tal

Getting My Butt in Gear with Digital Strategy School!

I have been running CMD+Shift Design since 2008. In those 7 years I learned a lot, I made a lot of mistakes, found some amazing clients, did some really fun projects and made some good money. I’ve had ups and downs and these past 2 years have been tough… really tough. Part of it has […]




tal

Let’s talk about how much I suck at business lately….

A couple weeks ago, I saw a tweet come through my Twitter timeline from my buddy Tim Smith, a designer and podcaster saying, “2014 was my worst year in freelance. My business revenue declined by ~10k.” I immediately related, but hesitated to reply. Who wants to talk about their failures? Business being slow is actually pretty […]




tal

Could you get PTSD from your pandemic experience? The long-term mental health effects of coronavirus

Experiencing intense flashbacks, nightmares, irritability, anger, and fear? In the face of a traumatic event like the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s common to feel this way.




tal

Could you get PTSD from your pandemic experience? The long-term mental health effects of coronavirus

Experiencing intense flashbacks, nightmares, irritability, anger, and fear? In the face of a traumatic event like the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s common to feel this way.




tal

Top 15 Digital Scrapbooking Downloads (Free & Paid)

Scrapbooking can be a fun way to capture important moments in life and with our list of the Top 15 Scrapbooking Resources, you can start right away!




tal

7 Vital Components of a Successful Brand Strategy

A brand strategy is a long-term plan that affects every facet of your business, but creating one can be confusing. We break it down into 7 essential components.




tal

Why Use A Digital Marketing Agency?

Outsourcing your marketing when you're running a small or medium sized business is often seen as an expensive option, one that can be done yourself. It might even be seen as something that's...




tal

5 Tips That You Absolutely Must Know To Design A Unique Metal Business Card

Every day thousands of business cards exchange hands, and these business cards often get lost in mounds of other cards. Often, clients are unable to reach you just because they couldn't find your...



  • Design Roud-up

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Fat Fractal enters the BaaS fray

What has sometimes been described as mobile middleware has taken a new tack. Now, the idea of Backend as a Service (BaaS) has begun to take off in the mobile application development space. Proponents of BaaS say it helps developers easily build mobile apps, or any other applications connected to a cloud backend. Some of Read the rest...





tal

Squared Circle Pit #54 - AVATAR Frontman Johannes Eckerström Talks Wrestling Unlocking His Love of Metal Frontmen

We're back and this week, we're talking to Avatar's colorful frontman Johannes Eckerström. If you've ever seen the band live,...

The post Squared Circle Pit #54 - AVATAR Frontman Johannes Eckerström Talks Wrestling Unlocking His Love of Metal Frontmen appeared first on Metal Injection.




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METAL INJECTION LIVECAST #535 - Liddle' Ditch

We kick things off with Rob talking about his favorite albums of the year. We then discuss the shocking news...

The post METAL INJECTION LIVECAST #535 - Liddle' Ditch appeared first on Metal Injection.



  • Metal Injection Livecast










tal

METAL INJECTION LIVECAST #542 - Dull By Obb

We kick things off talking about the Motley Crue reunion. Darren shares a story from work. Rob talks about going...

The post METAL INJECTION LIVECAST #542 - Dull By Obb appeared first on Metal Injection.



  • Metal Injection Livecast

tal

METAL INJECTION LIVECAST #543 - Gong Solo

We kicked things off with Rob recapping his experience at the Tool concert. We then discussed Dave Mustaine's recent interview...

The post METAL INJECTION LIVECAST #543 - Gong Solo appeared first on Metal Injection.



  • Metal Injection Livecast

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METAL INJECTION LIVECAST #544 - 33% Drained

This week, we had a very special guest, our Livecastard of the Month, Eric, who actually signed up for our...

The post METAL INJECTION LIVECAST #544 - 33% Drained appeared first on Metal Injection.



  • Metal Injection Livecast


tal

METAL INJECTION LIVECAST #546 - Grandma Smoothie

We kick things off talking about annoying holiday commercials. We discuss Christmas music this episode, and why Hanukkah lands on...

The post METAL INJECTION LIVECAST #546 - Grandma Smoothie appeared first on Metal Injection.



  • Metal Injection Livecast

tal

METAL INJECTION LIVECAST #547 - Crab Rangoomba

We kick things off talking about how we spent the holiday break and previewing the bonus Patreon episode coming next...

The post METAL INJECTION LIVECAST #547 - Crab Rangoomba appeared first on Metal Injection.



  • Metal Injection Livecast


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METAL INJECTION LIVECAST #549 - Loose Hot Dog

We kick things off with our New Year's resolutions. Noa explains her future vision board. We discuss climate change and...

The post METAL INJECTION LIVECAST #549 - Loose Hot Dog appeared first on Metal Injection.



  • Metal Injection Livecast

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METAL INJECTION LIVECAST #550 - Don Docking

We kick things off discussing our Tad's Patreon episode, and our fast food preferences. We then discuss the sad status...

The post METAL INJECTION LIVECAST #550 - Don Docking appeared first on Metal Injection.



  • Metal Injection Livecast


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METAL INJECTION LIVECAST #552 - Penis II Society

What's with all the good drummers dying? We kick things off discussing the sad news. Noa discussed locking herself out...

The post METAL INJECTION LIVECAST #552 - Penis II Society appeared first on Metal Injection.



  • Metal Injection Livecast

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METAL INJECTION LIVECAST #553 - Full On Lip

What an eventful edition of the Metal Injection Livecast! We kick things off talking about the new Dave Mustaine memoir...

The post METAL INJECTION LIVECAST #553 - Full On Lip appeared first on Metal Injection.



  • Metal Injection Livecast


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METAL INJECTION LIVECAST #554 - Rob's Nolita

We kick things off talking about the Rage Against the Machine reunion. We then discuss the summer touring season and...

The post METAL INJECTION LIVECAST #554 - Rob's Nolita appeared first on Metal Injection.



  • Metal Injection Livecast

tal

15 Digital Products That Web Designers Can Create and Sell

There are a number of different ways to make money as a web designer aside from simply creating websites for clients. Many freelancers choose to supplement their income from client work by doing some...

Click through to read the rest of the story on the Vandelay Design Blog.




tal

Urging Multi-Pronged Effort to Halt Climate Crisis, Scientists Say Protecting World’s Forests as Vital as Cutting Emissions

By Julia  Conley Common Dreams “Our message as scientists is simple: Our planet’s future climate is inextricably tied to the future of its forest.” With a new statement rejecting the notion that drastically curbing emissions alone is enough to curb … Continue reading




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New EPA Web Portal Helps Communities Prepare for Climate Change

By The EPA The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today launched a new online portal that will provide local leaders in the nation’s 40,000 communities with information and tools to increase resilience to climate change. Using a self-guided format, the … Continue reading




tal

Talking to computers (part 1): Why is speech recognition so difficult?

Although the performance of today's speech recognition systems is impressive, the experience for many is still one of errors, corrections, frustration and abandoning speech in favour of alternative interaction methods. We take a closer look at speech and find out why speech recognition is so difficult.




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Talking to computers (part 2): VUI as an error recovery system

I take a closer look at some unavoidable challenges to effective speech recognition, and I discuss why you may want to think twice before designing dialogue that is 'conversational' and 'natural'. I also offer five important questions that I think should form the basis of any VUI design kick-off meeting.




tal

My Nostalgia is back with Streets of Rage 4

My Nostalgia is back with Streets of Rage 4

abduzeedoMay 06, 2020

I grew up playing video games. My first console was the Atari 2600. The games were quite primitive, literally a few pixels on the screen moving. Remember, that was the 80s. In the 90s my brother and I got the Sega Mega-Drive (Genesis in US). It was a massive improvement in graphics. A 16bit console, whoah! There are incredible games, however the one that marked was Streets of Rage. I remember seeing some kids playing at this shop and I was blown away. I wanted to play it. We got the game a few weeks later and we used to play it all the time. The soundtrack was phenomenal. Fast-forward a few years and the second installment was released. Everything was better. Graphics, music. My love for the franchise was renewed till this day. I have both games on my phone and tablet.

Last week Streets of Rage 4 was released. The long awaited release for me since I learned it was in the works. I got it for the Switch and have been playing every single day and my expectations, which were very high, were met. The game is awesome. The pixelated graphics are no longer. The creators of the series decided to adopt a hand drawn clean look and it works really well. The graphics are beautiful, the scenarios have that 80s gritty look and are full of details. The music doesn’t disappoint either. I’ve been actually listening to the soundtrack on Spotify. 

As you can see, I am a fan and this game deserves a feature here on Abduzeedo.

Streets of Rage

Streets of Rage, known as Bare Knuckle (ベア・ナックル Bea Nakkuru) in Japan, is a trilogy of beat 'em up games developed and published by SEGA in the 1990s.

Famously known for its non stop action and electronic dance influenced music - scored by Yuzo Koshiro and Motohiro Kawashima - the series has gained the status of cult classic throughout the years. It is considered one of the best beat 'em up series of all time. After many years, Axel and Blaze are finally picking up the fight where they left.

Featuring hand-drawn visuals from the team behind 2017’s gorgeous Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap remake, Streets of Rage 4 builds upon the classic trilogy’s gameplay with new mechanics, a fresh story and a gauntlet of dangerous stages with a serious crime problem. Streets of Rage 4 recalls classic gameplay but it stands as an entirely original arcade-style romp thanks to the expertise of Guard Crush Games and Dotemu.

Whether players gang up with a friend or clean up the city solo, Streets of Rage 4 is a skull-bashing, chicken-chomping delight all set to a thumping soundtrack sure to get your blood pumping.

Screenshots

Making of




tal

Intercellar - Accidental Anomalies of Particle Wallpapers

Intercellar - Accidental Anomalies of Particle Wallpapers

AoiroStudioMay 07, 2020

Intercellar is a series of free wallpapers designed 'by accident' by Crtomir Just. I mentioned 'accident' because 'the images are the results of errors in particle simulations'. I think they are super stunning and crispy. We took the liberty to share Crtomir's entire collection and their 'download links'. You can download the 8K wallpapers, this feature is a reminder of what we used to do back in the days. We are definitely living in different times but it's always a nice reminder to remember what we were made of.

These images are the results of errors in particle simulations. While accidentally trying to scrub through the timeline, the otherwise predictable simulation explodes and is forced to take strange turns by blindly filling the gap between missing frames.

About Crtomir Just

Crtomir is an art director and 3D artist based in Murska Sobota, Slovenia, his work slightly shifted and it’s plain awesome. Make sure to follow his work on Behance and store.

 

 

 

 

 




tal

Could you get PTSD from your pandemic experience? The long-term mental health effects of coronavirus

Experiencing intense flashbacks, nightmares, irritability, anger, and fear? In the face of a traumatic event like the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s common to feel this way.




tal

Convergent normal forms for five dimensional totally nondegenerate CR manifolds in C^4. (arXiv:2004.11251v2 [math.CV] UPDATED)

Applying the equivariant moving frames method, we construct convergent normal forms for real-analytic 5-dimensional totally nondegenerate CR submanifolds of C^4. These CR manifolds are divided into several biholomorphically inequivalent subclasses, each of which has its own complete normal form. Moreover it is shown that, biholomorphically, Beloshapka's cubic model is the unique member of this class with the maximum possible dimension seven of the corresponding algebra of infinitesimal CR automorphisms. Our results are also useful in the study of biholomorphic equivalence problem between CR manifolds, in question.




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Willems' Fundamental Lemma for State-space Systems and its Extension to Multiple Datasets. (arXiv:2002.01023v2 [math.OC] UPDATED)

Willems et al.'s fundamental lemma asserts that all trajectories of a linear system can be obtained from a single given one, assuming that a persistency of excitation condition holds. This result has profound implications for system identification and data-driven control, and has seen a revival over the last few years. The purpose of this paper is to extend Willems' lemma to the situation where multiple (possibly short) system trajectories are given instead of a single long one. To this end, we introduce a notion of collective persistency of excitation. We will then show that all trajectories of a linear system can be obtained from a given finite number of trajectories, as long as these are collectively persistently exciting. We will demonstrate that this result enables the identification of linear systems from data sets with missing data samples. Additionally, we show that the result is of practical significance in data-driven control of unstable systems.




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Equivariant Batalin-Vilkovisky formalism. (arXiv:1907.07995v3 [hep-th] UPDATED)

We study an equivariant extension of the Batalin-Vilkovisky formalism for quantizing gauge theories. Namely, we introduce a general framework to encompass failures of the quantum master equation, and we apply it to the natural equivariant extension of AKSZ solutions of the classical master equation (CME). As examples of the construction, we recover the equivariant extension of supersymmetric Yang-Mills in 2d and of Donaldson-Witten theory.




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On the Total Curvature and Betti Numbers of Complex Projective Manifolds. (arXiv:1807.11625v2 [math.DG] UPDATED)

We prove an inequality between the sum of the Betti numbers of a complex projective manifold and its total curvature, and we characterize the complex projective manifolds whose total curvature is minimal. These results extend the classical theorems of Chern and Lashof to complex projective space.




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Characteristic Points, Fundamental Cubic Form and Euler Characteristic of Projective Surfaces. (arXiv:2005.03481v1 [math.DG])

We define local indices for projective umbilics and godrons (also called cusps of Gauss) on generic smooth surfaces in projective 3-space. By means of these indices, we provide formulas that relate the algebraic numbers of those characteristic points on a surface (and on domains of the surface) with the Euler characteristic of that surface (resp. of those domains). These relations determine the possible coexistences of projective umbilics and godrons on the surface. Our study is based on a "fundamental cubic form" for which we provide a closed simple expression.




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Multi-task pre-training of deep neural networks for digital pathology. (arXiv:2005.02561v2 [eess.IV] UPDATED)

In this work, we investigate multi-task learning as a way of pre-training models for classification tasks in digital pathology. It is motivated by the fact that many small and medium-size datasets have been released by the community over the years whereas there is no large scale dataset similar to ImageNet in the domain. We first assemble and transform many digital pathology datasets into a pool of 22 classification tasks and almost 900k images. Then, we propose a simple architecture and training scheme for creating a transferable model and a robust evaluation and selection protocol in order to evaluate our method. Depending on the target task, we show that our models used as feature extractors either improve significantly over ImageNet pre-trained models or provide comparable performance. Fine-tuning improves performance over feature extraction and is able to recover the lack of specificity of ImageNet features, as both pre-training sources yield comparable performance.




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Generative Adversarial Networks in Digital Pathology: A Survey on Trends and Future Potential. (arXiv:2004.14936v2 [eess.IV] UPDATED)

Image analysis in the field of digital pathology has recently gained increased popularity. The use of high-quality whole slide scanners enables the fast acquisition of large amounts of image data, showing extensive context and microscopic detail at the same time. Simultaneously, novel machine learning algorithms have boosted the performance of image analysis approaches. In this paper, we focus on a particularly powerful class of architectures, called Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), applied to histological image data. Besides improving performance, GANs also enable application scenarios in this field, which were previously intractable. However, GANs could exhibit a potential for introducing bias. Hereby, we summarize the recent state-of-the-art developments in a generalizing notation, present the main applications of GANs and give an outlook of some chosen promising approaches and their possible future applications. In addition, we identify currently unavailable methods with potential for future applications.