#thank you Sperber!!!

[brenna]

I haven't seen enough Klaus Nomi on tumblr. I think we should all be aware of him. He would definitely do numbers here, if he were still alive.

I mean.

Here's a bit from the wikipedia article on him:

Klaus Sperber (24 January 1944 – 6 August 1983), known professionally as Klaus Nomi, was a German countertenor noted for his wide vocal range and an unusual, otherworldly stage persona. In the 1970s Nomi immersed himself in the East Village art scene. He was known for his bizarre and visionary theatrical live performances, heavy make-up, unusual costumes, and a highly stylized signature hairdo that flaunted a receding hairline. His songs were equally unusual, ranging from synthesizer-laden interpretations of classical opera to covers of 1960s pop standards like Chubby Checker's "The Twist" and Lou Christie's "Lightnin' Strikes". Nomi was one of David Bowie's backup singers for a 1979 performance on Saturday Night Live.[1]

His voice. Please listen to this fucking song:

Thank you for your consideration of this amazing weirdo that was taken from this world too soon.

[notebooknebula]

Jake and Austin Deraaff

https://www.jayconner.com/jake-and-austin-deraaff/

Here on today’s show, I have amazing guests who actually twin brothers based out of New York City. They knew that the traditional route was not the best option for them. So they quit college and found an online course on making money in real estate WITHOUT any money!

After being told that they COULD NOT make it in real estate, they committed themselves to be successful.

In 7 months, they were able to do their first wholesale deal. This gave them proof of concept which gave them permission to take massive action. This led to 3 more deals. Then 30 deals. Now they’ve flipped about 60 houses so far!

Their mission is to help people build long term wealth through real estate investing.

With that, please welcome Jake and Austin Deraaf.

How they got to $3,000,000 in Wholesale Transactions both LOCALLY and VIRTUALLY.

Real Estate Cashflow Conference:

https://www.jayconner.com/learnrealestate/

Free Webinar:

http://bit.ly/jaymoneypodcast

Jay Conner is a proven real estate investment leader. Without using his own money or credit, Jay maximizes creative methods to buy and sell properties with profits averaging $64,000 per deal.

#RealEstate #PrivateMoney #FlipYourHouse

What is Real Estate Investing? Live Cashflow Conference

https://youtu.be/QyeBbDOF4wo

#LearnRealEstate #RealEstateInvesting #JayConner

——————————————————–

Jay Conner (00:12): Well, hello there. And welcome to another episode of Real Estate Investing with Jay Conner. I’m Jay Conner, your host then also known as the Private Money Authority. And if you’re brand new to Real Estate Investing with Jay Conner, We talk about all things that relate to real estate investing from finding deals, funding deals, rehabbing, flipping, wholesaling, and even more important than that is automating the business. So you’re actually running your business and your business is not running you. So here on the show, I have these amazing guest and experts come on today is no different. But before I introduce my special guest today, I’ve got a very, very exciting announcement for all of you who are tuning in here, either on iTunes or Google play or any, or our YouTube channels or Facebook live streaming ever. How you’re tuning in here to the show.

Jay Conner (01:22): And that is, I just recently launched my new monthly membership, which is called the Private Money Academy membership. What’s so exciting about it. First of all, with all the benefits is that you actually get me live two times a month with a live Zoom group coaching call for all the Academy members. And so what I’m extending to you as, since you are tuning in you’re on the show, I’m going to be giving you a full free trial to the membership and it’s a 30 day trial and you can check it out go on over after the show to Jay Conner, JayConner.com/trial, Now what’s so exciting besides the two live group coaching calls, where we talk about anything in real estate investment that you want to always have special content I prepared for the membership.

Jay Conner (02:22): But we also have in the membership site, we’ve got content that’s being updated every month with all kinds of resources, for private money and et cetera. We talked about finding deals and all different subjects. So again, get on over to www.JayConner.com/trial, And I’ll see you on the inside of the Private Money Academy membership. Now, today my special guests are actually twin brothers and they are based out of the big Apple after 24 long months in college they were suffering, and they knew that the traditional route was not the best option for them as far as getting on their way to a career. So they quit college. They dropped out of school and they found an online course on how to make money in real estate with no money down.

Jay Conner (03:26): After being told by every friend and family and colleague that they could not make it in real estate. They still took a leap of faith and they committed themselves 100% of the way to doing whatever it took to be successful. So after their first seven months in the business, they still had not closed a deal. They finally made it to their very first closing of their wholesale delivers the wholesale deal. Well that gave them the element of poof, changed their lives, gave them a proof of concept and gave them permission to take massive action into what we call this real estate space. So shortly after that, they did three more deals and then soon became a close to doing 30 deals. So today, as of today’s show, they flipped and wholesale, Oh, around 60 houses. So far now some of their flips have been promoted even by local magazines in their area.

Jay Conner (04:27): Another goal was to earn 250 units by February, 2021. And they’re well on their way. Their mission is to help people build long term wealth through real estate investing and to give their partners safe and secure returns with that. I’m so excited to have you on the show, my friends, Jake and Austin Deraaff. Welcome Jake and Austin, Hello.

Austin Deraaff (04:55): What an introduction. Wow! couldn’t have said it better.

Jake Deraaff (04:57): Thank you so much for having us on, Jay. We appreciate it.

Jay Conner (05:00): Absolutely! Well, I appreciate you all coming on. I mean, you know, the big twin brothers, you know, at the ripe old age of 14 years old, it’s just amazing how far you all have made it.

Austin Deraaff (05:14): Still going strong

Jay Conner (05:18): So anyway let’s see, here we are in a high end real estate investing mastermind group, right?

Austin Deraaff (05:25): Yes sir.

Jay Conner (05:27): In fact, that’s how we met. Hey question. Do I get to see you in person in a couple of weeks? Are y’all doing that virtual thing?

Austin Deraaff (05:35): We’ll be there.

Jake Deraaff (05:35): We’ll be there.We’re flying down.

Jay Conner (05:38): Awesome! My wife, Carol Joy, and I we’ve already got our plane tickets so I can’t hardly wait to see you in person. It’s, I’m looking forward to it. I know people are ready to like get out of Dodge, Right?

Austin Deraaff (05:51): That’s true.

Jake Deraaff (05:52): Amen

Jay Conner (05:53): So I love your story. So I know you want to share this. So actually, how old are you all Austin and Jake?

Austin Deraaff (06:02): 23.

Jay Conner (06:04): 23? My lands to know what I now know when I was 23 years old mercy! could I have not owned the world? Like you’re on your way to do it. So we know part of your story. So you started out in college you know, you went to college for you know, a couple of years or so, and you figured out that wasn’t working. So did you actually go out looking to learn about real estate investing? Or how did that come along?

Austin Deraaff (06:38): So, yeah, it was actually funny. We actually, you know, we always liked making money. We used to flip shoes, flip electronics with everything. And then one day I was with Jake and we found this course online by Cody Sperber The Clever Investor. And it was how to make real estate with how to do real estate with no money down, no credit, no money. Well okay, we have no money, no credit, no license. Let’s try this out. So that introduced the wholesaling. And like you said, it took us seven months to finally get proof of concept. But once we got the proof of concept, you know, we take massive action. Like we get obsessed very quickly and that can be a good thing or a bad thing. And our scenario was a good thing, cause it was absolutely for our business. But it took us a while, but you know, we got it done.

Jay Conner (07:19): That is awesome! So you took that course and so give it, just give us like a summary as to, so when did you do your first deal?

Jake Deraaff (07:31): We did our first deal in may of 2018.

Jay Conner (07:35): Okay. 2018. You did your first deal.

Jake Deraaff (07:39): I’m sorry. March of 2018.

Jay Conner (07:41): Okay. So we’re a couple of years down the road. So share with us what that journey looks like from the time you started. I mean, first of all, you went seven months without doing your first deal. What do you think was the cause of that? And then what happened that really started to catapult your business? So just give us a summary of what’s that journey look like since you started.

Austin Deraaff (08:06): Yeah. It’s like any other business, you know, most people probably would’ve quit after month three or four, but you know, we had times where we want to stop and this doesn’t, we thought it didn’t work. We kept going after it. But the problem, we didn’t get the first deal. It wasn’t even about what we didn’t know. I’m sorry, what we did know it’s what we didn’t know. Like we weren’t really good at marketing. So we were doing very little strategic and the consistent marketing. Like we would put up band-it signs, talk to attorneys, do all these things, but not consistently. But once we started to do consistent efforts in marketing, we actually saw results. So I think the biggest thing was consistent marketing, you know, implementing what we’re reading and learning and stuff like that. A lot of people just reading on YouTube, but they don’t take action. So we start to take a lot of action and then, you know, results started to happen.

Jay Conner (08:52): I got you. And so in a couple of years I think you said you’ve done like 30 deals so far, right?

Austin Deraaff (08:59): Yep.

Jay Conner (09:00): That’s fantastic! So one of your goals is to have 250 units by February, 2020. When you say a unit, are you talking single family houses? Are you talking apartment doors or what’s your definition of a unit?

Jake Deraaff (09:17): Apartments.

Jay Conner (09:18): Apartments? Have you already started in the commercial space?

Austin Deraaff (09:22): Yeah, we have 16 units right now and then another 10 in contract. So 26 units are going to be at the end of the month, about 26 units and the rack, you know, marketing and try to find commercial buildings. So hopefully we have, you know, close to that number by the time the year ends.

Jay Conner (09:36): Are you focusing more on commercial now or single family houses?

Jake Deraaff (09:40): Single family is our bread and butter, but we are starting to look more into the multi-family space

Jay Conner (09:46): I got you. So in your single family space, are you doing more wholesaling or flipping or what’s the percentage of those deals was like?

Austin Deraaff (09:55): We have a couple of different buckets in our wholesaling flip business. So we wholesale and we wholetail we fix and flip. I would say if we did, you know, at a hundred percent, I’d say about 60% is wholesaling, 20% is wholetailing then 20% is flipping.

Jay Conner (10:09): All right. So most people know what wholesaling is. Most people know about flipping is let’s make sure everybody understands what’s wholetailing.

Austin Deraaff (10:17): Yeah. So wholetails are great, especially in the market that we’re in. So basically when you’re able to identify a property that you can buy at a wholesale rate. And at that point, what we do is we clean it out. We close on the property and if it’s in the condition where a bank would be able to loan on the property, that’s when we’ll relist it back on the market and get that full market value.

Jay Conner (10:37): I got you. So in your businesses Austin what hat hats do you wear and Jake, what hats do you wear?

Austin Deraaff (10:47): So I focus mainly on the sales and marketing and any type of like finances, again, the financing. So sales, marketing, and financing, and then I’m on the dispositions, operations and hiring.

Jay Conner (10:59): I got you. So you got to divide it out. Was it any of it? Was it any kind of a challenge when you started out and to figure out who was going to do what?

Jake Deraaff (11:07): He’s the born salesman, So he was on the acquisition team from day one. So

Jay Conner (11:13): Is that why Austin smiles more than Jake?

Jake Deraaff (11:16): Probably.

Austin Deraaff (11:18): Built him for it.

Jay Conner (11:20): I hear ya. So when you got started, what were some of your biggest challenges that you’ve faced and lessons learned?

Austin Deraaff (11:29): Good question. So I think the biggest thing, like any entrepreneur is like, is it gonna work like seven months felt like seven years? Because you didn’t see a check and you’re like, you have to keep telling yourself everyday. It’s going to work. It’s going to work. It’s going to work. But no one around us even knew what wholesaling was like, if you’re in Phoenix other places, it’s common to wholesale. But were in New York, no one even knew what it was. Even most of our attorneys didn’t even know what the word wholesaling was. We have to like reinvent the word in our area. So like, it was just, we had no one, not a lot of support. So we had to build our own inner belief system. So, and that’s the hardest part was telling ourselves It’s gonna happen. It’s just, when is it gonna happen? So we kept going and kept going. But I think if we would have had someone in the beginning that, you know, maybe the coaches have guided us and we were more consistent on marketing. We probably would’ve got a deal done a lot faster, but you know, life, the lessons you learn and the money you make. So that’s our philosophy.

Jay Conner (12:17): Exactly. So while were talking about marketing, you know, the two main things that people want to know that are real estate investors, whether they’re brand new or they’re seasoned, the two things they know want to know more than anything else is where do I find the deals and how do I fund the deals? Where do I find the deals and how do I get the money? Those are the two most popular questions. So in today’s market for your single family houses, let’s focus on that on single family houses. What are your best marketing methods that consistently? And that’s a word you used a few minutes ago. Very, very important word, consistent leads If we don’t have consistent seller leads coming into the pipeline in the funnel, we’re not in business, we’re out of business. What are your favorite methods now to get consistent seller leads?

Jake Deraaff (13:06): So our goal Do a lot of different marketing strategies. So we always continuously have leads coming in. So the stuff that’s been working for us has been direct mail, band-it signs, cold calling, texting door knocking. And we’re just we’re we love to network. So we’re always getting deals with realtors, other wholesalers and even attorneys.

Jay Conner (13:24): So in all those activities, what does your team look like? Like, do you have virtual assistants or what? Like you just mentioned a bunch of things that are like sub businesses or marketing efforts you know, in and of themselves, door-knocking, that’s a business model right there texting outbound calling. So how do you get all that done consistently?

Austin Deraaff (13:50): Yeah. Good question. So right now we have someone who does texting. Like his only job is just, you know, drop the text and answer the text. So he focused on that. We have, we have a van assigned team and then we have about four or five drivers. And what we did was we picked the one that had the most leadership qualities and made him the leader of the team. So he’s a leader of the van assigned team, same with door knocking and then cold calling and keep it in house. So all of our acquisition guys would make outbound calls daily, so led to keep everything. We don’t do any, any like Philippines cold calling, but we do work a lot of VA’s to help us out.

Jay Conner (14:23): Got you. So when it comes to door knocking what types of properties do you door knock?

Austin Deraaff (14:31): Pre-Foreclosures people who just passed away or inherited a property. We’ll get like a bunch of lists, Jay. And what we’ll do is we do something called list stacking. And if you’re new in the business, that’s something I would really recommend because you can get deals that are very cheap. So you basically get a bunch of different lists. Pre-Foreclosure probate, high equity combined into one list, whoever is on multiple lists, put it on a new list. And then we hit those doors. Cause if they’re on three, four, five lists, there’s something going on that you might need to know.

Jay Conner (14:57): How did you train your door knockers

Austin Deraaff (15:00): By doing it with them, Just like people try to automate that It’s really hard. You have to describe a deal with them, show how it’s done, record yourself, doing it, and then, you know, have them consistently do it.

Jay Conner (15:11): So let’s talk about door knocking. So you knock on a door give us your tips on how to successfully door knock. What’s the mindset. What’s the talk off points. How do you build immediate rapport? How do you keep the door from being locked in your face? And what’s the scripting sounds like.

Austin Deraaff (15:35): Yeah. Great question. So we actually started to do was before let’s say we have a list of 50 properties before we go out and actually physically knock. We’re going to send them a handwritten note. Hey, this is so and so we bought a couple of houses in the area. Would you ever consider selling? And now we go to the doors and say, Hey, you know, we’re just knocking. We actually left you a letter. Do you happen to get it? So I’m like, yeah, I got the letter. Awesome. Are you guys considering selling? Me and my partners bought a couple of homes in the area and we love to make an offer. So we kind of go in there with like a warmth, we sent a handwritten letters before and then go out to the house. So it’s not like it’s a cold conversation.

Jay Conner (16:11): Do you think the age of the person helps as far as who’s doing or the age of the person doing the door knocking?

Austin Deraaff (16:19): Yeah, All of our guys are under 30. We had to keep them yet kind of it’s for us. It’s been working well, we have everyone that works with us is younger. So that’s why it’s been working for us.

Jay Conner (16:32): So younger people are perhaps less intimidating when they’re knocking on the door, right?

Jake Deraaff (16:38): Exactly.

Austin Deraaff (16:38): Yeah.

Jay Conner (16:39): What’s your favourite way to find your team members?

Jake Deraaff (16:43): We use a lot of wisehire.com indeed.com.

Jay Conner (16:47): I love wisehire. My favorite reason for wisehire is you’re like already, automatically plugged in to all the other ones just by going into wisehire.

Jake Deraaff (16:58): Yeah. It’s great!

Jay Conner (17:00): Do you use any of their tools such as personality, self profiling tests, et cetera?

Jake Deraaff (17:06): Yeah, we use the PI. Predictive Index.

Jay Conner (17:10): Yep.

Jake Deraaff (17:10): Yeah. So that’s definitely helped us out. We actually hired Sharper Solutions Gary Harbor’s team. And they’ve been helping us out with some hiring as well for some of our key candidates.

Jay Conner (17:21): I got you. So how about, what’s your advice for young real estate investors, young entrepreneurs wanting to get into the business, like, you know, from your experience, what’s your advice to give them

Jake Deraaff (17:37): Well first? Yeah, there’s a lot of different things you can do in real estate. So what I would tell them is figure out exactly what you want to do. Do you want to flip, do you want to wholesale? Do you want to be an agent? Do you want to do creative financing deals? Do you want to be a landlord, figure out and identify what you’re looking to do. And once you figure out what you’re looking to do, just keep failing forward, hanging around the people that are, that have what you want or that are doing what you want and just continue to fail and just keep going. Because if you keep going and you keep learning, you’re just going to keep growing. And that’s basically what we did.

Jay Conner (18:08): So would you say you all have a company mission?

Austin Deraaff (18:12): Yeah. Our mission is to help as many homeowners as possible. Our goal is have 150 homeowners for the year. If we can do that buy a lot of apartments, you know, we’re happy where we’re at. We’re happy at that number.

Jake Deraaff (18:21): Yeah.

Jay Conner (18:22): Well, you said a word that’s very, very important to me and that is that word help. So the reason I asked you about the mindset or how you’re, you know, looking to approach and particularly when you’re door knocking or whatever, myself and my team, we take on the approach of, we are servants. We’re out here to help people we’re out here to serve people. As a matter of fact, when people respond to our marketing and they’re in foreclosure, one of the first questions we ask them is, do you want to keep your home? And I’m in a very, very small area. My total market is only 40,000 people. And so we asked her, do you want to keep going? Yeah, I want to keep your home. I said well, we’ve got a checklist of 10 different ways that you might want to check out what, of course we tell them, we’re not attorneys. We can’t give you legal advice, but we’ll ask him, you know, have you talked to your mortgage company about a a loan deferment program or what have you, and if we give somebody an audio that helps them save their home, there’s nothing in it directly for us. But I do know through the law of reciprocity, what goes around, comes around and the more people we can help get, what they want. We don’t have to worry about ourselves. Would you agree with that philosophy?

Austin Deraaff (19:34): Yeah, 100%. What goes around, definitely comes around. Yep.

Jay Conner (19:38): Excellent! We’re actually live streaming right now. We’ve got quite a few comments coming in from folks. So everybody that’s watching the live stream. We’re glad you’re here and and welcome to the show. So what type of advice would you give to people? You know, just in general, what, you know, when I’m asking a general question, what’s the best advice I can give to a real estate investor. That’s starting out. One of the first things I tell them is don’t try to go about this business by yourself. You need to join hips with somebody that actually has walked through the mines you know, instead of getting blown up yourself. And I believe you all got a coaching program that I know you can help anybody of any age, but for those that are particularly perhaps younger and starting out how has your coaching program worked guys?

Austin Deraaff (20:33): Yeah, so, like I said, we have a coaching program, so we have set times customized program per person. So if you’re in a different market than us, we can still help you out. So we do across the country, a set plan, set time for the calls. But the most important thing is we hold you accountable because a lot of times you can’t hold yourself accountable. You need somebody else to help you do that. So our goal is not to do the work for you, but to give you the roadmap, to do the work, hold you accountable, be coachable and give you a support system. cause the biggest thing for us was we didn’t have support. So it took us a while to get a deal.

Jay Conner (21:06): Yeah. how about you, Jake? Any other thoughts come out?

Jake Deraaff (21:10): That’s pretty much it. Yeah. We’re just anybody who’s looking to get their first deal done, whether it’s, you know, locally or, you know, even out West or wherever.

Jay Conner (21:18): Excellent. Well, you know, it’s for that reason that the three of us are in a mastermind together. I mean, it doesn’t matter whether you’re brand new or, you know, you’ve been doing this thing for a long time and you know, what was working really well, maybe two years ago may not be working so well today, particularly when it comes to different marketing methods and et cetera. So parting comments. I’ll start with you, Jake. And then we’ll wrap up with Austin parting comments that you’d like to share with my audience.

Jake Deraaff (21:51): Figure out what you guys are looking to do and what you’re looking to accomplish and back your way into it. So if you want to do 10 deals your first year, figure out how you’re going to get that. First one done continue to network with people. Cause one of our big sayings is your network is your net worth. So show me the five people you surround yourself with and I’ll show you your, your future. So if you continue to hang around, people that are elevating you and who are going after what they want, you’ll be in it heading the right direction.

Jay Conner (22:16): Awesome, Austin?

Austin Deraaff (22:18): I would say this six letter word it’s called commit. So even if you don’t want real estate wholesaling, or you don’t want going to real estate, whatever business or venture you’re going to do, just commit to it. Because when we first started, we didn’t give ourselves a plan B or C, we just burned the bridge. It was either real estate or homeless. So we have to make it happen. Cause we left their parents’ house. And he said, you’re either going to college or you’re until you’re coming home and going to college or you’re not coming home. So we said, alright, we’re not coming home. So we had to really commit to it. And yes, it took a time. It took, we learned a lot in the process and one quote that I was like is “you can’t fail if you don’t quit”. So the only time you actually fail is if you quit. So if you’re continuing to prosper, continue, stop daily and continue to take action. You’re actually not failing. You’re not doing at all. So continue to take massive action. Listen to guys like Jay and you’ll be very successful.

Jay Conner (23:07): Yeah. It’s improper for you to fail until you decide to quit. I think I heard somebody say that one time.

Austin Deraaff (23:12): Yep.

Jay Conner (23:13): That’s awesome. Well, listen, folks, if you want to stay connected and get to know Austin and Jake even better and perhaps work with them go on over to www.JayConner.com/closer, Again, that is to connect with Jake and Austin Deraaff go over to www.JayConner.com/closer, Austin and Jake. God bless you guys. So good to see you I’m looking forward to seeing you in a couple of weeks.

Austin Deraaff (23:54): Thank you so much, for having us in this show. That’s the best show on the internet. So we appreciate that.

Jake Deraaff (23:58): We’ll see you soon.

Jay Conner (23:59): All right. Thank you so much. There you have it folks. Another episode of Real Estate Investing with Jay Conner and I am Jay Conner, The Private Money Authority. Wishing you all the best. Here’s to taking your business to the next level. And I’ll see you on the next show. Bye for now.

[kokoandalfi]

Awwww Arya's chicks are so fluffy and cute! Why is Peony a different colour to the others? Is Arya their biological mum? If not, do you have any idea what breed the babies are? Ah chicks are always so exciting! Say hi to them for me!

Hi! So this is going to be a bit complicated and will probably be way more than you wanna know but here I go!

Peony is the child of Patty and Bruno. Patty is an Italian Leghorn (German Breed) and Australorp Mix.

With Bruno we don’t really know what breed he might be. We hatched him from a neighbor’s egg. Sadly, this neighbor died shortly after the eggs hatched. I asked his wife if she knew, but all she could tell me was that he drove really far to get Bruno‘s dad and that only this one guy breeds this type of chicken around here. But who knows really. Bruno’s dad looked like him but without any tail feathers. Bruno’s mom was an Orpington most likely.

Bruno is the dad of the chicks. We chose him over Cookie simply because his temperament is so nice. And he‘s more hardy.

Arya now has 3 biological children. We hatched two of them in the incubator (Asha and Gwen) and one is part of her clutch: Maya. Arya is an Araucana.

The other moms are the other chickens of the flock. We don’t really know for sure which chickens. Anyway, here are the breeds of the potential moms in Bruno’s flock: Coffee and Bonnie are Leghorn and Italien Leghorn mixes. Mächthilde is an Italian Leghorn. Bettie is a German Sperber. Trixie is a blue Australorp. Hilda is a blue Australorp and Italien Leghorn mix. Emma is a Vorwerk chicken.

So the kids are going to be very interesting in any case!

Thanks for asking and greetings from the small ones!

[takebackthedream]

Celebrating Victory for Survivors of Hurricane Sandy by Krista Sperber

It’s been a long road, but we’ve traveled it together. On the sixth anniversary of Hurricane Sandy, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy joined members of the New Jersey Organizing Project to announce what we hope will be important steps towards finally bringing all of our families home on the Jersey Shore.

Standing with Senator Cory Booker, Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. and other elected officials, NJOP member Doug Quinn – who is himself still not home – thanked Governor Murphy, and reminded all of those gathered that much remains to be done.

“We are hopeful that this new $50 million dollar program to help people cross the finish line and freezing, reducing and eliminating clawbacks will give families more hope, more opportunity and more stability. We’ve fought long enough and families have been through too much,” Quinn said, as he introduced the governor.

“We cannot stop until every family, in every impacted community, is once again able to walk back through the doors of their homes,” said Murphy said to the crowd gathered at the Union Hose Fire Company station. “There’s 56 in Union Beach alone; that’s 56 families still waiting to write the end of their Sandy story.”

NJOP’s Sandy story was born out of born out of suffering, but it has made us stronger – as individuals, and as a community. Indeed, at the NJOP we have discovered how much stronger we can be when we stand together – and organize.

Just two weeks, ago, on October 13, we gathered in Manahawkin for our first annual convention to talk about our shared priorities: full and fair storm recovery for every family, preparing for the next storm, and the fight to keep healthcare affordable.

We talked about how we had learned that the state is sitting on $1.2 billion in Sandy recovery funds. We also talked about how to make the right choices in upcoming elections, and how to hold our elected officials accountable.

We shared with each other about our struggles with the problem-fraught RREM program, the injustices of the National Flood Insurance Program, the need for rental assistance and the clawbacks – letters that Sandy survivors received in the last days of the Christie administration demanding they repay what they had been told by the state was grant money to get home.

“There are people here today who haven’t even been able to even start rebuilding because they don’t have enough funding, and others who thought they were finished, even though they followed the rules and did all they were told, the state wants back tens of thousands in grant funds,” said Quinn.

That same day, dozens of NJOP members wrote letters to Governor Murphy, asking him to take action to address these urgent issues, and to start to disburse some of the $1.2 billion in Sandy recovery funds that are still in state hands.

Not long after we sent those letters, we got word from Governor Murphy’s office that there would be some good news coming for Sandy survivors on the six-year anniversary of the storm.

So we thank Governor Murphy – first for meeting with us as a candidate, then for following through on his promises to act with these two important new programs: $50 million dollars in zero interest, zero penalty loans to act as a cross the finish line fund for families who have exhausted their grant monies and are stuck without enough to finish the job, and a freeze on clawbacks and a process for homeowners who received clawback letters to have them reduced or forgiven based on need.

But most of all, we thank our members – for coming together in our darkest days, then sticking together until we achieved what many said was impossible. We thank you for standing with your neighbors, and for coming together to create NJOP. This victory belongs to you. Thank you for believing in grassroots power. We couldn’t have done it without you.

There’s still more to be done. Who’s going to do it? We are. If there’s anything Sandy taught us, it’s that when we stand together, we are powerful. And whenever we make moves forward – like on the foreclosure bill – we have to keep everyone’s feet to the fire, so there are no problems with the implementation.

We don’t have all the details yet, but we know that today, we took a big step forward. We also know that all of us, together, will make sure this gets done and helps as many families as possible.

Thanks for all you do. Today, we are more hopeful than ever.

[hamoudablog]

A Visitor in my Cherry-tree by ursulamller900 I think it's a Sperber (Accipiter nisus), if I'm wrong pleas let me know... Thank you for visits, comments and favs! Vielen Dank für Eure Besuche, Kommentare und Sternchen! https://flic.kr/p/2ieUrE7

[soundsof71]

The late great Wendie Jo Sperber in the AMAZING I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978), which affectionately offers a few slices of how Beatlemania touched some (mostly) young women fans during The Beatles’ first trip to the US for The Ed Sullivan Show.

One scene that the Tumblr fandom will appreciate is that there’s a radio trivia contest for tickets to the Sullivan show, and Wendie Jo’s character Rosie KNOWS she knows the answer when her phone call gets chosen for a chance to win...but is badgered by the boy she’s with that HE knows the right answer, not her. Even though she’s positive he’s wrong, she bows to his pressure, and gives HIS answer, which is in fact wrong. She was right. Boys have been stepping on girls in the fandom for over 50 years, and I Wanna Hold Your Hand makes great strides to set this aright.

This was the feature directing debut of Robert Zemeckis (he also co-wrote), who’d go on to do the Back To The Future Trilogy, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and another visitation of regular people intersecting with historical figures, Forrest Gump. I Wanna Hold Your Hand is still my favorite of his by far.

(In a little bit of Zemeckis-adjacent trivia, Wendie Jo co-starred with Forrest Gump himself, Tom Hanks, in the TV series Bosom Buddies, which ran for 37 episodes across two seasons, 1980-82, and would later reconnect with Tom in the film Bachelor Party in 1984. She worked with Spielberg and Zemeckis on 1941, as well as parts 1 and 2 of Back to the Future for Zemeckis again. Wendie Jo passed away in 2005 after multiple bouts with cancer, and the rest of her work is worth seeking out as well.)

You really do need to track this one down though. 

Thanks for these gifs, @thebeatlesordie!

[wallpaperpainting]

All You Need To Know About Renoir Paintings | Renoir Paintings

Throughout history, portraits featuring the animal contour accept acquired to reflect alteration cultural norms. A new abstraction led by Helena Miton, a Santa Fe Institute Omidyar Fellow, and co-authored by Dan Sperber of Central European University and Miko?aj Hernik, of UiT the Artic University of Norway, shows that animal acknowledgment plays a ytical role in the change of animal portraiture.

“These cerebral factors account greater ad-lib absorption to what is in advanced of — rather than abaft — a subject, Miton says. “Scenes with added amplitude in advanced of a directed article are both produced added generally and advised as added aesthetically pleasant. This leads to the anticipation that, in profile-oriented animal portraits, compositions with added amplitude in advanced of depicted capacity (a ‘forward bias’) should be over-represented.”

To ysis their prediction, the ysis aggregation looked at 1831 paintings by 582 different European painters from the 15th to the 20th century. They not alone begin affirmation that this advanced bent — area painters put added accessible amplitude in advanced of their sitters than abaft them — was widespread, they additionally begin affirmation that the bent became stronger back cultural norms of spatial agreement benign absorption became beneath stringent.

In the accompanying image, the account on the larboard (Adrian Brouwer, 1630) is an archetype of a agreement with the babysitter centered. On the right, a account by Pierre Auguste Renoir (1905) shows the advanced bias, with added chargeless amplitude in advanced of the babysitter than abaft her. The abstraction showed this blazon of spatial agreement added over time.

“Culture and acknowledgment are two interacting domains,” Miton explains. “With best cultural phenomena, you’re activity to accept some affectionate of access from

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[linguistlist-blog]

Looking for theories related to loss of cultural meaning in translation

Ask-a-Ling Question: Hello, I am an American student in China and am currently in the early stages of planning my thesis. I am comparing two authors' translations of Sunzi's The Art of War and analyzing specific sections where some meaning or significance that the original Chinese version had that were lost when the book was translated into English. I need a linguistic theory to plug into this whole equation(since I am studying linguistics), but I do not know which one I should use. My advisor recommended Relevance Theory by Wilson and Sperber, but from what I've read, this seems to relate more to spoken language and the listener's ability to fill in the holes of the story with what is inferred. I feel like this does not really pertain to translating a very old document into different languages today or have anything to do with culture. So if you could help me do one of two things, I would greatly appreciate it. Let me know if there is a better linguistic theory that has more to do with my topic. or Let me know if my understanding of Relevance theory is incorrect, and I can actually use it when writing about translating and losing meaning. Thanks a lot! http://dlvr.it/RSPkkw

[ciathyzareposts]

Missed Classic 79: A Christmas Adventure (1983)

Written by Joe Pranevich

Merry Christmas! Welcome back to another Christmas at “The Adventure Gamer” where we are looking at our sixth holiday adventure game! Time flies while we are having so much fun and I’m just amazed that we keep finding new holiday adventures to play. This time out will be 1983’s A Christmas Adventure, a “bitCard” (more on that in a bit) by Chartscan Data, Inc. This game has two notable distinctions: First, it is the earliest Christmas game that I have found so far. Merry Christmas from Melbourne House and A Spell of Christmas Ice were both 1984 games, but this one is a full year earlier. This may be the first commercially released Christmas adventure ever, but we’ll keep looking for more. Second, this game was brought to us by you! Last year, we ran a brief GoFundMe to purchase the only available-to-the-public copy of the game from Retrogames. Our community pitched in some funds and we purchased and sent the game off to the Internet Archive. Unfortunately, they were unable to get the game imaged for the holidays and we detoured to Humbug instead. The archivists uploaded our game in January and that gave us plenty of time to review it for this Christmas.

The Christmas Adventure story begins in Montreal, Quebec at the home of Frank Winstan. It was spring or early summer 1983 and he was working on an idea to design and sell personalized software as an electronic holiday or greeting card. You wouldn’t just play an adventure game, you’d play a game that knew your name and would have personalized messages and other features set by your friends or family. Even in the 1980s, the holiday card industry was hundreds of millions of dollars in yearly sales; if they could tap even a tiny portion, the upside would be huge. In part due to a fear that someone else could capitalize on a similar idea first, he set his sights on a Christmas release for his first electronic “bitCard”. Even for the fast development cycles of early games, the timing was incredibly tight and made all the more so due to a lack of marketing or distribution infrastructure. Winstan needed to bootstrap a startup and ship their first product in less than five months. Was that even possible?

The software retailed for approximately $45 in today’s money.

Winstan had been advised by others that his timeline was too tight, but he enlisted the help of a Larry Callahan, a friend from Vanier College, and they set to work. Chartscan Data was born! Winstan was a psychology professor and he did not have experience with adventure games. Nonetheless, he and Callahan established a system where he (and Ron Sperber) wrote the scenario, Callahan built much of the initial Apple II version, and other programmers were brought on board for porting and other work. Callahan wrote the software in a combination of BASIC and 6502 assembly for speed and size. To make an impossible task even harder, Winstan targeted five separate 6502-based systems, each with their own versions of BASIC and other platform dependencies, all needing to ship at the same time.

While Callahan and others built the product, Winstan built the company. Time was against him. Despite marketing copy that said the game would go on sale in October, he only officially incorporated his company that September. Winstan’s role was to ferry code and documentation between the contracted programmers, develop marketing relationships and ship copies of his near-completed game for reviews, as well as write and type-set all of the documentation, and just about everything else. The coding wasn’t entirely going according to plan either and with only a month to go, he was still placing “help wanted” ads in the McGill University newspaper looking for experienced 6502 programmers. He reports that he frequently slept only two hours per night to keep all of the gears turning. Christmas was, in a very real sense, coming!

Judging by the date on this review, you would be correct to surmise that they made it! Chartscan Data released their first product on time, but not quite everything had fallen into place. Given the schedule, there was insufficient time to produce or distribute a boxed version of the game or to develop relationships for the same. Instead, all sales were to be via mail order. Winstan had managed to get seven or eight (by his report) reviews published, but these were in the holiday issues of various computing magazines. Between the delays inherent in print publication and the challenges of a mail-order only business model, there was a slim window where readers could purchase the game and ensure that it arrived in time for Christmas with all of the customizations inact. Samples were sent to computer stores, but this was not the perfect harmony of distribution and marketing that Winstan’s e-cards needed to be successful.

The Apple II edition of “A Christmas Adventure”

I’d love to report that A Christmas Adventure was the surprise hit of 1983, but that distinction falls to Care Bears and Cabbage Patch Kids. They made their Christmas delivery, but ultimately the timeline and budget were too tight to build a distribution pipeline to reach the masses by Christmas morning. Less than a thousand copies were sold that first year, plunging Chartscan Data into debt and ultimately bankruptcy. Having played the game (as you will soon read), they did not fail for lack of either effort or a good idea. Winstan’s concept of personalized games as gifts was a remarkable leap in 1983! In fact, I would assert (without adequate proof or research, mind you) that he is likely the unsung inventor of the “e-card”. I hope that he and his team look back on this failure with a certain amount of pride.

As a final coda on this part of our story, Winstan tells me that The Sloane Report, a Miami-based newsletter focusing on software in education, named A Christmas Adventure as their co-game of the year in 1984. Of course, this recognition came too late for the Christmas season, but it hinted that there may still have been life in the product after all. Although Chartscan Data had gone under, a new Bitcards, Inc. emerged through the magic of business and financial wizardry. Winstan taught himself BASIC and continued the development of A Christmas Adventure himself, releasing a “2.0” edition in time for Christmas 1984. This is the version that I played in my review. He continued updating and selling the game through Christmas 1986 with the final version being tagged as version 2.8. He tells me that he nearly had an agreement for a boxed edition of the game, but at that late stage the industry was shifting towards IBM PCs and that was not a platform that he or his team envisioned supporting. In the end, no other Bitcards were created and the company was eventually folded. Winstan and Callahan continued their careers at Vanier College. Winstan taught Psychology, while Callahan ran their IT Support Services (a role that is very dear to my heart!).

Frank Winstan in the 1980s.

This title has become exceedingly rare. Unlike so much of the early Commodore and Apple II software library, the game was never picked up by the BBS community or the abandonware forums. Very few copies were known to survive. For many years, the only known version was one of Winstan’s “sampler” demos sent to computer stores, documented by AppleAdventures in 2015. This version included 50% of the story and a “mini-customizer” so that you could see how your personalization would affect the story. AppleAdventures was later able to get his (or her?) hands on an original full version by 2018 and produced a “Let’s Play” video of it on Youtube, but I was unable to convince him to give us a copy to review. When I speak of the differences in the 1983 version below, I am comparing to his earlier efforts in documenting the game.

The version that I played for review was Winstan’s “version 2.0” edition with a 1984 copyright date. This update incorporated a few new puzzles and cleaned up old ones, added a bit more music, and redid some of the item names and text descriptions. This is the version available today on the Internet Archive and, I believe, the version that we purchased last year in our GoFundMe promotion.

Before I begin, I want to thank Frank Winstan and Larry Callahan for their kind cooperation in my review of their work. I can only imagine what it is like to have strange people email you about something that you did thirty-six years ago, but to their credit they have been incredibly forthcoming with details and anecdotes about the development of the game. It is to my great shame that I only incorporated around a third of the historical details that they provided me. I am also exceedingly grateful for Frank for sending along a copy of the manual and offering to mail me a pristine Apple II version for my review. I was unable to take him up on that given the time constraints– I suspect rushing right before Christmas is a feeling that he is familiar with!– but appreciate it nonetheless.

Very nice “3D” rendering of flying towards the palace; quite advanced for 1983!

Introductory Movie

The game opens with an extended cinematic, very unusual for a game of this era and well-done over all. The camera flies over a darkened North Pole snow field towards Santa’s Ice Palace. We are taken inside to Santa’s office. A “greetings” message on the wall appears to be customizable. I’m not positive who is narrating, but they have “chatted” with Santa’s computer many times before and refer to us, the viewer and player, as a “poor mortal”.

Something is amiss? What can it be?

OMG. Who could it be?

  Suddenly, an alert appears on the computer: Santa is missing! With only a few hours before Christmas, the computer springs into action to figure out what to do. It searches its worldwide naughty-and-nice database to locate someone that can help. That someone… is you! My version has the name set as “Current Player” although this also is customizable.

With that, we are instructed to flip over the disk and begin.

Presumably the Apple logo was also customizable.

Playing the Game

We start the game where the cinematic ended, in Santa’s “Ice Palace”. The greeting message from the opening is still there, but the safe that was clearly visible before is now covered by an Apple painting. I’d wager that was either customizable as well, or at least changed based on which platform you were running. Is that a hint? Yes! We can move the painting to reveal the safe, although it is keyed to only let Santa open it. A strange parser issue shows up immediately in that the “waste basket” is spelled “was’basket”, presumably because the word was too long. You have to be careful as “basket” isn’t recognized as a synonym. I’ll have to be on the lookout for these sorts of things.

When we look at the desk and chair, we get the message that they “cannot be manipulated in any way” and “this is not a trick”. The 1983 edition of the game doesn’t mention them at all and I am not sure what was gained by adding them in except to fill out the room.

In terms of customization, the 1983 video that I viewed has the game brought to us by “Frostbyte Computers” while my version says “Apple User Magazine”. Apple User was a magazine published in the 1980s by Database Publications, although beyond that I am not deeply familiar with it. Frostbyte is a name that is used by far too many companies over the years and I am unclear which one this referred to. In both cases, my guess is that these are companies that Frank Winstan worked with to promote the game. I do not know what a straight-from-the-factory edition of the game would have said.

In addition to the vault, we also have a computer that wants us to insert both a system and a data disk (oh, the 1980s!) and we can pick up the waste basket.

Made in Canada!

  My first task is to explore the house and see what I find. Rather than narrate through every room one-by-one, let me summarize:

To the north is Santa’s Workshop, complete with a map of Canada! I grab a shovel, but the crafting tools are too delicate to be picked up by my fingers. I pull aside the rug to reveal a key. I ignore the stairs down for now.

In the northwest of the palace is Santa’s minimalist art gallery: only a single painting adorns the wall. Moving it causes me to be attacked by “cursed elves”. That triggers a brief action scene, but there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do except watch as they ransack the place. I am forced to restore already. A window in the room is too high up for me to do anything with it. Will I find a ladder?

West of the office is a living room with a chair and a (very!) hot fireplace. Even looking at the fire kills me, so I’ll avoid that for now. I sit in the chair and discover that it “feels funny”. I remove the cushions and discover a rope that I can add to my collection. A sword over the fireplace seems interesting but I can’t do anything with it.

Further west is an entertainment room with a jukebox and ping-pong table. I pick up a record, but there is no obvious way to play music.

North of the living room is a spartan kitchen containing milk and an empty bag. I nab both.

In the south, I find a bedroom with dressers and closets. One closet contains a surprise Pac-Man cameo while the other has a full set of Santa regalia including boots, a hat, a coat, and gloves. I pocket some coins from the dresser. A second drawer is locked, but my key fits. That contains a disk labeled “chanukah”! Finally, a piece of paper falls out of Santa’s coat that says to call “Current Player” (me!) in the event of an emergency. How did they know I was so good at adventure games!?

Hey look! It’s a cameo!

  That is a lot to digest, but I want to highlight a few things. When you enter that closet in the bedroom, the screen goes black and Pac-Man marches across the screen. When he gets around half way, he discovers that he’s in the wrong game and quickly runs off. It’s bonkers and the first laugh-out-loud moment of the game. I hope we see more examples of the authors’ humor as we play on. It seems impossible, but when this game came out Pac-Man (1980) was very new and “Pac-Man fever” had only just subsided.

Interface-wise, the game is inconsistent whether or not objects disappear when you pick them up. The shovel and key disappear, for example, while the wastebasket does not. Unlike Sierra’s Mystery House-style games, dropped objects only appear when you drop them in the room that they originated in. The parser seems very simple with very few supported synonyms. I’m also fairly sure that it has only three characters of sensitivity, as opposed to the five used by many other early adventures.

Finally, this is the first reference to Chanukah (or “Hanukkah” or any number of equally-valid alternate spellings) in one of our Christmas games! I’ve been hoping to come across a Hanukkah adventure game, but I’m almost certain that none were made in the classic era. The only Hanukkah game that I know of at all is Game of the Maccabees (1983), a little-known action game for the Atari. The earliest Jewish-themed adventure game that I know of is The Pesach Adventure (1993) celebrating Passover. If I ever find a Hanukkah adventure, you can bet your menorah that I’ll find a way to cover it.

If only Amazon could work out how to store 43 million boxes in such a small space!

  Just beneath the workshop is the “gift storage room” where we can see piles of gifts for the good little boys and girls in the world. Looking at them triggers a database-style interface where I can theoretically learn the gifts of all 43,126,798 good children, but for simplicity we can only see the first eight entries. While 43 million seems like a big number, there were 63 million children in the United States alone in 1983. Were the rest naughty? And what about all the good children everywhere else in the world? And did I spend more time than I should researching historical census data? The answer to the last question is “yes”.

We can look at the presents, but only a couple of them seem valuable. Presents #1, #5, #6, and #8 all teleport me somewhere around the castle when I look at them. I’m not clear why. Present #3 is apparently “curtains” and thanks to the magic of an overly-destructive pun, I die and have to restore. #7 is the present for me that I will get at the end of the game. The only presents of value are #4, a doll that I can pick up, and #2, a rhyme:

I was talking to a computer ace Her name, it was Veronica I said, “Hi Ronny- what’s the word?” She said, “The word is Chanukah!”

With two references to Hanukkah in the last couple of minutes, I think that will be important later.

The 1983 game has a completely different puzzle here. In the opening cinematic, there is a brief display of Santa’s gift list. For some reason, Susie’s present is listed in that opening but left blank here. Somehow this is supposed to clue you in that you can pick up (“get doll”) in this room. Regardless of how you get it, the doll is pull-string and intones, “Mommy says that you have to keep warm when you are sick.” Could that be a clue?

The sleigh is pointed in an inconvenient direction, don’t you think?

  Past the gift room is the empty reindeer stables and a garage containing Santa’s sleigh. With neither reindeer to pull it, nor jolly old man to steer it, they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. I do find a blanket that I can grab. By this point, I’m out of inventory space and storing things elsewhere but you get the idea.

With no more rooms in the Ice Palace, I resolve to solve some puzzles. The first is easy: Santa’s security system is fooled by wearing his clothes and that gets me access to his safe. Inside is an unlabeled potion. I can also insert the “chanukah” disk in the computer, but it still needs a second before it will boot. (Weren’t old-timey computers so quaint?) It takes some time and experimentation, but I realize that the record from the jukebox is referred to as “floppy” in its description. That makes no sense at all, but the computer boots when I (somehow?) insert it, so what do I know?

On startup, the computer asks for a password so I take the most obvious guess: “chanukah”. It works! Only a moron would write the password on the disk itself, but my wager is that Santa isn’t the most clued in to digital security. Wait until he gets his whole “naughty” list hacked one of these years! The computer displays a menu with four options:

The first is the gift list, but it doesn’t appear to be useful. The list does not match what is in the store room; the doll is the same, but the third gift is a bicycle and not (evil) curtains.

The second and third options are “need to know” and the computer somehow thinks I don’t need to know yet. When I need to “cure elf maladies” or render “reindeer first aid”, I’ll know where to look for answers.

The final option describes an emergency exit from the palace. It reveals that during an emergency (like this one), the castle is automatically sealed to prevent anyone entering or leaving. However, there is one way out via a “virtually empty” room, although it involves fastening together two common items hidden elsewhere. To make it trickier, one of the items is in a “different time plane”. Is there time travel in this game? My guess is that the rope is one of the items, but what is the second?

The 1983 edition has the computer with the same password, but without the menu. Instead, it gives you a (unnecessary, in my case) clue to access the vault.

Catch the elves in color!

  This is where I get stuck and I eventually watch the 1983 video to see what I missed. The next puzzle that I could solve was the “cursed elves”. I had not noticed that if I opened up the painting while carrying the bag, my action scene would be different. Now, I can control the bag with the arrow keys to capture as many elves as possible. It was more difficult than it looks! For one thing, the elves can move diagonally while I can only move up and down or left and right. Even leaving one behind ends the game and it took me a few tries to capture them all. Once I did, I discovered that I captured seven bad elves and one good one. I have to play over again to try to leave one of the green elves and this adds another layer to the difficulty as the green ones seem to kamikaze whenever I get close. After a few frustrating attempts, I work out that the striped elf is the “good” one (not the plain green one) and seal the deal.

This puzzle is clearer in the black-and-white version of the game as all of the elves wearing vertical stripes are evil while the one with horizontal stripes is not.

Catch the elves in black and white!

  Once we work out the correct elf to keep and get lucky with the arcade sequence, the final elf appears in the room with me. Unfortunately, all of the evil magic has made him ill (an elf malady!) and I can now consult the computer to see what to do. The computer tells me that I need to feed the elf the potion and to keep him warm. I hand over the potion and blanket and he’s right as rain again. The elf turns out to be the leader elf and is happy to follow me around from room to room. I am not clear how to solve this puzzle in the 1983 edition of the game as there is no computer hint. I believe that the doll’s advice was supposed to clue you in to give him the blanket, but I am uncertain what may have clued you in to needing the potion as well.

With the elf in tow, I can pick up the tools in Santa’s Workshop since he can carry them for me.

I fail to notice at first, but you can walk through the hole where the evil elves poured through. This leads to a dark tunnel and then to a time machine! See? I knew there would be time travel here eventually. The original edition of the game has a small maze in place of the tunnel, but since I’m just watching a video I have no idea how difficult it was.

This time machine has a Y2K problem.

  Even with the time machine, I am immediately stuck again. The 1983 video just shows the elf activating the machine when you enter the room and look at it, but that doesn’t happen in the 1984 version. I have to solve this myself. Before I get too far, let me admit that this was multiple hours of experimentation with a little bit of “reading the source code” included. Only a small portion of the game is written in BASIC and I was unable to find anything relevant, but that tells you how desperate I was. Given the rarity of this game, I do not believe a “request for assistance” would have been useful!

If I only had the manual when I played!

  This is when I discovered the “help” feature and boy is it robust! This is all clearly laid out in the manual, but I did not get my hands on a copy (thanks again to Mr. Winstan!) prior to playing. By typing “help”, you can request general information (such as a list of verbs that the game understands) or more specific information about the room that you are in. You can even decrease the difficulty of the elf capture game! This is a great feature, made slightly worse by all of the disk swapping that you have to do to access it. This was likely quite easy on a real system, but my emulator did not handle the disk swapping correctly (probably because the game writes its state to the disks?) and so I had to restore after receiving the hint. I will blame this on modernity rather than a bug in the original. The two hints for the time machine room are cryptic:

“He is his name and his name is like he. Get his attention- that’s the key!”

“Only someone who is small by design can help you slip through the cracks of time.”

Both clues point to the elf as the solution, but I only stumble on the answer by accident. We can, it turns out, issue commands directly to the elf by typing “elf” by itself. That brings up a second prompt to tell him what to do. You can even type “help” again and he’ll give you his own clues! In this case, he tells us to examine the time machine. I had done that already, but now I tell him to examine the machine. This reveals that there is a keyhole in the back.

I know I missed something because I never learned that the time machine was broken, but if you tell the elf to “fix timemachine” when he is carrying the tools, he does so and we are whisked back to the past.

I had thought that this strange syntax for asking the elf to do something would have been in the manual, but it turns out that it is not. My manual is for a later update to the game and perhaps this puzzle was tweaked again, but as it stands I found this to be the most frustrating part of the game so far. Being able to issue commands to the elf is a great feature! It opens up tons of puzzle mechanics and was implemented very well in the Zork series, for example. I am not aware of any other games using this syntax and I wish that it would have been mentioned in the manual.

Prehistoric!

  With my complaints out of the way, I travel back to the year “1”. (The current year was “8X”, but I’m not going to nit pick this two-digit year too much. I expect there were more than just cave paintings in the year 1901!) When we are in the past, the interface doesn’t really work because– somehow this makes sense– we are in an era before computers existed and therefore we cannot tell our computer to do stuff for us. Fortunately, the elf traveled with us and we know how to control him so it all works out. It’s clever but reminds us that we are working through an avatar. We learn that the cave paintings are done by an ancient Evil One and that he is the one that put the elves under a spell. Did he make Santa and the reindeer disappear as well? I discover a hook hidden under a pile of bones and grab that before heading back to the present.

The 1983 version of the puzzle is different.

  In the original version, the time machine is easier to activate as I stated previously, but also takes you to a different era. This is the only example of changed art that I see so far between the 1983 and 1984 games. Rather than going prehistoric, we seem to go somewhere else. The dial remains on “83” so I am glad that this sequence was rewritten for clarity. We still pick up a hook in the past (behind a painting rather than in a pile of bones) and then travel back to the present.

With the hook and rope together, I can create a grappling hook! I throw that to the window in the art gallery and I am able to leave the Ice Palace for the first time. I’m not even going to mention that we were on the second floor.

Just because my nose glows… I just don’t fit in.

  I have been reluctant to mention this before now because I am not sure what is the game and what is the emulator, but I have been struggling with infrequent lockups. I’ve never lost more than a few minutes, but from this point on the game suddenly becomes much less stable. By the time I reach the end in a few minutes from now, I’ll be carefully plotting every move and avoiding actions (like checking our inventory!) that can trigger a crash. I push through, but if these bugs were in the original then I am not sure how much patience the players would have had for this. I’m going to assume that the bugs are due to emulaton and possibly due to my use of save states rather than saving to disk as intended.

I emerge outside. To the west is a snow bank. I dig with the shovel and discover that Rudolph was trapped under the snow! He’s suffering from the extreme cold and his nose has turned orange rather than red; apparently that also means that the other reindeer will not recognize him. Are glowing colored noses so common that they couldn’t put two-and-two together? Sure, Comet and Cupid might be dumb, but Donner and Blitzen could have worked it out. I ask the computer what to do and it tells me that I need to administer a “hot non-alcoholic beverage”. I don’t have any of those yet.

Not the game’s best art.

  Abandoning Rudolph for now, I head east to discover a hut with a loose floorboard. Looking at it tells me that it is “hanging at the window” and I can only assume that it’s a translation error of some kind. It hardly matters because I can move the board to find a path downstairs. Heading down, I discover not only Santa’s secret stash of booze, but also the jolly old elf himself. He’s been tied up, but it is no problem at all to “untie santa” and he heads off on his way. Santa will wait for us by his sleigh.

The final puzzle stumped me for a long time, but I eventually found the “hint” that I needed by hex-editing the game files. I know, I know… I’m a dirty cheater. The 1983 edition of the game just requires you to give the milk to Rudolph, but the 1984 edition wants it to be warm milk. I had guessed as much, but no amount of trying to warm it by the fire seemed to have helped. I eventually noticed an item in the game called “was’bas+mlk”. This revealed that I could put the milk in the basket, then I could put the basket in the fire, and finally I could fish them back out and have warm milk. Make sense? The parser doesn’t handle this very clearly as we cannot remove the milk from the basket when done, but it gets the point across and we can feed the milk to Rudolph. Once back to health, he too went back to Santa’s sleigh.

I race back to the sleign, noticing that there are now reindeer in their stables. Presumably Rudolph gathered them together once he was feeling well. At the sleigh, Santa gives me a present and a message from my friend that gave me the game and heads off on his yearly rounds. I win!

Time Played: 6 hr 35 min

Santa thanks you and leaves for his once-a-year task.

We get our gift (never revealed) and then the game ends with a personalized message.

Final Rating

We made it to the end of another holiday classic! I hope you enjoyed this trip as much as I have. I have a ton of fun researching these holiday games and I hope that comes through. This is a game that has tremendous promise, but for everything that is ahead of its time (the personalization and help system especially), there are some head-scratching moments that a more seasoned game designer would have avoided. The fact that I had enough fun that I was willing to try to hex-edit the game to solve it should be seen as a sign of my enjoyment and desire to reach the end, rather than my frustration.

Every one of our reviews may be someone’s first and that is doubly true for these holiday posts. Let me remind you that we are using our “suspiciously similar” EGGNOG system for review since our usual rating scale doesn’t seem festive enough. Also keep in mind that these scores are based against an idealized version of a circa-1990s LucasArts or Sierra game. Text adventures and early adventures in general do not score all that highly, but this is an indication only of their quality compared to games released more than a decade later. These ratings are designed to be fun and it is generally not a good idea to put too much stock in them.

Let’s get to reviewing:

Enigmas and Solution-Findability – On the whole, I enjoyed the puzzles in this game even though most did not rise above fetch quests around the house. The use of the computer for hints was fantastic, as was everything involved with the Elf, and the creation of the warm milk. Ultimately, those were let down by the primitiveness of the parser but the underlying ideas were solid. The animated arcade sequence was also done well with the right level of charm and frustration; having to work out which elf to save was a nice touch. I am giving extra credit for the robust helpo system which was exceptional for the era and helped to ensure the game remained fun and not frustrating. The rhyming clues ( which I only briefly covered) were some of the game’s best sources of humor. My score: 3

Game UI and Items – As much as I hate to say it, the interface isn’t quite baked yet. A three-character parser with very few synonyms is not great even by 1983 standards and it shows that the developers hadn’t played that many adventure games prior to building this one. If they had better tools, they could have made a better game. Still, the verb list was helpful (even if it felt like an exaggeration) and there are some great features such as the ability to make multiple moves in a single line which are listed in the manual but which I did not discover on my own. My score: 2

Gameworld and Story – The Ice Palace and environs were fun to explore, but they never felt like a real place and the story never coalesced into a full narrative. We never fully understood who our avatar was in the game (an intelligent or magical computer?) and the menace of an Evil One from the dawn of time who plotted something against Santa was a great start, but didn’t go anywhere and didn’t have any impact on the ending of the game. It feels like there were plot beats missing. Who tied up Santa? How did Rudolph end up trapped in the snow? Did we ever cure all of those cursed elves? My score: 1

Noises and Pretty Pixels – This game gives us both a Christmas soundtrack and some excellent art, including a surprisingly nice opening animation. A few of the locations weren’t drawn as well as the others, but the little touches ranging from Pac-Man’s cameo to the catch-the-elves game were done very well. My score: 3

Overworld and Environs – In our normal rating system, we refer to this category as “Atmosphere” and it describes how the game made you feel. Was it tense? Did the setting evoke strong emotions? Did it all come together in an indescribable way? Unfortunately, I have to say that while the game was good and had some nice bits of levity, the overall tone wasn’t consistent. I may have felt differently if I had used the help system more or if the rhymes were integrated into the game itself. My score: 2

Gregariousness and Thespianism – This category refers to the game’s text and I’m very much in a split-decision. On one hand, the room descriptions were spartan and a few object names had strange contractions. And yet, some of the jokes landed, the computer interfaces were nice, and the help system was robust and clever with lots of rhyming clues that most players would never see. I loved those rhyming clues! My score: 2.

Before we add it all up, I want to add one bonus point for being customizable. I was considering deducting points for the crashes, but as I am uncertain whether that was my game or the emulator, I’ll give the game the benefit of the doubt.

Finally tally: (3+2+1+3+2+2)/.6+1 = 23 points!

Honestly, that feels about right. This is another case where the game is greater than the sum of its parts, but it is in good company with several of our other Christmas games, as well as Brian Moriarty’s early work. I am positive that the Bitcards team would have continued to improve had they remained in the industry. With a slightly better engine, they could have done wonders. Even so, it seems likely that Frank Winstan invented the computer greeting card.

I might be stretching things a bit, but I would not be at all surprised to learn that Winstan’s game inspired the release of Merry Christmas from Melbourne House the following year. While they were Australian (but releasing games in the US and UK) and it seems unlikely that they played this one, a particularly inscrutable joke in that game was that you could only exit Santa’s workshop via a window. We may never know if these events are connected, but I have my suspicions.

If you are looking for even more Christmas-gaming fun, please check out our previous holiday specials:

Merry Christmas from Melbourne House (1984)

A Spell of Christmas Ice (1984)

Crisis at Christmas (1986)

Elves ‘87 (aka Elf’s Christmas Adventure) (1987)

Humbug (1990)

As for me, I’ll be taking a break until the new year when I will resume our Infocom marathon (finally!) with Trinity. See you in 2020!

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/missed-classic-79-a-christmas-adventure-1983/

[goldeagleprice]

Billionaire buys Seated Liberty dollar collection

A billionaire has purchased a set of Seated Liberty silver dollars with the help of David Lawrence Rare Coins.

The Virginia Beach, Va., numismatic firm announced Feb. 13 that it had acquired the set on behalf of a partner, Dell Loy Hansen.

Price was undisclosed.

This 1851 Seated Liberty silver dollar, part of the Hall of Fame Collection recently sold to a billionaire, is graded by PCGS as MS-65 and was once part of the legendary Norweb Collection. (Image courtesy www.pcgs.com)

Called the Hall of Fame Collection, the Seated dollar set had been assembled by Bruce Morelan through Legend Numismatics.

Legend was going to auction the set in May, but when rumor suggested that a world class collection was to be auctioned, John Brush, DLRC president, said he inquired about the coins.

DLRC and Dell Loy Hansen jumped on the opportunity, and the negotiations with Laura Sperber of Legend Numismatics took only a few hours.

“This is simply a group of coins that should not exist. The quality of each of the Seated dollars is absolutely impeccable, and every single coin was hand-picked for not only condition, but ultimate quality,” said Brush.

“We acted quickly as we view this as one of the few collections that simply should not be broken apart if at all possible. The sum of all its pieces are so much greater than the individuals,” Brush said.

“When I notified Mr. Hansen about it, he thought that it was an excellent opportunity and one that we should pursue immediately.”

Emotions were strong on the part of the seller, Laura Sperber said.

“I am sad to see the set go, as I have enjoyed exclusively building it for 15 years. It was certainly a highlight of my career.

“With what Dell Loy is trying to accomplish, this monster Hall of Fame set is a perfect fit for his collection. I am thrilled to see it placed with him instead of being broken up,” Sperber said.

Perhaps the best part of this deal for numismatics in general is that average collectors will gain access to it.

“I know he cherishes it and will allow it to be displayed to treat the current and future collecting public,” Sperber said.

Currently, it can be seen as a Professional Coin Grading Service Registry Set at D.L. Hansen Liberty Seated Dollar Set.

DLRC notes that of particular interest are the 1851 and 1852 dollars.

The 1851 is graded by PCGS as MS-65 and was once part of the legendary Norweb Collection.

The 1852 is similarly graded by PCGS and is simply an amazing example of this key date.

In the set are coins from the Garrett, Share, Childs, Fairfield, Stack, Hayes, Amon Carter and Knoxville Collections.

Now Hansen has put his name on the provenance. He is a Utah real estate developer. who has been very active in the coin market for almost two years.

Most of these words are not my own, but as with the Seated dollar set, you can’t improve on top quality.

Thanks for the information David Lawrence Rare Coins.

  This article was originally printed in Numismatic News. >> Subscribe today.

  More Collecting Resources

• If you enjoy reading about what inspires coin designs, you’ll want to check out Fascinating Facts, Mysteries & Myths about U.S. Coins.

• Is that coin in your hand the real deal or a clever fake? Discover the difference with U.S. Coins Close Up, a one-of-a-kind visual guide to every U.S. coin type.

The post Billionaire buys Seated Liberty dollar collection appeared first on Numismatic News.

[inquissien]

Some more sketches of big boy Sperber