly packed rhymes, before El jumps in to trade some dense rhymes as well. Mike and El depict themselves as outlaws, with Mike surrounded by cops with only one bullet remaining. He contemplates suicide instead of allowing the police to take him alive, until El-P jumps back in, offering Mike a way out, with a getaway car waiting outside. This tense situation is depicted lightheartedly in this song’s music video, which was released via Adult Swim and features the duo animated.
The trade-off between Mike and El’s short verses are reminiscent of late-80’s EPMD flows, while the production sounds like boom-bap that’s been sent to us from the future. This distinctive blend of old-school rap roots and forward thinking production is what continues to separate Run The Jewels from absolutely all of their contemporaries. While so many artists are continually playing catch-up with the latest trends, RTJ are side-stepping the trendy and moving forward with the mind-bending.
FLEXIN’ (ayo one for mayhem, two for mischief)
The second single “ooh la la” samples a Gang Star track "DWYCK (feat. Nice & Smooth)" as the basis for the chorus. I say “samples” as that’s how it is credited in the album’s liner notes, however it’s truly an interpolation of Greg Nice’s bar, slowed down slightly, and sung by El-P and Greg Nice himself. El-P is a true old-head at heart, and it’s abundantly obvious in his work, even going as far as to recruit legendary producer DJ Premiere to handle the scratching on the back end of this banger.
Out of key piano chords are looped to quickly create an unsettling aura surrounding the track, before El-P’s voice cuts through the infectious piano like a whip. Pounding, up-tempo drums are introduced after the chorus’ first iteration, creating what is possibly El-P’s first danceable beat. Lyrically, Mike and El-P initially seem scattered on this track, however the music video quickly makes their point very obvious.
”we imagined the world on the day that the age old struggle of class was finally over. a day that humanity, empathy and community were victorious over the forces that would separate us based on arbitrary systems created by man.
this video is a fantasy of waking up on a day that there is no monetary system, no dividing line, no false construct to tell our fellow man that they are less or more than anyone else. not that people are without but that the whole meaning of money has vanished. that we have somehow solved our self created caste system and can now start fresh with love, hope and celebration. its a dream of humanity’s V-DAY… and the party we know would pop off.”
The video envisions a society celebrating the fact that the class system we currently exist within has finally imploded. Money is worthless, and we have rejected the desire to bind ourselves to the constraints of capitalism. All creeds and colors unite to burn the system that has so effectively controlled us for over a century. It’s a party, and if there was a song to celebrate the end of the world as it is currently known, “ooh la la” is that song.
Mike’s last verse features a few metaphors and comparisons celebrating the destruction of capitalism, saving the most poignant for last:
I used to love Bruce, but livin' my vida loca
Helped me understand I'm probably more of a Joker
When we usher in chaos, just know that we did it smiling
Cannibals on this island, inmates run the asylum
Premo’s expertly cut scratches lead us into the equally hard hitting sample flip of “Misdemeanor”, by Foster Stevens as the basis for the beat to “out of sight”. Lending yet another nod to the old-school greats that laid the foundation for RTJ, “out of sight” samples the same track as The D.O.C.’s “It’s Funky Enough”, only adding a bouncy, electronic synth atop the inverted chord hits, and uptempo, industrial drums, to create an absolutely infectious groove for Mike and El’s dynamic chemistry to shine, rapidly jumping between each other’s two line flows in the first verse.
“out of sight” shows each MC providing insight into how each of them earned a living and achieved their current status. Mike and El’s opening verse each details themselves robbing people in order to eat. El alludes to the fact that he crossed his accomplices in crime for the whole bag, while Mike details the fact his assailant tells him it’s an “honor” to be robbed by his mother’s only son.
While El-P’s production is the obvious stand out on first listen, Killer Mike comes through with one of the most sonically pleasing and technically proficient verses of 2020.
We the motivating, devastating, captivating
Ghost and Rae relating product of the fuckin' '80s
Coke dealin' babies, never regulating, bag accumulating
It would not be overstating to say they are underrating
The pride of Brooklyn and the Grady, baby
We don't need no compliments or confidence
Our attitude and latitude is "fuck you, pay me"
The dense, intricate rhyme schemes smack you in the face, almost distracting you from Mike’s delivery and blistering flow on the verse; flexing his legendary status while paying homage to his drug-dealing past. This absolutely stunning display of technical skill, story telling, and complex rhyming illustrates how RTJ seamlessly integrates the best of both old school and new school hip-hop.
“out of sight” also features a guest verse from 2 Chainz, and he continues to lay the braggadocio on thick. Considering Tity Boi’s dedication to trap stylings, his verse feels right at home on the flex track, despite it’s late 80’s tribute sample, a considerable departure from his usual sound palette.
Up until this point, I haven’t mentioned any of the El-P’s lyrics specifically. El-P is a great rapper, but Killer Mike… Well, Killer Mike is an incredible rapper. He’s the guy who draws you in. El-P is the one who lays the foundation for greatness and Mike is the show stopper, and that’s generally the case for most RTJ tracks. But on “holy calamafuck”, El-P seems determined to make people stop and ask, “Who the fuck is this?!”.
A sharp, yet nearly minimalistic drum kit backing a heavily distorted synthesizer melody lays beneath rhymically knocking cow-bells. This aggressively set stage allows Mike and El to flex as the dynamic duo they are, until the beat suddenly takes a turn for the chaotic. A gnarled, ultra-menacing synth overtakes everything while Mike screams into the abyss, until a distorted snare, enormous 808s, and skeletal hi-hats cut through and launch the beat switch into another dimension. The minimal, yet incredibly dark soundscape allows El-P to snap in a way I have never heard from him previously. His rhymes schemes are reminiscent of an old MF DOOM lyric notebook, while his topics flawlessly combine flexing, psychedelic use, and his well-cemented legacy in the hip-hop community. Cutting and pasting a few of his bars into this review could not convey a fraction of how stunning El-P’s performance on “holy calamafuck” is.
Slightly later in the track list, making liberal use of the Ether song “Gang of Four”, “the ground below” samples and loops the sharp guitar riff and adds aggressive, pounding drums as the basis for the beat; this is finally reminiscent of the forward-thinking, stridulous production El-P has built his reputation on. Capitalising on the classic RTJ moment, Mike and El both flex in their own unique ways. Mike compares himself to Godzilla taking on Tokyo, and El-P demands respect for his name as the legend he is, threatening to smack dying children for mispronouncing his name with his middle finger to the world; his complete disregard for human life and confidence in his abilities are summed up at the end of his verse.
You see a future where Run the Jewels ain’t the shit
Cancel my Hitler-killing trip
Turn the time machine back around a century
SO¢IAL JU$T-ICE (until my voice go from a shriek to whisper...)
While the first few tracks aren’t without their social and political themes, the back-end of RTJ4 is where Mike and El start to bust out the heavy topics. “goonies vs. E.T.”. starts off light, with El-P pointing to the irony of how once he finally started to make it “big” in the industry, the world began to descend into chaos due to climate changes, increasingly obvious social injustice, and political madness. He culminates his frustration with our disregard for the Earth with a fantastic quotable.
Fuck y’all got, another planet on stash?
Far from the fact of the flames and our trash
That is not snow, it is ash, and you gotta know
The past got a wrath, it’s a lover gone mad
Mike’s verse takes the light-hearted frustration expressed by El-P, and turns the aggression to the next level. Aiming his sights against the ruling class and their society that’s been designed to oppress people for profit, who have very meticulously painted themselves as celebrities and idols to the American public. Mike accepts that he will be villainized by these people for speaking against them, but he welcomes the nefarious role, knowing that the working class will eventually eat the rich, no matter how much they are stomped into the dirt.
And this is just the warmup.
If it’s possible for a song to represent a moment in time that captures the absolute shit storm that has been 2020, “walking in the snow” is that song. It’s release coincided perfectly with the protests for George Floyd which were sweeping the nation. Killer Mike’s verse directly references the phrase “I can’t breathe”, the last words of Eric Garner, which also happened to be the last words of Floyd as well. The fact that this verse was reportedly written in November 2019 perpetually underscores the importance of the content and perfectly represents how persistent this problem is. “walking in the snow” is a true encapsulation of both a defining moment in time and an ever-persisting issue.
But he doesn’t just stop at the racial injustice. Mike goes on an absolute rant about the American education system; how it’s not designed to teach people, but to discriminate against poor populations, limiting their legitimate opportunities, and therefore disproportionately leading them into a criminal lifestyle. He calls out the media as fear-mongers, and the apathy of the American public in the face of indecency. Fortunately for Mike, by the time we finally had the chance to hear this masterpiece, we were already on our feet, using this album as a war cry to mobilize against a tyrannical government that militarized against its own citizens simply for asking that we recognize systemic racism and demanding change. Killer Mike has the best verse of the year, no doubt in my mind.
The only drawback is that Mike’s verse is so fucking good that it completely overshadows El-P’s, which is also amazing. A menacing guitar riff and haunting synths kick the track off into a bouncy groove, where El-P unleashes a flurry of internal rhymes that does not relent for about half his verse. Even adding layers of social commentary within the densely packed bars, El refuses to quit and continues on his political tirade; criticizing ICE’s detainment center practices and the “pseudo-Christians” who support them, with a bar that now lives in my head:
Pseudo-Christians, y’all indifferent, kids in prison ain’t a sin? Shit
if even one scrap of what Jesus taught connected you’d feel different
what a disingenuous way to piss away existence, I don’t get it
I’d say you lost your goddamn minds if y’all possessed one to begin with
The combination of two of the best verses spit by any rapper(s) this year and production help from El-P and long time RTJ collaborator Little Shalimar, create a bouncy, aggressive, deeply truthful banger. “walking in the snow” not only encapsulates the crux of 2020 with lyrics that will become more powerful as they age, but will also forever be associated with the Black Lives Matter movement and the determination to expose continuing racial and societal injustices.
The sonic palette of RTJ4 holds an extremely unique place in El-P’s discography. Jamie is the definition of a self-made 90’s hip-hop legend. This is the dude who put New York underground hip-hop on the map with Company Flow, and he did it with his unique flavor of dark, noisy, dense, boom-bap. Whether he was doing it with the help of Rawkus, or completely independently during his Definitive Jux run, El-P has never made music with the intention of becoming famous. Funcrusher Plus, Fantastic Damage,I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead, and Cancer 4 Cure are all highly revered as industrial, technical, abrasive, and completely unsuitable for the radio or a party. The fact that three songs on RTJ4 could easily be heard on the radio, at a party, or in a TV series credits scene is frankly, astounding. In a 2002 interview/documentary on El-P’s budding record label Def Jux, he stated that his friend bet him $500 that he could not make a beat that was “happy”. At the time of the interview, El-P said that he had not won that bet yet. While I might not qualify the beats on RTJ4 as “happy”, if you showed El-P the beat for “JU$T” in 2002, I believe he might have won that bet.
Pharell opens “JU$T” with the pre-chorus, spitting varied examples of how we’re all slaves to our current system throughout the track, over echoing snares and bouncy 808s before bright synth chords and up-tempo hi-hats burst in while Killer Mike delivers the chorus, pointing to the fact that the majority of the people featured on American currency owned slaves at one point in their lives. Mike’s verse touches on the fact that he has committed crimes to get where they are today. Mike is publicly open about his past as a drug dealer. So why is he a criminal, but Benjamin Franklin isn’t? These are the people who built our country, and they built it on the backs of slaves. He illustrates this theme with a more recent examples:
You believe corporations runnin marijuana? Ooh (how that happen?)
and your country gettin ran by a casino owner (ooh)
pedophiles sponsor all these fuckin’ racist bastards (they do)
When corporations are able to sell cannabis legally, but the government continually incarcerates people who trap, our president is a notoriously fraudulent businessman, and the people who helped put him in power run a pedophile ring, yet none of them face consequences and are allowed to continue to profit and remain in power while people suffer; well, we might be closer to slaves than previously imagined.
Rage Against The Machine frontman Zach de la Rocha also makes his mandatory feature appearance at the end of “JU$T”. As the only artist to feature on three Run The Jewels albums, Zach is essentially an unofficial member of the group at this point. His fiery verse is spit with the same “Rage” energy that set him apart in the mid-90’s, ending the track questioning his place in a capitalist society as a recipe for his inevitable demise, since his “breath”, or art, as his weapon to express himself is still being exploited for other’s profit.
Continuing with RTJ4’s heavily synthetic sonic palette, “never look back” features wavering synth leads resting above the slow-jams snappy snares and thumping bass, while a haunting voice echoes in the background. This unsettling aura provides additional gravity for Jamie and Mike to continue self-reflecting on defining moments in their childhood, and as well as how far they’ve come from those moments. Mike and El are both self-made men, and while they have a certain fondness for those gritty moments that defined them, moving forward in life is undoubtedly more important.
Skeletal drums reminiscent of a slowly pounding heart opens “pulling the pin”, before rhythmic hi-hats and textured, watery synths fluttering in the upper register resting above a bouncy synth lead, and punchy 808s, burst in. The track digs itself into a slower, marching groove and shows the duo figuratively doing exactly what the title implies. Painting a portrait of a society that has turned on itself, Mike and El are ready to pull the pin and start over.
The duo both detail their despise for the ruling class, pointing out multiple examples of how the elite have designed our society to keep poor people in their class. Simultaneously recognizing their own hypocrisy for profiting in a system that inherently discriminates; Mike reflects on his own success, knowing that living the lifestyle he enjoys is one built on oppression, and expresses the guilt that has caused him. El-P opens with a brutal metaphor for police, implying that they’re the root cause of the “wretched state of danger” our society exists within, and that the only effective corrective action is to numb yourself with drugs. Despite his advice, Jamie knows this is not a permanent solution, but one that causes more self-inflicted wounds.
The final piece of the puzzle that is RTJ4, “a few words for the firing squad” begins to close the album with ever crescending strings, and loud, thunderous drums which never seem to resolve, continuing throughout their verses. While the drums that lead to nowhere can be sonically unpleasant, the unresolved melodies are intentionally representative of their current mindsets. Their verses are reflective and grim, but simultaneously optimistic and envisions a world where tragedy is a less common occurrence.
El is grateful for what he has now but recognizes his entire life has been skewed by traumas, so out of place feels normal for him. He reflects on his current success, noting that the worst people tend to end up with the most, which makes becoming “rich” something not as desirable as it once was.
Mike opens up about the death of his mother who died while he was on an airplane, admitting his struggles to not cope with his trauma with opioids. However, his wife provides him the most important reason to stay clean “but my queen/say she need a king/not another junkie rapper fiend” while a heartbreaking saxophone solo highlights the gravity of his lyrics.
The track ends with what sounds the like wrap-up voiceover to a TV show, a conceptually satisfying ending, as the opening track “yankee and brave (ep.4)” began with El-P stating:
”This week, on Yankee and The Brave”
This voiceover paints the duo as brothers on the run from the law and crooked cops, and while this does close this “episode” out as intended, the critic in me is bothered by the slightly kitschy outro to such a spectacular album. The voices singing over and over, “Brave, brave, braaaaaave, Yankee and the Brave” would be, simply put, better left on the cutting room floor. The ending of this track alone is what knocks my score of this album down a few points. Despite its stellar lyrical content, with drums that never seem to reach that “holy shit!” moment, and the easily skippable outro, it’s upsetting to me that an album this great ends on such a low note.
Overview
RTJ4 is by far my favorite album of the year. El-P’s cutting edge approach to their sound, blended with lyrical content that continues to be more relevant by the day, the duo have come together with what is objectively their most accessible album to date. RTJ4 is the natural evolution of sound and subject matter for the duo; taking the foundation set by Run The Jewels 3 and evolving it into a more concise, more accessible, and more conceptual album. While I still personally prefer the “fuck the world” intensity and experimental nature of Run The Jewels 2, RTJ4 opens themselves up to a whole new world of exposure, and when you’re as talented as these two, you know they’re going to capitalize on it. RTJ is currently at their apex, and they’ve created an album that will make many new life-long fans going forward.
9.2/10
Discussion Points
  • How does this compare to other RTJ releases? How about in comparison to the member’s solo works?
  • Does the overwhelmingly positive critical reception of this album surprise you?
  • How will this be looked back on in 5 years?
  • What are your favorite lyrics?
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[NEWBIE] Learn from My Experience. Try Your 1st Guitar in Person Before You Buy Online

TLDR at Bottom
Background: Longtime reader, first time poster. I am a 40 something that failed learning guitar from a cheap Strat copy when young. Decided to take guitar up agin late spring 2020 during Covid lockdown. I was limited to places I could order from (open). So, I could not tryout guitars in person. Left with just going off reviews of gear or from what artists I listen to play. I decided to concentrate on places close to me in case there were problems with the guitar. Also, went with a place that said they did a full setup before sale, which was important to me from my research. The place I settled on was 45 minutes away.
The Gear: The first guitar I went with was a Squire Classic Vibe 70’s Custom telecaster. This was a demo model sold at a discount. It arrived with fret buzz on the low E and it appeared the brass saddles were out of whack with the whole bridge rattling. I contacted the guitar shop and sent them videos. They tried have me do adjustments over the phone. No luck in improving. The suggested sending the guitar back. I didn’t want to wait 7-10 days to receive it back. I felt like I was losing time (The irony once you read the rest of the story). They offered to return and exchange for another guitar if I brought it in person. Doing the exchange outside. I jumped on it. As I didn’t want to wait and the telecaster didn’t feel comfortable to hold or play.
The guitar I exchanged it with what was available was an Epiphone Les Paul Muse. This again was a demonstration unit. I drove did the exchange. I got it home and to my disappointment there was fret buzz on Low E, A and D strings. Also, this guitar even felt more uncomfortable to play. I kept feeling like I was slouching down around the guitar to play, I’m 6’ 3”. I contacted the guitar shop again and they offered to fix or exchange. I took the exchange option again to save time and it was uncomfortable.
With stock they had I settled on a Gretsch 5222. Drove and did the exchange again. This was a demonstration unit as well. This guitar was definitely the best out if the 3 comfortability wise. Sound, Fit and finish was the best too. One thing I struggled with was the thin-u neck. I found that doing chords I could never get my thumb comfortable as it was so thin by the headstock. Later, learning songs I found the bridge rattling when I did power chords and such 10 fret or higher. Sounded terrible. Turned up my amp high to try to cover the noise. I decided to change the strings (wanted to try to go down to 9’s to see if it would make easier to play) and do a beginner setup to see that would help with the help of the internets. No improvement. There are few videos and many forum posts about Gretsch bridges rattling. That is what I would hear. So, I decided to try to get this fixed under warranty going through and approved Gretsch dealer right near my house.
I took the Gretsch 5222 do the guitar shop in the dealer network. The person I checked the guitar in with said he felt it was just fret buzz ant the guitar would just need a setup. At this point I’m so frustrated with the sound of the guitar I left it for the full setup for $50. The guitar was finished a week later. I arrived to pick it up and I kid you not, there was still rattle or fret buzz according to them. Although, it was slightly better. They suggested to take it home and try it out through my own amp. If there were still issues bring it back. Well, got it home and I could hear the sounds coming through the amp with headphones even. I brought it back. They worked on the guitar for an hour while I there. They couldn’t get it to stop. They did the old “That is the way it is”, “This is Gretsch’s low line”. The last ditch effort was to move back to a set of factory 10’s. This cleared rattle/buzzing on the E. I still felt like I could hear the A and D string. It was loud in there, hard to tell. I got it home. Through the 2-week holiday stretch and was disappointed that the unwanted sound was still there.
I made the decision to investigate if I could trade it in. I didn’t want to be without a guitar for a week or more. Plus, I never felt good with the 5222. Still felt I was slouching over to play sometimes and the neck being so slim up top. I decided to mostly target larger semi-hallow and hollow guitars. Thought they would be better for me being taller. Researched as much as I could and targeted the usual value picks of Epiphone (335, Coupe, Sherition, 339, Casino, Rivera), Ibenez 73, D’ Angelico DC, etc. I thought the Casino was going to be my favorite.
Went to Guitar Center first. Had a good selection to look at. Setups were all terrible. One was the worst I ever seen; the frets were like knives. Nothing spoke to me. A D’ Angelico DC was probably the best built there. Still felt small, but better than my 5222. It was hard to flag someone to even get a ladder for me. Couldn’t find anyone to estimate my trade. Decided to bail.
There was the original well-known guitar shop I would have gone to way back at the beginning of my Journey if lock down did not happen. I got there and the staff was super helpful and knowledgeable. Totally listened to my situation. They assessed my 5222 and gave me space to look, like I should have done at the beginning. I just went around looked and held all the models. I held Semi-hallows, offsets, telecasters. Didn’t plug them in. Just felt them in my lap and hands. Played difficult chords. Listed to them resonate. It came down to 2 guitars. An Epiphone 335 Figured Blueberry figured and an Ibanez AS73FM Green Valley Gradiation.
There was a clear winner side by side by holding them and plugged in. The Ibenez 73 Flamed Maple Green Valley Gradiation was the guitar for me. The shop offered me $120 less than I paid for my 5222 and I took it without thinking twice. My fingers just fit the Ibanez. The thicker neck feels great. It doesn’t make chords harder for me, it makes it easier. The guitar felt like it fit me. The sustain is fantastic, I can play unplugged. The fit and finish was good. Flamed top looks really cool and I never would have pictured me with a guitar like this. Is the tone the best in the world? No. But, I think they are averagely versatile from what I read, heard and seen. I honestly have to let the tone go. I’m such a beginner I don’t know what good tone is yet. I’m just looking for something I want to pickup all the time, makes it easier for to play and therefore learn. I will upgrade later or may be never. I may always love it.
TL/DR
To beginners similar myself. Don’t just go off reviews/videos and order online. Try out guitars in person first. There is plenty of advice like this that I wished I would have taken from the beginning. The guitar should feel good in your hands, lap, standing, or however you play. I have progressed more in the last 2 weeks than I have in the last 3 months with the right guitar. I really attribute this to the ease of play. I’m not fighting the guitar as much. Going in person will open your eyes to new possibilities you may not have pictured in your head. Plus, you may find issues with the guitar before you purchase. Hope this helps someone.
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Analysis: Does Robin charge you too much for house upgrades and how I concluded she is a diety.

Analysis: Does Robin charge you too much for house upgrades and how I concluded she is a diety.
Ever since a Let’s Play got me into Stardew Valley, I’ve fallen in love with the world. It’s something special, a place to relax and get away from the world’s problems. Here, you can pay bills with the sweat of your own brow, make friends, fall in love, and can escape the drudgery of modern life. It’s magical in its own way.
I’ve played hundreds of hours over multiple save files. I’ve been wondering one thing just recently, however. I remember when I first asked Robin for house upgrades and the sheer bowel-emptying amount she asked for. Seriously? That much for a kitchen? Now that I haven’t left my house for the past several weeks, fear human contact, and have deep dived into the paranormal, I’m overthinking something constantly: with regards to modern housework, does Robin the carpenter over or under charge you for her work?
To figure this out, it’s going to require a fair bit of math and a lot of guesswork. I’m going to have to establish a lot of ground rules but I’m going to try and be as accurate to real world costs as I can. We need to learn four things:
  • What year does the game take place so we can calculate accurate inflation?
  • What is the square footage of the house and its upgrades?
  • What is the exchange value of gold, the game’s currency?
  • What is the cost of Robin’s labor?
Let’s tackle the first. To do this, I scoured around to look for modern conveniences. Primarily, I found these five:
  • Leah mentions she has a laptop
  • The carpentry shop sells Plasma screen TVs.
  • There is what appears to be an old Apple computer monitor in Harvey’s clinic and Maru’s room.
  • Sam has an electric guitar and what looks like a plasma screen computer monitor in his room.
  • In Mr. Qi’s casino, the slot machines do not have a lever. This is important because that gives us a firm earliest date of 1963.
Another interesting factoid is the number of Cathode-ray TVs you see in Stardew Valley. These are the precursors to plasma screens, which were in turn succeeded by LCD screen TVs. Additionally, a large number of your starter houses comes preequipped with Cathode-ray TVs. Granted, this may be because the farmhouse was abandoned for many years before you came along, but there exists another such TV in 1 River Road where we often see George watching his shows. I will concede that George and Evelyn are quite old and may not have the tech savvy nature of Sebastian to get something more modern, so that can’t be an accurate measurement. Plus, Alex’s mental acumen is a little... questionable.
As for crafting recipes, there really isn’t anything worth talking about. Magic items I won’t talk about because it has no real world comparison; that also throws out the wizard shop’s items. The furniture catalog has nothing of note to pinepoint a date, and nor does Pierre’s General Store, Joja Mart, Joja Warehouse, the Blacksmith, Stardrop Saloon, or Marnie’s ranch. Leah doesn’t mention anything about her laptop, so that is of little help.
So the casino gives us a low bound. Although manufacturing of the plasma screen TV stopped in the US in 2014, plasma screen TVs were losing their market shares around 2007 and factories were shutting down. As you can buy them like hotcakes and fill a shed with them, 2007 is our upper bound.
The price for plasma screens was quite pricey for residential homes. 1995 was the year 42 inch plasma screens became commercial, and some had home installation priced somewhere around US$15,000. Still not quite the size of the queen or king sized bed you and your spouse have (the size of the plasma screen in the game), but sixty inch plasma screen TVs were sold around the year 2000, and that is plenty big. Given the size of the screen in the game is roughly three tiles just like your bed, I think it’s safe to say this is around the size of our estimate. Our rough year range is now 1995 to 2007. Let’s split the difference and say the game takes place in 2001.
We have our year.
To calculate the size of our farmhouse, we need some baseline measurement. Luckily, the game is pixelated so we can be quite accurate in our measurements. Unluckily, we have no confirmed height of anything, so we have to intuit some things. Reddit user asparagus made this excellent size chart, so while I can just use that and save myself a lot of work, let us do some measurements of our own and then measure the farmhouse with both this method and asparagus’ method.
First, there is the height of plants, but those can vary widely. For instance, you can pot prickly pear cactuses in your farmhouse, but their height can vary anywhere between one and seven feet. Plant height is a no go. The average height of a minifridge is forty three inches (109 cm) tall, so unless you are a dwarf, that’s not right either. The fences are also a good starting point, as most agricultural fencing stands at four feet (1.2 m).
Here we don’t have to do much; all fences are forty eight pixels in height. Four feet equals out to forty eight inches (121.92 cm). It doesn’t get more perfect than that!
Trigger warning: incoming math.
Now comes the really tricky part: getting the dimensions of each iteration of your farmhouse, and squinting at my computer screen like a mole in order to count pixels; we must include walls as well as that is included in square footage. Our first iteration has pixel measurements of 704x496. Add in the doorway (136x64pixels), and then we’ll still convert for square feet. 704 * 496 + (136 * 64) = 318,452 pixels/sq, which (dividing by 12^2) converts to 2,211.47 ft/sq. Damn, we’re well on our way for most modern mansions.
I have to have messed something up (205.45 m/sq, btw). The average firebox (the inside of a fireplace where you burn wood) tends to be around 32x20 inches (81.28x50.8 cm). Ours is... 72x40. Twice as large. I also haven’t even begun to calculate the farmhouse’s height because Robin is beginning to scare me.
Alright, new plan, we’re going with asparagus. I married Haley and took her measurements. She is 104 pixels tall, and since she is 65 inches (165.1 cm) according to asparagus, that gives us a measurement of .625 inches/pixel (1.5875 cm/pixel).
Side note, I really want some Twizlers right now.
So instead of having pixels as at a 1:1 ratio, we have something a little more lenient, but things are looking a little... grim. We’ll have to convert each individual amount, so we have (704 * .625) * (496 * .625) + ((136 * 64) * .625^2) for 124,395.31 inches/sq, 863.86 ft/sq., 80.25 m/sq. But still, we haven’t even begun to calculate the actual volume of our farmhouse yet, so these numbers are going to explode.
I’m beginning to think Robin is Hestia. Yoba is not the only deity in this town.
Alright, calculating the rest of the floor spaces is a little boring so let’s speedrun this.
Wall height for the farmhouse is 140 pixels, so (140 * .625) * 124,395.31 inches/sq / 12^3 = 6,298.95 ft^3 (178.36 m^3) for the farmhouse, and 25,800.51 ft^3 (730.58 m^3) using my method.
Just... let’s move on.
Second iteration has me doing a fair bit more work.
Wall height is 135 pixels, and rightmost—wait, the walls are shorter? Weird. Anyway, the rightmost room has dimensions of 486 for width by 375 for depth (and the same cubby dimensions), giving us cuboid dimensions of 24,603,750 pixels^3, which converts to 14,238.28 ft^3 (403.18 m^3), and 3,476.14 ft^3 (82.83 m^3) using asparagus' method
Middle corridor has a dimensional width of 42 pixels by 87 depth, giving us a total of 285.47 ft^3 (8.08 m^3), and 69.69 ft^3 (1.97 m^3) using asparagus' method.
Leftmost room (the kitchen) has a width of 870 and depth of 375, with a doorway of 136x64. That gives us a cuboid area of 314,019.38 ft^3 (29,173.11 m^3), and 6,388.74 ft^3 (180.91 m^3) using asparagus' method.
That gives us a grand total for a tier two home of...
... 328,543.13 ft^3 (29,584.37 m^3) using my method and
... 9,934.58 ft^3 (281.31 m^3) using asparagus' method.
So Robin added at a minimum 3,635.63 cubic feet to your house in three days by herself. Even if you extend the days and months to roughly align with our own calendar, that would be a mere nine days. How much powdered starfruit did she snort in order to do that by herself? I 100% believe Emily is the town’s dealer. I didn’t even calculate the length of the farmhouse loft. It’s doable, and even though you can’t enter it in the game, a bigger farmhouse means a bigger loft judging by the look of it.
Anyway, I’m not going to calculate the loft area right now. I’m not going to calculate the other tiers of your farmhouse either, even though that was my intent when I started this analysis. The math is easy enough, but it gets boring to type, and no doubt to read. Plus, I’m a little stunned by Robin's carpentry acumen. C’mon Robin, stop upgrading my house. Exercise with the girls, dance with your husband, smoke some weed, I dunno, RELAX.
But in a strange way, it makes a weird sort of sense. Pretty much no one plays the game with auto-run turned off, but do so for a moment. See how fast you move. That is your normal pace, and auto-run is you, an Olympian god, sprinting around town every second of every day, helping the shit out of everyone whether they want it or not, snorting the same starfruit mixture you got from Robin to keep going, who may have gotten it from Linus (my money is still on Emily). We’ve become so accustomed to seeing the run animation as our default I almost didn’t realize it doesn’t translate to modern life. The boards in your house, I almost took those as your normal 2x4 planks of wood (which actually measure 1.5x3.5, the world lies to me). They are not. They are almost the width of your entire body, and your walking pace (sorry I can’t get an exact pixel measurement) covers roughly one and a half boards, a similar length to a normal human gait. The art style fooled even me until now, but your house is massive.
Let’s just answer our other two questions. What is the exchange rate? Calculating the exchange rate of a fictional world is always tricky as they have different concepts of rarities, but I’ll give it the ol’ college try. Once again, I can’t do anything with magic. Let’s first list some things of note:
  • Iridium is fairly easy to get around Stardew Valley once you are able, and that is a rare and valuable metal, with a current price of US$1,510 per troy ounce.
  • You can purchase a golden column to place on your farm, and gold has a current price of US$1,643 per troy ounce
  • Conversely, while the first two are rare and valuable metals, crops such as corn are valued at prices like 150g, a very unusually high amount if exchanged 1:1 to USA dollars.
  • Going back to plasma screen TVs, we can use its price history and then convert currencies to Stardew Valley gold.
Now you may be tempted to say we can’t translate iridium and gold’s prices to real world market values, and normally you may be right, but there are some extenuating circumstances in the game: the town is right next to two very large mines. It is even a plot point once you clear the glittering boulder that the water carries ore from deep inside the mountain. Yes, gold and iridium are valuable, but your location to ore veins is important; gold and iridium may be uncommon resources but you have access to very specific places where they are more common, otherwise known as the scarcity heuristic). This also explains two facts about iridium: discounting magic, iridium is quite rare in the game, just like real life. Secondly, Clint’s prices make a lot more sense not only because it’s endgame material, but because iridium is super dense and has a very high melting point, thus making it a very difficult material to work with.
But by far the biggest challenge of this question is figuring out whether or not items you produce factor in the cost of your labor or not. For instance, lace is made of simple materials that even in the days of Victorian England, it was easy to get. However because lace was so time consuming to make, it could command absurd prices. Thus, one of the first things we need to discover is whether or not the game takes into account cost of labor or not.
So I am going to take you all back to school and talk about someone who’s old and dead: Adam Smith. It was he who talked about the cost of labor in his book The Wealth of Nations, and because of that, I bring up this particular line:
“...From century to century, corn is a better measure than silver, because, from century to century, equal quantities of corn will command the same quantity of labour more nearly than equal quantities of silver.”
Why did I mention corn above? This is why. Prices may vary, but agriculture has been around for thousands of years and the cost of a farmer’s labor equals about the same.
According to Dylan Baumann, Stardew Valley corn plants have a profit value of 535 gold per plant. Our corn plant profits are about as high as they can get without adding something new into the mix, and we don’t want that yet.
Let’s set some ground rules:
  • Cultivatable farm space on the standard farm equals out to 3,427 spaces, but we’ll round that down to 3,350 for iridium sprinklers, iridium watering can, and scarecrows, equaling maximum farming with no loss of crop.
  • We’ll keep Dylan’s ground rules, so no fertilizer.
  • No preserves, jams, wine, and juices.
  • No farming efficiencies and crop selling bonuses.
  • No use of the greenhouse to grow crops outside of the growing season.
If you plant the entire farm with corn and stop harvesting on Fall day 28 when the growing season ends, that lets you harvest a total of 11 ears of corn per plant. Multiply that by 3,350, we get a total of 36,850 ears of corn for your entire farm. Corn is measured in bushels, and a bushel of corn can be anywhere between 40 and 60 ears of corn, but we’ll say you really pack it in for 60, meaning your growing season for corn produces 36,850 / 60 corn for a total of 614.17 bushels per year.
The USDA has a 2001 labor value of corn at US$2.92 per acre (and that matches the Iowa labor statistic), and using 156 bushels per acre, that brings our labor cost per bushel at... US$00.02. That’s a real pittance. Considering bushels of corn retailed around $2.11 per bushel in 2001, that is an incredible markup of 184.85 times.
We’re almost done with the dreaded math, I swear.
Corn retails at 100g apiece in Stardew Valley(You get 50 gold from Pierre, so he has a 100% markup), meaning the labor cost should be around 184.85 times less that amount, meaning it takes about 0.54 gold to make one ear of corn.
Your average US farmers salary $55,000 and $100,000, and we’ll take the middle of $77,500 for our measurements. Dividing the farmer’s salary by the total ears of corn our farmer grows in Stardew Valley, we get a labor cost per ear of corn in US dollars of $2.10 per ear of corn. Now we multiply this by our markup ratio to get the IRL retail cost of corn in Stardew, getting US$237.08! Damn that better be some good eating! We divide that number by the Stardew Valley retail cost of corn, netting us a real world conversion of gold of, drumroll please, $2.37 US dollars per gold in 2001.
Now just for funzies, let us calculate the actual salary of your famer in Stardew Valley. Multiplying your 36,850 ears of corn by 50 gold (your selling price of gold, not the retail price of 100g), that nets you 1,842,500 gold per growing season. Multiply that by the dollagold conversion we just calculated and your real life gross income comes out to be US$436,672,500.
Give me all of the golden clocks, wizard.
Three questions down, one more to go. Currency conversion was rather tricky because it involved quite a lot of math, but this last question, what is the cost of Robin’s labor, that requires the most assumptions. There’s an easy answer and a hard answer.
Robin’s upgrades, except for the last, require you the farmer to give her resources in addition to gold. The simple answer is you are providing materials in order to keep the raw gold cost down. This means that the first house upgrade, 10,000 gold, is strictly her labor cost as the 450 wood is all the raw materials she needs to build. 3 days * 3 months (to adjust Stardew month lengths to our month lengths) comes out to Robin working an IRL equivalent to 9 days. Taking 10,000 gold / 9 days equals a cost of 1,111.111 gold per day, and considering Robin has snorted enough powdered starfruit to have 20 hour work days, that comes out to 55.56 gold per hour.
Just to be sure, let’s see if the math holds up for the last upgrade. That one requires a cost of 100,000 gold and comes preequipped with 33 casks. You do not provide the resources for the casks, meaning that comes included with the cost. Casks cannot be sold, but the materials required to make them are 20 wood and 1 hardwood, which Robin will provide for the same 100% markup (meaning 4 gold and 30 gold respectively). 4 gold * 30 gold * 33 casks comes out to 3,960 gold. Using the same calculations for the first house iteration, we get (100,000 gold - 3,960) / (3 days * 3 months) / 20 hours for a total of 533.56 gold per hour.
Not even close to our first estimate. We could just average them together for (533.56 + 55.56) / 2 = 294.56 gold, and that would be the easy answer. It would be nice to settle for the easy answer.
Let’s find the hard answer. We are going to calculate labor cost per square footage, and luckily most of the work has been done over the course of several google spreadsheets. To find the cost of materials and money per upgrade volume we get the formula (Upgrade volume - Base Volume) / 10,000 gold. This gives us a grand total of cubic material built per gold of...
...2,573.26 in^3/gold, 30.27 ft^3/gold, 2.89 m^3/gold using my method and
...628.24 in^3/gold, 0.36 ft^3/gold, 0.01 m^3/gold using asparagus’ method.
Let’s see if the math holds up for the basement upgrade and dammit I just realized I got to do more pixel measurements now. Hold on, be back in an hour.
Alright, I’m back. We don’t need to do any subtraction for the previous volume of the house considering the cellar is its own little area, but we still need to subtract the value of the materials used for the casks. The cellar comes out to a grand total of cubic materials built per gold of...
...386.91 in^3/gold, 0.22 ft^3/gold, 0.01 m^3/gold using my method and
...94.46 in^3/gold, 0.05 ft^3/gold, 0.0015 m^3/gold using asparagus’ method.
Huge discrepancy.
Before I get into my reasoning why, let us outline what we know first.
  • We’re pretty sure the game takes place in 2001.
  • We have the exact sizes of each house upgrade calculated with two different methods.
  • We have a certified exchange rate of US$2.37 at that point in time.
  • We have two different methods of calculating the cost of Robin’s labor.
  • The amount of work Robin does during her three(nine?) day job is absolutely obscene.
I come to one conclusion: Robin is a god that has settled down in the world of Stardew Valley.
Here me out. I have three pieces of evidence.
The first is when Robin is hired to take on a house upgrade job no one helps her, not even her husband Demetrius. Your house is right next to hers, so you’re not paying for travel. As we have shown by our calculations above and in the gDoc spreadsheet, that is a massive amount of work. It’s simply not possible for a human to accomplish such a monumental task. Robin claims she built her own home herself with this line from the game...
“Have I told you that I built our house from the ground up? It's definitely been the highlight of my career so far.”
...so we know her carpentry acumen is impressive enough for the job, but she has severely understated her skill. Homeadvisor pegs a house costing anywhere between US$150,000 to US$500,000 (US$102,005.53 to $340,018.44, adjusted for 2001 inflation), but even adjusted for inflation, Robin absolutely underbids the current housing market. Those inflation adjusted values, when converted to gold, come out to a range of 43,040.31g-143,467.70g. Granted, these prices are for a complete house, not adding onto a current house, but even if we half the value you are getting one hell of a discount.
The second piece is Robin’s language. The sheer passion for her work speaks wonders..
“Wood is a wonderful substance... it's versatile, cheap, strong, and each piece has its own unique character!”
...but perhaps she is just passionate about what she does. Many people are, but knowing what we do about how dirt cheap and blindingly fast she works let’s go into more detail about some things, specifically three lines. The first...
“Our little plan worked out well, don't you think? Pam and Penny seem really happy.”
...is said after Pam’s house undergoes an upgrade. “Our” plan? Sure, you are the one that buys the upgrade and Robin has to build it, but I can’t help but feel there is a double meaning behind this language. It is done out of the kindness of Robin’s heart and the materials have to come from somewhere, so she can’t do it for free, but it wasn’t about the money, as we have stated previously. It was about Penny.
Pam is a somewhat contentious person because of slobbish and slovenly nature. She is immediately and irrationally angered when Penny tries to pick the place up. She drinks heavily...
“\sigh*... My mother definitely has a problem with going to the saloon too much. But it's best not to dwell on bad things, right?”*
...doesn’t seem to understand not paying her tab has some consequences, and doesn’t realize what her habits have done to her daughter’s psyche.
Then you, the player come along. Pam is okay with the simple things in life, but you help Penny with her worries and insecurities, and then with you and Robin together, you give Penny everything she needs to help her shed those worries. She has a house that doesn have problems with rain, two friends who look out for her, her mom has a job, and most importantly she has peace of mind and in a world fraught with problems, that is truly priceless.
This is the second line...
“Hey! I heard some weird noises last night, and woke up this morning to find the quarry bridge completely repaired! It's a miracle of woodworking!”
...and it occurs once you offer items to the community center junimos to get the quarry bridge repaired.
It is also a bald-faced lie.
The junimos are good, don’t get me wrong, but we’ve seen what Robin can do with our own two eyes. She is absolutely incredible at her job, and while I may give it to her she has no idea what junimos are or what they are capable of, we have proof that the act of restoring the bridge in one night is not out of the realm of possibility for her. A miracle, yes, but I’m certain she can beat the junimos’ time.
Lastly, there is one quote from her that is just... it opens up some very interesting questions. When she says...
“My parents were bewildered when I told them I wanted to be a carpenter. They were pretty old-fashioned.”
...how old are her parents when they consider carpentry too new-fashioned for them? Carpentry is one of the world’s oldest professions. If they were old-fashioned, why were they bewildered?
This line is just so fascinating to me. Robin is incredibly skilled, but I cannot rationalize carpentry being too newfangled for parents to wrap their head around. Who were they? Where are they from? I know your secrets, Robin, I know your parents are gods, too.
The third and final piece is the contrasting pieces of the world at large. Just like ours, it’s a little depressing. Joja Corp runs dozens of what even Cyberpunk would consider a dataslave farm. The world is flooded with consumerism run amok, Orwellian surveillance, and rampant urbanization. The Ferngill Republic is in the middle of a war with the Gotoro Empire and Kent still suffers PTSD from being in a prisoner of war camp.
Stardew Valley isn’t just a town to retire in, it is a place of respite and healing. There are three confirmed magic users deeply tied to the town’s mystical roots. The bears speak and encourage you to manage the world around you. You are rewarded for restoring balance to the valley by being able to recycle things you don’t need. Your main resource in the game, gold, also doesn’t matter that much; if it ever slips into the negative, nothing bad ever happens. You must just work to raise it back up. There is no lose condition in the game.
In many respects it is similar to the Gaiaism philosophy that all living beings are connected, each relying and depending on each other in order to maintain a peaceful coexistence. You help Shane with his nihilism and depression, Sebastian with his ability to express and accept affection, Sam with his dreams, Kent with his problems, Leah with her ambitions, Haley with her generosity and narcissism, or even simple goals like Penny’s idea of a quiet domestic life.
Whether it is the addicted, lost, or scorned, everyone is welcome and everyone can have a home in Stardew Valley. No one embodies this more than Robin who just wants a simple life. Whether it is her own house or her own boat during the Dance of the Moonlight Jellies, Robin builds it herself. The feel of wood grain, the smell of lacquer, the stickiness of stain, the thrum of the saw, and the bite of the axe. Robin doesn’t charge you nearly enough for your house upgrades because it is not about the money. Woodworking is what she loves and she lives in a place where barterism, kindness, family, and friendship substitute so many of life's modern problems and inconveniences.
Friendship increases in the game aren’t just a measurement of achievements, a means of getting more recipes, or more candles lit on a grave. You are making friends and getting to know these people for who they are and everyone’s life is bettered because of it. The amount of love I’ve seen for Linus is just staggering. Shane, in all of his melancholy and despite him not being a suitor in the original version of the game, is loved by so many. I know some despise Haley, but I love that I was able to show her what kindness can do for people.
You are in a gentle and loving place, and you are loved.
What a better place for a god to reside? A quiet town filled with peace and love, seeped in nature and the old magics of yore. A loving mate, a family to raise. Land to share with those that forage from its bounty. It’s all she needs.
Robin’s role in all of this? She desires neither worship nor admiration. She is just a friend. A god, certainly, but a friend first and foremost who is just settling down in a quiet town looking for a little peace.
​
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Image by MagicallyClueless
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Theory: One Stardew Valley villager is secretly a God

Ever since a Let’s Play got me into Stardew Valley, I’ve fallen in love with the world. It’s something special, a place to relax and get away from the world’s problems. Here, you can pay bills with the sweat of your own brow, make friends, fall in love, and can escape the drudgery of modern life. It’s magical in its own way.
I’ve played hundreds of hours over multiple save files. I’ve been wondering one thing just recently, however. I remember when I first asked Robin for house upgrades and the sheer bowel-emptying amount she asked for. Seriously? That much for a kitchen? Now that I haven’t left my house for the past several weeks, fear human contact, and have deep dived into the paranormal, I’m overthinking something constantly: with regards to modern housework, does Robin the carpenter over or under charge you for her work?
To figure this out, it’s going to require a fair bit of math and a lot of guesswork. I’m going to have to establish a lot of ground rules but I’m going to try and be as accurate to real world costs as I can. We need to learn four things:
Let’s tackle the first. To do this, I scoured around to look for modern conveniences. Primarily, I found these five:
Another interesting factoid is the number of Cathode-ray TVs you see in Stardew Valley. These are the precursors to plasma screens, which were in turn succeeded by LCD screen TVs. Additionally, a large number of your starter houses comes preequipped with Cathode-ray TVs. Granted, this may be because the farmhouse was abandoned for many years before you came along, but there exists another such TV in 1 River Road where we often see George watching his shows. I will concede that George and Evelyn are quite old and may not have the tech savvy nature of Sebastian to get something more modern, so that can’t be an accurate measurement. Plus, Alex’s mental acumen is a little... questionable.
As for crafting recipes, there really isn’t anything worth talking about. Magic items I won’t talk about because it has no real world comparison; that also throws out the wizard shop’s items. The furniture catalog has nothing of note to pinepoint a date, and nor does Pierre’s General Store, Joja Mart, Joja Warehouse, the Blacksmith, Stardrop Saloon, or Marnie’s ranch. Leah doesn’t mention anything about her laptop, so that is of little help.
So the casino gives us a low bound. Although manufacturing of the plasma screen TV stopped in the US in 2014, plasma screen TVs were losing their market shares around 2007 and factories were shutting down. As you can buy them like hotcakes and fill a shed with them, 2007 is our upper bound.
The price for plasma screens was quite pricey for residential homes. 1995 was the year 42 inch plasma screens became commercial, and some had home installation priced somewhere around US$15,000. Still not quite the size of the queen or king sized bed you and your spouse have (the size of the plasma screen in the game), but sixty inch plasma screen TVs were sold around the year 2000, and that is plenty big. Given the size of the screen in the game is roughly three tiles just like your bed, I think it’s safe to say this is around the size of our estimate. Our rough year range is now 1995 to 2007. Let’s split the difference and say the game takes place in 2001.
We have our year.
To calculate the size of our farmhouse, we need some baseline measurement. Luckily, the game is pixelated so we can be quite accurate in our measurements. Unluckily, we have no confirmed height of anything, so we have to intuit some things. Reddit user asparagus made this excellent size chart, so while I can just use that and save myself a lot of work, let us do some measurements of our own and then measure the farmhouse with both this method and asparagus’ method.
First, there is the height of plants, but those can vary widely. For instance, you can pot prickly pear cactuses in your farmhouse, but their height can vary anywhere between one and seven feet. Plant height is a no go. The average height of a minifridge is forty three inches (109 cm) tall, so unless you are a dwarf, that’s not right either. The fences are also a good starting point, as most agricultural fencing stands at four feet (1.2 m).
Here we don’t have to do much; all fences are forty eight pixels in height. Four feet equals out to forty eight inches (121.92 cm). It doesn’t get more perfect than that!
Trigger warning: incoming math.
Now comes the really tricky part: getting the dimensions of each iteration of your farmhouse, and squinting at my computer screen like a mole in order to count pixels; we must include walls as well as that is included in square footage. Our first iteration has pixel measurements of 704x496. Add in the doorway (136x64pixels), and then we’ll still convert for square feet. 704 * 496 + (136 * 64) = 318,452 pixels/sq, which (dividing by 12^2) converts to 2,211.47 ft/sq. Damn, we’re well on our way for most modern mansions.
I have to have messed something up (205.45 m/sq, btw). The average firebox (the inside of a fireplace where you burn wood) tends to be around 32x20 inches (81.28x50.8 cm). Ours is... 72x40. Twice as large. I also haven’t even begun to calculate the farmhouse’s height because Robin is beginning to scare me.
Alright, new plan, we’re going with asparagus. I married Haley and took her measurements. She is 104 pixels tall, and since she is 65 inches (165.1 cm) according to asparagus, that gives us a measurement of .625 inches/pixel (1.5875 cm/pixel).
Side note, I really want some Twizlers right now.
So instead of having pixels as at a 1:1 ratio, we have something a little more lenient, but things are looking a little... grim. We’ll have to convert each individual amount, so we have (704 * .625) * (496 * .625) + ((136 * 64) * .625^2) for 124,395.31 inches/sq, 863.86 ft/sq., 80.25 m/sq. But still, we haven’t even begun to calculate the actual volume of our farmhouse yet, so these numbers are going to explode.
I’m beginning to think Robin is Hestia. Yoba is not the only deity in this town.
Alright, calculating the rest of the floor spaces is a little boring so let’s speedrun this.
Wall height for the farmhouse is 140 pixels, so (140 * .625) * 124,395.31 inches/sq / 12^3 = 6,298.95 ft^3 (178.36 m^3) for the farmhouse, and 25,800.51 ft^3 (730.58 m^3) using my method.
Just... let’s move on.
Second iteration has me doing a fair bit more work.
Wall height is 135 pixels, and rightmost—wait, the walls are shorter? Weird. Anyway, the rightmost room has dimensions of 486 for width by 375 for depth (and the same cubby dimensions), giving us cuboid dimensions of 24,603,750 pixels^3, which converts to 14,238.28 ft^3 (403.18 m^3), and 3,476.14 ft^3 (82.83 m^3) using asparagus' method
Middle corridor has a dimensional width of 42 pixels by 87 depth, giving us a total of 285.47 ft^3 (8.08 m^3), and 69.69 ft^3 (1.97 m^3) using asparagus' method.
Leftmost room (the kitchen) has a width of 870 and depth of 375, with a doorway of 136x64. That gives us a cuboid area of 314,019.38 ft^3 (29,173.11 m^3), and 6,388.74 ft^3 (180.91 m^3) using asparagus' method.
That gives us a grand total for a tier two home of...
... 328,543.13 ft^3 (29,584.37 m^3) using my method and
... 9,934.58 ft^3 (281.31 m^3) using asparagus' method.
So Robin added at a minimum 3,635.63 cubic feet to your house in three days by herself. Even if you extend the days and months to roughly align with our own calendar, that would be a mere nine days. How much powdered starfruit did she snort in order to do that by herself? I 100% believe Emily is the town’s dealer. I didn’t even calculate the length of the farmhouse loft. It’s doable, and even though you can’t enter it in the game, a bigger farmhouse means a bigger loft judging by the look of it.
Anyway, I’m not going to calculate the loft area right now. I’m not going to calculate the other tiers of your farmhouse either, even though that was my intent when I started this analysis. The math is easy enough, but it gets boring to type, and no doubt to read. Plus, I’m a little stunned by Robin's carpentry acumen. C’mon Robin, stop upgrading my house. Exercise with the girls, dance with your husband, smoke some weed, I dunno, RELAX.
But in a strange way, it makes a weird sort of sense. Pretty much no one plays the game with auto-run turned off, but do so for a moment. See how fast you move. That is your normal pace, and auto-run is you, an Olympian god, sprinting around town every second of every day, helping the shit out of everyone whether they want it or not, snorting the same starfruit mixture you got from Robin to keep going, who may have gotten it from Linus (my money is still on Emily). We’ve become so accustomed to seeing the run animation as our default I almost didn’t realize it doesn’t translate to modern life. The boards in your house, I almost took those as your normal 2x4 planks of wood (which actually measure 1.5x3.5, the world lies to me). They are not. They are almost the width of your entire body, and your walking pace (sorry I can’t get an exact pixel measurement) covers roughly one and a half boards, a similar length to a normal human gait. The art style fooled even me until now, but your house is massive.
Let’s just answer our other two questions. What is the exchange rate? Calculating the exchange rate of a fictional world is always tricky as they have different concepts of rarities, but I’ll give it the ol’ college try. Once again, I can’t do anything with magic. Let’s first list some things of note:
Now you may be tempted to say we can’t translate iridium and gold’s prices to real world market values, and normally you may be right, but there are some extenuating circumstances in the game: the town is right next to two very large mines. It is even a plot point once you clear the glittering boulder that the water carries ore from deep inside the mountain. Yes, gold and iridium are valuable, but your location to ore veins is important; gold and iridium may be uncommon resources but you have access to very specific places where they are more common, otherwise known as the scarcity heuristic). This also explains two facts about iridium: discounting magic, iridium is quite rare in the game, just like real life. Secondly, Clint’s prices make a lot more sense not only because it’s endgame material, but because iridium is super dense and has a very high melting point, thus making it a very difficult material to work with.
But by far the biggest challenge of this question is figuring out whether or not items you produce factor in the cost of your labor or not. For instance, lace is made of simple materials that even in the days of Victorian England, it was easy to get. However because lace was so time consuming to make, it could command absurd prices. Thus, one of the first things we need to discover is whether or not the game takes into account cost of labor or not.
So I am going to take you all back to school and talk about someone who’s old and dead: Adam Smith. It was he who talked about the cost of labor in his book The Wealth of Nations, and because of that, I bring up this particular line:
“...From century to century, corn is a better measure than silver, because, from century to century, equal quantities of corn will command the same quantity of labour more nearly than equal quantities of silver.”
Why did I mention corn above? This is why. Prices may vary, but agriculture has been around for thousands of years and the cost of a farmer’s labor equals about the same.
According to Dylan Baumann, Stardew Valley corn plants have a profit value of 535 gold per plant. Our corn plant profits are about as high as they can get without adding something new into the mix, and we don’t want that yet.
Let’s set some ground rules:
If you plant the entire farm with corn and stop harvesting on Fall day 28 when the growing season ends, that lets you harvest a total of 11 ears of corn per plant. Multiply that by 3,350, we get a total of 36,850 ears of corn for your entire farm. Corn is measured in bushels, and a bushel of corn can be anywhere between 40 and 60 ears of corn, but we’ll say you really pack it in for 60, meaning your growing season for corn produces 36,850 / 60 corn for a total of 614.17 bushels per year.
The USDA has a 2001 labor value of corn at US$2.92 per acre (and that matches the Iowa labor statistic), and using 156 bushels per acre, that brings our labor cost per bushel at... US$00.02. That’s a real pittance. Considering bushels of corn retailed around $2.11 per bushel in 2001, that is an incredible markup of 184.85 times.
We’re almost done with the dreaded math, I swear.
Corn retails at 100g apiece in Stardew Valley(You get 50 gold from Pierre, so he has a 100% markup), meaning the labor cost should be around 184.85 times less that amount, meaning it takes about 0.54 gold to make one ear of corn.
Your average US farmers salary $55,000 and $100,000, and we’ll take the middle of $77,500 for our measurements. Dividing the farmer’s salary by the total ears of corn our farmer grows in Stardew Valley, we get a labor cost per ear of corn in US dollars of $2.10 per ear of corn. Now we multiply this by our markup ratio to get the IRL retail cost of corn in Stardew, getting US$237.08! Damn that better be some good eating! We divide that number by the Stardew Valley retail cost of corn, netting us a real world conversion of gold of, drumroll please, $2.37 US dollars per gold in 2001.
Now just for funzies, let us calculate the actual salary of your famer in Stardew Valley. Multiplying your 36,850 ears of corn by 50 gold (your selling price of gold, not the retail price of 100g), that nets you 1,842,500 gold per growing season. Multiply that by the dollagold conversion we just calculated and your real life gross income comes out to be US$436,672,500.
Give me all of the golden clocks, wizard.
Three questions down, one more to go. Currency conversion was rather tricky because it involved quite a lot of math, but this last question, what is the cost of Robin’s labor, that requires the most assumptions. There’s an easy answer and a hard answer.
Robin’s upgrades, except for the last, require you the farmer to give her resources in addition to gold. The simple answer is you are providing materials in order to keep the raw gold cost down. This means that the first house upgrade, 10,000 gold, is strictly her labor cost as the 450 wood is all the raw materials she needs to build. 3 days * 3 months (to adjust Stardew month lengths to our month lengths) comes out to Robin working an IRL equivalent to 9 days. Taking 10,000 gold / 9 days equals a cost of 1,111.111 gold per day, and considering Robin has snorted enough powdered starfruit to have 20 hour work days, that comes out to 55.56 gold per hour.
Just to be sure, let’s see if the math holds up for the last upgrade. That one requires a cost of 100,000 gold and comes preequipped with 33 casks. You do not provide the resources for the casks, meaning that comes included with the cost. Casks cannot be sold, but the materials required to make them are 20 wood and 1 hardwood, which Robin will provide for the same 100% markup (meaning 4 gold and 30 gold respectively). 4 gold * 30 gold * 33 casks comes out to 3,960 gold. Using the same calculations for the first house iteration, we get (100,000 gold - 3,960) / (3 days * 3 months) / 20 hours for a total of 533.56 gold per hour.
Not even close to our first estimate. We could just average them together for (533.56 + 55.56) / 2 = 294.56 gold, and that would be the easy answer. It would be nice to settle for the easy answer.
Let’s find the hard answer. We are going to calculate labor cost per square footage, and luckily most of the work has been done over the course of several google spreadsheets. To find the cost of materials and money per upgrade volume we get the formula (Upgrade volume - Base Volume) / 10,000 gold. This gives us a grand total of cubic material built per gold of...
...2,573.26 in^3/gold, 30.27 ft^3/gold, 2.89 m^3/gold using my method and
...628.24 in^3/gold, 0.36 ft^3/gold, 0.01 m^3/gold using asparagus’ method.
Let’s see if the math holds up for the basement upgrade and dammit I just realized I got to do more pixel measurements now. Hold on, be back in an hour.
Alright, I’m back. We don’t need to do any subtraction for the previous volume of the house considering the cellar is its own little area, but we still need to subtract the value of the materials used for the casks. The cellar comes out to a grand total of cubic materials built per gold of...
...386.91 in^3/gold, 0.22 ft^3/gold, 0.01 m^3/gold using my method and
...94.46 in^3/gold, 0.05 ft^3/gold, 0.0015 m^3/gold using asparagus’ method.
Huge discrepancy.
Before I get into my reasoning why, let us outline what we know first.
I come to one conclusion: Robin is a god that has settled down in the world of Stardew Valley.
Here me out. I have three pieces of evidence.
The first is when Robin is hired to take on a house upgrade job no one helps her, not even her husband Demetrius. Your house is right next to hers, so you’re not paying for travel. As we have shown by our calculations above and in the gDoc spreadsheet, that is a massive amount of work. It’s simply not possible for a human to accomplish such a monumental task. Robin claims she built her own home herself with this line from the game...
“Have I told you that I built our house from the ground up? It's definitely been the highlight of my career so far.”
...so we know her carpentry acumen is impressive enough for the job, but she has severely understated her skill. Homeadvisor pegs a house costing anywhere between US$150,000 to US$500,000 (US$102,005.53 to $340,018.44, adjusted for 2001 inflation), but even adjusted for inflation, Robin absolutely underbids the current housing market. Those inflation adjusted values, when converted to gold, come out to a range of 43,040.31g-143,467.70g. Granted, these prices are for a complete house, not adding onto a current house, but even if we half the value you are getting one hell of a discount.
The second piece is Robin’s language. The sheer passion for her work speaks wonders..
“Wood is a wonderful substance... it's versatile, cheap, strong, and each piece has its own unique character!”
...but perhaps she is just passionate about what she does. Many people are, but knowing what we do about how dirt cheap and blindingly fast she works let’s go into more detail about some things, specifically three lines. The first...
“Our little plan worked out well, don't you think? Pam and Penny seem really happy.”
...is said after Pam’s house undergoes an upgrade. “Our” plan? Sure, you are the one that buys the upgrade and Robin has to build it, but I can’t help but feel there is a double meaning behind this language. It is done out of the kindness of Robin’s heart and the materials have to come from somewhere, so she can’t do it for free, but it wasn’t about the money, as we have stated previously. It was about Penny.
Pam is a somewhat contentious person because of slobbish and slovenly nature. She is immediately and irrationally angered when Penny tries to pick the place up. She drinks heavily...
“\sigh*... My mother definitely has a problem with going to the saloon too much. But it's best not to dwell on bad things, right?”*
...doesn’t seem to understand not paying her tab has some consequences, and doesn’t realize what her habits have done to her daughter’s psyche.
Then you, the player come along. Pam is okay with the simple things in life, but you help Penny with her worries and insecurities, and then with you and Robin together, you give Penny everything she needs to help her shed those worries. She has a house that doesn have problems with rain, two friends who look out for her, her mom has a job, and most importantly she has peace of mind and in a world fraught with problems, that is truly priceless.
Then there is this line...
“Hey! I heard some weird noises last night, and woke up this morning to find the quarry bridge completely repaired! It's a miracle of woodworking!”
...and it occurs once you offer items to the community center junimos to get the quarry bridge repaired.
It is also a bald-faced lie.
The junimos are good, don’t get me wrong, but we’ve seen what Robin can do with our own two eyes. She is absolutely incredible at her job, and while I may give it to her she has no idea what junimos are or what they are capable of, we have proof that the act of restoring the bridge in one night is not out of the realm of possibility for her. A miracle, yes, but I’m certain she can beat the junimos’ time.
Lastly, there is one quote from her that is just... it opens up some very interesting questions. When she says...
“My parents were bewildered when I told them I wanted to be a carpenter. They were pretty old-fashioned.”
...how old are her parents when they consider carpentry too new-fashioned for them? Carpentry is one of the world’s oldest professions. If they were old-fashioned, why were they bewildered?
This line is just so fascinating to me. Robin is incredibly skilled, but I cannot rationalize carpentry being too newfangled for parents to wrap their head around. Who were they? Where are they from? I know your secrets, Robin, I know your parents are gods, too.
The third and final piece is the contrasting pieces of the world at large. Just like ours, it’s a little depressing. Joja Corp runs dozens of what even Cyberpunk would consider a dataslave farm. The world is flooded with consumerism run amok, Orwellian surveillance, and rampant urbanization. The Ferngill Republic is in the middle of a war with the Gotoro Empire and Kent still suffers PTSD from being in a prisoner of war camp.
Stardew Valley isn’t just a town to retire in, it is a place of respite and healing. There are three confirmed magic users deeply tied to the town’s mystical roots. The bears speak and encourage you to manage the world around you. You are rewarded for restoring balance to the valley by being able to recycle things you don’t need. Your main resource in the game, gold, also doesn’t matter that much; if it ever slips into the negative, nothing bad ever happens. You must just work to raise it back up. There is no lose condition in the game.
In many respects it is similar to the Gaiaism philosophy that all living beings are connected, each relying and depending on each other in order to maintain a peaceful coexistence. You help Shane with his nihilism and depression, Sebastian with his ability to express and accept affection, Sam with his dreams, Kent with his problems, Leah with her ambitions, Haley with her generosity and narcissism, or even simple goals like Penny’s idea of a quiet domestic life.
Whether it is the addicted, lost, or scorned, everyone is welcome and everyone can have a home in Stardew Valley. No one embodies this more than Robin who just wants a simple life. Whether it is her own house or her own boat during the Dance of the Moonlight Jellies, Robin builds it herself. The feel of wood grain, the smell of lacquer, the stickiness of stain, the thrum of the saw, and the bite of the axe. Robin doesn’t charge you nearly enough for your house upgrades because it is not about the money. Woodworking is what she loves and she lives in a place where barterism, kindness, family, and friendship substitute so many of life's modern problems and inconveniences.
Friendship increases in the game aren’t just a measurement of achievements, a means of getting more recipes, or more candles lit on a grave. You are making friends and getting to know these people for who they are and everyone’s life is bettered because of it. The amount of love I’ve seen for Linus is just staggering. Shane, in all of his melancholy and despite him not being a suitor in the original version of the game, is loved by so many. I know some despise Haley, but I love that I was able to show her what kindness can do for people.
You are in a gentle and loving place, and you are loved.
What a better place for a god to reside? A quiet town filled with peace and love, seeped in nature and the old magics of yore. A loving mate, a family to raise. Land to share with those that forage from its bounty. It’s all she needs.
Robin’s role in all of this? She desires neither worship nor admiration. She is just a friend. A god, certainly, but a friend first and foremost who is just settling down in a quiet town looking for a little peace.
​
https://preview.redd.it/vxedrolha3w51.png?width=507&format=png&auto=webp&s=d109cc65b008db74dc4ef74d20083c6eeb2cfc60
Image by MagicallyClueless
submitted by doctorsirus to GameTheorists [link] [comments]

1999 HxH is bizarre

HxH (2011) is my favorite anime. I've also read through the manga twice so far. It's easy to say I love this series, and I believe Togashi has created one of the best stories of all time. The dubbed version of the 1999 anime was reuploaded to youtube about a month ago. I was excited to see a different perspective on my favorite series, but to not need to actively sit and read a subtitled version. I could put it on in the background and watch it passively. Or so I thought. The 1999 version of this show is so weird that it's distracting. I'd even go so far to say it's not good. I've only watched up until Kurapika fights Uvo but here are some of my thoughts at this point:
Overall, I'm just glad I saw the 2011 version of the anime first.
submitted by layinbrix to HunterXHunter [link] [comments]

Dr. Dog Survivor: Abandoned Mansion — Round 2

Welcome! Vote for whichever song you think should be ELIMINATED and the last song standing wins.
------------------------
We're making our way through Dr. Dog's 2016 album Abandoned Mansion.
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Yesterday "I Know" was eliminated with 15 of 51 votes.
Ode to “I Know”: I have a lot to say about Abandoned Mansion. I think it’s one of the most interesting and tragic stories of an album release with a satisfying ending (like Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Kesha’s Rainbow). It was recorded in 2014, fresh off the heels of B-Room but ANTI- didn’t want to release it, favoring The Psychedelic Swamp. Then came 2016, which was the universe’s dry-run for 2020. It was heartache after heartache: David Bowie, Merle Haggard, Prince, Leonard Cohen, capped with the biggest “fuck-you” to science, culture and decency: a reality TV bozo becoming the American president.
Dr. Dog had decided to part ways with ANTI- but still had Abandoned Mansion. Just a few weeks after the election they dropped it on Bandcamp with little fanfare for free streaming or $10 to purchase, all proceeds going to the Southern Poverty Law Center. There was no tour behind it, no merch or marketing campaign. It felt like the potential last move of a band with no label and no plan, I sincerely wondered if they’d decided to call it quits. There is, however, a really great press release that I’ll quote:
​
Its a mood record. What I call Easy Peasy listening. Nothing too jarring or atonal. No blips or bloops or anything else that might unsettle you. There’s plenty of upright bass for any of you tall people. And, also plenty of acoustic guitar for those of you trying to live off the grid. Oh, and the harmonies put God’s own angels to shame. Also lightweights. We did a song a day for two weeks. And, almost everything was tracked live, except for some pretty egregious organ clams that we had to punch in over. Thematically, this is Dr. Dog meat and potatoes. Our proverbial wheelhouse. Songs of the oldest questions. Songs as tools to finding oneself. And most importantly, songs of acceptance. Acceptance of yourself and acceptance of the others around you.
​
We all know they came roaring back with Critical Equation and if you were fortunate enough to catch their most recent Wwwinterlude tour you know they’re on the absolute top of their form. Abandoned Mansion is a melancholy album with a glimmer of hope. The universe knew we didn’t need it in 2014 and saved it for us when it could do some good for us and the world.
Anyway, on to “I Know”: I imagine Dr. Dog will tour until they’re old men. My mind’s eye visualizes Scott sitting on a velvet stool in a smoky casino lounge, crooning this song at 3am between sips out of a sweaty tumbler. The room could be empty or filled to capacity, I imagine he’d sing it as truthfully and earnestly the same.
I think y’all voted this song out because it makes you sad. It makes you sad for Scott and it makes you sad to have to reflect on yourselves. Lord knows I hate to be alone with my own thoughts. I definitely hate to objectively think about the sum of my life. I make a lot of assumptions about you, fellow Dr. Dog fans. We’re not the same but we’re all in this together.
The harmonica is a divisive instrument. It’s a harsh sound but it matches this song’s no-punches-held message. Like the rest of the album it’s a super slim arrangement: simple drumming, piano, and upright bass. The backing “oohs” that come in at 2:30 send tingles down the spine after Scott’s crooning has already primed the pump. Lyrically this song is a gut punch. There’s some beautiful metaphors but a total lack of whimsy, not allowing the listener space to escape the reality we’re being asked to face.
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Eliminated so far:
  1. I Know — 15/51 — 29%
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Still in the running:
🗳 Which song should be ELIMINATED? Vote at this link: https://strawpoll.com/5b6uq6c1y
Voting ends Friday, September 25 at 9am MT.
submitted by trevorbolliger to DrDog [link] [comments]

morning joe

The vaccine trade
The tug of war between cyclicals and tech stocks will likely continue for the next few weeks as traders weigh growing vaccine optimism against rising coronavirus cases and lockdown measures. The last few Mondays have seen outsized gains given strong vaccine results from Pfizer (PFE) and Moderna (MRNA), while AstraZeneca (NASDAQ:AZN) and the University of Oxford became the latest to report an interim analysis of their clinical trials overnight (see below). Cyclicals will likely start today's session with a leg up given the news as Dow futures rose 0.7% vs. the 0.4% advance of the Nasdaq. Predictions are also growing that the Fed will unveil more monetary action when it meets in December after the central bank said it will comply with a Treasury request to return unused funds meant to backstop five emergency lending programs. Interim results from Astra-Oxford jab
One regimen, given to some 2,700 people, showed an effectiveness of 90% when trial participants received a half dose, followed by a full dose at least one month apart. The other dosing regimen, given to nearly 9,000 people, showed 62% efficacy when given as two full doses at least one month apart. The combined analysis from both dosing regimens found average vaccine effectiveness of 70%. Despite a lower average efficacy rate than its rivals, the British shot has some distribution advantages. While vaccines from Pfizer (PFE) and Moderna (MRNA) have to be stored frozen, the Astra-Oxford (AZN) shot can be kept at refrigerator temperature and comes at a potentially lower cost.
Vaccine access and distribution
At this weekend's summit in Riyadh, G20 leaders pledged to ensure fair distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, drugs and tests around the world so that poorer countries were not left out of a post-coronavirus recovery. "We will spare no effort to ensure their affordable and equitable access for all people," read the communique. "We recognize the role of extensive immunization as a global public good." One of the questions still out there is what role America will play in the process. So far the U.S. hasn't joined COVAX, which is the WHO's flagship vaccine distribution plan.
Less than three weeks
"On the 11th or on the 12th of December, hopefully the first people will be immunized across the U.S., across all states, in all the areas where the state departments of health will have told us where to deliver the vaccines," Moncef Slaoui, head of the government's Operation Warp Speed, told CNN's State of the Union. Current plans forecast another milestone around May: a 70% immunization rate across the U.S., which "would allow for true herd immunity to take place." Pfizer (NYSE:PFE) and BioNTech (NASDAQ:BNTX) have already requested emergency use authorization for their product, while Moderna (NASDAQ:MRNA) will finish its application by the end of the month. Even if (or when) approved, there is uncertainty over whether the general public will trust the jab enough to take it. According to a Pew Research Center report in September, only about half of U.S. adults say they would get a COVID-19 vaccine.
Coronavirus therapies
A COVID-19 antibody cocktail from Regeneron Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:REGN), including casirivimab and imdevimab, has received Emergency Use Authorization from the FDA to treat patients who are not hospitalized but are at high risk of developing the disease. The cocktail was one of three pharmaceutical treatments given to President Trump for treatment of COVID-19 in October. It's the second antibody drug cleared this month for emergency authorization to use in a similar set of COVID-19 patients after Eli Lilly's (NYSE:LLY) bamlanivimab previously had won approval. Previous drugs cleared for COVID-19 use, such as Gilead's (NASDAQ:GILD) remdesivir, were only authorized for hospitalized patients. REGN +4.9% premarket.
Portfolio rebalancing
"We see some vulnerability in equity markets in the near term from balanced mutual funds, a $7T universe, having to sell around $160B of equities globally to revert to their target 60:40 allocation either by the end of November or by the end of December at the latest,” according to JPMorgan Chase. "If the stock market rallies into December, there could be an additional $150B of equity selling into the end of the month by pension funds that tend to rebalance on a quarterly basis," added strategists led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou. For the retail investor, is the 60/40 portfolio still the way to go? Recent contributors on Seeking Alpha have suggested otherwise based on pricing and real returns. See articles by Jussi Askola and KCI Research.
Pandemic hammers retail
Guitar Center, owned by private equity firm Ares Management (NYSE:ARES), has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy as the coronavirus pandemic moved shopping online and weighed on purchases of new music gear. The company, which has nearly 300 stores across the U.S., as well as subsidiaries including Music & Arts, has negotiated to have $375M in debtor-in-possession financing from its existing lenders and intends to raise $335M in new senior secured notes. Guitar Center will continue to stay in business during the bankruptcy process, but it could miss another major shopping period due to weaker consumer spending this holiday season.
Lockdowns bite
Economic activity across the eurozone plunged in November after members of the bloc introduced new lockdowns and social restrictions to contain the spread of coronavirus. The flash eurozone PMI composite output index, which tracks both manufacturing and services sectors, came in at 45.1, marking the lowest reading in six months. Meanwhile, the ECB said it will continue its pandemic emergency purchase program as long as COVID-19 persists and continues to disrupt regular economic activity. Things aren't looking brighter. Germany is looking to extend its current lockdown into December as the number of coronavirus infections remains high across the country.
Latest China crackdown
The Trump administration is close to issuing a list of 89 Chinese aerospace and other companies that would be unable to access U.S. technology exports due to their military ties, according to Reuters. That would restrict companies like Commercial Aircraft Corp of China, which is looking to compete with Boeing (NYSE:BA) and Airbus (OTCPK:EADSY), as well as Aviation Industry Corporation of China. The list, if published, could further escalate trade tensions and comes just ten days after President Trump unveiled an executive order prohibiting U.S. investments in Chinese companies that Washington said are owned or controlled by the Chinese military. Go Deeper: GE, Honeywell among those that have supply deals with COMAC and AVIC.
What else is happening...
Nevada cuts capacity limit for casinos and entertainment.
Zucker expected to leave CNN (NYSE:T) in early 2021 - Vanity Fair.
Retail rotation faces reversal with COVID Black Friday.
Can the SPAC-tacular returns in the EV space ride on?
Drilling rig operator Noble Corp. (NYSE:NE) to exit Chapter 11.
Europe likely to lift Boeing (BA) 737 MAX grounding in January.
Today's Markets
In Asia, Japan closed. Hong Kong +0.1%. China +1.1%. India +0.4%. In Europe, at midday, London +0.3%. Paris +0.6%. Frankfurt +0.8%. Futures at 6:20, Dow +0.7%. S&P +0.6%. Nasdaq +0.4%. Crude +1.4% to $43.01. Gold -0.4% at $1865.70. Bitcoin +3.1% to $18693. Ten-year Treasury Yield +2 bps to 0.85%
Today's Economic Calendar
8:30 Chicago Fed National Activity Index 9:45 PMI Composite Flash 11:30 Results of $56B, 2-Year Note Auction 1:00 PM Results of $57B, 5-Year Note Auction
submitted by upbstock to Optionmillionaires [link] [comments]

Trying to find Les Paul but they feel weird to me?

Posted a thread a few weeks ago about my next guitar, but need some help. I was deciding whether to focus on adding a Strat, Tele, or Les Paul. Went to Guitar Center and tried a few of each. The Strats weren't really right for me -- I didn't really like the feel or the tone. I didn't think I'd like the Teles as much as I did, but I really liked the way it felt. Simple and tough and fun. However, I liked the tones I got from the Les Pauls more. (All into a Fender Pro Jr.)
BUT all the Les Pauls I tried felt weird. I tried a Standard, a Traditional, and a 50s Standard. Didn't like the Standard; didn't mind the non-weight relieved models from a weight perspective. What I didn't like were the ergonomics. The damn things just felt weird to me. I didn't realize how small the body would be, and even though I'm used to Gibson scale length, the neck also felt smaller than the SG or Casino I have. It just felt awkward to me, in a way the Tele and Strat didn't, even though it took some adjusting to play those too. I played the Traditional for a while, and it didn't feel "right."
I know everyone's different, but I feel like I must be missing something if I can't even get comfortable playing a Les Paul. Anyone else experienced this? I'm wondering if I'd be happier with an ES model if I want that vintage PAF sound, but that feels like it could be too similar to the Casino. Or I wonder if I should go for a Tele since I liked that. I'm worried that the scale length will hold me back as I have only normal-sized hands.
submitted by rainytuesday12 to guitars [link] [comments]

What's Happening in CT: 8/26 - 8/30

Thursday, August 27th:

Friday, August 28th:

Saturday, August 29th:

Sunday, August 30th:

FIND MORE THINGS TO DO HERE, STAY SAFE, SOCIAL DISTANCE, WEAR MASKS, AND HAVE A NICE WEEKEND!

https://www.ctvisit.com/events

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Okay, I played a G2622 Streamliner today and I loved it. So I'm asking the community for opinions on long term, etc. I honestly could go either way, I REALLY like both. Unfortunately buying both isn't exactly an option.

Okay, I played a G2622 Streamliner today and I loved it. So I'm asking the community for opinions on long term, etc. I honestly could go either way, I REALLY like both. Unfortunately buying both isn't exactly an option. submitted by DrPhilter to guitars [link] [comments]

I made a compilation of (almost all) GBF.wiki's April Fools Art Swap references.

Credits to Lumos96 for the some of the screencaps here.
(Please do note that the Expected column are just solely my opinions. If you have any other expectations for the April Fools Art swap of these characters, you might want to share with us here.)
Characters:
Name April Fool "Base Art" Expected
GBF Wiki's Vyrn Ball Vyrn Ball, but it's Red Sphere.
Main Character (untouched, really?)
Albert Albert in his Dragalia Lost rendition.
Aletheia Gandalf (Sir Ian McKellen), Lord of the Rings series
Alexiel Drawn Haruhi Suzumiya in Alexiel outfit (VA Joke: Aya Hirano)
Altair Altair (Assassin's Creed)
Andira Generic cartoon monkey
Anila Generic cartoon sheep Shawn the Sheep? Hibiki Tachibana? Okita Souji (F/GO)? Any freaking Aoi Yuuki role?
Anre A stock image of a potato replaced his body aside from her mustache, and his spear. Pringles
Anzu Futaba A stillshot of Anzu from the idolm@ster anime, with a screenshot of a tumblr post.
Aoidos Crow (Show By Rock!!) (VA Joke: Kishow Taniyama)
Arthur (Event)) Arthur Read Arthur Pendragon) (Fate/Prototype)?
Athena Athena (Saint Seiya) Athena Asamiya (KoF)?
Ayer A stillshot from Fight Club?
Azazel Azazel being runned over by Bacchus' carriage in Shingeki no Bahamut: Genesis anime. Fun fact: It's actually his low HP animation in-game.
Baal Demonic Baal (any depictions or illustrations from history, books, or other media)
Bakura (Yami) Bakura (Yu-Gi-Oh!)
Beatrix Beatrix (Platinum Sky) on an end subtitle from the last episode of Cowboy Bebop. Umineko Beatrice? Divine Comedy Beatrice?
Black Knight A black knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Fire Emblem Path of Radiance Black Knight/Zelgius?
Blazing Teacher Elmott Eikichi Onizuka (Great Teacher Onizuka)
Cagliostro 2019: Alessandro Cagliostro, 2020: Cagliostro (Symphogear)
Cagliostro (Dark)) Cagliostro (Transformed) (Symphogear)
Cagliostro (Summer)) More Symphogear Cagliostro
Caim Caim (Drakengard (PS2))
Cain (Grand)) CnC: Red Alert Kane (Joseph Kucan) Kain Highwind? Biblical Cain?
Cassius (Event)) Image manipulated (Society event spoilers!) Cassius with his head opened up in the fashion of a bottle cap.
Cassius (Summer)) Twitter post screencap.
Catherine (SR)) 2019: Katherine from Catherine. This too was removed from the wiki.
Cerberus Her render from Dragalia Lost, like Lily and Albert?
Ceylan and Clarisse
Charlotta Stock image of potatoes on a box Saber from Fate/stay night?
Charlotta (Light)) Stock image of a lightbulb on a potato. Specifically, a potato battery. Saber from Fate/stay night doing her Noble Phantasm?
Chat Noir 2019: Cat Noir (Miraculous: Tales Of Ladybug & Cat Noir,) although they removed it. Joker, but not in his GBF rendition? Lupin III? Any gentleman thief?
Chloe Kuro/Chloe von Einzbern
Chloe (Summer) Kuro/Chloe von Einzbern in a swimsuit.
Christina 2019: The poker game. 2020: Chris Yukine (Transformed) (Symphogear XV)
Clarisse Drawn rendition of Clarisse with Djeeta and Cagliostro on an explosion in the fashion of "Disaster Girl" meme.
Clarisse (Holiday)) Drawn rendition of Clarisse with Djeeta and Cagliostro on an exploded Christmas tree in the fashion of "Disaster Girl" meme.
Clarisse (Light)) Drawn rendition of Clarisse with Djeeta and Cagliostro on an explosion with flare effects in the fashion of "Disaster Girl" meme.
Clarisse (Valentine)) Drawn rendition of Clarisse with Djeeta and Cagliostro on an explosion with Valentine Chocolates as debris in the fashion of "Disaster Girl" meme.
Colossus Colossus (Marvel Comics) The Colossal Titan? The Colossi from Shadow of the Colossus game?
Cucouroux (SSR) "kokoro" (JP: heart) jokes
Cure Black and Cure White Their character design from their home series.
Dante Dante (Devil May Cry 1 render)
Dante (SR)) Dante (Devil Mary Cry 4 render)
Dante and Freiheit 2019: Some man carrying with a guitar case, featuring Freiheit from granbleu fantasy series. 2020: Dante (Unlockable Super Dante outfit) (Devil May Cry 4) with Freiheit. "Boomer Dante" as his uncap art.
Deliford Delibird (Pokémon)
Deliford (SR)) Delibird (Pokémon) in HD
Dorothy Aqua (Seiyuu Joke)
Drang (Grand)) "What are you gonna do, stab me?" image. Trivia: It was deleted last year, but it came back this year. Gintoki Sakata (VA joke: Tomokazu Sugita)
Drusilla A screenshot of emptied rupies (A reference to her Rupie-spending skillset.)
Eahta Kyoshiro Senyro (Samurai Shodown series)
Ejaeli Kirby with Mike ability (Kirby series)
Elmott "Elmo Rise" meme
Estarriola Kirby with Sleep ability (Kirby series)
Eugen Prinz Eugen (the real ship or its shipfu (Kancolle, Azur Lane) equivalent.)
Eugen (Grand)) Edited brown-hued Mr. Krabs (Spongebob Squarepants) with a eyepatch, and a shotgun. Prinz Eugen (the real ship or its shipfu (Kancolle, Azur Lane) equivalent.)
Europa Europa (moon)/Jupiter II, one of the moons of planet Jupiter. Europa (Fate/Grand Order)?
Eustace Eustace (Courage the Cowardly Dog)
Farrah (Summer)) Farrah Fawcett
Feather All kinds of "feather" in the game as a pun. From top to center, clockwise: Falcon Feather, Mystical Feather, Gleaming Feather, Zephyr Feather, Fortuitous Feather, Satin Feather, and Azure Feather. Missing are the Primarch Pinions, which they're also feathers.
Feather (SR)) Rock Howard (Fatal Fury and King of Fighters series)
Feather (Halloween)) An illustration of a black feather.
Feower Anpanman
Ferry A ferry boat, or her pits.
Ferry (Grand) A ferry boat, or her pits.
Ferry (Halloween) A ferry boat, or her pits.
Ferry (SSR) A ferry boat, or her pits.
Ferry and Tyre
Fif Kirby with Mirror ability (Kirby series) Doraemon (VA joke)
Forte Forte (Megaman series)
Fraux Yukiho Hagiwara (Punishing Fallen Angel) (idolm@ster Starlight Stage: Cinderella Girls) (VA joke: Azumi Asakura)
Freezie Frieza (Dragon Ball Z series) (a "freezing" pun) A freezer.
Friday (Summer)) A stillshot from Rebecca Black's "Friday" music video (probably a thumbnail on Youtube.)
Gachapin The Holiday/New YeaAnniversary Roulette
Galadar The illustration of Pokemon Sword and Shield's Galar region.
Garma His original art with "Level 1 Crook" on top of it, referencing the infamous Mafia City ads (see Yuisis.)
Gawain Char Aznable with MS-06S Char's Zaku II (Mobile Suit Gundam), but somehow the wiki removed it. F/GO Gawain? F/GO Riyo Gawain?
Geisenborger An image of a hamburger (YUM.)
Ghandagoza Akuma (Street Fighter series, but on his Tekken 7 incarnation) after using the Raging Demon Rage Art (referencing Ghandagoza's FLB uncap art.)
Goblin Mage Goblin Mage (Final Fantasy IX)
Grimnir PriConne art of Kokkoro
Grimnir (Valentine)) PriConne art of Kokkoro (New Year)
Haaselia Kaguya (Dynamis Series summon) (moon puns.) The Moon from Soul Eater? The (damaged) Moon from Assassination Classroom? The (shattered) Moon from RWBY? Or that moon from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time?
Haohmaru Hyakkimaru from Dororo
Helel ben Shalem Maggie Simpson (The Simpsons) Koenma (Yu Yu Hakusho)
Io Eeyore (Winnie the Pooh) (pronunciation joke)
Io (Grand)) Nanoha Takamachi (Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha) (VA joke: Yukari Tamura)
Ippatsu This image with Ippatsu's face edited over the man's face.
Izmir Elsa (Frozen)
Jeanne d'Arc Jeanne d'Arc/Ruler from Fate/Apocrypha (Fate/Grand Order, initial art)
Jeanne d'Arc (Dark)) Jeanne d'Arc (Alter) (Fate/Grand Order)
Jeanne d'Arc (Grand)) Jeanne d'Arc/Ruler from Fate/Apocrypha (Fate/Grand Order, 4th Ascension art)
Jeanne d'Arc (SR)) Jeanne d'Arc (Santa Lily Alter) (Fate/Grand Order)
Jeanne d'Arc (Themed)) A screencap of Granblue Fantasy's maintenance page (only works when there's really a maintenance going on.) (referencing her banner started with the servers crashing.) Fate/Grand Order's version of Summer Jeanne).
Johann An image of Johann Strauss, himself or his son.
Joker 2019: Joker (Batman the Animated Series) 2020: still Joker (Batman: the Animated Series, but he's holding a card with his face on it.)
Karteira Tressa Colzione (Octopath Traveler) Francesca (Dragalia Lost)
Katalina (Grand)) Murgleis (her recuitment weapon) Herself rubbing Vyrn??
Kokkoro Rage of Bahamut art of Grimnir (Grimnir Returns)
Kolulu A photo of Yuuki Ono, Gran and Lancelot's voice actor, the Gislalord.
Korwa A Polish "kurwa" joke i.e. Stachu Jones?
Krugne Ryuji Otogi (Yu-Gi-Oh!)
Kumbhira Generic clip art of a boar on a bamboo.
La Coiffe Edward Scissorhands (Johnny Depp)
Lady Katapillar and Vira Vaporeon, Caterpie (Pokémon)
Laguna Laguna Loire (FFVIII), or the Laguna de Bay or the eponymous province in the Philippines.
Lamretta Any liquors? Johnny Walker? Absolut?
Lamretta (R) Any liquors? Johnny Walker? Absolut?
Lamretta (Water) Any liquors? Johnny Walker? Absolut?
Lancelot Lancelot (Saber) (Fate/Grand Order, 4th Ascension art) Lancelot (Berserker) (Fate/Grand Order?) Lancelot from Mike, Lu & Og?
Lecia Lecia's expression with 3 stars on her background (probably a joke as she's the only main story SR character (not counting Rein) without an FLB uncap.)
Leonora Kunoichi (Samurai Warriors)
Levi Leviathan (the Bible,) or the Leviathan/Leviathan Omega in-game?
Levin Sisters Top to bottom: Madoka Kaname (Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica,) Shuten-douji (Fate/Grand Order,) Hibiki Tachibana (Symphogear series.) (VA joke: Aoi Yuuki)
Lilele Ranka Lee (Macross Frontier)
Lily Lily in her Dragalia Lost rendition.
Lily (Event)) Clay Golem with an SR crystal above it.
Lobelia Cioccolata w/ his Stand, Green Day (JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Vento Aureo)
Lucio Lucifer (Shin Megami Tensei series) with 3 image stock katanas and a pair of small wings edited behind him.
Lucius Dio Brando (JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Phantom Blood, episode 1) (VA joke: Takehito Koyasu)
Lucius (Fire)) Dio Brando (JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Phantom Blood, episode 3) (VA joke: Takehito Koyasu)
Lucius (SSR)) DIO w/ ZA WARUDO (JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders) (VA joke: Takehito Koyasu)
Ludmila A mushroom poster named "Poisonous & Psychotropic Mushrooms", originally created by David Arora, a renowned mycologist.
Luna Kaguya Luna (a virtual Youtuber)
Lunalu (SSR)) Lunalu's event portait with a bunch of skill icons on her paper. Said skill icon is "Ground Zero," Sarasa/Threo's notable skill, in which it is notoriously used with Lunalu's Facsimile skill.
Mahira Generic clip art of a chicken with Mahira's string edited on it.
Maria Theresa Maria Theresa Amalia Walburga von Österreich, the ruler of Habsburg dominions, the Duchess of Lorraine, Grand Duchess of Tuscany and Holy Roman Empress.
Mariah Mariah Carey
Marquiares Megumin (KonoSuba) with an pair of angled shades edited in.
Medusa An edited image of a jellyfish with Medusa's eyes, and blushes. F/SN RideMedusa
Medusa (Promo)) Original art of Medusa with LogicLinks logo over it (refers to her required method of recruiting her.)
Melissabelle An MSPaint rendition of a corn.
Melissabelle (Valentine)) An MSPaint rendition of a corn, with a pink heart.
Mirin Kikkoman Aji-Mirin.
Monika FE Three Houses' Bernadetta (VA joke: Ayumi Tsuji), or Doki Doki Literature Club Monika.
Monika (Grand) FE Three Houses' Bernadetta (VA joke: Ayumi Tsuji), or Doki Doki Literature Club Monika.
Mugen A screenshot of a M.U.G.E.N. gameplay. Characters are "Oira GF" by yugusic, and the stage is the "The Grancypher" from Panda Hoodie Grl & friends.
Narmaya Original art with Mao Ichimichi (M・A・O)'s head edited over Narmaya's head.
Narmaya (Holiday)) Original art with Mao Ichimichi (M・A・O)'s head edited over Narmaya's head.
Narmaya (Summer)) Original art with Mao Ichimichi (M・A・O)'s head edited over Narmaya's head.
Narmaya (Valentine)) Original art with Mao Ichimichi (M・A・O)'s head edited over Narmaya's head.
Nemone Original art, repeated all over the place (probably a reference to her catchphrase.)
Nezahualpilli A clip art of a "birdman" holding a spear.
Nicholas Genji (Overwatch)
Nier NieR (Gestalt) US PS3 box art Sakura Matou, or NieR Automata-related crap
Nina Drango "Blush Value" of characters in the wiki superimposed over each other.
Niyon Hiding in a cardbox in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Probably a reference to her appearance in Grand Blues. Notte (Dragalia Lost)
Orchid 2019: A stock image of an orchid flower. 2020: Carl Clover and Deus Machina: Nirvana (Blazblue)
Owen Owen's character design in Shingeki no Bahamut: Manaria Friends.
Paris (Event)) The Eiffel Tower in Paris, France.
Pavidus A screencap of Willie McNabb's tweet.
Pecorine Original art with Mao Ichimichi (M・A・O)'s head edited over Pecorine's head.
Pengy Pingu
Percival Percy the Small Engine (Thomas and Friends)
Petra (SSR) JoJo Stand jokes.
Philosophia Anything regarding Philosophy.
Philosophia (SR) Anything regarding Philosophy.
Predator The Predator) from Alien vs. Predator
Rackam Various panels from Grand Blues of Rackam doing stupid things, and exploding.
Rackam (Grand) Laguna Loire (FFVIII)/Balthier (FFXII) (VA joke: Hiroaki Hirata)
Randall (SR) Sanji from One Piece, Hwoarang from Tekken series?
Rei Rei Ayanami (Neon Genesis Evangelion) (name joke) Anyone with bizarre things in their eyes (i.e. Ciel Phantomhive, Lelouch, Sharingan users, FREAKING SHIKI RYOUGI?)
Reinhardtzar (Grand) (don't bother, it's empty.)
Richard The Jewel Resort Casino Poker game
Richard (SR) The Jewel Resort Casino Poker game
Romeo (Event) Ramza Beoulve (Final Fantasy Tactics), or any similar designs from Akihiko Yoshida.
Rosamia Any of Yui Ishikawa's roles (2B, Enterprise, Mikasa, Violet Evergarden?)
Rosamia (SR) Any of Yui Ishikawa's roles (2B, Enterprise, Mikasa, Violet Evergarden?)
Rosamia (SSR) (She was once had a April Fool quirk, the Colony Laser from Mobile Suit Gundam, but somehow they removed it.) Any of Yui Ishikawa's roles (2B, Enterprise, Mikasa, Violet Evergarden?)
Rosetta (Grand) Kiara Sesshouin? (VA joke)
Sakura Shinguji The commercial with her VA, and Segata Sanshiro.
Sandalphon (Event)) An iPhone 5, with a phone case that looks like a Japanese slipper. It's a visual pun.
Sarunan (Dark)) Sarunan (Dark) in a jar of honey.
Scathacha Scathach (Fate/Grand Order) alternative: Scathach (Shin Megami Tensei)
Scathacha (Valentine) Scathach-Skadi (Fate/Grand Order)
Seofon His Eternal's Summer Vacation outfit, but focused on his abs and crotch.
Seox A Scooby-Doo parody of unmasking Seox, with Gran as Fred and him as a villain in a ghost costume.
Shao The Medicine Seller from Mononoke (no, not the Ghibli one.) (VA joke: Takahiro Sakurai)
Shiva 2019: A title screen of a game based on an Indian Nickolodeon show. 2020: Shiva (Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward)
Siegfried Saber of Black (Siegfried) from Fate/Apocrypha (Fate/Grand Order, 4th Ascension art)
Siegfried (Fire) Sieg from Fate/Apocrypha
Societte (Fire) A stock image of an helicopter.
Sophia Sophia, the Goddess (Warring Triad)) (Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward)
Spinnah 2019: A stock image of a fidget spinner, but somehow they deleted it.
Stan An album cover of "#" by the K-pop girlgroup LOONA. The term "stan" is used within the general pop fandom that means "stalker fan." It is mostly used within the K-Pop fandom.
Sturm (Grand)) Strum (Advance Wars (GBA))
Suzaku Kururugi I can't find them, there's only soup. I mean I'm at soup! I'M AT THE SOUP STORE!!!
Tanya Tanya Degurechaff (Saga of Tanya the Evil) (name joke)
Therese (Event)) Yugi Muto "dueling" (Yu-Gi-Oh!)
Threo 2019: Soul Balm > A stock image of a two-layered cake.
Tiamat Tiamat (Dungeons and Dragons) Beast II (Fate/Grand Order)
Tien Tien Shinhan (Dragon Ball) Something TH-related.
Tsubasa Tsubasa Kazanari (Symphogear XD Unlimited)
Tweyen A kitchen twine (probably a pronunciation pun)
Tyre There's no other reference like Gaston! (Beauty and the Beast, 1991 animated movie)
Uzuki Shimamura Z35 (Azur Lane) (Design and VA joke)
Vajra Generic clip art of a dog with a red scarf, while there's a similar looking fish down there.
Vane A wind vane.
Vania A red apple core (Vampy is core + (potential) The Twilight Saga) reference?)
Viceroy An Iron Cluster. (why?)
Vikala A cartoon illustration of a rat with balloons.
Vira Eevee (Pokémon)
Vira (Grand)) Sylveon (Pokémon) with Luminiera/Chevalier Bits
Vira (Promo)) Flareon (Pokémon)
Vira (SSR)) Umbreon (Pokémon)
Vira (Summer)) Leafeon (Pokémon)
Vira (Wind)) Jolteon (Pokémon)
Volenna (Event)) Lightning (Knight of Etro outfit) (Final Fantasy XIII-2)
Walder (Holiday)) Generic clip art of a man's head with a Christmas tree and Santa's hat at the top.
Wulf and Renie 2019: A stock clip-art of Red Riding Hood and a wolf. 2020: Akazukin (Otogi Jushi Akazukin)
Yggdrasil Suzuho Ueda (idolm@ster Cinderella Girls: Starlight Stage, Smiling Tree+ art)
Yngwie Blastoise (Pokémon) Yngwie Malmsteen
Yodarha (SSR)) An illustration of Yoda (Star Wars) (nickname joke)
Yuisis Her original art with the phrase "Level 100 Boss" over it. Probably a reference to the infamous Mafia City ads (see Garma.)
Yuisis (Fire) 2B (Nier Automata)
Yurius Marluxia (Kingdom Hearts)
Zahlhamelina A stock image of a potato replaced her body aside from her hands, her staff, and the flames.
Zeta A photo of Kana Hanazawa.
Zooey Original art with a screenshot of a tumblr post over it.
Zooey (Promo)) Original art of Zooey with GBF-themed SMBC Visa credit cards on both hands (refers to her required method of recruiting her.)
If something's missing here (especially when they add more April Fools crap on the wiki while I make this,) or any mistakes here, leave a comment.
submitted by Kalafino to Granblue_en [link] [comments]

casino guitars guitar center video

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