The Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC) has released its latest analysis of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Producer Price Index data for the month of November. The Index remained unchanged as inputs to nonresidential construction gained 0.1%.Overall construction input prices are now 0.5% higher than they were a year ago, whereas nonresidential construction input prices are 0.3% higher. Prices for concrete products, steel mill products, softwood lumber, and wood products all increased.Chart credit: Associated Builders and Contractors"Construction input prices are up just 0.2% through the first 11 months of 2024," ABC Chief Economist Anirban Basu said. "However, that encouraging year-to-date price growth primarily reflects declining energy prices and obscures price escalation that has occurred for specific materials. Prices for copper wire and cable and softwood lumber, for instance, are up nearly 12% year over year."Chart credit: Associated Builders and Contractors"Whi...

Marvel Rivals has a large roster of heroes to choose from, and that list is set to grow even more in the coming weeks and months. Every character has between four to six abilities to choose from, including their Ultimate and Team-Up Ability.With so many heroes and movesets to choose from, it can be daunting for players to try out something new after getting to grips with their first four or five heroes. One way to go would be based on the single stand-out ability of any given hero. This guide lists the single most interesting ability of every current character in Marvel Rivals.HEROABILITYDESCRIPTIONNOTESBlack PantherSpirit RendLunge forward and deal damage to enemies. Vibranium Mark produces Bonus Health and refreshes the abilityMovement-based damage abilityBlack WidowStraight ShooterSwitch the Red Room Rifle to Sniper mode to fire high-energy roundsSingle-cast direct hitShares the same magazine with Red Room RifleCaptain AmericaVibranium Energy SawHurl the energy-charged shield to strike enemies in a pathSingle-cast projectile that can ricochetStart at 70, with a 20% reduction for each ricochetCloakDark TeleportationEnshroud nearby allies in the Darkforce Dimension, plunging them into the Phased state, making them untargetable and invisible to enemies and granting them a Movement BoostPersistent Spell FieldAllies within the area gain Invisibility and Movement BoostDaggerDagger StormLaunch a volley of daggers, creating a Healing Over Time field in the impact areaSingle-cast projectile with delayed impact that also generates a spell fieldGrootThornlash WallTarget a location and grow a Thornlash Wall. When Awakened, it strikes nearby enemies attacked by Groot and his alliesThornlash Wall deals 60 damage every 0.5sHawkeyeHypersonic ArrowShoot a Hypersonic Arrow, dealing two instances of damage to enemies in its path and inflicting them with Slow. This ability can Knock Down flying heroesStraight-line projectile that is accompanied by a spell fieldHelaPiercing NightFire multiple Nightsword thorns that detonate after a delayStraight-line projectile that generates a spell field upon impactBruce BannerGamma GrenadeLaunch a Gamma Grenade to inflict damage and Launch Up enemiesSingle-cast projectile with a downward delay that creates a spell field upon impactWhen the caster enters the spell field, it restores 50 gamma energyHero HulkIndestructible GuardGenerate gamma shields for Hero Hulk and nearby allies, absorbing and converting damage into energy for HULK SMASHSingle-cast spell field that surrounds the casterWhen the casters shield takes damage, 100% of the damage is converted into gamma energy. When an allys shield takes damage, 10% of the damage is converted into gamma energyMonster HulkRadioactive LockdownEmit gamma energy to irradiate enemies and render them immobilize and immune to all ability effects. Using Heavy Blow or Gamma Burst will prematurely remove this statusSingle-cast projectileHeavy Blow and Gamma Burst can detect and damage irradiated enemies, and prematurely remove the statusIron FistDragons DefenseAssume a defensive stance with a boost of Chi to block incoming attacks and gain Damage Reduction, then strike back with Yat Jee Chung KuenNoneIron ManMicro-Missile BarrageWhen Hyper-Velocity or Armor Overdrive is used, Iron Man can launch a missile bombardmentScatter-type projectile that generates a spell area upon impactLaunch missiles directly beneath Iron ManJeff The Land SharkHealing BubbleSpit a bubble that heals the ally who collects it, granting them Healing Boost and Movement Boost while also launching up nearby enemiesTouching the bubble will immediately activate its effect and will knock back nearby enemiesLokiRegeneration DomainUse Rune Stones to create a magical field that provides allies Healing and converts incoming damage into further healingRelease a spell field at the location of Loki and the IllusionThe spell field is sustained by Rune Stones. It will disappear if the Rune Stone is destroyed or if its maximum duration is reached. Allies within the field will receive healing over time, and any damage taken will be converted into healing based on the amount of damage takenLuna SnowAbsolute ZeroCast a clump of ice to Freeze the hit enemy and restore HealthSingle-cast projectile with delayed impactFreeze enemies for 2.7s. However, if they are attacked during the last 2.2s of the freeze, the effect will be canceledMagikStepping DiscsJump through a Stepping Disc, teleporting a short distance in the direction of movement. Become Invincible while teleportingMagik is invincible while movingMagik can perform a combo ability within a certain time frame, choosing between Eldritch Whirl or Demons RageDarkchildDemons RageSummon a Limbo demon that attacks enemies after exiting a Stepping DiscA cuboid spell field in melee rangeMagnetoMag-CannonConvert the iron rings on Magnetos back into a Mag-Cannon and launch a metallic mass forward. Higher stacks of rings increase damage, and full stacks knock back enemiesSingle-cast projectile with delayed impactNo cooldown, but the ability can only be activated when the Iron Ring has at least one chargeWhen fully charged, the Iron Ring has a 6m knockback distanceMantisHealing FlowerConsume Life Orbs to grant allies Healing Over TimeHealing Flower provides two types of healing effects: One-time Healing and Healing Over TimeMoon KnightTriple EclipsePerform a combo with his truncheon, and the third strike will launch up the enemy hit slightlyNoneNamorWrath Of The Seven SeasLaunch the trident forward to damage nearby enemies, then direct all Monstro Spawn to perform an enhanced attack on the nearest hit enemy. When the trident hits an enemy, Monstro Spawn to enter a berserk state, gaining increased Attack SpeedArced projectile that generates a spell field upon impactPeni ParkerCyber-Web SnareCast futuristic webbing that Immobilizes enemies or creates a Cyber-Web. While in the Cyber-Web, gain Healing Over Time and a Movement Boost. Excess healing converts into Bonus HealthSingle-cast projectile with delayed impactEnemies hit are ensnared for 0.7s. While trapped in the Cyber-Web, Peni Parker receives 25 healing per second. Any excess healing is converted into Bonus Health, up to a maximum of 150 Health, and grants a 25% Movement BoostPsylockeWing ShurikensLaunch a volley of psionic shurikens that stick to enemies, dealing damage and granting herself Bonus Health. Press again to recall the shurikensProjectile that fires in a straight trajectory.When the projectile is recalled, it will move 20s toward the crosshair before returning to PsylockeRocket RaccoonB.R.B.Deploy a Battle Rebirth Beacon that revives a fallen ally and periodically produces armor packs and rocket jet packsGenerate an item every 3s, including Armor Pack and Rocket Boots45s. You can reclaim the beacon by pressing E. When reclaimed, the cooldown will be reduced based on the beacons remaining health. If you reclaim a full-health beacon, the minimum cooldown will be 5sScarlet WitchDark SealLand a hit on a target or the scene, or press E to generate a Force Field that periodically Stuns enemies within rangeStraight-line projectile that generates a spell field upon impactSpider-ManGet Over Here!Shoot webbing to reel in the hit enemy. If the enemy is tagged with a Spider-Tracer, Spider-Man will get pulled to them insteadProjectile that fires in a straight trajectoryAttack enemies marked with a Spider-Tracer, pulling Spider-Man towards them and performing a flying kickSquirrel GirlSquirrel BlockadeLaunch an acorn to unleash Squirrel Guards, Imprisoning the first hit enemyCharged projectile with an arced trajectoryStar-LordBlaster BarrageFire a frenzy of shots, causing damage to enemies within range.Spherical Spell FieldStormBoostChannel the power of the weather to empower Storm: Tornado grants a Movement Boost and inflicts Slow on enemies; Thunder grants a Damage Boost and summons lightning to inflict damageSpherical Spell FieldThe PunisherCulling TurretDeploy a Culling Turret that grounds Punisher and blocks damage from the front while dealing massive damageRapid-fire projectiles that create a spell field upon impactThorAwakening RuneConsume Thorforce to enter the Awakened state, granting Bonus Health and enhancing Mjolnir BashAbility EnhancementVenomCellular CorrosionUnleash tentacles to Slow enemies within reach. Enemies unable to break free in time will suffer damageSpell field that surrounds the casterTendrils apply a 15% Slow on the target and take 3s to inflict damage. If the distance from Venom exceeds 11m, the tendrils will detachWinter SoldierTroopers FistDash forward, seizing enemies along the path and launching up enemies at the end of the dashMovement-based damage abilityWolverineFeral LeapLeap like an animal to snatch the first enemy upon impact and Smash them to the ground. Unleashing this ability will enhance his normal attack to Berserk Claw Strike for a brief periodNoneThose are the best abilities that should entice you to play any given hero in Marvel Rivals.

Spirit is an all new resource to keep track of in Path of Exile 2. Unlike Health and Mana, Spirit is not consumed and recovered at will, but is instead held in a pool, to be reserved and used by buffs, auras, and summons.Beginning with none, you will gain Spirit as you progress through the game. Later on, an ever increasing pool of Spirit will be required for new abilities or more minions, but sources will be far and few to come by. Correspondingly, Spirit costs for some abilities can be decreased through certain skill nodes. This guide has every currently known method to increase Spirit in Path of Exile 2.GearInitially, the only way to have a Spirit reserve is through an item. Sceptres are the only known weapon to offer Spirit, supplying a generous base of 100. This can increase with any modifiers that may be present, usually expressed as X(#-#)% Increased Spirit. Sadly, Sceptres cannot be dual-wielded.Body Armour, Focuses, Shields, and Amulets can all roll with a straight bonus to Spirit, expressed as +X(#-#) To Spirit.This method can be severely limiting on progression, as you are now tied to a set of gear that may not be up to the task for the content you are playing.BossesA handful of bosses can specifically award you with Spirit, +30 each to be exact. On the map, their legend is notably distinct from regular bosses, and is denoted by a skull overlaid with a plus in the lower-left corner. This indicates that they are a Boss Encounter With Upgrade. The names and locations of known bosses specifically with Spirit upgrades are:King in the MistAct 1FreythornIgnaduk, the Bog WitchAct 3The Azak BogAfter you have felled a boss, be sure to collect and consume the Gem-prefix Skull drop, in order to actually apply each of these Spirit boosts permanently.You may then double up on these Spirit rewards on a Cruel difficulty run, for a total of 120+ Spirit.If the pattern is maintained, there ought to be an optional boss somewhere in Act 5 that grants a Spirit buff reward, but that remains to be seen until Path of Exile 2 exits Early Access.Skill NodesExclusive to the Witch class and her Infernalist Ascendancy, is the skill Beidats Will. This skill reserves 25% of Life, in exchange for +1 to Maximum Spirit per 25 Maximum Life. While potentially a troublesome trade-off, there are far more ways to extend and retain Life/Health than there are to increase your Spirit reserve.An indirect way to increase the Spirit pool is to actually lower the Spirit reservation of the abilities themselves. Two such passive nodes are Lord of Horrors which sees Minions have 12% reduced Reservation, and Fate Finding which gives a 15% reduced Reservation of Herald Skills.Eventually there may well be more nodes hidden somewhere in the skill constellation which will either increase Spirit or reduce its reservation for a given ability, perhaps once Path of Exile 2 finally leaves Early Access.That is every possible way to raise Spirit at this time in Path of Exile 2.

Caroline Hill (1845 c.1926) was an English actress. She began acting as a child in the company of Samuel Phelps and soon joined the company of J.B. Buckstone at the Haymarket Theatre. There she created roles in several new plays, including some by W.S. Gilbert, in whose plays she continued to act later in her career. She played at various London and provincial theatres in the 1870s. In 1883, Hill married the actor Herbert Kelcey, with whom she had begun to appear on stage. The couple played mostly in New York City in the 1880s, and Hill continued to act through the 1890s, mostly in England. This 1870 photograph shows Hill as Mirza in a production of Gilbert's The Palace of Truth.Photograph credit: London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company; restored by Adam CuerdenRecently featured: OrngeStephanolepis hispidusStuben am ArlbergArchiveMore featured pictures

December 16: Day of Reconciliation in South AfricaBoston Tea Party1598 Led by Admiral Yi Sun-sin, the Korean navy were victorious at Battle of Noryang, ending the Japanese invasions of Korea.1773 American Revolution: A group of colonists threw chests of tea into Boston Harbor (pictured) to protest British taxation without representation.1938 Adolf Hitler instituted the Cross of Honour of the German Mother, an order of merit for German mothers with at least four children.1997 Amid an outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, the British government banned the sale of beef on the bone for human consumption.2012 A woman was gang-raped and fatally assaulted on a bus in Delhi, generating protests across India against inadequate security for women.Elizabeth Carter (b.1717)James Murrell (d.1860)Camille Saint-Sans (d.1921)Taliep Petersen (d.2006)More anniversaries: December 15December 16December 17ArchiveBy emailList of days of the yearAbout

html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"Released on 14 November 2024. Scroll down for news of the 1.2 update.Nekki has released Cascadeur Mobile, a new mobile edition of Cascadeur, its AI-assisted character animation software. The new app makes it possible to animate 3D characters on an iPhone or iPad, then export the animation to refine in the desktop edition of Cascadeur.Create animations based on real-world physics, aided by AI-based toolsLaunched in 2019, Cascadeur is intended as an artist-friendly alternative to conventional animation software for game development, motion graphics or visual effects work.Although it has standard tools for rigging, posing and animating characters, its unique selling point is a set of AI-assisted, semi-automated toolsets.Its AutoPosing system lets users quickly establish key poses for a character by positioning a small number of joints, with Cascadeur taking care of the rest of the body.The software can then calculate a physically correct trajectory between the poses.New mobile edition: pose and animate characters in augmented realityCascadeur Mobile adapts those workflows for use on mobile devices.Users can pose characters to match a reference images or videos, using gesture controls and a simplified version of the standard Cascadeur interface.The characters can be animated using core features from the desktop application, including the timeline, IK/FK interpolation, Ghosts, Trajectories and the Tween Machine.The rough animation can then be converted into a physically accurate version of itself using the built-in AutoPhysics system, with a separate slider control adding secondary motion.The app also includes an AR Mode, making it possible to animate characters in augmented reality, as shown in this video.Updated 14 December 2024: Nekki has released Cascadeur Mobile 1.2, the first major update to the app since its original release.There are a few quality-of-life updates, but the main change is file exchange: it is now possible to import animation in FBX format, and export it in FBX and glTF formats.Price, system requirements and release dateCascadeur Mobile is compatible with iOS 13.0+ and iPadOS 13.0+: according to Nekki, you need an iPhone 11 or better for an optimal experience.The base app is free, but cannot import or export files, and lacks support for video references. To export data, you need a paid-subscription, which costs $7.99/month or $49.99/year.The full toolset is also available free to users with Pro subscriptions to the desktop edition of the software, which have a standard price of $49/month or $588/year. Download Cascadeur Mobile from the App StoreHave your say on this story by following CG Channel on Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter). As well as being able to comment on stories, followers of our social media accounts can see videos we dont post on the site itself, including making-ofs for the latest VFX movies, animations, games cinematics and motion graphics projects.

A circa 1883 photograph of Lakota leader Sitting Bull Public domain via Wikimedia CommonsOn December 15, 1890, Major James McLaughlin of the United States Indian Service wired a telegram back to headquarters in Washington, D.C. He had stunning news: On his orders, Lakota resistance leader Sitting Bull was dead.The Indian police arrested Sitting Bull at his camp, 40 miles northwest of the agency, this morning at daylight. His followers attempted his rescue, and fighting commenced. Eight Indians were killed, including Sitting Bull and his son, Crow Foot, and several others wounded, McLaughlin wrote in the telegram, which was reprinted in the Chicago Daily Tribune.Sitting Bulls followers, probably 100 men, deserted their families and fled west up the Grand River, he continued. The police behaved nobly, and great credit is due them. Particulars by mail.But McLaughlins neutral language and lack of details obscured much about the showdown on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota, as well as the years of conflict and resistance that preceded that fateful, frigid morning.Sitting Bull, also known as Tatanka Iyotake, was born around 1831. He was known for his opposition to U.S. encroachment on the northern Great Plains, the ancestral homelands of the Lakota people. He rejected integration with white settlers and became known as a leader of the non-treaty Indians.Sitting Bull and Wounded Knee | The American Buffalo | A Film by Ken Burns | PBSWatch on Not least because of his role in the infamous defeat of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer at the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull was an avowed enemy of men like McLaughlin, who led the U.S.s attempts to integrate, assimilate and rule Native Americans by force.In his 1910 memoir, My Friend The Indian, McLaughlin called Sitting Bull crafty, avaricious, mendacious and ambitious. He was by far the most influential man of his nation for many years.Indigenous influence and unity particularly worried the federal Indian Service, especially after a revived Ghost Dance spiritual movement reached the Lakota in 1890. Premised on an intense communal dance, the movement suggested that adopting ancestral traditions would deliver Indigenous Americans to a pre-European state of bliss, peace and freedom.As the U.S. Army tried to crush the movement before it spread further across the country, McLaughlin linked Sitting Bull to the Ghost Dancea perfect justification for his immediate arrest and removal from the reservation.Sitting Bull had gone with zest into the business of promoting the new religion, McLaughlin alleged. Knowing his people, and utilizing the mysticism with which he habitually preyed on their superstitions, he established himself as the high priest of the cult.On December 14, McLaughlin ordered the arrest of Sitting Bull in a letter to Lieutenant Bull Head, a Native American member of the Indian police. P.S., McLaughlin added. You must not let him escape under any circumstances. An 1890 depiction of the capture and death of Sitting Bull Public domain via Wikimedia CommonsThe next morning, Sitting Bull was awoken by officers knocking on the door of his cabin on the Grand River. He let them in. The naked, half-asleep leader looked wholly insignificant and breathed none of the defiance that might have been expected under the circumstances, historian Robert M. Utley wrote in The Last Days of the Sioux Nation.Bull Head told Sitting Bull that he was under arrest. Sitting Bull acquiesced, dressing and coming quietly out of his cabin. But his wife began to shout, and dogs from the village, woken by the dawn raid, barked, waking a gathering crowd.In the chaos, Sitting Bull began to call out, too. Then shots were fired.Piecing together the true story of what happened next is difficult because accounts from McLaughlin and the police are predominant. But when it was all over, Sitting Bull, his son, Bull Head and five others were dead.Panic spread across the reservation, and Lakota began to flee. Some made for the Pine Ridge Reservation, where, just two weeks later, they would be stopped and slaughtered by the U.S. Army in the Wounded Knee massacre.Sitting Bulls death, McLaughlin wrote triumphantly, put a stop forever to the domination of the ancient regime among the Sioux of the Standing Rock reservation.But Sitting Bulls legacy, contrary to McLaughlins wishes, did not diminish. As Sitting Bulls great-grandson told SmithsonianGet the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

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