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Archive for the 'Business' Category
Indie Sixy Times
Tuesday, July 15th, 2014
Last week was the sixth anniversary of the start of my journey into independent game development. Every year I like to write up a little recap of the past year, and this year is no different. And we're off!
For me the past year has been quite different from previous years. Most of the year was spent not working on my own Streaming Colour projects, but instead working with Matt Rix on games for Milkbag Games, our new company.
I did manage to put out a few things by Streaming Colour: Finger Tied Jr. (July, 2013), and Baby's Playful Hands (October, 2013). I was also lucky enough to have Apple ask me for a demo version of Finger Tied that they could put on iPads in actual, physical Apple stores. That was pretty exciting, and being able to see my game on iPads in Apple stores was extremely rewarding.
The rest of my year was spent working with Matt on games for Milkbag Games. At the start of my year six, Matt and I were in the middle of working on a game called Snow Siege. However, by the fall, we both needed a break from the game. We'd been working on it for a year and were still months away from it being finished. At that time I was working on a prototype for a bonus mini-game in Snow Siege. The game was a little scratch card where you tapped on squares to reveal shapes that rewarded you with prizes. The game was so much fun on its own that we started joking about taking the mini-game idea and making it about rescuing cute, pixelated animals. But the more we talked about it, the less it became a joke, and the more it became something we really wanted to make happen. This mini-game became the core of Disco Zoo.
Disco Zoo started as a three-week prototype to test the idea and see if it was fun. Once we were able to play the game, we were convinced that it was something worthwhile and we spent the next three months expanding the prototype into a finished game. We teamed up with our friends at NimbleBit to publish the game, and the game launched on iOS in late February, 2014 to an Editor's Choice feature on the front page of the App Store. We brought the game to Google Play in April, and between the two platforms we've had nearly 3 million downloads so far.
Needless to say, we've been extremely pleased with the response to Disco Zoo. Matt and I had a great time making the game, and people seem to really enjoy playing it, so we couldn't be happier. Some people buy things in the game, so that makes us happy too. 😉
On a personal note, Disco Zoo couldn't have come at a better time for me, because if the game had flopped, I might have been at the point of having to decide between continuing with indie life or finding a full-time job again. I'm so lucky to be in a position where I can keep doing this. I have said this before, but none of us do this alone. I'm always aware of how much help and support I've received from family, friends, journalists, twitter acquaintances, players, and more. I'm extremely grateful to everyone who has supported me in a myriad of ways over the past six years. Because of you, I can continue to do what I love and keep making games for the future. And after all, that's kind of the whole point.
Here's to year seven!
P.S. The title of this post was blatantly borrowed from TOJam 6: "TOJam Sixy Times". 🙂
5 Years Old
Monday, July 8th, 2013
I can hardly believe it myself, but Streaming Colour is five years old today! Five years ago today I arrived in Toronto after moving back from Vancouver, sat down at my computer, and started my indie career. When I started Streaming Colour I had no idea if I'd survive for five years. It was a gamble. I had a left a good job as a senior programmer in the console games industry and I was taking a big risk. My goal was to build the business to the point where I was making a livable income after five years. Not be rich, just making enough to keep doing what I wanted to do.
It has been a very long and very short five years filled with lows and highs, and everything in between. Being an independent game developer definitely hasn't been easy. In fact, it has been a huge struggle at times. But it has also been incredibly rewarding on a personal, professional, and creative level. There are few things as creatively rewarding as taking an idea in your head and turning it into something that people can experience for themselves.
Over the past five years I have taken on some really interesting contract work. I've spoken at conferences in Guelph, Toronto, and San Jose. I wrote a chapter in a book on iPhone development. I moved to Guelph, Ontario with my amazing wife, and we've had two incredible children. Through it all, I somehow managed to release seven games/apps. I'm not releasing any numbers today, but these are those games ranked from most revenue to least, for those curious:
- Finger Tied (Oct, 2012)
- Baby's Musical Hands (July, 2011)
- Dapple (Feb, 2009)
- LandFormer (June, 2010)
- Monkeys in Space (Nov, 2009)
- Dirty Diapers (Dec, 2010)
- Finger Tied Jr. (May, 2013)
Update: A couple of people on twitter were curious about relative revenue. Here's a graph showing each game/app as a percentage of total revenue earned on the App Store:
I have learned some hard and important lessons about developing games on my own. I've learned some very hard lessons about marketing and PR. I feel like I'm getting better every day at what I do, and I intend to keep learning and improving with every game.
After releasing Finger Tied last fall, one thing I realized was that I really missed working with other people. Working on one's own gives you a lot of creative freedom and choice, but it's also really difficult to see the big picture at times. Late last year, Matt Rix and I teamed up and started prototyping some game ideas. He and I had worked together a couple of times at TOJam in Toronto, and we decided we'd see if we could make a game together. Earlier this spring we founded a new company called Milkbag Games and we're currently hard at work on our first game: Snow Siege. It has been a fantastic experience working with Matt so far and I think Snow Siege is going to be a really great game.
Finally, I wanted to extend a big thank you to everyone who has supported me and Streaming Colour over the last five years. If you bought my games, offered encouragement, talked with me about game design at GDC or 360iDev, or just sent a friendly message of twitter, thank you! Nobody can do this alone, not even those of us who work alone. I wouldn't still be doing this if not for all of you. Here's to the next five years!
Finger Tied: A History
Thursday, December 13th, 2012
Yesterday I released a big update to Finger Tied (get it on the App Store) which enables the sharing of levels in the game. You can now share the levels you create, and download levels created by other players. I think it's pretty cool, and I hope the players do too.
As I was working on the update, I started thinking back on the process of creating the game from start to finish. I like it when other people talk, in detail, about the process of creating their games, so I thought I'd do something to share the process of making Finger Tied. I wished I'd kept a diary or journal about the development of the game, but then I realized that I had the next best thing: my commit logs from my Git repo for the game. Every time I check in code or art, I add comments about what I accomplished.
With that in mind, I exported the logs and wrote a little PHP script to generate HTML code of all the commit comments. I've also gone back through my screenshots and pulled some that are relevant to given dates. I haven't edited any of this, so you'll see references to features that don't appear in the finished game, because I decided to cut them.
The first commit comments are from Guelph Game Jam 3, in April, where I first prototyped the game. It was a game about planting flowers, called Trillium Fillium. From there you can see it involve into something more abstract and into the final game.
This post is long. I wouldn't blame you if you don't read it. I hope one or two of you find it interesting. 😉
Finger Tied: From Start to v1.1
Wed Apr 11
- Adding cc2d files. Adding shell project for GuelphJam3.
Sun Apr 15
- Background renders.
- Drawing dirt.
- Adding some flowers
- Starting condition.
- You can draw flowers.
- Lose condition
- art & sounds
- Broken attempt at 2 touches
- Multitouch mostly works. There's some buggy behaviour, but it's somewhat playable.
Fri Apr 27
- New artwork. Removing 2nd touch for now for testing in sim.
Mon Apr 30
- New artwork, start of json data implementation.
- Passing level data through to the game scene, but not using it yet.
- Added triply animation to the stripes…not sure if it'll stay or not…
- Experimenting with changing the speed of the frame animations on the fly.
- Crazy colour anim experiment.
- Fixing size values used for the experimentatl animations
Tue May 1
- Tying the animations to the percentage complete. Tying the colour animations to the colours of the touches.
- Doing a bit of refactoring to set up for tracking touch history.
Wed May 2
- Limiting how much of the screen fills with colour.
- Committing for posterity: Trying out a moving stripes colour animation. WAY too distracting.
- Loading all the level data from the json file and using it to build the starting conditions for the level.
- Tying touch index to the start point index, instead of the order you touched the screen.
- Fixing a lot of problems with the multi-touch handling logic.
- Adding a separated level. Fixing some of the math that a split level exposed.
Fri May 4
- Properly handling highlight state updating.
- Fixing bugs in multi-touch
- Fixing ending the level if you work yourself into a corner.
- Fixing starting presses logic.
- More multitouch fixes.
- More multitouch fixes. Multitouch *seems* to be working like I expect it to now? Hopefully…
- Added a four touch level. It's showing some weird behaviour starting the level, though…
- Fixing a bug where all starting fingers needed to happen without any movement.
- Added spin animation to show history.
Sat May 5
- Splitting the game scene up into play/edit classes in prep for an editor.
Mon May 7
- Getting the main editor UI flow working.
- Adding start highlight markers so you can see which fingers are active on start.
- Adding easing equations to the animations for little tweaks.
- Refactoring some code, and fixing a bug that would allow multiple touches to start in the same tile in editor mode.
- Improving the editor start touch stuff. Fixing some bugs in the multi-touch stuff in the editor start stuff.
- You can now draw your areas in editor mode.
- Handling end tiles in editor.
- Unhighlighting in editor after done editing.
- Starting to work on generating level data from the editor.
- Fixing a bug where you could take your finger off the ipad once you had no more options to move without ending the level.
- Working on more level data output.
- Start/end points exporting.
- Writing the tile histories to the json data.
Tue May 8
- Fixing a bug where you could move your finger around (without lifting it) once you'd backed yourself into a corner with one finger. Now you can't.
- Adding some rough sfx for select/cancel.
- Starting to rough out the UI flow.
- Colour theme support/implementation added.
- Changing the history animation so that it only starts once the whole previous anim has finished.
- Adding some transitions to the FE screens.
Wed May 9
- New buttons in the play menu, and pagination now. Yay!
- Copying the play menu code into the level editor menu.
- Adding ability to delete levels created with the editor.
Sun May 27
- UI mockups file.
Wed May 30
- Lots of UI mockups and colour changes.
- UI mockups and font projects.
- Starting to work on the new front end. NOTE: You CAN NOT launch the game in this build. I removed some art from the texture atlases, so we get crashes going into the sub-menus for now.
Fri Jun 1
- Playing around with a texture applied to the game in the UI mockups.
- Solid implementation of the square button.
- fonts galore!
- Setting the clear colour to magenta to make it obvious where I'm not drawing.
- Making the BM font label pay attention to padding values.
- Default colours.
- Adding fonts to project file.
- Main menu buttons hooked up. New fonts in.
- Some quick fixes to stop the missing art crashes in the play/editor menus.
Mon Jun 4
- Switching the FE implementation around so that screens aren't scenes, they're nodes. WARNING: This build crashes if you go passed the Main Menu then try to get back to it.
- Font padding tweaks.
- Playing with a "stamped ink" effect over the screen.
- Screenshots.
- Converting all the remaining screens to the new class format to get rid of the crashes. Also handling the colour changes better.
Tue Jun 5
- Refactoring FE "scenes" to "screens". Setting up zOrder on tiles so that they mask the FE contents. Reworking the Main Menu squares to centre anchors so they can be scaled for intro animation nicely.
- Main menu intro animation, but also broke screen-to-screen transitions somehow…
- tweaking spacing on sd-font
- Fix for broken MM buttons
- MM outro anim (for now). Also put in temp code for other screens to handle exit properly now that the hack code isn't in the base class.
- Tweaking MM anims
- Play menu. Setting it up for the 4 finger buttons. Just animating them in and out right now. Set up a back button for all screens, managed by the FrontEndScene.
Wed Jun 6
- Switched MM animations to move-based instead of scale-based
- Disabling input during screen transitions. Disabling multitouch in the FE.
- Adding text and finger icons to the play menu buttons
- Changing the back button's highlight colour when the theme is changed.
- Hooking the play menu up to load the level select screen and pass a variable that tells it which file it should load (not used yet).
- Changing the squarebutton to use standard touch delegate instead of targetted, so that I can get it to play nice with the scroll node. Starting the scroll node implementation.
- More work on the scroll node.
Thu Jun 7
- Non-dragging scroll works.
- End bounce working.
- Cancelling input to children of a scroll node once movement starts.
- Fixing the case where the innersize was smaller than the viewsize. It was causing weird bounce behaviour.
- Fixing gaps between scroll view elements by setting "Extrude" to 1 in TexturePacker. Setting 2D projection.
- Better spacing on the 40pt font
- Working on the level select screen.
- Hooking the level select buttons up to the game to launch the appropriate level. Fixing a crash that resulted.
- Font spacing
- Adding more things to the level select buttons.
Fri Jun 8
- New editor UI screens implemented. Main FE flows now working.
- Lots of new colour schemes, mockups, things tried, fonts. Progress with visual style!
- Tweaking position of screen titles for new font.
Tue Jun 12
- ASL fonts and new UI designs.
- Adding ASL letters to MM
- Swapping finger icons on Play Menu for new ASL font.
- New ASL font and layout in Level Select screen.
- Playing with title text colours…
- Applying text colour to a few labels in the level select screen that were missing it.
- Adding a whole bunch of new colour themes.
Wed Jun 13
- Splitting levels into their respective json files based on num fingers used. Adding a bunch of new levels.
- Create now launches straight into the level editor. Adding a "My Levels" button to the Play Menu. New animations for the Play Menu. Quitting to appropriate FE screen from inside the game now.
- saving some level editor json files.
- Fixing bug in level select where extra row of space would show up in scroll view when even number of levels present.
- Bug fix: colour animation was kicking in full-blast if you sat at 25% completion
- Bug fix: you could move a finger onto an end point that wasn't appropriate for that finger
- Adding a one-tile buffer around the play area for the "audience" animations
- Bug fix: resetting tiles to the background colour (instead of white) when stopping the colour anim. Also tweaking the math that calculates how much of the screen to use for the anim to take into account the new buffer around the play area.
- bug fix: flicker on startup. failure animation (breaking glass) added. added a buffer to touches so the game feels a bit more forgiving.
- Failure anim only plays on tiles playing colour anims.
Fri Jun 15
- New start/end point art
- Switching the start/end icons. Playing with the colour/lines animations to make them come in sooner, appear right away as the user completes the level. This makes the tiles dropping off feel a lot cooler.
- Save implemented for percent complete progress on both built-in levels and created levels. Also painting the preview using the background colour.
Tue Jun 19
- Hooking up the Testflight SDK and adding some checkpoints.
- Adding a few more one-finger levels
- Tuning FE animations.
Wed Jun 20
- Adding in scroll-to animation functionality to the scrollnode class.
- Limiting the level creation area to a 12×12 centred grid. This gives room for UI elements that are guaranteed not to overlap gameplay area.
- Colour palette inspiration from wes anderson movies
- Creating new button class. Replacing the back btns with the new btn class to make sure it works.
- Converting the custom buttons to use selectors instead of delegates. Changing all relevant code. Added a temp "back" button to the game that returns you to the FE immediately. This will become the pause button.
- Removing several unneeded source files.
- Starting work on the pause screen class. Cleaning up a bunch of compile errors.
Thu Jun 21
- Removing the stars hand and percentage complete when user hasn't completed the level.
- New pause button art. New art and positioning code for the stars on the level select screen.
- Functional pause menu. Needs some new fonts. Needs intro/outro animations.
- Pause menu for main game play complete?
Fri Jun 22
- WIP: Batching tile draw calls. NOTE: FE is currently broken as the background tiles render in front of the FE buttons.
- Changing the tile default bg to be the on-square with a colour tint as a lighter version of the bg colour. This looks really nice when the tiles fall away on failure.
- Fixing the FE drawing by splitting the tiles in the bg out into a separate batch node.
- Adding classes for the other soon-to-be in-game menus. Hooked the existing pause menu up in the editor scene.
- Building new post-level-play menus. Buttons all quit for now.
- Level retry implemented.
- Fixing a couple of compiler warnings causes by method name changes.
- Implementation for the post-edit menu.
- Adding a new, really hard, 3-finger level.
Wed Jul 4
- New created levels.
Mon Jul 16
- Most of the failure cases are displaying the fail point (except back-tracking). Build Target renamed to "FingerTied". Game display name now "Finger Tied".
- Handling showing the failure marker for backing up over a tile already added to the path.
- Adding an animation to the failure point sprite.
- Splitting fail point sprite into two sprites, that can be colour tinted…though not sure how to get the colours to them properly, yet…
Tue Jul 17
- Tinting the fail point to be in the same colour family as the touch that caused the failure. Doing conversion to HSL so I can adjust the brightness.
- Saving a few new created levels.
- Reskinned the editor "how many fingers" menu.
- Starting working on the tutorial.
Wed Jul 18
- Lots of work on tutorial system. You can launch it now and run through the tutorials. A bunch of bugs to do with retry levels, or actually finishing the tutorial, though.
- Fixing some colours in the tutorial post screen.
Fri Jul 20
- Checking in progress on the tutorial, but I'm about to rip it out.
- Removing all tutorial code.
- Pulsing all the starting points to make it more obvious that you have to touch them. To do this meant switching the main game atlas to an anti-aliased texture…no side-effects so far…
- Tweaking start tile pulse anim time. Adding a pulse to the end points once all start points are activated.
- Displaying a reason message for failure and reworking the success message for when I have timing working.
- Implementing the "next" button on post-game screens.
Mon Jul 23
- Removing "next" from the play fail screen. Timing levels and displaying the time in the success screen. Times are not saved yet.
- Tutorial levels json file. New screenshot.
- Saving and retrieving per-level best scores.
- Changing time format strings. Displaying total time for a level pack if the whole pack of levels is completed.
- Fixing some labels that weren't using the same naming convetion as other places.
- Adding the tutorial levels to the start of the various level packs.
- Saving the scores for the user created levels properly by adding a -1 score when the level is created to the NSUserDefaults.
- Bug fix: levels with start/end point on the same tile would show the failure marker even though level had been properly completed.
- Hiding pause button when pause/postgame menus are up.
- Adding a whole bunch of created levels to the appropriate level packs. These are NOT in any particular order yet.
- Fixing missing comma in one of the level files.
Tue Jul 24
- Bug fix: changing colour theme would reset all the tiles in the FE so the black background would disappear.
- Fixing font spacing for non-retina chunk 18pt.
- Disabling the fps counter.
- Adding temp app icon so testers have something to see at least.
- Better testflight beta tracking points. Anonymizing TF tracking data.
- Reordered all level packs based on some difficulty testing play-throughs.
Wed Jul 25
- Various project/code changes readying the first tester build.
- Making the available tiles highlight significantly more subtle, as it was confusing some testers.
- Trying a new version of the play menu that shows two hands instead of single hands for multi-finger level packs.
- Working on a popup message for multitasking gestures warning. Works when returning to gameplay, but not if the game is quit while it's in the background…
- Multitasking Gesture warning is implemented. It gets stored that a gesture was made and displays a message next time a 4-finger level is launched.
Fri Jul 27
- Adding random tips to the menus.
- Increasing the fudge factor by a few pixels to make it a bit easier to larger fingered players.
- Wasn't comfortable with how much I increased the fudge factor. Slight decrease.
- Applying a fade to the non-active start/end pieces. So end pieces start faded, then start pieces fade out once all active.
- Removing testflight SDK, adding Flurry for beta testing analytics.
- Tweaking some tips wording.
- Post-level screenshots for doing mockups.
- Conversion to Portrait mode, step 1: Front End
- Portrait step 2: post-level screen and pause button.
- Portrait step 3: level editor.
Mon Jul 30
- Better flurry event names.
- Adding first pass at music loop to the game.
- Disabling the history animation during gameplay and playing it as soon as the user finishes a level instead. Several testers mentioned the animation was confusing/distracting during gameplay. This feels much nicer.
- Applying the stripe animation to all FE tiles.
- Adding some interactivity on the menus. Touching the background tiles plays a one-time colour tint animation.
- Attempt at new finger icons for the play menu, but I don't like them. Checking them in, but will be removing them.
- Reverting to the ASL letters on the Play Menu screen.
- Fixing an animation in the Main Menu. One of the squares was sliding in slightly faster than an adjacent square.
- You can set mandatory and directional tiles and they render properly. There's no UI and the values aren't stored yet, but you can draw them.
- New music loop from the composer. No sax.
- Bunch of artwork that needed adding.
Tue Jul 31
- Created new flurry api key.
- Special tiles can be saved and loaded from json data.
- Making the square button class toggle-able.
- Adding top menu for the post edit screen that has buttons for directionality and mandatory tiles. Buttons do nothing yet.
- Exposing whether the square button is on/not on as a property. Allowing other code to set the state of a square button.
- Post edit UI hooked up and functional. Allows full creation of levels with special tiles.
- Gameplay now has rules for special tiles. However, failure reasons not implemented yet.
- Adding all the logic to detect new failure reasons: diagonals, directionals, mandatory colours, slipped end points, and a catch-all. Adding help text to the failure screen for the new cases.
- Bug fix: post editor screen wasn't dismissing properly when Erasing or Quitting
Wed Aug 1
- Removing the upside down screen title text (doesn't work in portrait) and moving the tip text up into its place. Shortening the tip text (and adding some new tips) so that they fit into the new space next to the back button.
- Tweaking the sizes of the mandatory square markers. MUCH nicer now that they all feel the same size.
- Removing unused iPhone icon sizes.
- Adding some temp code to kill any level progress save data for this version because the level ordering will change.
- Fixing button order dismiss for fail screen.
- Upping version number to 0.2
- Not sure what's changed in this PSD, but checking it in.
- Adding new levels with special tiles to the level sets.
- I had broken the FE when switching colour themes during the switch to portrait. Fixing.
- v0.2 build sent to Testflight.
Fri Aug 31
- Latest music loop. GameCenter implementation (no icon in main menu yet).
- Latest adhoc build.
- Game Center leaderboard icon art.
- Custom game center icon added to the main menu.
- Disabling the GC icon on the MM when the player isn't authenticated. Also, setting up a notification to the MM to let it know when the state has changed, so that it can enable/disable based on the async event.
Tue Sep 4
- Adding the "More Games" popup.
- Replaced the AAC music loop with an AAC-compressed CAF file. This eliminates the stutter when looping.
- Build the UI for the Options screen. Still needs to be connected to things…
- Hooking up a few of the options menu items.
Thu Sep 6
- Adding icons for the music/sfx controls in the options menu. Properly updating them based on state. Initializing music/sfx on launch based on saved states.
- Uncompressed WAVs for the various versions of the music loops.
- Credits screen implementation. Needs final credits list.
- Adding particle effect on level completion. Needs tweaking, but looks pretty good so far.
Fri Sep 7
- Finished tweaking the level complete particle system.
- Various screenshots.
- Improving the "fail" icon animation. Is much more obvious now, which should help people recognize a fail state has occurred when playing.
- First pass at a "select" found effect. Still a bit too loud, but a good start.
- Tweaked volume on the select sfx. Added new "back" sfx. Changed the button class to expose the sound it plays on trigger.
- First attempt as lose SFX.
- Fixing bug where launching in upsidedown portrait didn't launch in proper orientation. Upping version to 0.3
- Changes to credits.
- Fixing bug where returning to game from multitasking to a FE screen outside the MM caused a crash because it wasn't cleaning up its NSNotificationCenter registration.
- Some new screenshots.
Mon Sep 10
- Bug fix: leaving a directional from the wrong edge generated an "incomplete" fail state instead of a "directional" fail state.
- Bug fix: if finger 1 is stationary and finger 2 boxes finger 1 in, the game didn't end.
- Final music track!
- First pass at COMPLETE LEVEL REORGANISATION. UI still needs work, and level progression needs extensive play testing.
Tue Sep 11
- Adding additional "trumpet" particle systems to the sides of the screen. Had to convert blend mode back to additive after discovering I was using an invalid blend fun parameter in previous blend.
- Only playing the new side-of-screen fanfare particles if you set a new record on a level. Otherwise you just get the end points bursts.
- Bug fix: Game would slow down significantly the longer you played it. Discovered the post-puzzle screens weren't being cleaned up, so were still be rendered and reallocated every time you finished a puzzle. Eventually caused massive slow down. Now being cleaned up properly.
- Improved the handling of mandatory and directional tiles. These could produce "blocked" fail messages, which were confusing. Now lets the user move incorrectly onto them first so that they get a more useful fail message.
- Starting to reorg the layout of the level select buttons.
- Finished new layout for the level select screen.
- Two-pixel tweak the positioning of text on the level select screen.
Wed Sep 12
- New stars art. Positioning stars. NOTE: this build displays random stars for every level, just for positioning testing.
- Only displaying stars in the level select screen if you've completed a level, and displaying the correct star based on the par times.
- Par times for beginner levels
- Displaying target times on post-level success screen.
- Adding animated star awarded for your current time. Fixing case where 3rd significant digit would prevent you from winning a star.
- Par times for easy levels.
Thu Sep 13
- Only showing the goal stars above what you just earned. So you just got silver, it only shows you the gold target time.
- Post game screenshot.
Fri Sep 14
- Adding the star target times to the play fail screen.
- Making the centre of the screen tappable to restart on fail. Has a 0.5s delay before activating to try to prevent mistaken triggering at the end of a level.
- Allowing user music to play instead of game's music.
- Par times for Medium and Hard. Rearranged a couple of levels.
- Bug fix: double play music on startup.
Mon Sep 17
- Returning the play menu screen to use single-handed icons for different difficulty packs.
- Adding trash can buttons to the level select screen when viewing your created levels (but they don't actually delete yet).
- Converting the SquareButton to use either standard or targeted touch. Adding new input blocker class. Adding popup for delete confirmation to the level select screen. Delete still not actually being done.
- Actually deleting levels and their associated save data!
- Touching up the font bitmaps: fixing holes and funny spikes.
- Updating music/sound credit.
- New launch screen.
Tue Sep 18
- Locking level sets until prev set has 10 levels completed. Added lock icons and lock explanation text that fades in when a locked button is pressed. Reworded the "incomplete" text to show how many levels have been completed.
- Adding a compile-time cheat to allow me to unlock all the level packs.
- Displaying stars for each level pack on the Play menu. Displays the star for the lowest star level you've got across all the levels in the pack.
- New tips.
Fri Sep 21
- LOTS of work on the icon.
- Lots of new icon art, including final icon designs!
- Copying final icons into the project.
- Adding first pass at SFX files. Adding in hookups for the FE sounds.
- In-game sound hookups for first pass SFX.
Sat Sep 22
- Applying a tiny random pitch to the soundOn SFX so that they give a bunch of really subtle variation in the sound.
Mon Sep 24
- Adding promo popup code in case I ever need it.
- Some screenshots
- New SFX files.
Tue Sep 25
- Bug fix: side particle effects systems were not cleaning up on restart. Resulted in big slow downs on iPad 1 after playing many levels.
- Adding SFX hooks to the editor for edit start and end.
- Some new raw level files.
- Tweaked SFX files.
- Icon design progression image.
- Final raw SFX from audio guy.
- Increasing default capacity of sprite batch nodes since they were overfilled every time, which caused a realloc.
- Adding in final levels and doing some removal and rearranging for difficulty tuning. No par times for new levels yet.
- Created levels.
- Tweaking the character padding on the 18pt font for non-retina iPads, as it was rendering too wide in the UI.
- Fixing some buggy behaviour in the scroll node. Touching it wasn't stopping an scroll in progress. And performance dips on 1st gen iPad would cause really messed up behaviour because of where the dt was being used.
Fri Sep 28
- Made the silver/gold targets for beginner levels easier to achieve.
- Fixing float rounding display bug on the play success screen and level select menu.
- Tuning target times for all easy levels.
- Tuned the Medium difficulty target times.
- Replaced accidental dupe level. Tuned target times on Hard up to level 28.
- Finishing the tuning of the hard level target times.
- Tweaking the 'tap to retry' time on the fail screen. Needed to be slightly shorter delay.
- Bug fix: Disabling input to the game when the pause menu is up. Also disabling the pause button while fingers are playing a puzzle.
- Bug fix: play menu lock text was displaying incorrect instructions (wrong level pack name displayed)
- Upping project to v1.0 in preparation for submission.
- Upping reset value to 1.0 so it resets beta testers' builds because all levels were reordered.
- Rewording some tips text.
- More levels exported from ipad.
- xcode scheme file changed?
- Release Candidate ad hoc IPA.
- Thanks sections added to Credits screen.
Sat Sep 29
- Adding help message for players to the My Levels screen if they haven't created any levels yet.
- Removing a bunch of unnecessary flurry events.
- Repositioning the multitouch gesture popup for portrait layout.
- Pointing the twitter button to the new @FingerTiedGame account.
- First draft of app store description.
Sun Sep 30
- App store screenshots.
- Updated description and keywords.
- Screenshots PSD file.
Tue Oct 9
- FT description updates.
- PressKit WIP
- Launch Day!
Fri Oct 19
- Displaying Multitasking Gestures popup *as soon* as a gesture is detected, instead of on next launch. Should help with people getting confused.
- Sound files show as modified, but not sure why. They appear to be correct, so maybe I forgot to check them in?
- Lots of finger tied ads and screenshots.
- A whole whack of screenshots.
- Archived builds.
- Latest changes to the FT app description.
Wed Oct 24
- Added Parse framework and started working on level sharing. Realized how huge this is going to be. Going to set this aside for now and come back to it later.
- FT description changes.
- Created an iPhone target. Builds and deploys, ready to start work on iPhone version.
Fri Oct 26
- Main menu converted. Loading iPhone textures. I think I found a good size for the tiles, but it's hard to tell yet.
- Rough pass at Play menu for iphone. Functional, but not pretty.
- Level select screen working on iPhone. Editor basic functionality working (but not UI)
- Working on the editor post edit screen for iPhone.
Mon Oct 29
- Editor post screen layout works, but still needs tweaking.
- Better layout on the editor post screen.
- Pause menu updated for iPhone
- Play fail screen for iPhone.
- Success screen for iPhone
Tue Oct 30
- Centering the completion time lbl on success screen when no star to render (iPhone)
- Duplicating the levels json files and splitting them into iPhone/iPad folders. And apparently I forgot to
- Options screen for iPhone
- Credits screen for iphone.
- TexturePacker 3.0 file for the game atlas.
- Better layout for play menu screen (iphone) and intro/outro anims
- Splitting tips into iPad/iPhone. Customizing iPhone tips. Reducing tip display time from 10 to 7s.
- Some first iPhone level designs.
- Adding button for 4 fingers in the editor for iPhone.
- More iPhone levels.
Wed Oct 31
- Temporarily putting all created levels into Beginner so I can send an iPhone build to testers.
- Fixing the More Game popup for iPhone.
- Changes to prep a test build for iPhone.
Fri Nov 2
- scheme files.
- Some debug code that forces the iPad build to run at iPad Mini size. Committing inactive.
- Fixing a few UI glitches introduced to iPad code during iPhone porting.
Tue Nov 6
- Adding "more levels" button to the main menu.
- Stubbed out the more level screen.
Fri Nov 9
- Working on level sharing stuff. Built a popup widget I can use for general popup messages now. Converted the level select screen to use the new popup. Adding Parse code back in.
Tue Nov 20
- GC sign in popup when trying to share a level if not signed in.
- A whole whack of Finger Tied related files. Not sure why some are marked as modified, but checking 'em in.
- Uploading levels and tying them to a player object works. Tracks which levels have been uploaded. Does not handle the errors well yet.
- Starting to work on loading "more levels" data from parse server.
Mon Nov 26
- More Levels screen properly loading/closing without generating extra buttons.
- Added buttons for filtering results with stubbed out calls.
- Implemented 3 of the 4 queries we want for filtering. Search needs more UI. No caching yet.
Wed Nov 28
- Displaying search UI in more levels. Non-functional yet. Textfield needs property tweaking too.
- Properly positioned/sized search field. Not doing proper attributes yet.
- Proper text field attribute settings.
- Two search fields now. Search works.
- Caching the queries. Handling network failures nicely. Canceling queries when moving between filters.
- Adding a constant upward counter for created levels. Renaming levels player has already created to conform to the new system on first boot after update. Adding proper level naming to editor code.
- Killing active queries when leaving the more levels screen.
Fri Nov 30
- Built the popup menu for settings on the My Level screen. Upload/delete now done via this popup.
- Bringing up a popup when a level is selected in the More Levels screen. Buttons just call callbacks, but don't do anything yet.
- Fixing a bug where the game became unresponsive if you closed the keyboard from the search page and attempted to back out of the screen. Also added some text to the screen in cases where no results are returned from the server.
- Likes and Reports working. Game auto-ignores any levels with 3 or more reports.
- Implementing the download button in the More Levels screen. Though you can't actually view the levels anywhere.
Sat Dec 1
- Adding a downloads screen, and a button to the play menu. Seems to be a crash trying to save best time on downloaded level. May be bad data in the NSUserDefaults? Need to update the level buttons in More Levels screen to use the new font/level name stuff from Downloads screen.
Sun Dec 2
- Fixing the crash after completing a downloaded level. Handling deleting best times on downloaded levels properly.
- Displaying proper levels names for More Levels screen. Displaying # likes on More Levels. Fixing some bugs with incorrect Setttings displays.
Mon Dec 3
- Implementing pagination of search results.
- Displaying a "loading" animation when a query is running.
- Displaying game center message to user when going to "my levels" sub-screen. Shrinking button text on the FEPopup slightly to accomodate slightly longer text.
- Displaying network errors as popups in More Levels. Fixing a bug where some queries weren't being cancelled.
- Fixing a bug in the More Levels where rapid tapping would result in a duplicate copy of the level data.
- Fixing a bug where tapping the Refresh button when search boxes were showing caused a crash.
- New settings button art.
- Implementing deletion of shared levels.
- Fixing a bunch of potential crashes. Better network error handling and display. Not displaying Like/Report buttons if already liked/reported. Displaying proper level names in popups.
- Created new art for more levels filter buttons (but they're not in-game yet). Removing some unused art from the atlas.
Tue Dec 4
- Added icons to the filter buttons for More Levels screen.
- Delete/settings popups on My Levels were showing incorrect level name.
- Adding delete confirmation when deleting uploaded levels. Making popup msg scale to fit text that's too long. Fixing some calls to open vertical popups that were displaying level name incorrectly.
- Adding instructional popups on upload/download telling the player where to find the levels.
- Ordering the user level's query by creation time so they see their most recent uploads first.
- Adding a "new" icon to the More Levels button on the main menu that disappears once clicked.
- Improving the promo system so I can show popups with users with specific builds. Will be used so I can show players who haven't updated a popup announcing the update.
- Upping the build version to 1.1.
- Parse requires iOS 5.0 or higher, so upping the min supported version to 5.0 from 4.3.
- Adding version (read from info.plist) to the credits. Pointing the twitter button to my own account instead of the FingerTiedGame account.
- WIP: Level sharing and custom URLs.
Wed Dec 5
- Handling custom URLs to load into the search page properly.
- iOS 5 pasteboard sharing.
- New splash screen.
- Doing proper copying to pasteboard for iOS5 (previous version wouldn't copy both text and images).
- Removing the level id search box. Making the level sharing shorten the fingertied level link with tinyurl. Made it async so it doesn't hang things.
Fri Dec 7
- 1.1 build and what's new notes.
Today only: FREE GAMES!
Friday, December 9th, 2011
Yes, you read that right: for today only, I'm reducing the price on four of my games to FREE. I have never dropped the price of any of my games to free before, and now you get four in one day!
Maybe it's that the holidays are coming up, or maybe I was just in a good mood. Who cares?! You get free games! So what are you waiting for? Go to the App Store and download these games now!
Monkeys in Space (Reg. Price: $1.99)
LandFormer (Reg. Price of Premium Content: $1.99)
* LandFormer was always a free download. However, the Premium Content is available from the In-Game Shop for FREE today.
Dirty Diapers (Reg. Price: $0.99)
I hope you enjoy the games. And if you do, please feel free to throw a good review up on the App Store. 🙂 Happy Holidays!
Results: iOS Game Revenue Survey
Wednesday, September 28th, 2011
10 days ago I launched a survey in the iOS game developer community aimed at gathering revenue data from as many developers as possible. The goal was to get a more realistic view of what the iOS game marketplace actually looks like and share the results with the entire dev community. The reason I felt this was necessary is that we tend to see two kinds of articles written about iOS game revenue: "Developer makes millions on iOS games!" or "Game makes $0 on App Store". I felt it was important that we get a more realistic look at what the market we're developing for looks like.
With that in mind, the survey launched on Monday, September 19, 2011 and ran for seven days. 252 developers filled it out! Now, before I get to the actual data, there's some important disclaimers I need to make, and I want to talk about methodology. Let's begin…
The survey was conducted entirely using the online service SurveyMonkey. The survey consisted of eight questions. Two questions gathered information about the type of developer and the number of people working on their games. The next three questions gathered data about lifetime game releases on the App Store, and revenue those games generated. Finally, the last three questions gathered data on games released within the last 12 months (more on this in the next section on errors and bias).
Requests to take the survey were distributed via the following social networks and web sites:
- Google+
- 148Apps.biz
- TouchArcade forums
- iPhoneDevSDK forums
- cocos2d forums
- Unity forums
The goal was to engage as many active iOS game developers as possible. More on this in the next section on errors and bias.
The survey was closed on Monday, September 26, 2011 at noon, EDT. Survey responses were downloaded at that point, and I've been using Numbers (from iWork '09) for Mac to analyze the data.
It is also worth noting that when I launched the survey, I stated two things:
- The survey would collect no personal data
- The data would only be released in aggregate, no raw data would be released
This is why I'm not releasing the raw data.
Errors and Bias
Disclaimer: I make no claims as to the statistical validity of this data. There is a good chance that the sample population is not representative of all game developers on the App Store. There is a good chance that I introduced measurement bias/error into the data by the way I worded the survey questions. In short: I am not a professional statistician. Do not treat this data as 100% accurate. It is just interesting to look at.
Ok, let's talk about that disclaimer in a bit more detail.
Sample Population
Because the survey was completely voluntary, and I have no information on the demographics that make up App Store developers, I have no way to determine how representative the data is. Further, because of the way in which I went about gathering the data, the developers who responded are all likely developers actively working on games, and who are actively involved in the development community. Because of this, I would be tempted to guess that the numbers we see here are actually higher than on the App Store over all. However, I have no data to be able to back up that guess.
12 Month Data
One of the things I really wanted data on was a snapshot of what the last 12 months have looked like for game developers on the App Store. However, the questions I created to gather this data clearly confused respondents. The intent was that devs enter only revenue from games released within the last 12 months, but many developers provided revenue from the last 12 months for all their games. This made the data I collected for these questions largely useless for the purposes I wanted. Further, most people didn't understand the instructions and didn't match the sales revenue to the non-sales revenue in the two questions, making drawing conclusions there impossible, also. You'll see later on that I did manage to get some basic data from it, but couldn't do the detailed analysis I had hoped for.
There are, no doubt, other sources of error and bias in the data. The main thing to remember is that these numbers are not 100% accurate, but rather just provide a glimpse into the App Store market for games.
To the data!
The survey was open for exactly seven days and had 252 respondents.
General Questions
The first two questions of the survey were there to get an idea of the kinds of developers responding.
You can see from the results in Figure 1 that only about 1/3 of respondents consider themselves full-time independent game developers. Over half the respondents are part-time indies, hobbyists, or students. (Note: Click the charts to see them full-sized).
When questioned about the number of people (from now on referred to as "developers") working on their games, half the respondents were working by themselves. I was surprised by the number of respondents who were working for larger companies in the 10+ developers range. However, over 93% of respondents have 5 or fewer developers working on their games. See Figure 2.
Lifetime Game Releases and Revenue
The next three questions of the survey gathered information about lifetime revenue on the store. The three questions asked for data on:
- The number of games released on the App Store
- The number of months the developer had games on the App Store
- Lifetime revenue for all games on the App Store
Using this data, it's possible to generate some very interesting results. First, let's look at all the lifetime revenues reported (see Figure 3). One of the most interesting features of the graph is the clearly exponential curve associated with the revenues. The graph makes it very clear that most developers aren't making a lot of money selling games on the App Store, while a few are making a lot of money.
I've made note of both the arithmetic mean average, and the median average on the chart. This is why the median is so important. The extremely high revenues reported by a small number of developer skew the arithmetic mean significantly. If you looked at that as an average, it would be easy to say "the average game developer has made about $165,000". However, the median tells a very different story. The median splits the developers in half. This means that 50% of developers have made less than $3,000 lifetime revenue on the App Store, while 50% have made more. The reason that the mean and median are so different is that the computed sample standard deviation is 639,966. A standard deviation that high means that the mean average is not very representative of the data spread. Because of this, I have used median averages everywhere in these results, instead of mean averages.
What is also telling is that if you were in the 75th percentile, you would have made about $30,000 on the App Store. This means that only 25% of developers have made more than $30,000 lifetime total revenue selling games on the App Store. Conversely, we can see that 25% of developers have made less than $200.
I wanted to take that revenue data and plot a distribution curve from it. However, the range of data was so large that I couldn't plot it on a linear scale. This was the case for many of the graphs you'll see. Like Figure 4, I have made note whenever one of the axes is using a logarithmic scale instead of a linear scale. By breaking the revenue down into buckets (each one 10x greater than the last), I was able to get a better distribution graph (see Figure 4). From this, we can clearly see that nearly 25% of developers have made between $1,000 and $10,000 on the App Store. What is particularly impressive is that 4% of respondents (10 respondents) had made over $1,000,000 on the App Store!
Note on Figure 4: You'll notice duplicate values between buckets (i.e. 1-10, 10-100, etc). This was done only for the labels so the chart was easier to read. The data is actually divided into (10n)-(10n+1 – 1) buckets (i.e. 1-9, 10-99, etc).
That 4% of respondents got me wondering about the idea of where the revenue was going on the App Store. So next I took a look at what percentage of the total revenue reported was reported by what percentage of respondents (similar to a distribution of wealth chart you might see for a country's population). See Figure 5. What is fascinating to me is that the top 20% of developers are earning 97% of the revenue on the App Store, with the top 1% earning over 1/3 of the revenue on the App Store. The bottom 80% of game developers are earning only 3% of the revenue.
Next, I wanted to start comparing lifetime revenue to the other data the respondents had provided. To start, I wanted to see how revenue compared to developer type. Figure 6 shows a graph of median lifetime revenue, divided by developer type. It is no surprise to me that full-time indies, and representatives for iOS game dev companies reported the highest revenue. Note that revenue in Figure 6 is charted on a logarithmic scale, so the median earnings of a full-time indie developer are reported to be 30x greater than those reported by part-time indies. This does not mean that going full-time indie will guarantee you 30x the revenue, these are just the numbers that have been reported.
Next I wanted to see if developers who worked with more people earned more revenue than those working alone. Figure 7 clearly shows this is the case. Note that the revenue for companies with 10+ employees may not accurately reflect a good median, because there were so few responses in these categories. However, it's clear that individuals have earned the least lifetime revenue, on average.
But then I started to wonder if it was just because larger groups might be able to release more games, meaning their total revenue would be higher. So, I broke the revenue down, dividing it by the number of games released, and by the number of months the developer had had apps on the store. The result is a chart of median per-game, per-month, lifetime revenue by the number of developers who worked on the games. You'll see in Figure 7b that the curve looks almost identical to Figure 7's. The conclusion that I draw from this is that, in general, larger groups of developers are able to create games that earn more money. Wagering a guess, this is perhaps because they are able to create games that are larger in scope, more technically interesting, and more polished, because they have more people to work on the game and provide input into its improvement.
Finally, a friend was curious whether or not releasing more games meant that a developer ended up improving over time. To attempt to answer that question, I divided each respondent's lifetime revenue by the number of games they had released on the App Store, then graphed the median distribution curve by the number of games released. The results can be seen in Figure 8. What is really interesting to me is that developers do seem to generate more revenue over time (on average). This should be encouraging if you really want to make games, but your first game was a flop. Fear not! 50% of developers who have only released one game made under $500 on that game. However, the more games developers had released, the more per-game average revenue they seem to generate. This seems to validate the old adage: practice makes better than doing something once. Wait…that's not quite right…
12-Month Releases and Revenue
The final three questions of the survey were supposed to deal with revenue generated by apps released within the last 12 months. However, since many respondents provided the last 12 months of revenue from all their games, I can't draw the same conclusions that I would have liked. However, what I have done is graph the revenue for each individual game reported.
Figure 9 shows the individual game revenues over the last 12 month period. It is a graph of 382 games that reported non-zero sales revenue (including IAP). You can see that the curve follows a very similar line to the lifetime revenue chart, in that it's exponential. Again, we can see that the difference between mean and median is significant, telling us that the high earners on the right distort the mean average.
What's important to note in Figure 9 is that the median game earned $1,100 in the last 12 months. This means 50% of the games earned less, and 50% earned more. 25% of games earned less than $140, while conversely, 25% earned more than $10,675.
And finally, Figure 10 shows the non-sales revenue generated by the 85 games that reported non-zero revenue. The non-sales revenue was to account for all revenue generated from a game aside from sales (e.g. ads, affiliate links, merchandise, etc). Figure 10 is graphed on the same y-axis as Figure 9. You can clearly see that the top end is much lower than for sales. However, in the middle of the graph, games that reported non-sales revenue, reported slightly higher earnings on the non-sales side of things.
What this means is that there is clearly some good revenue to be made through things like ads, affiliate links, and other non-sales sources of revenue, and there are clearly some games doing this very well.
Phew! Did you make it all the way through? Good. This is a lot of data to process, so thanks for following along. I'm sorry I wasn't able to get more useful data out of the 12 month questions. I clearly needed to word the questions differently.
Hopefully these results have provided some insight into the games market on the App Store. I hope that it can be used to help set expectations for new and experienced developers alike. It is clear that there is a lot of money to be made in games on the App Store. However, as the data shows, it's not easy, but the more games you make, the better you'll get. Common sense, I suppose…but sometimes it's nice to have the data to back it up.
Thank you so much to the 252 people who participated in the survey for sharing this data with the rest of the community. We all appreciate it greatly.
Now you've been reading this for much too long. Get back to work on your next game!


text:
Biloxi council tables baseball stadium vote
The Biloxi City Council has tabled a vote on a minor league baseball stadium while those working to bring a team to the city are in Orlando at the Major League Baseball's winter meetings.
On Tuesday's Council agenda was an application for conditional use to build the stadium north of the Beau Rivage Resort & Casino.
City attorney Michael Collins said additional documentation was required before the vote.
The Sun Herald reports meeting in Orlando this week are Ken Young, who told the Council he is in negotiations to buy a team to bring to Biloxi, and Timothy Bennett, president of Overtime Sports, who has worked for more than 10 years to get a stadium built in South Mississippi.
No announcements about the team were made Tuesday.
Previous story:
Biloxi to announce minor league baseball stadium plans
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subset: commoncrawl


text:
Part 2
Of course, to be a writer you have to write. But of equal importance to the writing element is you have to be read. There are many different ways to be read, but rest assured that for all the fantastic poetry and prose you scribble in your fancy notebook and for all the standing up on stage you do at open mic nights, you will never be never be read if you do not approach the media.
Of course you could argue that you write for yourself, which is fine, but if that is your take on writing then this post is not directed at you. And even if that is your take, you probably want to write for someone someday.


text:
Nintendo has sold a record amount of Nintendo 3DS games in 2013 and is set to release four new games early this year to take advantage of this trend. Last year, more than 16 million combined packaged and digital Nintendo 3DS games were sold, topping 2012 sales by 45 percent. Lifetime hardware sales in the U.S. for the Nintendo 3DS family of portable systems, including the Nintendo 3DS XL and Nintendo 2DS, passed 11.5 million.
Yoshi's New Island will launch on March 14 in stores and in the Nintendo eShop, where Yoshi will reunite with Baby Mario to help him to safety. Disney Magical World will feature dozens of Disney characters in Disney-themed worlds, launching in stores and in the Nintendo eShop on April 11. A free demo of Square Enix's role-playing game Bravely Default is now available exclusively in the Nintendo eShop and the full version will be available for purchase in stores and the Nintendo eShop on February 7. Lastly, the final installment of the second Professor Layton trilogy will launch on February 28 in stores and the Nintendo eShop.


text:
Kristin Scott Thomas
Monthly Forecast for October 2020
Kristin Scott Thomas is an Anglo-French actress who gained international fame in the 90s with roles in Bitter Moon and Four Weddings and a Funeral, before earning a Best Actress Academy Award nomination for The English Patient.
She was born on Tuesday May 24th 1960, in Redruth, Cornwall, England.
October 2020 brings Kristin Scott Thomas stability and clarity. Her career shows promise, but there is not any promotion or practical gain just yet.
If Kristin is involved in legal affairs or has wanted to take care of something that involves the law, this month is a good time to start the necessary procedures. Dame Thomas may be notified of an impending legal procedure that affects her or a loved one.
Kristin Scott Thomas will be feeling more intellectual than emotional during October 2020. Tolerance and forgiveness will not come naturally and Kristin could be a little self-righteous. She should try to be more flexible.
Let's see now what Saturday, October 31st 2020 has in-stored for Kristin.
You and Kristin
About Kristin's Personal Month Cycle
Just as Kristin Scott Thomas evolves through a nine-year cycle, she also experiences nine-month cycles, even though their impact is subtle compared to the Personal Year cycle. The Personal Month cycles proceed according to the same pattern - 1 through 9 - that the Personal Year cycle does. The numbers within the monthly cycles have a similar, though less pronounced, impact on Kristin than the yearly cycle has.
Read more about our numerological monthly forecast for


text:
ROLLINSFORD — The town's annual School Meeting deliberative session pertaining to proposed teacher and paraprofessional contracts will be held Saturday at 9 a.m. at the Rollinsford Grade School. The session is in regards to Warrant Article 6 of the Rollinsford School District Agreement between the Rollinsford Education Association and the Rollinsford School Board.
Saturday's public session is the first half of the annual School Meeting. Voters will act on the warrant articles when they go to the polls on March 12.
Warrant Article 6 states: "That teachers shall be notified of their contract for the ensuing year no later then April 15. If the Board is considering any action concerning a teacher's contract, the teacher shall be so notified in writing before April 15 of each year. Paraprofessionals will be notified of their contract for the ensuing year no later than May 15 of each year."
Members of the negotiating team, Krauss, McCabe, Lawton and the Rollinsford Education Association will be present to answer any questions the public may have about the contract proposal.
The second session of the School Meeting will be held on March 12 and will give district residents the opportunity to go to the polls and vote on warrant articles.


text:
University Search
For additional information please refer to the Bereavement Leave Policy.
Rutgers University Human Resources
Phone: 732.745.SERV (7378)
Fax: 732-932-0046
Email email@example.com
ASB II, 57 US Highway 1
New Brunswick NJ 08901-8554
View Map
Site by SVM
To submit a comment or to report a any problems with this site, please email us. For question about University Human Resources programs and services please email our Operations Team.
Rutgers is an equal access/equal opportunity institution. Individuals with disabilities are encouraged to direct suggestions, comments, or complaints concerning any accessibility issues with Rutgers web sites to: email@example.com or complete the Report Accessibility Barrier or Provide Feedback Form.


text: A small zoo in North Carolina obtained a very rare species of gorilla. Within a few weeks the gorilla, a female, became very difficult to handle. Upon examination, the veterinarian determined the problem. The gorilla was in heat. To make matters worse, there was no male gorilla available.Thinking about their problem, the Zoo Keeper thought of Bobby Lee Walton, a redneck part-time worker responsible for cleaning the animal cages. Bobby Lee, like most rednecks, had little sense but possessed ample ability to satisfy a female of any species. The Zoo Keeper thought they might have a solution.Bobby Lee was approached with a proposition. Would he be willing to mate with the gorilla for $500.00?Bobby Lee showed some interest, but said he would have to think the matter over carefully. The following day, he announced that he would accept their offer, but only under five conditions:"First", Bobby Lee said, "I ain't gonna kiss her on the lips." The Keeper quickly agreed to this condition."Second", he said, "She must wear a 'Dale Earnhardt Forever' T-Shirt." The keeper again readily agreed to this condition."Third", he said, "you can't never tell no one about this." The keeper again readily agreed to this condition."Fourth", Bobby Lee said, "I want all the children raised Southern Baptist." Once again it was agreed.And last," Bobby Lee said, "I'm gonna need another week to come up with the $500.00.


text:
Equinix is the home of the interconnected cloud. Our Platform Equinix™ data centers and Equinix Cloud Exchange™ enable you to bypass the Internet and rapidly deploy and scale cloud computing services on demand, including migrating your content delivery systems infrastructure to a hybrid cloud.
Connect to cloud services that will expand your content delivery systems' reach.
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With Equinix, content delivery systems companies can:
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- Locate your cloud-based content and media delivery platform closer to your partners and customers, and increase end-to-end content delivery efficiency and speed.
- Create a hybrid cloud environment to provide a secure and reliable content and media archiving infrastructure for business continuity/disaster recovery.


text:
Washington Immigration Lawyers
Washington, IA 52353
Iowa City, IA 52240
Drake University Law School
In her current practice, she focuses primarily on removal defense in Immigration Court and family-based immigration; however, she also takes an assortment...
Suite 1010
Cedar Rapids, IA 52401
Fairfield, IA 52556
Iowa City, IA 52245
University of Iowa College of Law
Cedar Falls, IA 50613
Hamline University School of Law
Building G
Davenport, IA 52803
Mr. Perkins has represented hundreds of clients in deportation defense cases including asylum, cancellation of removal, criminal waivers, and more. He also has...
Des Moines, IA 50309
West Des Moines, IA 50265
University of Iowa
Allison McCarthy is a May 2007 graduate of the University of Iowa. During her undergraduate...
Ames, IA 50010
Saint Louis University School of Law
Suite 110-417
Ames, IA 50010
Ames, IA 50010
Related Practice Areas
Need immigration help?
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (formerly the Immigration and Naturalization Service) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement are components of the Department of Homeland Security and handle the processing, enforcement, and adjudication of U.S. immigration matters. U.S. immigration laws treat persons as either citizens or aliens. The law classifies aliens according to immigration status, with each group afforded different rights and obligations, such as the right to reside in the United States, the right to sponsor relatives, and the right to work in the United States. Aliens may be lawful permanent residents (i.e., green card holders), immigrant visa holders, temporary lawful visitors, or undocumented persons.
Immigration lawyers represent persons seeking visas or green cards, which allow them to enter or remain in the United States. Two common types of visas are employment-based visas and family-based visas. Employment-based visas grant a non-U.S. citizen the right to work in the United States. Spouses and children may sometimes accompany employment-based immigrants. Family-based visas confer lawful permanent resident status to a foreign national based on an immediate relationship to a U.S. citizen.
Immigration attorneys also handle deportation/removal, naturalization (citizenship) and asylum matters. Because immigration proceedings are often complex, an immigration attorney is invaluable to those dealing with immigration issues.
Deportation/removal: The formal removal of an alien from the United States when the alien has been found removable for violating the immigration laws. Removal (formerly called deportation) is ordered by an immigration judge without any punishment being imposed or contemplated.
Lawful permanent resident: Any person not a citizen of the United States who is residing in the U.S. under legally recognized and lawfully recorded permanent residence as an immigrant.
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On the north end of Evros prefecture where it shares boarders with Turkey, Evros river forms a rich delta, a wetland of international importance which extends over 200 km2.
The great variety of plant species of Evros river delta composes a beautiful mosaic. The rare flora and fauna that extend in this area are due to the influences that the wetland gets because of its advantageous geographical position.
Evros river delta shelters a great variety of bird and animal species which is unique in the European continent. For example, so far scientists have recorded 316 bird species, a particularly large number considering that the total number of species that has been recorded in Greece is 425.
The wetland is very important not only for the migration period of some birds but also because many species spend the winter here. During winter thousands waterfowls, coming mainly from North Europe and the former Soviet Union countries, arrive in delta. This period visitors can admire hundreds of flamingos and swans and thousands of ducks which feed themselves in the lagoons of the delta and in the sunset they move to the coasts.
The number of birds using the wetland as intermediate station when they migrate from Europe to Africa and vice versa is also large. Some species that pass by Evros river delta are the white pelican, the glossy ibis, the spoonbill, the Dalmatian pelican, the little gull and the black tern. The most important presence is this of slender-billed curlew, which is one of the most rare bird species on earth.
Visitgreece.gr is the official tourism web site for Greece, run by the Greek National Tourism Organisation, where you'll find information on the main tourist destinations, such as cities, beaches, as well as activities, events and much more!
All content included on this site consists intellectual property of GNTO and you are not allowed to reproduce the whole or part of this work in any way.
For information please contact: email@example.com. All Rights Reserved. GNTO © 2020.


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Morrisville-Eaton Valedictorian Morgan Leblanc and Salutatorian Jessica Chandler looking forward to future possibilities
MORRISVILLE >> Valedictorian Morgan Leblanc and Salutatorian Jessica Chandler aren't sure what they want to do while in college, though both agree they are going to strive for a well-rounded education.
Leblanc will be attending Vassar College in Poughkeepsie undeclared. He may focus his studies on neuroscience and music, though he is unsure what he might major in. He said the idea of becoming a college professor interests him, but he wasn't sure what he would want to teach.
Chandler will be attending Morrisville State College for its business program, but she doesn't know what career path she will pursue.
"It's just such a universal degree," Chandler said. "It can be used for a variety of different jobs."
Both star students are members of the MECS track and field team, chamber choir, National Honor Society and drama club. Chandler was avidly involved in soccer, volleyball and dance while Leblanc focused on music both in and out of school, playing guitar and piano. Both students said they were grateful for the program opportunities they have had at Morrisville.
"Having the ability to be involved in multiple programs at once has been great," Chandler said.
"The teachers here are skilled at what they do," Leblanc said. "I think the people here at the school have been my favorite part. I've had some good teachers in all of my classes. It's been a fun group of people to be around, I fell really lucky to have been able to work with all of them."
Although both appreciated their teachers, they weren't the driving factor that pushed the two students to succeed. Their role models were much closer to home.
"My biggest influence is probably my mom," Chandler said. "She's been through so much in her life, and she's always been able to support the family." Chandler said her mother has been through divorce and difficult marriages, though remained strong for her children.
Leblanc said his biggest influence was his brother Keenan.
"He's been such a huge part of my life, I've always followed in his footsteps," Leblanc said. "I used to always question my music, I wasn't sure it was a secure route for my future. Keenan told me to keep at it and do what I enjoy."
Both students said hard work and dedication pay off.
"Other students should take school seriously," Chandler said. "If you don't care enough early on, it's hard to come back when you're a senior."
Leblanc added that focus is important, and that the numbers may not be the most crucial part of education.
"I've always committed my time to the things I enjoy learning," Leblanc said. "I've focused on music and astronomy especially this year. You should focus more on learning and gaining knowledge while you're in school than grades."


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Steven Land Mens Dress Shoes. Steven Land's goal remains to make every fashion forward man look good, feel great and turn heads where ever he goes! When you wear Steven Land, everyone knows it's a Steven Land!
- Plain Toe Sneaker
- Leather Upper & Lining
- White Rubber Sole
Steven Land has become one of the most recognizable haberdasheries in the world. Steven Land is known for being on the cutting edge of fashion and bringing to the industry the freshest ideas. Land is the originator of âThe Big Knotâ tie and the only tie house to be authorized by âSwarovskiâ to use its world-renowned crystals exclusively for Steven Land. Steven Land designs are all done in-house, using talented designers and artists. These associates select colors and design shells and fabrics unique to Steven Land.


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Surrey House
One of the most elegant and opulent Edwardian office buildings in Britain.
Erected on the site of the house of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547), Surrey House is a Grade I listed building. It was designed by local architect George Skipper as the new headquarters for The Norwich Union Life Insurance Society, now Aviva.
Skipper produced a splendid yet functional office space. He incorporated various Greek and masonic symbols, together with the themes of insurance, protection and wellbeing in the design of Surrey House.
The main hall (known as Marble Hall) is magnificent - it incorporates over 15 types of marble, originally destined for Westminster Cathedral. The hall has a spectacular glass-domed ceiling, of around 11m in diameter and contains an innovative Edwardian air conditioning system.
The West Committee Room is also impressive; richly decorated in ebony inlaid mahogany it houses the original Board Room table. The Board Room includes beautifully carved mahogany wall panelling and a fantastic collection of ceiling paintings.
Today Surrey House remains as an office building for Aviva. Members of the public who drop by are usually able to look at Marble Hall. However it is recommended that members of the public who wish to visit Surrey House call and book in advance to ensure a guide is available and that the most is made of the visit.
Venue Type:
Heritage site
Surrey House is open during office hours, Mondays to Fridays. Members of the public who drop by are usually able to look at Marble Hall. However it is recommended that members of the public who wish to visit Surrey House call and book in advance to ensure a guide is available and that the most is made of the visit.
Free: there is no fee to enter Surrey House although donations to charity are welcome.
Surrey House education pack
The Surrey House education pack is aimed at teachers of Key Stage 4 (GCSE) Business Studies and Art and Design.
The Business Studies element looks at the history of Aviva, the former Norwich Union. The Art and Design worksheets are loosely based around Unit 7B 'What's in a building?', which is part of the DfES Schemes of Work for Art and Design at Key Stage 3. As well as aiding the students' knowledge of architectural features, the building is also rich in symbolism and the use of the natural world for inspiration.
How to obtain
The file is available as a free download via the link above. (It is quite large so may take some time). If you are not able to download it, please call HEART on 01603 305575 and we will send you a CD with the pack on it.
Surrey House
Aviva PLC
8 Surrey Street


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Barclays Vows Fresh Course, Axes 3,700 Jobs
Barclays' new chief executive pledged a fresh course for the British lender on Tuesday, axing at least 3,700 jobs and pruning its investment bank as he seeks to rebuild its reputation and boost profitability after a series of scandals.
In an attempt to distance Britain's third biggest bank from the aggressive, high-risk culture championed by his predecessor, Antony Jenkins said Barclays would put ethics above earnings at the bank, which has become a focus for public anger at the excesses of the financial sector.
"Barclays is changing. There will be no going back to the old way of doing things. We are changing the way we do business, we are changing the type of business we do," Jenkins said.
"I understand why there is cynicism and skepticism out there given the track record of banks in the past. You should judge us by what we deliver in the next one, two, five or ten years," he said at a news conference.
Jenkins unveiled his grand plan, dubbed "Project Transform", at London's Royal Horticultural Halls, an Edwardian exhibition space well away from the bank's skyscraper headquarters in Canary Wharf and just a short walk from parliament, where lawmakers have heavily criticized the bank for its misdeeds.
Keen to show change is afoot, Jenkins cut pay for investment bankers, halted speculative trading in soft commodities and closed a profitable tax advisory unit, which one lawmaker last week said advised clients on "industrial scale tax avoidance".
Jenkins, wearing a bright blue tie and sober grey suit, gave a precise presentation but rarely strayed into awkward territory. He refused to answer questions about the future of Rich Ricci, head of the investment bank and one of the last remaining senior executives of the previous era.
"I can't predict the future," Jenkins said.
He committed to keeping the investment bank, which contributes more than half of group earnings, and did not go as far as rivals such as UBS or RBS in cutbacks in this area, saying the division was one of "an increasingly small group" of firms winning business and improving margins.
Investors applauded the bank's plans to raise its dividend and cut 1.7 billion pounds in annual costs, including eliminating 1,800 jobs in corporate and investment banking and 1,900 in its European retail and business banking.
"A commitment to cost reductions and evidence of cost control in the investment bank bonus pool have spurred today's renewed optimism," Simon Maughan, strategist at Olivetree Securities, said.
Barclays shares surged 7.5 percent to 325 pence, their highest level for two years, making them the strongest performer in a European banking index up 1.1 percent. The bank's shares are up 75 percent since Jenkins took the helm at the end of August, lifting the its value to $62 billion.
Jenkins, 51, has said he expects "Project Transform", his plan to revamp the bank, to take five to 10 years and has told staff they should leave if they do not want to sign up to the new standards.
He cut the average bonus for investment bankers to 54,100 pounds for last year, down 17 percent on the year. It will pay 1.85 billion pounds in bonuses, down 14 percent.
"We need to give our investors a bigger share of the income we generate," he said.
But he warned there would be no quick fix and the bank would not deliver his target of a return on equity above 11.5 percent until 2015.
Jenkins will focus investment in Britain, the United States and Africa, and cut back in continental Europe and Asia.
Nearly one in three of Barclays' branches across Italy, Spain, Portugal and France will close, or about 340 branches and sales centers, and remaining retail operations there will focus on well-off customers.
Jenkins will scale back the investment bank's equities and advisory businesses in continental Europe and Asia.
He said his "root and branch" review of 75 business units will result in four being closed, covering old assets held in fixed income and European corporate and retail loans.
A further 17 units, which contribute 2 billion pounds of income, could be sold or will need a significant transition to make the grade, including the tax unit and a raft of European retail operations.
Another 15 units will need restructuring, while 39 units are performing well and will get investment to grow, the bank said.
Jenkins aims to cut the bank's cost base to 16.8 billion pounds in 2015, excluding one-off costs to achieve that of 2.7 billion over the next three years, and lift its dividend to achieve a 30 percent payout ratio.
The bank will pay a dividend of 6.5 pence per share for 2012 from 6p in 2011, or a payout ratio of 19 percent, which analysts said was an encouraging signal for it and UK rivals given that regulators are telling banks to conserve capital.
Barclays is still recovering from the political furor that followed its $450 million fine for manipulating benchmark interest rates in June. The ensuing storm triggered the departure of its then chief executive, former Wall Street trader Bob Diamond, and chairman Marcus Agius.
Its bill, meanwhile, to compensate customers for mis-sold products has hit 3.5 billion pounds and investigations are continuing into whether it correctly disclosed fundraisings from Middle East investors.
The Financial Services Authority and Serious Fraud Office are probing certain commercial arrangements between Barclays and Qatari investors related to two 2008 fundraisings.
The bank reported a 2012 pretax profit of 246 million pounds, down from 5.9 billion in 2011 due to the cost of compensating customers and losses on the value of its own debt.
Its adjusted pretax profit for 2012 was 7.05 billion pounds, up 26 percent on the year and in line with the average forecast by analysts, and the bank said it had a good January.
Pretax profit at the investment bank rose by 37 percent to 4.1 billion pounds, stronger than expected, with income down 2 percent from the previous quarter but up 13 percent on the year. ($1=0.6385 British pounds)


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Go to the search box and there will be an option to 'Add Yahoo! Malaysia'.
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Conveying and storing goods in an efficient and effective manner is key to increasing productivity for any manufacturing plant.
With its broad product range, Interroll helps industries worldwide to achieve high throughputs and to reduce operational costs by saving space and energy at the same time.
High-quality solutions
Simple but accurate and reliable ways to store and convey parts. This is what most industrial plants require to run their operations in the smoothest and most efficient fashion.View our references


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The Simlish alphabet has been translated before, but The Sims Freeplay, the game's mobile edition, appears to use a different one. Redditor Bump424 this morning published what figures to be the game's Rosetta Stone, and found some wirty-dords hidden in the signs.
A sign that appears to be a calendar instead says "Multiplication Fuck You" in Simlish. A diploma says "Certifica Name Blah Suck Shit Dick Cunt Sensa. "Shit" was written sideways on a hairstylist's sign. Probably my favorite is the dojo flag above, which features a fist, the yin-yang symbol, and "Fuck Mike Bensa" written backward. Poor Mike Bensa!
There are tons of other non-potty mouth words Bump424 translated ("Lap Time" and "Blanko" appear above a train station clock, proof that even when using a fake alphabet no one can read, you can't use real brand names without permission.) For more, hit the Imgur gallery at the link.
Simlish Translation in The Sims Freeplay [imgur via Reddit.]


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A reproduction of the first crash helmet produced by the BELL company. It was inspired by Roy Richters famous design of 1954, forming their very first helmet from fibreglass. It received its '500' name from the legendary 'Indianapolis 500' endurance race and, as a measure of its immediate success, was soon protecting all of the top racing personalities of the day.
If you wondered how such an icon could possibly be improved the people at BELL have proved it is possible. Due to a newly designed shell-shape the fit is much better and as a result does not look as bulbous as other modern crash helmets. Its lower overall profile and closer fit combined with being available in six different head sizes make finding the perfect fit simpler than ever! To enable this sleek look BELL use a total of five different shell sizes for the six head sizes that this helmet is available in. Despite its smaller relative size the CUSTOM 500 helmet fully conforms with the ECE 22.05/DOT regulations.
SIP-TIP : Do not forget to order a compatible visor/bubble and a stylish pair of TUCANO URBANO gloves to complete the look.
Size is full shell circumference:
XS 54-55cm
S 55-56cm
M 57-58cm
L 59-60cm
XL 61-62cm
XXL 63-64cm


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Boston: First Look at Back Deck
Having worked a boring desk job in downtown Boston for the eight months of my life I like to refer to as The Dark Ages, I'm all too aware of the lack of decent, moderately priced lunch and dinner options within quick walking distance of the Park Street station.
There's Chinatown, or perhaps an overpriced sandwich from Sam La Grassa's. There's the over-hyped Chilean sandwiches from Chacarero, or the food court underneath the Orpheum theater. So I'm always happy to see a newcomer come around, if only because it lets me empathize with the desk jockeys who never made it out of downtown.
The newest comer to throw their hat into the downtown Boston lunch ring: Back Deck. A partnership between Brad Fredericks (owner of the 20+ year-old Fajitas and 'Ritas) and chef Paul Sussman (of Macondo Latin Grill and Z Square). The concept is one I dig: everything on the menu from apps to side dishes to mains sees grilling action in some form or another.
Walking through the kitchen is like going through a live catalogue of wood-burning equipment. Three different massive wood-burning grills dominate the kitchen, each one used for a different purpose.
Sussman makes one thing clear: though smoke permeates every dish on the menu, this is decidedly not a barbecue joint, rather a grilled food restaurant.
Take a look at what's grilling >>
Back Deck Boston
2 West Street, Bost, MA 02111 (at Washington Street; map); 617-670+0320; backdeckboston.com
All products linked here have been independently selected by our editors. We may earn a commission on purchases, as described in our affiliate policy.


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Government contracting includes the Federal, State, Local and sub-contracting marketplaces. The federal, the individual state governments and local governments seek to do business on a competitive basis, with competent businesses that can supply products and services as required by manufacturing and/or delivery specifications and schedules.
The government market is large and growing. The federal government alone is the largest consumer of supplies and services in the world! With small business goals, no other market provides more potential opportunity for small business than government contracting.
The Procurement Technical Assistance Center (PTAC) at SAP&DC provides one-on-one counseling to businesses guiding them through vendor qualifying criteria and to the appropriate market entry points while instructing them on the protocols and procedures for each market. We are here to help businesses in Bedford, Blair, Fulton, and Huntingdon Counties!
This procurement technical assistance center is funded in part through a cooperative agreement with the Defense Logistics Agency.
James F. Gerraughty, MBA, CPP
Government Procurement Program Manager
If your company is not in the above counties, please visit the DLA PTAP page to find the PTAC to serve you!


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A true-crime author stumbles onto something beyond his beat in Scott Derrickson's "Sinister," which follows Ethan Hawke's Ellison Oswalt as he grows increasingly obsessed with a missing girl case he hopes will lead to a bestselling book.
Occasionally stupid (stretching even fright-flick conventions) but scary nonetheless, the pic should please horror fans.
When Oswalt's wife (Juliet Rylance), just uprooted to a new town (so he can investigate the new story) and already getting bad vibes from neighbors, asks, "We didn't move a few doors down from a crime scene again, did we?," he assures her they didn't.
She asked the wrong question: Oswalt has bought the very house in which four members of a family were slain, with the fifth abducted. An ornery sheriff (Fred Thompson) stops by before the boxes are even unloaded to warn the author he's not a fan of his books, and doesn't cotton to a fame-hungry scribbler second-guessing his department's work.
Local lawmen are soon the least of Oswalt's worries. He finds a box of Super-8 films in the attic, each showing a family being murdered in a uniquely grisly way. Believing he's stumbled across his own "In Cold Blood," he stays up nights scrutinizing the films and looking for connections between killings whose locations and victims are still unknown.
Derrickson borrows the vibe of Joel Schumacher's "8MM" as Hawke, swigging whiskey and giving the crease between his eyebrows a workout, struggles with the horrible things he's seeing. But the film soon shifts into bump-in-the-night mode, with an unseen visitor leaving clues for Oswalt in his own house and taunting him with increasingly unsettling (and harder to explain) stunts.
Setting aside Oswalt's infuriating unwillingness to turn on the lights when homicidal intruders infiltrate his home at midnight, the movie has him doing some pretty unjustifiably dumb things — like walking with a butcher knife thrust in front of him when he has every reason to think his sleepwalking young son might suddenly leap out at him.
We allow him some of this, thanks to the picture's coy suggestions that Oswalt might be going a little nuts due to the nature of his investigation.
But Derrickson and co-screenwriter C. Robert Cargill are eager to draw in more familiar supernatural elements — an occultologist (Vincent D'Onofrio) identifies a crime-scene marking as a pagan symbol "dating back to Babylonian times" — and the movie's proceduralist pleasure takes a backseat to ghosts and a mysterious figure known as "Mr. Boogie."
The scares are effective throughout, helped a good deal by Christopher Young's glitchy electronic score. While the end clearly points toward a possible franchise, though, many of the ingredients that make "Sinister" compelling wouldn't make sense a second time around. Some of them barely hold up for the first.


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Below are links to some of the news stories and book reviews related to law and the arts that caught my attention this week.
Plans to release a trove of unpublished writings by Malcolm X, including journals he kept during 1964 trips to Africa and the Middle East, have been thwarted by a longstanding feud over the estate of his widow, Betty Shabazz, between their six daughters. (NYT)
A recent English translation of "a Russian reworking of JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings" is proving popular with fans, but Tolkien's estate is not pleased, deeming it copyright infringement. Publisher David Brawn elaborates: "Online there are lots of infringements which it is extremely difficult to do anything about," he said. "When you get something as popular as Tolkien, fans want to create new stories. Most are pretty amateurish. Tolkien himself isn't around so it's the estate's view that it's best to say no to everything. If you let one in, you'd open the floodgates." (Guardian)
Emma Thompson is seeking a declaration from a New York federal court that her latest film script does not infringe the copyright of a play by Gregory Murphy. Both film and play focus on "a love triangle featuring the 19th century poet and critic John Ruskin." (Guardian)
Lawyers for Amanda Knox are suing to prevent the airing of a television movie about the murder for which she has been convicted in Italy, arguing that it "could prejudice perception of the case just as the appeal process gets underway." The victim's family also wishes to stop the film, fearing that it will make their struggle to put the tragedy behind them more difficult. (Hollywood Reporter, Media Law Prof Blog)
New Orleans "Mardi Gras Indians work to copyright costumes" in a bid "to get a slice of the profits when photos of the towering outfits they have spent the year crafting end up in books and on posters and T-shirts." (NPR, Clancco)
"A bill introduced [this week] in the Iowa House calls on the University of Iowa to sell its famous Jackson Pollock Mural painting, valued at $140 million, to set up a trust fund for student scholarships." (Cedar Rapids Gazette, The Art Law Blog)
In a profile of Barry Gifford, best known as the founder of Black Lizard Press and an author of noir thrillers, Allen Barra stresses the originality and versatility of his recent work. (Salon)
Carlo Wolff makes Keigo Higashino's The Devotion of Suspect X sound irresistible to this aficionado of international crime fiction. He lists "murder, philosophy, forensics, and a culture of repression" among its ingredients, and pronounces it a compelling noir novel "that ratchets up tension to the end, providing excitement and insight into the psychology of modern Japan along the way." (Boston Globe)
Jennet Conant describes Douglas Waller's Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS & Modern American Espionage as "an entertaining history" and notes: "Waller is more concerned with the politics of personality, and the legacy of Donovan's complex, larger-than-life character. As he amply shows, Donovan was a combination of bold innovator and imprudent rule bender, which made him not only a remarkable wartime leader but also an extraordinary figure in American history." (NYT)
Fancy tracking the Socratic method back to its source? Steve Donoghue trumpets Bettany Hughes' The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens, and the Search for the Good Life as "a beguiling book" and "history, and historical reconstruction, exactly as it should be written." He concludes: "The Socrates Hughes creates is ultimately a towering yet intensely human figure. He lives and speaks again in these pages: It's a singular accomplishment." (Washington Post)
* The image above is a reproduction of Jackson Pollock's Mural (1943, oil on canvas, 8′ 1 1/4″ x 19′ 10″), owned by the University of Iowa Museum of Art.


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Kim Deitch Files – Regular Edition
The Kim Deitch Files is a limited edition portfolio of the looseleaf 'story' pages which serve as Kim's sketchbook; it's where he works out the ideas for his comics. included in this folio are selections of the original story pages from many of Kim's major works (Alias The Cat, Boulevard Of Broken Dreams) as well as many of his other projects (Deitch's Pictorama, Southern Fried Fugitives), never before seen projects (the aborted Alice's Adventures Underground) and even a couple pretty jaw dropping life studies. they are exclusively in pencil, many in a fully rendered style that is both insanely gorgeous and (in their way) totally different than what you 'expect' from Kim's art. These pages have rarely been seen, and as individual pieces and as a look into the process of a master cartoonist.
"Kim Deitch is (obviously) a national treasure and this is the next best thing to breaking into his studio and stealing a stack of originals (don't try that - he'll kick your ass)."- Dan Clowes