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Tagged: videogames
The unreal urbanism of Pokémon Go
Earlier this month the mobile-app game Pokémon Go was released in the U.S., and the game has been ubiquitous ever since. Aside from being a sudden pop culture phenomenon, the game's success poses some significant implications. First of all, this is clearly a breakthrough moment for augmented reality. Pokémon Go is not the first augmented reality game, nor is it the most ambitious, but it has undoubtedly brought AR into mainstream consciousness. Secondly, the success of Pokémon Go has led me to reconsider all my previously held assumptions about the uses of mobile apps and gamification for interfacing with urban spaces. I have historically been cynical about the prospect of using mobile games or AR interfaces to interact with urban space, since they usually strike me as shallow and insignificant, typically resulting in a fleeting diversion like a flash mob dance party, rather than altering people's perceptions of place in any lasting or meaningful way. Pokémon Go satisfies all the requirements of my earlier preconceptions, yet despite my best critical instincts, I really like the game.
The buzz about Pokémon Go had been building on various forums online, and after it was released it was virtually impossible to avoid Pokémon Go-related posts. Save for maybe 10 minutes with a friend's Game Boy in the late 90s, I've never played a Pokémon game and I preemptively wrote off Pokémon Go as yet another cultural fad that I would never partake in or understand. Curiosity got the best of my wife, however, and she downloaded the app and we walked around our neighborhood to test it out. To my surprise, the game was a lot of fun; our familiar surroundings were now filled with digital surprises, and we were excited to see neighborhood landmarks and murals represented as Pokéstops, and wild Pokémon hanging out in the doorways of local shops. We meandered around discovering which of our local landmarks had been incorporated into the game, and each discovery increased my enjoyment of the app. Yes, the game is simple and shallow, but I was completely charmed. I downloaded the game so I could play, too.
Reactions to Pokémon Go have been as fascinating as the game's widespread adoption. Many news articles sensationalized the inherent dangers of playing the game: distracted players wandering into traffic or off of cliffs, people's homes being designated as Pokéstops and besieged by players, and traps being laid (using the games "lures") to ambush and rob aspiring Pokétrainers. There have also been insightful critical analyses of the game. An early and oft-shared article by Omari Akil considered the implications of Pokémon Go in light of recent police shootings of black men, warning that "Pokemon Go is a death sentence if you are a black man":
I spent less than 20 minutes outside. Five of those minutes were spent enjoying the game. One of those minutes I spent trying to look as pleasant and nonthreatening as possible as I walked past a somewhat visibly disturbed white woman on her way to the bus stop. I spent the other 14 minutes being distracted from the game by thoughts of the countless Black Men who have had the police called on them because they looked "suspicious" or wondering what a second amendment exercising individual might do if I walked past their window a 3rd or 4th time in search of a Jigglypuff.
Others questioned the distribution of Pokémon across neighborhoods, suggesting that poor or black neighborhoods had disproportionately fewer Pokémon and Pokéstops. Among urbanists, however, reaction to the game has been mixed. Mark Wilson at Fastcodesign declared that Pokémon Go "is quietly helping people fall in love with their cities". Ross Brady of Architizer celebrated the game for sparking "a global wave of urban exploration". Writing for de zeen, Alex Wiltshire boldly states that the game has "redrawn the map of what people find important about the world". City Lab contributor Laura Bliss proclaimed "Pokémon Go has created a new kind of flaneur".
Others have been more critical of the game, with Nicholas Korody at Archinect retorting: "No, Pokémon Go is not an urban fantasy for the new flaneur". At Jacobin, Sam Kriss implores readers to "resist Pokémon Go":
Walk around. Explore your neighborhood. Visit the park. Take in the sights. Have your fun. Pokémon Go is coercion, authority, a command issuing from out of a blank universe, which blasts through social and political cleavages to finally catch 'em all. It must be resisted.
Some, like Jeff Sparrow at Overland, drew direct parallels to the Situationists:
On the one hand, that's way cool – suddenly, the old pub near your house is inhabited by monsters.
On the other, there's something faintly distasteful about the recuperation of specific real histories into a billion-dollar corporate mythology. Nearly 150 people lost their lives when the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory burned to the ground, entirely needless deaths caused by the atrocious working conditions of the garment trade. The tragedy became a rallying point for the trade union movement, the name of the factory, a shorthand reference to employers' greed.
Now, though, it's three free Pokeballs.
We might also say, then, that, even as the game leads players to embrace the derive, it also offers a remarkable demonstration of the phenomenon that Debord critiqued.
Writing for the Atlantic, Ian Bogost mediated on "the tragedy of Pokémon Go":
We can have it both ways; we have to, even: Pokémon Go can be both a delightful new mechanism for urban and social discovery, and also a ghastly reminder that when it comes to culture, sequels rule. It's easy to look at Pokémon Go and wonder if the game's success might underwrite other, less trite or brazenly commercial examples of the genre. But that's what the creators of pervasive games have been thinking for years, and still almost all of them are advertisements. Reality is and always has been augmented, it turns out. But not with video feeds of twenty-year old monsters in balls atop local landmarks. Rather, with swindlers shilling their wares to the everyfolk, whose ensuing dance of embrace and resistance is always as beautiful as it is ugly.
Pokémon Go's popularity has led to many online comparisons to the Star Trek: TNG episode "The Game," in which the crew of the Enterprise is overcome by a mind-controlling video game. The game in Star Trek is not strictly-speaking an augmented reality game, but does involve projecting images onto the player's vision similar to an AR-overlay. Previous gaming and gadget fads have been compared to the TNG episode, notably Google Glass (for it's similarity to the eye-beaming design used to interface with the game in Star Trek) and the pervasively popular Angry Birds game (as evident in this parody video). The comparison has regained cultural cachet because, unlike Angry Birds which can be played on the couch, Pokémon Go is played in motion. This, of course, has contributed to the perception of the game's zombie-fying effects; we've grown accustomed to the fact that everyone's eyes are glued to a smartphone screen in our public spaces, but now there are whole flocks of people milling around with their eyes on their devices.
My cynical side is inclined to agree with the critics who see Pokémon Go's proliferation as proof positive of the passification and banalization of our society; the visions of Orwell, Bradbury, and Phil Dick all realized at once. But there's something there that has me appreciative, even excited about this goofy game. As my wife and I wandered our neighborhood looking for pocket monsters, we noticed several other people walking around staring at their phones. This is not an uncommon sight, but it is re-contextualized in light of Pokémon Go's popularity. "Look," my wife would say, "I bet they're playing, too." After a while she had to know for sure, and started walking up to people and asking, "Are you playing Pokémon Go?" Every person she asked was indeed playing the game. Then we were walking along with these people we've just met, discussing play strategies, sharing Pokéstop locations, spreading word of upcoming lure parties.
One night around 10:30 last week we went into the Oakland neighborhood, home to both Pitt and Carnegie Mellon's campuses and a hotbed of Pokémon Go activity. When we arrived, at least 20 people sat along the wall in front of the Soldiers & Sailors Memorial, smartphones in hands. We walked around the base of the Cathedral of Learning, where dozens of people in groups of two, three, or more were slowly pacing, stopping to capture a virtual creature. We crossed the street to Schenley plaza, where still dozens more people trekked through the grass, laughing and exclaiming and running up to their friends to share which Pokémon they had just got. Sure, most of these people were only talking to their own groups of friends, if they were talking at all, but it was still a cool experience. For me, the greatest thing was not which monsters I caught or XP my avatar earned; rather it was the energy, the unspoken but palpable buzz generated by all these people walking around in the dark of a warm summer night. Yes, I was giving attention to my smartphone screen, but what I remember most from that evening are the stars, and the fireflies, and the murmuring voices. Pokémon Go is promoting a sort of communal public activity, even if the sociality it produces is liminal at best. Yes, it is still shallow, still commercial, still programmed, but it's something; there's an energy there and a potential that is worth paying attention to.
Pokémon Go is not the be-all-end-all of augmented urban exploration, nor should be it considered the pinnacle of how mobile technology can enable new ways of interfacing with city space. But the game's popularity, and my personal experience using it, has given me hope for the potential of AR apps to enrich our experience of urban spaces and engender new types of interactions in our shared environments.
Urban Communication: media ecology & infrastructure, neighborhood narratives, rhetoric & rebranding, and more
- In Urban Media Ecology news, several recent studies reported correlations between characteristics of the built environment and human health. A study from the University of Kansas (in my birthplace of Lawrence) found that "neighborhoods that motivate walking can stave off cognitive decline in older adults":
The researcher judged walkability using geographic information systems — essentially maps that measure and analyze spatial data.
"GIS data can tell us about roads, sidewalks, elevation, terrain, distances between locations and a variety of other pieces of information," Watts said. "We then use a process called Space Syntax to measure these features, including the number of intersections, distances between places or connections between a person's home and other possible destinations they might walk to. We're also interested in how complicated a route is to get from one place to another. For example, is it a straight line from point A to point B, or does it require a lot of turns to get there?"
Watts said easy-to-walk communities resulted in better outcomes both for physical health—such as lower body mass and blood pressure—and cognition (such as better memory) in the 25 people with mild Alzheimer's disease and 39 older adults without cognitive impairment she tracked. She believes that older adults, health care professionals, caregivers, architects and urban planners could benefit from the findings.
- Another research paper from researchers at multiple institutions "suggests that street design may have a larger impact on public health than previously thought":
By studying 24 California cities with an array of street design characteristics and their associated health data, the authors find that living in cities with high intersection density—a measure of compactness—significantly reduces the risk of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease. A full-grid street pattern also is a factor in lower risk of obesity, high blood pressure, and heart disease, as compared with full treelike patterns.
- At CityLab, Richard Florida posted a roundup of recent research studies on the health benefits afforded by walkable communities:
If walkability has long been an "ideal," a recent slew of studies provide increasingly compelling evidence of the positive effects of walkable neighborhoods on everything from housing values to crime and health, to creativity and more democratic cities.
Walkability is no longer just an ideal. The evidence from a growing body of research shows that walkable neighborhoods not only raise housing prices but reduce crime, improve health, spur creativity, and encourage more civic engagement in our communities.
- Another CityLab article by Emily Von Hoffman looked at what architecture is doing to your brain:
I spoke with Dr. Julio Bermudez, the lead of a new study that uses fMRI to capture the effects of architecture on the brain. His team operates with the goal of using the scientific method to transform something opaque—the qualitative "phenomenologies of our built environment"—into neuroscientific observations that architects and city planners can deliberately design for. Bermudez and his team's research question focuses on buildings and sites designed to elicit contemplation: They theorize that the presence of "contemplative architecture" in one's environment may over time produce the same health benefits as traditional "internally induced" meditation, except with much less effort by the individual.
- As part of a directed study this semester, I've been studying the role of communication infrastructure in urban design, and particularly the parallel developments of mass media and the modern metropolis. Urban explorer Bradley Garrett recently wrote a piece for The Guardian about the massive infrastructure of underground London, including not just tube stations but communication infrastructure including Britain's deepest telephone exchange:
The urban exploration crew I had worked with, the London Consolidation Crew or LCC, had long graduated from ruins and skyscrapers – it was the city in the city they were after, the secrets buried deep underground where the line between construction site and ruin is very thin indeed. The Kingsway Telephone Exchange was the crème de la crème, more coveted even than abandoned Tube stations or possibly even the forgotten Post Office railway we accessed in 2011.
Kingsway was originally built as a second world war air-raid shelter under Chancery Lane. These deep level shelters were, at one time, connected to the Tube and citizens would have undoubtedly taken refuge here during Luftwaffe bombing runs. In 1949 the tunnels were sold to the General Post Office where they became the termination for the first submarine transatlantic phone cable – the £120m TAT1 project. The system, meant to protect the vital connective tissue of the city in the event of terror-from-the-air (including nuclear attack), stretched for miles. It only had three surface entrances and contained a bar for workers on their off-hours, rumoured to be the deepest in the UK at 60m below the street. Although the government employed a host of people to maintain the tunnels, Kingsway was a spatial secret of state – part a trio of the most secure and sensitive telephone exchanges in Britain, along with the Anchor Exchange in Birmingham and the Guardian Exchange in Manchester.
- These photos of subterranean communication infrastructure contrast with images of above ground cables covering the urban landscape, as featured in this io9 post, "photos from the days when thousands of cables crowded the skies":
Before most cables ran underground, all electrical, telephone and telegraph wires were suspended from high poles, creating strange and crowded streetscapes. Here are some typical views of late-19th century Boston, New York, Stockholm, and other wire-filled cities.
- Joseph Stromberg at Vox recently wrote about the "forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of 'jaywalking'":
Auto campaigners lobbied police to publicly shame transgressors by whistling or shouting at them — and even carrying women back to the sidewalk — instead of quietly reprimanding or fining them. They staged safety campaigns in which actors dressed in 19th century garb, or as clowns, were hired to cross the street illegally, signifying that the practice was outdated and foolish. In a 1924 New York safety campaign, a clown was marched in front of a slow-moving Model T and rammed repeatedly.
This strategy also explains the name that was given to crossing illegally on foot: jaywalking. During this era, the word "jay" meant something like "rube" or "hick" — a person from the sticks, who didn't know how to behave in a city. So pro-auto groups promoted use of the word "jay walker" as someone who didn't know how to walk in a city, threatening public safety.
- William Eric Rinehart at Sweet Talk asks: Did a change in rhetoric give rise to cities?
Between the mega-village and the cities that came later lies the formation of the state. Ultimately, this is the world of stratification buttressed through religion. With it came the creation of differing social groups and distinctions based upon rank or property. Yet, the acceptance of social specialization required a new view of the world, a new rhetoric in the McCloskeyian sense. And once that jump was made, benefits followed. Clustered people allowed for more trade and specialization of work, leading to more wealth, prestige and better equipped armies. While still a brutal world, cities had the potential for stability, but it came at the expense of radical equality.
- Matt Stroud at The Verge recently wrote about the dream and the myth of the paperless city in Chicago:
But you can't just flip a switch to reverse paper systems in place for hundreds of years, can you? Adobe first released its Portable Document Format nearly 20 years ago, yet many private companies, nonprofit organizations, libraries, law firms, courts — and yes, major city governments such as Chicago's — have yet to embrace a world reliant on PDFs and devoid of paper records. Mayor Emanuel has agreed to change that. Or at least to try. In 2011, he announced plans to spend $20 million on efficiency improvements including changes to make the city less reliant on paper.
Will Mayor Rahm Emanuel change the way governments deal with paper? Or is the road toward a "completely paperless" government a long way off?
- At URBACT, Stefan Höffken and Chris Haller consider urban planning and the multi-dimensional communication era:
"Because urban planning has always been based on the gathering and exchange of information and – as a democratic process – on communication between different stakeholders, a change in the method of communication has a significant impact on decision-making throughout the process"
The quote at the beginning of this post was taken out of a paper by Stefan Höffken and Chris Haller, who set out to research how new medias were used for urban planning matters. They are refering to geographer Manuel Castells' and Clay Shirky's work to describe the change from uni-dimentional communication towards a many-to-many exchange sphere that, so Shirky, is on the verge of becoming ubiquitous. Höffken and Haller provide interesting insights in how different tools can serve certain goals and complement each-other by surveying urban projects and institutions or civil society mobilizations on urban matters as different as Tulsa municipality and the Mediaspree campaign in Berlin.
- Emily Badger at the Washington Post reports that Uber is offering cities an olive branch in the form of their customers' trip data:
The company plans to partner first with Boston, sharing quarterly anonymized trip-level data with the city in a model that Uber says will become its national data-sharing policy. The data will include date, time, distance traveled and origin and destination locations for individual trips, identified only by zip code tabulation area to preserve privacy. Once held by cities, this information will be open to records requests, meaning that the public (and researchers) will have access to it, too.
Such data could help cities keep tabs on Uber and, for example, which neighborhoods the company is serving. Uber says, though, that it's primarily offering the data so that cities can better understand themselves.
- Rosie Cima at priceonomics recently wrote about a designer's war on misleading parking signs:
Sylianteng first tried to redesign parking signs when she was living in LA and applying to grad school, in a project she called "To Park or Not to Park." She reduced the usual jumble of signs and regulations to a single, holistic panel, which looked a lot like a Google Calendar – it was a grid of days of the week, broken into hours. The blocks of time when a parking spot was valid she shaded green, the blocks of time it was invalid she shaded red. She also simplified the rules she illustrated, working off the principle that people would much rather adhere to an overly restrictive regulation than get a parking ticket.
Her prototypes provoked a lot of commentary, discussion, and praise. She used this feedback to improve her designs. She printed out new prototypes, and taped those up. The feedback validated some of her central assumptions, among them: (1) a lot of current parking signs were very confusing, and (2) people didn't care why they could or couldn't park somewhere, they just didn't want to be ticketed.
- At Tropics of Meta, South El Monte Arts Posse posted about mapping community narratives in El Monte and South El Monte:
The writing of social history needs to keep in mind the motivations and individual agency of the people participating in events as they happen. In interview after interview, people were aware of the larger structural forces, and yet made choices and actions in contradiction to expectations. Again and again we spoke with people who beat the odds, who pushed back against racism, and took it upon themselves to change circumstances and in many cases succeeded.
- Arwa Mahdawi at The Guardian reports on neighborhood rebranding in London:
Similar semantic shifts are being attempted, with varying degrees of success, throughout the rest of London. Intrepid developers have discovered "Tyburnia", an undervalued stretch of real estate between Paddington Station and Hyde Park. Meanwhile, the "Knowledge Quarter" is an attempt to rid King's Cross of its association with prostitution by emphasising the new preponderance of cerebral institutions there. You could call it "brain-washing". The Knowledge Quarter, incidentally, is one of 21 "Quarters" in London; there are also a dozen or so new "Villages". Neighbourhood rebranding is often the linguistic leg of gentrification and, as such, follows a predictable pattern: "Villages" assert their legitimacy by emphasising community, while "Quarters" lend a gravitas to whatever noun they follow. Both have a cleansing effect on the associations that came before them.
- At NextCity, Nathan C. Martin considers why art, not Google, could revolutionize WiFi:
Remember a few years ago when television went digital and everyone had to get adapters or new TV sets? When that happened, what once were television channels became simply channels, a bulk of empty bandwidth that could host any variety of transmission. The Federal Communications Commission named it Super WiFi. The policies to regulate it are yet to be written, and a chorus is imploring the FCC to leave a large part of the spectrum open, or "unlicensed," instead of auctioning it off. Those advocates tend to refer to the spectrum in spatial terms — a group of Stanford University economists likened the spectrum to a public park, a resource everyone should have access to. Mary Ellen Carroll speaks of it similarly. "It's like public land," she says. "It's like Yosemite."
- Finally, Emanuel Maiberg at Motherboard looks at homelessness in SimCity, and whether it is a bug or feature:
SimCity's homeless people are represented as yellow, two-dimensional, ungendered figures with bags in tow. Their presence makes SimCity residents unhappy, and reduces land value. Like many other players, Bittanti discovered the online discussions when he was searching for a way to deal with them.
At first, players wondered if they were having so much problems with the homeless in their cities because of a bug in the game. Like many of 2014's big-budget games that launched in broken or barely-functional states, SimCity originally would only work if players connected to EA's servers, which repeatedly crashed under the load of players. It seemed possible that the homeless problem in SimCity was simply a mistake.
"Has anyone figured out a easy way to handle the homeless ruining those beautiful parks you spend so much money on?" asks one player on EA's site. "Create jobs, either through zoning or upgrading road density near industry, that helped me a lot," another player suggests.
McLuhan Monday: Print and Islam, mobile gaming medium theory, McLuhan's relevance, and more
- In an article for Haaretz reflecting on last week's terror attacks in Paris, Michael Handelzalts invokes McLuhan's infamous aphorism in relation to the emergence of print culture in the Islamic world:
So, in the Muslim world, books and literacy became generally accessible (instead of being accessible only to the educated male and the wealthy) about a quarter of a millennium later than in European-Western culture. I found this information, together with an assessment of the damage this 250-year lag caused to Muslim society and culture, in the works of Muslim scholars.
This lag could be made up in the blink of an eye as the cultural world moved from Johannes Gutenberg's galaxy into the era when "The medium is the message," and with the development of the virtual and digital world (at the expense of the printed one, of course).
- Today the Santa Barbara Independent published an article by Dean Stewart looking at McLuhan's message 50 years after the publication of Understanding Media:
McLuhan had a lot of ideas and subsets of ideas. But he had one very big idea: that human civilization had passed through two stages of communication history, oral and print, and was embarking on another: electronic media. He believed the new media would change the way people relate to themselves and others and would change societies dramatically. Is the computer, then, the ubiquitous laptop and other devices, the McLuhan "audile-tactile" dream come true? There is no way to know. And it will take at least another 50 years to make a full evaluation of the work of Marshall McLuhan.
- At TechCrunch, Tadhg Kelly uses McLuhan's famous formula to consider how mobile games are marketed:
Taking a leaf from McLuhan then, I submit that the message is the product. The tone, approach and strategy of how marketing is conducted shapes what kinds of product can be allowed by a product's developer. What kind of ad you'll run determines what kind of game you'll believe can work, and therefore what kind of game you'll fund and make.
The medium is the message and the message is the product, remember. In Marvel's case the medium of cinema sends the message of the big experience, and the message disseminated through a high value trailer leads to the will to make a high value product: a big splashy movie. That's how it earned the right to be thought of as premium. That's how games do that too.
- At Newsday, Clarence Page uses McLuhan's media theory to argue that the Internet can be used to undermine freedom:
When media guru Marshall McLuhan declared back in the 1960s that "Every innovation has within itself the seeds of its reversal," I had no idea what he meant. But, like his other catchy quotables — "global village," "cool media," "the medium is the message" — it stayed with me. Now, in the Internet age, I am seeing proof of his prophecy every day.
For example, McLuhan predicted that a rapidly expanding automobile culture would lead to more traffic jams, air pollution and longing for space to take long walks or ride bicycles. I'm sure he'd give a knowing I-told-you-so nod to today's battles between car people and bike people for asphalt space.
But more recently and less happily, I see far more sinister seeds of reversal in this era's greatest innovation, the Internet. We greeted the Web as a liberator, but in today's age of terrorism and post-Cold War autocrats it also poses a growing menace to the press freedoms it otherwise has invigorated.
- Lastly, Hervé St-Louis at ComicBookBin considers whether McLuhan is still relevant:
Two common critiques of McLuhan's are his obliviousness to political economy and his technological determinism. McLuhan's prognosis on media appears to celebrate a burgeoning world order and global capitalism. The way he foreshadows cognitive capitalism appears deterministic. Critics attack McLuhan for being silent on the transformation of global capitalism. This criticism focuses on what McLuhan did not write inUnderstanding Media as opposed to what he did. It is interesting to note that European scholars, even those who with political economic inclinations do not scorn McLuhan the way North Americans do. They do not blame him for being the messenger of a cognitive capitalist message.
McLuhan rightly described and to some extent predicted how messages need not be unidirectional. When he argued that technology is an extension of the senses, he did not argue that a select few had agency over the shaping of the message. He argued that any person had that potential. Specifically, he described how alternates modes of literacy allowed non literary people to participate in a global discourse. This is McLuhan's legacy and part of why his work should be celebrated today.
Gamification: educational applications and the rise of engagement
- This EdTech article by D. Frank Smith showcases an app designed by a UW-Madison professor to teach campus sustainability through gamification:
One of the app's games lets students practice waste sorting to reinforce good habits in distinguishing waste from recyclable materials. Different objects scroll down the side of the screen on a conveyer belt, and students click and drag to sort them into the proper bins.
Work on the app was funded in part by a Sustainability Innovation in Research and Education (SIRE) grant from the UW Office of Sustainability. It is being designed by the Mobile Learning Incubator (MLI) team at the Madison campus. Sustainable U is the team's follow-up to Waste Eliminators, an interactive, environmental tour of campus which was also created with the help of Middlecamp and two graduate students in 2013, according to a university news release.
- Michael Logarta at GMA News reports on the expansion of homework-helping social platform Brainly to the Phillipines. The article touches on the value of 'play' for students, the challenges of gamifying education, and why playing is the future of learning:
"When lessons are delivered in a game-like manner – that is, interactive, challenging, with instantaneous feedback – students easily remember them," said Christine Rom, Game Developers' Association of the Philippines (GDAP) board member and CEO of educational games developer PODD. "If we harness the elements that make these games interesting and integrate them into education, we get the opportunity to enhance the learning process."Gamification improves motivation. "By giving students a sense of achievement (through exciting rewards and recognition), students will be encouraged to learn and progress more," explained Rom.
- Amanda Schneider at HuffPo considers gamification and the shift from "productivity" to "engagement":
In a recent Mashable article Gabe Zichermann, the author of Game-Based Marketing and the CEO of Gamification.co states that one of the reasons for the increase in gamification is that long-standing marketing techniques are now failing. "They're failing because people today are seeking more reward and more engagement from experiences than ever before." Younger generations may be even more in tuned with gaming because they have likely never known a world without computers. Specifically, "Today's youth mandates a more engaging experience. Gamification is required to bring those things into balance, and to make things engaging enough so people will pay attention to them and stay focused on them for a longer period of time."
Ludology grab bag: video games and authenticity, semiocapitalism, and geography
- Tim Biggs wrote an article at IGN considering video games in relation to the human search for authenticity:
The postmodern condition presents a constant struggle and conflict between our own desires and a world that seems fully available to experience but devoid of concrete or objective meaning. Video games, by virtue of their most basic structure, allow easy access to the feeling that your chosen actions and goals are both informed and legitimised by the overarching rules surrounding them. This is the very definition of authenticity.
None of this is to say that games are better or preferable experience to real life or other media, but it is to suggest they're uniquely placed at this point in time to provide satisfying experiences. Indeed, matching the appeal of video games with the search for authenticity goes a ways to explaining the particular trajectory of gaming's prevalence, from largely rejected as a toy in the production-focused late eighties and early nineties, to an explosion of mainstream acceptance as the global media and advertising machine makes up more and more of our everyday lives.
- Forbes contributor Michael Thomsen reports on an independent video game that touched on symbolic representation, labor and productivity, and even namedrops Franco Berardi's "semiocapitalism":
In most videogames, the semiotic meaning of the system is accepted by players before they begin playing—they don't know what tactics they'll use to win, nor whether they'll play long enough to do so, but they know that winning or completion is the organizing metaphor. Players aren't often encouraged to question the values of competitive systems, but only asked to internalize the responsibility of making them work as efficiently as possible, postponing the anxious reality of failure for a few magical moments that we've agreed to describe as fun.
In contrast, Rehearsals and Returns overflows with signifiers placed in a system that remains indifferent to their interpretative meaning, and which consciously obscures the player's desire to interpret them in terms of winning or losing. The system acknowledges player choices—whether you chose to tell Hilary Clinton something hateful or nice—but the game doesn't interpret the player's choice, nor does it tie the economy of collectible conversation pieces to any allegorical meaning. It uses the game as a sort of digital confessional chamber, in which familiar units of social and political meaning are taken out of their historical narratives and given to the player in an incomplete space meant only for self-reflection.
- Ian Bogost recorded an interview for the Go For Rainbow podcast, discussing "gaming culture as it relates to geographical space, and when and when not to whip out the PhD cred". Full audio is available here.
Video mélange: David Harvey, Antonio Negri, and Saints Row IV
- David Harvey has a new book out, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. In this video Harvey speaks about the contradictions of capitalism (approx. 19 mins):
- I recently stumbled across this nearly hour-long documentary on Antonio Negri, titled The Revolt that Never Ends:
- Lastly, this video from Errant Signal considers Saints Row IV as celebration and example of kitsch (and makes me wish he'd dedicate a video to GTA V):
Ender's Game analyzed, the Stanley Parable explored, Political Economy of zombies, semiotics of Twitter, much more
It's been a long time since the last update (what happened to October?), so this post is extra long in an attempt to catch up.
- I haven't seen the new Ender's Game movie, but this review by abbeyotis at Cyborgology calls the film "a lean and contemporary plunge into questions of morality mediated by technology":
In a world in which interplanetary conflicts play out on screens, the government needs commanders who will never shrug off their campaigns as merely "virtual." These same commanders must feel the stakes of their simulated battles to be as high as actual warfare (because, of course, they are). Card's book makes the nostalgic claim that children are useful because they are innocent. Hood's movie leaves nostalgia by the roadside, making the more complex assertion that they are useful because of their unique socialization to be intimately involved with, rather than detached from, simulations.
- In the ongoing discourse about games criticism and its relation to film reviews, Bob Chipman's latest Big Picture post uses his own review of the Ender's Game film as an entry point for a breathless treatise on criticism. The video presents a concise and nuanced overview of arts criticism, from the classical era through film reviews as consumer reports up to the very much in-flux conceptions of games criticism. Personally I find this video sub-genre (where spoken content is crammed into a Tommy gun barrage of word bullets so that the narrator can convey a lot of information in a short running time) irritating and mostly worthless, since the verbal information is being presented faster than the listener can really process it. It reminds me of Film Crit Hulk, someone who writes excellent essays with obvious insight into filmmaking, but whose aesthetic choice (or "gimmick") to write in all caps is often a distraction from the content and a deterrent to readers. Film Crit Hulk has of course addressed this issue and explained the rationale for this choice, but considering that his more recent articles have dropped the third-person "Hulk speak" writing style the all caps seems to be played out. Nevertheless, I'm sharing the video because Mr. Chipman makes a lot of interesting points, particularly regarding the cultural contexts for the various forms of criticism. Just remember to breathe deeply and monitor your heart rate while watching.
- In this video of a presentation titled Game design: the medium is the message, Jonathan Blow discusses how commercial constraints dictate the form of products from TV shows to video games.
- This somewhat related video from mynextappliance contextualizes Valve's Steam machine place in gaming history.
- This video from Satchbag's Goods is ostensibly a review of Hotline Miami, but develops into a discussion of art movements and Kanye West:
- This short interview with Slavoj Žižek in New York magazine continues a trend I've noticed since Pervert's Guide to Ideology has been releasing, wherein writers interviewing Žižek feel compelled to include themselves and their reactions to/interactions with Žižek into their article. Something about a Žižek encounter brings out the gonzo in journalists. The NY mag piece is also notable for this succinct positioning of Žižek's contribution to critical theory:
Žižek, after all, the Yugoslav-born, Ljubljana-based academic and Hegelian; mascot of the Occupy movement, critic of the Occupy movement; and former Slovenian presidential candidate, whose most infamous contribution to intellectual history remains his redefinition of ideology from a Marxist false consciousness to a Freudian-Lacanian projection of the unconscious. Translation: To Žižek, all politics—from communist to social-democratic—are formed not by deliberate principles of freedom, or equality, but by expressions of repressed desires—shame, guilt, sexual insecurity. We're convinced we're drawing conclusions from an interpretable world when we're actually just suffering involuntary psychic fantasies.
- Wired UK reported on university students who turned maps of seventeenth century London into a detailed 3D world:
Following the development of the environment on the team's blog you can see some of the gaps between what data was deemed noteworthy or worth recording in the seventeenth century and the level of detail we now expect in maps and other infographics. For example, the team struggled to pinpoint the exact location on Pudding Lane of the bakery where the Great Fire of London is thought to have originated and so just ended up placing it halfway along.
- Stephen Totilo reviewed the new pirate-themed Assassin's Creed game for the New York Times. I haven't played the game, but I love that the sections of the game set in the present day have shifted from the standard global conspiracy tropes seen in the earlier installments to postmodern self-referential and meta-fictional framing:
Curiously, a new character is emerging in the series: Ubisoft itself, presented mostly in the form of self-parody in the guise of a fictional video game company, Abstergo Entertainment. We can play small sections as a developer in Abstergo's Montreal headquarters. Our job is to help turn Kenway's life — mined through DNA-sniffing gadgetry — into a mass-market video game adventure. We can also read management's emails. The team debates whether games of this type could sell well if they focused more on peaceful, uplifting moments of humanity. Conflict is needed, someone argues. Violence sells.
It turns out that Abstergo is also a front for the villainous Templars, who search for history's secrets when not creating entertainment to numb the population. In these sections, Ubisoft almost too cheekily aligns itself with the bad guys and justifies its inevitable 2015 Assassin's Creed, set during yet another violent moment in world history.
- Speaking of postmodern, self-referential, meta-fictional video games: The Stanley Parable was released late last month. There has already been a bevy of analysis written about the game, but I am waiting for the Mac release to play the game and doing my best to avoid spoilers in the meantime. Brenna Hillier's post at VG24/7 is spoiler free (assuming you are at least familiar with the games premise, or its original incarnation as a Half Life mod), and calls The Stanley parable "a reaction against, commentary upon, critique and celebration of narrative-driven game design":
The Stanley Parable wants you to think about it. The Stanley Parable, despite its very limited inputs (you can't even jump, and very few objects are interactive) looks at those parts of first-person gaming that are least easy to design for – exploration and messing with the game's engine – and foregrounds them. It takes the very limitations of traditional gaming narratives and uses them to ruthlessly expose their own flaws.
- An article at Techcrunch looks at how the Twitter-acquired Bluefin Labs "took the academic subject of semiotics and made it something "central" to the future of Twitter's business":
Roy's research focus prior to founding Bluefin, and continued interest while running the company, has to do with how both artificial and human intelligences learn language. In studying this process, he determined that the most important factor in meaning making was the interaction between human beings: non one learns language in a vacuum, after all. That lesson helped inform his work at Twitter, which started with mapping the connection between social network activity and live broadcast television.
- Nathan at metopal posted their paper posing the question: What happens when we stop thinking about videogames as cinema and instead think of them through other media, like fashion, dance, or architecture?
Aspiring to cinematic qualities is not bad in an of itself, nor do I mean to shame fellow game writers, but developers and their attendant press tend to be myopic in their point of view, both figuratively and literally. If we continually view videogames through a monocular lens, we miss much of their potential. And moreover, we begin to use 'cinematic' reflexively without taking the time to explain what the hell that word means.
Metaphor is a powerful tool. Thinking videogames through other media can reframe our expectations of what games can do, challenge our design habits, and reconfigure our critical vocabularies. To crib a quote from Andy Warhol, we get 'a new idea, a new look, a new sex, a new pair of underwear.' And as I hinted before, it turns out that fashion and videogames have some uncanny similarities.
- John Powers at the Airship posted this great longform piece on the political economy of zombies:
Zombies started their life in the Hollywood of the 1930s and '40s as simplistic stand-ins for racist xenophobia. Post-millennial zombies have been hot-rodded by Danny Boyle and made into a subversive form of utopia. That grim utopianism was globalized by Max Brooks, and now Brad Pitt and his partners are working to transform it into a global franchise. But if zombies are to stay relevant, it will rely on the shambling monsters' ability to stay subversive – and real subversive shocks and terror are not dystopian. They are utopian.
- This article at The Conversation addresses the "touchy subject" of Apple's Touch ID:
Ironically, our bodies now must make physical contact with devices dictating access to the real; Apple's Touch ID sensor can discern for the most part if we are actually alive. This way, we don't end up trying to find our stolen fingers on the black market, or prevent others from 3D scanning them to gain access to our lives.
This is a monumental shift from when Apple released its first iPhone just six years ago. It's a touchy subject: fingerprinting authentication means we confer our trust in an inanimate object to manage our animate selves – our biology is verified, digitised, encrypted, as they are handed over to our devices.
- In the wake of the Silk Road shut down last month, Chloe Albanesius at PC Mag asks: What was Silk Road and how did it work?
Can you really buy heroin on the Web as easily as you might purchase the latest best-seller from Amazon? Not exactly, but as the FBI explained in its complaint, it wasn't exactly rocket science, thanks to Tor and some bitcoins. Here's a rundown of how Silk Road worked before the feds swooped in.
- Henry Jenkins posted the transcript of an interview with Mark J.P. Wolf. The theme of the discussion is "imaginary worlds," and they touch upon the narratology vs. ludology conflict in gaming:
The interactivity vs. storytelling debate is really a question of the author saying either "You choose" (interaction) or "I choose" (storytelling) regarding the events experienced; it can be all of one or all of the other, or some of each to varying degrees; and even when the author says "You choose", you are still choosing from a set of options chosen by the author. So it's not just a question of how many choices you make, but how many options there are per choice. Immersion, however, is a different issue, I think, which does not always rely on choice (such as immersive novels), unless you want to count "Continue reading" and "Stop reading" as two options you are constantly asked to choose between.
- Finally, GamesForChange has uploaded video of Ian Bogost's keynote address from this year's Games for Change Festival. Bogost extolls the virtues of "earnestness" over "seriousness" in game design:


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47 countries including 10 African Member states have submitted their voluntary reviews on the Sustainable Development Goals at the high level political forum (HLPF) on Sustainable Development happening in New York this week in a session that started on 9th July.
The Forty-seven countries – both developed and developing – presented on the actions they are taking to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals during the three-day ministerial meeting from 16 to 18 July when they present their Voluntary National Reviews.
The Voluntary National Reviews are part of the follow-up and review mechanism for the 2030 agenda which states agreed to in September 25, 2015. As stipulated in paragraph 84 of the 2030 Agenda, regular reviews by the High Level Political Forum-HLPF are to be voluntary, state-led, undertaken by both developed and developing countries, and involve multiple stakeholders.
On the 29th of June, 2018, The Chief of Intergovernmental Policy at the United Nations Economic and Social Affairs, Ms. Irena Zubcevici in a webex meeting addressed journalists gathered at the UN Information Centres dotted cross the globe about the High level political forum so that they in turn inform the public about this very important meeting which involves everybody.
She said, "Sustainable Development Goals to be reviewed this year include goals on water, energy, cities, environment sustainable consumption production, SDG 17 Partnership on means of implementation (Goals 6,7, 11,12 and 15, with Goal 17) and the outcome of the meeting is the Ministerial Declaration which gives political guidance on the review and implementation of the 2030 agenda."
The Economic and Social Council-ECOSOC is responsible for convening the High Level Political Forum whose aim is to discuss the progress being made among states on the SDG's and the 2030 agenda. The Sustainable Development Goals knowledge online platform further informs that, "The voluntary national reviews (VNRs) aim to facilitate the sharing of experiences, including successes, challenges and lessons learned, with a view to accelerating the implementation of the 2030 Agenda. The VNRs also seek to strengthen policies and institutions of governments and to mobilize multi-stakeholder support and partnerships for the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals."
The theme for this year's High Level Political forum is, "Transformation towards Sustainable and Resilient societies."
Member states:
Irena pointed out that, The number of countries presenting reviews at the High Level Political Forum in New York keeps increasing each year. "In 2016, 22 countries opened doors to the voluntary reviewing process, in 2017 there were 43 countries and in 2018, 47 countries are in the process of submitting their VNR's including 10 African countries namely, Benin, Cape Verde, Congo Brazaville, Egypt, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo."
Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals is not an option, it is an imperative for a safe and secure future of prosperity, opportunity and human rights for all, and it is within our grasp. This will require greater attention and more resources, but the investments will pay dividends for years to come. Taking action on the Sustainable Development Goals isn't just the right thing to do—it makes economic sense as well.
During the webex meeting, journalists from Ghana-asked about the African representation and why only few countries presented their reviews. In response they heard that the voluntary national reviews are only 47 due to the limited time available for countries to present. The criteria for these countries, is on first come first served basis and the limitation is for the three days. After this, other countries express their intention to present next year.
Besides the 47 countries submitting Voluntary reviews, there are some 198 countries participating in the High Level Political forum as a whole-following up the process. This forum carries the all State Formula meaning more than the 193 UN member states participate. Observer states like Palestine also participate. Journalists from Bahrain, specifically from The Gulf Daily News were informed that besides Bahrain, other Gulf States that would present their reviews were Qartar, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Palestine.
While most African countries are yet to submit even one review, Egypt which represented its VNR in 2016 is presenting again in 2018. Togo has submitted each year since 2016. A website has been dedicated to Egypt on the VNR on the report and submissions. There is a lot of information on the Voluntary National reviews on the SDG knowledge platform there is also a synthesis report for all countries that submitted reviews in 2016/2017. The countries presenting VNRs are Albania, Andorra, Armenia, Australia, Bahamas, Bahrain, Benin, Bhutan, Cabo Verde, Canada, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Greece, Guinea, Hungary, Ireland, Jamaica, Kiribati, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Mali, Malta, Mexico, Namibia, Niger, Paraguay, Poland, Qatar, Republic of Congo, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Singapore, Slovakia, Spain, Sri Lanka, State of Palestine, Sudan, Switzerland, Togo, United Arab Emirates, Uruguay, and Viet Nam. Uganda submitted in 2016, Kenya in 2017.
Tanzania will submit its Voluntary National Review in July 2019. This was said during a meeting convened to discuss and coordinate Tanzania's Sustainable Development Goals implementation at the Julius Nyerere International Convention centre recently. According to ECOSOC already 30 countries have registered for 2019. In that meeting, One ECOSOC Youth champion, Rahma Mwita from Tanzania called for the engagement of young people to participate in the review process. Youth affirmative actions are key to the achievement of the goals.
Tanzania has a number of good stories including fight against corruption, infrastructure development, health sector developments, free education, the Standard Gauge Railway and the reviving of Air Tanzania. Sectoral reforms can be showcased and fingers can point on existing evidence. The standard of living is improving-the road towards 2030.
During the webex with journalists, The Intergovernmental Policy Chief, Irena informed journalists that "Member states are encouraged to conduct regular and inclusive reviews of progress at the national and sub-national levels, which are country-led and country-driven" The national reviews are expected to serve as a basis for the regular reviews by the high-level political forum (HLPF), meeting under the auspices of ECOSOC.
Last year, some 2500 stakeholders including civil society, academia, UN system officials, Governments and youths participated in the High Level Political forum and the same number is being recorded this year. 55 ministers confirmed participation to the on going event.
Side events;
Like many global conferences and events, a number of side events take place around the official meetings. UN has recorded over 120 side events on partnerships, business forum, labs for voluntary national reviews, SDG learning platforms which are taking place and where participants can come to learn about SDG' goals and agenda. Please visit https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/hlpf/2018; for the Local and Regional Governments' Forum (16 July) and the SDG Business Forum (17 July)
This means that at next year's event, Tanzania's multi sector partners can also utilize the side-events platforms to speak on specific success stories undertaken in the country. For example, on Sustainable Tourism, UN World Tourism Organization has released a manual on how to develop a sustainable tourism. A link between Tourism and sustainable growth-the circular economy- managing wastes protecting life on land/anti-poaching-could be presented by TANAPA at the global event. Many success stories lie in wait and the global platform could be utilized fully.
Data and developing countries;
A journalist from Tanzania expressed concern about data gaps or missing data which may hinder many African countries from submitting their reports. A question was also asked on the status of funding for SDG's in Africa.
Irena clarified that this was a million-dollar question in that "all countries have a serious issue with data-it cuts across the board-different countries have different challenges." However, she continued to say that, "in the (UN)department, we are working on statistical capacity of developing countries including Tanzania. Not a single country has all indicators to measure the goals. The UN system is looking for the best ways to assist the countries to develop statistics office to develop data." In Tanzania, The Tanzania National Bureau of Statistics is already serving in this area.
However, data is a major challenge in many parts of the world. Disaggregated data is missing and even when data exists it may not provide finer reliable details. For instance in Tanzania while the country conducted a census which included people with disability which is great progress, work may still need to be done to identify how many people live with the different types of disabilities. This is one tiny bit of the whole equation, on the development side overral- more reliable data needs to serve as a baseline for measuring the targets and indicators.
Progress is being made—more people are living better now than just ten years ago. But a far greater effort is needed to achieve the SDGs and ensure that no one is left behind on the road to a better life and a hopeful future. Only data can help provide evidence to this effect.
Without data, it is not easy to mark the level of success with the outlined indicators. Each of the Sustainable Development Goals has targets and indicators to measure its implementation. Without data you cannot know how far you have advanced. Irena explained to journalists that funding and resource mobilization needs also to focus on the need for nations to develop their data and statistical developments. "There are a number of workshops, capacity building workshops looking every day how to improve so that countries can measure but also to collect and use the data." Added Irena.
Convening power;
The High Level Political Forum is a good example of how the convening power of the UN can help nations to adopt and improve of their implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Instead of reinventing the wheel, Member states can now hear lessons learned and gain experiences from other countries. Countries can imitate good practices that have worked in other countries and apply them locally depending on the culture and matter at hand.
The Intergovernmental Policy Chief- Irena also informed that all Voluntary National reviews sessions will be preceded by a statistical detail on where we are globally with each SDG's. General data on the prominence of the SDG's given before country presentations. Countries can then relate to that global picture and see where they are and what needs to be done.
The good thing overall with the Sustainable Development Goals Review process is that this is not a finger pointing exercise but a platform for member states to show case what has been accomplished and sharing with others so that others can learn-its more of a cherry on the cake. More work has been done by the country nationally and at the High Level Political Forum it is more of sharing the success/challenges story of countries' progress. No one should be left behind in this process. Individual actions are important. Personal adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals by people in both developed and developing countries move us closer to achieving them.
What next after reviews
After the reviews The Economic and Social Council- ECOSOC prepares a synthesis report indicating the categories, institutions, means of implementation, a number of analytical studies have been looked at before for instance in 2017 they looked at old Vienna reports from the angle of Policy coherence, partnerships and leaving no one behind. Other studies also analyses the reports. Irena informed that, "After countries present the report, the idea is we work closely with UN Country Teams- UNCT so that they follow up with the country and see after the report was done what are the areas where the country still face challenges and to see how they can best support them." She also confirmed that, "We also hear from donors in their support for these countries-what are the identified challenges they want to see how they could support countries to curb these challenges." The important thing is for the civil society to work closely with government and private sectors to follow through these processes and harness the opportunities.
The Department of Public Information has since the inception of the Sustainable Development Goals informed people around the world about the developments of the goals. A number of websites and social media platforms have been provided globally for everyone to follow; The global statistical information is also available in the SG report on the progress with the Sustainable Development Goals.
Please visit these websites for more information. The SDGMedia Zone programme, will during the Ministerial Segment of the have full day sessions (16-17 July) that feature government officials and mayors, civil society and business leaders on broadcast. More information is available here; http://www.un.org/sdgmediazone/ ; https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/vnrs/; https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/monitoring-and-progress/
by Stella Vuzo,Information Officer, UN Information Centre in Dar es Salaam
email: firstname.lastname@example.com twitter:@stella_vuzo

subset: commoncrawl


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Healthcare finances reimbursement
This content was COPIED from BrainMass.com - View the original, and get the already-completed solution here!
I would like pros and cons of the following reimburesments:
Prospective-payment, Cost-reimbursement, Discounted-charge, Flat-rate reimbursement.
How does each of the reimbursement system affect the departments of health care companies and healthcare providers.© BrainMass Inc. brainmass.com April 3, 2020, 11:18 pm ad1c9bdddf
Solution Preview
Prospective payment systems establish payment rates in advance. These rates are determined by basing averages of resources used. The prospective payment system can result in more coordination and collaboration among all the health care provider team. The prospective payment system formulas are complex and difficult to understand. The inpatient prospective payment system under Medicare is know as DRG. The efficient providers will profit and the inefficient will not. The prospective payment system has no focus on quality of care and patient safety, the focus is on economic efficiency.
Cost re-reimbursement covers self-reported provider costs and service usage. The costs are not validated and this can encourage more care and less efficiency. This method can generate more costs and places most risk on the payer or insurance company. The provider has little or ...
Solution Summary
Healthcare finances reimbursements are examined. The prospective-payment, cost reimbursement, discounted-charge and flat-rate reimbursement is examined.


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Service Built on Trust
Celebrating Customer Service Week 2017
At United Technologies, thousands of dedicated employees around the globe work to build and maintain strong, productive and trusting relationships with our customers every day.
In celebration of Customer Service Week 2017, we're featuring members of our extraordinary team and their thoughts on serving our customers and the importance of building trust. We thank these remarkable people for all that they do.


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Artist's drawing of two blobfish. (Photo: Rachel Caauwe/Wikimedia Commons)
The fish that was once bestowed the title of "world's ugliest animal" is getting its very own London cafe — at least according to the Internet.
A mysterious new website claims that next summer East London will be getting the world's very first blobfish café, an impressive feat considering the blobfish has rarely even been photographed alive because it lives so deep in the ocean.
The café will supposedly house three blobfish named Lorcan, Barry and Lady Swift, which people can observe as they dine or sip their drinks. The construction of the animals' tank is already underway, according to the website.
If that's true and the café owners manage to get their hands on the fish, it would likely be the very first aquarium to house a living specimen.
Callum Roberts, a marine biologist at the University of York, recently told Mashable that he's unaware of any aquariums with blobfish.
"I'm very skeptical about any of this," he said. "As with any deep sea species it's quite difficult to get them to survive. It takes a great deal of specialist skill to keep deep sea creatures in an aquarium... I would question whether it's all a prank."
Blobfish are found off the coast of Australia at depths of between 2,000 feet and 4,000 feet where the pressure is 120 times higher than it is on the surface. This pressure is what gives blobfish such a dramatically different appearance when they're photographed out of water.
Blobfish don't really have skeletons or muscles, so they appear rather saggy — and quite Ziggy-like — in appearance up here, but down below, they simply look like fish. In their natural habitat, they'd look something like this.
So unless the blobfish café is displaying dead blobfish, Lorcan, Barry and Lady Swift wouldn't look anything like the illustration on the café's website.
BlobfishCafe.com's illustration of blobfish (Photo: BlobfishCafe.com)
Still, people seem quite taken with the concept of a blobfish café — the café's Twitter account has already amassed nearly 20,000 followers. Meanwhile, @BlobFishCafe only follows one account — that of Simon Mignolet, a Belgian athlete who plays soccer for Liverpool and is not known to possess a particular affinity for rare deep-sea fish.


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Don't miss the latest stories
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Furniture Made From Superstorm Sandy's Debris
By Dorothy Tan, 17 Dec 2012
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Some good has come out of the devastation of Superstorm Sandy—in addition to the stronger community cohesiveness in affected areas, the disaster has also given designers an opportunity to turn the destructive into the creative.
New York-based initiative Reclaim NYC invited local artists and designers to make furniture out of the debris material found at clean-up sites—these pieces will then be auctioned off to benefit relief effort.
Using reclaimed parts—such as rusty steel sheets and battered garbage cans, the designers produced beautiful, industrial-looking furniture, including lamps and nightstands.
If you are interested making a bid, you can find the details of the auction here.
[via Fast Co Design]
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How much do you make Selling Avon?
How much do you make selling Avon? When you are an Avon Representative, there are three different ways you can earn money. The first is by Selling Avon Products and earning commission from your sales. The second is by Selling Avon Online through your personal Avon website. And the third is through leadership (recruiting others to start an Avon business of their own). So How much do you make Selling Avon? Read below to find out more about Avon Commission Levels.
Click here to sign up to sell Avon – use reference code: ESEAGREN.
How Much do you Make Selling Avon Products?
With Avon's new Kickstart program, you can earn over $1,000 in your first 90 days as an Avon Rep. After your first 90 days, you will earn 20 – 50% earnings on all full earnings items and 20% commission on fixed earnings items (products in the Avon Catalog with four diamonds in front of the description).
See the Avon Earnings Chart below:
- $0 – $149.99: 20%
- $150 – $299.99: 30%
- $300 – $499.99: 35%
- $500+: 40%
How Much do you Make Selling Avon Online?
When you Sell Avon Online, you earn 20 – 50% commission. Your online sales are combined with your traditional (face-to-face) sales to determine your earnings level for the campaign.
Ready to Start Selling Avon?
Signing up to Sell Avon Online is as easy as 1-2-3! To Become an Avon Representative Online, follow these steps:
- Go to www.startavon.com
- Enter Avon Reference Code: ESEAGREN
- You will then be assigned an account number and have access to your new online Avon Representative account!
When you Sign up to Sell Avon Online, you will receive your Avon starter kit in the mail about 3 – 5 business days after you are appointed. Once you are a member of my Avon team, I will send you a welcome email and you will begin receiving other important updates from me including campaign updates, Avon selling tips, and recognition reports!


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EPA- Estimated MPG
Cargo Space
3655 S Campbell
Directions Springfield, MO 65807
Shopping for a SUV that offers top-notch power and performance, high efficiency and great creature comforts you can show off to your friends? Look no further than the 2017 Chevy Equinox in Springfield. Stylish and affordable with two great engine choices and a variety of trims and accessory packages, the Equinox is a perfect choice for drivers of all ages. Continue reading our review below for more details on this popular compact SUV!
The Chevy Equinox is available in four trim levels: L, LS, LT and Premier. New this year are two special edition trims, the Midnight Edition and Sport Edition, which add blacked out accessories and leather-appointed seating among other stylish upgrades. Inside, the Equinox's great comfort and connectivity features carry over to the new model year. All models of the 2017 Chevy Equinox in Springfield are equipped with a 7-inch color touchscreen with Bluetooth phone pairing and a built-in Wi-Fi hotspot. Higher-tier trims throw in more tech features, including Chevy MyLink infotainment with navigation, internet radio-streaming and a rear-seat entertainment system.
Two engine options are available on the Equinox. The 2.4L standard engine with Eco mode delivers 182 horsepower. Rated at an estimated 31 highway mpg on FWD models, this base engine gives the SUV the fuel-economy of a car. The available 3.6L V6 model, a leader in the compact segment, kicks up the power to 301 horsepower. 2017 Chevy Equinox reviews recommend the V6 for its towing power of up to 3,500 lbs. Whether you need the SUV to work or play, the available all-wheel-drive system will get the job done.
When it comes to safety, the Equinox knocks it out of the park. Standard safety features like a rear-vision camera, LATCH safety anchors and top-notch stability and traction control make this SUV a great choice for families. For increased safety measures, 2017 Chevrolet Equinox reviews recommend splurging for the active safety suite like forward collision alert, rear cross traffic alert, lane departure warning and more.
Don't just look at the 2017 Honda CR-V, Buick Encore, Ford Escape, Kia Sportage, Toyota RAV4 and the GMC Terrain when looking for a new car; also remember to view the 2017 Chevrolet Equinox near Springfield. You may find that it is a proper match for you, with its attention-grabbing exterior styling and easy-to-use cabin amenities. Find out if the 2017 Chevrolet Equinox is perfect for you using our evaluation and other research tools, then browse current finance incentives!
Considering a Chevrolet Equinox and looking for the latest manufacturer incentives? Then remember to visit us next time you're in the area! We've included this 2017 Chevrolet Equinox review on our site to make it a cinch for you to find the information you need to make an authoritative vehicle purchase. You can find Chevrolet Equinox inventory at Reliable Chevrolet - we invite you to come in for a test spin. Want to get a peek at its features preceding your visit? See the included video recording.
Purchase prices do not include tax, title, license and $199.00 admin fee. Prices include the listed rebates and incentives. Please verify all information. We are not responsible for typographical, technical, or misprint errors. Inventory is subject to prior sale. Contact us via phone or email for more details. *MPG Based on 2017 EPA mileage ratings. Use for comparison purposes only. Your mileage will vary depending on driving conditions, how you drive and maintain your vehicle, battery-pack age/condition, and other factors.


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About You
Age: 23
Gender: M
Country & Region: Sweden, Stockholm County
Your Character
Mordred, transferred it back to Thunderhorn when I started playing Legion again, had previously been on Grim Batol during my brief stint in WoD. I started playing on my warrior in 2006.
Level: 110
Class: Death Knight
Spec: Blood
Current ilvl: 910
Please note, we are not an alt guild. Therefore, would you be happy moving all your alts into the guild (excluding alts that are in a private guild to keep Guild bank access)?
Alts Please list ALL alts, regardless of level, including name, realm, faction, class, level and guild:
Argylon, Thunderhorn, Alliance, Mage, 90, N/A.
Sigmund, Thunderhorn, Alliance, Paladin, 80, N/A.
Rhodric, Thunderhorn, Alliance, Warrior, 71, N/A.
Bodark, Thunderhorn, Alliance, Druid, 64, N/A.
Vidur, Thunderhorn, Alliance, Rogue, 6, N/A.
Primary 1: Blacksmithing
Primary 2: Mining
Dungeoneering & Raiding
Tell us a little about your Mythic+ experience - what +level are you most confident with? What's your highest +level?
None as of right now, I wasn't really aware of the system for the majority of my recent play time, and I feel like it'd be a bad idea to PUG something like that with no prior experience.
Please list your progression and experience of the following raid instances, and indicate if your experience is LFR, Normal, Heroic, Mythic experience & progression, ie 5/12:
Emerald Nightmare 7/7 LFR
Trial of Valor 3/3 LFR
Nighthold 10/10 LFR
Tomb Of Sargeras 9/9 LFR
Do you have any aspirations to become a Raid Leader? And if so, why?
No I don't have such grandiose plans for my guild membership .
Play Style
What sort play are you looking for? (Delete as appropriate)
Flexible Raider: I will sign to any events I'm able to attend, which would be around a couple a month*
Backup Raider: I am willing to spot fill when needed, but I understand a place is not guaranteed**
Social: I have no current aspirations to raid
*, **, I'd like to raid, but considering I'm untested in real PvE content since MoP I wouldn't want to be a burden to the guild. I can put aside time to raid every week, so there is potential to act as a but I'd rather not be so brash as to add a caveat to that as well.
Which of the following days each week are you available? Please see the top post for details of our current raid days.
Wednesday 21:00 CET until 23.30
Sunday 20:30 CET until 23.30
All of the above.
Tell us more about why you chose your current spec. (You may wish to tell us a little about your spell/shot/melee rotation & general play style in a raid/dungeon/group situation or link stats websites such as WoL in support of your application)
I enjoy tanking, I always have. I tanked as a warrior prior to switching to my Death Knight the day WotLK was released, and I tanked on him ever since. Tanking has a nice balance of cerebral "pre-planned" play and at times a more hectic "reactive" tactical play.
About general play style, I find Gorefiend's Grasp immensely satisfying in trash environments. Pulling all the mobs into a single massive death blob and going ham with Dancing Rune Weapon and Heart Strike cleave is some bloody goodness.
I also enjoy Blood's more "Reactive Mitigation" defensive playstyle compared to other tank's "Active Mitigation", e.g. utilising the tools at hand to "undo" damage done to me rather thanp reemptevily using more standard mitigation tools. Naturally you need to be preemptive in Blood DK play as well, capping off good Death Strike Blood Shields in preparation for something like Fel Claws.
Choose all of the following which best describes what you enjoy, delete those which do NOT apply
In rough order of importance to me:
- Raiding
- Mythic+ Runs*
- PvP
- World Quests/Rep Grind
*Obviously I have no experience with Mythic+, but from what I've learned looking at it it seems to just be another way to challenge yourself in a PvE environment, which is something I definitely enjoy.
What, in WoW terms, are you the most proud of? *This does not have to be a recognised Blizzard achievement*
Levelling my warrior roughly 12 years ago and having the red glow of Lesser Beastslaying infused into my white two handed sword by a level 60 paladin atop a mighty golden steed. I didn't replace that weapon until I got my Whirlwind Axe.
Other Stuff
Do you know an existing member of the Highland Warriors? If so, who: for how long, and how do you know them?[/b]
Why do you want to join the Highland Warriors?
Mainly for a social guild as of right now, but I obviously have aspirations to do challenging PvE content in the future. View me as an untapped resource that you can call on once I've "proven myself" both to my own standards and yours.
Anything extra you would like to tell us about yourself?
Don't really have anything relevant to tell you outside of what I've already said.
Finally, as you should always end on a laugh, tell us your best joke...
Why was the ketchup red? Because it saw the salad dressing.


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Why Use Bail Bonds
Oftentimes, it is quite easy for one to see the drawbacks when they happen to be involved in a bail bonds process, be it that they are the ones who are seeking to be bailed out or otherwise are looking for the same for some other loved one. AA Action Bail Bonds explains some of the benefits, shedding some bit of light on aa bail bonds and as such get you some of the advantages that come with the use of bail to secure your release from jail or that of a loved one.
The number one thing that makes this an ideal alternative is the fact that it helps you save money. The reason for this is the fact that with the williamson county bail bonds you will actually only pay a small share, 10{ea16380743b316a39f97798823f1549a145cee2d863ed4d005dbb07a37dbdeb5} of the full bail amount and as such the balance, 90{ea16380743b316a39f97798823f1549a145cee2d863ed4d005dbb07a37dbdeb5} will be yours to spare or otherwise spend on whatever other need it is that you may be having.
Second is the fact that it allows you to save on time. This happens to be so looking at the fact that a cash bail will often call for the payment of 100{ea16380743b316a39f97798823f1549a145cee2d863ed4d005dbb07a37dbdeb5} of the full figure called for the accused one to be finally released from being held in custody. You need to appreciate and acknowledge the fact that there are some bail figures that are at times set so high and as such raising the full figure for the bail amount can indeed be such a challenge for many which may take sure some time for them to raise the full amount. Looking at the bail bonds, these tend to be a lot different to the cash bail as with them you only will have to submit and commit to paying some small installments after the release of your loved as such making them so affordable and as well faster a means to help you with the need to secure the release of a loved one.
It is as well a sure deal going for the Bail Bonds looking at the fact that with them you happen to gain such an easy access to professional advisors so advises AA-Action Bail Bonds. Going for these services, you will be assigned a professional bail bonds agent assigned to you who will be ready and handy to advise you all through the process so as to bring you as much up to speed on what is going on. Of course a bail bonds agent is a professional you can trust his advice for the fact is that they are just as well interested in your good and share a common interest and goal in the outcome of the case as a lawyer would be.
Actually , there are a number of benefits for going for the services of the AA-Action Bail Bonds and you can get in touch with them for you to know more on how you can be helped by them.


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Lady on The Train: radio drama (45 minutes)
It is the 1950's and these are exciting times for the young David McAllister as he boards a train from Edinburgh to London, steaming towards city life and the new world of a student doctor. As the journey gets underway David's first impression of the other travellers sharing his booth is that of a harmless bunch of middle-aged gossips – even if their ridicule appears to be mostly at the cost of the very beautiful but melancholy widow seated further down the carriage. David is earnestly informed that she is the trophy wife of the recently deceased Sir Fitzpatrick, a wealthy Scottish laird. As the group's spirited banter continues, little good is said about the woman and David is drawn into Madeleine's tragic story through the contemptuous eyes of her self-appointed jury. It is only later, once the bullies' prey has fled from their loud and thoughtless jeering, that David becomes contrite, seeking out the bereft Mrs Fitzgerald to apologise. It is too late, the damage is done and there is nothing David can do but witness the awful consequence of their cruelty unfold.
Something Borrowed: radio drama (45 minutes)
Sandra is an erstwhile writer single-handedly bringing up two children following the demise of her marriage. Christine is an ambitious young professional looking forward to a bright future with her new fiancé. Sandra and Christine hate each other – which is not surprising considering that they're both in love with the same man. Forced to spend the night together in a hospital family room, waiting to hear whether Warren, the object of their shared love, will make it through complex brain surgery, the two women embark on a passage of mutual discovery – learning as much about themselves as they do each other. As powerful as their feelings of love and loss are, bound by a common purpose, the women's hostility cannot compete with friendship's subtle allure and as the night unravels, a tenuous bond is formed. Surgery continues, no news comes, the hours pass and cruelty surrendering to kinship, both women realise that the love of the man they have fought over can – indeed must – be shared if they are to rebuild their lives and move forward into whatever future fate has handed them.


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Not all adventures in eating begin when the food arrives. Sometimes, it's not what you get but HOW you get it that truly makes an experience remarkable. And often, just trying to order food is more notable than the food itself.
Most cultures have highly varied notions of what individuals find appealing. For example, I have a bun warmer in my kitchen which was probably installed right after the second world war called the "MOIST-CRISP!" Obviously the first point I'd like to make is:
What the hell, y'all?
But secondarily I'd like to point out that that combination of words is not at all appetizing for most people. Presentation is important when serving food, and even more important when it comes to labeling and advertising. You wouldn't want to consume a product called the "porous and yeasty," which is why we have "Bread." (In point of fact, bread used to be called "mealy bowel gel" but marketing directors soon found that a name like that dissuaded people from keeping it in their MOIST-CRISP! and so they passed a legislation making it really difficult for inventors to name their own products. This is why it's taken so long for me to formally offer you a little something I've been working on, the "cheddar flavored dump-lube." Hypocrites.)
China takes these cultural differences into account when making food and drink accessible to its foreign friends. Just as advertisers focus on naming and describing products in a manner evocative of the concepts consumers value most, China often takes the priorities of the target market into account when translating.
From the sublimely optimistic:
To the things that are better filed under "Harbinger:"
who do you suppose would go here?
Some food related Engrish is constructive.
Other instances are just ill conceived.
To me, attempting to divine what might actually be meant by a given description is probably by far the best part of the process. Since my brother can both speak and write Chinese, there was a failsafe. But I really enjoyed the deductive reasoning. For example, "Of the beef?" Does that mean "from a cow?" or actually "From the beef?" Is it beef? Is it a beef product? or is it something one might find on beef? Like a parasite? a food-borne pathogen? What kind of beef is this of? "Beef with skin mottled?" That is the least encouraging description of ostensibly edible meat I think I've ever read. And this isn't even a concrete assumption we're making about whether or not the food in question is beef. We may in fact be ordering a non-beef substance that is simply derived from some alleged beef, such as fat. Or a deer tick. OR E. COLI. WHO SERVES E. COLI IN A RESTAURANT, CHINA?!?!? At least it was an evocative euphemism.
Don't even get me started on the implications of "explosive Australia."
WOULD you just JUICE A NICE PIECE OF GARLIC STEAM SAUNA!?! I can't even begin to imagine what the hell that means. Perhaps changing the emphasis systematically would be helpful? Like, could we just juice a NICE piece of garlic steam sauna for once? No? not working for you?
a) What the fuck is hairy crab oil? SUPER PASS.
b) I admit to being a little discomfited by the options they offer. When is the last time you had to choose between soup and bacon? WHAT KIND OF SICK ESTABLISHMENT IS THIS?!
c) How are you even going to fry some soup?
There isn't a paragraph in the world that could really analyze these options comprehensively, unless I just discovered the secret to speed reading "Finnagan's Wake." (Ed. note: I checked; I didn't.) So I'm just going to attack these in order.
1) Colorful: I'm not even going to guess.
2)pleurotus eryngii bacon lentils: I can identify exactly two of these words, and the other two sound like the kind of thing you might see printed on a card underneath a picture of a person's foot fungus or infected surgical incision.
3)Taken the rice dish of meat string beans (chocolate chip cookie dough): Chocolate chip cookie dough? What the fuck kind of rice dish is this? And what is a meat string bean?
4)Dadzi's fried veal: boooooooooring.
5)coffee aileron de requin au coco chicken: The most comprehensible thing on this menu.
6)Bacon piled fried lily: This is the kind of thing I imagine Kermit the frog having raging night terrors about.
7)With a fresh: For five dollars. With a fresh. A FRESH COSTS FIVE DOLLARS.
The mandarin fish WOULD have been a steamed dry squirrel, but flowers being the fried fish of fruit, the eels the teriyaki sauce. The moral being, that Tseung Kwan o is a cook in the butter on the cook cook.
Are we clear?
OK, in order: Snapper candy, the steam, fried, soup.
Better now? Alright.
Oh Jesus. Obviously they obtained an advance copy of Snoop Dogg's new single, "Back into a sweet eel."
Also, they have that mouth watering special, "Spicy crisp pieces of limbs!"
After viewing this menu, I will never again drive by one of those bozos standing on the street corner waving signs for Stereo Outlet or Mattress Clearance warehouses without imagining that the text of the sign says,
At least it's homemade. That makes everything more appetizing!
or had one too many run-ins with the samurai salmon.
This just sounds like a Tijuana sex show. I don't even want to know what comes out of the kitchen when you order this.
This page looks like the liner notes to a Frogs album.
That first option is so revolting to the most unmitigated extreme that I was sure there was some mistake. I ran it through google again, just to be thorough.
nourishment kuko pullus cum osse nigro soup = nourishment kuko the chicken with the bone black Soup.
Poor Kuko.
This is Latin. Just how in the good goddamn hell this restaurant decided that Latin would be more comprehensible than English is beyond me.
For the love of – ! Not the baby!!
And finally, to end on a more instructive note,
This dish is clearly a parable. Like, the bullfrog was so greedy, he ate way too much. All day long he just sat on his bacon piled fried lily pad and hogged down. He was such a rapacious bullfrog, the townsfolk (oh, those ubiquitous townsfolk. The underpinnings of every fable. Where would we be without their faceless, mindless panel of homogenous judgment? Thank God I had a spare set at this blog. I don't usually stock them. There's sort of a dearth of demand for that kind of thing around here.) were perplexed. They convened at the town hall (I didn't have a church in my bag of banal literary mainstays, sorry) and decided to kill the bullfrog, sell his bacon piled fried lily, and offer his stewed carcass to the public with a clear description of his crime emblazoned below a photo of his corpse as if THAT WOULD MOTIVATE PEOPLE TO SPEND MONEY ON IT.
Sorry. I'm not really all that good with unhappy endings.


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The Official 2017 Rally Spectator Guide is now available on the spectator information page. Please take a moment to read over the Parking Information and Safety Issues before coming to the event.
Printed spectator maps will be available in the Salem & Steelville newspapers a few days before the rally and printed spectator guides will be available in various stores around the area the week of the rally. Or visit the Rally America information booth at the Parc Expose' on Friday and Saturday to pick up your free copy of the spectator guide.
Again for this year we will be using a text messaging service from RainedOut.com. We will be able to send mass text messages to anyone who subscribes to this service. These text messages will update you about delays, cancellations, or other urgent rally related messages.
If you would like to enroll in this service, to be alerted of significant events, please subscribe using your phone or computer.
From your phone: text 100AW to 84483. That's all it takes.
From your computer: go to https://www.rainedout.net/team_page.php?a=cb3e0dcee97b70bac470 and complete the registration of your phone number. You will then be sent a confirmation code to your phone that you will enter on the site.


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Although Twitter is a unique and fantastic tool for businesses as well as for personal accounts, it can sometimes become a little too much. Do you receive constant messages from users? Do you constantly get frustrated at the amount of tweets they put up on a daily basis? Do you just want to block them to ease your stress levels? Believe it or not, the process is extremely simple and is even recommended for a better Twitter experience.
How to block people on Twitter:
Find the Twitter user account you wish to block either from your Twitter feed or even from your list of followers.
Once here, you will see a little 'gear' or settings button next to their name which will bring up a list of options.
One of the options in question will say 'BLOCK @' followed by their name and if this is clicked, they will be blocked.
Blocking people on Twitter means that you will not be able to see their tweets as well as stopping them from seeing your tweets. Furthermore, if they aren't following you, they will no longer have the chance nor will they be able to add you to any lists. There is a way around this if they search your name but this only works if your profile is set to public rather than private.
If you regret your decision to block an account on Twitter, the process is easily reversed by unblocking them.


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Help us build the world's most flexible cloud-based commerce platform!
Looking for a job with impact? Join our brilliant team!
European and Asian job openings
Marketing & PR
People & Organization
Sales & Partner Management
- Front End Engineer - Infrastructure & Extensibility (m/f/x), Berlin, Munich
- Open Source Front End Engineer - Design Systems (m/f/x), Berlin, Munich
- Product Security Engineer (m/f/x), Berlin
- Scala Engineer (m/f/x), Berlin
- Senior Scala Engineer (Checkout Team) (m/f/x), Berlin
- Site Reliability Engineer (m/f/x), Berlin, Munich
To view job openings in the United States, please click here
Our Hiring Process
We aim for quick, smooth and personalized processes, tailored to each role. Our Talent Acquisition Team guides you through and answers any questions you might have. We believe that during the process it's essential for you to meet your future colleagues, get a tour of the office, understand our vision, and give/receive feedback openly.
Diversity & Inclusion
Your colleagues come from all over the world! The majority of our team is senior level, but the strong mentoring culture enables us to onboard interns and working students who can gain real work experience and develop individual skills. We are also strong advocates for women in tech!
Company Values
Team spirit. A flexible & family friendly work environment. We strive towards a clear company vision that allows us to be always two steps ahead of competitors. We share our knowledge. We don't blame. We live & breath "agile" and have a strong will to improve by giving & receiving feedback. Psychological safety matters to us (Never heard about it? Google before you apply.) 😉
Engineering Culture
You build – you deploy – you maintain! We live agile software development, foster involvement and autonomy. We love automation, continuous integration. We work with modern tools & technologies on reactive architectures & microservices. And yes, we damn love to create open source software (check out our Github profile https://github.com/commercetools)!
Perks & Benefits
Improve your German or English, attend conferences and meetups. Need a training to enhance your skills and competencies? We've got that covered. As well as your gym membership, drinks, and snacks in the office! For our foreign employees we offer support in obtaining a visa. As we are a very family-friendly company, we also try to help you in finding a kindergarten for your little rascals!
Work Environment
Bright offices with shared spaces and quiet rooms to focus in silence. Apple computers and extra screens. Height-adjustable desks, sofa & chillout areas with a kicker, billiard and/or table tennis. Modern and well-equipped kitchen for lunch cooking or culinary after work events.
eCommerce Industry
We are one of the top players in the global eCommerce platform scene, involved in projects for huge retail brands all around the world. We are innovative, stir up the market and leave our footprints in a fast-moving industry, which is used by millions of people every day. Take a look at our blogs to learn more.
Table Tennis Games
Berlin – the place where opposites attract: German history and Government meet Döner Kebab, graffiti & techno. The economy is driven by a dynamic, innovative tech scene with startups as well as international companies. Diversity and internationality describe the vibe of this 3.5 mio. people city.
The majority of our Platform Engineers, but also the REWE Team, Support and parts of Marketing and our Talent Acquisition Team are working in our office located in Berlin's new "hipster" neighborhood Neukölln.
Munich is world-famous for the Oktoberfest, a traditional beer festival. The city with 1.5 million inhabitants lies in the South of Germany on the edge of the Alps. It's becoming more and more international every year. The coolest thing about Munich? You can swim & surf the river Isar!
The city of Munich is the cradle of the commercetools, which was founded in 2006. Our Finance, Sales, and Marketing departments are located here in beautiful Schwabing, as well as the Management Board, the Designers, some Platform Engineers, the Professional Service Team and parts of our People & Organization Team.
Jena is a small German university town in the lovely area of Thuringia (East Germany). Our Partner Management works mostly from our Jena office, which is one of our smaller locations.
Durham – USA
Durham, North Carolina, is home to a bunch of Fortune 100 tech companies. There are several top universities close by which made it attractive for innovators & investors from the Bay Area & East Coast to build up their business. That's why Durham became the "startup capital of the South" in the past years.
Our office is right across the street from the famous Durham Bulls Stadium, in the heart of downtown. The spacious and bright rooms have high exposed brick ceilings with a fully equipped kitchen, smaller private offices, and conference rooms, as well as all essential gaming (ping pong, foosball, darts, and a putting green)!
Amsterdam – Netherlands
Amsterdam is the biggest Dutch city with about 850,000 residents. It's rumored that Amsterdam has more bikes than inhabitants. Beautiful canals with tiny houseboats wind everywhere through the city. The nearby airport is one of the top 3 in Europe which makes Amsterdam a gate to the world.
Our Dutch office is home of our remotely working Sales Team. Located in the beautiful Herengracht in the heart of Amsterdam this office is the home base for all our BENELUX & UK sales activities.


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Recently got a PAT48PG4-1.20 but someone removed a 3.3V voltage regulator and I'm trying to figure out which component I could put there so 3.3V 486 CPU's can work again. So if someone has such a board or a close relative to it I'd love to know what regulator they use for it.
Or which voltage regulator I could use for it. To give some info, it has a 5V in/I line, an (currently) 1.49V out/O line and a 1V R line and has 2 spots where I could put that regulator. One marked R-O-I and one the exact reverse.
Missing 3.3V voltage regulator
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You Should Have Known
Coming Soon to HBO as the Limited Series The Undoing
Devour the New York Times bestselling novel, soon to be an HBO limited series called The Undoing, starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant: a "rollickingly good literary thriller" about a marriage counselor who learns that her perfect life is only a mirage leaving her to dismantle one life and create another for her child and herself (Vanity Fair).Grace Reinhart Sachs is living the only life she ever wanted for herself, devoted to her husband, a pediatric oncologist at a major cancer hospital, their young son, Henry, and the patients she sees in her therapy practice. Grace is also the author of the forthcoming You Should Have Known, a book in which she castigates women for not valuing their intuition and calls upon them to pay attention to their first impressions of men.
But weeks before the book is published, a chasm opens in her own life: a violent death, a missing husband, and, in the place of a man Grace thought she knew, only a chain of terrible revelations. Left behind in the wake of a spreading and very public disaster, and horrified by the ways in which she has failed to heed her own advice, Grace must disassemble one life and create another for her child and herself.
*Includes Reading Group Guide*
"This excellent literary mystery [unfolds] with authentic detail in a rarified contemporary Manhattan. . . intriguing and beautiful."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)