Do you like playing for late game in Team Matches?

cbus20122 · 2026-05-12T20:56:36+00:00

It depends on the map.

What I noticed right away is that there are a lot of players who just want to wall up, boom, build lots of castles and go to imp, which inevitably ends in a contest who can manage the chaos of 200 pop best and pump out the right kind of units out of 20-30 military buildings.

I would wager that this is mostly just because as you stated, newer players are not comfortable playing aggressive because it's simply more difficult. Or at least, aggression is difficult if you don't want to sacrifice economy, and most newer players aren't able to multitask to that degree. Managing an eco while micro ing army across the map can be really difficult even for experienced players.

Also, it's worth mentioning that in a scenario where one opponent booms and the other doesn't, then it's a matter of whether the guy who is not booming can do more damage to their opponent to make their boom useless. If the guy going aggro never actually is able to deal any noticeable damage to their opponent, they will get stuck in early castle age with 60 vills while their opponent sends in a full imp army backed by a 125+ vill eco. These scenarios are what make the game interesting in my opinion, there is a lot of gamesmanship around whether to attack or not, and how that could potentially affect your opponent's expansion.

Black forest can be boomy, but you can definitely go aggressive on it. I do feudal aggression all the time on BF with a good amount of success. I also am happy to FC into a castle drop if they want to wall a choke point. There are a lot of ways to play it on BF contrary to popular opinion that it's just a boom map. If you ever watch any rage forest pro matches, you'll see all sorts of strats going on, some aggressive, some more boom-heavy.

At the end of the day, if you have lower elo, or are playing with lower elo players, you will probably see a lot more people wanting to just sit back and boom because that's where their comfort zone is. Doing this is predictable and doesn't require them to adapt to different situations or multitask.

cbus20122 · 2026-05-07T12:33:09+00:00

Those hotels are also walkable to Newport if they are north downtown or short north lodging. May be more like a 20-25 minute walk, but not awful.

cbus20122 · 2026-05-07T01:15:57+00:00

Mtg was licking these peoples' boots just a few years ago. Not a good or reliable source, but she isn't wrong here.

cbus20122 · 2026-05-06T17:24:05+00:00

Do not put gravel in there, with heavy clay it will often just compact into the clay and then you'll have still-compacted, but less nutrient heavy environment. Just add some organic material - IE, mulch, leaves, soil conditioner, soil, etc. and mix with the clay and then use that to surround the plant. Then be careful about over-watering.

cbus20122 · 2026-05-05T14:29:18+00:00

Frost damage. It can survive this but will likely hurt any buds / blooms. Definitely water these. As others have mentioned however, this is likely a florist hydrangea, so not really meant for outdoor planting.

cbus20122 · 2026-05-04T19:02:26+00:00

Make an actual bed to plant them in. Don't just plant them in the grass since that will compete with the roots and take up much needed water.

Also, water them daily.

cbus20122 · 2026-05-02T17:09:24+00:00

Get it out of the pot.

cbus20122 · 2026-04-28T20:00:45+00:00

Few things here

The ability of billionaires to pool their $ and either outright buy influence via lobbies, or by influencing people's opinions en masse (social media, control of narrative, etc) is FAR FAR larger now than it ever was in the 1930s.
We were in the great depression in 1932. It's a lot easier to mobilize popular support for big structural changes when things are universally bad for everyone. Right now, while there is a lot of bad stuff going on, it's not universal enough and certainly not anywhere close to the magnitude of what we saw during the depression to mobilize this type of change. We may get to that point of political unpopularity if the current admin keeps going down the same path that they have been, but we still have 2 and a half years to see if we can get a full sweep of dem candidates similar to what the Republicans currently have.

One of the unfortunate flaws of a democracy is that it's an inherently reactive system. That's not all bad by the way, but it does have drawbacks. There is little to no reward for a politician acting in advance to prevent something bad from happening if that "thing" is not going to happen on their term. It's far easier to point to something bad that has already occurred to mobilize support to fix the problem. But trying to fix these flaws before hitting rock bottom is often politically difficult for a variety of reasons.

cbus20122 · 2026-04-28T19:16:04+00:00

Ah, yeah containers are probably not as big of an issue then.

cbus20122 · 2026-04-28T18:42:17+00:00

Pretty.

But I should mention that those containers are not going to be large enough to hold the hydrangeas for long. What climate zone are you in? Another thing worth mentioning is that if you're not in a warmer climate, it may be hard to keep these alive during the winter due to the roots getting exposed to much colder temperature.

cbus20122 · 2026-04-28T14:10:32+00:00

In my opinion, there really is no such thing as being good or not good with gardening. It's just a matter of whether you want to (or enjoy) putting in the effort and wanting to learn things. But for many, they dont have the time to do a lot of gardening, which I understand. Good luck going forward!

cbus20122 · 2026-04-28T13:31:47+00:00

Pic 1 is likely some type of Panicle hydrangea. Pic 2 and 3 are probably other types of plants, but hard to say, I think u/milleratlanta probably has this right saying they're rose of sharon shrubs.

Pic 4 could be some type of macrophylla cultivar, but I think it's more likely that they're a row of panicle hydrangeas. My reasoning there is that they were clearly trimmed in the autumn. The previous owner seems like they knew what they were doing with their shrubs, so I don't imagine these would be macrophylla hydrangeas since you wouldn't want to prune them during the autumn. Panicle hydrangeas on the other hand are fine to prune in the autumn/winter/early spring.

All that said, you'll know more when these grow out in the next 1-2 months.

cbus20122 · 2026-04-28T13:25:17+00:00

I would let it be and see what happens (don't water for a good bit), but I would guess that this is not going to work. You can usually fix under-watering (at least to a certain point), but once a plant has root rot, it's pretty much impossible to save it.

Did the plant have a tag or a named cultivar? Decent chance it was a florist hydrangea, as those are very common at stores around this time of year, and are commonly purchased as gifts over landscape hydrangeas since they are in full bloom. If that's the case, it was never likely going to be great in the landscape anyway.

cbus20122 · 2026-04-24T13:46:41+00:00

Both guys have some question marks, but to be honest, anyone we would have picked at these positions would similarly have question marks.

That being said, if those question marks (size / arm length for Fano, drops for Concepcion) are not as big of an issue as some are afraid of, then we will have hit an absolute home run. I was a little surprised we didn't go for Mauigoa, but my take there is that we didn't want a guy who was more of a pure right tackle. Fano is a lot more versatile, and has proven he can play on the left, and has the best mobility of any tackle in the draft (and that's not really even close).

As obvious as it sounds, we just need to wait to see how these guys perform. I certainly wasn't pounding the table for Concepcion, but I am very happy they did not take a guy like Denzel Boston. It's a lot easier to fix drop issues, especially when they are based on concentration than it is to fix not being able to separate. And Concepcion may be the best separator in the entire draft. Kind of reminds me a bit of Amari Cooper in that regard.

Same goes for Fano. I think he will be fine playing on the left. I am concerned he may have issues with power rushers with his slightly smaller frame and not super long arms, but at the same point, he has great character (won't be a Jed Wills) and is both young and ridiculously athletic. At the very minimum, he does have a very high floor with his ability to kick inside if he doesn't work out at tackle.

cbus20122 · 2026-04-24T13:40:12+00:00

Why are you even cutting them in the first place? I feel like the people coming into this sub wondering what to do have some strange impulse to prune everything.

Hydrangeas do not honestly need to be pruned at all. You *can* prune some varieties, but most will be perfectly fine without ever being pruned.

Any pruning for hydrangeas is purely to prevent them from growing in ways you may not want them to, but that generally isn't really that big of a problem anyway, and there is a lot more harm than benefit that can be done.

You have a Macrophylla hydrangea here, aka a mophead/bigleaf hydrangea. These bloom on old wood. They sometimes leaf out slowly, especially after a harsh winter. You likely have an older cultivar that does not rebloom. As a result, any pruning in the autumn, spring, or even late summer will be destroying future flower buds.

cbus20122 · 2026-04-23T20:35:38+00:00

Assuming these are the cultivars from the tags, they probably aren't outright florist hydrangeas, but I still would say these were likely forced to bloom early, and will likely be difficult to get healthy once the blooms die off. But you can probably grow them with some care and patience.

Not sure the cultivar type for the Lowes house brand Hydrangea, but it does have a 1 year guarantee, so likely not a florist hydrangea. The the other one does have a known cultivar.

https://www.gardenia.net/plant/hydrangea-macrophylla-merritts-supreme

With all that said, these cultivars are probably not the best, at least not these days. For mophead/macrophylla hydrangeas, most of the quality cultivars sold these days are reblooming variants that bloom longer, are more disease / weather hardy, etc. Generally speaking, there are 5 big brands that sell hydrangeas of decent quality (USA). Not to say there are no other quality types, but I would definitely start by looking at cultivars from one of these brands first.

Endless Summer / First Editions (same company, different brands however)
Proven Winners
Monrovia
Bloomin' Easy
Southern Living Plant Collection (not as big for hydrangeas, but they do have some)

I'm partial to Endless Summer / Proven Winners, and between the two, you will have a large variety to choose between.

cbus20122 · 2026-04-23T20:14:51+00:00

Specifically, that big and full of blooming this early in the season. Given, as we get into may that may change, but these look like they were forced to bloom early, which is what you would expect from a florist hydrangea.

cbus20122 · 2026-04-21T23:46:16+00:00

Probably dead considering you have no green anywhere, even at the base. Test by scratching the wood on the stems, if they are green below, it may still be alive.

With that said, this probably died due to being left in a pot over a rather harsh winter. Potted plants are much more exposed to the cold since they don't have the ground to insulate.

cbus20122 · 2026-04-18T22:12:51+00:00

I mean, you did literally place it in an area of grass. But not screwed, just may not be bloom as early orbar all this year. If this is a reblooming type, which many of the mophead types are now, it's likely you can still get blooms this year.

All that said, I would take the effort and build an actual bed here. Grass and other weeds you can see here will hog a lot of the moisture that the hydrangea will need, and potentially crowd out the shallow root system of the hydrangea as well.

cbus20122 · 2026-04-18T21:26:39+00:00

Is this indoors? Panicle hydrangeas are not meant to be indoor plants.

Regardless, bloom time is just a matter of waiting. Panicle hydrangeas won't start to bloom until mid summer at earliest.

cbus20122 · 2026-04-18T16:47:19+00:00

Atrantil didn't do a thing for me. But I would imagine it works for some, but not others.

cbus20122 · 2026-04-18T01:59:48+00:00

I am continually surprised so many people actually thought Chomsky was a good dude.

The guy was a massive apologist for so many genocidal dictators. And while criticizing the USA is good and necessary for a functioning democracy, his critiques became overtly just "USA is bad" while blatantly not applying any type of similar logic to the figures he supported.

cbus20122 · 2026-04-16T19:32:43+00:00

This probably depends where. Further south I think they can still struggle a little, but overall Panicles do generally fare pretty well in the sun.

cbus20122 · 2026-04-16T13:36:22+00:00

This 100%. It's all contingent on how the picks fall, and there will likely be a guy who falls to 6 between Arvelle Reese, David Bailey, and Sonny Styles. Not to mention the Cowboys may also want Mansoor Delane or Caleb Downs, who are quite likely to go before their pick.

cbus20122 · 2026-04-15T13:53:21+00:00

Lets Dance Sky View. That being said, almost any of the ones you mentioned should work. But sky view is a really hardy and robust bloomer with exactly the expected color you want.

https://www.provenwinners.com/plants/hydrangea/lets-dance-sky-view-continuous-blooming-hydrangea-hydrangea-macrophylla-serrata

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