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Topps Star Wars User Guide – 1

I am old enough to have collected Topps Star Wars bubble gum cards when they first came out in 1977. So, about ten years ago, I was quite pleased to find there was an app in the app store that brought the experience into the twenty-first century. I will admit I played it for a few years, built up quite a collection (for free) and then gave up with it. I would go back once a year, collect that year’s base cards and a few inserts and then quit again. Anyway, it has evolved over the years and is quite different to the original app. I couldn’t really find any user guides, so here is my attempt.

Aim

The aim of the game is to collect virtual cards. You do this by opening packs. There are literally thousands, if not millions, of different cards. Each year, a new set of base cards comes out. These are the bog-standard cards. There are usually a couple of hundred to get. They all feature a character from one of the Star Wars films or one of its many spin-offs. Some are just photos with a fancy background and picture frame. Then there are the limited edition inserts. These are usually original artworks and the most fun to collect. Each card has a value depending on how rare it is. These are ranked as Base (1 to 10), Common, Uncommon, Rare, Super Rare, Epic and Legendary. You may end up with hundreds of a particular Base card, while there may only be one copy of a Legendary card among all the collectors.

Collectors

Because you and all the other collectors are collecting from the same supply of cards. Most of your time will be spent sending and receiving trades. This is when you swap one or more cards for one or more different cards. You can get so far with the free cards, but to be a proper collector means paying out real money for what is essentially virtual cards.

Tips

Here are my tips for getting the most from the game. The last one, I have only just discovered, and it is a real game-changer.

  • Free cards are free cards. At least they don’t take up any space online. You soon get to a point where cargo drops and workbenches are only useful if there is an event on.
  • Pick an aspect of the cards and collect that. Chasing a certain character, film or art style makes it more fun. Lock the cards that you really like. If not, then you may actually trade one away by mistake.
  • I think that the older a card is, the more it is worth. Five 2015 cards are not worth the same as five 2026 cards.
  • Don’t be too precious when collecting base cards. There are so many of them out there that you WILL get them all eventually. As long as each trade gets you one card closer, it doesn’t really matter if there are sme dupes in it.
  • When trading, make sure the other person is online. A little green dot by their name means they are online, and a yellow dot means they have been around recently. They are most likely to respond immediately. No dot means they could be asleep.
  • Once you have a few Rare, Super Rare and Epics, the “take one and leave two of the same value” really works. There are people out there with loads of Epic dupes, so it’s no loss to them to trade a few for a new card. Rare, Super Rare, and Epic are where the collection points are, so the more you get, the bigger your collection value.

I hope you find that useful. If so, I will go into more detail about playing the game.

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CC Parameters in Ableton with VST3s

My favourite part of the performance music sequencer Ableton is the follow actions. This is the facility to add a certain amount of randomness to a piece by playing with the % chance of one clip moving to another. Not much use for producing a club banger, but very useful for more experimental stuff. You could have three clips, where clip one plays once and then goes to clip two. Clip two plays a random number of times, and then goes to clip three. Clip three plays a random number of times and then randomly goes back to either one or two.

As well as doing it with clips full of notes, you can do it with envelope data as well. This is where I came slightly astray. If you set p a channel as in track 6 of this image, the envelope data will be sent to the assigned track, in this case “Piano”. The only trouble is, when you come to drawing your envelopes, you have to do it against the generic channel number rather than the controller name. So if you want to draw an envelope directly in a clip in the Piano track, you would see a list of all the available parameters at the bottom of the screen. If you do it in the “Midi” track, though, you just get a list of all the generic controller names. Unless you have a conversion chart from your VSTs creator, then it is trial and error trying to find the right one.

Now I had the VST3 for JC-303 installed, and I was trying control the filter cutoff and resonance via a separate track. Whatever I tried, though, nothing seemed to work. This had worked with an old VST2 version of the plugin. After much googling, I discovered this was by design rather than a bug. It seems VST3s don’t really do old-fashioned CCs. Instead, they use Parameter Automation, which gives you greater control over the parameter. Whereas the old way gave you 128 steps between 0 and 127, the new value is a floating-point number between 0 and 1. This gives you thousands of steps. Some VST3s still accept old-fashioned CCs, but they require some method of bridging one value to another.

It is a bit annoying, but I suppose it is a bit of a niche use. My options appear to be;

  • Stick with VST2s. That feels like a bit of a step back.
  • Get Max For Live. Currently, I am a Standard user. I don’t need the full Suite, so I could just get the Max add-on.
  • Hope someone writes a wrapper for VSTs that allows this communication to happen. There are lots of old VST2s out there that may not be updated. This could very well be useful to a lot of people.

I will update you with any changes.

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Reddit Moderation is Broken

Up until a few months ago, I was a great fan of Reddit. It was my go-to place for hot takes on all my hobbies and local news. I had lots of great interactions with people, and someone on r/jazz said I changed their life with an artist recommendation. It calls itself the “Heart of the Internet”, but it is more like an electronic pacemaker, ticking away, keeping its shareholders happy.

As I said, I loved it. Not any more, though. I have fallen afoul of the Reddit moderators, and apparently, I will never be able to use the site again.

Like most social media, it is hard not to offend someone with something you say. You will always get a ban at some point, but you just delete the offending comments and carry on. My first taste of this was when I was banned from r/mildlyinfuriating, which was mildly infuriating. Apparently, at some point in the past, I had posted a snarky trolling comment in one of the incel subs. Then, a year later, I posted a “great!” type comment in r/mildlyinfuriating. It seems there had been some great war between the two subs, and if you posted in one, you weren’t allowed to post in the other. Even though both comments were harmless, the bots put two and two together, and I got kicked out. It was easily remedied and after a morning, life went on.

The big ban was when Elon Musk was going through his Nazi phase. Everyone was piling in on Reddit. I may have commented r/elonmusk, which I later discovered was purely for fanboys and where dissent was not allowed. That got me a ban from that sub. Presumably by one of the mods. That was ok as I have a couple of accounts and it’s not like I spent a lot of time there anyway.

Fast forward five months, and someone posts videos of Musks humanoid robots. The robots are moving at a normal rate, but the humans in the background are flying around like a double speed Benny Hill video. With my good account, I just asked to see the original videos. What I posted was irrelevant. Reddit knew the two accounts were linked, and down came the ban hammer. “You are being banned for ban evasion, i.e. a previous account of yours was banned and you’re trying to dodge the ban”. Honestly, it was five months ago, and I had forgotten about the first ban.

So what went wrong? Firstly, a lot of the banning is done by bots. These faceless upholders of the law have no concept of context and purely ban you because you posted when you weren’t supposed to. The second post could have been me professing my love for Musk and his work, and it would still have banned me. Secondly, Reddit has a graph somewhere showing how all your accounts are related. I guess it is IP address-related, as all the accounts I have since created are banned as well.

My question is, why on earth did it let me post the second comment in the first place? It knows I have a ban on one account. If it had said, “I am sorry, one of your accounts appears to have a ban on this sub; we can’t let you post here”, I would have shrugged and got on with my day. As it is, I am writing this blog. If you know how the accounts are related, then you can easily stop people from doing things they shouldn’t. I wouldn’t go as far as calling it entrapment, but Reddit is making a lot of people unnecessarily angry with it with its “ban first and ask questions later” moderation. I appreciate that some of the subs are quite contentious and there are various inter-sub rivalries, but I can’t help feeling I am an innocent bystander caught in the crossfire. I have tried appealing, but I doubt if a human actually saw my appeal.