#it’s the visual language of every eureka moment to me

[nevergeneralize]

“There comes an end to all things; the most capacious measure is filled at last; and this brief condescension to evil finally destroyed the balance of my soul.” (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)

[couldnt-think-of-a-better-name]

Okay remember that colour page with Emma hanging on to some kind of bridge-like thing with Conny's bunny on her other hand? Yeah. I just realised if you flip the page upside down you can see a gate AND THERE ARE TINY HUMANS HANGING ON TO IT/CLIMBING IT?!??!?! PLEASE EXPAND YOUR THOUGHTS ON THIS and how THis is similar to the colour page with the staircase and Gilda being upside down

Let me answer your question with my newest theory on the

Alice in Wonderland Motifs in The Promised Neverland

Prepare yourself for a wild ride here. You will most likely get mindblown and think “why didn’t I think of this before?!”. This had all been there right from the start, and none (as far as I know) noticed…So let me start this off with a little summary of how Alice in Wonderland begins:

Alice was living a carefree, but (peacefully) dull life until one day her world was turned upside down when she decided to chase after a white rabbit with a pocket watch. Hmmm hmm, didn’t I say in my previous post on Gracefield items that there was a bit more to the “pocket watch” than just it being a tracker? Oh yeah, because we DO. HAVE. A. WHITE. RABBIT. 

Oh, yeah, and the whole bloody adventure started because of it!

You may cry coincidence here even if you notice the glaringly obvious watch on the neck of Little Bunny (or its posh waistcoat…), so let me continue on.So remember that I also said before that Carol’s name had some importance? Or that Alicia’s stuffed toy was noted also for a reason? Well, you know who wrote Alice in Wonderland?

LEWIS CARROLL!!Are you (mentally) screaming yet? No? Okay, so remember that Alicia’s toy is a cat? Well, you should also remember that Alice’s favourite pet was a cat as well.

But you know, these are just some odd references so far, so how about we look at some other characters? Like… doesn’t Lewis kind of ring a bell to you? Hm, what was so distinctive about him again? Well, he was a bit crazy, but you could always recognise him from his HAT, RIGHT?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t Alice in Wonderland have someone called the MAD HATTER?!

Also, remember the Mad Hatter’s teaparty? It was one heck of a chaos, but what about his friends that he happily shared his tea with (note that in the original British language version tea can also mean lunch/dinner)? The March Hare (not to be confused with the White Rabbit) and the Dormouse. Isn’t it interesting that our hat wearing Leuvis was so close with Lord Bayon and the little Parvus?

Haha, I hope now you can’t get the image of Bayon with bunny ears out of your head either!.Actually, you know what, wasn’t Alice’s Wonderland kind of a messed up place and experience for her? Even though it was meant to be her happy place? Hm, isn’t that a little bit like the Goldy Pond experience? I have always thought it looked like a creepy theme park tbh.

But if you think I am going to stop here, you are wrong… because we haven’t talked about the Cheshire Cat yet! This confusing creature was the first thing that Alice had an intelligent conversation with, and he also explained the rules of Wonderland to Alice. Wasn’t that nice of him? Kinda a bit like how Son-ju explained about the Promise to Emma, no? How about the Cheshire Cat’s grin? Didn’t Son-ju have a nice, toothy grin? Also, kind of a fluffy mane if you ask me.

GUYS HAVE YOU NOTICED THAT SON-JU HAS TABBY STRIPES?! I am so done in by laughing about that!.Lets not forget however the first being that helped Alice in Wonderland: the Caterpillar. Alice was at first suspicious of it, and a bit rude, but eventually she figured out that the caterpillar was just pretty nice and helpful to her. Oh right, I seem to recall Emma being a bit suspicious of Mujika at first, but then receiving some pretty handy advice and help from her!

At this stage, the visual resemblances are not even subtle, right?.

However, let me admit that I have only had an eureka moment after reading chapter 132, and noticing this resemblance:

The situation is a bit unclear to me if Legravalima is meant to be the Red Queen or the Queen of Hearts. These two characters are separate, and often get confused, see the explanation here:

The Queen of Hearts was shown to be a quick to anger, passionate person. Since we see Legravalima’s hair resemble a rose, she may be a reference to the Queen of Hearts, who had people’s heads chopped off for painting roses red. However, Legravalima also acts cooly, and the Red Queen is a lot more like that. While the Queen of Hearts was a card, the Red Queen was a chess piece. With all the recent chess images, I am reminded of the following:

However, I haven’t yet answered the original question about that colourspread. Well, the answer is very simple actually.

It’s the Rabbit Hole that Alice falls down in.

Just in case you missed it, I have included a couple more connected images, and have circled Little Bunny on each and every one of them (you can also see Carol’s doll on some of those). Yepp, it is the rabbit hole. It’s the tunnel that leads to a different world in Alice in Wonderland, and so it is in the Promised Neverland.In response to your previous questions about the well in Gracefield’s yard, in Alice in Wonderland, the rabbit hole leads to what is described as a “really really deep well”. So this may be the other significance of the well.Since I was unable to finish this post before the spoilers dropped for chapter 133, you can find my thoughts on them, and how they fit if you read below the cut

So in chapter 132 we entered the Seven Walls, and it looks like we are finally in for a full Alice in Wonderland trippy experience in chapter 133! I kind of knew as soon as I saw Gracefield, as my previous theories have connected it to the tunnel.There are two motifs that instantly strike out at me: Emma falling, and Ray being shrunk down. Both of these things happen to Alice as well.

The chapter ends with Emma and Ray staring down a hole to a pantry. This actually seems like the rabbit hole proper to me. The Alice in Wonderland novel describes the rabbit hole having endless shelves and cupboards on the walls with various things on them. It is noted that Alice takes a jar of marmalade from a shelf, then places it back to another while she falls. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some marmalade in chapter 134 after all of this now!

So yepp, let’s see our kids fall down the rabbit hole in chapter 134!

The interesting thing to note about Alice in Wonderland is that Wonderland is all imagined by Alice. That seems to be just like my theory on demon!God using its powers of imagination to create the demon world! ;D

Ok, that’s it folks for today, hope you enjoyed it!

[littlemsscareall]

Till: "Do you want to touch my face? You can touch me everywhere."

The remarkable story about a blind lady that translated Till's poem books in Finnish. 

 It all started back in August 2019, during Rammstein's concert in Tampere, Finland that exceeded all expectations of Jonna Heynke. Blind born Jonna met the band members in person and found the brother she needed in singer Till Lindemann.

Jonna won the Meet & Greet by the LIFAD Community raffle. She was one of the fifteen people who got to meet Rammstein in person.

When Jenna was escorted to the room where the Meet & Greet would take place, accompanied by a steward, she sensed a new aroma through her nose. “Is this the scent of the Ramm boys?” Jonna asked.

Fans lined up to greet the band members. The joint picture could be taken if consent was given. A total of 10 minutes, or less than half a minute per person, had been set aside for more than 15 enthusiastic fans.

It didn't concern Jonna. She was first introduced to keyboardist Christian “Flake” Lorenz and guitarists Paul Landers and Richard Kruspe. Flake and Paul let Jonna’s hands ‘look’ at them, Richard contented himself with shaking hands.

Then came the expected sound. "Hey, here's Till."

Till Lindemann pulled Jonna Heynke into his arms and hugged her for a long time. Jonna's face was covered with Till's show makeup. She thought her face should not be washed at least until tomorrow. The same for her t-shirt.

“It felt good and safe to be so close to Till. He was like a wall. I saw the real Till without his role of a performer”, Jonna describes.

More than 30,000 people waiting for the concert at Tampere's Ratina Stadium on August 9 and 10, where Rammstein played a double show. Till didn't rush and took his time.

"Do you want to touch my face, you can touch me everywhere", he asked Jonna. Till realized that Jonna could see him with her hands.

“My fingers saw a man who has been kicked down in life more than enough. But I also saw a man who, despite all the walls he pulls up, pushes to go forward. I felt a broken man that always got up again".

She is also sure that this encounter would not the only one.

Jonna felt like she had hugged an old, beloved friend. “I could have immersed himself in his friendly, soft voice. The same voice like a big brother that is talking to me in my dreams. I wouldn’t always be able to be strong. The dream of this brother have given me strength.”

While examining and touching Till's face, Jonna said she got a lot of strength from the lyrics of Rammstein during her life, that went with up and downs.

Jonna's hands found Till's corner piercings and a small piercing pushing in his head. "Till laughed that luckily he had shaved his beard in the morning."

Every now and then Till pulled Jonna to him and hugged her.

“I would have liked to say so much. To tell him how I respect him as a person. But my head didn't work. My mind and language were on strike.”

Jonna said she imagined Till to be shorter and really skinny. She added that he smelled really good.

The Meet & Greet ended with a big long hug.

After Till, it was drummer Christoph Schneider's turn, from whom Jonna received his Drumsticks.

“You get great selfies with a camera. My selfies are in my heart. These autographs are written in my soul and are part of me. These, and the drumsticks I received from Schneider, are something that cannot be bought with money.”

Jonna, who is currently graduating as a German translator, will translate Till Lindemann's book of poems "In Stillen Nächten", (published in 2013) into Finnish. The book has already been translated into several languages. Jonna hopes to find a publisher for Finnish as well. "Once I meet Till, I can get a better view in his texts."

Until a couple of years ago, she didn't like Rammstein’s music, even though she hadn’t really listened to it.

“I was in the village with a friend of mine and he put on a beautiful ballad. When I said it as great, he told me that it was Rammstein and we listened to more of their songs. My friend explained me more about this band and especially about Till Lindemann and his story. The next day, I realized that Rammstein and Till Lindemann, with their ingenious thoughts and lyrics, changed my life. I don’t know how, but my life was becoming more positive when Rammstein became part of it.”

Jonna graduated as a German translator in 2008, but did not experience the profession of translator until she tried to translate Rammstein's lyrics into her own delight.

“That’s when I experienced the Eureka moment. I realized that this was my thing. Thanks to Till Lindemann, I found my ability as a translator of poems after a long search for my own field of translation.”

The meeting in August with Till sealed the decision to offer Finnish translations of the poems to the publisher.

She recieved an answer in an hour. The idea translation the book was of much interest, but first the translation rights to the book should be obtained from a German publisher.

When Jonna Heynke woke up on December 12, she stayed in bed to think about the dream she has that night. In that dream she was hugging Till Lindemann again.

During her dream, Jonna told Till what was left unsaid at the Meet & Greet: ‘Stay as you are. You're really important to me, just like a big brother. I will translate your book into Finnish. Then you come here to the book fair and we’ll see you again, right? ”. Till replied, ‘Of course’.

The dream began to feel real when the next day on December 13, 2019, Jonna opened her e-mail. The publisher had obtained the translation rights to Till Lindemann's poetry book In Stillen Nächten and ordered a Finnish translation from Jonna.

This information got Jonna's heart pumping.

“No words are enough to describe the significance of this work. I am no longer an unemployed and hopeless socially supported being. I got a job! I can do what I feel is my own. I get to enjoy the fruits of my education and still see this as a translating of a significant work.”

Jonna feels that Till is her ‘soulmate big brother’.

“Till helped me, he pulled me out of the abyss. Thanks to him, I got a job. I have to do the best translation I can ever do so that Till also conquers the hearts of fans of Finnish poems. So on my shoulders lies a big responsibility.”

Jonna hopes that other blind people will also benefit from the work she receives.

“Trusting such a significant work to a blind translator is a bold act and a act of trust. I can show that even blind people have the potential and abilities on the job market. We are not free riders in society. I now have a unique opportunity to do something for myself, Till, a publisher who trusts me, the Finnish readers and other visually impaired people. ”

After In Stillen Nächten, Jonna also translated Till's new poem book 100 Gedichte / Sata Runoa, that will be release on October 21, 2020

Till and Jonna, a meeting to always remember Photo by Silja during the Rammstein Meet & Greet Tampere, Finland 10.08.2019 

[exposingnotbatmanyet]

HOW TO FOLLOW YOUR INTUITION By SamuelMay 23, 2015Love

So many of us have an inner voice that we hear. Or we feel. Either one is trying to get your attention. But do you trust it? Do you follow what it is saying to you? I am trying very hard lately to trust my intuition. By doing that, I have found out that someone was trying to manipulate me and I caught them in the middle of 2 bad things. I listened to my gut because it didn’t add up to me. I felt something was wrong. I heard my inner voice telling me to check this person out. I’m glad I listened.

That gut feeling you get, it’s never wrong. You may think it is but it’s your body’s energy giving your life a warning flag. How many times did you feel or hear something your gut was saying and you ignored it? And then later on you say to yourself I should have listened to my gut! Well then start listening now. See what it feels or says to you. Don’t analyze it, just follow it. I’m excited to see what I can learn from all of this. So I looked up how to do this. I wanted to share it with all of you.

The best article I have found about this is here: How to Follow your Intuition

Intuition is “knowing” something without being able to explain how you came to that conclusion rationally. It’s that mysterious “gut feeling” or “instinct” that often turns out to be right, in retrospect. When you’ve whittled down your options and are stuck at a crossroads, getting in touch with your intuition can help. Learning how to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, is difficult but intuition can be developed, especially when following some of these ideas.

STEPS

1  

2Ask yourself questions and listen to the first answer that pops into your mind. That isn’t easy, because several thoughts will flood your mind at once. For instance, let’s say you’re looking at a menu. In figuring out what you want, pick out the first thing that stands out to you. Ignore the remainder of your thoughts, like for example: “But I didn’t even look at the specials” or “But my friend is on a diet and I’ll feel bad eating this in front of him” or “But my uncle said the mashed potatoes he had here were too mushy” etc. Don’t dwell on it. Just pick something. It might be scary, because what if you make the wrong choice? Do not worry, you will be fine.

3Meditate. Clearing your mind of repetitive thoughts and worries will make it easier to listen to your intuition. Find a meditative technique you are comfortable using and practice.

4Listen to your gut. There’s a reason it’s called a “gut feeling”. Many times, a decision that you “know” is wrong makes you feel discomfort in your stomach area.

5Listen to and communicate with your multiple brains. Neuroscience research has shown we have functional and complex brains in both our heart and gut. These brains have memory and intelligence. As the points above indicate, your gut and heart brains know when something isn’t right and will tell you through feelings, hunches and messages. You can communicate with these brains through simple language, imagery and touch. Sometimes few things in our life gives us feeling of fear and nervousness . From the core of our heart we are not ready to accept this. As these are the feelings which makes us realise what we are going to do or what is going to happen is not good for us. So, we must avoid those things and protect ourselves from any wrong doing. As these intuitions comes out to be true.

6Keep an intuition journal. Every day, use your intuition to make a guess about someone or something. Don’t act on it, though. Just write it down. Focus on statements like “I have a feelings that…” or “My intuition tells me that…” If there are any sensations associated with your intuition, such as a vision, or physical discomfort, be sure to record it. Looking back in your journal, see how often you are right. As you learn more about how to recognize your intuition, and you see it leading you in the right direction. Your confidence will grow and so will your intuitive power.

7

Trust your instincts. It can be difficult to depend on something that you don’t understand, and you probably shouldn’t base every one of your decisions on intuition. For example, if you’re hiring someone, you should look at qualifications first and foremost, or else you might accidentally discriminate. But when you’ve weighed all the options and there is no obvious, rational choice, intuition is really all you’ve got. Consider the following:

Intuition is basically how you quickly tap into your subconscious mind, which is where you “archive” all kinds of information that you don’t remember on a conscious level.[2] Sometimes you pick up on things subconsciously without realizing it, such as body language. It’ll register as a certain “feeling” that you can’t articulate at that moment, but it could very well be valid.[3]

Without intuition, you’re no different than a computer. You only make decisions based on facts, and you don’t always have all the facts.[3] So unless you’re functioning like a computer, you are already making decisions based on various factors other than logic. Why not learn how to use your intuition as well?

Even some of the world’s greatest scientists, the most logical thinkers of all time, have made their greatest discoveries based on flashes of intuition (think of Newton and the apple that fell on his head, or Archimedes shouting “Eureka!” in his bathtub).

Exercise the right side of your brain. Intuition is drawn from the right hemisphere of the brain[4] which is the same side that controls nonverbal, holistic thought and expression. Here are some other ways to “work out” your intuition:

Be Creative

Dance

Paint

Visualize

Brainstorm

[our-beginnings]

Lena Groeger: Developer, designer, and journalist at ProPublica

First thing’s first: tell us a bit about who you are, and what you do now.

Sure! I’m Lena, I’m a journalist/designer/developer at ProPublica. My job is a mix of reporting, writing, designing and coding, and I mostly make interactive graphics & data visualizations. I’ve also got a column called Visual Evidence where I write about how data & design affects people’s everyday lives. I was living in Brooklyn until a few months ago when I moved to San Francisco... and now live & work a block away from the beach!

What’s your favourite thing about ProPublica?

As an organization, I love our mission: to do journalism in the public interest, to give people context for what’s happening in their world right now (especially these days), and to have a real impact. But my favorite thing is definitely the people. I work with incredibly talented and accomplished journalists who at the same time manage to be some of the most humble people I’ve ever met. I consider myself ridiculously lucky to get to learn from them every day and to have a chance to try out crazy new ideas together.  

Talk about some recent projects. How do you come up with those crazy ideas, and how do they become reality?

Usually it’s a random mix of things. Sometimes it’s another reporter going “Hey look, this health agency publishes emergency room waiting times on their website, what if we did something with that?” which led to an app called ER Wait Watcher. Other times it’s an editor saying, “We have this complex cast of characters for a story about narco-terrorism, what if we made it into a comic?” which also turned into an interactive piece. And sometimes it’s just me surfing the internet and stumbling upon a French researcher’s website that happens to have county-level presidential election results going back to 1828.

Above: “The Making of a Narco-Terrorist,” a ProPublica interactive examination of whether the DEA is stopping threats or staging them. 

The latter was probably my favorite recent project, a piece called Lost Cause that we published right before the election. It framed past American elections through the lens of the losers: showing maps of who voted for the candidate that ultimately lost. The best part was interviewing a bunch of historians and geographers about what was going on in the country at the time and what they could “see” in the maps. Those conversations were endlessly fascinating (pro-tip: interview academics as much as possible – they are extremely eager and excited to talk to you about their work!)

Above: The “Lost Cause” project, showing past American elections from the standpoint of the loser. 

On the technical side, creating almost 50 maps for the piece was an interesting challenge, because not only did we need to map dozens of election results, but we needed to create historically accurate maps that corresponded to each election year. Turns out shape of the country has changed a lot since the 19th century (who knew!) and each year the county boundaries were slightly, or in some cases drastically, different.  

Thinking back, what was your ‘eureka' or origin moment?

I went to graduate school for science journalism, thinking I would write long articles about discoveries in neuroscience and psychology (I was really into that stuff in college, but didn’t want to be the one in the actual lab doing the actual work). I had never heard of data journalism or data visualization, and I certainly didn’t know that people working in news made graphics for the web. But when I found out (right around Hans Rosling’s famous wealth & health of nations video) it was instantly appealing. I had always really loved graphic design (mostly in a print context, posters and such), and suddenly here was this thing in journalism that let you tell incredible visual stories and meant that I could sometimes use Photoshop? I was so in.

One of the requirements of NYU’s science journalism program was to do an internship over the summer. I did mine at WIRED, and the vast majority of it I spent writing articles for the the Danger Room blog about drones and spies and other sci-fi worthy military projects. Somehow my editor Noah Shachtman agreed to let me do a data visualization project for the ten-year anniversary of 9/11 (keep in mind I had not published a single other graphic and all Noah knew was that I was capable of Photoshopping words onto petri dishes and chickens onto tanks).   

suddenly here was this thing in journalism that let you tell incredible visual stories and meant that I could sometimes use Photoshop? I was so in.

But we did it, and the final graphic was an attempt to tally up the cost of the war on terror. I realized at that point that this was precisely what I wanted to spend all my time doing.  

Above: ‘The Dead, The Dollars, The Drones’, Lena’s ‘eureka’ moment. 

What path did your career take from there? How do you find yourself where you are today?

It wasn’t long after that I started an internship at ProPublica. It was a writing internship – I was mostly writing stories about health and the environment. But every so often I would pitch a visual idea to Scott Klein, the editor of the data/graphics team (or “news apps” team, as we call it), and ask if I could design and build it myself. The first one I ever did was a side-by-side comparison of two types of airport body scanners. Then a fellowship on Scott’s team opened up and I moved across the office, and a few months later was hired full-time as a news apps developer.

Turns out that to make news graphics today, you need to know how to code. Whether that’s Javascript, R, Ruby or some other language often depends on the project, but knowing at least one programming language and being open to learning more is pretty important. When I stumbled into data visualization I knew only maybe a tiny bit of HTML and CSS. So my first year at ProPublica was a crash course in all kinds of programming challenges that I now encounter all the time but then were totally new: how to scrape a website, how to put dots on an map, how to make an interactive chart.

each project is less “Holy shit I have no idea how to do that,” and more “I’ve solved this other problem, I can probably do that one too.”

That year was probably the most insane and frustrating and rewarding year of work in my life. I was very lucky that ProPublica in general and Scott in particular care a great deal about giving reporters the time and space they need to learn new things. And it has its benefits – I joke with Jeff Larson and Al Shaw (two developers on our team) that they’ll never have trouble reading my code because they literally taught me all of it.

These days, I’m still learning a ton of new stuff for every project, but I’m familiar enough with the basics that each project is less “Holy shit I have no idea how to do that,” and more “I’ve solved this other problem, I can probably do that one too.” So, for example, when we wanted to make a visualization of human body parts for a project about America’s disastrous workers comp system, I was able to cobble together some pieces of code plus some shapes I made in Illustrator into an interactive that worked. For more on that project (I’m sure some of you may have a question or two) here’s a longer explanation.

In general, I’ve also gotten significantly better at Googling for the answer – that’s not nothing. 😜

Do you think that this convergence of data, design, and journalism is the way forward for the news industry more broadly?

I don’t want to make any sweeping predictions about the news industry, but I do think having data, programming and design skills can make you a better journalist, for a bunch of reasons. Here are a few: first, knowing a bit of programming lets you find and tell stories that no one else can.  If I had to copy and paste all the data that went into this project about health and safety problems on cruise ships, it would have taken me years (not even kidding). But knowing how to scrape a few websites let me grab all that data and sort, filter and analyze it into its final form.

knowing a bit of programming lets you find and tell stories that no one else can.

Second, having some data wrangling skills let’s you verify information on your own – you aren’t dependent on PR people or government officials to tell you what’s true. You can see for yourself what the data says! (That said, it’s probably a good idea to talk to a bunch of experts and do enough reporting to back up what you find).

Finally, knowing a little bit about design helps you create projects that are easy to understand and use. Most people know how to read a story that’s made entirely of words. But some of the interactive graphics and data visualizations making their way into the news these days are pretty complex, and being able to design them in a way that’s easy to follow and also tells a compelling story is important. That doesn’t happen by accident – designers spend a lot of time thinking about the user, ideally testing out different approaches on real people. Constantly keeping the user in mind usually makes for better journalism.   

You teach design and data visualisation as well; what prompted you to do this, and how have you found the experience of teaching?

Teaching is both much more difficult and much more fulfilling than I ever thought. It’s really amazing to see students applying the things you’ve mentioned in class to their own work, or getting them super excited about a new technique or a chart form they’d never seen. Then again, it’s really humbling to realize that even though you thought your lecture about, say, design principles was awesome and intuitive and the best explanation yet, some students are still totally mystified. It’s always a learning process for me also, since I’m constantly reworking lectures or tutorials to make them easier to follow or adjusting exercises to better capture the ideas I’m trying to explain.

One thing I do try to do is make all of my teaching materials, slides, etc, totally public and free for anyone to use. I’m constantly learning from free online resources, and feel like it’s important to put materials back into that space for others. We do this at ProPublica too, my colleague Sisi Wei and I run a 2-week workshop called the Data Institute, and put our entire curriculum up online for anyone to look at. It’s not the same as being in a classroom for 2 weeks, but it’s a way we try to give more people access to what we teach (at no cost to them).

A final note on teaching: showing students the Web Inspector for the first time is always a joy. That collective gasp probably makes the entire class worth it.

Finally: if you could do everything all over again, do you think your journey would be the same? Would you want it to be?

I’m sure if I did everything over again my journey would look very different. It’s easier to tell a nice linear narrative in retrospect, but along the way my path felt very random. Even going into journalism in the first place feels a lot like an accident (I applied to NYU after a good friend told me about the program, and just happened to get a full scholarship to go). But I do think I would have eventually come across data visualization, especially now that it’s become so much more mainstream. And it was probably inevitable that I was pulled towards some combination of design and writing.

And what about the future?

We’ll have to see! Luckily the intersection of journalism, technology and design is so broad that I don’t think I’ll be bored anytime soon.

Anything you’re particularly excited about?

I really like gifs that explain things.

Endless thanks to Lena for her patience with this interview! Find her on her website, or on Twitter.

[teritcrawfordca]

IT’S OFFICIAL—Excessive Internetting, Smartphoning, and Social Media Make Us Miserable

Every week as SmallBizLady, I conduct interviews with experts on my Twitter talk show #SmallBizChat. The show takes place every Wednesday on Twitter from 8-9 pm ET.  This is excerpted from my recent interview with Blake Snow. Blake is an author with over a decade of experience who has written and published thousands of featured articles for half of the top twenty U.S. media, including CNN, NBC, USA Today, Fox News, Wired Magazine, and many other fancy publications and Fortune 500 companies. In this book Log Off: How to Stay Connected after Disconnecting, he passionately, succinctly, and sometimes humorously explains how to hit refresh for good, do more with less online, live large on low-caloric technology, increase face time with actual people, outperform workaholics in half the time, and tunefully blend both analog and digital lives with no regrets. You can learn more at http://blakesnow.com/.

SmallBizLady: Do you think entrepreneurs spend too much time online?

Blake Snow: Yes. I believe we live in the most distracted, bottomless, demanding, opportune, and noisiest time in all of human history. That makes finding offline (or digital) balance very hard indeed. It’s a great time to be sure, and we’re all empowered with more life-changing tools than ever before (i.e., internet, smartphones, work from anywhere). But we must deliberately harness these powerful tools with measured boundaries. Otherwise, they can dictate how we live our daily lives rather than consciously choosing how we want to. But offline balance isn’t just about good health—it’s the key to greater income, growth, fulfillment, free time, and lasting relationships. That’s what my book puts forth in a short and very prescriptive 100 pages.

SmallBizLady: Why is online addiction a growing problem?

Blake Snow: While online addictions certainly existed in the desktop and laptop computing days, they didn’t go mainstream until the smartphone era, about a decade ago. To compound the issue, the more information and entertainment that gets digitized, the easier it is to get lost in the bottomless search for distractions.

SmallBizLady: How do excessive internetting, smartphone, and social media negatively affect our lives?

Blake Snow: The last decade of research shows that excessive internetting, smartphoning, and social media make us miserable. There are two reasons for this. First, online abuse stifles our individual and collective creativity and productivity. Secondly, it keeps us from bonding and connecting with others in more meaningful ways. That is to say that social media is mostly the illusion of relationships. True relationships develop largely offline, though facetime, human touch, body language, and shared presence and experiences. While social media can sometimes facilitate that, it mostly isolates us. In fact, in-person meetings have dwindled in the social media era, as opposed to being boosted by it. This all matters because all of us want to contribute and all of us are social creatures.

SmallBizLady: What are some successful strategies for limiting time online?

Blake Snow: The first, if not biggest, step is turning off all beeps, buzzes, and visual alerts on our default phone settings (save for voice calls from very important people such as spouses and our boss). That way we can choose to use our phones when we want to rather than having our day interrupted by them every other second. As radical as it sounds, I’ve done this for the last nine years and my professional, personal, and social lives have dramatically improved as a result. True story!

SmallBizLady: How can work-related online use be balanced?

Blake Snow: Set the expectation with bosses, coworkers, and clients that you’re revising your online use for greater productivity and fulfillment. This starts by ceasing to answer emails on nights, weekends, and vacations. Obviously, emergencies happen. In that case, tell those you work to please call you. But remember, in most cases, legitimate emergencies are rare. Either way, 99% of people are understanding because they want the same thing in their own lives. If you happen to have a boss in the 1%, it’s probably time to start looking for a new job.

SmallBizLady: Are there benefits of online time? If so, how can we avoid going overboard?

Blake Snow: Certainly! I wouldn’t be where I am today without the internet. It truly is a wonderful thing, the greatest human invention since Penicillin. I say as much in both the opening and closing chapters of my book. That said, the internet isn’t going anywhere. The sooner we all realize this, the easier it becomes to take more regular and healthy breaks from it (i.e., on nights, weekends, and vacation) without getting sucked into and distracted from the overwhelming amount of noise taking place online. It’s all about using the internet, our smartphones, and social media with purpose as opposed to the default and unhealthy “all the time.”

SmallBizLady: Can “Logging Off” fix your business?

Blake Snow: Yes! Better focus, revenue, mental recharges, and personal fulfillment all play a contributing role in running a successful business. Although “Logging Off” is no substitute for ABC (always be closing), it’s a powerful program that permeates and improves virtually every aspect of your business.

SmallBizLady: Can you still have a positive content marketing presence after logging off?

Blake Snow: Yes. Most content marketing is constant but forgettable. You just need regular content that’s good to make an impact. And ‘regular’ doesn’t have to be up to the minute, second, or even the day. It just means at least once or twice a week and it will reach more people if it’s really good, say an original idea or perspective rather than a regurgitated, predictable, or trite ideas that often populate social media or blogs. To learn more, please read What 12 Years of Content Marketing Taught Me.

SmallBizLady: What’s the best approach to setting boundaries with my device?

Blake Snow: Default settings don’t work. They are put in place by phone and app makers to distract you, so they can make more money from you (mostly with advertising) rather than you making more money for yourself, your family, your business, and your community. Instead, you must turn off all audible and visual notifications unless they’re from a few very important people (spouse, kids, bosses). That way you can set well-defined boundaries with your phone, social media, and internet, and only reach for them when needed, rather than them telling you they need you. When done this way, you are planning to win.

SmallBizLady: What’s the best way to stay focused?

Blake Snow: There are many ways, but I’ll offer one that has really helped me. Accept that it’s okay to have diversions, distractions, and breaks from concentration. In my research, I’ve found that the high-producing creators break for 15 minutes after an intense 90-minute work session. They don’t grind for full mornings, afternoons, and certainly work days without several healthy breaks. That said, it also helps to reach for diversions that have an end or bottom, like a book, or gardening, or other analog experience. The problem with the internet, social media, and smartphones is that they are largely bottomless, which sends us down a black hole and ruins our focus. So reach for diversions with a clear finish instead.

SmallBizLady: Can being well-rounded improve my business?

Blake Snow: Yes. Early in my career, I was rather one-dimensional and wholly consumed by my work. That determination led to some successes, but it also resulted in me spinning my wheels in the mud a lot more than was healthy. Since then I’ve tried to foster seemingly unrelated talents outside of work with the books I choose to read, the outdoor activities and adventures I engage in, and the non-professional relationships I attempt to foster. I can’t tell you the number of “Eureka” moments I’ve had during those times which directly resulted in a great business idea. Moral of the story—being well rounded helps you make even better business decisions because it gives your conscious mind a break and it lets the subconscious mind do the heavy lifting for you.

SmallBizLady: What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?

Blake Snow: “It’s better to ask forgiveness than permission.”—Unknown

If you enjoyed this interview, please join us live on Twitter every Wednesday from 8-9 pm ET. Just follow the hashtag #Smallbizchat, and don’t forget to follow @SmallBizChat on Twitter.

Click here for directions to join the weekly conversation. 

The post IT’S OFFICIAL—Excessive Internetting, Smartphoning, and Social Media Make Us Miserable appeared first on Succeed As Your Own Boss.

from Teri Crawford Business Tips https://succeedasyourownboss.com/its-official-excessive-internetting-smartphoning-and-social-media-make-us-miserable/

[cryptobully-blog]

'Ripple' in Cherryhurst: Project transforms bungalow into swirling wonderland

http://cryptobully.com/ripple-in-cherryhurst-project-transforms-bungalow-into-swirling-wonderland/

'Ripple' in Cherryhurst: Project transforms bungalow into swirling wonderland

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Artists Dan Havel, left, and Dean Ruck have created “Ripple,” their latest monumental sculpture installation.

Artists Dan Havel, left, and Dean Ruck have created “Ripple,” their latest monumental sculpture installation.

Photo: Molly Glentzer

The exterior of “Ripple,” Havel Ruck Projects’ latest immersive sculpture.

The exterior of “Ripple,” Havel Ruck Projects’ latest immersive sculpture.

Photo: Molly Glentzer

“Ripple,” Havel Ruck Project’s latest monumental sculpture, was inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of water. Artists Dan Havel and Dean Ruck “draw” with saws, transforming buildings.

“Ripple,” Havel Ruck Project’s latest monumental sculpture, was inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of water. Artists Dan Havel and Dean Ruck “draw” with saws, transforming buildings.

Photo: Molly Glentzer

“Ripple,” Havel Ruck Project’s latest monumental sculpture, was inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of water. Artists Dan Havel and Dean Ruck “draw” with saws, transforming buildings.

“Ripple,” Havel Ruck Project’s latest monumental sculpture, was inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of water. Artists Dan Havel and Dean Ruck “draw” with saws, transforming buildings.

Photo: Molly Glentzer

“Ripple,” Havel Ruck Project’s latest monumental sculpture, was inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of water. Artists Dan Havel and Dean Ruck “draw” with saws, transforming buildings.

“Ripple,” Havel Ruck Project’s latest monumental sculpture, was inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of water. Artists Dan Havel and Dean Ruck “draw” with saws, transforming buildings.

Photo: Molly Glentzer

“Ripple,” Havel Ruck Project’s latest monumental sculpture, was inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of water. Artists Dan Havel and Dean Ruck “draw” with saws, transforming buildings.

“Ripple,” Havel Ruck Project’s latest monumental sculpture, was inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of water. Artists Dan Havel and Dean Ruck “draw” with saws, transforming buildings.

Photo: Molly Glentzer

“Ripple,” Havel Ruck Project’s latest monumental sculpture, was inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of water. Artists Dan Havel and Dean Ruck ��draw” with saws, transforming buildings.

“Ripple,” Havel Ruck Project’s latest monumental sculpture, was inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of water. Artists Dan Havel and Dean Ruck “draw” with saws, transforming buildings.

Photo: Molly Glentzer

“Ripple,” Havel Ruck Project’s latest monumental sculpture, was inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of water. Artists Dan Havel and Dean Ruck “draw” with saws, transforming buildings.

“Ripple,” Havel Ruck Project’s latest monumental sculpture, was inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of water. Artists Dan Havel and Dean Ruck “draw” with saws, transforming buildings.

Photo: Molly Glentzer

‘Ripple’ in Cherryhurst: Project transforms bungalow into swirling wonderland

Dan Havel and Dean Ruck admired Leonardo da Vinci’s deluge drawings long before Hurricane Harvey hit.

During the last few years of his life in the early 16th century, the Italian master made 11 lushly layered pencil sketches that captured the force of a flood so intense it uprooted trees and collapsed mountains and buildings.

Havel and Ruck especially liked the mechanics of upheaval da Vinci illustrated – the idea that “sound, water, air, anything can kind of reverberate and have cause and effect, creating other ripples around it, the chain-reaction effect of the action,” Ruck said.

That was the genesis of Havel Ruck Projects’ new immersive sculpture, “Ripple.”

A provocative fun house, “Ripple” circulates in swirly patterns that have been sliced through virtually every inch of a 1,400-square-foot bungalow at Cherryhurst House, the Montrose contemporary art compound founded by Dallas McNamara in 2012. Havel and Ruck have cut so thoroughly into the walls, ceilings and floors that visitors must be careful where they step – curvaceous slivers of floor rise up or drop away, revealing the soil underneath.

More Information

Havel Ruck Projects: ‘Ripple’

When: Noon-5 p.m. Sunday and April 15; 11 a.m.-5 p.m. March 24 and April 7; check website for future open dates

Where: 1603 Cherryhurst

Details: Free; cherryhursthouse.com

Next cut-up: ‘Open House’

Havel and Ruck are already planning their next project, and this time, it’s truly on sacred ground. The Downtown District and the Heritage Society have commissioned them to create a space at Sam Houston Park, hoping to draw more visitors to the historical buildings there. Not to worry: They aren’t tearing into one of those, and they’ve met with the Parks Department to ensure that they won’t damage trees, either.

They’ve bought a 16-by-24-foot home from Cherry Demolition’s storage lot that will be moved onto a prominent hill in the park in mid-April. They’ll fence it off while they’re working and plan to have it open by sometime in June.

“Open House,” as that one will be called, will be on view for nine months.

Havel expects it to resemble Swiss cheese, with a historical twist. He and Ruck plan to paper the walls with prints of old photographs of Houston and holes through the images to create a kind of puzzle – so viewers might view the skyline outside by looking through an image of a historical face, for example.

He imagines that at night, like “Ripple,” the “Open House” place will glow from inside. “The house will kind of disappear. I hope. Because it’s all an experiment.”

Until last July, the frame bungalow housed Cherryhurst’s artists-in-residence program. But Havel and Ruck are not typical artists in residence. During more than 20 years, they have made an art of transforming doomed buildings into traffic-stopping but ephemeral monumental sculptures.

Their history ranges from 2005’s “Inversion,” for Art League Houston, which created a vortex of wood scraps inside a pair of frame houses on Montrose Boulevard, to last year’s minimalistic “Sharp,” for which they cut an opening clear through the center of a mid-century home in Sharpstown and painted it in a gleaming, reflective copper.

Typically, bulldozers arrive a few weeks or months after Havel and Ruck unveil their work, and the show is over.

Cherryhurst curator Barbara Levine said she and McNamara wanted to challenge Havel and Ruck by inviting them into a building that was not scheduled for demolition and would be on view for at least a year.

“We try to find projects that will resonate in a domestic environment. ‘Sharp’ made a big impression,” Levine said. “We started thinking about that scale and the impact of thinking about home in a different way.”

The artists had a plan. But there was a “pause” at the beginning, after McNamara invited them to alter the Cherryhurst home, Havel said. “One final email, where we said, do you understand what we do?”

McNamara gave them just one rule: They could not penetrate the roof.

Translator

To read this article in one of Houston’s most-spoken languages, click on the button below.

Havel and Ruck started on “Ripple” last July, working nights and weekends since they both maintain full-time jobs. (Ruck is a project manager for capital construction projects at the University of Houston. Havel teaches art, architecture and history at St. John’s School.)

They wanted to riff on da Vinci’s idea, although they never really know until they bring out the saws where a project might lead.

“This was just a pretty wild possibility; seven months of thinking about a project, and every day it’s a new puzzle,” Havel said.

He and Ruck had long wanted to create a progressive, cut piece. “Then it became more about how we circumnavigate the architecture with this system of ripples,” he explained.

The home’s nice oak floors gave them a Eureka moment. “Part of it was the wood grain and just the beauty of the wood,” Havel said. The ripples they cut would be inspired by wood grain.

His models and drawings gave them a starting point, but before they lit into any surfaces with chain saws, Ruck “drew” the lines they would cut with painter’s tape. They debated, redrew. Discarded tape piled up on the floors as they improvised.

“All of our projects explore something different for ourselves in terms of process and approach,” Ruck said. “So there’s learning as you go – just the style of cut, and how to make the cuts you want, with design elements.”

Havel said he and Ruck don’t really think alike, describing his artistic partner as a formalist who sees what he wants, then finds it by doing, physically sculpting. Havel is more of a draftsman who prefers to work out ideas first on paper or with models.

“So a lot of our projects, he’ll describe something to me, and I’ll go home and draw it out,” Havel said. “Or I’ll get my sketchbook out and go, ‘Is this what you’re saying?’ ”

While they cut with the same visual language, when wood chips and dust were flying and saws were screaming, they worked in separate rooms but also fed off of each other’s discoveries about ways to work with shiplap, say, or pile debris into closets. And they often switched places, extending each other’s lines like a couple finishing each others’ sentences.

“The design challenge is to get it to blend and make sense,” Ruck said.

Working from the center of the house outward, they made their first cut in the floor because it was so tempting.

“Not a good idea, cutting the floor that you need to work on for the next six or eight months,” Ruck said, grinning. “So we stopped that. Did the walls, and the floors came last.”

They hadn’t yet poked through the exterior walls when Harvey blasted Houston in late August. The house didn’t sustain storm damage, but really, what would it have mattered?

In some ways, the hurricane made “Ripple” seem even more relevant: It doesn’t take much imagination now for a Houstonian to visualize the effects of a deluge.

And the sculpture doesn’t have to be taken literally; social, political and personal chaos upend lives in so many ways.

Somewhat amazingly, Havel and Ruck didn’t lose the home’s air conditioning until fairly late in the process, when the weather was cooler. But they inadvertently sawed through a few other electrical lines – enough that Havel started calling himself “Sparky.”

Before “Ripple” opened to the public, they rewired the entire structure, adding lights underneath, so that at night the house glows like a lantern.

Levine hung a small show of Havel and Ruck’s lesser-known, individual works in Cherryhurst’s main house, so visitors might gain a sense of how their aesthetics combine in their collaborations.

Havel’s complex drawings throb with chaotic energy while his more raw-looking assemblages reveal his deft hand with smaller-scale sculpture. Ruck shows himself as more of a carver: His sculptural pieces, built with layers of plywood that have been burnished and pocked, look organically decayed – like rubble from a fire.

Some preservationists are not happy about “Ripple.” The quiet enclave of Cherryhurst, built around a small park in the first half of the 20th century, is succumbing to redevelopment pressure; two new, contemporary homes are under construction within a block of the art space.

Havel understands, to a point.

“When we first saw it, we thought, ‘This is too nice of a house. I could live here,’ ” he said. But he also saw the maze of old wiring in the home’s attic, which had multiple owners over many years. He could see it had other problems as well.

Levine notes that McNamara lives next door in the main house, a restored, circa 1922 brick bungalow that she saved from demolition. She won a Good Brick Award from the group Preservation Houston for that effort in 2016.

“From our point of view, this is improving the cultural life of the neighborhood,” said Levine, who lived in the frame house as a resident for two years.

“I think the house looks a lot better now,” she said. “It was an unremarkable house that they have now turned into something remarkable and inspiring. … It’s challenging; it’s confrontational. … You ask all of these questions that alter your view about what can be done, what can be recycled, what happens when you give an artist a challenge? It challenges everything we think about home and houses. That’s what art is for.”

McNamara has not decided what she will do next with the sliced-up structure. Conceivably, it could be rebuilt, although that doesn’t look practical at this point, with holes through the exterior walls.

“Our intention is to leave it up for a year, to see how nature interacts with it, how people interact with it,” Levine said. “Whatever Dean and Dan want to do with it, if they want to bring other artists in, sound or dance, it’s a springboard for inspiration, for conversation about the relationship between domesticity and nature; how vulnerable we are to the elements.”

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Ripple

[edamame-reviews-blog]

Our interview with the Groo Gadgets Team, The creators of Spiraloid

Are you – just like us – captivated by Spiraloid? A dizzyingly beautiful 3D adventure… If so today we’ve got an interview you simply can’t miss!

If you’d like to check out our review of Spiraloid, you can also do that here.

Today we’d like to share with you our interview with the Groo Gadgets Team, the developer of Spiraloid!

Before we start, we’d like to thank the Groo Gadgets Team for participating in our interview, and for spending some of his valuable time answering our questions. Thanks!

Now without any further ado, our interview begins.

  The Interview

Ok first up, why did you decide to make Spiraloid?

I’ve been learning the art of game development for over 10 years and have started (and stopped) development on around 10 games. Since I’ve always been a “team of one” I had to whittle down the grandiose ideas into something that I knew I could complete on my own.

In early 2016 I put my foot down and said to myself “I have to FINALLY finish a game!” so I started researching and playing casual games from the likes of Boombit and Ketchapp. I found a game called Spike Dash which was quite fun but ultimately a bit boring.

It’s a 2D game where the player is a cube that rotates around a circle. Spikes start popping up so the player taps the screen to perform a single jump. I started thinking how I could take such a simple concept and put my own “twist” on it.

The eureka moment came when I had the idea to extrude that gameplay idea into 3D and when I thought of a spiral (or more accurately a helix) everything just came together quite quickly. A prototype was playable within 2 days, from then I knew this would be the first game I would finally finish!

Here comes the obvious next question, how on earth did you manage to create such immersive 3D graphics? (To be completely honest, Spiraloid looks so good, it almost looks wrong on a mobile device!)

Thank you so much for your praise! My professional background has been in 3D animation and motion graphics for film and TV so my strength has always been my design skills.

I really admire games like Monument Valley and Chameleon Run for their simple yet beautiful low poly style. The best thing about low poly graphics is that not only do they look amazing if done well but they are also much quicker to produce than more textured 3D games.

My tool of choice is a free 3D software package called Blender. I have used other commercial software packages before but none of them struck a chord with me like Blender has, especially since most other packages cost around $3,000 or more! Almost all of the 3D elements in Spiraloid have no textures at all, the colours are embedded into the 3D models by a technique called “Vertex Colouring”.

To be honest creating the graphics was the easiest aspect of creating Spiraloid. It would take me an average of one and a half days to create a new level from scratch which I did find surprising myself. You will be happy to know I have many more levels planned including an underwater level with giant whales that swim by the spiral and an outer space level where you travel through space stations and asteroids. The best is yet to come! 😃

The next question is a little less obvious.

At first, Spiraloid seems like it is going to turn out to be an impossible game, but as you progress throughout the game, you’ll soon realize that Spiraloid is hard, but still very achievable.

How did you manage difficult levels when developing Spiraloid?

It’s great that you’ve raised this point since balancing the difficulty has been a real challenge. When I watch people play I can see them struggle with the difficulty, they don’t jump quick enough to avoid spikes or they don’t time their double jumps properly. Soon after I got the prototype working I had the idea that the player should jump to the beat of the soundtrack so I designed the game around that mechanic.

You can still play the game without audio but if you can tap your foot to the beat of a song you should be able to tap your screen to the beat of the game! Each music track in Spiraloid has exactly the same tempo: 120 BPM so the speed of the gameplay never changes, even when the whole world starts to spin. I have designed the game so that most spikes and obstacles need to be jumped on the second beat (typically when you hear a snare hit in the music). To help the player I have also made the hitbox of the spikes much smaller than the spikes themselves so there is a slight margin for error when you jump a spike and when you land on the other side.

Even with all the tweaks I made to help the player, I find that most people struggle to get a score of 10 (for the record my wife has an average score of around 500 on each level). As you have pointed out with a little practice and some trial and error you can master the game and play for many minutes if you follow the beat and observe the spike patterns. Once you have mastered the first two levels (Amethyst and Silicon) you will find the challenge ramps up significantly when you first play the Obsidian level (fun fact: Obsidian is my tribute to the brilliant TV show Stranger Things!). Instead of spikes that pop up, you encounter mines that float up and down to the beat. Where spikes are always below you mines can be above or below you and explode on contact. This is where upgrading the shield power-up is vital so you can learn how to navigate mines without exploding!

Now for some extra geeky questions. What programming language and or software did you use when making Spiraloid?

Since I have a background in design I had very little experience with programming. I started making games in the early 2000’s with a program called Blitz Basic. While I never completed any games it did give me a good grounding in the basics of programming.

When the first iPhone was released I knew I had to get on board and start developing mobile games. That’s when I discovered Unity 3D and have been using it ever since. At first, it was daunting since I had never used the C# scripting language before and I was determined to create games on my own. I then found a tool which would be the best asset I have ever downloaded for Unity; PlayMaker. PlayMaker is a visual scripting tool that lets you program visually with nodes.

Instead of writing your own code it uses code snippets called “actions”. The actions are simple functions like moving 3D objects, detecting button presses, etc. Since I already had an intermediate understanding of programming the learning curve was very shallow and I had prototypes up and running within days.

If anyone reading this has been dreaming of getting into game development but doesn’t know where to start I would highly recommend a combination of Unity and PlayMaker. I should mention that I wouldn’t have been able to complete the game without the help of assets from the Unity’s Asset Store. When I had the idea to sync the game to the music the first thing I did was search the Asset Store and I found a brilliant tool called Koreographer by Sonic Bloom. Not only did it do exactly what I wanted but it also included PlayMaker actions so I had it running in my game within a couple of hours.

Ok, here is a difficult question. What was the hardest problem you needed to overcome when developing Spiraloid?

Well, I can start by telling you that the easiest part was creating the gameplay itself, once I knew what I needed to do I just did it with next to no real issues. The hardest part was integrating all the systems that needed to be in there to form a fully functional game.

Implementing things like language localization, in-app purchases, leaderboards, etc was a real challenge and completely broke the game a few times. The lesson I have learned is to start implementing those systems soon after a good prototype is working.

There isn’t all that much text in the game but since I added localization after I had all the menus in the game it was very time consuming to set everything up to work with multiple languages. Other than those issues it has been a reasonably smooth experience. I started prototyping around May 2016 in my spare time then I went full time from October to the start of January this year so for just one person it has been a reasonably quick process.

Last question. Where do you get your inspiration or ideas from?

I play a lot of games! I have all the current consoles and I download and play around 3 games every week from the App Store. I do tend to gravitate to obscure indie titles since they usually are in line with the kind of games I like to make.

I am mainly inspired by games that bring new ideas or fresh takes on tried and tested gameplay mechanics; this inspires me to come up with my own ideas that push the boundaries. I knew from the first prototype that Spiraloid would be a visual feast so I started doing research on visuals made for electronic dance music.

One of my inspirations has been the work of Beeple (Mike Winkelmann), the visuals he creates in sync with EDM are amazing. I also have a Pinterest board that contains loads of images I have found on the web that have inspired me to create the visuals in Spiraloid.

A few words to Spiraloid fans on Edamame Reviews.

I have a couple of projects in the works but haven’t locked anything in yet. One thing that I can tell you is that I plan to team up with another developer for my next game, solo game development is REALLY time-consuming since I have to do every single aspect of the game myself.

Before I start anything new I have to prepare the Android version for release which should be out soon. Another thing I have considered with Spiraloid is creating a version for VR. I actually spent a lot of time in the early stages of development creating a version of Spiraloid for Google Daydream and Gear VR. Can you imagine what Spiraloid feels like in VR when the world starts to spin? I can tell you a strong stomach is highly recommended😃

Lastly a few words on how you feel about Edamame Reviews and our service.

I’ve been following Edamame via Twitter for a while now and more often than not click through to read the reviews. I really enjoy the articles and interviews as I always like getting an insight into the minds of fellow developers, I hope your readers find this interview insightful as well!

There are a lot of gaming sites out there but not so many mobile-only gaming sites, this site fills the void very nicely indeed!

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Thanks for the incredibly detailed interview! Want to give Spiraloid a try? The download link is just below😉

Let us know what you thought in the comments section below and as always thanks for following edamame.club

Interview with the Groo Gadgets Team, The creators of Spiraloid Our interview with the Groo Gadgets Team, The creators of Spiraloid

[viralhottopics]

The real story behind those viral European videos trolling Trump

Spoof tourism videos perfectly mimicking Donald Trump have been spreading across Europe and going viral, in what appears to be a co-ordinated trolling effort by comedians across the continent.

SEE ALSO: Europe is trolling the hell out of Trump one hilarious video at a time

After Trump vowed to put “America first,” late-night shows in different European countries have been stating all the reasons why the Donald should put their respective countries second. It all started with a video from the Netherlands and has spread to Switzerland, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Portugal, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Italy, France, Bulgaria, Slovenia.

There is even a website called ‘Every Second Counts’ curating the English-language videos in a catchy visual.

So who’s behind it?

After the Dutch video went viral (it was made by the show “Zondag met Lubach”) German writers of the satirical show “Neo Magazin Royal” sent an email to other European late-night shows inviting them to make similar parodies.

“We decided to stand up to Trump humorously as a new action. That’s why we are planning to follow our Dutch colleague Arjen Lubach’s example and produce a German version of their excellent video,” said the email, according to a source at the Lithuanian Laisvs TV channel.

The editor of the Danish show Natholdet also confirmed that Germany had reached out to them. Holland made the original video a few weeks ago. Germans contacted a number of European talkshows with an invitation to make local versions where each country is told to speak to President Trump with a call that their country should be second,” said editor Karsten Holt.

“More people have seen the video than the people living in Switzerland”

Almost a dozen European late-night shows took part in a Skype conference call to coordinate action, said Patrick Karpiczenko, head writer and director of Swiss late-night show “Deville”.

“We’re a very small team but we wrote and produced ours last week,” he said. “We’re very happy with the reaction so far. More people have seen the video than the number of people living in Switzerland.”

Germany have played down its role in making all of this happen and stops short of taking any credit. A spokeswoman for “Neo Magazin Royale” said the show followed the Dutch example as “we were all indignant and followed suit” but denied that it was Germany to launch the initiative. “We are just happy that a lot of countries are joining!” spokeswoman Gilda Sahebi said.

Despite its protestations, it is plausible that the German show rallied others to troll Donald Trump. Its host Jan Bhmermann has form on speaking out. Last year, his satire of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan caused a political scandal in the country.

The American behind that voice

The man behind the Trump voice in the Dutch video is an American comedian based in the Netherlands.

Greg Shapiro has a ‘Daily Show’ on YouTube called “United States of Europe”. “The Dutch show asked me to do a voiceover for the spoof video and initially they wanted someone to read it neutrally,” he said. “Then I tried a very Trumpy voice and that seemed to work better.”

Among other things, Shapiro teaches “How to do a Trump impression when you have large hands” and has a stage show in Amsterdam’s Boom Chicago Theatre called “Trump up the volume”.

Shapiro had a eureka moment about how to replicate Trump’s peculiar cadence during a theatre performance a year ago.

“A partner was on stage doing more of a Trump’s New York accent. Suddenly I realised Trump has more of a Californian surfing dude accent. He doesn’t sound very New York at all. More like the surfing guy who asks you to grab the board and go to the beach. That was my moment.”

So any tips on how to do a perfect Trump impression? Shapiro’s suggestion is simple: don’t overdo it. “He’s already crazy as he is.”

BONUS: Sean Spicer just cannot get the Prime Minister of Australia’s name right

Read more: http://on.mash.to/2k82B93

from The real story behind those viral European videos trolling Trump

[our-beginnings]

Nick Caldwell, VP Engineering at Reddit

First thing’s first: tell us a bit about who you are, and what you do now.

Sure! I’m Nick Caldwell, and I’ve been VP of Engineering at Reddit for the past 9 months. Before that I had a 13 year career at Microsoft where I worked my way up from intern to General Manager of a product group called Power BI. I live in San Francisco with my wife Tia and dog Poochie (a corgi, because Cowboy Bebop). I grew up in Largo, Maryland which is a little suburb to the south east of D.C. as an only child.

Besides building the team at Reddit, lately I’ve been doing a lot of writing about management, participating in /dev/color, and am starting up a scholarship fund called Color Code.

What's does your day-to-day at Reddit look like? What’s your favourite part about it?

Management is all about making sure that your team has everything they need -- inspiration, tools, processes -- to head in the right direction together. Over the last year, Reddit has undergone a lot of change and there’s more to come. A big part of my job is organizing the engineering team and making sure that we are delivering new features to users on time with high quality. So on a typical day you’ll see me tracking engineering work in JIRA, coordinating upcoming features with the PM team, working with our network of vendors/contractors, and coaching my staff.

A sort of mission statement we like to say around the office is that “everyone has a home on Reddit” and I look forward to making that a reality.

There’s no one favorite thing about my job, so I’ll give you three. First, it’s pretty amazing that I get to come into work every day and make Reddit better. I have been a Redditor for just shy of a decade and it’s always been one of my favorite sites to learn, laugh, kill time, and more. There is nothing better than getting to work on a product you love alongside a great team, which is the second thing I like about my job! Reddit’s engineering organization is packed deep with some of the smartest yet low-ego engineering minds I’ve encountered. We’ve also got a “People and Culture” team that does a great job of making Reddit a fun place to work. Probably my favorite example of this is the all-company trip to Lake Tahoe. The final thing I love is Reddit’s potential. We have 300M monthly active users but there’s a lot we’re doing this year that should drive the number even higher. A sort of mission statement we like to say around the office is that “everyone has a home on Reddit” and I look forward to making that a reality.

When you were a kid, your dad brought home a Tandy 1000— is this where your love for coding began? 

I was only about 4 years old then, so I don’t remember much about it other than that I learned enough to play my favorite games: Reader Rabbit, Pac Man, Tank!, and a few others. When I watch my nieces play with their iPads and iPhone nowadays, I suspect they are far more tech savvy than I was at that age.

At that time no one in my life knew about computer programming. But gamers and coders have a lot in common. They share the same systematic ways of thinking about problems, the desire to optimize systems, and the superpowered ability to stare at screens for hours at a time. So inevitably, my love of games eventually transformed into coding.

What was your ‘eureka'  moment—the one that, if you look back on it now, sparked your journey? How did it feel? Was it “Hello World”? 

In junior high school, I had a friend named Billy, and we were great friends back then because we both loved video games and were both absolute nerds. One day he invited me over for video games at his house. I was expecting Super Nintendo but what I got instead was an absolutely epic re-introduction to PCs.

Billy had LHX Attack Chopper [pictured above], Wing Commander, and Wolfenstein 3D. These were all amazing, groundbreaking PC games at the time. After that, Billy launched a game he had written himself in QBasic. It wasn’t especially complicated but he showed me how he could change the scoring system and game text, then relaunch the game with the changes. Then he used a 2400 baud modem to dial into a local Bulletin Board System called “The Illusionary Forest” and download a copy of Commander Keen.

I was completely blown away by all this. I biked home after that and begged my father to buy a new PC, which we did a few weeks later on a trip to Micro Center.  

Out of all that experience, it was the BBS that stuck. BBSs were a doorway to a much bigger world, where I could be anyone I wanted to, talk to whoever I wanted to, learn more than I could at school. I eventually learned to code so that I could write and sell my own BBS software.

Of course, the first program I wrote was “Hello World” in C++, but I think the real catalyst for my coding career was watching my friend hacking on QBasic and imagining what I could do when it was my turn.

BBSs were a doorway to a much bigger world, where I could be anyone I wanted to, talk to whoever I wanted to, learn more than I could at school.

A bit later, I was also introduced to the idea of starting something of my own, the Silicon Valley dream; I was in a summer program call MITES (Minority Introduction to Science and Technology) hosted at MIT. It prepared me for the school and introduced me to entrepreneurship.

You went from that Maryland/DC magnet school to MIT, then to Microsoft. What brought you to Reddit eventually?

Before Microsoft, I got my first paid internship as an engineer at NASA working on software for x-ray detectors. In school, I became fascinated by AI and machine learning and game programming, and that resulted in my first internship at Microsoft on the Direct3D team.

My first fulltime job, though, was at Microsoft— first working on natural language processing components, which led to learning about enterprise search, information retrieval, machine translation, and machine learning. After that, I jumped into business intelligence where I picked up knowledge about data modelling, data visualization, in memory databases, and advanced analytics. Somewhere in the middle of all that I got my MBA from UC Berkeley, became a General Manager, and started learning about the inner workings of marketing, finance, and business development. Because of MITES, I was continually coming up with ideas with that startup mindset; I always wanted to do something, but it was safer and still fun to stay inside Microsoft and do "intra-preneurial" projects. Now I’m at Reddit and it’s great fun to pick up knowledge about consumer products, online ads, and venture capital.

Going to Reddit was a shock to a lot of people in my life. I had been at Microsoft 13 years and was having one of the fastest career trajectories possible. I’d also built a truly amazing team. I think if I were still there I’d probably be working with my mentor James on how to become a corporate vice president at a large company. But a combination of things finally got me to leave: 

First was a mental shift around how “safe” I felt. I realized that a lot of my energy and motivation came from proving myself through work and that my validation came in the form of promotions and money. But at a certain point, money just stopped being a huge motivator for me and by the time I became a General Manager there was nothing left for me to prove career wise, other than to manage more and more people. 

I realized that a lot of my energy and motivation came from proving myself through work and that my validation came in the form of promotions and money. 

I like learning new stuff and challenging myself but there wasn’t anything on the horizon that excited me.  So, in the months before left Microsoft I was faced with a choice: continue on the same track and be paid a lot to work on a huge new project I didn’t honestly love, or finally chase the dream of Silicon Valley I’d been putting aside for a decade.

Second, Seattle weather. ‘Nuff said. 

Third, living in Seattle made it very hard to see our family. Our brother and sister and live in California but we rarely got to see them, and they were starting to have kids of their own. It made us stop and realize just how isolated we were. At one point the trade-offs made sense, but I could see it in my wife’s eyes that being separated from her family by such a distance was weighing on her.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, Reddit contact me about a VP of Engineering opportunity. The timing was good because my manager at Microsoft was asking me to move into a larger role outside of the Power BI organization. I was already thinking about “what’s next?” and open to taking on something new. I suddenly found myself with an opportunity to make a clean break from Microsoft and get down to the Bay Area. So I handed the reins of my organization over to a guy I knew would take great care of it, and my manager found another experienced exec to run his new team.

I had been looking at other jobs in the Bay Area, but Reddit was the first consumer company. What they needed perfectly matched my skillset: building product teams fast. I’m no longer the best coder around, but if you drop me out of a plane handcuffed and blindfolded into the deepest darkest Amazon, I will crawl out of the jungle 3 weeks later with a kick-ass product team and a working MVP.   

The other thing that “de-risked” the decision for me was a conversation with Steve the CEO where he explained just how much traffic Reddit gets on a monthly basis, the general direction he wanted to head with the business model, and how critical communities are to Reddit. Having launched a few products before, it immediately clicked that his vision would work as long as we could move quickly and carefully.

You’ve mentioned before that “you can’t go home again” after life changes so much. How do your parents perceive your career now, after laying such strong foundations for it?

They are astoundingly proud but I’m sure they have no idea what I do. I know they aren’t on Reddit or Power BI users. Whenever I go home my family asks me to help them install Office or debug their machines. But I think that’s true for a lot of people who work as software engineers. 

The other thing it took me a long time to realize, being so focused on my own career, is that my parents never really cared how high I got in the corporate world. When I was at Microsoft, they didn’t understand what a General Manager was, or show any interest in the fact that had come to have a large team with employees around the world.

My mom was a school teacher and my father a public defender. I have yet to meet two people who are more selfless and satisfied with what they have. They only ever really cared that I was doing my best for the people around me. 

Do you ever feel pressure to be a mentor, an example, or a role model for underrepresented folks in tech?

I feel a lot of pressure to be a good person. I’ve had a very fortunate career with an unbroken string of supportive managers and great opportunities. The great thing about being where I’m at career-wise is that I can do pretty much whatever I want now. I don’t need to prove anything to anyone or chase money.

So when I try to mentor, give back, or write a blog, it’s because I actually think it is important to help other people. Tech careers are today’s gold rush, and I want to make sure that women and minorities have access to the opportunity.

If you could do everything all over again, do you think your journey would be the same? Would you want it to be? 

Looking back on my early career I thought of Microsoft was a “safe” job where I could build a career and fortune over time. I equated money with a safety net that would allow me to take on more risks. But now I realize that I always had something even more valuable: time and motivation. When you are early in your career, time itself is a safety net. You can take on risks, try a lot of things, and if it doesn’t work out you can try again. Because I didn’t have this mentality, I passed on great opportunities that would have made the entrepreneur in me happy. 

Second, I am a total workaholic. I put all my energy into building software with little to spare for thinking about kids or family. But eventually I came to understand that tech projects are sandcastles. Even the most beautiful and carefully designed system is meant to be swept away and replaced someday. Looking back, I would have learned to balance work and life more carefully.

Nowadays I work at Reddit where the company culture makes it hard to fall into that trap, and my wife also gives me a back-of-the-hand slap if I’m spending too much time on the keyboard.

"Roy Rogers is terrible but nothing beats the spice of nostalgia.” Is there anything about the internet or technology that you remember from your childhood/early years that gives you the same nostalgic feeling as Roy Rogers?  

I hate to age myself this badly but Usenet, IRC, BBS systems, MUDs. You could be pseudo-anonymous and because of that you could connect with people in ways that weren’t possible in real life. But something got lost along the way from the development of those early systems to modern social networks. It could be the nostalgia speaking but the connections with total strangers I met on BBSs, and even AOL, felt more real to me than most of my Facebook and Twitter “friends.” The early internet was maybe slower paced and harder to get into, but the result was a deeper sense of community.

total strangers I met on BBSs, and even AOL, felt more real to me than most of my Facebook and Twitter “friends.”

Reddit works because of great communities. I think it has the potential to bring back that spirit of the early internet and make it available to everyone on the planet.

How many steps did it take you to become an C++ expert in the end?¹

I will proudly say that I have written software in C++ that is today used by a good fraction of humanity. But I will never say I’m an expert in C++.

Thank you so, so very much to Nick for his time and thoughtful responses to my questions. I originally reached him via the dev/color speaker request form. A lot of this interview was sparked by his piece From “Hello World” to VP Eng, which you should most definitely read. You can also find him on Twitter.

¹ - “My father got me a copy of my first coding book called “Learn C++ in 12 Easy Steps”. Now, this was an absolute god damned lie.” From “Hello World” to VP Engbuild