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Darkwing Duck Quadruple Feature! (Beauty and the Beet, Whiffle While You Work, Jurassic Jumble, Something Fishy)

Welcome back! It’s been a bit since I visited St. Canard and my march to watching Just Us Justice Ducks by watching one episode, with the exception of Megavolt the first chronological appearances of, each member of the Justice Ducks and Fearsome Five. The Megavolt exception was so I could, by comission, cover the one and only appearance of the OTHER Negaduck if you were curious.So far besides Negsy and Volty, i’ve covered both of Morgana’s first chronological episodes, Liquidator’s and (SIgh) Gizmoducks. But with only 6 left to go.. I put the seires on hiatus to work on ride of the three cabs and my minty fresh retrospective of life and times. At the TIME it didn’t seem like a bad idea, I could get to this any time and what not.. but in hindsight.. yeah putting an almost finished project on hold till two much larger projects, that at the time of this review have 10 and 13 installments left, WHILE also starting two more projects... was not my best move, especially since I have a comission, and an episode needed to properly review that comission AND a valentine’s day episode to review.. all of which come AFTER Just Us Justice Ducks chronlogically and 2 of which involve Negaduck. So yeah I whiffed it bad on this one and this mini-marathon is my way of fixing that, finsihing up the last few episodes before the big event. The episode i’ve waited almost a decade to watch and one of the most loved in the series history: Just Us Justice DUcks, which is coming up next week. Then LIfe and Times will be right back where it was and I promise to get that out weekly. But yeah with logisitcs out of the way and 4 episodes to go, I don’t know how to go slow so let’s get dangerous shall we?

Beauty and the Beat:The Misplaced Batman the Animated Series Villian

We open with one of the first Darkwings I watched via my old Darkwing Duck DVDS, rewatched a while back and easily one of my faviorite episodes and the first apperance of my faviorite Darkwing Duck Villian, though Liquidator and now Quackerjack are giving him a run for his money. But yeah I love Reggie and part of it is he’s something far diffrent than what Darkwing normally fights. 

While he still fits in with the Rouges gallery: someone with either powers or a good gimmick whose intresting, engaging and most importantly to this show, Reggie is still diffrent in that he’s an inherently tragic figure. While the rest of the rouges have sympathetic qualities theier still not really good people: Quackerjack chose to lash out at what drove him out of buisness instead of starting over again, Megavolt is your standard wants money bad guy, and Liquidator was a massive asshole. And if you add in the other villians i’ve covered, Taurus Bulba was basically Marvel’s Kingpin as a bul and Splatter Phoenix while having a noble goal of funding her arts does so via framing an innocent child and stealing. They aren’t unsympathetic, some of them anyway, but they are still ruthless because they choose to be.  Reggie.. didn’t get that choice. We see from the start of this episode his life has just been being everyone elses punching bag: His boss dosen’t respect him, his cowowkers not only don’t respect him but actively bully him and only the newsest researcher has ever paid him the time of day much less told the two assholes, Gary and Larson, a nice shout out, to stop. And given I reviewed Wonder Woman 84 yesterday i’ts NICE to remember a version of a “geek becomes a supervillian’ story that’s.. actually good. This is basically the same sorry, a disrpsected scientest trnasforms and gets revenge.. just you know done right. 

And SOMEHOW Reggie’s life only gets worse as asshole one and asshole two sabotage his work, he gets fired and is forced to experiment on himself. While that’s a classic mad scientst and supervillian trope what’s notable is Reggie didn’t go immiedtly to world domination. He just wanted to cure world hunger and get some respect. He just wanted to be treated like a human being for once. Instead he got turned into a plant and despite this being a miracle.. he gets MOCKED by gary and larson and runs away, feeling like a freak. And since after that the transformation has clearly made his brain unstable.. he goes from a sweet, put upon guy who just wanted help to people.. to an obsessive plant monster.. who still just needs HELP. He needs therapy and a warm blanket and to turn his life around. And his motivation.. is just not being alone. While his kdinapping of the one scientest who liked him, and he assumes has feelings for him, is bad, and selfish.. it’s clear by that point Reggie is just not himself anymore. He’s Bushroot now. He’s lost himself and were this a diffrent show maybe he could’ve gotten the help he needed and some empathy.  But what adds to the tragedy is Darkwing himself. This episode really showcases one of Darkwing’s biggest weaknses: his inablity to see crime other than in black and white terms. To him it’s just a game of heroes and villians. Nothing more nothing less. Villians can become heroes, as he hopes for Morgana, but to him there’s just good guys ,him and bad guys, everyone breaking the law. For someone whose often seen as an outlaw himself.. he still can’t see things in any other terms. However instead of just being lazy writing... it’s a clever character quirk, at the center of this episode and our final one, as well as one that pops up a little in Stegmutt’s first apperance. It nicely parodies/deocnscruts the whole good guy badguy dynamic by making it clear that sometimes while the person may be doing bad things.. they have a reason for it and sometimes the law just dosen’t work. It’s something I do wish they’d dug into more but given this was more of a comedy, I get why they didn’t, but what they did with it is great and it adds to this episode tremendously: Darkwing just sees Reggie as another villian to stop and not as a very unstable man who needs his help, but also needs tobe stopped for his own good. It’s why this is such a good episode, besides some great comic set pieces: it has a really tragic and moving story that , with some tweaking woudln’t of been out of place in batman the animateds eires. It’s still a bit goofy in places, as it should be giving the show it’s in btu at i’ts heart it’s just a relaly godo really tragic supervillian origin story. 

Whiffle While You Work: The Saving Grace of an Okay Episode This one’s more of a mixed bag. For the good... Quackerjack is fucking awesome. While I already loved him from the comics, I hadn’t met his more lightehearted tv counterpart yet.. but boy was he a delight. From his it’s play time catch phrase which despite being repeated a LOT never got bored to his really invenitve use of toys. While a vilian with a toy gimmick is not new, Toyman has been around for.. 80 years? Damn. I should do some Superman TAS episodes this year to commemerate that. Point is between him and the joker the gimmick isn’t “New” but Quackerjack still feels unique from using actual jacks, to a motorized hula hoop, to a GIANT CRYING BABY DOLL TO FLOOD A CITY. Jackie is just a delight every minute he’s on screen, and his motivation is solid: wanting to get revenge at the Whiffle Boy video game and i’ts insuing phenmonin and merchandise deals for squeezing him out of buisness. It makes him mildly symathetic enough to be intresting but not enough to override his terrible actions. He’s just fun to watch, and Micheal Bell is phenominal in the roll. easily one of my faviorite vilians thus far and it’s easy to see why he showed up quite a bit. 

Sadly the rest of the episode.. is not very intresting. It starts with your standard “Adult gets child away from the video game only to play it” plot which is belivieble, my dad was a gamer back during my childhood and probably still plays games ocasionally to this day. He fucking loved Starcraft, Ultima ONline, Super Metroid, Warcraft II and III.. and swearing. He really loved swearing at the games. And the idea of the episode isn’t bad, Drake is jealous that Gosalyn is in the limelight for once.. the issue  being a grown man competing with his own daughter just makes Drake really unlikeable. He at one point tries to use his parental authority to take her out of the contest, lies about being in the competition, and dosen’t apologize or learn enough to make up for his being a dick about this. THe episode really suffers from Launchpad not being around to be a buffer between the two and as ssuch it’s just uncomfortable. Hell Gos threatens to reveal Drake’s identity to .. someone.. but she still comes off sympathetic as when Drake presses her on it.. it’s very clear she made the threat on the spur of the moment out of hurt. 

Also the whole Whiffle Boy game craize extending to a city is delightfully batshit, and plausable given i’m pretty sure if nintendo could afford their own city we’d have it over in japan and for a video game episode in the 90′s, this one isn’t all that bad. It actually seems to get games on SOME level, and seems based more on an arcade game, which drake plays whiffle boy on at one point and the 80′s arcade competition craze, and since arcade comeptitions were still a huge thing in the 90′s, it’s very clear this si written by people who actually know what a video game is and don’t just fear it as some strange doodad their kids are into. Trust me I’ve been around animation so long this plot has become tiresome. So not a BAD episode, just held back by drake being written even more dickishly than usual.  P.S. there’s apparently an ultima level to the game.. so either Lord British is finally putting Chuckles down or someone needs to know what’s a paladin. 

Jurassic Jumble: Two Great One Shot Characters that Taste Great Together Well okay Segmutt does get one more episode but this is still his only episode on his own just like Neptuina next, so I count it well enough. Point is this episode is pretty good. It does have some weaknsses: It starts with Drake not beliviing Honker’s theory about a recent theft of acountants, one he’s only on the scene for because he happens to really need help with his taxes because, contrary to what Wesley Snipes thought, Superheroes still need to pay taxes. He dosen’t belive it’s dinosaurs.. he dosen’t belivie it’s dinosaurs despite the foot prints, honker being smart and HAVING FOUGHT A DOG MADE ENTIRELY OF WATER. 

I just get annoyed when superheros in a superhero universe don’t hav ea logical reason for dismissing something.. or random citizens.. it was fine if reptitous in the stan lee days because it’d been 20 years, at the time, since superheros were active and people can be stupid but it gets grating when someone says somethin’gs not possible in a superhero universe. Given we’re currrently dealing with an outgoing president who refuses to accept an election is real and his followers who think masks are a polical issue i’ts not exactly unrelasitic, dosen’t mean it’s enjoyable to read or watch. 

Still it works here because it splits the plot nicely and Gosalyn’s disbleif is less grating as she just wants it to be martians and dosen’t bully her friend or anything over it, just makes a few snyde remarks. The episode also wasn’t helped at first by the fact there’s a really reptitive bit where Darkwing bungies down to investigate the crook he thinks is responsible, but is actually just chilling at his minium security prison. It’s just not funny and takes up too much of the episode. But the episode picks up towards the second half when we meet our dinosaur: Stegmutt, a dumb but kind and friendly child like former janitor turned stegasaurs, whose unwittingly kidnapping people for his “friend” Dr. Fossil, the professor who turned him, and genuinely is not a bad soul and likes gosalyn and honker. He’s just clumsy and destructive and working for someone he dosen’t know is evil.  Speaking of which.. Dr. Fossil is really damn awesome and i’ts a shame he never came back in the comics or cartoon and hopefully Frank does him better in the reboot. Seriously he’s enjoyable, a bit nebbish but delightfully insane, deciding to wipe out all non dino life because he’s tired of getting panicked screams in the street and of all the dino merchandise like those puzzles with the pieces missing. He’ sjust delightfully nutty, with his love of saying bin bang boom and his having to put up with Stegmutt’s antics, as well as the whole joke that he TURNED HIMSELF INTO A DINOSAUR, yet gripes about being a dinosaur and acts like it’s humanity’s fault , balking when Gosalyn suggests he just.. turn himself back. Plus Ptetrodacytl’s are awesome so tha’ts a bonus. Seriously his showing up turns the episode from okay to fucking amazing. Seriously bring him back for the reboot.. and get Rich Fulcher to voice him. Seirously Bob Fossil as Dr. Fossil... it’s too perfect NOT to do casting gag wise, and he frankly perfectly fits the charcter down to the nasily voice. Plus Rich does voice acting quite a bit, so he’s already likely in Frank’s Rolodex. 

Stegmutt himself is also not too shabby, your standard child like moron, but he’s got a sweetness and niceness to him and we get some good gags like his habit of breaking off handles, his opening sodas with his tail and Fossil getting rid of him by telilng him to check if he left the bathroom light on...

And the climax with Darkwing.. turning.. into this

I don’t get it either but i’ts still a fun climax. Also forgot to mention Dr. Fossil can do that blow you away by flapping his wings thing Storm Eagle can do. Neat. All in all while not the series BEST outing, it has some flaws holding it back, it’s a damn fun one and one I highly recommend. Okay one more. 

Something Fishy: The Better Submariner This is a simple but good one: St. Canard beach has gotten trashy.. literally there’s trash everywhere. And while Drake is ambilent to it, Gosalyn is taking up the crusade to take out the trash and the garbage people... and gets her dad beaten up over it by dumping trash on some guys head but frankly, he deserved it.  Things go up a notch though when some sea creatures invade and .. clean up the beach and beat up darkwing. And while they destroy some property.. they aren’t exactly wrong? This is where that flaw I mentioned comes in though. Drake just.. can’t see things in shades of grey and insits he must be the good guy and whoevers doing this must be stopped.  However it becomes clear when we meet the antagonist that while her methods are wayy to extreme.. she’s in the right. Neputina is an awesome character, easily one of the series best and esaily horribly underulitized. She was a simple fish who thought a toxic waste barrel was a new friend.. and learned the hard way by becoming a sexy fish woman. Yeah I said it. But her motive is understandable thanks to her origin and just how BAD it’s gottne, with piles of trash all underwater and the laws Drake cites agianst this sort of thing not doing squat. It’s a nice take on the old enviornmental message , something I dreaded going in as it makes a valid point; sometimes diong things the “right” way isn’t enough.. but it still dosen’t justify harming innocent people in the process, as Nep’s ultimate plan to flood the city would.  Launchpad ends up being the voice of Reason as drake is too caught in his games of good guy bad guy to get Neptuina ISN’T a bad person, just one fed up with people hurting those she cares about. Neptuina is a unique villan in that unlike Morgana, who while having a sympathetic motive was out for herself, Stegmutt, who didn’t reailze he was on the wrong side, and Gizmoduck.. wellll

Neptuina.. is just misguided. She has the right idea but the wrong methods and Darkwing’s too stubborn to admit it.. but he’s also seen as in the wrong with Launchpad realizing DW just.. isn’t the good guy this time, but in the best scene of the episode talking Neptuina down by pointing out innocent people will get hurt. It’s a good, nuanced episode about envrionmetnalism with a throughly charasmatic and intrersting, acted wonderfully by Sussan Silo, antagonist. Neptuina is a better version of Marvel’s namor the submariner: she goes against humanity.. but I don’t want to punch her and dosen’t have one of her constnat character traits as “I want to bank your wife richards BANG YOUR WIFEEEEE”

So overall.. a good batch of episodes. Only Wiffle While You Work was all that weak, and even it had it’s charms and Quackerjack. It shows the series overall quality: even the just okay episodes here are still really fun to watch. It’s just a solid show overall and whie not without flaws is a classic to this day for a reason. Next week we’ll wrap this up with JUST US JUSTICE DUCKS! Until then stay safe and goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. 

[your-dietician]

Best extended 4th of July sales at Walmart 2021

New Post has been published on https://tattlepress.com/lifestyle/best-extended-4th-of-july-sales-at-walmart-2021/

Best extended 4th of July sales at Walmart 2021

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No disrespect to Thomas Jefferson, but Walmart’s here to tell you that all sales are not created equal. (Photo: Getty Images)

The past few weeks have been chockablock with sales — from Memorial Day to Prime Day to Walmart’s Days of Deals and the 4th of July, there’s been no shortage of opportunities to save a few (or many) bucks. So why stop the party now? Even though the 4th has come and gone, that doesn’t mean the sales have stopped — in fact, they’re going as strong as ever. 

Case in point? Walmart’s treasure trove of extended 4th of July sales. You can still score discounts across the board, from TVs and vacs to home goods, and plenty on the fashion and beauty front as well.

Plus, if you spend $35 or more, you’ll get free shipping. To score free shipping on all orders, plus lots more benefits including speedy delivery, sign up for Walmart+. Get a free 15-day trial here (and answering a quick three-question survey will add on an additional two weeks for a solid 30 days of use). 

Without further ado, here are the best extended 4th of July sales at Walmart. Happy shopping!

Best TV sales

Who knows what we’re looking at on that screen. We know what we’re looking at with this price tag, though — a steal! (Photo: Walmart)

On sale for $648 (was $750), the Sony 49-inch 4K Ultra HD LED TV is the latest from the legendary tech company. The massive 65-inch 4K display is vivid and detailed. Sony’s state-of-the-art Processor X1 powers this beauty for true-to-life visuals, while HDR (High Dynamic Range) settings make sure colors stay bright and black levels stay dark. And shoppers just love its massive size!

“I will never be able to watch a smaller TV again. The picture and sound are incredible,” raved a happy TV watcher. “I can’t say enough great things about this TV. It feels like I’m at the movie theater! It also automatically signs in to all my applications after I log in with my Google account, and I can talk into the remote to control the TV. Love it!”

This 4K TV includes Android TV straight from Google. This means you’ll have instant access to popular streaming apps like Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, Hulu, YouTube, Prime Video and much more. You’ll also get a wide range of gaming apps too. What’s not to love?

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Check out more TV sales below:

Sceptre 19-inch Class HD LED TV, $70 (was $110), walmart.com

Sony 32-inch Class HD LED Smart TV, $298 (was $348), walmart.com

LG 55-inch Class 4K Ultra HD Smart OLED C1 Series TV, $1,497 (was $2,000), walmart.com

LG 65-inch Class 4K Ultra HD NanoCell Smart TV, $997 (was $1,200), walmart.com

Best headphone and earbud sales

Meet your new best buds: These Samsung Galaxys will always be there, telling you what you want to hear. (Photo: Walmart)

No shocker here: Earbud shoppers are looking for excellent audio, first and foremost. These Samsung Galaxy Buds+ — on sale for $100, a cool $50 off — offer crisp sound and punchy bass for up to an impressive 11 hours per charge (plus get an additional 11 hours with the included wireless charging case). That’s nearly a full day of use! Plus, you can get an hour of playback with a three-minute quick boost. This comes in handy when you’re about to go for a run and your buds are at zero.

Calls will sound crystal-clear thanks to three microphones (two outer and one inner) that reduce ambient background noise even if you’re in a busy location.

“…I am simply blown away by the sound quality, ease of setup and use, and fit,” shared a satisfied Walmart shopper. “I am an active person and have had zero issues with the buds slipping out or moving around in my ears while running, walking, biking, hiking or kayaking. The battery life is as advertised at normal volumes. Haven’t had any issues with Bluetooth lag or connection. The feel of the buds and case are simple and unobtrusive. They look very sleek and futuristic. I have had Bose, JBL and Sony headphones that cost more than these buds and I feel like they are a steal for the price.”

Check out more headphone and earbud sales below:

Beats Solo Pro Wireless Noise-Canceling On-Ear Headphones, $149 (was $300), walmart.com

Philips UT102 Wireless In-Ear Headphones, $30 (was $60), walmart.com

Sony WH-CH510 Wireless On-Ear Headphones, $38 (was $60), walmart.com

Bietrun Wireless Bluetooth Earbuds, $26 (was $130), walmart.com

Meidong Bluetooth Noise-Canceling Over-Ear Headphones, $35 (was $70), walmart.com

Luxmo Bluetooth Headphones, $21 (was $36), walmart.com

Jelly Comb On Ear Headphones, $17 (was $50), walmart.com

Best video-game sales

Get three games for the one super low price of $21. That’s, like…wait a minute, we’ll figure it out…7 bucks a game! (Photo: Walmart)

It’s time to join a mayhem-fueled thrill ride — at nearly 60 percent off! In Borderlands Legendary Collection for Nintendo Switch, you’re tasked with stopping the Calypso twins from getting all the bandit clans together and claiming ultimate power in the galaxy. Travel through new worlds and collect a whole boatload of gadgets along the way.

This is the Legacy Edition, which includes all three games (Borderlands: Game of the Year Edition, Borderlands 2 and Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel), DLC (downloadable content) packs with new missions and stories, and more loot and power-ups. 

Shoppers love the game because it can be played just about anywhere. “Awesome to be able to play Borderlands on the go,” raved a gamer. “Also great for late night or early morning gaming when my wife is sleeping.”

Check out more video-game sales below:

Grand Theft Auto V: Premium Edition (PS4), $20 (was $60), walmart.com

No Man’s Sky (Xbox One), $20 (was $50), walmart.com

Greedfall (Xbox One), $19 (was $30), walmart.com

Star Wars: Squadrons (PS4), $21 (was $39), walmart.com

Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games: Tokyo 2020 (Nintendo Switch), $40 (was $60), walmart.com

Outriders: Day One Edition (PS4), $40 (was $60), walmart.com

Madden NFL 21 (Xbox One), $20 (was $60), walmart.com

Liphom Gaming Headset, $29 (was $57), walmart.com

The Pillars of The Earth (PS4), $29 (was $41), walmart.com

Best smart-home sales

Make your “dumb” TV smart: Here’s the way to get your stream on. (Photo: Walmart)

The Roku Streaming Stick+ — on sale for $39, down from $49 — gets you access to HBO Max, Hulu, Netflix, Disney+ and more. It’s a must for older TV sets that don’t have built-in streaming, or for people who’ve grown weary of watching Schitt’s Creek or Emily in Paris on a tiny tablet, laptop or phone screen.

One of the brand’s most powerful devices, the Roku Streaming Stick+ turns any TV with an HDMI port into a smart TV. It supports Wi-Fi and wired streaming via Ethernet for a smooth and steady HD and 4K Ultra HD picture quality. Translation: You’ll notice little loading time or buffering. Thanks to HDR (High Dynamic Range), you’ll get vivid colors, inky blacks and the sharpest picture imaginable. And shoppers love that you can plug it directly into the internet. And shoppers love that you can use its included remote to control their TVs too.

“Roku is super easy to set up and cheaper than cable,” wrote a five-star Walmart shopper. “If you do not have a smart TV you will with a Roku. It is small and you will never see it since mine is behind the TV. The remote syncs with your TV so you can turn it off and on and use the volume too. Perfect!”

Check out more smart-home sales below:

Google Nest Mini (second generation), $35 (was $49), walmart.com

Xodo Smart Wi-Fi Video Doorbell Wireless Security Camera, $90 (was $150), walmart.com

Defender Ultra HD 4K Wired Outdoor Security System (1TB), $260 (was $450), walmart.com

Xodo Smart Home Security Surveillance Kit, $60 (was $80), walmart.com

Anself Wireless Burglar Alarm, $20 (was $28), walmart.com

Fymall Wi-Fi Smart Color LED Light Bulb, $11 (was $24), walmart.com

TSV Smart Plug (two-pack), $18 (was $26), walmart.com

Best home office sales

More than just a Chromebook — it’s also a tablet. It’s a Chromelet! A Tabbook! It’s your next computer, is what it is. (Photo: Walmart)

On sale for $199 (was $310), the Lenovo Chromebook Flex 3 has a brilliant HD 11.6-inch LED touch display that makes everything look great, from charts and graphs to your favorite shows to family Zooms. Count on a speedy, powerful Intel Celeron N4020 Dual Core Processor paired with 4GB of memory and 32GB of on-board storage. It even has a 360-degree hinge, so it can rotate to any angle for use as a tablet. And shoppers love the size and build quality too.

“I really like this Chromebook,” raved a savvy Walmart shopper. “It is the perfect size, and I love that they didn’t skimp on the frame — it’s made of metal and not plastic. The size is perfect for carrying it back and forth. The new operating system works way better than my older Chromebook, and it does everything I need it to do.”

Meanwhile, this Chromebook runs the latest version of ChromeOS, so you know you’ll get speedy results. And unlike Windows 10 or MacOS laptops, with long loading times and complicated app downloads, you just log in to your Gmail account via Google Chrome and you’re good to go. At the same time, this Chromebook can access and download ChromeOS and Android apps for more versatility.

Check out more home office sales below:

Lenovo Ideapad Flex 5, $399 (was $520), walmart.com

Ousgar 47-inch White Desk, $100 (was $333), walmart.com

Samsung CB4 Chromebook, $159 (was $230), walmart.com

Hemu Fashion Bamboo Laptop Lap Tray, $38 (was $80), walmart.com

Canon Pixma G4210 Wireless MegaTank All-In-One InkJet Printer, $300 (was $400), walmart.com

Gamma Ray Optics 010 Slim Vintage Computer Readers, $18 (was $25), walmart.com

Best robot-vacuum sales

Got your ION this Shark robovac? Great, but at this price you might want to do less browsing and more clicking. (Photo: Walmart)

On sale for $269 (was $394), the Shark ION Robot Vacuum RV1000 is designed to tackle all sorts of household surfaces, unlike other devices that just suck up dirt and grime and get stuck against a wall or under furniture. What good is that?

This smart little guy uses a navigation system to map the landscape of your home’s floors, so it doesn’t bump into walls, scratch up furniture or tumble down stairs. During its prodigious 90 minutes of battery life per charge, it can sweep your hardwood floors and then switch to carpets and tiles at a second’s notice. Another perk? It can also be controlled and scheduled via its smartphone app or Alexa.

“I love this shark robot vacuum,” raved a delighted shopper. “It maps out my rooms and vacuums in straight lines instead of all willy-nilly like others. We recently removed all of our carpet and put luxury vinyl tile down, we have two dogs that shed constantly, this shark robot vacuum has been a life saver.”

Check out more robot-vacuum sales below:

Mighty Rock Robot Vacuum and Mop, $73 (was $130), walmart.com

Ionvac SmartClean 2000 Robovac, $99 (was $180), walmart.com

IHome AutoVac Nova Self Empty Robot Vacuum and Mop, $299 (was $599), walmart.com

IHome AutoVac Eclipse G 2-in-1 Robot Vacuum and Mop, $179 (was $400), walmart.com

ILife V5s Pro Robot Vacuum and Mop, $135 (was $180), walmart.com

Eureka Groove 4-Way Control Robotic Vacuum, $129 (was $199), walmart.com

ILife A4s Robot Vacuum Cleaner, $119 (was $180), walmart.com

Best style sales

The ultimate wear-everywhere summery frock. (Photo: Walmart)

Before you ask: No, it’s not a typo: This gorgeous Max Studio frock is on sale for 40 bucks! It’s incredibly flattering, thanks to a lovely U-shaped neckline and a fit-and-flare silhouette that defines the waist juuust right. The tiered skirt and fluttery ruffled sleeves are flirty without going overboard. And the soft, jersey material? Feels like a dream.

“Fabric is soft and comfy, like pajamas,” a shopper shared. “Cut is flattering….The shoulder detail is super cute. It’s pretty casual, but some wedges and jewelry could probably dress it up for an office setting.”

Check out more style sales below:

Zanea Womens Polka Dot Short Sleeve Long Dress, $24 (was $48), walmart.com

Scoop Women’s Espadrille Wedge Sandal, $20 (was $35), walmart.com

Kogmo Womens Premium Cotton Full Length Leggings, $12 (was $18), walmart.com

Cate & Chloe McKenzie 18k White Gold Dangling Earrings, $20 (was $136), walmart.com

Charmo Women’s Ruffle One Piece Swimsuit, $18 (was $30), walmart.com

Avia Women’s Summer Romper, $7 (was $14), walmart.com

Nlife Women Criss Cross V Neck Sleeveless Cami Top, $17 (was $30), walmart.com

Best kitchen sales

The good news? You’ll be all out of excuses for not making that big family dinner. The bad news? You’ll be all out of excuses for not making that big family dinner. (Photo: Walmart)

This sturdy aluminum alloy cookware set comes with five must-haves: two fry pans and sauce pans, and one casserole pan, with lids. The teal color is pretty enough to leave on your stovetop even when not in use, and its BPA-free construction is compatible with all types of burners.

“I thought it was some kind of mistake when I first got these pans, because they are exactly like much more expensive sets,” a shopper shared. “They are heavy, well coated for nonstick, fantastic quality, and beautiful.”

Check out more kitchen sales below:

The Pioneer Woman Cowboy Rustic 14-Piece Forged Cutlery Knife Block Set, $39 (was $70), walmart.com

The Pioneer Woman Mazie 2-Piece Ceramic Red Rectangle Baker Set, $20 (was $25), walmart.com

Best Choice Products 16.9qt 1800W 10-in-1 Family Size Air Fryer, $130 (was $255), walmart.com

Ninja 12 Cup Programmable Coffee Brewer, $69 (was $79), walmart.com

Hamilton Beach 12 Cup Digital Automatic LCD Programmable Coffeemaker Brewer, $70 (was $105), walmart.com

Tramontina Primaware 18 Piece Non-stick Cookware Set, Steel Gray, $40 (was $50), walmart.com

Best beauty sales

No, this is not a mirage….but Image’s hydrating repair cream is as thirst-quenching for your beleaguered skin as a desert oasis. (Photo: Walmart)

If your skin is feeling absolutely parched, introduce it to this rejuvenating, hydrating cream. It’s packed with aloe and radiance-boosting Vitamin C, both of which help combat the effects of stress, fatigue, and general dullness. In short: Your skin will sing.

“Simply the best for my under-eye and sensitive skin,” a shopper declared. “It is rich but does not leave my skin greasy or clog my pores. Also I can apply generously, and this jar lasts about 6 months!”

Check out more beauty sales below:

Glycolic Acid 20% Resurfacing Pads, $25 (was $50), walmart.com

BylissPRO Nano Titanium Lightweight Ionic Hair Dryer, $65 (was $85), walmart.com

Burberry Classic Eau De Parfum, $32 (was $98), walmart.com

Image Skincare Ageless Total Eye Lift Creme, $31.50 (was $50), walmart.com

Elizabeth Arden Ceramide Capsules Daily Youth Restoring Face Serum, $65 (was $100),walmart.com

Remington Anti-Static Flat Iron, $16 (was $20), walmart.com

Artnaturals Anti-Aging Retinol, $12 (was $16), walmart.com

Conair Double Ceramic Curling Iron, $16 (was $23), walmart.com

Best mattress and bedding sales

The bestest, soundest sleeep of your life awaits…as soon as you clear off that ridiculous pile of pillows. (Photo: Walmart)

If you’ve had your mattress for longer than you can remember, it’s high time to replace it — and, lucky you, this one is on sale! It’s made with 12 inches of plush memory foam supported by coils, and it’s just the right balance between soft and firm. The only drawback? Getting out of bed in the morning is about to get a lot harder.

“I was surprised at how soft and comfy this mattress was,” a shopper reported. “I took it out of the box, and it opened right up to the 12-inch size. It is supposed to take 24 hours to expand but it expanded a lot right away. It’s super thick and so far feels very comfortable. I am surprised at how great a mattress in a box could be!”

Check out more mattress and bedding sales below:

Hatch Embroidered Stripe 7-Piece Comforter Set, $30 (was $70), walmart.com

Zeny Weighted Blanket, $47 (was $78), walmart.com

Better Homes & Gardens Flowing Floral Comforter Set, $45 (was $65), walmart.com

Mattress Topper Queen, 2-Inch Cool Swirl Gel Memory Foam Mattress Topper, Blue, $70 (was $105), walmart.com

Wenzel 70″ x 60″ Camp Quilt – Red Brick Geo Print, $18 (was $29.50), walmart.com

Best pet sales

A product that poses the question: You’re not still using those annoying, sticky-sheeted lint rollers to wage war against the scourge of pet hair, are you? (Photo: Walmart)

If you’re sick of vacuuming and lint-rolling your couch and bed, this nifty little gadget can help. It picks up pet hair like a pro, minus the sticky, hard-to-peel-off sheets. Instead, it uses a brush to grab all the fur and deposit it inside the storage compartment inside the brush. Genius! Just roll it back and forth over the spot you’re trying to clean, and voila — zero hair!

“I was shocked this works so well,” a shopper shared. “My cat is a shedding machine, and this really picks up the hair!”

Check out more pets sales below:

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[transcending-chaos]

Quick ‘n Dirty Character Design

Okay, speed run, let’s go!

Tom:

Why does he look like this?

-His design is based on monochromatic contrast, or contrast within the same color/color family. You see this a lot with characters dressed in gray, they’re meant to be easy to look at. Besides, he’s boring because he’s juxtaposed against the Creatures, most of whom have really identifiable designs and really saturated colors

-Giving characters blue eyes with dark hair is an automatic contrast point and eye focus. You see this a lot in media because it works; you immediately go to one of the few points of interest on him (his face) because it’s a light blue against dark hair -and it’s also a temperature/complementary contrast because his skin tone is warmer. Which, on that note, his skin also seems warmer and darker against the blue and grays -because most of them are mid-tone. This is also form of racial coding. 

-His cardinal color is blue, so all of his colors should be cold so there’s no real struggle with temperature contrast. You can see this a little more in season 1′s palette, but season 2 definitely cooled everything down and removed the green tone from most of the grays. It’s not completely a cold blue-gray combo, but it’s far more unified than before.

Kaz:

Why does he look like this?

-His design is based on complementary contrast. He’s dressed in mostly green and then in warm brown, which is really just desaturated reds and oranges. Coupled with his bright red hair and the golden highlights, and bam, you’ve got a really simple color match that’s literally made for itself.

-Keeping a majority of the warm colors at his face immediately draws your eyes there. His face is a focal point because most of his design is dominated by the greens and cooler colors; by blocking it all in one area, you can trap the eye there. This is basically a 90%-10% color scheme. 

-His cardinal color is green, thus adding emphasis to all the warm colors and tones that act as accents. They lightened up his palette more in season 2, making his pants and shoes more readily defined, but they didn’t really do too much all things considered. Kaz was the one who won the whole “which kid did you remember the most based on design alone” poll because he’s really the only member of the cast with an iconic design. The other three main members are more or less copying design tropes (which is fine, I mean, they’re tropes because they work).

Sarah:

Why does she look like this?

-Her design is based on value/hue contrast. Black, white, and a rich red are her most predominant colors, thus black and white (value) are juxtaposed against the red (hue/saturation) which happens to be a mid-tone. 

-Her design is meant to draw you to her chest, reminding you she’s a girl. I hate it when designs do this, but the largest contrast is her black shirt, which is accented with white to keep you in the boundaries. If you squint or let your eyes unfocus, they’re going to go right to the point of contrast, ie, the darkest part whereas everything else blends together. 

-Her cardinal color is red, which is meant to imply both her attitude, as well as compete with the black in her design. It doesn’t succeed as well as Kaz’s does, but her design has the three extremes of hue, value, and saturation on it. Sometimes bolder is better, but not when the parts are almost divided up evenly in thirds. 

Peyton:

Why does he look like this?

-His design is based on hue contrast. Peyton is a lesson in using color to direct one’s eye. All of his values are remarkably similar, which is made all the more striking by the bright pop of yellow right in the center of it. The only point on his design with any other sort of contrast are his shoes. 

-His design is meant to draw you to his stomach, as well as broadcast his sunny disposition. Because of the lack of contrast, you can look up and down his design easily, but find your eyes drawn back to the yellow since it’s the only real point of interest -as well as the largest area of focussed color. Whereas Kaz is a 90%-10% design, Peyton’s more of a 40%-60% where the 60% is broken up into even smaller pieces. 

-His cardinal color is yellow, which unifies the green tones, warm grays, and provides focus. Peyton’s design is the busiest by far in terms of color, but it’s surprisingly easy to look at due to the values being so close; if they were farther apart, then the yellow would be too bright or the greens too dark. The gray also frames the brightest point nicely, acting as a buffer and transition. 

Okay, so what’s the point of all of this?

Simply put, the kids’ designs work, but they do the minimum required in order to do so, and it’s not necessarily an art thing. As much as we love the show as an audience, and as much as we identify with these characters, they’re not meant to be what we attach ourselves to. They’re vague enough so that you can imagine yourself in their place, while still being identifiable enough so that you can tell them apart. Nothing more, nothing less. After all, Chaotic is more about the cards and the Creatures, not the kids -even though we see much of them because they’re audience surrogates (also it’s because they’re showing off playing the game, but still).

There’s a lot more I want to say, but I really wanted this to just be the most basic overview it could be. 

Thanks for coming to my TedTalk.

<3

[paponikablog]

About a three-hour drive from north Korea's capital, Pyongyang, lies what might be the world's most isolated ski resort. Masik Pass offers 11 runs and 4 lifts plus a gear rental shop. The attached luxury hotel features 120 rooms, complete with a swimming pool, sauna, bar and karaoke room.

Snowmobiles were imported from China and chair lifts from Austria, after a Swiss company refused to sell them, which North Korea called a “serious human rights abuse”. The resort has four and a half stars on Trip Advisor from genuine, happy tourists. Most of its visitors, however, come from within North Korea. While the country is almost exclusively portrayed as a poor, starved relic of the past, recent reports from defectors have begun to paint a much more nuanced picture. In reality, Pyongyang cafes are filled with patrons reading from tablets and teenagers making phone calls, some driving BMW's and Mercedes. The key to understanding who is really in charge, whether a revolution will ever occur, and what daily life is like, is to see how North Korea - both the state and the people within it - make money.

After Swiss cheese, bad haircuts, and empty buildings, North Korea is best known for seemingly wanting to end the human race in a giant nuclear explosion. When Kim Jong un-finds his country unusually hungry or one of his yachts, in need of repairs, the country turns into that annoying kid on the playground who will not shut up until you share your hot Cheetos. Insults are hurled, threats made, and missiles launched.

Inevitably the U. S. sees no choice but to respond, agreeing to ease sanctions or grant food aid in exchange for a return to normalcy. Now, with their mouths freshly fed, Kim and his compatriots will suddenly turn from murderous dictators to charming, levelheaded, although admittedly, stylistically eccentric diplomats. Then the six, twelve, eighteen months later, like clockwork, we’ll all have Deja Vu. But while Kim’s seeming obsession with nuclear toys attracts nearly all the media attention, in reality, it's just one of many strategies the world's most secretive regime has for accomplishing its much larger goal: staying alive. The fundamental challenge for North Korea is that it cannot truly, verifiably, and permanently give up its nuclear capabilities Without becoming, at best irrelevant. At the same time, it cannot truly thrive with the level of international sanctions that come with threatening to sink an entire U.S. state. Thus, all three generations of leadership have been forced to master the art of negotiation: to extracted just enough aid to stay afloat well never actually giving up its one and only source of leverage.

Before founding the democratic people's Republic of Korea Kim Il Sung was an unlikely leader. Having fought alongside Chinese communists and later in the Soviet army the first Kim with well-prepared, militarily, but lacked the softer skills considered necessary to oversee a communist Republic. His education was poor, Korean mediocre and understanding of Marxist theory deemed insufficient. Despite this initial hesitation, he was eventually selected to lead the new state, although, with much oversight. Soviet advisors drafted north Korea's constitution and approved all its major speeches in advance, making it a near-perfect puppet state, or, in gentler terms, a “Soviet Satellite Regime”.

By the end of the Korean War, Kim Il sung had become a national hero and icon - praise which fueled grander ambitions. His devotion to socialism soon morphed into a strong sense of nationalism - a desire to be more than Moscow or Beijing's puppet. Many Soviet officers were purged from government positions and for several decades, North Korea intentionally positioned itself between the Soviet Union and China, realizing it could play them off each other. Whatever Moscow gave or promised, Beijing was sure to match, and then some, and vice versa. Both countries knew they were being played, of course, but preferred this to the far worse alternative: ceding influence on the other. This dynamic of reluctant support, in fact, has more less continued to this day. Conventional wisdom portrays China as North Korea's only ally, or even puppet state. The reality is North Korea hasn't been a true puppet state for many decades, and with China, it has less a marriage and more an opportunistic relationship. China’s strategic interests overlap with north Korea's continued existence, not necessarily success or prosperity. At the base level what Beijing wants is nothing – stability. By far, its worst-case scenario is a dissolved or failed North Korea, after which, up to 25 million, unskilled, culturally dissimilar refugees will flood into some of its most economically weak North-Eastern provinces. Even worse would be the accompanying advance of American forces on China's doorstep.

The north, in other words, acts as a nice buffer from U.S. troops stationed in the south. As long as the North doesn't push tensions too high, China is happy more less maintaining the status quo. Ideally it would like to see Kim Jong unfollow its own example of economic reform and opening up, making it less dependent on nuclear threats for survival, and potentially justifying a retreat by American forces. Realistically, though, China also knows its influence is limited. China is indeed North Korea's largest trade partner, by a mile, but it's easy to overstate the leverage from trade with a country whose propaganda can offset almost any internal challenge.

In simple terms, Beijing could destroy North Korea - militarily or economically. It almost certainly also has a plan for regime change should it ever be deemed necessary. What it lacks is the fine-grained ability to influence it. And because China wants stability first and foremost, it has no reason, currently, to use its blunt weapon, leaving it with limited leverage. So, while there exists a clear power dynamic between the two nations, neither is likely to do anything too dramatic.

When Kim met with Xi Jinping in 2018, the supreme leader was seen obediently taking notes while the Chinese president spoke. China has historically condemned its missile tests and voted in favor of UN sanctions. And yet Xi recently made the first visit to Pyongyang by a Chinese leader in 14 years. North Korea, for its part, understands the need to, at a minimum, not anger the closest thing it has to a friend. It's all too familiar with the cost of losing an ally. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, North Korea suffered a devastating famine which ultimately killed somewhere between 200,000 and three million people. Before this, food was distributed via its Public Distribution System - PDS - which had formers surrender their harvest to the government, who then allocated it amongst the population. This model worked well during the 50s, 60s, and 70s even making Chinese towns on the border jealous. In the 80s and 90s, however, the system came violently crashing down. 450 grams of food rations per day in 1994 became 128 grams by 1997. Soon only six percent of the population received any food from the government who promised to feed it. This, arguably, was the most pivotal moment in the nation's history, alongside the deaths of its first two leaders. The PDS has never fully recovered, leaving most of its 25 million people to fend for themselves. Officially, Capitalism doesn't exist here - private property and trade are both highly illegal. In practice, however, it can be seen everywhere - from those in poverty all the way to the highest levels of the regime. Almost everyone is assigned a government job, and yet 62% of defectors surveyed in 2010 say they had worked unofficial, gray market jobs. Married women can register as full-time housewives rather than work an official job - giving them the freedom to start a private enterprise. Across the country, women can be seen in roadside markets selling food, and homemade or imported goods like Russian cigarettes and Chinese beer. Ironically, Because of this women's rights are surprisingly strong in North Korea, where they tend to make many multiples of their husband’s income.

As expected, the government is aware of this illegal activity and could, in theory, eliminate it entirely. But having never recovered from a now-three decade-old famine, most of the population has come to depend on private markets for basic survival. Additionally, the majority of this trade is conducted purely for material, not political, reasons. The poor simply wish to get by and the rich only seeking more luxurious life - not an end to the regime.

So the state simultaneously manages my markets through selective enforcement and also sometimes even encourages it. The “August 3rd rule”, for example, allows one to pay a fee and be exempted from official work - essentially profiting from instead of cracking down on private enterprise. Still, there are limits.

North Korean bank notes were ordered to be exchanged in 2009 with a limit of 100,000 won per person - wiping out many family savings and causing the closest thing North Korea has likely ever seen to a protest. This taught north Koreans not to trust their own currency. So, today, most unofficial transactions involve a foreign currency - usually the Chinese yuan. And just as individuals resort to capitalism - so do government committees and departments.

For decades, many offices have been given limited or no resources, forcing them to generate their own. Anyone with any authority, therefore, is likely to use their influence to start a business, sometimes using the national military as workers. Those who bribe the right people and play the game well can become fabulously rich - even by international standards. These newly wealthy families drive luxury cars, own cell phones and eat western food in Pyongyang, which some jokingly refer to as the “Dubai” of North Korea.

In this way, and many others, North Korea is two very different countries: the north Korea seen by the outside world, and the one that lived by the vast majority of its population. The North Korea of tall buildings and bright lights you see in tours and pictures, and the one, only minutes away, of sprawling fields and flickering, if any, electricity. The famous monument to socialism, and the private shops selling Western clothes only blocks away.

And finally, an unwavering ally, on the surface, who, in reality, is, at best, ambivalent. For now, the system works. Inevitably, though, someday in the future, like the Soviet-era machines on which its factories run, North Korea will simply stop working - for any number of potentially trivial reasons.

In truth, it’s remarkable how long it has worked. But, for the time being, this tapes together, occasionally in need of kicking, jury-rigged machine keeps slowly, inefficiently chugging along.

For all its strangeness, the genius of North Korea, the reason for its survival - is its relative self-sufficiency. It knows how little say a small nation like itself has in the larger world.

[seatsbythepit]

Hey Anna :) I just listened to Monday's Arsecast and they continued to talk about the silence of the board and the possible search for a sporting director and I was just wondering if in other EPL clubs the higher ups are really more present?

Because in Germany the sporting directors and comparable people are very present in the media. Like they get interviewed after games and are regularly on matchday shows and all. 

And I just got the impression that not only at Arsenal but in the EPL in general they are a lot less present. Or is that really just Arsenal?

Hey Sabrina, thanks for your question(s)! I’d like to start off by saying I am probably not the most educated on this topic, nor am I the worst - so I’ll try my best to give you a satisfying response!

Sporting Directors are very…fluid characters, they can often be referred to as technical directors, can be seen as the all-knowing all-seeing eye of a club’s footballing activities, they can be a guide/guardian for the manager as well as a buffer between fans and manager.

As you mentioned, in Germany they have a strong media presence, including post-match interviews - I would say that based on that information alone it’s definitely not the same for the Premier League as a whole, I cannot recall many times I have seen a sporting director for a club speak regularly and so presently. They tend to pop up at times of importance or interest for a club, maybe during a changing over of managers or during transfer season, but not in the day to day life, they work in the shadows so to speak.

In fact previously it was not at all a common thing for PL clubs to have sporting directors, at least not in that official role.

I know this next bit is probably very extra info, but I took the liberty of checking the bigger clubs (I was initially going to do all of them, but that would make this post even longer than it already is.) in the PL, whether they have such a figure and also how they are described on the club websites and here is what I found:

Chelsea | Michael Emanalo - Technical Director

He has been an important part of the first team management structure since his arrival in October 2007, and now supports the work of the first team manager, leading the club’s international and domestic scouting network, and assists in driving the technical programmes of our Academy and international youth network.

Tottenham | Rebecca Caplehorn - Director of Football Operations

Graduated from Loughborough University with a Joint Honours Degree in Physical Education, Sport Science and Mathematics.  She subsequently qualified as a Chartered Accountant via the NHS Graduate Management Scheme and has worked in senior finance roles within both tennis and football. Rebecca joined the Club in March 2015, after spending over five years at Queens Park Rangers FC.

Manchester City | Txiki Begiristain? Director of Football

Txiki is not listed on Manchester City’s corporate page, but in 2012 he was announced as Manchester City’s Director of Football. And there are recent articles about him, including Pep Guardiola speaking of him. So I presume he does still hold that role.

Liverpool | Michael Edwards - Sporting Director

From Nov 2016: Michael Edwards has today been appointed as Liverpool Football Club’s sporting director.

The 37-year-old is being promoted into a newly-created role as part of a restructuring of the football operations. Edwards will now lead the club’s overall football development, including player identification, acquisitions, sales and retention, as well as taking primary responsibility for reviewing and implementing improvements to the training ground environment and infrastructure.

Manchester United | Not applicable. (Make note of Edward Woodward.)

United do not have an official sporting director, but Edward Woodward, their executive vice-chairman, is probably the closest to it. However, he has been criticised in the past about how he has handled their transfers, and thus it was once thought United would eventually opt to bring someone experienced to take on the Sports Director role - but this was later denied, and it did not happen.

Arsenal | Not applicable.

Of course, we know the answer to this one. Ivan Gazidis has been proud in the past that we currently have no such figure at the club, trying to play the angle of “team effort” among the board, rather than a hierarchy. (Check out this episode of Arsecast Extra that Sabrina referred to hear of previous attitudes towards the club corporate setup.)

We once had David Dein, who came close to being a sporting director before such a title was really given. “Dein built up his shares until he owned 42% of the club in 1991. During his time at the club, he was responsible for football matters taking an active role in the transfer of players and contract negotiations where he was able to use his extensive network of football contacts. Dein was behind the appointment of the then little known Arsène Wenger to the manager’s job in 1996; under Wenger Arsenal have won the Premier League three times and the FA Cup six times, and Dein strongly backed him and his transfer wishes throughout.[3]”

However, as previously mentioned, we may now be seeking an official sporting director after Arsene Wenger leaves, due to the fact that Dick Law may also think about departing with him. The Telegraph wrote recently:

Dick Law has liaised closely with manager Arsene Wenger on player negotiations and contracts since 2009 and, while he would initially work with any appointment, it is understood that he is ready to step away from his current position in the longer-term.

The idea would also be to create a wider football operations role, with possible responsibilities stretching to shaping and fine-tuning the structures around sports science, medicine, scouting and recruitment, the academy and logistics.

Losing the two closest figureheads we have to a sporting director would likely be cause for a serious re-organisation of the club’s higher positions.

Wenger has largely become a one man band, he covers a lot of what a sporting director should. For example, he was the figurehead in the club moving to a bigger stadium, the club was outgrowing its beloved home, and a move was necessary to follow the growth, he was also key to assuring the banks we would pay them back in order to receive more loans. [x] He was also responsible for the state of the art training ground we currently have, he ensured that we invested in health and science to better our players to such a high standard, his success as our manager is proof of how crucial that was.

So remarkable is his influence that our club is actually viewed as a financial anomaly, here is a quote from a financial report I posted about in 2016:

“*Due to the structural issues identified below, our view is Arsenal is not investable for the general public, the fact its ISDX quotation has survived is anomalous.*

In my opinion, the growth of our club since the 90s and early 2000s has meant that this one-man role is even less feasible than it was back then, nor should it even try to be feasible now.

An interesting correlation I make between Arsenal and United is that the two big clubs without a sporting director are the two clubs who have had/still have (in our case) a recent long time serving manager. I feel that the greatness of both Arsene Wenger and Sir Alex allowed the figureheads behind their respective clubs to take a back seat and allow the two managers to be absolutely everything to their clubs - which whilst so very admirable on AF and AW’s behalves proves to be a problem when their tenures come to an end. You only have to look at United and see that there wasn’t really a backup plan for the departure of such a legend, and if there was it hasn’t really worked, and I can only hope that our farewell with AW happens when we have planned meticulously for everything that comes thereafter.

Not to mention the growth of the Premier League, the gap between clubs and their quality is getting smaller, therefore it is not ideal to rely on one person who already has a high position/highly stressful role at the club - I mean he’s the manager for goodness sake. Arsene is our manager, and manage is what he should be expected to do. He should not be under fire for the inner workings of our club, despite the fact that he often is. It is not wholly his responsibility and even if our directors are not sports directors, they still have a duty to manage this club effectively, both in the football we produce and otherwise.

A sporting director is supposed to be the go-between, the adviser, the helper, we need structure and strategy behind Arsene, or whoever is in charge of the team.  Which is why there has been a certain amount of annoyance/anger with the board, because they use that “one man band” role to let Arsene take a lot of the flack for the club’s stagnation, and have not committed to any real responsibility on their part.

Something I particularly find scandalous is when our CEO, Ivan Gazidis, charges such an extortionate amount for his services…none of which we actually get to see with any real transparency. It only aggravates the discontent among fans, and he does no good to act like everything is amazing at things like the AGM meetings and such.

Something else that Arseblog touched on in a regular Arsecast podcast is that he actually out-rightly said the fans would decide AW’s future, the fans. It displays a terrible amount of irresponsibility to place such an important decision on the fans, a lack of judgement and ultimately it has played part in the current situation we have with the protests etc, because through not taking charge, the directors have essentially shown the fans that they are not leading, they are not being clear in their goals and intentions as a board, BUT at the same time they are not listening to fans either, they are not listening to the fans as Gazidis had alluded they would. It’s this inaction that is painful to see, and to see AW take the brunt of the repercussions outside of the football elements is saddening.

And although he is majority shareholder first a foremost, then a director, Stan Kroenke charging for “advisory services” is bizarre. There is no confidence in the man who basically said he didn’t care about trophies, and it’s even more laughable that he should charge for so-called advice. I realise these are more likely to be business orientated services, not football ones, but that’s just it - we don’t all wear our Arsenal shirts seeking to cheer on a well run business, we want our team to thrive and succeed. I am proud of what we do outside of playing football, but we have to aspire to more than what we’ve already achieved, we are already very good but we could be even better. Which is why, after all I have written, I really do hope we get a sporting director.

I am SO sorry for basically answering your question in the first few paragraphs and then going on to write a novel, but I hope this has been useful in some way, it give me clarity to write in detail. I also recognise that I may be talking nonsense, and that I don’t know the ins and outs of other clubs as well as I know my own, so apologies for that, haha.

Thank you again for your question, Sabrina!

[mindscope65-blog]

Dana White States: “There Would Be No Women Fighters in the UFC...”

During those years where Professional Boxing took a nose dive, hand to hand combat in America needed someone to cheer for.  For awhile Laila Ali was battling with the likes of Christy Martin, then as of recent, Floyd Mayweather was going up against UFC fighter Connor McGregor.  Yet somewhere in between, boxing got lost and MMA/UFC rose to the occasion.  

Like most, my interest rose in the early 90s with fights between Royce Gracie vs Ken Shamrock.  It was something new and fresh, yet way brutal than boxing.  I didn’t have to wait a few rounds to see damage.  I didn’t have to see dragged out clenching, holding and dancing around the ring.  Unlike guys my age and older who found MMA to be humdrum, I was hooked...but I wanted more.  I wanted to see the women fight in this brutal combat.

I loss contact with MMA, Boxing and everything due to my working life and family.  I had no clue that in 1995 the first women’s MMA tournament took place.  I am sure it was small then as I did not see any coverage about it on sports channels, newspaper etc.  It was out there but it certainly was small scale.  By 2009 I heard of a fighter named Cris Cyborg but knew nothing about her.  in that year, it was all about the men fighters like Jon Jones, Georges St-Pierre, BJ Penn and Anderson Silva.

Years would pass and by the year 2013, I was on board with the female UFC.  The fighter was Ronda Rousey and she fought Liz Carmouche in UFC 157.  I heard about his fighter Rousey and her submission move called the armbar but never witnessed it pulled off.  As a matter of fact this fight would be my first women’s UFC fight I’ve ever watched.  Reminiscent to my days of watching Mike Tyson, I grabbed a drink and a snack and focused in on the fight.  Rousey punched a bit, though he game plan was to get to the floor.  A few tussling moves here and there, a few strikes to the head, and the next thing I noticed Carmouche’s arm was being bent in a move called the armbar.  After witnessing that fight I was completely done with professional boxing.

I would follow Ronda Rousey and become a fan.  I still enjoyed the men’s UFC fighting but I always kept a close eye on the female fighters.  UFC 193 was the fight that I watched my hero fall.  Ronda Rousey vs Holly Holm was suppose to be a competitive but a win for Rousey as I anticipated.  Like usual, Rousey came out with her focused mad woman look and I bought into it.  Bruce Buffer dragged out that it was time, so I was ready.  Rousey came to center ring and gave that look to Holm, no touch after the rules are explained by Herb Dean.

The fight was most on foot to the advantage of Holm as Rousey was certainly not a boxer or kick fighter.  In the second round with 4:08 on the clock, Rousey threw a sweeping over hand left that missed, she slipped and Holm caught her with a kick followed by a punch to end the fight.

That fight was the rise of women’s UFC and the fall of Ronda Rousey. She would stick around for a bit to fight again, and when she fought an opponent even tougher than Holm when she faced Amanda Nunes, her career was definitively over.  At UFC 207 Ronda Rousey vs Amanda Nunes fought to one of the quickest knockouts in UFC Womens history.  At 4:14 of the first round, Nunes sent a punched stumbled Rousey into retirement. It took 48 seconds to knockout Rousey and end her UFC career.

Amanda Nunes has already been dubbed the GOAT of female UFC fighting yet I feel its too soon to give her such a title. Her current wins are well highlighted as being unbeatable, but what about the losses.  UFC 178 Nunes gets knocked out in the third round by Cat Zingano.  In 2013, Nunes losses to Sarah D'Alelio by unanimous decision.  In 2011, Alexis Davis knocks her out in the first round and in 2008 she losses to Ana Maria 35 seconds by submission in the first round.  Unlike the win/loss argument in other sports when it comes to identifying the GOAT, Nunes still can achieve the greatest of all time status as her career progresses. Her current 18-4 record is a remarkable achievement.

In January of 2011, Dana White said “Women will never fight in the UFC.”  Interesting as on December 14, 2019 champion Amanda Nunes defends her title in the females main card against Germaine De Randamie. Women are in the UFC and fighting in the main card, pre-lims and early pre-lims.  Female UFC fighting is exciting and in many cases, more exciting than the male matches.  The decision has literally buried female professional boxing as many female professional boxers are coming over to mixed martial arts.  The UFC is the present and future of professional fighting and thanks to Dana White, female fighting is stronger than ever. 

[talhaghafoor2019-blog]

Optimisation is the enemy of creativity in marketing and music

No, you are not becoming crankier as you approach middle age – music is indeed getting worse every year. And the marketing industry’s obsession with optimisation is to blame.

In late 2017, the YouTube channel Thoughty2 published a video exploring how music has changed over the decades. After starting with The Beatles, the narrator continues with an example of classic British understatement: “Fast forward to 2010, when Justin Bieber released his hit single Baby. This is generally considered to be a bad move.”

According to the research in the video, lyrical intelligence, harmonic complexity, and timbral diversity have decreased while dynamic range compression has been used to make music louder and louder. In short, songs are becoming stupider – especially since every hit now includes the “millennial whoop” as well.

“Instead of experimenting with different musical techniques and instruments, the vast majority of pop music today is built using the exact same combination of keyboard, drum machine, sampler, and computer software,” Thoughty2’s narrator states. “This might be considered as progressive by some people, but it truth it sucks the creativity and originality out of music – making everything sound somewhat similar.”

As a rule, businesses do not like risk. The video states that record companies today must spend anywhere from $500,000 to $3m to sign and market a new artist. That is a lot of money to spend on a band without being fully confident of success.

To minimise the risk and maximise the potential return, these companies optimise the music to do whatever seems to have worked in the past. Same set of instruments? Check. Simple lyrics? Check. Is it loud? Check. Simple melody? Check. Can you dance to it? Check. Millennial whoop? Check check.

But that optimisation process is a downward spiral that will result only in songs that will make Rebecca Black’s Friday sound as brilliant as Led Zeppelin's Kashmir. It is creating music by paint-by-numbers. It is ticking boxes rather than being creative. And the same thing is occurring in the marketing industry today.

The rise of optimisation

After my first career in journalism years ago, I went into marketing and at one point met with a recruiter who was looking for a digital marketer. “I need an expert in SEO, ASO, and SMO,” she told me, further rattling off a lengthier list of random acronyms.

“Optimisation” became all the rage after companies discovered in the 2000s how much traffic websites could attract from search engines. After the birth of search engine optimisation (SEO), marketers tacked on the latter word to create “app store optimisation” and “social media optimisation” as well as countless other uses where the term also made little sense.

App store optimisation (ASO) looks for hacks to increase a mobile application’s ranking and findability in places such as the Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store – rather than, you know, creating and promoting a real, useful app that people will like. Social media optimisation (SMO) is a useless term because social media is simply a set of channels and tools that can be used for any specific promotion tactic.

Now, businesses have always discussed general best practices. My last job in journalism in the 2000s was serving as the editor-in-chief and executive director of the Boston non-profit newspaper Spare Change News. (It is one of the newspapers in the United States that are modeled on The Big Issue in the UK.)

In that role, I once attended an annual convention of the North American Street Newspaper Association that was held in Halifax, Canada. There, the assembled staffers discussed the best practices in terms of pricing, circulation, and countless other topics. Today, marketers talk about optimisation, which often means the best practices in line with someone else’s algorithms or what has purportedly worked for others.

Buffer has published studies on the ideal lengths of everything from blog posts to tweets to headlines to Facebook updates. HubSpot has reported the best times to post on social media. But in the end, both best practices and optimisation come down to the same thing: doing what everyone else is doing.

The perils of optimisation

Once, I was in a meeting where people were discussing how to get more traffic from blog posts spread on Facebook. The ideas focused on using psychology and gaming the social network’s algorithm: “Let’s ask people to comment on posts to increase engagement!” and “Let’s change the posts so that they are lists whose headlines start with numbers!”

“Make a funny, creative video advertisement instead,” I suggested, noting the reach that humorous videos receive on Facebook. But no one listened. Everyone cared so much about optimising the form of the creative that no one thought about the creativity of the creative. They prioritised the form over the function.

The perfect example of this is when marketers see studies on which headlines get the most “engagement.” In June 2017, Buzzsumo analysed 100m headlines and found this information on which headlines receive the most clicks, “likes,” and shares on Facebook:

Too many digital marketers use such information and focus on producing whatever marcom is cheapest and then optimising it. Here is a sample of recent blog posts on Medium from a certain prolific marketing writer:

5 Strange But True Habits of the World’s Richest People

5 Smart Reasons to Create Content Outside Your Niche

5 Simple Hacks to Sharpen Your Emotional Intelligence

10 Insanely Good Reasons You Should Publish On Medium

3 Unusual Hacks to Completely Up Your LinkedIn Game

Bored now.

Too many marketers go overboard and focus on optimisation to produce rubbish marketing such as clickbait blog posts with the same headline format such as this: [number] [unnecessarily strong adjective] [noun] to [achieve some goal].

The internet will continue to be flooded with boring, optimised posts that all have the same title formats in an effort to get clicks or satisfy other short-term metrics. But optimisation is the enemy of creativity and leads to worst long-term results. (Just look at how many reboots of successful TV shows from the 80s and 90s have failed today. The studios likely thought that copying what was done before would guarantee another success.)

Redundant optimisation quickly becomes cliched, hurts the brand, and is obvious to consumers. If Oxford Academic were to title journal articles in the above manner, the Oxford brand would become laughable. The only way for BuzzFeed News to be taken seriously – and the publication is indeed doing excellent journalism – has been to decouple its brand from the notoriously clickbait parent company.

Optimised reflects only short-term thinking. Using clickbait to get people to a website is the same as knocking people over the head and dragging them into your store. They may be there, but they will not buy anything because they will hate your brand.

When everyone optimises for everything, it is no longer a competitive advantage. The only true competitive advantage that people will have is what rests in their brains – creativity. Without that, you will only be as good as everyone else.

The benefits of creativity

According to an updated study in Admap magazine by Data2Decisions founder Paul Dyson, creativity is – by far – the second-best profit multiplier after market size:

Optimisation and best practices aim to do what someone else defines or the best of what everyone else does – but nothing more than that.

"Best practice is like training wheels – it keeps you safe whilst you're learning how to excel in your industry,” Helen Pollitt, head of SEO at the British digital marketing agency Reflect Digital, said. “To really differentiate yourself from the competition you need to be open to experimentation and growth, true optimisation requires facing failure. The issue with sticking to the safe zone of best practice is it stifles creativity."

The best depiction of the benefit of being different that I have seen comes from this BBH ad:

People notice what is different. And if your marketing does not get noticed in the first place, nothing else you do matters. As BBH London strategy director Lucian Trestler recently put it:

“‘Difference’ isn’t just a two bob philosophy or a frivolous creative penchant. It is the most powerful communications tool there is to deliver commercial results. We have a vast amount of data to support that. Evidence from neuroscience, marketing science and creative effectiveness data all agree on this point; difference is commercially safer than ‘safety.’”

Optimising based on data or algorithms is easier than being creative – but it is not always better, according to Wistia co-founder and chief executive Chris Savage.

“Today, everyone scores their leads with Marketo and A/B tests thirty different varieties of their landing page. You can’t get a competitive advantage doing that stuff anymore. You could say that as the percentage of marketers with a certain tech stack or using a certain tool approaches 100%, the competitive advantage you reap from it approaches zero,” he once wrote. "Using data to scale your marketing is critical. But when we all have access to the same types of data, it won’t be the data that differentiates us — it’ll be the art.”

Tom Goodwin recently said something similar: “A/B testing seems to be getting out of hand. Seems to be a way to offload decision making, not have a strategy, or gut or courage. What great art/music/products would ever be made this way?”

But tell that to those digital marketers who think only in terms of optimisation. Tell that to high-tech chief executives who want to mimic the marketing of competitors and think that they need only a differentiated product to be successful. (Just like record companies, startups are risk-averse because they do not want to lose the millions of investor dollars.)

In a quote attributed to John Ward from B&B Dorland in England, “advertising is a craft executed by people who aspire to be artists but is assessed by those who aspire to be scientists. I cannot imagine any human relationship more perfectly designed to produce total mayhem.”

At Digital Annexe University in 2015, Dave Trott gave a classic speech on creativity. Effective communications, he said, needs to have an impact, needs to communicate, and needs to be persuasive. “Impact” is the most important part.

“Impact will get you on the radar,” he said. “Without impact, there’s nothing there. There might be a bloke outside on the street right now telling us the secret of all life, and we’ll never know because we can’t hear him. Without impact, nothing happens.”

Now, take the desire of so many marketers to optimise all collateral to match some alleged universal standard. How will their work be different from that of everyone else? How will their work stand out? How will their work have an impact?

“Optimisation might work for certain businesses for a certain amount of time,” Steve Daniels, an independent graphic designer in the UK, said. “This course of action may feel safer, but it only remains safe if there are no competitors who disrupt the market or start playing the brand game in a strong way. As soon as that happens, focusing on creativity is a great a way to play the long game – and to invest in your future success.”

If your business wants to remain safe, no one will notice you. Taking creative risks is how you become memorable.

A quick recommendation

So, if you want to listen to an album where the musicians wrote their own material, played dozens of instruments, and created songs that are lyrically intelligent, harmonically complex, and timbrally diverse, I have an assignment for you.

Listen to records or remastered CDs of the Moody Blues album In Search of the Lost Chord (1968) and The Smiths’ song How Soon Is Now? (1985) with a good pair of noise-cancelling headphones and some refreshment of your choice. Maybe it will kickstart some creative inspiration.

After all, the Beatles will be remembered forever. Justin Bieber will not.

The Promotion Fix is an exclusive biweekly column for The Drum contributed by global marketing and technology keynote speaker Samuel Scott, a former journalist, consultant and director of marketing in the high-tech industry. Follow him on Twitter. Scott is based out of Tel Aviv, Israel.

This content was originally published here.

[brandbaskets]

New Post has been published on https://brandbaskets.in/best-wireless-routers-2018-the-best-routers-for-your-home-network/

Best wireless routers 2018: the best routers for your home network

Nothing is worse than trying to show someone an awesome video on YouTube, only to have everything stop, suddenly replaced by the dreaded buffering icon. If this is something that happens to you often, you might want to go out and pick up one of the best routers you can buy today. After all – buffering icons need to stay in the past, where they belong.

The first thing you may be tempted to do to combat your internet woes is to just upgrade your internet service. But, even if you have the fastest internet connection in the world – it won’t matter if your router isn’t up to the task? Luckily, we’ve picked out the best wireless routers on the market in 2018.

Unfortunately, the router market is filled with dozens of different devices – so, finding the best router for your needs can be difficult. Don’t worry though, we’ve created a list of the best wireless routers you can buy in 2018. No matter what you need to do on the internet, you can be confident you’ll find the best router for your needs right here.

1. Google Wifi

The future of wireless networking gets affordable

Speed: 802.11ac 5GHz down: 101.41 Mbps, 2.4GHz down: 47.53 Mbps | Connectivity: 2 x Gigabit Ethernet ports per Wifi point (1 WAN and 1 LAN port each) | Features: AC1200 2 x 2 Wave 2 Wi-Fi, TX beamforming, Bluetooth Smart ready

Super simple setup

Great value

Limited hardware control

Lower AC rating

In a lot of ways, Google Wifi is truly the future of wireless routers, and with it, you can finally bid farewell to the days when the only way to achieve wireless freedom was a bunch of unattractive range extenders in all of your power outlets. The premise of Google Wifi is simple – you buy a set of points and place them in key locations around your house. Then you just simply scan a QR code, and you’re done. They’re set up. 

Read the full review: Google Wifi

2. Asus RT-AC86U

Performance as loud as the design

Speed: : 802.11ac 1734 Mbps down | Connectivity: : 5 x Gigabit LAN, 1 x USB 2.0, 1 x USB 3.0 | Features: : MU-MIMO, Traffic Analyzer, Adaptive QoS WTFast Gamers Private Network

Extensive firmware

Great speed and coverage

Complex firmware

Divisive looks

  Anyone who’s familiar with Asus, and especially its more gamer-centric products knows exactly what they’re getting themselves into here – especially regarding design. The Asus RT-AC86U looks like the result of a Mountain Dew-fueled deal with the devil, and it will certainly stand out wherever you put it. Underneath that garish design forever, is hardware that, for its price, wholly stands up against its competition. You won’t be paying a premium here for the ‘gaming hardware’ and, if you’re looking for a fast router at a good price, you can’t really go wrong here.

Read the full review: Asus RT-AC86U 

3. Netgear Orbi

Wireless coverage that’s high-end, almost to a fault

Speed: 802.11ac 5GHz down: 90.14 Mbps, 2.4GHz down: 93.69 Mbps | Connectivity: 4 x 10/100/1000Mbps Gigabit Ethernet ports (1 WAN + 3 LAN for Router, 4 LAN for Satellite), 1 x USB 2.0 port | Features: 4GB flash memory, 512MB RAM, AC3000, MU-MIMO ready

Excellent coverage

Easy setup

Mighty pricey

Finicky Wi-Fi band settings

Unlike Google Wi-Fi, the Netgear Orbi wireless mesh system comes with just two units instead of three: a router and a satellite, much like a cell phone signal booster. And, it may be expensive, but it’s worth it – its simple setup, requiring little more than being plugged into a modem and a wall adapter, makes the Orbi extremely accessible. Add in its fantastic performance, and it’s easy to see why the Netgear Orbi is one of the best routers you can buy in 2018. 

Read full review: Netgear Orbi

4. TP-Link Archer C5400 v2

Weird looks, great performance

Speed: 802.11ac 5GHz down: up to 2,167 Mbps, 2.4GHz down: up to 1,000 Mbps | Connectivity: 4 x LAN, 1 x WAN, 1 x USB 3.0, 1 x USB 2.0 | Features: MU-MIMO, Tri-band Wi-Fi, 8 external antennas, Alexa voice control

Fast and powerful

Alexa and IFTTT support

Expensive

If you want high-end wireless performance from a device that looks like something out of an 90s Sci-Fi movie, you’re going to want to check out the TP-Link Archer C5400 v2. Sure, it’s not a Mesh Wi-Fi system like Google Wi-Fi, but it’s unique in its ability to bridge consumer and enterprise users by offering high end features at an affordable price point – and with easy setup. Yeah, it looks weird, but if you’re looking for the best router for a large home, you really can’t do much better.

Read the full review: TP-Link Archer C5400 v2

5. Netgear Orbi Pro

A mesh router for the office

Speed: 802.11AC 3Gbps | Connectivity: 1 x Gigabit WAN, 4 x Gigabit LAN | Features: Modular network coverage, modern design, easy setup, traffic separation

Easy to deploy

Fantastic performance

Very expensive

If you work in an office, and you’re ready to bring your networking into the modern age with one of the best routers for businesses, you seriously need to check out the Netgear Orbi Pro. Much like the Netgear Orbi mentioned earlier in this guide, the Orbi Pro is a modular Wi-Fi mesh system, but it makes some design and performance changes that specifically cater to the business user. It’s not cheap, but if you run a business where you can’t afford anyone slowing down due to slow Wi-Fi, it’s worth every penny.

Read the full review: Netgear Orbi Pro

6. Amplifi HD

Bringing style to mesh networking

Speed: 802.11AC 1300mbps | Connectivity: 1 x Gigabit WAN, 4 x Gigabit LAN | Features: Modular network coverage, modern design, LCD touchscreen

 Modern aesthetic 

 Easy to set up 

 More expensive than competition 

While it may be more expensive than the Google Wifi for similar performance, the Amplifi HD as a clean, modern style that would make Apple jealous. While this may seem like a minor point for some, this aesthetic means that nobody will be ashamed of installing this router in a nice open space – which will only boost it’s already-great performance. In our testing we didn’t notice a difference in performance, whether right next to the main router, or upstairs next to one of the included mesh units. This is one of those routers that matches great performance with great looks – as long as you have the cash to support it.

Read the full review: Amplifi HD 

7. Linksys WRT32X Gaming Router

A gaming router with the performance to back it up

Speed: : AC3200 | Connectivity: : 1 x Gigabit WAN, 4 x Gigabit LAN, 1 x USB 3.0, 1 x eSATA/USB 2.0 | Features: : Killer Prioritization Engine, Customized Firmware, 1.8GHZ Dual-Core CPU, MU-MIMO

Great Wi-Fi speed

Easy to use firmware

Very expensive

On the surface, the Linksys WRT32X might not look that different than Linksys’ heavy-hitter, the WRT3200. And, well, that’s not actually that far off. The WRT32X takes all of the successful components of that highly rated router, and puts them in a gamer-centric router with a custom firmware that’s extremely easy to navigate and a very subdued and attractive visual design. You will be paying a premium for this repackaging, but if you’re looking for reliable ping performance that online gaming requires, the Linksys WRT32X takes one of the best routers and tailors it to your needs.

Read the full review: Linksys WRT32X Gaming Router 

8. Billion BiPac 8900AX-2400

A highfalutin router that doubles as a modem

Speed: 802.11ac: 2,400Mbps 802.11n: 2,400Mbps | Connectivity: 1 x DSL port, 4 x 1000Mbps Gigabit Ethernet ports, 1 x EWAN Ethernet port, 1 x USB 2.0 | Features: Built-in ADSL2+ modem, 1 x 2.4GHz; 1 x 5Ghz bands, LED status lights, reset button, power button

Good performance

ADSL2+ modem included

Clunky interface

Only USB 2.0

 Billion has done it again and delivered the fastest router it’s ever released. Boasting a throughput of 2,400Mbps over both a 2.4GHz and 5GHz band, the BiPac 8900AX-2400 is a beast – even if we wouldn’t consider it aesthetically pleasing. In lieu of a dated interface, this router features a wide range of ports for added storage down the line on top of integrating a state of the art ADSL2+ modem. 

Read the full review: Billion BiPac 8900AX-2400

9. Starry Station

Wi-Fi made easy (and attractive)

Speed: 802.11ac: 1,300Mbps 802.11n: 450Mbps | Connectivity: 2 x Gigabit LAN port | Features: Dual-band Wi-Fi technology, 3.8-inch LCD touchscreen, embedded speaker/microphone

Elegant, simple interface

Touchscreen offers info and control

May need to rewire source

Gets noticeably loud

For those of us still clinging on to those wireless modems rented out by our ISPs, the Starry Station makes Wi-Fi a breeze without handing over piles of cash every month to a greedy conglomerate. Not only is it fast, boasting download speeds that are usually around the same as a Verizon FiOS stock router, but the Starry Station is also beautiful – enough so that you won’t feel the need to hide it away in a cabinet, obstructing its signal. Plus, it manages to avoid those pesky numerical gateways that no one wants to memorize. 

Read the full review: Starry Station

This product is only available in the US as of this writing. UK and Australian readers: check out a fine alternative in the .

10. Synology RT2600ac

NAS or router – why don’t we have both?

Speed: 802.11ac: 1,733Mbps 802.11n: 800Mbps | Connectivity: 4 x Gigabit WAN, 1 x USB 2.0, 1 x USB 3.0, 1 x SD card reader | Features: 512MB RAM, 1.7GHz dual-core ARM Qualcomm IPQ8065 processor, MU-MIMO, beam-forming, 4GB flash storage

Easy-to-use web interface

Great hardware extras

Pricier than other AC2600 routers

Not the fastest 802.11ac router

It’s not everyday you encounter a router that doubles as an NAS, or network-attached storage device – a type of server box that allows you to store and access files over your local internet connection. The Synology RT2600ac, on the other hand, combines the best of both worlds, going as far as to deliver third-party applications such as VPNs and DLNA media servers. There’s even Apple Time Machine support for over-the-air Mac backups.

Read the full review:

Joe Osborne, Bill Thomas and Gabe Carey have also contributed to this article

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[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

Hi! My name is Coray Seifert, I’m the Director of Production here at Experiment 7. I’ve been working on VR games in various capacities for the past 4 years, first with Impeller Studios, then with Autodesk’s AR/VR Interactive Group, but most meaningfully with the fine folks here at Experiment 7. Over that time, I’ve made a number of horrific mistakes that haunt my dreams to this day. I’d like to share some of them with you!

If the beer is virtual, are the calories real?

Below you’ll find 7 lessons I learned working on VR strategy games at Experiment 7. I wanted to put this list together so others who are just getting into VR development can avoid some of the same challenges.

Why spend the time to share key learnings with potential competition? The bottom line for our corner of the industry is that the more teams there are making great VR games, the more consumers we’ll see adopting VR platforms, and the better the market will be for all of us. Just like how Tesla shares their best practices with their competition to help drive their industry forward, we hope that creating a marketplace of shared ideas will help the VR game creation space move forward as well.

In traditional game development, we have experiences, best practices, and cautionary tales that effectively guide our efforts. Platform migrations have happened in the past and we’ve tweaked our best practices accordingly. What works on PC might not work on console due to input differences, processing power or consumer expectations, so we modify our approach slightly to adapt for the new medium. 

VR, on the other hand, is a complete paradigm shift. Not only do our best practices need to be refreshed, but some of the core tenants of what we believe about game development need to be unlearned. Moving the player’s first person camera may make them sick. 2D planes for VFX can be invalidated due to stereoscopic rendering. UI and UX design has to be completely rethought from the ground up. This is a complete phase shift from the old way of doing things. 

That's no UI object...

I find myself annoyed by long-form lists where you have to scroll forever to see if the pillars of the article are worth investing your time in, so here are the 7 lessons, in brief:

Double down on engineering – More tech needs, less asset budget. Trade artists for engineers.

Make sure someone on your team has shipped something in VR – Ideally your tech lead.

Don’t skimp on preproduction – Prototype aggressively, define hardware/QA/pipelines first.

Respect the minspec – Pick your platforms, identify your minspec, and stick to it.

Realism is important, but comfort is king – Use realistic proportions, but framerate/comfort is priority.

Start small – Maintain vision, but start with a fraction of what you’re eventually trying to build.

Expect the unexpected – Prepare for rapidly evolving hardware, dev tools and marketplace.

If you just came for the pillars, I hope they’re helpful in your adventures. If you’re here for context, let’s dive into the details!

Let’s start at the beginning.

When you’re building your team for your VR project, you’ll want to staff heavier on the engineering side than you would for a traditional game project. Further, it's optimal to populate your team with a greater percentage of experienced developers than normal. 

While more engineers doesn’t perfectly equate to increased velocity, the simple fact is that every problem you face will require new solutions, a risk that can be meaningfully mitigated with people power. Even if you’re using a proven commercial game engine, everything from feature development to optimization takes a long time on VR and involves a significant learning curve. These are new knots to untangle and for the most part, very few people across the industry have meaningful experience in VR.

Here’s how I would recommend adjusting your engineering team size: 

>10 total headcount: 3x

11-50 total headcount: 2x

50+ total headcount: 1.5x

If you’re working with a fixed budget on your game, this may mean scaling down your art headcount, which isn’t great in and of itself. One mitigating factor is that stereoscopic rendering means you're basically rendering everything twice. A game of comparable scope simply has fewer pixels it can push through the renderer.

Accordingly, the content requirements for VR are lower than other platforms. If you think back to past generations of console games and the scope of art created for those games – both in terms of the raw asset density and in terms of the amount of polish per asset – you can get a good sense of where VR is in its current (2017) iteration. 

In an ideal world, I recommend a small VR art team laden with senior artists who enjoy new technology challenges and plenty of technical artists who are passionate about the medium.

The good news on this front is that great engineers are frequently drawn to new technology problems, just as great artists can be drawn to new mediums of expression.  You can harness that excitement to bring fantastic people into your organization.

It’s one thing to read about the technical limitations of VR or talk to someone who has shipped a game in VR, but don’t talk yourself into thinking you can make it without significant input from someone who released a commercial product on the platform. You need someone who has directly worked on solving the unique problems of the medium. It can be a freelancer, consultant, or advisor, but ideally that person is someone who is a core member of your team. 

The best case is if this person works in the engineering vertical of your company, even more so if your VR expert is the head of your engineering team. This allows that person to translate those experiences working on the platform directly through their team, providing that intrinsic, internalized knowledge of VR-specific challenges to everyone working on the technology that drives your game.

Experiment 7 is lucky in that our Technical Director, Mario Grimani, has been working in VR since the days of duct tape and bailing wire. One of our engineers worked on open source VR solutions. I worked on some of the very early (and very rough around the eyeballs) VR prototypes internally at Autodesk. Those experiences – often in figuring out what doesn’t work on the platform – have been crucial to the success of our team, even more profoundly than in traditional game platform transitions, because of the transformative nature of VR.

Baby steps from the Autodesk days...

New tech is exciting and none more so than VR. Which is why it’s vitally important that you take the time during preproduction to plan, prototype and test. Don’t get too excited and run straight into the teeth of your project! 

Stick to your phase gate plan. Build and iterate through your concept, look & feel, and early prototype in preproduction (which will take longer than you expect, especially for your first project). Getting a new asset pipeline for VR set up is no small task - do it early. If you wait until the production phase to finalize your content and feature workflow, you’ll spend your production cycle firefighting and redoing key systems, rather than delivering great features and content.

Make sure that you’re aggressively prototyping at every phase, even with proven mechanics. We made the decision to go with a relatively low-scope chess game for our first title, so we could easily integrate a Chess engine and use Unity store assets to test the concept of table games in VR early. That process, as rudimentary as it was, revealed tons of issues and opportunities in our core design and in our technology expectations. Issues that would have been hugely problematic (or significant missed opportunities) if we had left them to the end of the project.

"Okay, so imagine you've got a table...and it's magic..." - Geoff, probably

Finally, during preproduction, budget more time than you think for infrastructure. You can’t just buy a few machines and desks and be off to the races. Depending on the platforms you’re targeting, the various combinations of hardware and software can take significant time to track down, given the wide range of headsets currently in use (with new ones coming online every quarter). QA infrastructure can be especially difficult to get going on new VR projects given the specific physical device requirements at the scale of a full QA team.

In VR, more than any platform, framerate is more important than fidelity. 

As you may or may not know, framerate in VR has an outsized impact on the overall experience. High framerates (90+ fps) lead to a smooth experience, while lower framerates can lead to a profound sense of discomfort and render your application unusable to a significant portion of your audience. 

No matter how aggressively you scope for memory and processing power, content has a tendency to come in over budget – make sure your asset budget has lots of buffer room; more than you think you need. Things will get broken by new platforms that are dynamic and constantly evolving – make sure you’re accounting for this so that when something does break, it doesn’t completely nuke your game. Users will do horrible, horrible things to their hardware – make sure to account for your end users installing tons of CPU and memory-hogging applications on the target platform. 

If you’re multi-platform, set goals based on your lowest possible performing platforms…and stick to them! This is a non-trivial task, as it requires business, technology, and creative buy-in. Push this to the top of the priority list. 

Realistic proportions, movement, and physical relationships are critical to creating a VR experience that makes use of presence. Content that is out of scale with the world around it risks appearing "spooky" and unsettling, leading to subtle but meaningful feelings of cognitive dissonance in your users. Unrealistic or unfamiliar gravity, viscosity, or friction can have the same effect.

Door frames, windows, tables, chairs and other common real-world physical objects in game space are especially susceptible to this phenomenon. For games grounded in reality, there is a pretty simple solution. Measure things and stick to those sizes. This constraint can certainly be a limiting factor, but can also be a creative challenge that leads to dynamic and innovative solutions to problems both complex and mundane.

Preproduction proportions testing

During preproduction, try starting with realistic proportions and aggressively test with white-rooms to avoid having to rework assets down the road. Working from a regimented, realistic base of assets goes a long way towards making the user comfortable in your environment.

All that said, the one guiding principle for VR – especially in these relatively early days of mass market consumer VR – is that comfort is king. It’s imperative to ensure your experience is palatable to your target audience. 

If you’re making a card game for a wide audience, make sure that your framerate is extremely high, your contrast is relatively low, and you’re never accelerating or moving the character outside of motion-tracked head and body movements. If you’re making a hardcore flight simulator with 6 degrees of freedom and non-stop flak explosions, you have a different bar to hit, but core tenants (always high framerates, try to never move the player’s camera unless they’re controlling it, use slower acceleration where appropriate, etc.) are always good to keep top of mind.

Be cognizant that with every increment you push your experience past your target comfort point, you’re losing and alienating another large cohort of users, potentially damaging your reputation and your brand.

Find a spark and build from that. There are so many unknowns in VR – especially right at this moment in time – that it requires an entirely new pipeline, process, and technology outlook to bring anything to market, let alone something of notable scope. 

This is VR. You should dream big. However, the best advice I could give at this moment in time is to create a small chunk of that dream with your first VR release. Get that product to the market – to any market – and get into preproduction on your second title with everything you’ve learned. Use that experience to help your team execute more efficiently and at a vastly higher level than the first go round.

This is one thing we nailed at E7. We started off with a relatively small game in Magic Table Chess, moved on to something marginally bigger for our second game, with exponentially larger projects on the horizon. Each step along the way has enabled us to work faster, focus more on experiences than infrastructure, and push our quality bar higher and higher.

Starting to come together...

This is the agile mantra, but especially so for new, rapidly evolving platforms like VR. It might sound cliché, but the pain is real. These are incredibly dynamic software and hardware products that are constantly evolving in meaningful ways. Platform updates right before VC meetings, cables getting imperceptibly loose and taking someone offline for hours, system background processes triggering and running the game at one frame every other second are all real possibilities that many of you will encounter. 

While there’s little you can do to truly mitigate for these challenges, knowing that something along the way will conspire to foul up your perfectly-planned software project can help you reduce the impact of these issues when they do happen.  

In addition to unexpected critical fails, if you’re working with a commercial game engine or platform back end suite, plan to be rolling over to new versions far more frequently than on traditional platforms. The dynamic nature of these platforms means that new updates address critical issues and can introduce new version mismatches more frequently than stable technology platforms.

In Conclusion Making games in VR is awesome. I frequently find myself losing myself in our games when I should be doing work, just because the experiences are still so profoundly magical. VR is a new and massively exciting frontier. A stereoscopic wild west.

It all comes together

However, like the American wild west of old, it’s full of danger and adventure. Being cognizant of the perils of the medium can’t help you to avoid these challenges altogether, but hopefully it can help mitigate the impact of them when you hit them.

I’d love to hear similar experiences folks have had working on early projects in VR. Horror stories are always great, or if you disagree with anything I’ve said here I’ll keep an oculus out for comments posted to this article.

Yes, I just ended this 2500-word VR article with an eyeball pun. 

This post originally appears on the Experiment 7 Blog.

Coray Seifert is the Director of Production for Experiment 7, a VR strategy game developer based in New York City and San Diego. For more than 15 years, Coray has developed games as a producer, game designer, and writer for organizations like Autodesk, THQ's Kaos Studios, and the US Department of Defense. A Lifetime Member of the International Game Developers Association, Coray was elected to the IGDA’s Board of directors in 2007 at the age of 27; the youngest board member in IGDA history.  

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Missed out on Walmart’s Deals For Days? Believe it or not, most of the sales are still active this weekend! (Photo: Getty Images)

After a week full of sales, sales and more sales, you (and your wallet) can probably use a break. However, if you realized you forgot to pick up something important, or if something you really wanted got sold out from right under you, you’re in luck.

Walmart’s having a massive weekend-long sale and the savings are just as good as they were earlier this week. We’re talking marked-down TVs, tech, vacs and more, all discounted and ready to be scooped up.

If you spend $35 or more, you’ll get free shipping. To score free shipping on all orders, plus lots more benefits including speedy delivery, sign up for Walmart+. Get a free 15-day trial here (a answering a quick three-question survey will add on an additional two weeks for a solid 30 days of use). 

Here are the best weekend sales from Walmart sale.

Best TV sales

No joke — this Sony 65-incher is over $300 off this weekend! (Photo: Walmart)

On sale for $998 (was $1,300), the Sony 65-inch 4K Ultra HD LED TV is the latest from the legendary tech company. The massive 65-inch 4K display is vivid and detailed. Sony’s state-of-the-art Processor X1 powers this beauty for true-to-life visuals, while HDR (High Dynamic Range) settings make sure colors stay bright and black levels stay dark. And shoppers just love its massive size!

“I will never be able to watch a smaller TV again. The picture and sound are incredible,” raved a happy TV watcher. “I can’t say enough great things about this TV. It feels like I’m at the movie theater! It also automatically signs in to all my applications after I log in with my Google account, and I can talk into the remote to control the TV. Love it!”

The 4K TV includes Android TV straight from Google. This means you’ll have instant access to popular streaming apps like Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, Hulu, YouTube, Prime Video and much more. You’ll also get a wide range of gaming apps too. What’s not to love?

Story continues

Check out more TV sales below:

Sony 32-inch Class HD LED Smart TV, $298 (was $348), walmart.com

TCL 32-inch 3-Series Class HD LED Roku Smart TV, $145 (was $200), walmart.com

Sceptre 40-inch Class Full HD LED TV, $155 (was $200), walmart.com

Samsung 43-inch Class 4K Ultra HD Smart QLED TV, $898 (was $1,000), walmart.com

Samsung 50-inch Class 4K The Frame QLED Smart TV, $1,198 (was $1,700), walmart.com

TCL 50-inch Class 5-Series 4K Ultra HD QLED Roku Smart TV, $500 (was $600), walmart.com

LG 55-inch Class 4K Ultra HD Smart OLED C1 Series TV, $1,497 (was $2,000), walmart.com

Sony 55-inch Class XBR55X800H Bravia 4K Ultra HD LED Android Smart TV, $798 (was $1,000), walmart.com

LG 65-inch Class 4K Ultra HD NanoCell Smart TV, $997 (was $1,200), walmart.com

Best headphone and earbud sales

Your new best buds are now half price! (Photo: Walmart)

These Philips Wireless In-Ear Headphones are a handsome, waterproof option with a price that belies their high-performance quality: They’re on sale for just $30, down from $60. Yep, half price!

Walmart shoppers love everything about these cans: the sound, the comfy fit, the sturdy charging case. “I have had challenges finding in-ear phones that fit me well for a long time,” reported one fan. “I grabbed the chance to try these Philips Wireless In-Ear Headphones and I can say these are perfect! First off, I like the charging case, so you have power on the go when you need it. The headphones are super easy to pair both with my PC and my phone, and the sound is very good: The highs are not tinny and the bass is smooth…. Another quality product from Philips!”

What he said! You’ll never be juiceless with these Philips Wireless In-Ear Headphones — they offer up to 12 hours of playback. Impressive!

Check out more headphone and earbud sales below:

Beats Solo Pro Wireless Noise Canceling On-Ear Headphones, $149 (was $300), walmart.com

Bietrun Wireless Bluetooth Earbuds, $26 (was $130), walmart.com

Philips Bass+ BH305 Wireless Active Noise Canceling Headphones, $40 (was $120), walmart.com

JLab Audio JBuddies Studio Over-ear Kids Headphones, $15 (was $50), walmart.com

Meidong Bluetooth Noise-Canceling Over-Ear Headphones, $35 (was $70), walmart.com

Luxmo Bluetooth Headphones, $18 (was $36), walmart.com

Jelly Comb On Ear Headphones, $17 (was $50), walmart.com

JBL Live 500BT On-Ear Wireless Headphones, $60 (was $150), walmart.com

JLab Audio JBuds Air Executive True Wireless Bluetooth Earbuds, $39 (was $70), walmart.com

Best gaming sales

You haven’t seen The Last of Us! Not just a figure of speech, so snap this up! (Photo: Walmart)

The Last of Us Part II for PlayStation 4 — which is on sale for $30, or half off at Walmart — is set five years after the first game and follows Ellie and Abby’s fight to survive in a post-apocalyptic US. (Hint: The decisions made in the first game come back to haunt the characters in the second.) This is one of the best games of 2020, and it’s half off right now.

“I have played it three times,” shared a delighted gamer. “On each play-through, I found something new, which I most likely missed because of the insane attention to detail in this game. It all started to make sense after my second playthrough, and I think that The Last of Us Part II is one of the best storytelling masterpieces out there.”

Check out more gaming sales below:

Luigi’s Mansion 3 (Nintendo Switch), $40 (was $50), walmart.com

Fire Emblem: Three Houses (Nintendo Switch), $40 (was $50), walmart.com

The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (Nintendo Switch), $40 (was $60), walmart.com

Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games: Tokyo 2020 (Nintendo Switch), $40 (was $60), walmart.com

Outriders: Day One Edition (PS4), $40 (was $60), walmart.com

Madden NFL 21 (Xbox One), $20 (was $60), walmart.com

Liphom Gaming Headset, $29 (was $48), walmart.com

Grand Theft Auto V: Premium Edition (PS4), $18 (was $60), walmart.com

The Pillars of The Earth (PS4), $29 (was $45), walmart.com

Best smart-home sales

Wouldn’t you like to wake up to something more lyrical, gentle or informative than a sharp, droning buzz or beep? (Photo: Walmart)

On sale for $49 (was $80), the Lenovo Smart Clock is powered with Google Assistant for seamless syncing to a smartphone. It can rouse you from your slumber with your favorite tunes, the weather, calendar reminders and events, and that podcast you love. Because, really, who couldn’t use some help getting out of bed?

“I have trouble waking up in the mornings and this alarm clock doesn’t disappoint,” raved a satisfied shopper. “I like the wake-up feature that gradually wakes you up and then gives you a morning update of the weather and all the morning news. I’m able to connect it to all my Google devices too.”

Check out more smart home sales below:

Google Nest Mini (second generation), $35 (was $49), walmart.com

Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2 (44mm), $200 (was $279), walmart.com

XODO Smart Home Security Surveillance Kit, $60 (was $80), walmart.com

XODO Smart Wi-Fi Video Doorbell Wireless Security Camera, $90 (was $150), walmart.com

TSV Smart Plug (two-pack), $18 (was $26), walmart.com

Defender Ultra HD 4K Wired Outdoor Security System (1TB), $260 (was $450), walmart.com

Anself Wireless Burglar Alarm, $20 (was $28), walmart.com

Fymall Wi-Fi Smart Color LED Light Bulb, $11 (was $24), walmart.com

Best home office sales

You never know when you need a new laptop. Actually, now you do. (Photo: Walmart)

The thing about laptops? Sometimes you’re the last to know when one’s on its last legs, so it’s always wise to keep your eyes open for a replacement (or backup). On sale for $429 (was $749), this sleek and stylish Gateway Ultra Slim Notebook has a 15.6-inch Full HD LCD display at 1080p, runs Windows 10 and features a comfortable keyboard and spacious trackpad for quick and easy navigation. It’s paired with 16GB of memory and 256GB of on-board storage, and has up to 10 hours of battery life per charge. Shoppers love its built-in fingerprint reader for a super-speedy login.

“Laptop is amazing. I could not be happier with it,” raved a savvy Walmart shopper. “Super smooth interface, fantastic speed and video quality is superb — I have not had any buffering at all. The screen size is perfect and I am really loving this dark green color, very sleek and modern looking. I like that you can set a fingerprint login for extra security…Lots of storage space, fast browsing and crystal clear sound. You really cannot beat this laptop.”

Check out more home office sales below:

Lenovo Ideapad Flex 5, $399 (was $520), walmart.com

Sceptre 27-inch HD LCD Computer Monitor, $130 (was $200), walmart.com

Samsung CB4 Chromebook, $159 (was $230), walmart.com

Canon Pixma G4210 Wireless MegaTank All-In-One InkJet Printer, $300 (was $400), walmart.com

Ousgar 47-inch White Desk, $80 (was $300), walmart.com

Kuku Mobile Call Center Telephone USB Headset, $28 (was $40), walmart.com

Beyerdynamic MMX 300 2nd Gen Conference Call Headset, $268 (was $422), walmart.com

Gamma Ray Optics 010 Slim Vintage Computer Readers, $18 (was $25), walmart.com

Hemu Fashion Bamboo Laptop Lap Tray, $38 (was $80), walmart.com

Best vacuums sales

This vacuum sucks…and that’s a very good thing. Save nearly 70 percent! (Photo: Walmart)

Do you have hair-shedding pets? Do you want to keep a clean home but are just too busy during your week to make sure it stays neat and tidy? If your answer is yes, then the EcoVacs Deebot 711 Robot Vacuum Cleaner might be a good option for you. It’s on sale for a ridonculous $178 at Walmart!

The robovac makes it easy to keep your hardwood floors or carpet clean, even if you’re not at home. Just sync the vacuum to your smartphone via the Ecovacs app and let the Deebot do the rest. This vacuum uses “Smart Navi 2.0” technology to map your space, so it can keep your home free from crumbs, debris, pet hair and other icky things.

“I’m really happy with the quality and price of this vacuum,” shared a savvy Walmart shopper. “It does a solid job, follows its schedule and switches easily between thick shag rug and hardwood floors. I love that it sends you a report when it’s done and lets you know if it has an issue.”

Check out more vacuum sales below:

Bissell Pet Hair Eraser Slim Corded, $99 (was $199), walmart.com

Shark ION Robot Vacuum RV750, $148 (was $299), walmart.com

iHome AutoVac Eclipse G 2-in-1 Robot Vacuum and Mop, $179 (was $400), walmart.com

Eureka Groove 4-Way Control Robotic Vacuum, $129 (was $199), walmart.com

iHome AutoVac Nova Self Empty Robot Vacuum and Mop, $299 (was $599), walmart.com

ILife A4s Robot Vacuum Cleaner, $119 (was $180), walmart.com

Mighty Rock Robot Vacuum and Mop, $73 (was $130), walmart.com

Ionvac SmartClean 2000 Robovac, $99 (was $180), walmart.com

ILife V5s Pro Robot Vacuum and Mop, $135 (was $180), walmart.com

Best style sales

Floaty, flowy, and flamboyantly economical. Perfect for any occasion. (Photo: Walmart)

No, it’s not a typo: This gorgeous Max Studio frock is on sale for 15 bucks! It has a fit-and- flared silhouette, a tiered skirt, and fluttery ruffled sleeves. It’s made of a soft, flattering jersey material, and boasts a knee-length hem and a U-shaped neckline.

Did we mention it’s $83 off?!

“Fabric is soft and comfy, like pajamas,” a shopper shared. “Cut is flattering…The shoulder detail is super cute. It’s pretty casual, but some wedges and jewelry could probably dress it up for an office setting.”

Check out more style sales below:

Scoop Women’s Espadrille Wedge Sandal, $20 (was $35), walmart.com

Zanea Womens Polka Dot Short Sleeve Long Dress, $24 (was $48), walmart.com

KOGMO Womens Premium Cotton Full Length Leggings, $12 (was $18), walmart.com

Status by Chenault Women’s Cotton Slub Jersey with Cotton Eyelet Dress, $9.50 (was $78), walmart.com

Cate & Chloe McKenzie 18k White Gold Dangling Earrings, $18 (was $136), walmart.com

Charmo Women’s Ruffle One Piece Swimsuit, $17 (was $30), walmart.com

Best kitchen sales

Drool-worthy meals at an even more drool-worthy price. Seriously, though,don’t drool. People are eating! (Photo: Walmart)

Listen up, breakfast connoisseurs! This griddle is made for all sorts of morning delicacies: eggs, bacon, even pancakes! It’s treated with a nonstick coating and can act as a separate cooking surface for those with dietary restrictions or as an additional surface for family cookouts or side dishes. It’s so easy to clean too — just chuck it in the dishwasher.

“Really good griddle — everything I’ve cooked turned out delicious!” one shopper shared. “I put four chops on at a time, but you can fit more — just rotate them — and all I can say is…delicious!!! After use, I take a paper towel or a rag and wipe it down. My hubby and I just love it!”

Check out more kitchen sales below:

Tramontina Primaware 18 Piece Non-stick Cookware Set, Steel Gray, $40 (was $50), walmart.com

The Pioneer Woman Cowboy Rustic 14-Piece Forged Cutlery Knife Block Set, $39 (was $70), walmart.com

Chefman TurboFry Air Fryer, $74 (was $99), walmart.com

The Pioneer Woman Mazie 2-Piece Ceramic Red Rectangle Baker Set, $20 (was $25), walmart.com

Farberware 3.2 Quart Oil-Less Multi-Functional Air Fryer, $60 (was $99), walmart.com

Ninja 12 Cup Programmable Coffee Brewer, $69 (was $79), walmart.com

Best Choice Products 16.9qt 1800W 10-in-1 Family Size Air Fryer, $130 (was $255), walmart.com

Hamilton Beach 12 Cup Digital Automatic LCD Programmable Coffeemaker Brewer, $90 (was $105), walmart.com

Best beauty sales

The one mask you’ll be happy to keep wearing. (Photo: Walmart)

We can all use a little more luxury — and this mask is the perfect way to get it. It’s made with 24K gold, which is known for its anti-aging properties (think lifting and firming). Beyond helping rejuvenate your skin, it also leaves behind a beautiful golden glow.

“This mask is great,” a shopper shared. “It has a gooey consistency going on, and leaves your face super smooth and firm after. The gold color is really fun as well.”

Check out more beauty sales below:

BylissPRO Nano Titanium Lightweight Ionic Hair Dryer, $65 (was $85), walmart.com

Burberry Classic Eau De Parfum, $32 (was $98), walmart.com

Elizabeth Arden Ceramide Capsules Daily Youth Restoring Face Serum, $70 (was $100),walmart.com

Remington Anti-Static Flat Iron, $16 (was $20), walmart.com

Artnaturals Anti-Aging Retinol, $12 (was $16), walmart.com

Conair Double Ceramic Curling Iron, $12 (was $23), walmart.com

Glycolic Acid 20% Resurfacing Pads, $25 (was $50), walmart.com

IMAGE Skincare Ageless Total Eye Lift Creme, $31 (was $50), walmart.com

Best mattress and bedding sales

The stuff dreams are made of: saving $300 and getting the greatest sleep of your life. (Photo: Walmart)

If you’ve had your mattress for longer than you can remember, it’s high time to replace it — and, lucky you, this one is on sale! It’s made with 12 inches of plush memory foam supported by coils, and it’s just the right balance between soft and firm. The only drawback? Getting out of bed in the morning is about to get a lot harder.

“I was surprised at how soft and comfy this mattress was,” a shopper reported. “I took it out of the box and plastic and it opened right up to the 12-inch size. It is supposed to take 24 hours to expand but it expanded a lot right away. It’s super thick and so far feels very comfortable. I am surprised at how great a mattress in a box could be!”

Check out more mattress and bedding sales below:

Noble Linens 8-Piece Bed in a Bag Bedding Set, Twin, White, $45 (was $65), walmart.com

Mattress Topper Queen, 2-Inch Cool Swirl Gel Memory Foam Mattress Topper, Blue, $70 (was $105), walmart.com

Hatch Embroidered Stripe 7-Piece Comforter Set, $30 (was $70), walmart.com

Zeny Weighted Blanket, $47 (was $78), walmart.com

Wenzel 70″ x 60″ Camp Quilt – Red Brick Geo Print, $21 (was $29.50), walmart.com

Better Homes & Gardens Flowing Floral Comforter Set, $45 (was $65), walmart.com

Best pet sales

An unbeatable deal for the mistress of the house. That would be her. (Photo: Walmart)

It’s time to get your cat a space of her own — your couch cushions will thank you for it. This little den is perfect for small spaces and kittens. It has enough space for her to curl up and nap in, plus plenty of scratching spots and, most excitingly for her, a little ball she can attack as she pleases.

“My cats love this!” a shopper reported. “It’s great value for the price. The perch on top is small, but our cats find creative ways to utilize it…it’s a great scratcher and play station.”

Check out more pets sales below:

Oster Super Duty Dog Clippers, $35 (was $40), walmart.com

Portable Pet Dog Cat Outdoor Travel Water Bowl Bottle, $8.50 (was $11), walmart.com

Omega Paw Large Elite Self-Cleaning Litter Box, Black, $53 (was $78), walmart.com

Amgra Laser Pointer for Cats, $11 (was $16), walmart.com

Luxury Fluffy Soft Pet Bed, $15 (was $22), walmart.com

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Optimisation is the enemy of creativity in marketing and music

No, you are not becoming crankier as you approach middle age – music is indeed getting worse every year. And the marketing industry’s obsession with optimisation is to blame.

In late 2017, the YouTube channel Thoughty2 published a video exploring how music has changed over the decades. After starting with The Beatles, the narrator continues with an example of classic British understatement: “Fast forward to 2010, when Justin Bieber released his hit single Baby. This is generally considered to be a bad move.”

According to the research in the video, lyrical intelligence, harmonic complexity, and timbral diversity have decreased while dynamic range compression has been used to make music louder and louder. In short, songs are becoming stupider – especially since every hit now includes the “millennial whoop” as well.

“Instead of experimenting with different musical techniques and instruments, the vast majority of pop music today is built using the exact same combination of keyboard, drum machine, sampler, and computer software,” Thoughty2’s narrator states. “This might be considered as progressive by some people, but it truth it sucks the creativity and originality out of music – making everything sound somewhat similar.”

As a rule, businesses do not like risk. The video states that record companies today must spend anywhere from $500,000 to $3m to sign and market a new artist. That is a lot of money to spend on a band without being fully confident of success.

To minimise the risk and maximise the potential return, these companies optimise the music to do whatever seems to have worked in the past. Same set of instruments? Check. Simple lyrics? Check. Is it loud? Check. Simple melody? Check. Can you dance to it? Check. Millennial whoop? Check check.

But that optimisation process is a downward spiral that will result only in songs that will make Rebecca Black’s Friday sound as brilliant as Led Zeppelin's Kashmir. It is creating music by paint-by-numbers. It is ticking boxes rather than being creative. And the same thing is occurring in the marketing industry today.

The rise of optimisation

After my first career in journalism years ago, I went into marketing and at one point met with a recruiter who was looking for a digital marketer. “I need an expert in SEO, ASO, and SMO,” she told me, further rattling off a lengthier list of random acronyms.

“Optimisation” became all the rage after companies discovered in the 2000s how much traffic websites could attract from search engines. After the birth of search engine optimisation (SEO), marketers tacked on the latter word to create “app store optimisation” and “social media optimisation” as well as countless other uses where the term also made little sense.

App store optimisation (ASO) looks for hacks to increase a mobile application’s ranking and findability in places such as the Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store – rather than, you know, creating and promoting a real, useful app that people will like. Social media optimisation (SMO) is a useless term because social media is simply a set of channels and tools that can be used for any specific promotion tactic.

Now, businesses have always discussed general best practices. My last job in journalism in the 2000s was serving as the editor-in-chief and executive director of the Boston non-profit newspaper Spare Change News. (It is one of the newspapers in the United States that are modeled on The Big Issue in the UK.)

In that role, I once attended an annual convention of the North American Street Newspaper Association that was held in Halifax, Canada. There, the assembled staffers discussed the best practices in terms of pricing, circulation, and countless other topics. Today, marketers talk about optimisation, which often means the best practices in line with someone else’s algorithms or what has purportedly worked for others.

Buffer has published studies on the ideal lengths of everything from blog posts to tweets to headlines to Facebook updates. HubSpot has reported the best times to post on social media. But in the end, both best practices and optimisation come down to the same thing: doing what everyone else is doing.

The perils of optimisation

Once, I was in a meeting where people were discussing how to get more traffic from blog posts spread on Facebook. The ideas focused on using psychology and gaming the social network’s algorithm: “Let’s ask people to comment on posts to increase engagement!” and “Let’s change the posts so that they are lists whose headlines start with numbers!”

“Make a funny, creative video advertisement instead,” I suggested, noting the reach that humorous videos receive on Facebook. But no one listened. Everyone cared so much about optimising the form of the creative that no one thought about the creativity of the creative. They prioritised the form over the function.

The perfect example of this is when marketers see studies on which headlines get the most “engagement.” In June 2017, Buzzsumo analysed 100m headlines and found this information on which headlines receive the most clicks, “likes,” and shares on Facebook:

Too many digital marketers use such information and focus on producing whatever marcom is cheapest and then optimising it. Here is a sample of recent blog posts on Medium from a certain prolific marketing writer:

5 Strange But True Habits of the World’s Richest People

5 Smart Reasons to Create Content Outside Your Niche

5 Simple Hacks to Sharpen Your Emotional Intelligence

10 Insanely Good Reasons You Should Publish On Medium

3 Unusual Hacks to Completely Up Your LinkedIn Game

Bored now.

Too many marketers go overboard and focus on optimisation to produce rubbish marketing such as clickbait blog posts with the same headline format such as this: [number] [unnecessarily strong adjective] [noun] to [achieve some goal].

The internet will continue to be flooded with boring, optimised posts that all have the same title formats in an effort to get clicks or satisfy other short-term metrics. But optimisation is the enemy of creativity and leads to worst long-term results. (Just look at how many reboots of successful TV shows from the 80s and 90s have failed today. The studios likely thought that copying what was done before would guarantee another success.)

Redundant optimisation quickly becomes cliched, hurts the brand, and is obvious to consumers. If Oxford Academic were to title journal articles in the above manner, the Oxford brand would become laughable. The only way for BuzzFeed News to be taken seriously – and the publication is indeed doing excellent journalism – has been to decouple its brand from the notoriously clickbait parent company.

Optimised reflects only short-term thinking. Using clickbait to get people to a website is the same as knocking people over the head and dragging them into your store. They may be there, but they will not buy anything because they will hate your brand.

When everyone optimises for everything, it is no longer a competitive advantage. The only true competitive advantage that people will have is what rests in their brains – creativity. Without that, you will only be as good as everyone else.

The benefits of creativity

According to an updated study in Admap magazine by Data2Decisions founder Paul Dyson, creativity is – by far – the second-best profit multiplier after market size:

Optimisation and best practices aim to do what someone else defines or the best of what everyone else does – but nothing more than that.

"Best practice is like training wheels – it keeps you safe whilst you're learning how to excel in your industry,” Helen Pollitt, head of SEO at the British digital marketing agency Reflect Digital, said. “To really differentiate yourself from the competition you need to be open to experimentation and growth, true optimisation requires facing failure. The issue with sticking to the safe zone of best practice is it stifles creativity."

The best depiction of the benefit of being different that I have seen comes from this BBH ad:

People notice what is different. And if your marketing does not get noticed in the first place, nothing else you do matters. As BBH London strategy director Lucian Trestler recently put it:

“‘Difference’ isn’t just a two bob philosophy or a frivolous creative penchant. It is the most powerful communications tool there is to deliver commercial results. We have a vast amount of data to support that. Evidence from neuroscience, marketing science and creative effectiveness data all agree on this point; difference is commercially safer than ‘safety.’”

Optimising based on data or algorithms is easier than being creative – but it is not always better, according to Wistia co-founder and chief executive Chris Savage.

“Today, everyone scores their leads with Marketo and A/B tests thirty different varieties of their landing page. You can’t get a competitive advantage doing that stuff anymore. You could say that as the percentage of marketers with a certain tech stack or using a certain tool approaches 100%, the competitive advantage you reap from it approaches zero,” he once wrote. "Using data to scale your marketing is critical. But when we all have access to the same types of data, it won’t be the data that differentiates us — it’ll be the art.”

Tom Goodwin recently said something similar: “A/B testing seems to be getting out of hand. Seems to be a way to offload decision making, not have a strategy, or gut or courage. What great art/music/products would ever be made this way?”

But tell that to those digital marketers who think only in terms of optimisation. Tell that to high-tech chief executives who want to mimic the marketing of competitors and think that they need only a differentiated product to be successful. (Just like record companies, startups are risk-averse because they do not want to lose the millions of investor dollars.)

In a quote attributed to John Ward from B&B Dorland in England, “advertising is a craft executed by people who aspire to be artists but is assessed by those who aspire to be scientists. I cannot imagine any human relationship more perfectly designed to produce total mayhem.”

At Digital Annexe University in 2015, Dave Trott gave a classic speech on creativity. Effective communications, he said, needs to have an impact, needs to communicate, and needs to be persuasive. “Impact” is the most important part.

“Impact will get you on the radar,” he said. “Without impact, there’s nothing there. There might be a bloke outside on the street right now telling us the secret of all life, and we’ll never know because we can’t hear him. Without impact, nothing happens.”

Now, take the desire of so many marketers to optimise all collateral to match some alleged universal standard. How will their work be different from that of everyone else? How will their work stand out? How will their work have an impact?

“Optimisation might work for certain businesses for a certain amount of time,” Steve Daniels, an independent graphic designer in the UK, said. “This course of action may feel safer, but it only remains safe if there are no competitors who disrupt the market or start playing the brand game in a strong way. As soon as that happens, focusing on creativity is a great a way to play the long game – and to invest in your future success.”

If your business wants to remain safe, no one will notice you. Taking creative risks is how you become memorable.

A quick recommendation

So, if you want to listen to an album where the musicians wrote their own material, played dozens of instruments, and created songs that are lyrically intelligent, harmonically complex, and timbrally diverse, I have an assignment for you.

Listen to records or remastered CDs of the Moody Blues album In Search of the Lost Chord (1968) and The Smiths’ song How Soon Is Now? (1985) with a good pair of noise-cancelling headphones and some refreshment of your choice. Maybe it will kickstart some creative inspiration.

After all, the Beatles will be remembered forever. Justin Bieber will not.

The Promotion Fix is an exclusive biweekly column for The Drum contributed by global marketing and technology keynote speaker Samuel Scott, a former journalist, consultant and director of marketing in the high-tech industry. Follow him on Twitter. Scott is based out of Tel Aviv, Israel.

This content was originally published here.

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

Hi! My name is Coray Seifert, I’m the Director of Production here at Experiment 7. I’ve been working on VR games in various capacities for the past 4 years, first with Impeller Studios, then with Autodesk’s AR/VR Interactive Group, but most meaningfully with the fine folks here at Experiment 7. Over that time, I’ve made a number of horrific mistakes that haunt my dreams to this day. I’d like to share some of them with you!

If the beer is virtual, are the calories real?

Below you’ll find 7 lessons I learned working on VR strategy games at Experiment 7. I wanted to put this list together so others who are just getting into VR development can avoid some of the same challenges.

Why spend the time to share key learnings with potential competition? The bottom line for our corner of the industry is that the more teams there are making great VR games, the more consumers we’ll see adopting VR platforms, and the better the market will be for all of us. Just like how Tesla shares their best practices with their competition to help drive their industry forward, we hope that creating a marketplace of shared ideas will help the VR game creation space move forward as well.

In traditional game development, we have experiences, best practices, and cautionary tales that effectively guide our efforts. Platform migrations have happened in the past and we’ve tweaked our best practices accordingly. What works on PC might not work on console due to input differences, processing power or consumer expectations, so we modify our approach slightly to adapt for the new medium. 

VR, on the other hand, is a complete paradigm shift. Not only do our best practices need to be refreshed, but some of the core tenants of what we believe about game development need to be unlearned. Moving the player’s first person camera may make them sick. 2D planes for VFX can be invalidated due to stereoscopic rendering. UI and UX design has to be completely rethought from the ground up. This is a complete phase shift from the old way of doing things. 

That's no UI object...

I find myself annoyed by long-form lists where you have to scroll forever to see if the pillars of the article are worth investing your time in, so here are the 7 lessons, in brief:

Double down on engineering – More tech needs, less asset budget. Trade artists for engineers.

Make sure someone on your team has shipped something in VR – Ideally your tech lead.

Don’t skimp on preproduction – Prototype aggressively, define hardware/QA/pipelines first.

Respect the minspec – Pick your platforms, identify your minspec, and stick to it.

Realism is important, but comfort is king – Use realistic proportions, but framerate/comfort is priority.

Start small – Maintain vision, but start with a fraction of what you’re eventually trying to build.

Expect the unexpected – Prepare for rapidly evolving hardware, dev tools and marketplace.

If you just came for the pillars, I hope they’re helpful in your adventures. If you’re here for context, let’s dive into the details!

Let’s start at the beginning.

When you’re building your team for your VR project, you’ll want to staff heavier on the engineering side than you would for a traditional game project. Further, it's optimal to populate your team with a greater percentage of experienced developers than normal. 

While more engineers doesn’t perfectly equate to increased velocity, the simple fact is that every problem you face will require new solutions, a risk that can be meaningfully mitigated with people power. Even if you’re using a proven commercial game engine, everything from feature development to optimization takes a long time on VR and involves a significant learning curve. These are new knots to untangle and for the most part, very few people across the industry have meaningful experience in VR.

Here’s how I would recommend adjusting your engineering team size: 

>10 total headcount: 3x

11-50 total headcount: 2x

50+ total headcount: 1.5x

If you’re working with a fixed budget on your game, this may mean scaling down your art headcount, which isn’t great in and of itself. One mitigating factor is that stereoscopic rendering means you're basically rendering everything twice. A game of comparable scope simply has fewer pixels it can push through the renderer.

Accordingly, the content requirements for VR are lower than other platforms. If you think back to past generations of console games and the scope of art created for those games – both in terms of the raw asset density and in terms of the amount of polish per asset – you can get a good sense of where VR is in its current (2017) iteration. 

In an ideal world, I recommend a small VR art team laden with senior artists who enjoy new technology challenges and plenty of technical artists who are passionate about the medium.

The good news on this front is that great engineers are frequently drawn to new technology problems, just as great artists can be drawn to new mediums of expression.  You can harness that excitement to bring fantastic people into your organization.

It’s one thing to read about the technical limitations of VR or talk to someone who has shipped a game in VR, but don’t talk yourself into thinking you can make it without significant input from someone who released a commercial product on the platform. You need someone who has directly worked on solving the unique problems of the medium. It can be a freelancer, consultant, or advisor, but ideally that person is someone who is a core member of your team. 

The best case is if this person works in the engineering vertical of your company, even more so if your VR expert is the head of your engineering team. This allows that person to translate those experiences working on the platform directly through their team, providing that intrinsic, internalized knowledge of VR-specific challenges to everyone working on the technology that drives your game.

Experiment 7 is lucky in that our Technical Director, Mario Grimani, has been working in VR since the days of duct tape and bailing wire. One of our engineers worked on open source VR solutions. I worked on some of the very early (and very rough around the eyeballs) VR prototypes internally at Autodesk. Those experiences – often in figuring out what doesn’t work on the platform – have been crucial to the success of our team, even more profoundly than in traditional game platform transitions, because of the transformative nature of VR.

Baby steps from the Autodesk days...

New tech is exciting and none more so than VR. Which is why it’s vitally important that you take the time during preproduction to plan, prototype and test. Don’t get too excited and run straight into the teeth of your project! 

Stick to your phase gate plan. Build and iterate through your concept, look & feel, and early prototype in preproduction (which will take longer than you expect, especially for your first project). Getting a new asset pipeline for VR set up is no small task - do it early. If you wait until the production phase to finalize your content and feature workflow, you’ll spend your production cycle firefighting and redoing key systems, rather than delivering great features and content.

Make sure that you’re aggressively prototyping at every phase, even with proven mechanics. We made the decision to go with a relatively low-scope chess game for our first title, so we could easily integrate a Chess engine and use Unity store assets to test the concept of table games in VR early. That process, as rudimentary as it was, revealed tons of issues and opportunities in our core design and in our technology expectations. Issues that would have been hugely problematic (or significant missed opportunities) if we had left them to the end of the project.

"Okay, so imagine you've got a table...and it's magic..." - Geoff, probably

Finally, during preproduction, budget more time than you think for infrastructure. You can’t just buy a few machines and desks and be off to the races. Depending on the platforms you’re targeting, the various combinations of hardware and software can take significant time to track down, given the wide range of headsets currently in use (with new ones coming online every quarter). QA infrastructure can be especially difficult to get going on new VR projects given the specific physical device requirements at the scale of a full QA team.

In VR, more than any platform, framerate is more important than fidelity. 

As you may or may not know, framerate in VR has an outsized impact on the overall experience. High framerates (90+ fps) lead to a smooth experience, while lower framerates can lead to a profound sense of discomfort and render your application unusable to a significant portion of your audience. 

No matter how aggressively you scope for memory and processing power, content has a tendency to come in over budget – make sure your asset budget has lots of buffer room; more than you think you need. Things will get broken by new platforms that are dynamic and constantly evolving – make sure you’re accounting for this so that when something does break, it doesn’t completely nuke your game. Users will do horrible, horrible things to their hardware – make sure to account for your end users installing tons of CPU and memory-hogging applications on the target platform. 

If you’re multi-platform, set goals based on your lowest possible performing platforms…and stick to them! This is a non-trivial task, as it requires business, technology, and creative buy-in. Push this to the top of the priority list. 

Realistic proportions, movement, and physical relationships are critical to creating a VR experience that makes use of presence. Content that is out of scale with the world around it risks appearing "spooky" and unsettling, leading to subtle but meaningful feelings of cognitive dissonance in your users. Unrealistic or unfamiliar gravity, viscosity, or friction can have the same effect.

Door frames, windows, tables, chairs and other common real-world physical objects in game space are especially susceptible to this phenomenon. For games grounded in reality, there is a pretty simple solution. Measure things and stick to those sizes. This constraint can certainly be a limiting factor, but can also be a creative challenge that leads to dynamic and innovative solutions to problems both complex and mundane.

Preproduction proportions testing

During preproduction, try starting with realistic proportions and aggressively test with white-rooms to avoid having to rework assets down the road. Working from a regimented, realistic base of assets goes a long way towards making the user comfortable in your environment.

All that said, the one guiding principle for VR – especially in these relatively early days of mass market consumer VR – is that comfort is king. It’s imperative to ensure your experience is palatable to your target audience. 

If you’re making a card game for a wide audience, make sure that your framerate is extremely high, your contrast is relatively low, and you’re never accelerating or moving the character outside of motion-tracked head and body movements. If you’re making a hardcore flight simulator with 6 degrees of freedom and non-stop flak explosions, you have a different bar to hit, but core tenants (always high framerates, try to never move the player’s camera unless they’re controlling it, use slower acceleration where appropriate, etc.) are always good to keep top of mind.

Be cognizant that with every increment you push your experience past your target comfort point, you’re losing and alienating another large cohort of users, potentially damaging your reputation and your brand.

Find a spark and build from that. There are so many unknowns in VR – especially right at this moment in time – that it requires an entirely new pipeline, process, and technology outlook to bring anything to market, let alone something of notable scope. 

This is VR. You should dream big. However, the best advice I could give at this moment in time is to create a small chunk of that dream with your first VR release. Get that product to the market – to any market – and get into preproduction on your second title with everything you’ve learned. Use that experience to help your team execute more efficiently and at a vastly higher level than the first go round.

This is one thing we nailed at E7. We started off with a relatively small game in Magic Table Chess, moved on to something marginally bigger for our second game, with exponentially larger projects on the horizon. Each step along the way has enabled us to work faster, focus more on experiences than infrastructure, and push our quality bar higher and higher.

Starting to come together...

This is the agile mantra, but especially so for new, rapidly evolving platforms like VR. It might sound cliché, but the pain is real. These are incredibly dynamic software and hardware products that are constantly evolving in meaningful ways. Platform updates right before VC meetings, cables getting imperceptibly loose and taking someone offline for hours, system background processes triggering and running the game at one frame every other second are all real possibilities that many of you will encounter. 

While there’s little you can do to truly mitigate for these challenges, knowing that something along the way will conspire to foul up your perfectly-planned software project can help you reduce the impact of these issues when they do happen.  

In addition to unexpected critical fails, if you’re working with a commercial game engine or platform back end suite, plan to be rolling over to new versions far more frequently than on traditional platforms. The dynamic nature of these platforms means that new updates address critical issues and can introduce new version mismatches more frequently than stable technology platforms.

In Conclusion Making games in VR is awesome. I frequently find myself losing myself in our games when I should be doing work, just because the experiences are still so profoundly magical. VR is a new and massively exciting frontier. A stereoscopic wild west.

It all comes together

However, like the American wild west of old, it’s full of danger and adventure. Being cognizant of the perils of the medium can’t help you to avoid these challenges altogether, but hopefully it can help mitigate the impact of them when you hit them.

I’d love to hear similar experiences folks have had working on early projects in VR. Horror stories are always great, or if you disagree with anything I’ve said here I’ll keep an oculus out for comments posted to this article.

Yes, I just ended this 2500-word VR article with an eyeball pun. 

This post originally appears on the Experiment 7 Blog.

Coray Seifert is the Director of Production for Experiment 7, a VR strategy game developer based in New York City and San Diego. For more than 15 years, Coray has developed games as a producer, game designer, and writer for organizations like Autodesk, THQ's Kaos Studios, and the US Department of Defense. A Lifetime Member of the International Game Developers Association, Coray was elected to the IGDA’s Board of directors in 2007 at the age of 27; the youngest board member in IGDA history.