#adding links to incentivize myself to make more

[conceptsformyowner]

PTJ4: Body full of drawings, being their sex toy, and having a captive’s breakfast.

2022-07-10 Public Toy Journal 4

This week, I share with you what happens when I come back home and find myself without anyone awake to chain me up for the night, I tell you about a night where I was used thrice and then left helpless, and lastly, I become a canvas.

Saturday night

Coming back home late after being invited by a friend to a show. I found my owner was already asleep, so, as I’d been instructed, I chained myself up for the night.

I wrapped myself in my heavy blanket on the floor, by rolling around for a bit, then tightened a strap above my knees so I absolutely could not separate my legs, attached that strap to the feet of the couch, and then pulled my collar chain tight against the other foot, such that i was spread out, tightly wrapped strapped chained and stretched, with just a little pillow beneath my head.

Sunday morning

I awoke, unsurprisingly in the same position. I waited for my Owner, there, on the floor, inmobilized by myself without access to the keys to the chains that kept me there. Stored and degraded, I felt at home, put away when not in use with no possibility of escape.

They woke up and came up to me, a huge smile on their face. They grabbed a carabiner and joined my wrists together behind my back while caressing my face and just before kissing me.

They love me more when I’m restrained.

I’m prettier when I’m restrained.

They got up and started making breakfast, I waited there some more fore a few minutes, now less comtempt with my situation, having added the restraints behind my back. I managed to wriggle my newly bound wrists back into the sheet burrito I had made for myself. It’s winter, my shoulder were cold.

I watched them from the floor while they went to the table and poured themselves some coffee. They crouched down and set a plate with two croissants on the floor next to my head. They then went back to the table and had some coffee with their own pair of croissants in the comfort of a chair.

I was already more than familiar with how this worked, I had to eat everything with only my face, having my hands behind my back and my whole body chained and stretched out tightly against the feet of the sofa. I’d only be released once I’d finished my breakfast. Not guaranteed, mind you, but it wouldn’t ever happen before that.

It’s exhausting every time, some foods are better than others, this wasn’t so bad.

After that, I was kept with my hands behind my back for the next two hours. Bliss.

Thursday

I was interviewed! By the very hot and wonderful @musingsformyowner. I got have an extensive and long conversation about D/s and 24/7. I loved it and at least some people found it really helpful! So I’m super happy about that, and my Owner made sure I looked super pretty for it, which I adore.

Monday

My owner once, long ago, before we had a dynamic, had me make them an adjustable link, that could go from 15cm to 45cm (6-18inches). On monday they attached one of my wrists on one end, crossed it in front of me to the opposite side of my body, and then attached the other wrist to the other end, such that my arms where sort of crossed in front of me and pulled backwards, like a stratjacket. We call this: using the straitjacket strap.

They kept me like this for a while, it made me incredibly helpless, more than I’d have thought, and after a while it starts being wonderfully painful.

They used me like that, feet together and arms basically gone, more objectified every day.

Saturday night

As per our most recent monthly check-in, I’m now forbidden from hiding the fact that I feel too free. I’m then incentiviced to go and fetch whichever items would fix that and give them to my Owner, giving myself to them as well to bind.

This happenned while we were watching a movie, I went and fetched a link, and they hogtied me, covered me up and we continued watching the movie. After a while, they paused it and started kissing me, after a while more than kissing they were just using my mouth. They undid the hogtie and attached my wrists together to the top of the bed, then went down and sitting on top of me, stretched my feet together right down to the bottom of the bed. Stretched out, compeletely helpless and vulnerable, they then fucked me, used my body until they came.

They then dettached my hands and linked them back together behind me, placed me on top of them and used me from the bottom until they came once more, I felt like just a body, a sex toy.

Their sex toy.

They then unlinked one wrist, and attached the other behind my back to the chain around my neck. They then strongly grabbed my only now “free” hand and used it to touch themselves, using me for a third time, while making me beg for them not to let me come, fuck.

My arm hurt, my other arm also hurt, I was exhausted and stunned, used, worn out.

When they were finally happy, they attached the hand they were using to my other hand, so i was now with both wrists up my back, pulling the chain around my neck back. Sadly, this wasn’t at all choking me in any way, so it wasn’t cause for alarm, and therefore didn’t mean I was to be released soon.

This week they started making me get up and get washed every time I orgasm, and sometimes that’s become incentive enough to ask to…not be made to orgasm. I never thought I’d beg for that. I love them so much. I’m so happy.

Sunday

We finally finished the mothly check-in. We organized all my accesories (aka all the chains and locks and links and caribiners and tape etc) and they found inspiration to draw again! After quite a long time.

How? Well, I’m their canvas. They’re using permanent markers to draw on the cloth-covered parts of my body. They plan on having me all decorated by them, constantly changing as each drawing gets washed out.

I love it, being visibly of use to them.

I love being their toy.

#text #journal

[adamatomic]

Design of Doom Eternal

Wanted to jot down some thoughts while they were still fresh, and I hate writing threads on Twitter, so, here we are.

(Surprise! Male game designer has DOOM OPINIONS. BEHOLD LOL)

First, disclaimers: what follows is super subjective, pretty picky, and likely unjustified. I love a good mobility shooter - Doom 2016 and Titanfall 2 are the only western shooters I really enjoy, and each do super interesting things spatially, mechanically, etc. However, I’ve never worked on any kind of FPS type of game, and never worked on a AAA game, nor shipped a game during a global pandemic, and there’s a lot that I don’t understand about what goes into making this kind of thing, much less how it’s even possible. Making a followup to a well-loved and hugely successful game is also a terrifying prospect. Finally, I am about to "dwell” on what I perceive to be “negative” things about the game, which is pretty unfair, because there’s a LOT of positives (it’s fun, it’s gorgeous, the load times are crazy short, the vistas slay again, amazing accessibility options, perfect audio, etc etc). But I think this is a game where a lot of the positives are really in your face, and what again I personally perceive to be the negatives are a little bit harder to put your finger on. And this isn’t a review, and definitely isn’t yucking anyone’s yums. This is me trying to figure out why this one feels a bit different to play. Hopefully the unanimously positive reception of the game by literally everyone everywhere (including myself) balances out whatever acid might be in these queries.

OK!

Jungle Gyms Versus Canyons

Ok, so. Doom Eternal is structured a lot like 2016 in that it’s corridors linking big wave-based arenas, which is a good structure for a game about shooting all the things. Arenas can be flat-ish or tall-ish. Tall-ish arenas seem to roughly come in two flavors: jungle gyms, and canyons. Jungle gym arenas are the ones that I feel like took centerstage in the marketing and gameplay of Doom 2016, as a way of showing off the double-jump / ledge grab / launchpad vertical mobility stuff, and because they make narrative / thematic sense in the human-built oil rig environments that comprise much of Doom 2016′s level architecture. Jungle gyms are distinguished somewhat from canyons by generally having what feel like distinct “floors”, or solid planes creating multiple separated levels of combat. Canyons, even if they have some transverse traversal elements, are more open and chaotic, with less concrete divisions between elevations. I’m belaboring this essential difference because it has a bunch of second-order effects on gameplay - jungle gyms allow you to jump from skirmish to skirmish, you can use your mobility options to “interrupt” combat, while canyons are more continuous. Jungle gyms usually have more obstacles (like the aforementioned distinct floors) which make it slightly harder for long range enemy attacks to land, which reduces the overall ambient damage-soak.

The key thing about all these arenas - flat open spaces, distinct jungle gym environments, and canyon style playgrounds - is that you definitely want all of them in your game, because the strategy and tactics for playing these fights changes a lot based on these constraints. When do you want a roof over your head? When do you not? When do you want your back to a wall? These are valid and important differences for these games specifically, especially when basic resource management strategies in these encounters is pretty similar, and because the enemy behaviors and attacks have so much variety.

So far, though, Doom Eternal feels like it has a WHOLE LOT of canyons, and NOT a whole lot of jungle gyms. It’s possible that this changes later in the game, so take all this with a big grain of salt. But the first 3-4 hours of gameplay are really dominated by canyon-style vertical arenas, which isn’t necessarily ideal in terms of variety (and makes you angst a little harder for the wall-run affordances of other mobility shooters). They also tend to be slightly same-y, outdoor, rocky environments, versus the more oil rig-inspired, recognizably human-scale mining structures of 2016 (I’m sure this changes later in the game too). The oil rig-inspired stuff also lends itself to jungle gyms a lot more naturally, so I feel like these choices of arena shapes and environment types are kind of an interconnected and difficult problem.

None of this would really even qualify as a problem, either - this is nitpicking nitpicks, at this point - except relying on canyons so much exacerbates some of the “fussiness” of the combat changes (those are next). For me, anyways - I’m not sure anyone else is feeling like these are problems haha. And it’s a big game, so I’m not sure how much this stuff changes across the whole campaign yet!

Tactical Ballistics

A Doom thing I adored in 2016 and am continuing to enjoy in Eternal is the way ammo, health, and other arcade-style upgrades are thoughtfully placed around the arenas. It’s a nod to the strongest parts of Vanquish’s level design, and goes all the way back to using coins in Super Mario to lure players out to new places they might not explore otherwise. It’s a huge part of what gives the nu-Doom arenas their “chess-like” feel, and shifts the fights away from Serious Sam-style battles and makes them into four-dimensional puzzles. 2016 doubles down on this tactical approach by leveraging a kind of resource triangle of chainsaw kills, glory kills, and just plain firefights.

A lot of Eternal’s design seems committed to upping the ante on all of these strengths. Lower ammo capacities puts more pressure on the chainsaw kills. There’s a new technique called “flame belch” that turns the resource triangle into a resource square to accommodate armor. Monsters have “weak points” now, shortcuts that change their behavior or get you fast glory kills. It’s a pretty compelling jigsaw puzzle of abilities.

It also places a lot of strain on player attention and cognition, because all this is running on top of straight-up arena-wave firefights (with 7+ enemy types at a time, all with unique behaviors and optimal strats) AND beefy mobility controls (swinging, dashing, double-jumps, ledge grabs, launch pads, etc). It’s kind of a lot. But I don’t think this is necessarily the place for saying “this is DOOM, man, you got to keep it simple, just shoot the monsters, how come there’s even upgrades” or whatever. For so many reasons, but the primary of which is that most of this stuff rules, and throwing it away would suck. So what do you do?

I want to focus on two small, specific things that really stand out to me - I’m not totally sure that they’re actually “bad”, but I think they have a lot of weird secondary and tertiary effects that contribute to some perceptions of “fussiness” in some of the battles.

Weak Points

This is a big enough change that it is repeatedly tutorialized through video on every loading screen, after every game over, and after every new enemy is introduced... so I know it was on the designers’ radar haha. And it's an interesting addition - chess fights in Doom are already about hierarchies, and adding another tiny hierarchy within an existing hierarchy is a NICE bit of tension to add, it gives a kind of scrambly feeling that is good overall. The issue for me arises from an apparent or perceived damage scaling issue around these weak points. For example, the optional sniper rifle upgrade to the heavy cannon and the optional sticky bombs upgrade to the shotgun insta-wreck the arachnotron and revenant enemies’ weak points, while sustained plasma rifle fire doesn’t seem to ever do the job. Which makes sense on paper - this is a nice way of putting pressure on the player’s weapon choices and ammo, which is what it’s all about. Although I guess you could argue that it’s also all about movement, and that this particular combat pressure has a pretty tenuous relationship with mobility in general.

Either way, it means you spend a lot of time squinting at your weapon wheel mid-battle to see how many shots your shotgun still has, because you ran out of chainsaw fuel a while ago, and are still being actively bombarded at a pretty long distance (because its a canyon and not a jungle gym). I know, I need to git gud, trust me, i KNOW. But check out the weapon wheel ammo display size in Doom 2016 versus Doom Eternal:

I love the new color scheme and ammo icons in Eternal! But it’s 3-4x harder to read the actual, very important ammo counts.

All these small changes add up to something that feels like a pretty different gameplay experience compared to the more spatial (read: movement-based) and literally easier-to-read resource management stuff from 2016. Which, it’s a sequel - failing to sufficiently differentiate it is its own huge risk. And, to be fair, 2016 had its fair share of fussy (though more legible) weapon switching. But when you add this stuff up, the matrix of considerations in moment-to-moment combat in Eternal is pretty different from 2016, and I think it largely comes down to the damage scaling around the weak points. While you can technically choose to play through battles without leveraging weakpoints (thus sidestepping most of these cascading issues), this approach is heavily incentivized by the major behavior changes that happen after you hit weak points (in addition to the constant tutorializing) and the waves appear to have been balanced around taking advantage of these things. Whether or not these are even flaws, technically, whatever they are is exacerbated by the UI design of the weapon wheel AND the relatively popularity of the relatively unobscured canyon arenas. So it’s hard for me to judge weak point damage scaling in a vacuum.

Overall, these new combat options make the arenas feel more constrained and more prescribed. Design is a nightmare this way: sometimes by giving people more choices, you’re actually giving them less. My pitch for a small tweak that might engage with some of these issues would be to keep weak points, but get rid of the damage scaling and maybe make the hitboxes a little bigger. The goal here is NOT to make weak point enemies easier so much as to open up options about what weapons you can use against them, thereby reducing wheel squinting, thereby freeing up more attention to movement and all the other stuff that ruuuules about nu-Doom in general.

Also, I should clarify that it’s entirely possible that I completely imagined the weak point damage scaling, and am a big dummy with bad aim.

Flame Belch

This is a pretty small thing, there’s this new “flame belch” move, intended to complement the existing chainsaw and glory kill moves as a way of “farming” resources from combat, one of the things that really defined Doom 2016. It differs in one huge way though, in that it has to be committed to BEFORE killing a monster. Chainsaws and glory kills ARE kills. Flame belch adds a status instead, which is “cashed in” later when you do the kill. If chainsaw kills and glory kills and BFG shots are Super Mario jumps, Flame Belch is more like a Tony Hawk jump - it starts early and is carefully calculated. Which is pretty dope!! But in this environment where weak point damage scaling and canyon layouts are already putting huge strains on the player’s attention, it feels like a big ask. The “triangle button” mechanic from 2016, the BFG, was a kill move with cool-down, so really I’m just suggesting stuff they already tried anyways. There’s no way this is news to anybody, much less the developers haha.

But... I would love to play a build where flame belch was totally a thing, just it was a finishing move, not a status thing. Let it plug into that reload-replacing resource-farming punctuation pacing flow. That shit rules.

Of course, I have to wonder what the unintended secondary and tertiary consequences of these suggestions would be. Good action games are often tenuous and deeply interconnected things where results are really hard to predict. Maybe they already tried these ideas and they sucked, or they know their own game a lot better than I do, and have a big stack of reasons this stuff would suck for most of their player base.

But wait...

Where The Hell Am I?

Last section, I promise.

I am extremely not going to weigh in on whether or not Doom games need “Story” or not, or what that even means.

But...

If you are driving a monster truck, it is probably pretty fun to see a big line of cars in front of you, and know that you are about to drive all over those cars, and that at the end is a really big fancy car... and you are going to drive over that too.

The general conceit of Doom 2016, that you are on one end of a Mars base, and you need to get to the other end, and in between is a whole lot of cars demons, is a good one. It has good monster truck-ness.

So far this is something that I’m struggling to extract from Eternal. I’m not really sure who any of these grumpy folks are, or where it is that they are, or why I am going down this corridor (aside from the very Doom-like fact that it is the only corridor around).

The problem for me is decidedly NOT that I don’t understand the slayer’s emotional whatever, or that I haven’t been painstakingly expositioned into the specific hierarchies of the demon universe, or anything that I think would normally be described as a “narrative”. For me, it’s that I don’t get to sort of soak in the anticipation of the loooong line of cars I’m about to crunch.

Does Doom need a story? Idk. Doom might need a lot of about-to-get-crushed cars though.

Finally finally finally, and this is highly subjective, but I think the slayer is just more fun when he’s an X factor or a rogue agent. NPCs recognizing the slayer feels sort of weird to me? The feeling that he is a fly in the ointment I think is stronger and sexier when he’s like... outside the canon, almost. I’m not totally convinced that having him Kratos around is as fun as having a bunch of demons and priests both confused and terrified of what this dude is doing.

OK

I need to get back to family stuff. They let me sit here and type this out, which was very kind of them. Only five tantrums so far. Either way, I’m looking very forward to playing more Doom Eternal...

...just as soon as I finish designing 17 more shirts in ACNH.

Hope everyone’s staying home and staying safe! Rip and tear, friends. Rip and tear <3

[kingjaffejoffer]

Thursday Thoughts #36

I am irrationally impressed by complex gang signs. Like my nigga, this is a whole new language. It’s like finger heiroglyphics. 

I bet Iyanla Van Zant cant wait to get her hands on Cardi B so she can make her feel bad about how she acts. 

Carmelo is washed. He’s in the “Fat Elvis” stage of his career

All Kanye had to do is shut up and drop the album. He’s ruined his entire legacy. 

Billions may be the greatest cat & mouse game in TV history

What if the cure for extinction among animals is their ability to evolve to become less threatening and more convenient to be kept as pets by humans. Cats and Dogs are like “we saw this shit coming 8,000 years ago, yall gotta catch up”

A hidden perk of Kevin Harts profession and the fact that he’s made a living off self-deprecating humor means he has the option to never be truly embarrassed for the rest of his life. 

Like, if Kevin Hart was in a Starbucks wearing sweats and he got diarrhea and everyone could see it. All he’d have to do is crane his neck in an exaggerated motion while looking down at the back of his leg and be like, “damn I done boo boo’ed on myself” and it would be fucking hilarious. Who would hold that against him?

Getting older means you get to sit back and watch people do the exact same shit you used to do, with the exact same rationale,  And you get to hear them be so resolute and sure of themselves with their decision, and they swear up and down they’ll never change their mind. But of course, you know they will. 

I listened to “Why Don’t We Fall In Love” by Amerie for the first time in hella years. That song is still good. Production is A+++++

I watched Eddie Murphy RAW last night and jesus christ this could not have came out in 2018. As soon as it starts he starts joking about gay people (The Gay Police in San Francisco part 😭😭😭). Then a few mins later he’s talking about fucking a 19 year old girl.

There’s no place in society for outspoken conservatives. Shut the fuck up, all of them.

It’s 2018, its time for Instagram to stop that “Link In Bio” shit and let people put them in captions. I know the reason they aren’t doing it is because they want to incentivize buying ads. But still. . 

I really don’t think Steph Curry is a poor defender per se. I just think he’s not athletic enough to keep up with elite NBA guards. Guys who are explosive like Wall, I. Thomas, Kyrie, Russ, etc. I think all those guys have a level of athleticism that Curry physically cannot keep up with for an entire game. 

Is Bill Cosby bout to hit us with that Joe Paterno special or nah? “Oh yall not fucking with me?.... well ok then” **Dies**

INFINITY WAR TONIGHT BRUH

I low key don’t want Infinity War to make more than Black Panther in the box office. “They want you to do good, but not better than them” lol

I was on BART yesterday zoning out thinking about booty. And came to the conclusion that booty has 4 major components that bring it to life. The cuff, The shelf, The hips, and the consistency/density. You don’t need to have all 4 areas on point to have a nice ass, but there are different kinds of booty and they’re usually heavy in one area but not the others. 

[topicprinter]

Hey all,Just wanted to add a little preface to this post with some context. My colleague James just wrote a massive piece detailing everything we did to drive a ton of sales from a recent webinar.Unfortunately, James is a big-time lurker, and doesn't have the karma to share it with you. But I do!I've read through this a few times myself and I think he's done a really impressive job in giving you a look behind the scenes when it comes to our webinar strategy.I hope you find this useful! And please, feel free to reach out to me here or on social (not sure if I'm allowed to post it, so I'll hold off) if you have any questions about running your own webinars.P.S. There a quite a few (useful!) images in this article. If you don't already have RES, I'd recommend you go get it. :-)So this is the closest thing I've ever had to something worthwhile to put in this community.I'm head of inbound marketing for a tech startup in Vancouver, Canada, and 4 weeks ago our team met to discuss how we planned to meet our growth goals for Q4.One of the main things we talked about was webinars.I've always enjoyed the sound of my own voice, so I thought I'd give it a go.The webinar we ran, after a lot of trial and error, has driven more than 11k in sales, and I wanted to share how we did it. Not sure if /r/Entrepreneur will take the whole piece, so I may have to link at the bottom.Basically, this covers everything we did in the 4 weeks before going live with my webinar, "How to Increase Sales This Black Friday & Cyber Monday."4 weeks before the webinarWe started with a brainstorming session. Here's the questions we asked:1. What will our target market be interested in learning more about?- A webinar on Justin Bieber may get people to register, but those people wouldn't be particularly interested in buying your email software after the fact.2. What subject is related enough to your business that an offer related to it would be desirable?- Your target market may care about sales optimization, but if your business sells Wordpress themes, your post-webinar offer won't get a lot of interest.3. What do I know about? What am I a genuine expert in?- This one goes without saying. You are the primary reason people register. You need to have a demonstrable expertise in your webinar's subject matter to get them in the door.4. Can this topic be visually-represented? Does it have visual elements?- You talking without a slidedeck or screen capture gets boring fast. Choose a topic which engages your attendees visually.5. Will this topic stand out from the crowd in some way?- You're not the only business or marketer running webinars. Tie your topic into a current event, or put a spin on it (original research, perhaps) which helps you stand out from competitors.After throwing a bunch of ideas up on the board, we landed on one which we felt ticked all these boxes: Black Friday sales strategies: timely, interesting to our target market, and delivering strategies which attendees wouldn't have seen before.And, as important as any of those, this topic gives Wishpond the opportunity to show off the value of our software to prospective customers.The next step was planning:For project management, we use Asana. It allows us to see exactly who's responsible for each task, when that task is due, and (most importantly) to leave little notes for each other - some of which are even relevant to the task!Here's what the Black Friday webinar plan looked like:https://www.wishpond.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2018/10/Asana-plan.pngThis calendar dictated our responsibilities for the next few weeks.At this point the Wishpond marketing team separated to divide and conquer.Takeaway:Dividing and conquering is the only way to create a complete webinar campaign. There's so much to do. Get your team together and assign responsibilities, and use Asana (or a similar project management tool) to organize it all.3 Weeks Before Going LiveHere's what we needed to accomplish three weeks out:Step 1: Complete the webinar landing page (needs to be done before we can start sending traffic)Step 2: Send a mailout to existing contactsStep 3: Research and decide on a webinar platformStep 4: Complete the website additions to direct visitors to the webinar landing pageStep 5: Complete and launch Facebook AdsStep 1: Create the webinar landing pageWishpond makes the creation of landing pages easy, and we're lucky enough to work for Wishpond. So building a campaign page for our webinar was relatively straightforward.That said, it does help to have Carlo (a graphic designer before I stole him for the marketing team) on hand…Here's the page he designed:https://www.wishpond.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2018/10/webinar-landing-page.pngThere are a few essentials here, which we made sure to include:The form: You should collect exactly the information you need, and nothing more. More fields will reduce conversion rate. Fewer fields, and you won't be able to personalize your follow-up emails.The countdown timer: Countdown timers increase urgency, and have shown to increase webinar landing page registration rates significantly. Wishpond's editor enables you to drag-and-drop a countdown timer just like this one.The "About your Host" section: You need to prove that you, or whoever is hosting your webinar, is an expert on their subject. "Why should I listen to this person for 40 minutes?" is a pretty serious question you need to answer.The "What you'll learn" section: After all, people need to know exactly what they stand to benefit from your webinar. Don't hide this.Step 2: Send a mailout to existing contactsThis was pretty standard. It looked like this:https://www.wishpond.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2018/10/black-friday-newsletter.pngSince running this webinar, I've read more about incentivized referrals - basically, rewarding people when they share your brand or your promotion.Step 3: Research and decide on a webinar platformWe needed a webinar platform which worked well, looked great, and connected easily with our other tools.I'm part of a few marketing communities on Facebook, and a timely question from one of the other members was super helpful here:https://www.wishpond.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2018/10/webinar-software.pngDemio. It came up several timesSo we looked into it, and absolutely love the platform.It's clean, affordable and the UX is awesome. I won't wax on about it, but yeah, it's a really solid tool. Check them out.Takeaway:You're not alone. If you have a question about anything to do with setting up a webinar (or marketing in general) there are thousands of marketers willing to answer. Check out Quora and Facebook communities.Step 4: Create website additions to drive people to your landing pageThis, like the landing page, is Carlo's wheelhouse.Website additions, like popups and welcome mats, are an awesome way to drive your website traffic to register for your webinar.He created a popup for the Wishpond blog as well as a welcome mat.However, we didn't end up using the welcome mat, as we determined it could hurt our website conversion rates).TakeawayDon't be afraid to kill your darlings. Creating these website additions took Carlo about half an hour. Having a tool like Wishpond makes it super simple, which means it's okay when plans change. If he'd committed a full day to creating and coding a custom welcome mat, we would have had a harder time throwing it in the trash.Step 5: Create and launch Facebook AdsThis was a mistake.We created the ad designs and messaging, created tests and launched nine Facebook ads.Then we sat back and watched. And the cost per registrant just kept going up.We paused the campaign, created new designs and re-launched. But we couldn't make it work. When we couldn't get below $35/registrant, we had to stop.We'd driven 11 registrants for $400.At our customer value, this wasn't profitable.If we're paying $35/registrant, and only 10% of registrants book a demo after the webinar, and our demos have a 25% subscription rate, we'd need a customer value of $1,400 to make it break even. And we don't have that quite yet.TakeawayIt could be our target market (marketers are notoriously expensive), but my thoughts are that you'll get more bang for your buck if you ignore ads and, instead, get webinar registrants from your website traffic or past customers (i.e. popups and newsletter mailouts).Have you made Facebook ads work for webinars in the past? How?2 Weeks Before Going LiveTwo weeks before going live, we needed to wrap up a couple things:Step 1: Compete the slidedeckStep 2: Write the post-webinar email seriesStep 3: Write the reminder emailsStep 1: Complete the slidedeckI use Google Presentation for every presentation I do. The platform is super simple, and I love the ability to share, co-edit, and add seamless transitions.TakeawayThere are a few things to remember when building your webinar slidedeck:- Include less text than you think. Honestly, go back over your slidedeck a few times and remove text. If you need text prompts, write out notes. Don't ask your webinar attendees to read while you talk.- Add transitions. This is especially relevant between paragraphs and lists. Show only one idea at a time.- Make your images as large as possible. You never know what resolution or screen your attendees are going to be on. Don't bank on them being able to see what you're talking about. Err on the side of massive.Step 2: Write the post-webinar email seriesOnce your webinar is over, you'll need to have a strategy in place to turn registrants into customers.We've found (in other campaigns) that a 3 or 4-email series is the best way to do that.Sent automatically, a real person will get involved as soon as someone replies to the email. Other than that it's completely automatic.Here are templates similar to the three emails we wrote:Email 1: Post-webinar essential infoThank you so much for a successful webinar!Even if you didn't attend, I wanted to send you the recording/slidedeck.Exclusive to webinar registrants, I'd like to give you a [X%] discount to [Your Business] until the end of the month.If you have any questions about anything in the webinar, let me know!Email #2: Webinar follow-upWanted to make sure you received my last email?We're offering a [X%] discount exclusively to webinar attendees until the end of the month, and I didn't want you to miss out!Let me know if you have any questions! Email #3: Won't keep bothering you I won't keep bothering you, as I haven't received a response and I don't want to clutter up your inbox.I did want to send you one last thing. This [resource related to the webinar content], which can [concrete positive outcome].I'm always here if you have questions about [webinar content]!Step 3: Write the reminder emailsThe biggest barrier between a profitable webinar strategy and a failed one isn't the design of the page or the content of the webinar, it's attendance.On average, only 25-50% of your webinar registrants (those people you've worked so hard to get) will show up on the day.So I put serious time into writing 4 reminder emails:An auto-responderA "24-hours remaining" emailA "1 hour remaining" emailA "15-minutes remaining" email1. Auto-responder emailImportant webinar informationHi [First_Name]Thanks for registering for [Webinar Name]!Webinar Details:Name of WebinarDate:Time:I'm excited for the big day, and can't wait to share the strategies we've used to [achieve concrete, positive result].To make sure you don't miss it, use this link to add the webinar to your Google calendar:And be sure your friends don't miss it! Share with your network and get a free Starbucks coffee on me, to drink during the webinar! - [Link]Looking forward to it!To add "Add to Google Calendar" links to your emails, check out this url generator.2. A "24-hours remaining" email:Subject Line: Only 24 hours left!Hi [First_Name]Only 24 hours before we get rolling with [Webinar Name]!Can't wait to see you there at [time].If you haven't already, be sure to share the webinar your friends to get a free Starbucks coffee on me, to drink during the webinar! - [Link]Cheers!To send your registrants a free coffee from Starbucks (which is more than worth it, believe me), check out the Starbucks website.3. A "1 hour remaining" email:Subject Line: [Webinar Reminder]: 1 hour left to get your free coffeeHi [First_Name]We're going live with [Webinar Name] in about 55 minutes!Log in to the webinar waiting room using this link:And you still have time to earn that free Starbucks coffee by sharing this link with your friends: .Only by attending will you get my exclusive [secret strategy] which won't be in the recording!Can't wait to see you there!That's a bit of a gamble, that last sentence. Whether you do want to hold back something exclusively for attendees is entirely up to you. My recommendation would be to test it. Do you get more people to attend (and buy from you) if you do hold something back, or do you get more if you record the whole webinar and send it to all your registrants?4. A "15-minutes remaining" email:Subject Line: [Webinar Reminder]: 15 minutes leftHi thereStart settling in!We'll be going live in about 15 minutes.Grab your coffee and log in to the waiting room by clicking this link: .Can't wait to see you there!I will give you some strategies below for how you can still turn registrants into customers, even if they don't attend your webinar.Week of the WebinarThe week of the webinar was all about setup and rehearsal.We also sent another mailout to everyone who hadn't opened the previous one (didn't want to bother people who had already registered), but I've already covered that.This section will cover the essential steps you need to take the week of the webinar and on the day itself.Step 1: RehearsingI scheduled two full-length rehearsal webinars for the Monday and the Wednesday before going live on Thursday morning. I invited (of course) Carlo and Mateus, but also Ali (our CEO) and a few people from sales. I wanted insight from as many different people as possible.Rehearsal of your webinar does several essential things:Allows you to get a feeling for how long you should be talkingAllows you to record yourself, to see where you're weak and where you're strongAllows your colleagues to give notesGives you confidence in your subject matter and your webinar content Rehearsing is huge. Don't even attempt a professional webinar until you've done the entire thing (with recording) at least a couple times.Step 2: ModeratingNot only do moderators give you that extra little "this is professional" kick, they are also super helpful.My colleagues Carlo and Mateus both acted as moderators during my webinar.Moderators do a number of essential things:Moderate: As in, they kick out anyone who's spamming or trolling the comment sectionProvide relevant links: If you mention your Twitter handle, email address or a demo link, your moderators can put it in the comment section for attendees.Collate questions for the Q&A: Rather than you having to scroll through all the comments at the end of the webinar, have your moderators put all the questions in one place. Then you can answer them more smoothly.Top Tip:This is a bit cheeky, but everybody does it. If there's some information you'd really like to share with attendees but you don't want to appear too salesy, have your moderators "ask" some pointed questions as if they were attendees.For instance, in my last webinar I had a total stranger/my colleague ask "How do we book a demo, again?" as well as "What software do you recommend we use to create the website popups you showed us?"Step 3: Giving people time to arriveOnce I went live, I introduced myself and told everyone how excited I was to start the webinar.Then, and this is crucial, I gave attendees a couple minutes to arrive.My webinar started at 10am. I went live at 10:02 (intentionally) and told everyone I'd get rolling at 10:05. This gave latecomers time to enter the webinar.Have you ever turned channels to find a movie which started 10 minutes ago? You've missed the beginning, which is everything. You can spend the next 2 hours wondering "Wait, who's that guy? Is that the main character or the bad guy? What's he trying to do?" What's the chance you'll stick with that movie?Webinars are no different. A big part of keeping people to the end of your webinar is ensuring they're there when you start. Give them some time.Final thoughtsSo there you have it: the exact strategy we used for our most recent webinar."How to Get More Sales This Black Friday and Cyber Monday" drove 524 leads, 115 of them new to Wishpond. Those leads have turned into over $11,000 in sales, and the follow-up emails are still going out.I'm super happy with how this went. It was nerve-wracking and I was sweating the whole time, but it was exhilarating and fun, nonetheless.I really hope you give webinars a shot, and let me know if you do!If you want to see the original post in its fully-formatted glory, just click here: https://blog.wishpond.com/post/115675437738/guide-to-webinars

#/r/entrepreneur #reddit

[certainhologramobservation]

Why affiliate marketing is the best solution for your business What is Affiliate

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing is a performance-based marketing tactic where your eCommerce company advertises on other people’s websites and shares revenue with them, every time someone buys directly through their links.

Affiliates are incentivized to promote you because they get paid when anyone clicks through one of these affiliates' unique URLs for the product being sold by Affluent! This means that if an individual or organization uses my link then I'll be compensated in some way either monetarily plus other benefits like free shipping etcetera - all thanks just from having promoted myself via this sort viral campaign strategy known as "affiliate."

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

To get the most out of your eCommerce affiliate marketing campaigns, we suggest using a platform like an Impact or AWIN.

Sign up for these platforms in three easy steps:

Select what type you want, create an account and profile by adding new affiliates to grow networks with them - this will make sharing easier!

Regularly update content hubs so that it's fresh when customers want something different from what was there before.

Also, keep affiliates informed about special offers/discounts via email during campaign season as well as any other ways they can communicate throughout promotions periods.

Affiliate marketing platforms are a great way to get your product in front of potential affiliates. When you sign up for one, the site will connect with other marketers at once and give them all information about what kind of new release or patch has just come out so that they can share it among themselves quickly before anyone else finds out first!

Possible downsides might include not getting chosen by every user on these sites if another advertiser was quicker than expected (or even faster), but there's usually some sort of rating system that should help prevent this from happening too often anyway.

How Much Does Affiliate Marketing Cost?

There are a few different fees that you might pay in affiliate marketing, depending on the platform. For example, there is an one-time fee to set it up and then monthly subscriptions or portions of your sales can be taken as fees for using their service (a $500 setup + 3k/monthly subscription).

There will always be some kind of cost associated with running any type if business online because they all involve bandwidth; however these numbers vary quite considerably between companies so make sure before committing yourself!

Affiliates are a great way to get started in affiliate marketing. Not only do you not have pay them much, most of it comes from your revenue and there is no need for large initial investments so long as they get on board with the plan early-on! There’s plenty more where that came from too; once things ramp up - watch out because this can be an incredible ROI: 900%.

How To Track Affiliate Marketing Results

The advantages of affiliate marketing are many, but one that stands out is the ability to track results and manage reputation with data-backed decisions. If you use an online platform for managing your campaigns it will provide insights into all aspects from clicks per ad click through rate on a particular site or product link as well as revenue gained directly from their links in Google Analytics if they have given permission

One benefit without using any third party services at all would be being able yourself access metrics such as number of visitors coming via affiliates' websites to your product pages, the average time spent on site and even social media like Facebook or Pinterest too.

Can You Hire An Agency To Help You?

Totally!!

You can do it on your own if you want to, of course. But hiring a digital agency will make life easier! They’ll take care of all the platform setups and campaign management so that there is no need for any panic attacks in this process (believe me when I say we know how daunting creating content can feel). You also get access to experts who are versed with what works best online; they'll help create ads based off affiliate marketing strategies as well as provide visuals such like formats/dimension combinations color schemes etc., which affiliates could then utilize when posting their links onto social media sites or exchange programs like bittorrent.

Pros & Cons Of Affiliate Marketing

Pros

Affiliate marketing advantages and benefits include:

Affiliate marketing is a performance-based strategy with the potential for high ROI. It's fast and easy to set up, as you can quickly connect your affiliates through affiliate networks like CJ Affiliates or Commission Junction (CJ). You'll be able to track results on these platforms or within Google Analytics once they start selling products in their network - which could happen quite soon after setting everything up!

Affiliate marketing is a great way to get high-value leads. With affiliate partners who share your target audience, you can promote the brand and acquire new customers almost immediately!

Cons

Affiliate Marketing is a great solution for promoting product launches, new collections and seasonal discounts. Unlike influencer marketing though it doesn't work as well long-term because affiliate platforms are not very conducive to building strong networks over time if you're just starting out in this industry or niche with no established following already built up by others who have done some of these things before.

Summing Up

One thing is for sure: choosing between these tactics should be easier now that you understand how they work and what the advantages, disadvantages of each tactic are.

To wrap it all up here's a final overview to help make an informed decision about which solution best suits your needs as an entrepreneur looking into acquiring new customers or growing revenue streams quickly - affiliate marketing or social media advertising?

For more Info keep in touch with Nikulsan.

#bestdigitalagencyinbagalore

[niell87]

YouTube ads are a gamble, sometimes you get a good one and today it was Imperfect Foods. With how it presented itself I couldn't help but look into it, but what did "waste" mean exactly? Can't be this simple and while informing myself about Imperfect Foods, I stumbled into 'Here’s the ugly truth about the ugly produce movement,' a post on a commentary site about the food industry. After, I clicked on the response link the article provided, 'Let's Talk about Food Waste and Hunger.' Needless to say I was educated on a problem I hadn't thought to look into. While both inform readers about a systemic issue in the food industry and their very distinct tactics to confronting it, neither seem wrong. For Imperfect Foods, it seems that most people prefer the ability to customize details in their order and the availability of the service in their area while, like Kelleen Silveira Rose stated in her comment, "...(not) taking our business from the farmer's markets or the other boxed produce companies, (but rather) taking our business from the big chain stores." Big chain stores perhaps meaning Walmart or Sam's Club. The lack of transparency is what makes this situation more complex than it already is as Cynthia Fan stated, Imperfect Foods is not disclosing the farms and wholesalers they use to further assure consumers they are not incentivizing large-scale agribusiness to continue overproducing. Further elaborating on the desire to be a part of a movement that builds a sustainable food system committed to only working with growers who practice social responsibility and endorse policies that, presented under 2.1 standards of the Center for Good Food Purchasing's, support union contacts, respect freedom of association and collective bargaining, offer safe and healthy work conditions, prohibit child labor (as defined by the International Labour Organization), and who value their employees. Miss Cynthia's stance is what most resonated with my concerns. Ideally there would be a solution everyone agrees onto and participate in but a gray/complex matter will almost always lead to vague and unclear discussions where things simply aren't simple.

#ads Wonderland #once upon a time

[bloghealthinterventions]

Episode #16 Protecting Your Personal Life

When you are working in the medical profession there is a lot of demand on you. You are seeing patients, charting, managing authorizations and if a business owner, the business. There is a lot of stress and time involved in that. The time and stress can start to creep in and take over your personal life.  In this episode, we are going to take a look at how that happens, how it looks from your family’s point of view and ways to protect your personal life from being consumed by your work life.

  When you are new to this profession, it doesn’t seem so difficult to see the patient, chart on the patient, follow up on labs that you have ordered and be finished by the end of the day. Especially when you are often not given the real picture of a full patient load during your clinical experience. You get shielded as a student from the big picture. As your patient load increases, or you start to encounter more complex patients that require extra care coordination getting that charting done might be a little bit more difficult before the end of the day. Next thing you know you’re taking your charting home. This begins interfering with your home life. Most often, your family does not understand why when you get off at five or 6 o’clock you still have to work. Unfortunately, this is where we are right now, with a ridiculous amount of documentation required for reimbursement. With the introduction of pay for performance reimbursement, we will see what happens. The theory behind this pay for performance is that it is about the quality of care, not the quantity of care. Meaning that instead of billing the E& M codes You will be coding the diagnosis’ and the outcomes. Meaning you are reimbursed and incentivized for A1C, BP and cholesterol levels within goal and for decreasing visits to the ED. Unfortunately, this doesn’t reduce the number of patients that NEED to be seen when you are booked out 6 weeks.  The current system requirements to see 30 to 40 patients a day to make a viable income is quite ridiculous. This reduces the quality of time spent with the patient. 

 You often find yourself needing to choose between getting your work done before the end of the day or spending your time with the patient that is in desperate need of your attention and services. Patients do not come in with a clear-cut problem that can be tended to in 15 minutes. Often the patient will come in and you’ll finish reviewing the studies, Completing your objectives for the visit just in the nick of time, with your hand on the door and they say, oh one more thing.

 Of course, you don’t want to cut them off, you need to address with that one more thing is. You can’t have them make another appointment to go over that one more thing because you were booked out for the next six weeks and they are there now in front of you requesting another moment of your time. That moment usually turns into an additional 15 minutes. Most insurance companies will not reimburse you for the extra time spent on an acute problem that was added on to the established care visit. They want you to make them have a separate visit for acute problems. 

 Again, the goal of this podcasting adventure is not to get into data and details and regulations and insurance issues. The goal is to put things into real life. To give you the tips and tricks that you need to take care of yourself and take care of your patients, preserving your sanity and their health. In episode #8 I talked about How To Maximize That 15 -Minute Visit to be able to fit it all in. If you haven’t listened to that one check, it out. I’ll link to it in the show notes for today. 

 You don’t want to become bitter and burned out and forget the reason that you went into this profession. You don’t want to start neglecting the patient’s needs because you need to finish charting or move on to the next patient. You also do not want to take it home with you and become irritable or spend your free time working on documentation.

 Today I want to share with you a chance encounter I had to see things from the family’s side.  The encounter I want to discuss is the one involving the significant other of another nurse practitioner asking me for advice or support. This encounter was with a gentleman that was at my office to do some contract work. He had scheduled the work for me to be done on a holiday weekend. I gratefully accepted the offer to meet me at the office on this day, as my schedule is quite insane and the issue at hand need to be tended to rather quickly. While he was there doing the work, I asked why he had offered to do it on a holiday weekend. I learned that his wife was a fairly new nurse practitioner, in a primary care office, And then came what was like a huge slap in the face of reality to me. The reality of the current situation in our profession. 

 He said to me, “she’s always working anyway, doing charts and stuff so it doesn’t matter”.

 I was literally speechless for a few moments. He looked so sad and looked away, shrugging his shoulders as he said it. We continue to have the conversation around the work situation. I felt it almost an obligation to help him to understand some of the downfalls to what we do in our profession. I of course supported the fact that our patients are more important to us than ourselves sometimes, even if that wasn’t right. Inside, I deeply wanted to help him to not be disappointed. I also wanted to be supportive of her as she was finding her place in the practice, and with her patients, in her first year of practice. But as I was talking, I found that I was only making it worse inside of myself. Why should I support the fact that this woman was gone from home for 50 hours a week at the office and then brought home her work every evening and weekend and holiday. Why is this right? There was no extra compensation for this. She’s actually compensated per patient. She does not have a base salary; she is completely commission based and at the same time is pushed with minimal experience. Without speaking to her myself, I didn't know the complete extent of this, but I was gathering that she had minimal support in her new role and was not only trying to see the patients, document on the patients, but research of course what was needed to effectively treat her patients. There was a flicker in me that was furious that someone was being treated like this and was being encouraged to run patients through as fast as possible for a dollar with minimal support, but I did not let that out. I just listened. 

 I always thought that the things I did for myself were of my own accord. I own my business, I am an entrepreneurial spirit, I have multiple projects always in the works, therefore self-inducing my demands on self and indulging my workaholic nature. if you were to ask any of my staff, they would tell you they don’t ever want me to have free time because it will only give me time to think about new ideas. I will blame this trait on my mother. 

  Nothing is ever perfect, but You have to learn how to work with in your career and your life with balance. Balance is the key. And if you don't get that balance from the beginning or work hard to find that balance once you own up to it as a need, you’ll find that you're getting burnt out. I'm afraid this is only going to lead to misery. You can't do everything; you can't cure everyone, and you can't fix everyone. And when you're honest with yourself and with your employer or coworkers they will appreciate that as much as you do. Your family will appreciate that. In the profession of caretakers, put yourself first, because when you take care of you, you're much better for everyone else.

  The moral of the story in this one, is to hang in there if you are a new graduate and build your confidence. With things like this podcast. It’s a learning process. You do have to seek out other resources. You were given so much information in your program to get you to where you are right now, but unfortunately a lot of it is not real life. You may not have gotten a good first job. You may struggle with finances that have been put on hold while you were in school. Don't succumb to a greedy bully that is called your boss.  Remember that there is a learning curve. Have an open discussion with your family about that learning curve, but definitely be aware of their feelings also and do what you can to not make it a snowball effect that only gets worse instead of better. Start with the discussion with your employer about needing a little bit more time your skills and confidence. If they are not willing to budge, maybe you need to look at other opportunities. 

 Do not sacrifice yourself or your family. There are too many options and opportunities out there. If you’ve been at this a while maybe, consider starting your own practice. If that’s not in your interest that’s ok. There’s no shame in seeking a position that allows you to protect yourself and your family. 

 A little lesson from the heart. We’ll get back to more of the medical stuff next week and care of your patients. I’ve just felt it necessary to give some love to my colleagues for your own health. 

  I encourage you to share your own personal experiences to help others.

 Have a great week! May it be filled with many Health Interventions!

[blaurascon-kzk]

KZK Discord Digest [Week of April 17 - April 24]

SUMMARY: Lions are live! Preorders should already be sent out. Hope everyone digs em! I've updated the FAQ some. Added a few new sections, removed some irrelevant sections, etc. Check it out if you haven't yet! https://blaurascon-kzk.tumblr.com/post/71402739026/kinzart-kreetures-faq-n-stuff RE: the Direwolf community showcase: There haven't been any submissions. Not entirely unexpected, but a bit saddening. Still! If you make something new and spiffy with the Dire devkit, show us! We still love seeing stuff you guys make! The Direwolf discounted price will be up for a while still. We had some unexpected downtime a few days ago. It's all resolved now!

______

April 18

Blau04/18/2020 @everyone The unscheduled downtime from earlier should be complete and Okarthel is open and ready to go again. If you have any failed purchases or whatnot from last night / earlier today, please contact Sharim Nova / Kat with the transaction information and he'll sort you out.

Kat04/18/2020 @everyone No one's mentioned it, but I do want to address it here: At the start of march, I put out the very belated direwolf devkit, and hoped to incentivize content creators to create content for it, by offering to promote their creations to the group.

Well, sadly, no one really came forward and.. while it disheartened me, I also understand that the direwolf is well over a year old at this point and that I heartily dropped the ball on those. Perhaps my next big venture like that won't be such a trial. I do have more big stuff like that in the works, but I won't announce anything until some sort of update for the Dire has been pushed.

That said, The direwolf's discounted price will remain active for a while longer, not sure how long.

______

April 22

Kat04/22/2020 @everyone Hey folks! As many of you know, the Lions should be dropping today but honestly, in the interest of not spending all night trying to get things packed, forgetting stuff, messing shit up, ect(again).. I've opted to just.. get everything reset and loaded tomorrow. I just wrapped up foldering everything, now I just need to load the boxes, set up the unpacker, and reload/edit the server details. its the home stretch, and I'd rather get there without jeopardizing my mental health to do it.

I've spent years pushing myself way too hard, and as things are finally stabilizing for me financially and emotionally, I don't want to get back into the same habits that put me here in the first place.

I hope you will all understand, and I look forward to seeing you all in your spiffy new lions tomorrow!

:heart:

______

April 23

KatYesterday at 11:08 PM @everyone Houston, we have liftoff.Lion Redeliveries have begun. :)

Not sure what the  numbers are, so no clue how long it'll take, but suffice to say that everyone should have their lions by morning for sure. I'll be hanging out for the next hour or so monitoring the situation.

______

April 24

BlauToday at 1:11 PM @everyone Hi folks, hope everyone is digging the Lions so far :)

I just went through the FAQ and gave it a couple updates. Check it out if you haven't so far, there's a bunch of useful links right at the top! Convenient shortlink: http://bit.ly/kzkfaq Long boi link: https://blaurascon-kzk.tumblr.com/post/71402739026/kinzart-kreetures-faq-n-stuff

#kzk-dd #kzk #.

[because-its-important]

making a pico8 game during my first week of RC

tl;dr - Play my first ever solo game right here!

On my first day of Recurse, fellow W1 2017 batcher Ayla Myers (whose work you can peep here) presented on fantasy game consoles, PICO-8 in particular. Her presentation ran roughly 5 minutes, but it only took about half that time to convince me that I should give it a whirl. Since asking for help is more than encouraged here, I approached her immediately afterwards and asked if she could do a quick walkthrough of PICO-8 sometime.

“Yeah, of course. When do you want to start?”

“Uh…” It was already 6pm. “Tomorrow?”

“Okay!”

And lo, 11am the next day found myself and a handful of other Recursers sitting around a table in the Turing meeting room as Ayla showed us the ropes.

PICO-8 is a highly-opinionated, highly-constrained fantasy console with a robust set of tools for quickly developing and sharing games. While I’d played a few PICO-8 games before, I hadn’t realized just how core the commitment to retro-nostalgia is to the engine itself. Here are some fun things I learned about PICO-8:

It includes a pixel art editor and a chiptune mixer, both of which are a delight to use.

PICO-8 games can have 2 players, but each player only gets 6 possible inputs: four directional keys and two others (typically Z and X).

On the programming side, developers are allowed a maximum of ~8k tokens and ~65k characters. This incentivizes some extreme optimization, overloading, and other tricks in larger games that near those limits.

The games are super easy to export and share, either as embeddable HTML and JS or as downloadable executables.

As someone who has shipped dozens of games professionally but has never personally programmed one from start to finish, I decided that it’d be a good exercise to build one during the remaining 4 days of the first week.

On programming in a new language.

PICO-8 uses a subset of Lua, which I’ve never read or written before. Under other circumstances, I probably would have preemptively given up and shied away from using a tool that required learning a new language. Fortunately, my current circumstances are “you are entirely here to learn new things and surrounded by people who can help, actually” so I waved off the anxiety and plunged ahead instead.

Turns out that Lua felt very similar to other game programming I’d done in the past, so there wasn’t any need to worry anyway! (One begins to suspect that there is rarely a ‘need’ to worry… 🤔)

There were a few things that stood out in particular as I built my game.

First, to handle animations - like bobbing a sprite or moving UI elements on and off screen - I found myself repeating a pattern using a counter (incremented every update loop) and a maximum (resetting the counter to 0 when it reached this value). I wasn’t sure if a series of timers would be a better fit for cycling through animation states, especially since this pattern meant assigning at least two tokens per animation. Since I was focused on building this quickly and wasn’t worried about running up against the token limit, however, I figured that consistently using a single pattern that I knew worked was the way to go.

Example of the section of the bat’s update loop that flaps her wings up and down and plays a quick beat on each flap:

Second, I learned that tables are “the only data structuring mechanism” in Lua, and that there is no readily available method to query them about the number of items they’re holding. To solve this, I tracked the count of items as a separate variable and updated the count any time I was adding or removing items from the table. If I were pinched for tokens I’d probably handle this differently, likely by writing a separate function that iterates over the the items in the table and returns the count.

Lastly, and this one was a pleasure to discover, Lua is perfectly a-okay with removing items from a table while iterating over items within that table. For example, during the update loop I want to iterate over each of the moths in the game and check if the bat is in a position to eat them. If the bat should eat the moth, I want to add a quick sound effect, draw some bug-gut splatter to the screen, and remove the moth from the moths table.

I can do all of that like this:

This was a big relief to me because I’ve had trouble doing the same with JavaScript in the past!

On finding relief in constraints and designing a tiny game.

I didn’t have a strong idea when I first started making Sonar, other than that I should be able to finish it in a few days and that it should be about animals. Certainly my appreciation for earth’s non-human lifeforms would stave off any temptation to jump ship if things got confusing or tedious. 🦇

There was a brief moment where I sat, staring at my laptop screen, wondering what I could even do with only two non-directional inputs. It took about five minutes for me to come to my senses. What if this constraint, much like the constraint on tokens or audio channels, was a blessing? “Wow, I’m so glad I only have two buttons to work with,” I told myself, found it to be true. “In fact, let’s start by using only one of those buttons.”

Changing your perspective sure is a time-efficient way to clear obstacles!

On making art and SFX.

While I’d done some game programming (though never a complete solo project), I’d certainly never done game art or audio. In fact, art and audio often felt more intimidating than the rest of the design or development. I didn’t really know anything about creating reasonable looking pixel art or have any kind of background in creating music or sound effects; I just knew that both were important to making a game feel whole.

Once again, PICO-8 provided seamless introduction to these areas of game development. With only 16-colors and 8x8 pixels to worth of space to work with, I never got stuck trying to pick the perfect colors or shape for a sprite. If it worked, it worked, and it only took a matter of seconds to make changes and see them live in the game.

As someone who has zero musical education the responsibility of creating audio made me more than a little apprehensive, but I found the SFX editor similarly quick to learn and pleasant to use. I stopped short of making any ambient music, but I did make a few sounds: a steady but muffled bassline for the bat’s wings flapping, a high-pitched chirp for the echolocation, a gulp for a bug being swallowed, and a confirmation bloop for starting the game. SFX are necessary for giving a non-haptic game the illusion of tactile feedback, and even just these few simple, two-note sounds do a lot of heavy-lifting in making the game feel more responsive.

On jamming fast, alone, in an environment geared towards collaboration.

The single biggest struggle I had while working on this project was worrying if I should be spending my time doing something else. Whenever I spent large chunks of time coding alone, rather than pairing or attending study groups, I couldn’t help but feel like perhaps I was missing the forest for the trees. Shouldn’t the first week be about learning as much as possible about my peers and their interests, in the spirit of future collaboration? Did I somehow find a way to ‘do it wrong?’

Hard to say, what with only one week’s worth of information! My current guess, however, is no. I became familiar with a new language, I learned a new toolset, and I finished a project that I feel at least remotely comfortable showing to other people. Those are pretty solid accomplishments, even in the face of a gnawing suspicion otherwise!

More importantly though, I practiced being comfortable following my own intuition of what an ideal first week might look like. I proved to myself that I could set my own goals and meet them. I also developed a general feel for the ebbs and flows of working with myself as sole author and stakeholder on a project. I’m sure this kind of self-knowledge is valuable at any level, but as a beginner it feels like an especially worthwhile point of reference.

Besides, this was all made possible because I was inspired by a fellow Recurser, asked them for help and got it. 

How could that be wrong? 😊

You can play Sonar right here.

ps. I almost forgot something funny!

This is one of the first things that happened when I began animating my pixel bat:

I laughed at this for a solid minute. It was wonderful, and only more so because I had spent the previous two hours setting up new software, familiarizing myself with basic Lua syntax, and fretting over whether my pixel art would be at all legible.

As one of my friends commented, “OH NO, HIS FLAPS FELL OFF!” And then, “or HER flaps, excuse me.”

Making games is generally time-consuming, tedious, detail-oriented work. On the bright side, many of the bugs and SNAFUs you run into are just silly as heck. The moments where ish goes off the rails can provide exactly the right dose of harmless humor to revitalize your motivation to finish. 👑

edit (11/15/2017)

Once again going above and beyond in her helpfulness, Ayla informs me that you totally can get the length of a list in PICO-8!

Here’s how, using the # operator:

local some_list = {32, 4, 72} print(#some_list) -- prints 3

✌️🦇

edit (11/17/2017)

So probably it makes sense to link to the the code, since becoming a better programmer is the whole gosh darn point! 😑

Also, because it may be helpful, I want to provide a quick outline of how you might also crank out a small game in a narrow window of time:

day1 - purchase and install pico8 (if you’re at RC, talk to someone about using their license!) - install a lua linter on your text editor of choice - run pico8 in console mode, so u can use printh to debug - make a player character that responds to input - make a 2-state animation for that player character (eg. flip between two sprites, add some bobbing motion, etc) - get ppl to Play Your Game!

day2 - make an enemy (note that these could also just be Collectable Objects if u aint feeling like defaulting to violence ✨) - make a 2-state animation for that enemy - give that enemy some passive behavior - disappear the enemy conditionally (eg. touched by player, hit by bullet) - make another enemy with similar but more challenging behavior - get ppl to Play Your Game!

day3 - add an end-condition (eg. eating some amount of bugs) - add SFX. this is more important than music for making your game feel whole, and you can do just about everything you need to with 2 note blips - add UI elements (eg. health bar, bullets left, etc) - add a start screen - add an end screen - get ppl to Play Your Game!

day4 - add finishing touches - export your game as html from PICO8 - host somewhere, like itch.io - write a blog post!! - share with your friends and the rest-o the world

#game development #pico-8 #recurse center #lua #pico8 #games #bats #pixel art

[clarencenicholsonata]

7 Unconventional Lead Generation Techniques for Brick and Mortar Businesses

The whole lead generation process for physical brick-and-mortar stores is not only tedious but also laborious if you’re relying on traditional methods.

Cold emails and cold calls by scraping through local address books just don’t cut it anymore.

But, what if you could still accomplish your lead generation goals using methods that add value to your prospects?

To walk you through some of the different methodologies, we’ve curated 7 unconventional lead generation techniques for local businesses.

1.Embed know-how videos

Video marketing is the future of the internet. Video content improves SEO, increases conversion rate, generates a direct sales lead and more.

Web users spend more time watching videos. This has proven to be highly beneficial for marketers and local businesses.

Videos are an effective lead generation tool. Consider using high-quality, informative content as gated content, adding videos on landing pages, and adding CTAs at the end of the video with a related offer can help to generate leads.

Consider platforms like YoutTube and Vimeo to get millions of views every single day. YouTube is the second most popular search engine as of today.

Users get on to YouTube to find potential answers to their questions. If a video is linked to the answers at the bottom that directs them to your website, that is a potential client in the pipeline.

Forbes predicts that 90% of customers say a video helps them make decisions to buy and 64% of customers say that watching a video makes them more likely to buy a product.

Add dynamic QR Codes at the end of the videos for the potential lead to scan and are directed to your website’s top landing pages or social media handle.

Beaconstac here, for example, leverages know-how videos to educate their users on how to create PDF QR Codes. Videos serve as a great interactive tool and simplify the process on the whole for users.

For more on using video for business, check out our guide on six types of video ideas to supercharge your social media.

2. Leverage app-less marketing

Deploy QR Codes and NFC Tags to generate leads to your local business and automate your marketing strategy.

QR Codes and NFC tags are cost-effective, work out-of-the-box, and is extremely efficient in generating leads.

This allows businesses to analyze, track and retarget their consumers by engaging with third-party applications exclusively meant for analyzing and retargeting by studying their click behavior.

Macy’s, the largest retail chain in the US has deployed beacon and NFC technology to strategize an engaging shopping experience for its users.

By opting for these technologies, Macy’s has amped the customer experience by rolling out loyalty programs, an enhanced customer service, segregating the layout merchandise in their stores, and offering personalized shopping experience.

Using QR Codes and NFC Tags on print marketing medium such as flyers, brochures, OOH advertisements, incentivized coupons and offers can be leveraged to promote the product, and, in turn, effectively increase leads.

McDonald’s used QR Codes on their paper packages after learning that their customers wanted to know more about their food by sharing nutritional information about their hamburgers.

This not only instilled a blanket of trust amongst the customers but also helped the company to highly target and retarget their customers to send out personalized messages and offers.

3. AMA (Ask Me Anything)

One of the most powerful and unique techniques to generate leads to your local business is by reaching out to pioneers in the market industry for their thoughts.

Take advantage of social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and even LinkedIn to post these Q&As. Send out a planned invite to your customers and followers notifying them about the Q&A session.

The questions could either be asked by an employee or you could even leverage consumers in this case with questions to ask the expert.

Awario states that companies who engage in social selling get 199% better ROI.

DataVLT, a data analytics platform ran an AMA session on Twitter by using the hashtag #AskDVLTAnything. By keeping their hashtag unique, the company was able to gather questions from different parts of the world and answered them during the session.

4. User-generated content

User-generated content and review platforms have a powerful foothold in organic search, making them an eminent opportunity to expand your brand name and get noticed by the right consumers.

When a business encourages its consumers to leave a review behind on a third-party platform with strong SEO, they are exponentially increasing the chances of being discovered by qualified prospects in search; without paying a penny.

FinancesOnline is an online B2B solutions finder service that works purely on customer reviews and ratings. The platform segregates companies based on the maximum quality content reviews and helps consumers find the solution they need.

Google acknowledges their independent role in helping consumers what they want and seems to approve review sites in search engine results.

Businesses can also outmaneuver their competitors in high-value keyword searchers. Considering the Google/CEB study found that 71% of B2B searchers start with a generic keyword phrase, this is crucial.

5. Answer questions on Quora

Quora is a Q&A based social networking site that reaches more than 100 million users per month. Quora can be taken advantage of to build yourself as a thought-leader in your particular niche.

Quora is primarily a user-generated content platform. But with that being said, there are ways to get the formula right on Quora. Quora is best used as a method to open up communication threads as you engage and help out users who are looking for a particular solution.

By answering questions related to my niche, and offbeat content, I can categorize myself as an expert on the subject matter garnering more attention to the company. This, in turn, will help the company get more users to at least click on the link, open a loop, and get them interested in the platform.

Quora doesn’t allow overly self-promoting content to generate leads and bring in revenue. The laws of reciprocity come into light and consumers will reach out to you after establishing yourself as a trusted source on the platform.

6. Offer free trials and giveaways

Giveaways, free trials, and sample products are the ideal method for getting potential users excited and letting them use your brand’s product to have an insight into it.

Free trials of a brand’s features can hels to capture potential consumer. If the trial helps them greatly, they are more likely to purchase the product and become a customer.

Sephora offers a plethora of free giveaways and trial products for their customers. In fact, Sephora is hugely popular for its giveaways, coupons, and discounts which get consumers flocking to their website and physical stores.

This lead generation process for Sephora has been hugely successful and has helped the company to retarget their potential customers to turn into qualified leads.

Touchless buying can also be employed for businesses that have an online presence.

In addition to that, consumers who have tried free samples are the most qualified leads because they have actually reached out to try your products.

By offering free trials and giveaways, a brand can do its own selling and encourage people to buy their products in a low-pressure manner.

7. Optimize email marketing

According to a report by DemandGen, lead-nurturing emails get as much as 10X the response rate as opposed to standalone mails.

Marketing automation is one of the biggest trends in email marketing at the moment, thus generating great results for businesses. Marketing automation tools are constructively hybrid email marketing tools that connect with your CRM that automatically pushes you to send highly personalized targeted emails to leads.

Email marketing plays a massive role in content marketing success. It plays the role of the concept of direct engagement. Some of the clues to develop a successful email content to generate leads must include -

Subject line

Concise content

Integrate social media handles in the mail

Include high-quality and lightweight images in the mail to explain the content better

Incorporate a CTA at the end of the mail

There are several tools that integrate email marketing to send out timely emails with highly engaging content such as Drip, Aweber, and Constant Contact to name a few.

Drip is an end-to-end email marketing platform that gives an incomparable insight into the customers’ behavior; right from their click behavior, emails they’ve opened, and purchases made to help build a brand from email to social media.

Most users open emails from businesses they want to connect with. This makes email marketing as one of the best tools for lead generation.

Experiment what’s best for your business

As a recap, the seven unconventional lead generation tactics are -

Embed know-how videos

Leverage app-less marketing

AMA (Ask Me Anything)

User-generated content

Answer questions on Quora

Offer free trials and giveaways

Optimize email marketing

A well-thought-out established process and subsequent focused strategy to generate leads can be wholesome and have the power to grow and sustain a business.

When it comes to businesses, the agenda “one size fits all” doesn’t hold good; what might work for a SaaS company might not work very well for a grocery shop.

Although lead generation is the numero uno challenge in this present day, identifying the bottlenecks in the funnel and tweaking strategies to take a technology-first approach always helps.

About the Author

Apoorva Hegde is a Content Marketer at MobStac. Apart from writing articles and blog posts related to QR Codes and all things related to it, she enjoys simple pleasures of life like going on long walks with her dog, eating carbs all day, and alike.

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[nigeiadigitalmarketingcompany]

Links 8/1/19

Digital Elixir Links 8/1/19

Paragliding husky is totally chill during his adventure New York Post (furzy)

John Steinbeck: Did Nobel Prize-Winning Novelist Spy for the CIA in Paris? Daily Beast (furzy)

Orange is the new green: How orange peels revived a Costa Rican forest Princeton (Michael SF)

Instead of practicing, this AI mastered chess by reading about it MIT Technology Review (David L)

Researchers Develop Speedy Soft Robot That’s More Robust Than a Cockroach IEEE

Sony Plans to Release a Wearable Air Conditioner Next Year Core77. Resilc: “See, my global warming problem is fixed. USA USA.”

Greenland Is Melting Away Before Our Eyes Rolling Stone (Chuck L)

The Dying Art of Instruction in the Digital Classroom New York Review of Books. Resilc:

The combination of computer use, Internet, and smart phone, I would argue, has changed the cognitive skills required of individuals. Learning is more and more a matter of mastering various arbitrary software procedures that then allow information to be accessed and complex operations to be performed without our needing to understand what is entailed in those operations.

China?

Hong Kong protests: China military breaks silence to warn unrest should not be tolerated Guardian

US accuses Chinese billionaire of evading aluminium tariffs Financial Times

Russian army ordered to tackle massive wildfires BBC (David L)

Olga Misik: How teenage girl reading constitution in front of Putin’s riot police became a symbol of Russian resistance Independent (Kevin W)

Syraqistan

Oil Tankers Perform Vanishing Act in Hormuz as Tensions Escalate Bloomberg (furzy)

Iran mocks Pompeo’s offers to visit Politico (Kevin W)

Big Brother is Watching You Watch

DNC vs Wikileaks Court Case Ruling WSWS Glenn F: “Hadn’t heard about the case. The ruling may not bode well for the DNC and the extradition of Assange. From the post:

The judge labeled WikiLeaks an “international news organization” and said Assange is a “publisher,” exposing the liars in the corporate press who declare that Assange is not subject to free speech protections.

Facebook is funding brain experiments to create a device that reads your mind MIT Technology Review. Resilc: “What could go wrong?”

Cambridge, Massachusetts Moves To Ban Facial Recognition Gizmodo

Capital One Breach Said To Also Affect Other Major Companies TechCrunch

Everything Cops Say About Amazon’s Ring Is Scripted Or Approved By Ring Gizmodo

Imperial Collapse Watch

Pillars of nuclear arms control are teetering Financial Times (David L)

Stealth wars: China’s J-20 vs. USAF’s F-35 Asia Times . Resilc: “All it has to do is fly and it beats the F35.”

Trump Transition

“Have We No Decency?”: National Cathedral questions Americans’ silence over Trump’s racism Vox (David L)

Bulk of Trump’s U.S. farm aid goes to biggest and wealthiest… Reuters (resilc)

Trump Administration Plans To Allow Imports Of Some Prescription Drugs From Canada NPR. Um, I don’t read this as different than existing rules. The bar is against reimportation. This reads as if the supposed rule change allows importation of drugs similar to US drugs but not made in the US.

Sen. Rand Paul offers to buy “ungrateful” Rep. Ilhan Omar a ticket to Somalia. Slate UserFriendly: It might be my imagination but i5t feels like every time someone has a big ask for Trump he has them go defend his latest dumpster fire to the press and only gives it to them if they do it well.”

2020

Democratic debate: Biden dodges question on deportations under Obama BBC. #2 story on US edition.

This Is the Soul of the Democratic Party New Republic (resilc)

Via e-mail: DFA down on DEM DEBATE: “The real winner of tonight’s debate was Tuesday night’s debate.”

Joe Biden isn’t the only one being attacked tonight. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard didn’t hold back when she took on Sen. Kamala Harris’ criminal justice record. #DemDebate pic.twitter.com/7eZE6v6ZHW

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) August 1, 2019

Twitter is censoring @TulsiGabbard from appearing in United States trends. I got her to appear on worldwide trends but with over 113k tweets she should have been on one of my US trends lists. Tulsi Gabbard needs to address this like she did with Google.#Tulsi2020 #DemDebate pic.twitter.com/YySD1rMtHR

— Currie Dobson (@Ventuckyspaz) August 1, 2019

CNN Tried to Derail Sanders and Warren Last Night. It Failed. Truthout (furzy)

Senate Democrats see Warren, Sanders proposals as unfeasible The Hill. So those Dems need to go.

>Why Millennial Socialists Aren’t Into Elizabeth Warren Atlantic (resilc)

Kamala Harris’s Phony Medicare for All Plan Jacobin (furzy)

Taibbi in Iowa: Dems Are Repeating GOP’s 2016 Primary-Season Errors Rolling Stone. Resilc: “It is un-Amerikin to learn from history.”

Pro-impeachment ad with Mueller to run during Democratic debates Reuters. EM:

LOL – As soon as I saw the headline I thought to myself, ‘this sounds like a Tom Steyer stunt’. Even after the debacle-for-the-pro-impeachers that was the recent Mueller testimony, the deluded True Believers just can’t help themselves. Perfectly happy to see Steyer waste more of his money on this nonsense, however!

L’affaire Epstein

Jeffrey Epstein, Trump’s Mentor and the Dark Secrets of the Reagan Era MintPress

Jeffrey Epstein Trial Will Have a Million Pages of Evidence, Lawyers Tell Court Daily Beast (furzy)

Police State Watch

Following Another Water Incident, Assemblymen Propose Law Making Disrespecting Police A Felony CBS New York. Resilc: “I love my local stormtrooper.”

Marital infidelity and professional misconduct linked, study shows ScienceDaily and People who cheat on their partners more than twice as likely to engage in workplace misconduct, study claims Independent (Dr. Kevin)

Businesses struggle for survival in US coal country Financial Times

FTC Says ‘You Will Be Disappointed’ if You Choose $125 For Equifax Payout The Verge

Opinion: Central bankers now must cut interest rates to compensate for politicians’ mistakes MarketWatch. By Raghuram G. Rajan, former Governor of the Central Bank of India who gave the famed presentation at the 2005 Jackson Hole conference that concluded that financial “innovation” increased risk. He stood up to being hooted down by everyone in the room, including Larry Summers, who called him a Luddite. So this will get some attention. But as resilc pointed out, “Incentivized mistakes. USA USA.”

The Opioid Crisis Is About More Than Corporate Greed New Republic (resilc)

Lyft is halting its e-bike program in San Francisco after two bikes mysteriously erupted in flames BusinesInsider (David L)

Powell fails to bend yield curve to his will Financial Times

Guillotine Watch

Drugmakers to pay $70 million over deals to keep cheap generics off the market ars technica (Dr. Kevin)

Drugmakers’ Alleged Price-Fixing Pushed a Needed Pill Out of Reach Bloomberg (resilc)

In 1980, life expectancy was the same in the US, UK, Germany, and France.

Now it’s 3-4 years lower in the US, and it is falling.

That’s in a country that spends almost twice as much on health care than every other nation. pic.twitter.com/nOUatLPy17

— Gabriel Zucman (@gabriel_zucman) July 31, 2019

Class Warfare

IBM Fired Up to 100,000 Older Employees to Make Room for Millennials, Lawsuit Alleges Fortune (David L)

IBM Fired as Many as 100,000 in Recent Years, Lawsuit Shows Bloomberg

Antidote du jour (furzy):

And a bonus:

I’ve discovered camel barbering and my life will never be the same. pic.twitter.com/M0sAuAGsIb

— Claude T. Hector (@TlntdMrHector) July 28, 2019

See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.

Links 8/1/19

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#Digital Marketing #SEO #Social Media Marketing #Nigeria Digital Marketing Company #Lead Generation

[econ23econlive]

The Economics of 3D printing

Please Read here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sixuG9AJ94mxLIOCKiCbdR1T1ZHUYrAcUId9G5T6444/edit?usp=sharing

Kyle Seward

ID: 39063238

Discussion: Wednesday, 11:00 AM

I pasted my submission here in case there were errors viewing the link above:

(I used my 3D printer to make this UCI Econ 23 panel and the “Pink” Panther, in honor of the Lecture Video’s intro music)

3D printing has given everyone from doctors to DIY enthusiasts the ability to transform ideas into physical objects. As a mechanical engineering student, I use 3D printers for nearly all of my classes, design projects, and research. Also, I have been a proud owner of my own 3D printer since the beginning of 2019, so I’d like to share my experience as it relates to the economic concepts we’ve learned in this course.

Commercial 3D printers operate as luxury goods since its demand increases as its price changes, and exhibits an elastic demand curve. In my case, I placed the value of owning a 3D printer at $600, since I value saving time and completing school projects quickly more than I value keeping $600 in my bank account and dealing with on-campus 3D printer waitlists and faulty prints. Since the on-campus printers are a common resource, it is rival in consumption, where one person’s use of the printer prevents another person’s use. Additionally, the printer is non-excludable, which allows any student to use the printer (there are approximately eight thousand engineering students on campus). As a result, the printer acts similarly to a congested non-toll road.

In December, my wishlist printer, the Prusa i3 Mk2s, was running a limited-time holiday promotion, dropping the price from $700 to $500. Since I was willing to pay $600 for the printer, this instance reflects a consumer surplus of $100. Adding sales tax to the cost of the printer, it would cost me more money which took money from the firm, resulting in a deadweight loss of $50. Therefore, the end consumer surplus was $50 ($600 - $500*10% sales tax). As a result, I purchased the printer.

Only a decade ago, the average consumer 3D printer cost $1,500, a price that many customers, myself included, were not yet able or willing to purchase. What caused the price to drop in the past years? With Prusa Research Group, one contributing factor to the price drop is economies of scale, which brings down the unit cost of production and leads to lower prices for consumers. This cost advantage can be explained by Prusa’s investment in technology to replace labor when building their products. Called “printing farms,” a group of 3D printers create parts to build other 3D printers, as depicted in the images below. Over the past few years, Prusa has increased its production capacity by increasing the number of “farmers.”

(Source: YouTube Video - “Three hundred 3D printers in one room: A quick look at our printing farm”)

Another contributing factor to the 3D printing price drop is technological advances in the printers themselves. As competitive firms have introduced product upgrades and software efficiency improvements over time, printers have become more efficient to produce, requiring fewer quantities of input (filament).

An issue firms like Prusa must watch out for when expanding their business and increasing production is the point of diminishing marginal product, where marginal product declines as quantity of input increases. With firms that require human labor, this issue is more prevalent due to coordination issues or scarcity in resources between workers, such as crowded workspaces or limited 3D printing time. Since Prusa’s production is run by machinery, these inefficiencies are not as common to arise, since printers can be run automatically, with little need for coordination.

Thanks to the price and product democratization of 3D printers, I’m now a happy owner of my very own printer, which has given me the opportunity to put my curiosity and college education into action. However, soon after my purchase I became acquainted with a negative externality. Whenever a print is running, plastic filament particles disseminate through the air, and excess exposure can be detrimental to your health. Therefore, a majority of printer owners end up purchasing air purifiers, which act as complement goods. Since I place high value on my health and wellbeing, the price of the printer was a sunk cost, and did not affect my decision to use the printer without an air purifier, or purchase an air purifier. Thankfully, my friend was looking to sell his air purifier for $40, a price lower than the original since the demand for a used item is much lower than a new item. Therefore, the total cost of the 3D printer and air purifier came out to $590 after taxes, leaving me with a $10 consumer surplus based on the value I placed for the ability to 3D print from home. Nonetheless, I would have been willing to spend more money on the air purifier because I value my health more than I would want to experience the harmful effects of my printer’s negative externality.

3D printing can also be used to explain comparative advantage and trade. I recently took part in a competition to build an autonomous drone, which consisted of two parts: mechanics and programming. My friend Alex, a skilled programmer with little manufacturing experience, also took part in the competition (Alex’s specialization = programming). On the other hand, I had little programming background but was skilled in manufacturing, thanks to my experience with 3D printing (my specialization = mechanics). To leverage each other’s skills and experience, we decided to team up.

As depicted in this chart, I had the absolute advantage in producing parts, and Alex had the absolute advantage in writing code.  (The producer who gives up less of other goods to produce Good X has the smaller opportunity cost of producing Good X and is said to have a comparative advantage in producing it.)

In terms of comparative advantage - which determines which individual can produce more efficiently in one activity than in another - I held the comparative advantage in making parts, and Alex had the comparative advantage in coding. In the end, the formation of our team, and our trade in production efficiency, gave us the competitive edge we would not have had we competed as individuals.

BONUS

As an engineering student, I’d also like to explore the concept of opportunity costs, trade-offs, and incentives within the example of a typical Saturday. There are three different ways my Saturday could look:

Spend time studying, school-related activities

Spend time at the gym, the beach, fun non-school activities

Combination of A and B

In Scenario A, I could spend my entire Saturday studying. I would only do this if I were incentived to have the best grades possible to be rewarded with getting the best research or internship positions and increasing the amount of opportunities to earn more money in the future. Constant studying leads to inefficiencies such as de-motivation and reduction in endurance, which indicates a point of diminishing returns. However, the opportunity costs of devoting all of my time to studying include maintaining friendships, taking up new hobbies, and having a memorable college experience.

In Scenario B, I could spend my time improving my fitness, enjoying the beach surroundings, and having fun, which I would choose if I did not value the benefits that come with getting good grades. While this sounds nice, I would easily fall behind in class, receive a lower GPA, and experience the opportunity costs of being a competitive candidate and receiving job opportunities afforded to those with better academic standing.

In reality, I fall under Scenario C, where I balance studying with a few hours at the gym and taking study breaks and take my workload to gauge the equilibrium amount of hours studying and relaxing to maximize mental health and fun along with getting the highest grade.

[orbemnews]

Why India’s Farmers Fight to Save a Broken System BHAGWANPURA, India — The farmer sat in the house his grandfather built, contemplating economic ruin. Jaswinder Singh Gill had plowed 20 years of savings from an earlier career as a mechanical engineer into his family’s nearly 40-acre plot in the northwestern Indian state of Punjab, just a dozen miles from the border with Pakistan. He has eked rice out of the sandy, loamy soil with the help of generous government subsidies for 15 years, in hopes that his son and daughter may someday become the sixth generation to work the land. Then India suddenly transformed the way it farms. Prime Minister Narendra Modi last year pushed through new laws that would reduce the government’s role in agriculture, aimed at fixing a system that has led to huge rice surpluses in a country that still grapples with malnutrition. But the laws could make Mr. Gill’s farm and many others like it unsustainable. They would reduce the role of government-run markets for grain, which the farmers fear would eventually undermine the price subsidies that make their work possible. If that happens, the livelihoods of millions of people who depend on the land could be in jeopardy. At 56 years old, Mr. Gill doesn’t know what to do next. “How can a man restart at that age?” he said. Mr. Modi’s campaign has ignited one of the biggest and thorniest conflicts of his seven-year tenure. Farmers from Punjab and elsewhere have camped outside the capital, New Delhi, for four months in protest. The country’s Supreme Court has suspended the laws while it figures out the next steps. The government has occasionally cut off internet access for protesters and tried to suppress criticism online. At the heart of the dispute lies the subsidy system that the government, economists and even many farmers agree is broken. But Mr. Modi’s haste to remake it — his political party pushed the laws though Parliament in a matter of days — could devastate vast swaths of the country where farming remains a way of life. “Agriculture in India does need change,” said Devinder Sharma, an independent economist in Chandigarh, the capital of Punjab, “but this isn’t the way forward.” Nearly 60 percent of India’s 1.3 billion people make a living from agriculture, though the sector accounts for only about 11 percent of economic output. For many, getting another job isn’t an option. The manufacturing sector has shrunk slightly since 2012, government figures show, while the work force has swelled. “Our potential nonagricultural work force is growing very fast,” said Jayan Jose Thomas, an economist and professor at the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi. “They’re all looking for jobs.” Officials in the ministry of agriculture in New Delhi did not respond to requests for comment. Unquestionably, India’s current system is outdated. It was introduced in the 1960s to stave off a famine by encouraging farmers to grow wheat and rice. It included minimum prices set by the government, helping farmers sell what they grow for a profit. “‘You produce as much as you can. Work hard,’” Mr. Gill, the farmer, said, citing the government’s instructions. “They made a solemn guarantee that they would pick up each and every grain.” The prices are fixed at government-run markets called mandis, where farmers and buyers, for a fee, can meet where grains are sun dried, stored and sold. The fees get channeled to rural infrastructure projects, farmer pensions and programs that provide free technical advice on such matters as seed and fertilizer. The system, along with improved techniques, greater use of machinery and fierce competition, increased yields. As a result, India has too much wheat and conventional rice — as compared with basmati rice — enough to fill more than 200,000 shipping containers. Subsidized rice is sold on the global market, raising hackles within the World Trade Organization. At the same time, nearly 190 million people in India are malnourished, according to the Global Hunger Index. India’s surpluses are grown in the wrong places, and the public food rations system can’t transport all of the grain to the needy before it rots. The government doesn’t buy enough nutritious crops like green leafy vegetables, lentils, chickpeas and sorghum to incentivize farmers to grow them. The imbalances don’t end there. Price supports help keep smaller farmers in business, but most don’t till enough land to turn a profit, leading to crushing debt and suicides. The subsidies encourage farmers in Punjab, a relatively dry area, to grow conventional rice, which requires a lot of water. Rice and wheat irrigation is depleting the area’s water table, according to India’s Central Groundwater Board. Mr. Gill once tried to grow basmati rice instead. More flavorful and nutritious than conventional rice, it also consumes less water, grows faster and sells at a premium on the international market. But government price rules don’t cover basmati rice. When he sold the basmati rice, Mr. Gill said, a private buyer shortchanged him. Under Mr. Modi’s plan, corporate buyers would take a much greater role in Indian agriculture because farmers would have greater power to sell their crops to private buyers outside the mandi system, which he said would lift farmer incomes and increase exports. The protests ignited because many farmers fear that the laws will eventually kill both the subsidies and the mandi system. The new laws would also make it more difficult for farmers to take their disputes with buyers to court. Farmers point to an effort 15 years ago in the state of Bihar to deregulate agriculture. Supporters say it spurred growth, but some economists and farmers in Punjab consider it a failure. Some farms in Bihar ship their harvests to Punjab’s mandis for the guaranteed prices, while many of those who lost their farms became migrant laborers in Punjab. The change in the farm laws is an example of how Mr. Modi has a penchant for quick, dramatic moves that have roiled the country. Punjab’s farmers and local officials want slower change and a shift in subsidies to support different crops. In interviews, the farmers of Bhagwanpura, population 1,620, said they feared losing their farms and having no other work. “I’m not scared of hard work,” said Rajwinder Kaur, 28. “I will do any job, but there are none.” Ms. Kaur, a widow, said her family lost most of its farm because her late husband needed to feed his drug and alcohol habit. It is only a half acre in size, compared with India’s average of about two and a half. With revenue from her grain sales, Ms. Kaur said, she and her two children can barely eat. A relative pays one child’s tuition at a local Catholic school. She is negotiating with the school to waive fees for the other. A big cut of the sales goes toward paying down her $4,100 in debt for seed and fertilizer. “I repay every six months,” she said, “but with interest, the amount never goes down.” If she loses her farm, “I will have to beg,” she said. Many of the farmers who have joined the protests have left family members to tend the land. Others pool their money to support the protests. “We feel that the struggle of Punjab is everyone’s struggle,” said Gurjant Singh, the village head, “and unless everyone contributes to that cause, the protest will not be successful.” Mr. Gill lent his 17-foot tractor-trailer and donated money and grain to those taking turns. For him, defending the farm is a family matter. His grandfather built the farmhouse after the bloody partition of Pakistan from India in 1947 forced him to flee Pakistan. The subsidies of the 1960s brought the farm prosperity, making it the largest landholding in this corner of Punjab. Since he took over the farm in 2005, Mr. Gill has plowed his savings into a smart irrigation system, built a machine to clear crop residue and invested in a pair of John Deere tractors. As he spoke, prayers from a Sikh gurdwara, or temple, bellowed through a loudspeaker across Mr. Gill’s wheat fields. “Work hard, worship the Almighty, and share the benefits with all mankind,” Mr. Gill said. “That is what is taught to us at the gurdwara every day.” His fears for the future, he said, should not hinder his work. “What’s going on here is within me,” he added, touching his heart. “I should keep it in myself.” Source link Orbem News #broken #farmers #Fight #Indias #save #system