Correct Score Tips & Correct Score Predictions For Today's

Does anyone else feel like something is off?
I think the fear has set in.
Even investors holding GME are scared - not knowing when to jump off, afraid they will miss more gains.
Tulip-mania is alive and thriving.
Instead of tulips, it’s short-interest stocks.
The rise of the retail investor is awesome.
It really has been great to see the average person become a millionaire at the expense of billionaires and hedge funds.
Vito’s 🎩 is off to all.
For years and decades Wall Street has tried to make all of this look so difficult and overwhelming that you bought into the system and handed over control.
They made bank and you made 6% - if you were lucky.
COVID and the rise of the Reddit, Discord or whatever is your internet fancy destination to chat stocks has dethroned some of the big boys.
For now.
I think there are some good companies that will be here for the long haul that are shorted and I believe they were shorted out of greed and in a market with no liquidity- it would have worked.
It always did.
Until now.
Short squeezes have always happened, it just wasn’t so public and in a backdrop of massive liquidity and organized legions of traders that are much smarter than they have been given credit for.
These pigs got too fat, became hogs and were slaughtered.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/business-leaders/steven-cohens-fund-point72-suffers-15-loss-amid-gamestop-frenzy-nyt
Now my advice, for what it’s worth, is don’t follow the same path.
Don’t be a hog.
Be a happy, full pig.
I believe the market is 100% disconnected at this point and the bubble is swelling.
Everything has been sold over the past month, growing more and more each day to raise liquidity to either cover 🩳 or buy into the other side of the trade.
What sealed it for me this afternoon was Apple earnings and the reaction by the market.
In what was probably the greatest quarter ever shown by a company and the momentum building on all their services and wearables, it went down.
Maybe it’s up tomorrow morning, but I doubt it.
Any other time other than the current micro-market we are in and $AAPL pops $20+.
The market is priced to perfection on Tech and there is not much more room against the ceiling on the FAANG’s and all their cousins and step-children.
Tech has been what propelled this market through the lows of March 2020.
What’s going to take it from here?
Who does the baton get passed to?
I think it gets dropped and there isn’t a clean hand-off.
It’s going to get rocky and turbulent, until the market finds itself again and corrects the overcorrections and tulip-mania ends.
And it will end.
It always does.
Stonks just don’t go up.
Anyone that follows me knows this and is currently feeling it.
The steel stocks, feeling heavier than the steel itself in everyone’s portfolios.
I’m a bull on steel.
I live it daily and have for 25 years.
I’ve never seen anything like what is going on right now from manufacturers idling last year to not being able to make and ship it fast enough now.
Input prices soared to record levels in second half November, December and early January.
This was due to inventories through the entire supply chain being at record lows.
However, construction and manufacturing have stayed very resilient throughout 2020 and gained steam heading into 2021.
Zero and negative interest rates have become the norm across the world, the ideal backdrop for investment and building.
Governments seem determined to spend their way out of deficits and create jobs and infrastructure across the world.
It has already happened in China.
So, why are prices going down is what everyone keeps asking and more importantly - why are steel stocks going down?!
“It’s priced in!! You are an idiot.”
This is Vito’s DM’s in a nutshell.
My answer is, it’s not.
Was I early - 100%, but March is still a ways off and June feels like next year.
Here is what’s driving prices - scrap and iron ore have pulled back to due to buyers of finished product holding off thinking the market has become overheated, so manufacturers have held off buying inputs, but here are the two most important points to consider:

Manufacturers order books are full for Q1 and Q2 2021. European mills are sold out. US mills have backlogs that are pushing summer. The supply chain for all finished steel products for essentially any industry is bare. The cupboards are empty.

The only reason finished product is sitting anywhere is because transportation cannot be secured to move it.
Especially, ocean freight.
The space is elusive and at prices not seen in my lifetime.
It costs 300% more to move ocean freight today than it did at this time last year and is being auctioned off to the highest bidder in many cases.
When I say the supply chain is broken, I’m talking about the entire chain - from tip to tail.
With this disruption, spot prices on anything steel are staying high and will, even if inputs drop - which brings me to point number two:

I have said we wanted to see prices level on inputs, if they slide a bit, even better. Why? The futures sold over the past 3 months for the next 6 months are at some of the highest price levels we have ever seen. When manufacturers have orders at $1,000+/ton for the next 6 months and inputs drop, margins expand, exponentially.

Do I think the input slide lasts and scrap and iron ore keep dropping?
No.
The Chinese came into the market today and started buying some scrap to test the price action.
European manufacturers have not yet purchased.
If the scrap price remains the same to weak, China will likely buy some more to see what price will firm the market and to put pressure on iron ore prices - as they are the biggest buyer of iron ore in the world.
It’s a game of chicken right now with many players on many levels.
The most similar, recent market I have seen was the 2017 to 2019 market.
Prices on steel and steel stocks started climbing in early anticipation of steel tariffs in the US.
However, then input prices did not move up until February/March 2018 and then the tariffs further spiked the market. Buyers rushed to get orders in and the highest costed material arrived in late 2018.
The market was overbought on oversupply.
A glutton of oversupply that carried into mid-summer 2019.
With oversupply comes lower and lower prices until equilibrium is reached.
That became a challenge as US manufacturers pumped more into the system, absolutely making those that bought imports bleed all year long.
It put many of the speculators and trading companies out of business.
2019 was death by a thousand cuts.
No one has forgotten it, too fresh.
Currently, we are not in a position of oversupply, but quite the opposite.
Shortages may have been artificial in nature due to idling and destocking in 2020, but demand is real.
Countries have already shown signs of being territorial in India and Russia, not allowing exports because of internal demand and considering penalties to discourage.
This is how I see it and my thesis still stays the same.
“What about the tariffs being removed?!”
I don’t see it happening immediately.
If they are removed it will likely be in increments of 5% every 60-90 days to not shock the market.
The tariffs have not been the benefit that many believe they have been to steel in the United States.
They artificially created a bubble that burst long ago in 2019 but no one really noticed.
The tariff is a pure tax that ends up 100% being passed on to the consumer in the end.
China actually subsidized the tariff through Value Added Tax credits on many of the products that were not already dumped in the US.
There was a massive tariff, yet product cost less than before the tariff??
Huh??
Yet no one noticed as China gave away tax credits and manipulated currency.
There was an equal sum game.
The tariff did however keep out European manufacturers that played fair.
They stand to benefit the most from tariffs being lifted in the US.
Imports are healthy if played on a level playing field, as the US cannot support all US demand on all products.
Moreover, this is a global economy and the US isn’t the only place to sell steel anymore.
In conclusion, because I know many of you are asking yourselves - “when will this DD fucking end??”. . . I believe in America. America has made my fortune, and I raised my daughter in the American fashion. I gave her freedom, but I taught her never to dishonor her family. . .and I also believe in the rest of the world pumping more liquidity into infrastructure.
I think it’s becoming quickly obvious that more stimulus is necessary, but needs to be better targeted to those that really need it.
Not to a bunch of retards putting it on red or black.
Steel is all around us and will be used for the green wave.
So will other metals from miners - zinc, copper, cobalt, rare earths.
I’ve shared in previous DD’s that militaries will also be upgraded and how much steel goes into aircraft carriers.
Steel stocks have been slipping day after day for the past two weeks.
I can’t blame you to say, “no fucking way, how many dips can I buy?!?!” - just stop asking me if you are going to print this Friday.
No.
You are not going to print on Friday.
I’m sorry.
I said this was a June play in anticipation of what I have laid out here.
I moved up to April on $MT and March on $VALE based on the sheer volume of order books.
I believed that earnings would be very good and get better through earnings season.
$NUE is tomorrow.
I’m guessing they did very well and will show beats and give decent guidance.
Stock will likely go down.
Why?
Because it’s the trend and the market is disconnected.
I’m somewhat a contrarian investor and it has benefited me more than ever in the past year.
Contrarian investing is a strategy of going against prevailing market trends or sentiment.
The idea is that markets are subject to herding behavior augmented by fear and greed, making markets periodically over- and under-priced - DOES THIS SOUND FAMILIAR?
"Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful," said Warren Buffett, a phrase that encapsulates the contrarian philosophy - THIS IS HARD TO DO, which is why most people don’t.
Being a contrarian can be rewarding, but it is often a risky strategy that may take a long period of time to pay off - CHECK and CHECK - it has been risky and it’s taking time.
I’m still betting on it happening.
So are these guys:
https://fintel.io/so/us/clf/blackrock
I’ve always said, I’d need to be BlackRock to move a market this big. . .that’s a big stake!
I’m sure we will see others as they disclose their holdings over the next months.
Goldman Sachs has even called for the commodity super cycle
https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN29A1QM
They played it right last year and see opportunity on the horizon.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2021-01-08/goldman-traders-score-2-billion-in-commodities-comeback-year
Commodities - the shit that everybody forgot or ran away from.
The land of misfit toys with steel and oil playing nicely together, recoupling.
Since I entered the steel business as a youngster the first thing I learned is “steel follows oil - watch the oil”.
So, I always watched oil prices and they do tend to run in tandem with oil moves.
Since early 2020 those two went their separate ways, by force, not by choice.
It is common for steel market participants to refer to high correlations between oil prices and the prices for scrap and steel. Among other reasons, this is related to supply chains, because the oil industry is a consumer of steel, the price of oil affects the processing and transportation costs of scrap, and oil is viewed as a reflection of a broader economic reality
Oil is gaining strength and projected to keep gaining.
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/images/Fig6.png
EIA forecasts that global oil consumption and production will rise during 2021 and 2022, and global oil inventories will continue to decline during much of that period. EIA expects that Brent prices will average $53/b over the next two years.
“So, where does that put us with steel stocks?!”
In a position I believe to scoop up the short term, as the thrashing that has taken the market down may have finally put some companies in a position to pop off a good earnings beat. Then catch a massive wave of Q1 and Q2 goodness.
The Q2 volumes and margins will be showstoppers and I believe the stocks will be bought up prior in June.
That’s why I gave June options originally as well as common.
We caught a peak, that I did not anticipate to last so long on the downside and the short covering action was further exacerbating the decline of the entire market.
Now, these levels look like complete steals to me - but so did it yesterday and the day before that and the day before that.
Then after writing this entire DD, China announces its cutting capacity.
https://www.metalbulletin.com/Article/3972342/hot-rolled-coil/CHINA-HRC-Prices-gain-amid-call-for-production-cuts.html
Sellers were motivated to raise offers amid higher futures prices, because funds flew into the ferrous market after the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced on Tuesday that it will urge a cut in steel output via mixed measures, according to a Shanghai-based trader.
Huang Libin, a spokesman for the ministry, said they will forbid the increase of steel capacity and encourage mergers and acquisitions in the steel industry to help curb output...
I guess we will see what tomorrow brings.
I never thought I would utter the following words and it feels very weird to say them, but I hope it’s big green dildos.
I missed the nightly prayer group tonight.
Sorry.
Save some dry powder, don’t YOLO anything, diversify so you limit down days and if you are on the $GME merry go round, it’s ok to get off.
I know it’s crazy and you feel like you are part of something big happening, but my feeling is most of the institutions and hedge funds have handed off the baton and it’s just you guys with each other and maybe a couple more smaller positions left. They may call a truce and then it’s Lord of the Flies.
I don’t want to hear the story end that way.
I want everyone to get out and leave them busted.
Then we make the movie.
Until then, I’ll be here.
https://youtu.be/PVDH3MX4MYI
-Vito

JoJo's Bizarre OC Tournament #5: Round 3 Match 6 Anthony ‘Ani’ Oakey and Kamen Rider Volt Versus ?????

The results are in for Match 4. The winner is…
Rushen walked out across the training ground after the four hours had concluded, a beaming smile on his face as she walked up to the four trainers. “Looks like I made some real good choices on you guys, huh? Really put these guys through the ringer!”
The various trainees stood around chatting with each other about their different experiences throughout the day before forming an orderly line once their leader came into view. Many were exhausted, yet at the same time, there was a certain sense of camaraderie there, high spirits… They felt ready to take on the world, yet they were starting to think they may not necessarily need to think of everyone as a potential enemy either.
Fira tilted her head back before taking a few steps forward. “Look, Rushen, compliments don’t keep the lights on or teeth perfect. You gonna pay us or not?”
Rushen took a quick step back and pulled out several light blue envelopes and handed them to both the pairs. “Figured you two would want yours in cash… Don’t lemme hear you spent it on nothing shady, alright?”
Fira almost smiled as she felt what must have been a decent stack of crisp bills. A smirk would do. “That’s satisfactory, yeah.” Byte, then, gave her an expectant look, only to be handed an even-looking cut. “Alright, fine.”
Cab and Inch, meanwhile, simply thanked Rushen for theirs, receiving it through checks as normal people tended to prefer receiving large payments for services.
After payment had been dispersed Rushen took a step back and looked over the paris. “Listen, the boss is impressed with both of you, but she specifically requested that two of you come to speak with her in her office…”
Right… The bonus, huh? The four guest instructors stood, then, tensely… So it was only one team getting it, huh?
“Sauvignon, Nine, c’mon.” Rushen jerked his thumb. “Allday’s a busy woman. Best not to make her wait.”
The Black Hill Estate, with a score of 76 to Graveyard Shift’s 69!

Category	Winner	Point Totals	Comments
Popularity	Black Hill Estate	18-12	Nine votes split 5.5-3.5.
Quality	Tie	24-24	Reasoning
JoJolity	Black Hill Estate	24-23	Reasoning
Conduct	Tie	10-10

“Fira, Byte, you two can go home now… Keep an eye on Elephant Bones. Good eats there. Think between that and what you could do with that gym next door, you’d be better off going legit.”
Byte took an instinctive step forward in protest. “What the hell do you mean? How’s a regimen like theirs gonna get a meeting with the big boss?”
Rushen shrugged and turned away before speaking. “Not my call. You two did good work, though… Really. Remember that when you’re countin’ out your bills there.”
Byte sighed, then, turning to Fira, who shrugged. “Let’s get something to eat, I guess… That’s something to do. What’s even open right now?”
Rushen saw the quartet off in their separate ways with a sigh, folding his arms. Today was a good day… Now, I only hope tomorrow’s as good. The day these recruits and I take down a whole crime ring is fast approaching, and even beyond that… Ugo ain’t just gonna go quietly. I am damn sure he’s gonna start something with that Neighborhood Watch he helped fold into us in Aurelio, and with Oxbow breathing down our necks until we can get peace worked out West of there, I can’t do a thing but hope they don’t act before it’s safe to disband them.
Within the next fifteen minutes Cab and Inch were in an elevator going to the top floor of one of the most imposing buildings in the city: ODIN HQ. As they rose Cab turned to Inch, his brow furrowed. “How much do we even know about this Miss. Allday anyways? You don’t see her around much, just hear her talked about in the news, politicians and protesters and the like… I only really see anything concrete in the form of projects she slaps that name of hers on.”
Inch thought for a moment and spoke. “It… It is a paradox to me, yes. Strange that someone so invested in this city is at once so elusive from it.” She turned to the ticing floor tracker at the top of the elevator steadily going up. “In any case this is a good opportunity. I doubt that people like us get many chances to meet with her, let alone requested by her.”
With that the elevator door slowly opened revealing a large, open office space with a multitude of white boards and empty parfait cups scattered across the space. “Nine, Sauvignon… Correct? It is a pleasure to meet you.” Sitting in the middle at a large, glass desk sat a white-haired woman with as welcoming of a smile as she could muster at the time. The effort of goodwill seemed earnest, but big smiles seemed uncomfortable and foreign on her face.
“My name is Arazu Allday… Though, I suppose you didn’t need to be told that. Ergh, I’m not good at niceties…” She shook her head, quiet and frowning a moment, before looking up with a sterner sort of warmth. “I wanted to thank you personally for your approach to aiding Mr. Smith in instruction. Sure, the combat lessons were good and fine, but the wise know that is far from the only thing this new generation of VALKYRIE needed to learn.”
“I’ll cut to the chase. You’ve done a great thing for us as a company, developing a regimen specifically to take the toxicity of Ugo McBaise and the ‘wisdom’ that he descended from out of those recruits' heads. I think now, they’re on a better track. With all that out of the way though, before we talk more, would either of you like a refreshment? As you can tell, sweetness does not come easy to me, but… Perhaps a parfait would substitute for that.”
There’s still a few hours left yet, as of posting this, to vote and make your voices heard in a bitter 2v2 Battle in a Stairwell.
Scenario:
Sound’s Garden Eastern Strip - Fox’s Penthouse Apartment
“Alright, Toby, you’re doing great! You’re recovering faster than any client I’ve ever had, even… You’ll be running marathons by Summertime like this!”
Toby Fox, the elusive shadow boss of the Entertainment District’s underworld, managed to step away from the bars that his physical therapist had set up for him, limping slightly, yet at the same time, confident in his progress. He had been shot months ago, twice in places where a few centimeters off could have paralyzed him for life, or even killed him, yet he’d managed to be up on his feet, if weakly, before the year had even ended. It would’ve gone a lot faster had he felt safe patronizing the Devil Blue, but… No. Peres Straviat was friendly with No, and with the University Board. Healing up the hard way, out of the public eye, had to do.
He rested his feet in the sand garden he’d made into a workout space, curling his toes against the grains and drinking from a water bottle as the therapist smiled at him. She had a very affable, can-do attitude about her, and he was certain this motivating presence had helped him along as well.
“A fresh start, then… That’s what this is. Tigran and I, we’re clearing our heads of all that nonsense about expansion, and getting back to the roots of what made our enterprise lasting… Intimate, guerilla shows of Stand Users coerced into beating one another senseless!”
“That’s the spirit, Mr. Fox! Oh, Tigran will be delighted to hear you’re in high spirits again! I bet that-”
She paused, then, going silent, before removing a pistol from her tracksuit. “…I just heard something. Someone’s outside. Sounds like a few people… I hear the distinctive shakes of body armor.”
“A raid? How didn’t you notice sooner, with those ears of yours? If… If the sounds were drowned out, then…” He shook his head, the sand around him beginning to swirl into a sort of vortex. “No matter. If it’s VALKYRIE or the police or something finally come for us, then all we need to do is let them tear themselves to pieces against my own defenses! We’ll get away…”
“Well said!” The therapist agreed. “We’ll just walk briskly out! You can handle that on that leg of yours, right?”
“Of course…” Fox smirked, hearing the door beginning to be banged up against and walking closer, his personal sandstorm still meters around, waiting just to its side before concluding. “Alright… Let our guests in.”
But an utterly blind charge into Fox’s attack, the sort of violent and overwhelming rushdown strategies that VALKYRIE had been notorious for before, which Fox himself was basically immune to with even seconds of preparation time, didn’t come. Rather, then, a more careful approach was taken, the enemy Stand Users kiting his range, blocking fire from the therapist’s pistol, and even actively taking time to deprive him of the sand that had been at his feet, cut him off form gathering any more from his little rock garden. Soon enough, he’d needed to make a sort of cone to fend the lot of them off as he backed towards a fire escape, finding his apartment pushed into and himself more and more outnumbered.
As soon as he leapt out of the now-opened window into the escape, bracing himself for some pain on his leg and needing to rapidly climb down anyway, he instead found himself flying far, far back, sonic energies blasting him into a wall adorned with an intricately-woven quilt of a funny white dog, knocking it loose and seeing it land overtop him.
Toby Fox’s mind was racing. These… These couldn’t be VALKYRIE. They were too careful… They fought like anybody cared if they lived or died, and the only property that had been damaged at all was in his own apartment. Some special forces team doing a false flag thing? But why? That was a sonic blast just now, a sound-based strike to his very core, by a helmeted member of the unit who stepped in and approached him fearlessly, something holstered at their side. Could… Could it have been that..?
“Fox, you’re under arrest.”
At the undoubtedly masculine voice which had come from his latest attacker, despite his situation, several guns trained on him as two strong-looking guys pulled him away from any particulate, cuffed him and the physical therapist, was relief that the worst thing he was imagining hadn’t come to pass.
As Rushen Smith pulled his helmet off and took a breath, he spoke into a communicator attached to his ear, putting his finger up to it as he adjusted the sunglasses he had of course decided to wear under full body armor. “Team A reporting in. We got ‘em… Looks like we caught him in the middle of PT. No casualties, but the physical therapist pulled a gun on us too… We’re booking her too.”
“So it’s all gone smoothly, then? Excellent! Our other teams are reporting similarly… Only one who’s slipped away is Golden Boy.”
“Keep lookin’. Man going around in as much gold as that guy can’t stay hidden for long. Over and out.”
“To be honest…” Fox couldn’t help but chuckle in disbelief, breathily, wobbling on his uneasy legs. It made him happy, again, to overhear that Tigran (nobody else could be ‘Golden Boy,’ right?) “If I was going to go down, I was expecting something a little more… Climactic.”
“Yeah, well, this is it. You’re going downtown.”
The Woods at Aurelio - An Abandoned Police Station, Slightly Earlier
“Bull shit!”
Uh oh. Ugo was in a bad mood, and Rob was out shopping. Anthony ‘Ani’ Oakey, sitting in the former small-town jail cell which had been renovated into a damn serviceable emergency living space, sat up, realizing that nobody else was around at all. He’d have to bear the brunt of this guy ranting, huh?
The two of them had outright faked their deaths to get closer to the famously unhinged head of VALKYRIE… They had to, in order to make this mission work without Byron painting a target on the collective backs of all of their friends, or worse, them thinking they’d lived on to betray them. They had seen the man for what he was, not just some aggressive meathead who only knew how to rush forward, but something far more dangerous.
He was a schemer who had quietly been polishing off plans to, if need be, potentially ruin any number of people in the city. From known enemies of his like Conqueror Worm, Ernie Ford, Byron Oxbow, to even ostensible allies like Arazu Allday, Chairman Ray, Cairo Satori, and several different Board Members. If it wasn’t for the fact that he just lacked the tactical flexibility to pull anything off, he might have accomplished more, but even then, as equipped as he was, hungry as he was to bring about his idea of order, there was no way to call him anything but dangerous.
Not days later, they’d learned their new boss was fired, and lost with that any semblance of accountability he’d had. The neighborhood watch still liked him second only to their founder, and recognizing the danger to themselves that would come with refusal, and many of his long time supporters within VALKYRIE quit and joined up with him upon his firing. The sole remaining police officer in the small town took a hefty payment for an early retirement making sure he was the law of the land. Ugo took up this new base of operations, smaller though it was than his old office, and kept working like nothing was changed.
“No higher-ups, no stockholders, no need for\ paperwork piling up in my way, yeah? So basically, I’ve got more space, really.” He’d said with a cold smirk. “Don’t worry about things on my end… I’ve had money stored away in case something like this happened. I’ll land on my feet. You two are the ones who need to remember your place… And our contract stands. You are loyal to me. Not Allday and not anyone she tries to say is in charge of VALKYRIE. Honoring their orders over mine is treason, and you can ask my old second in command how that goes.
“This is a good thing in disguise. Being lead of Allday’s VALKYRIE was a good teacher, but Allday is weak, as is that excuse for a replacement she found for me. This means that we have the opportunity to be the prime law for hire in this decrepit city. You should be grateful I took you on at this turning point. The only regret I have is that all my work in tracking down and taking down the scum of the entertainment District. It had been my white whale for years, and now that glory is going to some undeserving fed” For the first time Ani caught something deeper in Ugo something seething and angry that festerd under his controlled facade.
“I…” Ani had to choose his words carefully, feeling drained of much of his enthusiasm by the hard situation he’d placed himself into. Ugo had genuinely seemed pleased with the fact that VALKYRIE was going to lead a raid on the leadership of the Entertainment District’s illegal fighting rings, excited that he’d be in charge of coordinating a massive raid that would make the company look good. “I can see why that would be frustrating… Yeah. Especially when it was Mr. Jones’ intel that helped put it all together, and…”
“I’ll take care of that bald fuck later. ‘Deal with the devil’ my ass… For now, we need to ‘prioritize.’ When your enemy has the ball, do you run in front of them and wait? No. You ‘Tackle’ them. You don’t let them gain a single yard!”
Ani rubbed his eyes, sitting upright as he realized. “What… What did you do, Ugo? Uh, sir.” He froze up a bit at the glaring eye upon him, only to say. “Sorry if I sound fresh, just… You woke me up.”
“Lucky I’m in a good mood, kid… I’ll tell you what I did. I ‘tackled,’ and opened up a ‘hole’ in their ‘defense’ because of it. That golden narcissist second-in-command, Tigran Sins… I got his number, tipped him off right before they were gonna get his penthouse.” He waggled a finger. “But I made sure it was too late for him to tell his boss shit.”
“What?” Ani tilted his head. “I don’t follow… Tell me how that’s brilliant.”
“The guy’ll fly off the handle for anything that puts his Toby in danger. Probably, because this was my plan they wrote over, he’s gonna get caught, and when he does, they’re gonna drive him over a particular ‘bridge’ to head downtown for processing.” As Ugo was speaking, he had begun to demonstrate with pieces of scrap paper that had been lying around, indicating with arrows, dots, and the like. He wasn’t the best artist.
“So what’s gonna happen is, no doubt, he’s gonna put the best hitman of all the scum in this city up there, and he’s gonna just open fire and take a ton of those weaklings down. Fox and his associates will be freed, and then, when it’s all good and disastrous…” He scribbled and scribbled aggressively, then, on either side of the poorly doodled ‘bridge,’ with a small grin. “Me and Rob and everyone else will pour in from the East and West and save the day after those screw-ups! We’ll mop them up and make their ‘new start’ a reminder that they never should have cut me away.”
“You and Rob?” Ani was trying to process all of that, that much hanging over him. “Do you… Not want me involved?”
“You’ll be in, er, what’s the word…” Ugo scratched his head a moment with the pencil, it clearly on the tip of his tongue. The tip snapped against his jawline, and he concluded. “Support! Coordination! That’s the word… I’m not gonna put you right in the line of fire. Can you imagine how that’ll taint the PR? They’ll say I have child soldiers or something… And c’mon. People need to know we have standards.”
Rob showed up soon after, and Ugo followed him into the base’s small kitchen to talk the plan over with him in between bouts of grilling, leaving Ani, frankly, mortified.
This… This guy is fucking crazy! Is he that petty that he’s going to let so many people die just to say I-told-you-so? And not just new VALKYRIE people, or that Rushen Smith guy… No doubt at all, innocent bystanders are gonna get hurt too.
Ani dragged his hands along his forehead, rolling around in his bed and quivering with thoughts rushing through his head.
This is too much… This is way too much! I can’t just… I can’t just let this happen, right? And Rob, Rob needs to know that this is unacceptable too. Maybe we can slip away ahead of time, and… He shook his head. No. I can afford to be anywhere and out of his sight, and make a case for it being part of my role, but Rob… If he breaks formation, Ugo is going to know, and then we’ll both be… I need to leave him out of this. I have to stop this insanity myself, somehow!
He looked towards the sound of the adults talking, then, filled with an uncertainty. He’d said that one of the deadliest assassins in this city would probably be involved in this…
He knew he had to act, but he couldn’t do this alone. He would need to find help some other way.
Barrier Bridge ,early afternoon
Early in the morning, Seido had gotten the call about a job holding down this bridge, that a certain transport vessel was going to be crossing sometime in the afternoon. Said transport vessel carried his rescue target, Fox. Despite all the misgivings he had for the Underground leader, he paid well, and was respectful enough of Seido’s autonomy (for the most part). Plus, due to the nature of this job, its pay is based on success, so he’s going to take this seriously.
So as to not attract too much attention, he looked around for an appropriate vantage point with his phone camera, appearing to merely be taking a picture of the sights, and after finding a suitable location, he walks up to his spot and resumes feigning his tourist act. Finally set up, Seido took a moment to think to himself.
With enough luck, this’ll be an in-and-out job... but the way things have been going lately, I somehow doubt that it’ll be that easy. It feels as if Fox’s expansion has led to more and more interlopers, and of course I’m left to clean up the mess. Though it does sometimes get boring to do the same quiet job ad nauseum, it can also be a little tiresome to have interruptions and obstacles.
While nodding to himself on his preferences of job difficulty, almost on cue, he spotted a young kid, being approached by a different, stranger looking man, and after what looked to be a brief exposition by the kid, the pair both began looking around. It wasn’t hard for him to realize that this meant that the two would be the expected “unexpected company” he would be dealing with today.
Barrier Bridge, moments earlier
His bike skidding to a halt by the side of the road, Kamen Rider Volt took a look around him. Foot traffic on the bridge was as expected, people occasionally walking by and gazing over the rivers, and many cars driving by as people went on their daily commute. Business as usual for Los Fortuna, it seemed. However… he was called here for a reason. ‘Ani Oakey’, a kid whom he’d met in the past, had contacted him, telling him to come here for some important reason related to the shady underground of Los Fortuna’s entertainment district. Still, he couldn’t see the kid anywhere in the crowd around him…
“Volt! Over here!” The hushed voice of the kid came from behind him, and Volt turned around to see him, just barely noticing him from the various passersby on the bridge. Underneath the suit, Max let out a small smile seeing the familiar face.
“Ah, here you are! So, Ani, what did you call me here for? The ED’s underground… what information did you gather, and why exactly?” Volt knew the kid was somewhat of a troublemaker, but he couldn’t have caught onto such information had he not gone quite a bit beyond the realm of what a normal kid could do.
“Um...” Ani said, thinking for a bit. “Well… I’m currently helpin’ out some, uh... people who caught onto this, an’ I thought you’d help out, so… well, I guess I should tell you what I need help with, yeah?”
Volt listened to the kid as he explained the full extent to the situation with growing concern. Ani was probably a stand user, but Volt would have to prod further about what he was doing later, since it almost certainly wasn’t good for him. Still, if this bridge was to be used to transport the ED underground’s ringleader… Volt took a few looks around the bridge, thinking… It was likely that someone from their end would be stationed-
“Volt! Look out!” With all of the strength that the 13 year old kid could muster, Ani tackled Volt, pushing him back just as the sound of a gunshot rang through the air, almost hitting the kid.
The bridge went dead silent for a moment. Volt looked at Ani in shock, but he knew better than anyone that he had to act now. “Thanks for the save, Ani - now, come and get on the bike, now!” As the passersby erupted into screams, Volt shouted at Ani, the two of them rushing towards Volt’s ride. From the angle of the shot, the sniper was on top of the bridge - Volt would have to get there as quickly as possible, and drop Ani off along the way before he could.
Moments later
“No way!” Ani shouted emphatically, in response to Volt’s pleas, as the two of them rode on the back of Volt’s bike, trying to make it past the panicking crowds. “Look, you’re in serious danger here, and I need to protect you! Ani, even if you’re a stand user, this is serious!” Volt needed to get a spot where he could safely let Ani get off before heading for the sniper, but…
“I am serious! Look, without my ants keepin’ watch and warnin’ me, that man’d have shot you! I can help, an’ I will help!” Volt looked at Ani for a bit, before sighing and relenting. Time was running out, and the longer they bickered, the more they were in danger. Besides, if Ani was to try and handle it himself after Max left him behind, the sniper would certainly attack him too, no..?
“I can’t convince you otherwise, can I..?” Both of them knew the answer. “Fine. But I’m not letting you do anything too reckless.” Ani nodded in response.
The rest of the trip was certainly not easy - the sniper they’d been up against had kept on attacking them, and as Ani said, his ants certainly did help the two of them, letting them keep watch of all direction and keep better track of the area around them. Furthermore, as they got closer and closer, the sniper began using his stand -
“-Woah!” Volt shouted out, swerving his bike just in time before a flaming bullet flew past him and Ani, just barely managing to stay upright. Whatever stand the sniper had, he had access to a wide variety of bullets in his arsenal, enough so that neither Volt nor Ani were able to properly prepare for what he sent out. Still, they were getting closer - it wasn’t ideal, but riding a bike on the bridge’s arches was a surprisingly effective way of closing the distance, despite how reckless and dangerous it was!
Still, they were getting closer, enough that they could just barely see the sniper in the distance. “Volt! He’s aimin’ at us!” Ani shouted out. That made sense, since he was a sniper and they were trying to get to him and beat him up, but they still probably needed to do something about it.
“Gotcha! Hang on!” Volt shouted out, leaning forwards and pressing on the pedal even harder, the bike speeding up, and making for one hell of a bumpy ride. At the very least this’d make it harder to shoot them, and he could probably create some light to-
BANG!
Another gunshot rang through the air, the bullet flying towards Ani and Volt… and missing entirely, hitting the ground underneath them. They’d managed to evade quite a few bullets before, but the sniper certainly wasn’t an amateur, and had never missed this much… something was up. Soon, they’d realize what exactly it was - Volt’s bike rapidly slowed down, pulled back by some invisible force at a speed so sudden that both of them were tossed off from the bike.
Shit! Looking back for a moment, Volt could see the bike being tossed back, skidding across the surface of the arch. More importantly, he could see Ani right above him, the light kid practically flying in an arc. He had to do something before he got hurt!
Volt flipped around, arms outstretched, catching Ani just as the two hit the ground, and the sound of scraping metal filled the air. Still, he’d done his job and protected Ani - were it not for him, who knew what’d happen to the kid. Ugh… he should’ve been more insistent on not taking him!
Whatever… he couldn’t change what had happened. Ani was here, and they’d have to fight this sniper.
“Volt...” Ani got out of his grasp, getting up off the ground. Volt followed suit. “It’s lookin’ like we’ll have to go the rest of the way on foot, yeah?” Volt looked back, and the bike wasn’t there anymore - it had likely fallen off of the arch, then.
“Yeah… seems like it.”
The Kamen Rider and the kid looked at the sniper far off in the distance. He’d put a wrench in their plans with whatever that bullet of his was, but they could definitely still get to him. They just had to put in a little bit more effort, and then they’d get to him and stop the ED Underground’s plans for good.
OPEN THE GAME!
Location: On top of Barrier Bridge, a steel arch bridge in the Entertainment District. Here are two reference images for the general architecture. An overhead view and a side view
The bridge itself is extremely long, but the area for the match will be more limited to a 160 by 80 meter area visualized here. This area is a top down view, the bridge and water is hundreds of meters below you in the purple and blue tiles respectively. Each tile is 5 by 5 meters.
The teal rectangles are the arches, and the “X”s are the girders supporting the two sides of the arch. The girders are around 2 meters wide and 2 meters tall. The arches have metal stairs that run down the middle of the arches, represented here by the lines. There are guardrails on the sides of the staircases as well. The underside of the arch is also supported by steel pillars every 20 or so meters and matches up roughly with the side view image.
The arrows denote the direction of the slope of the arch, with the area between the arrows being the highest and center point of the arch.
The players are denoted by the yellow and grey circles and the boss is shown with the purple circle. Where the players are standing is just about halfway to the center of the arch while the boss is at the peak/center of the arch.
Due to food crumbs being left out every so often, there are three nests of ants that have made their homes between the metal plates of the arch. For this match they are effectively 1000s of them in each colony. These colony locations are denoted by the purple 6 pointed stars.
Goal: RETIRE your opponents!
Additional Information:
For the purposes of the match, the lower arches (visible on the side view) and the bridge below are not part of the map. Essentially if you are not on the girders, the arches, or otherwise fall off them and cannot or will not make it back up, that will count as a ring out.

Team	Combatant	JoJolity
Underground Rat Exodus	Anthony ‘Ani’ Oakey and Kamen Rider Volt	"See that? That's Morioh's energy! It's all mine! My power!" This entire structure is made of metal, with both of your abilities you should be able to make good use out of it. Use the metal arch and support structures in varied and effective ways!
Path of Four	Seido Shuto	“Someone's going to have to take one of the last four slices” Four is the path your life has set out for you so embrace it as much as you can. Make as many references to the number “4” in your actions and movements in meaningful ways!

Link to the Official Player Spreadsheet
Link to Match Schedule
As always, if you would like to interact with the tournament community and be among the first to get updates for the tournament, please feel free to PM a member of our Judge staff for an invite to our Official Discord Server!

Tips From a New Vegas Veteran on Fighting Difficult Enemies

I will list a number of characters, a suggestion or six, with potential for leaving comment with each list item. My primary focus will be on stronger characters, with some consideration for groups you may bump into. I thought I'd write this post since seeing someone asked readers about their first encounter with a Deathclaw.
Regarding order of list items, I'm writing each entry based on when they appear over at Fallout.Fandom. I have many thousands of hours with F:NV, and because I enjoy sharing knowledge and strategy, I will be including a number of unrelated items after talking about characters and carnage.
Note: The information contained in this post may seem obvious, but a reminder may help you keep from using V.A.T.S. as often as you might. Knowledge of death provides lessons in self-sufficiency, and with this knowledge, you may become much more proficient with improvement.
While I write this, I may come across previously known information listed at the link I provided earlier. I am mostly writing this based on what I already understand, however, knowing that you're getting information that is partially in circulation already saves you a trip to another website.
With much of what I will end up writing, a focus on limb damage and weapons that take to characters best will be emphasized, the reason being that this is about arming yourself with some of the best knowledge on killing, in the name of survival. There may come a time when you can't survive a fight, whether it be because of damaged items, a bad attempt at something, or something else entirely. If that time ever comes, you may remember this post. With most every tough fight, you can survive if you make the kill secondary to torture. After reading this post, you may be inclined to agree.

-"Characters and Carnage"-

-The Cazador-
Strengths: EXTREMELY HIGH Movement Speed, High Perception, High Damage, Headshot Damage Bonus Negation, Group Travel Preference (GTP), Poison Damage Chance
Weaknesses: Wingspan Contingency, Vulnerable Antennae, Affected by the Entomologist, Bug Stomper, and Tribal Wisdom Perks
Suggestion(s): When it comes to weapons, you can't really risk melee unless you know what you're doing, considering their GTP almost guarantees several more of them on either side of you. At any point in your game, you are ready to fight the closest group to you, given the right tools.
For weapons, automatic fire and explosives are your best bet, with shotguns being a secondary option if you've run out of bullets for your automatic weapons. Explosives are plentiful in NV, which is nice, and with automatic fire, you don't want to just hold the trigger.
Crippling the antennae is your best option during your earliest convenience, with a focus on the wings being second. The reason for this is the GTP. The more Cazador you have to deal with, the more the antennae becomes a focus, due to the Cazador(s) you've just frenzied being capable of killing any number of their group. Regarding making the wings your secondary focus, if you're shooting at the antennae mainly, you're likely damaging the wings, too. Crippling the wings also cripples the risk posed by a Cazador.
Going back to not holding the trigger, you want to pepper, not perforate, at least not while they're a distance away. Accuracy increases when you're closer to targets, especially in Fallout, considering how historically bad accuracy has been in a number of the games. Pepper targets from farther away by tapping your trigger while trained on the target. As they approach, if you're landing shots, quicken the pace based on how close they are to your face.
With explosives, you're damaging several parts of the affected party simultaneously. This could damage weaker characters enough that they die quickly to their frenzied neighbor(s). The same could be said of a Shotgun with a good spread. If you can land enough concentrated shots to the antennae and wings, you shouldn't have much of a problem with them, considering how if they're not able to fly, they can't chase you, and if one or more of them are frenzied, you can likely get away while they're distracted. If they're frenzied and fighting with each other, apply healing and return to the scene. Don't leave unless you know that you can't kill them.
There is no shame in running, but there is glory in remaining.
The Ant
Strengths: Firebreathing, Resistance to Fire (Fire Ants), Explosive Death (Specifically the Giant Ants, located at the Nellis Array), Good At Killing Unskilled Players
Weaknesses: Vulnerable Antennae, Low Movement Speed, Being an Ant in general, Affected by the Entomologist, Bug Stomper, and Tribal Wisdom Perks
Suggestion(s): Damage the antennae of a Giant Ant for a good show (if the GA is with a group). Ants are great target practice, and they can be found in plenty of places. Using anything other than a gun you're bad with is a waste of time unless you want to kill them quickly, in which case, a few explosives should do the trick. At higher difficulties, a few explosives may become a few handful of explosives.
Instead of using explosives on a higher difficulty against Ants, refer to my previous suggestion about target practice. Because ants move slow, it allows for you to train your shots on a shifting trail that tests your accuracy lightly. A semi-auto gun like a rifle or a pistol is ideal, even from far away.
The Radscorpion
Strengths: Armored At Birth, Lingering Damage and Poison Damage Chance (this isn't true for all Radscorpions), Medium Group Travel Preference, Fairly High Movement Speed, Poison Immunity (this isn't true for all Radscorpions), Reduced Damage to the Legs, Random Behavior
Weaknesses: Lower Claw Armor, Crippled Claw Syndrome, Leg Armor Reliant, Large Body Snags on Terrain, Lower Turning Speed, Telegraphs Stinger Attacks by Making Two Specific Noises While the Stinger Pulls Back for the Attack, Affected by the Entomologist, Bug Stomper, and Tribal Wisdom Perks
Suggestion(s): While Radscorpions can be tough, because they can be stunned by crippling the claws, they provide more opportunities for attack, especially when you pair that with their low turning speed. Not being able to turn as quickly as the player can circle around you makes for a bad time. Running circles around a Radscorpion allows for the player to repeatedly attack with a melee weapon. If you do cripple the claws, the Radscorpion stun that follows allows for damaging the legs and/or assess the situation (number of enemies around, the terrain, etc.) In place of attacking the Radscorpion while it's stunned, if there are enemies approaching, back away from the area while setting up a field of landmines or chucking sticks of dynamite. Focusing on the kill is not as important as minding your step.
Melee weapons are of incredible use against Radscorpions, with explosives helping damage several limbs on one or more characters. Armor Piercing Bullets are great against Radscorpions, but that's only if you're worried about dying. Large Radscorpions are crippled by the speed at which they can turn to fight you head-on, so fighting one or two at a time with just a stick is legitimately feasible, especially if bullets and explosives are low. Typically, a melee weapon with a higher DPS is what you'll want, considering you're pushing to deal damage to the claws and legs as quickly as you can manage.
The Feral Ghoul (Specifically the Reaver, Glowing One, and Vault 34 Ferals)
Strengths: Fairly High Movement Speed, Radiation Damage Chance, Radiation Resistance, Health Returns from Radiation, Notifies Others when the Player is Seen, Indoor Prowess Outclasses Indoor Voice, Minor Group Travel Preference, Can Heal Other Ferals, An Actual Challenge (IF YOU AREN'T CAREFUL)
Weaknesses: Will Kill Other Ferals to Restore Health, Runs With Scissors While Ignoring Landmines, Melee Attack Exclusivity Deal, Armor as a Cosmetic is Worthless
Suggestion(s): Hollow Point bullets will do them REAL damage, blocking with your fists/melee weapon can be used to stagger them with next to no chance of failure, limb damage seems easy to score on them, and they ignore landmines, which isn't exactly worth mention, considering many enemies will just ignore them, even though you're setting and activating the landmines right in front of them.
The Marked Man
Strengths: Level(s) Adjusted to Give the Player a Challenge, Weapon and Armor Usage Improves as the Player Levels Up, Fairly High Health, Occasional Stealth Boy Use, Radiation Resistance, Health Return from Radiation, Medium Group Travel Preference, Will Use Weapons Found on Dead Bodies, Medium to MAXIMUM Perception Levels, Regarded by Many as Top-Tier Trouble
Weaknesses: Incorrect Items on Spawn Leads to Confusion in the Ranks, Special Ammo can be Found on the Marked Men and Used Against Them, Often Easy to Spot (they like to hang out by various light sources)
Suggestion(s): I wasn't going to write about Marked Men because you can only find them if you have the correct DLC installed. It feels awkward to write about them here, but I needed to. The Marked Men can be incredibly difficult to deal with, but honestly, you've dealt with enough Fallout by this point that it'd only just feel like a proper level adjustment by the game. They have larger health totals than most characters outside of The Divide, that is true, but I have a tendency of stomping through them, without using Power Armor or V.A.T.S. for headshots.
To make your time easier, if you're going to use V.A.T.S., target their weapon or the grenades they throw, and target the weapon if they have either a gun or a grenade in hand. If they have a melee weapon, target the legs. I mentioned earlier that they will attack you with weapons they find. This is true, which means that it's important to chase down and pick up weapons you've blown out of their hands. If you have an abundance of throwables, The Divide is the perfect place to use up your grenades, spears, knives, etc. Silent kills may help you here by quite a lot, and if you use The Divide as a place to practice throwing items, not only could you get good with grenades (which is REALLY handy), you could also deal damage to Marked Men before ever seeing them. They camp out in a great number of places in The Divide, which is nice to know, considering how throwing a grenade in practically any direction almost guarantees damage.
Even better, based on your decisions, you could face anywhere from 1-6 of the different Marked Men Boss Characters. With the following Marked Boss rundown, I won't be giving tips of any kind, but a touch of intel and sources for the information linked below. Here are links to each of the six, with a paste of information from the links provided:
Marked Boss 1 is Blister, who uses a Flamer and Incendiary Grenades.
=Level 45=
SPECIAL:
6 ST, 5 PE, 4 EN, 4 CH, 4 IN, 6 AG, 4 LK
Modified SPECIAL:
6 ST, 6 PE, 4 EN, 4 CH, 4 IN, 6 AG, 4 LK
-Derived Stats-
Hit Points: 200
Damage Threshold: 15
Karma: Neutral
-Tag Skills-
Energy Weapons: 89 (95)
Explosives: 89 (91)
Guns: 100
Melee Weapons: 100
Sneak: 100
-Perk(s)-
Toughness: +10% DR
Marked Boss 2 is Beast, who uses a Shoulder-Mounted Machine Gun.
=Level 40=
SPECIAL: 7 ST, 6 PE, 6 EN, 5 CH, 5 IN, 6 AG, 5 LK
Modified SPECIAL: 8 ST, 6 PE, 6 EN, 5 CH, 5 IN, 6 AG, 5 LK
-Derived Stats-
Hit Points: 385
Critical Chance: 5% (7%)
Unarmed Damage: 5.5
Poison Resistance: 25%
Radiation Resistance: 10%
Carry Weight: 220 (230)
Damage Threshold: 13
Karma: Neutral
-Tag Skills-
Guns: 100
Melee Weapons: 100 (107)
Unarmed: 100
-Perk(s)-
Toughness: +10% DR
Marked Boss 3 is Bonesaw), who uses a Chainsaw.
=Level 45=
SPECIAL: 8 ST, 5 PE, 7 EN, 5 CH, 3 IN, 6 AG, 5 LK
Modified SPECIAL: 9 ST, 5 PE, 7 EN, 5 CH, 3 IN, 6 AG, 5 LK
-Derived Stats-
Hit Points: 465
Damage Threshold: 14
-Tag Skills-
Explosives: 100
Melee Weapons: 100 (107)
Unarmed: 100 (103)
-Perk(s)-
Toughness: +10% Damage Reduction
Ruthless: +25 Melee Damage
Marked Boss 4 is Blade, who uses a Blade of the West.
=Level 45=
SPECIAL: 5 ST, 6 PE, 6 EN, 5 CH, 5 IN, 7 AG, 6 LK
-Derived Stats-
Hit Points: 320
Damage Threshold: 15
Karma: Neutral
-Tag Skills-
Energy Weapons: 100
Melee Weapons: 100
Guns: 100
-Perk(s)-
Toughness: +10% Damage Reduction
Ruthless: +25 Melee Damage
The following two Marked Boss characters can only be fought if you've sent nukes in their direction. The explosion and radiation from the nukes turned both of these characters into the creatures you may soon have to deal with.
Gaius Magnus, who uses a Minigun and a Machete, can be found and fought after nuking Caesar's Legion.
=Level 50=
SPECIAL: 10 ST, 10 PE, 10 EN, 10 CH, 10 IN, 10 AG, 10 LK
Modified SPECIAL: 10 ST, 10 PE, 10 EN, 11 CH, 10 IN, 10 AG, 10 LK
-Derived Stats-
Hit Points: 545
Damage Threshold: 27
Karma: Neutral
-Tag Skills-
Guns: 100
Melee Weapons: 100
Unarmed: 100
-Perk(s)-
Toughness: +10% Damage Reduction
Radiation Healing: 15 HP per second
Royez, who uses a Plasma Caster and a Combat Knife, can be found and fought after nuking the NCR.
=Level 50=
SPECIAL: 10 ST, 10 PE, 10 EN, 10 CH, 10 IN, 10 AG, 10 LK
Modified SPECIAL: 11 ST, 10 PE, 10 EN, 11 CH, 10 IN, 10 AG, 10 LK
-Derived Stats-
Hit Points: 790
Damage Threshold: 24
Fatigue: 1200
Karma: Neutral
-Tag Skills-
Energy Weapons: 100
Explosives: 100
Guns: 100
Melee Weapons: 100
-Perk(s)-
Toughness: +10% Damage Reduction
Radiation Healing: 15 HP per second
Radiation Resistance: +85%
The Super Mutant
Strengths: Super Mutants Come in Two Different Varieties, with Differences Listed Below.
Super Mutant (SM)(Greenish) Strengths: COMPLETE Radiation Resistance, About 15 Damage Threshold, Mid-High Health Totals, Fairly High Movement Speed, Medium Group Travel Preference, Uses Most Weapons They Find Lying Around, Semi-Frequent Grenade Use, Strong Weapons Almost Exclusively
Nightkin (NK)(Bluish) Strengths: Most NK Have 30% Damage Resistance, Mid-High Health Totals, Fairly High Movement Speed, Use Stealth Boys and Much of the Same Weaponry and Tactics as Their Green Variants (not including the use of Stealth Boys)
~Weaknesses: Low-Medium Perception, Large Body Snags on Terrain, Low-Medium Turning Speed, Fun to Bully, Both Super Mutants and Nightkin are Affected by the Mutant Massacrer, Purifier, and Abominable Perks
~(Note: SMs and NKs have a near identical set of problems, so I'm lumping them together when regarding weaknesses.)
Suggestion(s): They seem easier to stagger than other enemies, so shots to most of the upper body may help gain the advantage, though I've had the most success with just using melee attacks. The stagger is remarkably real. As with others, focus on getting rid of their gun, picking it up ASAP, doing the same with any other guns they pull, then focusing IMMEDIATELY on the legs once they're purposely wielding a stick. Once the SMs/NK are unable to walk normally, they can't run at you with a weapon, though, at close proximity, they can manage a minor running attack. As with earlier, I emphasize a focus on targeting weapons and crippling the legs because you may not win every fight, however, being able to run from a dangerous situation is INCREDIBLY important. They feel comparable to the Marked Men, which is why I want to stress the idea of using SMs/NK as training for when you go to The Divide. The experience and loot that comes with killing SMs/NK is worth it pretty much all the time. You can slice them up or batter them with a stick and keep them almost certainly locked in a stun loop. SMs/NK are quite possibly the easiest of the large things to kill in New Vegas, which should instill some confidence in you the more you engage larger targets.
The Night Stalker
Strengths: Medium-High Movement Speed, Invisibility, Medium-High Group Travel Preference, Poison Damage Chance that Taxes Endurance by a Few Points
Weaknesses: Low Health Totals, Makes Noise When it's Time to Eat (which can ruin stealth attempts), Can be Spotted by V.A.T.S. the Same as Any Other Invisible Character, Scared off by a Single Shot using the Flare Gun, Affected by the Purifier and Abominable perks
Suggestion(s): Shotguns for close range, landmines for building that bridge to the morgue, and various bullet fire modes will come in handy based on the situation:
1-3 NS Pack Size: Semi-Auto is Ideal
2-4 NS Pack Size: Burst-Fire is Ideal
4+ NS Pack Size: Full-Auto is Ideal
2+ NS Pack Size: Explosives are Ideal, SPECIFICALLY a Grenade Launcher, Dynamite or Landmines.
Dynamite doesn't travel far by default, it has a short fuse, and you find plenty of it pretty much wherever you go. The quick speed of Night Stalkers make for a near requirement of your explosives, that they detonate sooner than later. If you are low on resources, and only have a stick, don't worry. As with Radscorpions, Night Stalkers telegraph their attacks. While they may have a lunge attack, their main attack causes them to stand in place, which lets you back up and move forward again after they miss their attack. When you move forward, hit them as quickly as you can with your stick. They may become staggered, which helps. Fairly easy to contend with, as I'm sure you know.
The Deathclaw
Strengths: It's Called a Deathclaw for a Reason, and There are Many like it. While the Baby and Young Variants have about 5 Damage Threshold, All Others Seem to Have 15 Damage Threshold, a Rating Equivalent to Combat Armor. High Health Totals, Incredibly High Damage, Medium-High Movement Speed, Medium-High Group Travel Preference, Incredibly Difficult to Kill One While Under Level 10, Above Average Perception at the Lowest for Some DCs, While Close/Completely MAXED OUT for the Others
Weaknesses: Large Figure Gets Stuck on Terrain Often While Reliance on Movement Speed for Much of Their Killing Power Hints TOO MUCH at What I'm About to Write Next (I mention further down that Deathclaws are scared of Flare Guns. Thought I would include that here as well.)
Suggestion(s): The suggestions I'm going to give regard getting in their face a bit and baiting them from afar. While their large figure helps them stick out enough that draw distance doesn't hinder much, you can easily plot your approach.
Lay landmines according to paths that work best for you when attacking a group. Make sure, however, that when you lay traps like this that you understand just how far apart your traps need to be, for if you aren't careful, you could create a fuse for the Deathclaw to set off, which could damage you and throw off your aim, allowing the Deathclaw an easier time with you. Because DCs can get stuck on terrain, there are simple ways to manage your hazard pay with little to no issue. You may also find it helpful to have a Flare Gun, as DCs are scared of the flare. I know that a Sheep Dog was cut from the game. You might be just perfect for herding Deathclaws using just a Flare Gun. Once you have your prey backed up against a wall, start moving backwards and dropping mines as you go. You may cripple or kill a number of the herd as a result.
Circling around rock formations so the Deathclaw(s) have to constantly maneuver (to avoid getting stuck on parts of the terrain) will allow for you to lay mines in front of you as you run around, though make sure to pace your explosive use and speed. You may run into the back of a DC as you play games with it, which may result in death. Climbing on top of parts of the environment allows for you to gun them down as well. From a sitting position, above any number of DCs, you can finally use up some of your explosives. Using explosives or a full-auto weapon from this position is helpful, as I've mentioned before that explosives hit multiple limbs simultaneously.
Shooting at the legs or detonating the ground underneath a Deathclaw should be the top priority when you're too close for comfort, considering, again, movement speed is the only thing that makes DCs as dangerous as they are. Granted, yes, they hit hard regardless of how many legs they have, however, a DCs lunge attack is often what kills players the quickest. If you damage them enough so they're limping, they can only lunge at you when you're only a few feet from them. You'd literally have to want to die or not understand the lunge in order for you to die after crippling the legs.
Shotguns, Explosives and Full-Auto Machine Guns are best for dealing with a Deathclaw, and yes, while I understand that melee builds are a thing, I'm not focused on a build, but a plan, for if I were to write these things so that builds are favored, the advice wouldn't be as valuable.
The Alien
Strengths: Advanced Weaponry, Capable of Defending Themselves
Weaknesses: Strange Cowardice, No Melee Weapons, No Damage Resistance/Threshold, Lack of Teamwork, Poor AI Scripting, Scared of Flare Guns, Killing the Captain Turns the Non-Captain Aliens Neutral to You
Suggestion(s): Killing the Captain seems to erase two thirds of their aggression, but only if the Captain hasn't spotted you. The Captain will usually flee while the remaining two fight you, with the Captain returning to fight if you killed his two underlings. You can also just either shoot the weapons out of their hands or nuke them from afar.
Lastly, if you don't have the Wild Wasteland trait, the Aliens will never set foot on the planet for you to deal with.
As I've been writing this for many, many hours today, I will leave this off with a simple request, that if you have anything worth mention, leave a comment below, and I will try my best to carve out a place at the end, somewhere underneath this last paragraph. I REALLY hope there's no character limit, for real.

GeForce RTX 3090 Review Megathread

[Table] I am Dave Plummer, author of Windows Task Manager, Zip Folders, and worked on Space Cadet Pinball, Media Center, Windows Shell, MS-DOS, OLE32, WPA, and more. (pt 1/2)

Source
Note: Based on observing question-taker's profile, he is still taking answers, so two parts may or may not completely summarize the AMA.

Questions	Answers
Space Cadet Pinball, how does it feel to be the most played "bring your child to work day" game? I remember it fondly.	The best part is that I used to "teach" computer lab when my kids were in K through 6th grades, back when Pinball was still included and well known. The kids could care less about anything technically hard or interesting that I'd worked on, of course, but Pinball gave me instant street cred with them.
	Especially cool was being able to walk over and enter a secret code that only I knew that would turn on all the cheats, like infinite lives. They thought I was a wizard at that age!
	The code, by the way, is "hidden test" without the quotes! Then various keys do different things, you can click and drag the ball around, and so on. Google it for the gory details!
	I always like to point out that I was working with a full set of original IP from Maxis, so I had nothing to do with the design of the game, or it's art, etc... that was all done! My contribution was volunteering to port it, including a partial rewrite from asm to C, to work on MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC, IA64, ARM, and so on, which was actually a lot of work. But I got it into the Windows box, which is how and why everyone knows it today. But all credit for the gameplay and so on goes to Maxis, all I did was not screw it up in that case!
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To add a bit of detail re Space Cadet Pinball: we built Space Cadet originally at my company Cinematronics and did a deal with Microsoft to ship it with the Plus Pack that accompanied Win 95 and Win 98. While it technically didn't ship w/ Windows, the Plus Pack had something like a 25% attach rate and pinball wound up on most systems anyway. Microsoft actually had an option in our original contract from 1994 to ship it with the OS itself or the Plus Pack. Maxis was our publisher for the subsequent retail version, and later bought my company. More germane to this thread: I believe Dave's port entered the picture a few years later, after Win 98, and was likely critical to pinball continuing to ship on later iterations of the Windows OS (i.e. 32-bit). I definitely appreciate the time he put in to give the game extra years of life on the Windows platform. Kevin Gliner, game designer and producer for 3D Pinball, and co-founder of Cinematronics.	Pleased to FINALLY put a name to the game design! You should update the Wikipedia article for the game, as I think it lists Matt Ridgway, who might have been sound? I've been crediting Maxis for years, not knowing the role of Cinematronics who was who. One thing that confused me: wasn't there a company that did video games in the 80s called Cinematronics? Any relation? Star Castle, Armor Attack, etc...
	As for timing, this likely between the Win95 and Win98 Plus! packs. It was very early on at least, and shipped at least in NT4, and perhaps earlier in "SUR" release that ran atop NT 3.51, but I don't have access to any source files to check dates!
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I keep meaning to fix that wikipedia article, there's a significant number of people that worked on the game and for some reason only Matt (an independent sound guy who did some excellent part-time contract work for us) is listed. There's also a lot of confusion about the timing of various releases and the companies involved, and who owns it now (EA). I actually have all the original source, although no rights to any of it anymore. Hard to say on the timing of the port. I was working in Redmond in '99 when I got word someone had done an NT4 and Win2000 port (I'm assuming that was you), so that was the first time the port showed up on my radar. I have a more confident memory (and contracts, email, etc) of all the events related to how pinball came about and the first couple years after it was released. I like to think pinball was the very first Win95 game (it was fun to watch Gates and Leno pretend to play it on stage at the Win95 launch event), but of course there were other games that shipped with the launch too. You're correct, there was an 80s arcade game company called Cinematronics that went out of business long before we started in 1994, and someone had let the trademark lapse. How we came to be called Cinematronics is a long story for another time...	NT shipped in 96, so the version I did for it would have been done in 95. I remember working on it about the time Win9X was shipping or in late beta. I could be wrong on that part, but Nov 95 would be my guess.
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Damn dude, porting assembly? You are a legend!	Thanks - we actually did all of our debugging in assembler. We didn't have any source-level or line-level debugging at all (except as noted below). So you'd connect to a machine through an ssh-like tool and then, if the symbols were right, you could get a callstack and inspect memory, disassemble functions, and so on. But since we spent much of our day staring at assembly, I became reasonably adept at it.
	I say "reasonably" as I was lazy enough that I would compile the components of interest to me with Visual Studio PDB symbols so that, if I could repro on my own machine, I could then source-level debug it. That made me fast at some stuff that others were slow at, but I likely never got as proficient at asm debugging as someone who never had an alternative. I had a developer friend named Bob whom was an ntsd (our debugger) superstar, and he'd write expressions inside of breakpoints to fire conditionally, that kind of thing. So I did learn that trick, but I'm sure there were dozens I just never knew.
	That all said, we rarely if ever coded in assembly. All coding was in C/C++.
	In the Pinball case, parts of the original were written in hand-coded in asm by Maxis, like the sound engine, and wouldn't have had a hope of working on anything but an x86. Rather than be lame and not have sound on the RISC platforms, I opted to rewrite that stuff in C so that it was portable.
	The RISC platforms also bring their own set of problems like 32-bit alignment for data. And being on Windows NT (now just "Windows") meant being Unicode, but fortunately there isn't a TON of text in a pinball game!
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boytekka: damn, the only time that I did assembly language is when we tried moving a small machine through the printer port.. I miss those days LordApocalyptica: Only time I did assembly was when I wanted to make a game on my TI-84, and decided that I didn't want to. I miss those days too.	First game I wrote in assembly I did in a machine language monitor on my C64. You can't (easily) relocate 6502 so to add code you'd have to jump out, do stuff, and jump back... Crazy!
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If I can ask a question, how does it feels to go from coding with basically zero help to working with modern IDE and code editors that give you a lot of infos, tips, error notifications and so on? I've started programming like a year ago from zero, and I don't think I could be able to program like y'all did 20 years ago or more. Thanks for doing this AMA anyways!	You're very welcome! The progression in tools has been amazing, really. I remember HESMON and my first machine language monitors for the PET and C64, then really nice ROM dev environments, and CygnusEd for the Amiga... all the way up to PlatformIO and Visual Studio Code.
	My most recent "WOW" moment was adding a line to my lib_deps line in platformio, which magically included the library being developed at the URL on github. So you can link to online projects... cool.
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Just wanted to say thanks for the Alpha port!	Alpha AXP was by far the hardest to debug! "Branch later, maybe"
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I just want to thank you for my first experience with pinball. I am now a top 100 competitive pinball player and own 16 pinball machines.	That's cool, which do you collect primarily? I was always a fan of Williams, and am FB friends with a couple of their older devs like Steve Ritchie, Larry DeMar, and Eugene Jarvis (but I should be careful, Bill Gates warned me never to name drop :-) )
	I have a Black Knight 2000 as my own machine right now!
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I have a wide range. Some modern Sterns like Metallica, Jurassic Park, Tron and Iron Maiden. Older Bally’s like Frontier and Fathom. 2 classic Bally/Williams Dr Who and Attack From Mars. Plus a few EMs. I like them all! Attack From Mars was the game that got me into the physical world of pinball. Collecting has been more of a recent pandemic thing since I can’t go out and play. I miss traveling around the country playing in big tournaments. Oh yeah and Steve Ritchie is quite the character. You must meet him some day. I’ve met him a few times and each time has earned a place in my pinball stories I talk about with friends.	Congrats on the collection, that's a nice set! I've never met Steve - I did meet Larry DeMar in vegas. I was playing at a slot machine and he was next to me, and had a name tag, and I was like... "Excuse me sir, but does the word Robotron mean anything?" and it turned out to be him!
Asking as someone pretty new in software development, did you experience impostor syndrome? If so, how did you deal with it?	My first couple of years were very productive, so I wasn't insecure about my output, but even so I definitely experienced imposter syndrome. I think most people who achieve aspirational roles do... I have a friend who was in the NFL who describes the same feeling.
	Being as productive as your peers is sort of the pre-requisite, and if that's true, then remind yourself that when you were in fifth grade, the eighth graders on the playground seemed so old and mature! It's odd in that I started in 1993, but to me anyone who started in the 80s was a "true" Old Timer and remains so in my head to this day. And similarly I'm no doubt the grizzled veteran to people I hired a few years later.
	I know when I started I felt like the dumbest guy in the room, and by the end I felt like the smartest guy in the room, and I don't think I'd gotten any smarter along the way. So it's all relative and perception. Well, that and the stock caused some serious attrition of the "really smart"!
	I remember visiting Google a couple of years ago in the bathrooms they had posters that read "YOU ARE NOT AN IMPOSTER", and info about seminars and so on about it, so it's very common! I wish I had a concrete strategy for you, but I don't other than "It's commonplace, and I bet there are a ton of resources on the Web. Don't be surprised you're experiencing it!"
What would you encourage someone to start learning today related to your field?	I'm learning React at the moment. Let's face it, the web development experience is utter nonsense. So I kept hoping for something that would make it clean, and easy to make components, and to work with REST apis. So I went looking for a solution. Then I read about Angular, and it seemed like "too much" to learn for the sake of making a SPA.
	But React seems understandable enough and solves a ton of problems with web development, not the least of which is being able to intermingle HTML and Javascript (via JSX).
	As for languages, I'd probably start with Python. I prototyped a complicated LED system a couple of years ago and it was admirable what it could accomplish for an interpreted language. And you probably have to know modern Javascript as well.
Now, would you be rather interested in working for windows, macos or linux ?	I work in all three. For my own projects I write to the ASP.NET Core 3.1, and that's available on Windows, Mac, and Linux. I originally wrote my LED server to it under MacOS, then moved it to Windows with about 5 minutes of changes (related to the consoles being somewhat different). Then I moved it to Linux, where I made it work and then containerized it with Docker. I got it up and running on my Raspberry Pi and in a Windows HyperV and under WSL using Ubuntu. To me that kind of stuff is super cool.
	Once I had it working in a Docker container I deployed it to my Synology NAS, which is some variant of Linux. So my NAS runs my Christmas lights!
	I love stuff like that when it works!
	My main workstation is a Dell monitor that has an internal KVM. I have a 2013 Mac Pro connected to it, which is maxed out and then has an eGPU and eRAID setup via Thunderbolt. And then I have a 3970X Windows PC connected as well, and I can jump back and forth with a button.
	I spend most of my day in Windows now, unless it's video related, in which case I use Final Cut Pro.
Hi Dave, thanks for the AmA! In regards to task manager - often times I have to click the 'end task' button more than once to get the frozen program to actually close. Why is this? Thanks again.	Remember that, at least in my day, End Task is different than End Process. The former sends a "Please close yourself" message to the app, and if it's hung, it should then detect it and so on, but doesn't always. Imagine the app is in a weird state where it's still pumping messages, it's not hung, but it's broken. End Task likely won't work.
	That's when you need End Process, which tears everything down for you. The substantive difference is that the program gets no choice in the matter and no notification. End Task can be graceful. End Process is brutal.
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What about when the task manager stops responding? We need a task manager manager to manage the task manager. Lol	I've never seen that happen, ever, unless the system itself or the window manager is bunged in some way. Your puny Task Manager cannot save you now.
	Then again, nothing can, save a reboot.
What cool new tech are you excited about?	Right now I'm actually trying to productize something of my own, a system for doing hidden, permanently-installed LED holiday lighting. It receives the effect entirely over WiFi, or it can fall back to built-in effects and so on. Quick demo from 4th of July here:
	https://youtu.be/7QNtj2hZtaQ
	I'm done the software on the ESP32 and on the desktop, and working on the phone app now. So the next step is to find someone to manufacture the actual addressable LED strip fixtures. They'd be like under-counter LED strips that snap together end to end, but weatherproof, and with WS2813 LEDs internally.
	In terms of stuff that I'm just benefitting from, the latest CPUs from AMD are amazing. I have the 32-core 3970X and the raw computing power is hard to comprehend. That you can buy a 32-core chip for $2K (or 64-core for $4K) amazes me! Now I need to learn AI or something to make use of all of that hardware...
After the rise of WinRAR, did you continue to use the trial or did you pay?	From: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])
	Sent: Saturday, April 29, 2006 3:14 PM
	To: Dave
	Subject: Your BuyRAR.com Order #: 122229610 License Key

	Attachments: rarkey.rar
	My WinRAR order number, from about 15 years ago, is above. And my WinZip license is much older than that. As someone who (a) made their real living in shareware and (b) worked on Product Activation, I'm the kind of guy who always licenses everything! You'll notice in my PlatformIO/"Arduino" video I even walk people through how to contribute to show how easy it is. I love good, cheap software.
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Would you download a car?	My wife's Tesla downloads update all the time. I'm sure they're just as complex as the mechanical components of the car, so in a sense, we already do!
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But... why did you keep the email?	I have a folder on my OneDrive called Registrations where I keep copies of license keys and registrations. So it was handy. Looks like Telix is my oldest registration from 1989 or so.
Also what was Microsoft really like back in the 90s? As a user of MS-Dos 3.30 forward till now. I’m assuming there has just been a whole tide of changes. Was double space really as funny on the dev side as it was on the user side with the slowness and the pufferfish as a logo :)	I worked on Doublespace in that I wrote a thunking layer that could live in low memory and then moved the rest of the code into the HMA. I didn't work on the compression, but odds are the guy who did is reading along right now, I bet!
	I don't really know if it was faster or slower than its contemporaries like Stacker. I wrote one for the Amiga, though didn't get it quite finished before starting at MS, and it's an interesting and hard problem to do well. At least on the AmigaDOS it was, FAT would be a tad easier.
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I mean for its time it was great. But back then floppy disks and 10M RLL-MFM drives were more the norm. It was actually awesome to have it included IN the OS instead of having to buy stacker. I think this is why I get so much of a kick out of every phishing AD that says download this to double your RAM. It just takes me back.	RAM Doublers are a whole 'nother ball of wax. Raymond Chen, in his blog "The Old New Thing", covers them well. If I understand it correctly, in the most famous case the code to do the actual memory compression was disabled, so it literally did nothing, but did it with overhead.
	On the other hand, I note that current Windows, the HyperV, and even my Synology NAS offer "Memory Compression" now so perhaps there's a time and a place on modern cpus and systems.
I'm an Engineer and regularly use MS Office to produce reports and calculations. Subscript and Superscript are something I use all the time. For at least the last 15 years, in MS Word I can hit "Ctrl +" & "Ctrl Shift +" to make the highlighted text Subscript or Superscript. But MS Word sucks for calculations, so I use MS Excel. But MS Excel it's about 8 clicks to make something super or subscript, and the hotkey technology hasn't made it in. So my question is, why was MS Office 2003 the best version of office that was ever produced?	I retired in 2003. Coincidence? I'll leave that one up to the scholars.
If you could go back and change anything about Windows without consequences or worrying about backwards compatibility, what would it be?	Format! I wrote that and since I was used to using the Visual Studio Resource Editor for dialogs, but couldn't in this case, I just laid out a stack of buttons and labels, content in the knowledge that a Program Manager or Designer would come up with a proper design for it that I would then code up. But somehow, no one did, and no one has for 25 years! So it's a big tall stack of buttons like a prairie grain elevator.
Ever met Bill Gates or have an interesting personal experience with him or another higher up you can share?	Yes, even when I was a new college hire he had the 30 of us or so over for beer and a burger in his back yard. It was a nice touch and quite informal. Obviously, at some scale, it wasn't 30 people anymore and they couldn't continue it!
	Ever play the video game Star Castle? It was like that. Concentric circles of people standing around BillG each armed with what they hope is a question or comment so clever they'll stand out in some way!
If every software you need would be available for both systems. Would you use a Linux distribution or Windows 10?	Right now I'd use Windows 10 because, if the same client software is available, I'd do it on Windows simply because I have a new 3970X w/ 128G of RAM and triple RAID0 SSDs plus an Optane stick. All for about 1/10th the price of a Mac Pro. Since the hardware is so cheap and powerful, it's really hard to resist.
	Even if all the client software were magically available, or Parallels for Linux were a thing, I'd stick with Windows because I haven't seen a Linux UI that I really like. I know everyone has a favorite... if there's an actually good and attractive one that works out of the box, let me know what distro, and maybe link a screenshot!
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Give Mint 20 with Cinnamon a fair shot! I have struggled for years trying to like a Linux distro but never found one that felt and looked right which I think had been the reason Linux hasn't been adopted mainstream but Mint20 with Cinnamon is possibly it..if not its very very close.. Has awesome multi-desltop winodws feature and you can make it basically just like Win10.. Would love to know what you think of it! 20.1 BETA just dropped and has a super interesting feature called Web Apps that needs to be checked out asap! Heres a link to the 20 long term support version.. some people do not like the Minto Logos/Backgrounds out of the box..keep in mind there are a ton of nice ones included and many more you can get quickly if that's something you don't like..what is really neat is that you can make Mint20 look like any OS.. there are themes that make it exactly like MacOS I just have not personally tried those out yet. https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3928	Thanks, I'll check out Mint!
I am looking at my copy of Douglas Coupland's "microserfs". Although it's fiction, do you think it resembles the Microsoft Culture of the time?	Lord no, that book bugged me. On the one hand, they're a bunch of pretentious and precocious, annoying kids. I worked on a team (NT) where the tone was set by Dave Cutler and the guys he brought over from Digital, so it was rather different. On the other hand, it's such a big company that odds are those four main people DID exist somewhere in the company. Just not around me!
Why was (is) a monolithic registry preferred over distributing the settings in a number of files like Unix? Why did windows remain single-user focused for so long when Unix was multi-user since the 70s? In my understanding, if there is just one user, that user has to be admin which opened Windows up to security issues. (I don't even recall any sudo-like privilege escalation in pre-XP Windows.)	Windows NT was multiluser from birth. And there's nothing about the Windows architecture that requires users to be admin; the reality, I think, is that most apps started out in Win95 land and just didn't work if they were run as non-admin, so people ran as admin because the apps required it.
	We couldn't just break all those apps and say "Oh well, get better apps" so what you got was a convention of people running as admin. But again, there's no need to. Same as Unix.
	The one exception is that under Unix it's easy to sudo and so admin work briefly. I wish Windows had (or exposed) a simpler mechanism for letting me run as a non-admin credential and escalate when needed. I know UAC does the same thing, more or less, if used cautiously.
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Yeah NT did eventually get around to fixing it. My question was really about the earlier systems, because I think you said you worked on MS-DOS? Since there were existing systems with multi-user and privilege escalation even before the first Windows, somebody must have made a conscious decision to not include that functionality.	MS-DOS was only the second or third OS I can think of for a Microprocessor (CPM, SCP, then MS-DOS). What existed for mainframes and minis didn't matter much in the memory limits available on the desktop.
What was the inspiration for Space Cadet Pinball and what is your high score?	I don't know, I wasn't the designer, the inspiration part happened separate, I provided the perspiration part! I was actually pretty good at the game, since I was literally paid to play and test it... but I don't know the score, sorry! I do have the world high score on Tempest, though! But not Pinball :-)
1. What's something super useful within Task Manager you think even seasoned Windows users don't know they can do? 2. What do you think a future version of Task Manager should be able to do?	I think CTRL_SHIFT_ESC is a surprise to a lot of people!
	I think Task Manager needs Dark Mode, and a way to show who has locked what file or device so you can kill the offender when needed.
Why is it that I can still find dialogs in Windows 10 that were clearly built using 16 bit Visual Studio 97 version?	This should explain it. When you achieve perfection, you leave it alone:
	https://youtu.be/l75a8CvIHBQ
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Please for the love of God, use your Microsoft contacts to stop the snipping tool from going away. It's literally perfect but they keep trying to discontinue it.	One Compound Word: SnagIt. It's what you need to make your life complete.
	After my time, but I heard the new snipping and history that's being built in to replace it is pretty good. It better be if they kill snipping tool!
Thanks for task manager! I use it for so many things. How do you feel about newer versions of Windows de-emphasizing the control panel in favor of their new settings app?	I'm all for it if they made sure they had 100% coverage of all settings. It's sort of weird that in this day and age, with an R&D budget in the billions, we still have a mix of new control panel and old property pages. But I like the new stuff if it covered all cases!
Hello Dave! Why does Windows have such a rough time transferring a lot of small files? Is it a limitation of NTFS?	It's not Windows, it's all operating systems. Part of it is filesystem related:
	Imagine copying a file takes 200ms of overhead plus 10ms per MB. Coping 100M of large files will take 200ms + 1000ms = 1.2 seconds.
	Now imagine you have 100M of 1M files. Now you have 100*200ms + 1000ms = 20000ms or 20 seconds. 20 times as long for the same amount of data.
Did you ever get a chance to work in/on OS/2? I stuck with OS/2 until 2005/2006, before moving onto Linux, and would love to hear any opinions and stories you might have.	I didn't! I used OS/2 a bit but never had a chance to work on it. Many of the people I worked with did, though... but if OS/2 were Kevin Bacon, I'm one degree removed.
I had waited more than 20 years to ask this... What the fuck is Trumpet Winsock?	That's what you need to use TCP/IP on Windows before it was included in Windows. You're welcome.
What was the idea behind having "generic" activation keys starting in Windows XP that would activate any version, it was said they were for [educational purposes], did Microsoft provide them to 501c3/non-profit schools, or was there a different reasoning?	I'm not sure what you mean by "generic". I remember retail and oem, but what was a generic key?
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There was a set of keys that became public knowledge partway through XP life that appeared to activate unlimited machines as valid, though added a banner "For Educational Purposes Only". I remember trying it back in the day and always wondered what the intention was that was important enough the key activations were never blocked. [I did have multiple legal keys, but curiosity killed the cat and I had to swap one to the "educational" key to see for myself, lol]	I don't actually know! But I can surmise that if it was displaying a banner down in the bottom right corner of the screen, it knew it was not licensed and was likely limited or time-limited in some way. Unless you could actually ACTIVATE them with that key, which would surprise me.
How does OLE still work? I can't think of anything else that complex and old that still runs. We've got a legacy piece in our application that uses it and I can build against it using .net 4.0, in an Azure pipeline and deploy to windows 10 hosts and a piece of 90s technology still works perfectly. How and why?	It was complex, but pretty well written and very well tested. That's not to say there aren't a lot of bugs outside the common case codepaths, but I bet if Office used it, it's pretty solid, and will be forever.
Other than your personal phone number, did any Easter eggs make it to general availability?	There was one in the Win9X shell, but I think we removed it for Windows XP and later. So not that I'm aware of!
Have you ever wanted to make a "sequel" to Space Cadet?	There are actually two other tables available in the original Maxis game that should work, in theory, but I think Space Cadet was the best of the 3, so...
Were there ever any 3rd party edit/change to shell that made you think, "Why didn't we think of that?"	Not offhand, but "Stacks" on MacOS where it tries to rescue your mess by grouping things by filetype (Images, Docs, etc) is pretty clever. So that's something I wish we'd though of!
Have you worked at all with Bryce Cogswell and Mark Russinovich?? Also, what was your initial response to Process Explorer /the Sysinternals stuff??	No, but the SysInternal guys are geniuses of the highest order, so far as I'm concerned (and I say that based on their products, no knowing them). They know their stuff.
What are your best/oddest purchases you were able to justify as a work expense (for example, were you able to get MS to buy pinball machines as an R&D cost)?	I had DirecTv in my office! I was working on the Media Center prototype and we couldn't get cable on campus, so I got the dish installed on the roof, etc....
	I had a Tempest machine in my Office but at my own expense. I started right around the days of the "shrimp vs weenies" memo, so they were pretty cost conscious.
Is it true that you and Dave Cutler got into a knife fight over a hand of poker gone bad?	A broken bottle is not a knife.
Was DoubleSpace stolen from Stacker?	No. As I understand it, DoubleSpace was licensed from an Israeli developer. Then I heard that Stacker had somehow been awarded a patent on using a hash table in compression, which sounds pretty ludicrous if true. There was a trial, and even though it revolved around hash tables and math and compression engines, and no one on the jury had been to college, as I heard it. So the big guy lost. That's the story I heard, your mileage may vary. I'm not a spokesman, etc.
^{the below is a reply to the above}
MS-DOS 6.21, the most useless version. I remember writing an extra "2" on my 6.2 OEM disks when the update came out (no point wasting disks).	You say "useless", I say "canonical".
	I think I actually worked on 6.22, not sure. It was 6.2 something. In terms of usefulness, the features I added to it personally were:
	- Moving Doublespace to HMA to free up a lot of low mem, as noted
	- Giving Diskcopy ability to do it in a single pass with no swaps
	- I wrote a new version of Smartdrv that added CD-ROM support
	- I wrote a special version of Setup that worked via deltas and put everything on a single floppy (no point wasting disks).
	Mind you, I was just a summer intern when I did that, and it took me about 3 months.
What are your favorite DOS command-line tricks that still work in Windows 10?	doskey!
What actually happens if someone deletes Win32?	Human sacrifice, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria. Do not attempt.
Did Bill ever swing by your cubicle and tell you'd he'd take your assignment home and finish it in a weekend if you didn't hurry up?	Cubicle? It was the 90s at Microsoft! I had a corner office with a table, chairs, a Tempest machine, and a sofabed.
What is the best project you worked on or had friends work on that was canceled, that you would revive if you had the resources?	Windows Media Center, I'd say! And I wish they'd done a great AutoPC that the OEMs could have licensed and made common to most cars.
There has been a lot of hate on Windows / Microsoft from the Unix / Linux advocates. What are some narratives that you disagree / don't think are true?	I used to love the Amiga, so I know what it's like to feel a sense of advocacy for a platform that you feel is superior but overlooked in the marketplace.
	I think the most untrue narrative I've heard about them is that they all have neckbeards. I think it's only "most", not all.
How do you introduce yourself at parties?	"Does anyone here know how to update my Groove subscription on my Zune?"
What OS are you using now? What's your favorite OS of all time? What's the worst OS of all time? What's the worst Microsoft OS (if different)?	The best OS of all time was Windows NT 4.0 with the Shell Update Release.
	The worst OS of all time was the TRS-80 Model 1, Level 1 DOS that didn't have the keyboard debounce code in ROM yet so you couldn't even type on the thing.
[deleted]	No, I never put a true easter egg in anything. Especially in an operating system, I don't believe in them. You have to be able to trust the OS, and I think it goes against that.
How did you get started in this specific field?	I first wandered into a Radio Shack store in about 1979 when I was 11, where I saw my very first computer. It was not connected yet, as the staff had not figured out how to set it up yet. Being somewhat precocious, I asked if I might play with it if I could manage to set it up. On a lark they said, “Sure kid, have a shot”, and ten minutes or so later I had it up and running. This endeared me to the manager, Brian, enough that every Thursday night and Saturday morning I would ride my bike down to the store: I’d type in my crude BASIC programs and they were kind enough to indulge my incessant free tinkering on their expensive computer. So that's pretty much how I started!
Do you ever have moments where you’re like “they have it so easy nowadays” or do you think that because of the groundwork put in place 30 years ago that systems have become exponentially more complex?	Only when someone spools up an entire docker instance to pipe something to it on the command line... then it's like "Really? You're basically booting a virtual computer as a command?"
What's the best C++ expert tip you can share for fellow programmers?	If you make anything in your class virtual, make the destructor virtual, particularly if there's any chance that anyone might delete an instance of your derived class through a base class pointer. Otherwise, the behavior is undefined, I think, but even if it works, it's not what you want!
^{the below is a reply to the above}
Wow this is eerie. I literally fixed a bug a couple weeks ago that was this specific case.	They can be weird bugs to track down, too!
Tabs or spaces?	Spaces on an indent of 4, tabs set to 8.
How can I open an MS Binder file?	Push down on the metal tabs at the top and bottom of the central spine of the binder. That will release the 3-hole punch claws, and then you can remove your printed file.
"It's now safe to turn off your computer" Why was this splash removed?	I think most current BIOSes can do it on their own by now!
Do you have any insight as to why MS decided to build Windows 95 from the ground up instead of building off of an existing *nix system the way Apple did with OSX? Was it just for backwards compatibility or were there other reasons? Also, had you gone this way, how do you think Windows, and the industry in general, might be different? I'm asking as someone who thinks that WSL is the best thing to happen to Windows in years.	Windows 95 was not built from the ground up, but NT was. The most succinct reason (and just a guess, I'm not a spokesman) is that even though MS had Xenix on hand, there were fundamental problems in the way Unix handled SMP multiprocessor locks and so on at the time. I presume these have long since been solved in Linux, etc, but not without significant work.
	WSL is one of my favorite things too, but for the library of tools and software, it makes available to me, not because of some fundamental architectural superiority, I don't think!
What are your feelings about "Microsoft Bob"?	https://youtu.be/rXHu9OmLd8Y
What did source control look like in the 90's? How did MS keep its code from leaking out to the public? How did you handle versioning and different developers working on the same feature?	We used a tool called SLM, or Source Library Manager. It was sort of available briefly as a product under the name Microsoft Delta.
	It was OK for smaller teams but did not support branching, so just before I left we moved to Source Depot.
Why was Ctrl + Alt + Delete changed to Ctrl + Shift + Escape?	It wasn't! Ctrl-Alt-Delete raises the "Secure Alert Sequence" which triggers the OS to switch to the secure desktop, where you have the ability to click a button which will start task manager upon return to your regular desktop.
	Ctrl-Shift-Esc is a feature built into Winlogon that launches a TaskManager on the current desktop without switching to the secure desktop.
	There are theoretically hacks and exploits that can only be caught by switching to the secure desktop, so if you're ever in doubt, ctrl-alt-del is the more secure way to go.
How did DOS ever get away with just pulling device names like "COM1" out of thin air when it came to output redirection etc..?	That's for compatibility with MS-DOS.
What are you currently working on?	Mostly on LED and Microcontroller projects that I detail on my YouTube channel, and the channel itself takes a fair bit of my time! If you're curious, you can check out my current successes and failure adventures at http://youtube.com/d/davesgarage
Did you work with Kris Hatleid on Super Hacker and the game Evolution?	I worked with Kris on an unreleased title called "Commander Video". That's largely where I learned assembly language, since he did the bulk of the coding, I watched and did level design, etc. 1982 or so I believe!
Got any dev back door mainframe access codes for pinball?	hidden test
Dave, how did you manage to do all that without being able to google everything?	That's one of the craziest things... I got a degree in computer science before you could even look anything up!
	The hardest part was OLE2. Coming form a different platform (the Amiga) it was a monster to wrap my head around, and the book (Inside OLE2) was not the best for introducing devs to OLE. It scared me, and I sure could have used a YouTube tutorial or two!
Hi Dave! So here's a bit of an odd one. I loved your Space Cadet Pinball! I must have spent countless hours on it as a kid, and even now I still occasionally try to find ways to boot it up. A legitimate classic. But lately, the version windows offers just... don't feel the same. They aren't as nice. Is there a game you can name that you would say feels like a worthy successor to Space Cadet Pinball? Or even any more general pinball games you would recommend?	I have a real Black Knight 2000 machine here in the house that I fully restored, so I'm a fan of physcial pinball as well!
	I think the two best video games are (a) arcade Tempest, and (b) XBox Geometry Wars 3.
	GW3 is a classic, or should be!
Woah woah woah, University of Regina?!? Are you from here? Cool to see a UofR grad had such a major impact!	Yup! Check out the regina sub for a recent article
When working on MS-DOS what did you think of alternatives such as 4DOS, NDOS or DR-DOS, were they source of inspiration for new features or not at all ?	No in general, but Norton had NCD. It was a change folder command that could jump around the disk, so if you typed "NCD drivers" from the root, it could go down to "C:\windows\system32\drives". Super handy.
	So I tried to write one for NT, but it meant changing the working directory of the PARENT process (cmd.exe) and I could never figure out a clean and elegant way to do it without modifying CMD itself!
Which is the best version of Windows? (Figuratively speaking).	Windows NT 4.0

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Steel, Short Interest Stocks & The Bubble?

JoJo's Bizarre OC Tournament #5: Round 3 Match 6 Anthony ‘Ani’ Oakey and Kamen Rider Volt Versus ?????

Tips From a New Vegas Veteran on Fighting Difficult Enemies

-"Characters and Carnage"-

GeForce RTX 3090 Review Megathread

GeForce RTX 3090 reviews are up.

Below is the compilation of all the reviews that have been posted so far. I will be updating this continuously throughout the day with the conclusion of each publications and any new review links. This will be sorted alphabetically.

Written Articles

Anandtech - TBD

Arstechnica - TBD

PC Perspective - TBD

TechGage - Workstation benchmark!

The FPS Review - TBD

Video Review

Bitwit - TBD

Tech of Tomorrow

[Table] I am Dave Plummer, author of Windows Task Manager, Zip Folders, and worked on Space Cadet Pinball, Media Center, Windows Shell, MS-DOS, OLE32, WPA, and more. (pt 1/2)

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