The coronavirus pandemic has forced everyone to adjust.

Businesses ordered employees to work from home and legions of people have embraced online platforms to socialize, dine out and celebrate with family and friends.

Nimbleness is typically a good thing, but when it comes to Harrisburg, drastic changes in the way we do business could test the citys economic resilience.

If more businesses adopt teleworking, that could translate into fewer people in restaurants, bars and attractions. A less vibrant social scene would not just be a bummer for millennials - it would mean fewer jobs for people in the city and, ultimately, a shrinking tax base.

I literally believe that its up to us what we make out of the future, said Ron Kamionka, owner of several downtown businesses, including Sawyers, Bourbon Street and Susquehanna Ale House.

If we decide that we are just going to reopen the door and go back to the same-old, same-old, a lot of places probably wont survive. This is an opportunity to come up with new fresh ideas and create a new vibrancy for downtown that we didnt have impetus for before.

Like hundreds of other businesses in the city, Kamionkas restaurants and bars have been shuttered since Gov. Tom Wolf ordered a statewide shutdown in March amid the escalating public health crisis.

Kamionka has stepped aside as other eateries pivoted to delivery and curbside pickup trade, but he has used the lull in business to plot out a recovery strategy.

Coronavirus pandemic: full coverage

You can sit back and feel frustrated or you can figure out what you can do in the future to be able to come back, he said. I do believe we are going to get a collective push of restaurateurs to come back even better and make the downtown a better destination than it was two months ago.

The pandemic has certainly battered the Pennsylvania economy, but it could have a greater impact on the Capital City, which faced added vulnerabilities to its economic viability.

Harrisburg had only recently emerged out of a bleak financial crisis. A few years ago it teetered on the brink of bankruptcy and the crush of millions of dollars in debt.

After relinquishing its authority to the state, selling its incinerator and leasing out its parking for 40 years, the tide changed. Harrisburg began last year with a multi-million dollar surplus and even kicked off several capital improvement projects - signals that the city had turned a corner.

But its economic engine is arguably fueled by the sizable workforce that comes into the city daily - from legislators, lobbyists, state employees and private sector professionals. That 9-5 workforce, plus the after-hours and weekend tourist trade, have made the city a destination for dining, entertainment and sports.

The economic activity came to a standstill in March. Scores of businesses ordered employees to work from home and restaurants and bars shuttered doors. The impact is being felt everywhere, but perhaps nowhere as severely as among the hundreds of small businesses and restaurants that now teeter on the brink of ruin.

This is critical, said Nona Watson, director of Economic Development for Harrisburg, speaking recently during a weekly webinar with Mayor Eric Papenfuse.

The economic shutdown has hit small business owners in Harrisburg hard. Watson said many are desperate; hundreds of business owners have written to her. The narratives are near-identical: Some report sales and volume decreases of more than 65 percent. Many cant pay bills or make payroll. They have laid off or furloughed employees. Others have simply closed down.

That is something that we just don't want to see happen, Watson said. We want our businesses to know that we are working diligently. We are trying to do everything we can to stand with you. We are trying to find ways to bring in more funds, trying to connect with other potential partners to see if we can replenish funds. We already know we don't have enough money to do the things that we want to do.

Harrisburg is slated to have its partial reopening on Friday as Dauphin County and seven other counties enter the yellow phase May 29 under Gov. Tom Wolfs gradual reopening plan.

The extent to which the city clings to the adjustments made during the pandemic - the teleworking and online shopping, dining and socializing - will likely determine its ability to recover and rebound.

The coronavirus pandemic has prompted Chris Bravacos, owner of Harrisburg-based The Bravo Group, one of the state's largest public relations firms, to examine workplace issues - such as the use of space and teleworking. Mark Pynes | mpynes@pennlive.com

I still think theres a reason for a vital center that a city represents certainly with the magnet that is the Capitol and the courts, said Chris Bravacos, founder and head of Bravo Group, the largest public relations firm in the state. That will find its place. Cities that dont have some of those things certainly might face more challenges.

Bravacos shuttered his eight-story business operation on North Second Street in Harrisburg in March, and ordered employees to work from home.

Since then, Bravo Group representatives, who manage contracts with energy and utility companies, the health care sector and financial services, have pivoted to teleworking and negotiating face-to-face meetings on Slack, Zoom and Google Meet.

The adjustments have left Bravacos with much to ponder: The company has operated seamlessly outside the traditional time-space limitation. His employees will always have reasons to collaborate in person, but this period has given him an opportunity to rethink workplace models.

The answer may well be that you contemplate space differently from what you previously had arranged, Bravacos said. I don't think anybody is thinking, Gosh we never actually have to have everybody together, or that the relationship bonds that can form as part of a team could be done without at all.... I do think its epiphany for professional service organizations as to what can get done without physical space.

The strategic use of space will likely also factor in the citys social scene.

For much of central Pennsylvania, downtown Harrisburg, particularly Restaurant Row, and more recently Midtown too, are popular go-to destinations for dining, happy hour and meet-ups with friends and coworkers.

The pandemic shutdown has underscored a stark reality: We always knew people could stay home and eat and drink cheaper, Kamionka said. Now they have had an opportunity to prove it to themselves.

In the months to come, as the region emerges from social distancing guidelines, the entertainment and restaurant sectors will need to make adjustments to find a better fit in the new paradigm.

We have to compromise, Kamionka said. We are not going to flip a switch and demand that its going to be there the way it was before this pandemic. People are genuinely scared by this. We have to approach this in phases and create different opportunities for people.

Kamionka is waiting for the final approval from the City of Harrisburg and the Downtown Improvement District to his proposal: To create an outdoor dining area on Walnut Street between 2nd and 3rd streets that would be open to all restaurants. The premise being that patrons order and pay online and take set at a table where a server delivers the meal.

Kamionka said it is one way for restaurants to address post-coronavirus limitations, such as potentially being allowed only 25 percent occupancy.

There arent many large restaurants in downtown, he said. It would be tough to remain viable with that few customers. You still have rent, utilities, insurance, people to bring back. All the inherent costs. If you are limited to 25 percent occupancy, you cant make money.

Empty tables at Cork and Fork at 6:00 PM on Thursday, March 26th. Views of the Capital region during the coronavirus pandemic. March 26, 2020. Sean Simmers | ssimmers@pennlive.com

Sara Bozich, who manages a special events company and has been writing about the citys social scene for 20 years, is confident that the citys social scene will recover - although it might just look and feel different.

I think in general people are going to be more careful about why and how they gather, she said. I think they are going to be more strategic about it. Let's say we are allowed to proceed as normal, I think well see a huge spike where everyone wants to get out of the house and do something, but I think well level out and we wont see constant gatherings.

That may not be so much a function of fear of the coronavirus, but rather an evolution towards a different mode of doing things.

I think this time may encourage people to slow down a little and be more conscious about how they spend their dollars and time, Bozich said. You want to support local businesses but I want to make sure I am going to the ones that speak to me....the ones that are most valuable to me.

The calculus on Harrisburgs rebound could come down to the old adage of not appreciating what you have until its gone.

The idea of summer nights in Harrisburg without the iconic stadium lights of FNB Field lighting up City Island is poised to change the tenor of the season not only for the Harrisburg Senators but the hundreds of thousands of fans who over the years have made the games a family affair.

A blank sign for the next Harrisburg Senators baseball game on City Island hints that no one knowns when the next baseball game will be, or even if there will be a 2020 season during the coronavirus pandemic in Harrisburg, Pa. Mark Pynes | mpynes@pennlive.com

The Double-A affiliate of the MLBs Washington Nationals was set to start play April 9 before its FNB Park opener on April 16 but the season was suspended amid the pandemic.

Terry Byrom, the spokesman for the Harrisburg Senators suggested it might give the region food for thought.

With the Senators, when things go back to normal, maybe people wont take having it for granted, he said. We all take things for granted and maybe we wont take it for granted anymore.

Byrom remains upbeat that Harrisburg will embrace its baseball franchise once the city reopens.

I think once we are fairly certain that this is under control, maybe there will be a vaccine, I think people will eventually go back, Byrom said. We hear a lot about the new normal and while I dont think I can look into the future and say what that means and what we might do differently in terms of the Senators or the NBA or Hershey Bears. Its hard to say but I think people are pretty resilient and I also think people have short memories. I dont mean that in a bad way. I just think it might take a while but well get back to normal.

Ultimately, though Harrisburgs resilience will likely depend on a unified community. That doesnt just mean a concerted effort to support business, but an equal effort to support its denizens.

I believe that while the business aspect of things is most important, it is critical that we look at the human standpoint. Our citizens, Karl Singleton, president and CEO of PA Diversity Coalition, which supports minority women-owned businesses. We have to figure out a way to incorporate the needs of the community first. What are those businesses that meet the needs of the community?

He notes the ripple effect of the actions taken by large businesses in the city on smaller ones. For instance, he notes, small, minority-owned commercial custodial service companies will be impacted if larger companies reduce their physical office footprint in Harrisburg.

You are going to have a lot less buildings and a lot less contracts, Singleton said.

A man sweeps the sidewalk in front of Sawyers on an empty 2nd Street in Harrisburg on St. Patricks Day as bars and restaurants remained closed because of the coronavirus . March 17, 2020. Sean Simmers | ssimmers@pennlive.com

Hundreds of small businesses had applied for emergency relief through the Neighborhood Business Stabilization Program. The program is available to businesses that are based and licensed in the city, but the demand has been so extraordinary that Watson has encouraged all business owners in Harrisburg to apply.

Papenfuse estimates that roughly 20 percent of the citys businesses have applied for emergency relief.

Singleton noted that a substantial portion of working-class Harrisburg residents work in the health care sector. With schools and daycare shuttered, the ability of many of those people to continue to work has been compromised.

Before we start focusing too much on these quote, unquote national bailouts or focus on business only, we need to make sure there is equitable balance in assistance for businesses and assistance for consumers, Singleton said.

Read more pandemic coverage:

Making a go of it: Area restaurant owners staying open (carefully) during coronavirus

You wont have to smile for the camera to renew your Pa. drivers license. PennDOT to use old pics

Deer enjoy a walk on vacant Jersey Shore beach: watch

Will your property taxes increase? Pa. schools face potential $1 billion in lost revenue because of coronavirus

Pa. students expected to return to school in fall, ed chief says

Cumberland County barber is back at work, but says there is still a risk: You choose not to come, thats fine'

Whats allowed when child care centers reopen in Pa. counties? And when should kids wear masks?

Horses and service dogs visit residents of retirement community

See the article here:
What is the future of Harrisburg beyond the pandemic? - PennLive

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

Over their decade long run, mobile 4X strategy games, sometimes known as SLGs, have brought in billions of dollars in revenue with only more to come.

For those wanting to get in on it, the history of these games is littered with both progress and mistakes that any hopeful successor would be wise to learn from. Their history may even foretell where the next generation of these games will go, and what the secret sauce of the next big one will be. You just need to know where to look.

Where am I coming from? Over the past nine years, I've played an array of 4X strategy games at a very hardcore level. Even as a player who doesnt spend on IAPs, Ive been the #1 player, led top clans, and sold my accounts for a tidy four figures. Thats the outside perspective I bring.

The inside perspective? I was the founding developer that led a team of engineers to build one such game, and was hands on for its conception, through prototyping, launch, and beyond. I cant discuss internal numbers of course, but nothings stopping me from discussing external ones.

In the beginning, the strategy games in the appstores were quite light. Games such as Kingdoms at War succeeded in reaching the top grossing charts. These were forebearers to what I'd consider the first real 4X strategy games on mobile. They had buildings, and armies perhaps. You could fight and interact with other players, and there might've even been PvE. But there was no world map. No physical world the players resided in.

There were PC and web-games that had this to be sure, but those hadn't made the move to mobile, at least not yet.

There are far too many games in the genre for me to count let alone play to a deep enough degree. However, the seven Ill go over paint an overall picture of the genre's history over a large time span, and will give us a perspective into what's worked, what hasn't, and what's to come. Let's get to it.

[November 2010]

This was the first game I played in this space. A lesser-known title from Sega which saw some decent success for its time, making it high into the top grossing charts. It had the prerequisites. Upgradeable buildings, ten levels each. Armies, themed as trading cards. Eye candy for UA in the form of 3D PvE encounters, though players quickly found out it was just a facade for a loot box. But most importantly, it had a world map, and the emergent behaviours that it brought to the table. Already a staple in the web-based games of the genre, this was one of the early implementations of world maps on mobile. It was a great game. I played the hell out of it. Unfortunately it had a fatal flaw that limited its lifespan and doomed it. More on that to come.

City Building in Kingdom Conquest

Eye candy, which didn't do much for gameplay, but helped with user acquisition

From the very start, this genre of games had a tight, addictive NUX. Quests guide the players actions. Return notifications call players back again and again. New mechanics are introduced keeping things interesting, and giving players milestones to strive for.

Kingdom Conquest's fatal flaw however was that they structured the game based on a short, finite season structure. After battling it out for multiple months, with a winner declared, player progress was reset. Not only this, but content was naturally structured with this in mind.

As many in the industry will know, the majority of the potential revenue from users comes from the tiny proportion of spenders who decide to spend a lot: the whales. To capture this full potential however requires time. Players can play for years and years, but artificially capping their lifespan slashes the full potential of this LTV.

As can be imagined, after a season reset, only a fraction of players return with the same interest and intent to spend. Any player would temper their spending in the game once they found out that even if they "won", it'd all be gone within a few months. Maybe it was a worthwhile experiment to try at the time, but it was a severe handicap in the end.

A brief lull in the genre followed until early 2012.

[March 2012]

Here was the first mobile game in the genre that hit it big in this space. This was the mobile incarnation of what was already a Facebook success.

To the formula we had already seen in Kingdom Conquest, Kingdoms of Camelot added a few new things to the mobile mix. A distinct, though limited, research tree. Multiple player-owned cities. Simple heroes. Simple map PvE.

Building upgrades also included a minor twist, where players who wanted to fully upgrade the building to level 10 needed a premium item to do so. One which cost them premium currency, available through in app purchases.

However, despite the additional systems, the game proved to be less effective at monetization than future successors would be.

Their heroes, while a nice addition were simplistic and not fleshed out at all. Skipping the fine details about how they worked, players desired the benefits they provided, and would pay for them, but the shallow way they worked combined with the cost ceiling left a great deal of potential on the table. The limited research and useless PvE came with similar criticism. They were shallow and the game subsequently wasn't as effective at monetization as it could be.

The ability for players to own multiple cities was an interesting advent as a way to try to stretch out the content, something the web-based game also made use of. But really it wasn't necessary, as future takes on the genre would find: a single city with better-balanced building progression was cleaner, and better yet, was more conducive to monetization. Moreover, managing multiple cities was frankly tedious.

The emergent behaviours and PvP threats in the game world were also limited by a Kingdoms of Camelot-specific mechanic where players could opt to hide their troops, making them impervious to military losses. The resources in their city would be free for the taking in the meanwhile, but those were fairly easy to acquire. As a result, certain opportunities for conflict and the monetization that comes with it was lost altogether.

In an attempt to better monetize the game, part way through its lifespan the developers decided they'd allow troops to be directly purchased. Certain players loved this to be sure, and short-term revenues shot up as the ineffectively monetized players found an avenue to spend. But such an approach totally circumvented the rest of the game's content and balance. It was a tacked on lever that was completely disconnected from the rest of the game, with a high potential to break it, which it sure enough did. The game's leaderboards and community was subject to an inevitable p2w death spiral from which entire shards would never recover.

Imbalanced monetization resulting in unstable community and p2w death spiral (data from first shard)

As an aside, some of this data is available in part because of how easy it was to decompile Unity builds in the past, allowing enterprising individuals to bypass API security checks the game server had in place. One such individual used this information to build a site that periodically scraped game information, allowing players to do game-breaking things such as easily searching for player city locations on the map.

Despite its shortcomings Kingdoms of Camelot found success at the time as it stood above its rivals, and it would spin off skins such as The Hobbit: Kingdoms of Middle Earth.

The games that would follow it though made up for these shortcomings, with better fleshed out systems and deeper content to match. These successors would reap the benefits of far higher LTV ceilings as a result.

[July 2013]

Game of War offered a big step up. The simplistic systems of the previous generation were taken, and properly fleshed out, while weaknesses were shored up, and brand new competitive features added.

To start off, lets go over the added depth. A hero avatar was introduced, with a fleshed out skill tree and equipment to match. Both the city and research content was now much deeper, offering a deeper progression path to both strive and monetize for. And the world map was now livelier, with more to observe and engage in. Player marches were now visualized, something absent in past iterations, resources could be gathered, and PvE was actually useful and rewarding. A player seeking more strategy in their games would find it here.

On the whole, the balancing seemed to have kept a better eye on player goals, and as a result they did a better job monetizing the critical path players take in the game as they build out their city and research the top tier troops. While in previous games an engaged player could pretty reasonably complete their city and attain top troops, it now took either considerable time and effort, or more likely, money, to achieve the same. Every successful game to follow would take a similar route.

All of these advancements together made for a deeper and more engaging game, which reaped far better LTVs.

To top it off, significant end game features were added, creating sources of conflict and goals for the biggest spenders. This came in the form of Wonders, a sort of clan-pvp king of the hill, along with shard vs. shard events, commonly referred to KvK. Both made use of added rallying mechanics, enabling the joint attack and defense of clan members and structures.

Wonders and Marches as implemented in Game of War

The basic formula laid out by Game of War would be carried forward in some form in all of the genre's successors to come. A new baseline had been set.

Outside of the game, Game of War was able to fully exploit its LTV advantages with tremendous UA efforts, including its infamous Kate Upton TV spots. Many in the industry questioned how they could be acquiring users profitably with the amount of spend here, but in the end, it's undoubtable how much of the market they captured as they had a solid position on the top grossing charts for a considerable stretch of time.

As time marched on though, cracks emerged. This was marked most significantly by the way live ops constantly pushed the economy and the game's players to the breaking point. Expensive whale content was frequently refreshed, which made older content obsolete, while at the same time aggressively inflating the economy.

It's impossible to say if this might've been the right move from an LTV standpoint. Their strategy was to aggressively suck out as much money as possible from players while they were still engaged, perhaps as a way to try to recoup their UA costs as soon as possible. What is clear though is that as this became more drastic, this was the specific thing that started to drive more players away, even their most dedicated whales. An informal survey of whales placed this as a top concern. Attempts to improve LTV may have backfired in the end.

Machine Zone, the makers of Game of War, would later try to run the same playbook with games like Mobile Strike and Final Fantasy XV, but a combination of a dated engine, mismatched expectations, and perhaps a change in the market limited the success of these endeavors.

[June 2014 / August 2015]

The next major iteration on the genre came with the advent of clan-controlled territories on the map.

Games like Clash of Kings saw significant success here. Unfortunately this wasn't one of the games I chose to pick up during this period as I was deep in the game development grind. However, observing colleagues playing the game and reading up on the details it's clear it was a meaningful step forward and laid the ground for new sources of large scale organic conflict on the world map.

Here, clan members could work together to construct structures on the world map, which provided benefits and new capabilities to members within it.

Many games now have their own take on territory, and it's something that's still evolving. The game I did play during this time that tried to tackle territory in its own way was March of Empires, which saw only very limited success. Its take involved fixed territories and buildings on the map, as opposed to something more organic. Clans can take over these territories and buildings, which provide dwellers with advantages.

These different variations are perhaps a good example of some of the risks involved when exploring an untapped design space. While territory in Clash of Kings proved quite successful, the implementation in March of Empires felt lacking. It isn't sufficient to just try something new, you still have to get it right.

Regardless, territory mechanics were a meaningful advance forward, and something which various successors would continue to take up.

[February 2016]

Then came Lords Mobile.

The two most obvious steps forward were:

Casual friendly mechanic as seen in Lords Mobile..

.. with similarities to Heroes Charge and games of the like

This was built atop of what was now the standard fare of 4X features. The only major thing missing was clan territory functionality.

Beyond this, their hero system was further fleshed out to include a multitude of different heroes, each of whom could be leveled up. Some were premium heroes that could only be purchased, while others could only be attained from events. The game also benefited from a live ops team that ran a healthier economy than some of its predecessors, supporting player longevity.

From the outside I can only speculate, but considering players of these types of games can play and spend for years and years, this healthier player longevity could have resulted in a significant benefit to their LTV metrics in comparison to the short-sighted live ops mentality of the past.

Lords Mobile became a long-lived success, as evidenced by the hundreds of millions of downloads it racked up, more than any of its predecessors.

If there was any short-coming to point out, it might only be that it didn't push the fundamental gameplay forward that much. Someone who had played previous iterations wouldn't have had too much new to look forward to beyond the initial novelty from the grafted on casual mechanics. It achieved great success in spite of this however, perhaps a result of the expanded audience base it was able to reach.

[September 2018]

That leads to Rise of Kingdoms, which significantly pushed forward the real time strategy elements of the genre on mobile.

The strategy elements had grown stagnant on this front for many years, with developers just taking the old formula and adding some new bells and whistles. The addition of wonders and territory were notable, but were mostly just layered on elements atop of the same gameplay. Rise of Kingdoms would change this, carving out multiple new paths on this front.

For almost a decade now, the basic march functionality remained more or less the same. Players could send their armies from their city to a target, an attack would be resolved, and the army would return. That's it. Whether for technical reasons or lack of ambition, developers didn't invest in pushing this forward. The underlying world map mechanics remained the same across all of these previous games.

Rise of Kingdoms promotes their take as a combination of Real-Time Battles, and Unrestricted Troop Movement, but this doesn't do justice to spelling out all of the changes that were made to the underlying mechanics, and the strategy it enables.

Firstly, no longer are battles resolved instantly. Instead, when armies clash, combat plays out over a period of time, during which armies can withdraw, or reinforcements can arrive and change the outcome of the battle. This creates a more lively and dynamic environment, and a greater surface area for emergent behaviours to arise.

Amplifying this is what they market as unrestricted troop movement. Marches are no longer constrained to their simple: city-to-target, target-to-city routes. They can now be redirected mid-route, or halted altogether and ordered to camp out on the map. Moreover, marches can be intercepted mid-route. Combined, this enables whole swaths of new strategic behaviour. A single march for example can be sent out, hitting target after target across the map, causing mayhem. A band of invaders can coordinate their marches, invading and besieging enemy lands, locking inhabitants in. Conversely, since marches can now be attacked mid-route, no longer can an attack be launched deep into enemy territory with impunity. Geographic consequences come much more into play.

Speaking of that, there were advances on the map itself. In previous iterations, developers would take liberties as marches walked straight over water, mountains, and other cities unhindered. Here however, all of those create impediments that need to be navigated around. At its culmination, this creates natural choke points on the map which become focal points to be contested.

This enabling of time and space considerations allows for new dimensions of combat to be explored, and new ways to differentiate content. The time-factor for example enables heroes with a wide array of different abilities, damage over time effects, healing, buffs during certain health ranges, and more. Additionally the space-factor makes area of effect abilities possible, and makes troop speed a critical factor.

This is a far cry from the simple march mechanics of predecessors.

Significant gameplay advances in Rise of Kingdoms

Beyond this are other meaningful advances I won't dwell on. Massive zoom out capabilities, fog of war (though mostly cosmetic), an hour-long clan vs. clan battleground event with a heavy use of all of these new mechanics.

This sits atop of other tried and true pieces of the formula. Buildings, research, heroes, wonders, along with their particular take on territory systems and KvKs, where 8-shards compete over 2 months unlike most other games.

All told, if a new player were coming to the genre, or a hardened veteran was looking for the latest and greatest, Rise of Kingdoms would be the surefire game to point them to.

From the UA perspective, the game was originally titled Rise of Civilizations, later renamed due to trademark disputes. It's reasonable to speculate they may have been looking to benefit from organic searches for Sid Meier's seminal game. It also seems like it may have been a conscious choice to attempt to reap the worldwide UA benefits of the free "IP" available by centering the game around different nationalities and historical figures. The appeals of a Joan of Arc, Caesar, Cleopatra, or Sun Tzu.

Cleopatra and other historical figures potentially aiding UA

From the game design perspective, there are three specifics worth calling out that play a significant part in shaping the actual gameplay as well as the monetization. These are the sort of things that might be easily overlooked unless you were a longtime player of the game.

First, a combination of the design decisions and the emergent behaviours that play out results in an environment that can be significantly more survivable and forgiving for a larger number of players, keeping them in the game longer. For example, the hospital and troop death rules are laid out in a way where combat can be much more forgiving in lower stake scenarios, while also being more risky for would be aggressors. Combined with the ability to intercept marches mid-route, this reduces situations where large players will want to take the risk and pay the cost of picking on weaker players - a frequent complaint in games of this genre. "Zeroings", where players lose all their troops, can still happen but are much rarer. To top it off, the need for cooperation to succeed in KvKs creates a strong incentive for shards to coalesce, and as a result after an initial period of conflict, most successful shards find ways to organize and work together peacefully, with the only major conflict occurring in KvKs. With time, this practically eliminates such zeroings outside of KvKs, and with it the sort of harassment that makes a lot of players quit early on.

Second, monetization seems very healthy up front. With some meticulous data collection, and using information they happen to make available in the game, it's possible to get a detailed assessment of certain player spending habits. Without going into fine details, the rate of monetization during my assessment period was very strong, a multiple over a less successful competitor at the time. For whales, a large part of this seemed to go towards acquiring limited hero content, where certain heroes were structured in a way that they could only be acquired by competing over them in events. This is on top of the desire to spend on other forms of content, especially research and troops, with an added boost of revenue during seasonal events.

To provide a little peek into the data collected, here was the spending behaviour from the top clan in one of the top shards over a one month period.

Daily spend by bundle type, heavily driven by event competition and content

80% of revenue came from players who spent $1000+ in one month

At the same time, the monetization balancing is far more f2p friendly, in that monetizing players get less of an advantage for their money than they do in competing games. Eyeballing it at one point, I found that a $10 bundle gave about 4x more of an advantage in Lords Mobile than in Rise of Kingdoms. As a result, f2p players aren't as ridiculously outgunned, and monetizing players also need to pay more for the advantages they desire. Furthermore, as is the case in many of these games, when someone purchases certain bundles, their clan mates benefit by getting a gift of beneficial items or speedups. The final balancing is such that if you're able to make it into the top clan in your shard, you can benefit tremendously to the point where even as a f2p player it's possible to unlock all of the main pieces of content aside from the heroes. This is something that would cost players thousands of dollars to unlock in a reasonable timeframe otherwise.

To provide an anecdote to give you a sense of this, even though I play these games quite dedicatedly, I never buy IAPs. In less than a year, I was able to unlock the top tier of troops, and sell my account for a low 4-figures when I left the game. This amount isn't something that was feasible in the balancing of other games.

The other side of this though is the cost to the developers. If someone who doesn't buy IAPs is able to unlock top tier troops in that time frame, players who do monetize can do so even sooner, cutting off one of the primary drivers for monetization earlier on than in other games. Other reasons to continue monetizing remain, but these aren't as enticing as completing your research and unlocking the top tier troops. I could imagine this putting a meaningful dent in their non-whale LTVs. Inadvertently, it's possible this helps create a fiercer, more competitive environment for whales to continue spending against. Considering they make up 80%+ of the revenue, perhaps this is a worthwhile trade off.

The third thing worth calling out involves the consequences of the peaceful in-shard metagame, in contrast with the 2-month long KvKs. The KvKs can be intense, and prove a great incentive for players to monetize, at least the first time players participate in them. Due to their intensity however, the consequences and potential losses can be equally large. While it doesn't happen in every KvK, once players have a sense of the costs involved, if the leaders of a shard get the sense they won't have an easy time and be able to sweep the KvK, there will be strong incentives to reach a diplomatic end to the KvK, and divvy up the rewards. Similar to what happens in individual shards.

This has related knock-on effects. If KvKs typically reach a quick diplomatic end, entire shards will lose their last remaining source of conflict, not a great result. At the same time, if KvKs don't wind up this way, KvKs are just too intense to be run too often. The result being that after the heightened activity of a KvK, players return back to their home shards for months worth of peace. It's quite anti-climactic, and I can only imagine it hurting their daily revenue numbers. The coming and going of conflict for large periods of time also seems non-ideal when it comes to encouraging regular player spending habits. A long break from conflict-driven reasons to monetize seems to provide players a good excuse to break their IAP addictions, or even leave the game altogether.

Though these issues may limit its full potential, Rise of Kingdoms is undoubtedly a sizable step forward for this genre on mobile.

Mobile 4X strategy games have thrived for a decade now, and will continue to do so for years and years to come. They've undergone a constant evolution to get to where they are now, continuing to set higher and higher gameplay bars, and higher and higher metrics.

It'd only be fair to ask, "What's next?"

In my previous life as a game developer, I've predicted and pushed for some of the very elements that have come to see breakthrough success in this genre. Not all of them certainly, but if you know where to look a certain pattern emerges, much of it in plain sight.

On the gameplay side, players who crave strategy will want more and more strategy. In many ways in this genre, mobile is playing catch up with PC games. When you look at something like the original Warcraft, or even games that preceded it, the gameplay there already delivered what's only now at the cutting edge of the actual strategic gameplay on mobile. Specifically, unrestricted troop movement and real-time battles only came in 2018, over 20 years after Warcraft. On the technical front these are much more challenging to deliver in a massively multiplayer online game, so it's no wonder it's taken awhile to get here, but as developers continue to push on to try to deliver the next top grossing hit, these elements will continue to find ways to mobile.

So as a player, or a developer who's asking what'll capture player imaginations next, the answers are already out there.

Things like airborne troops common in RTSes open up swathes of strategy. Instead of just the surface-to-surface troops of today, we now have surface-to-air troops, air-to-surface, air-to-air, surface-to-all, or air-to-all attack types. Congratulations, you've just exploded the interesting combinations, content, and strategy you can deliver.

Or even changing some of the fundamentals, and moving towards more of a Civilization-like approach, where units on the map move slowly and gradually in more of a real-time fashion, and freedom of opposing troops on the map can be completely restricted and blockaded. This would open up problems to be solved to be sure, but it delivers on totally new strategy and gameplay.

There are numerous promising avenues here, both in and outside RTSes. Territory systems for example long existed in MMORPGs before RTSes.

Capital ships. WMD attacks. Shardless game servers. Troop transportation units. Espionage. And I'm sure plenty more come to your mind when you think about the possibilities.

To those wanting to deliver on strategy, the investment needed to develop these games will grow ever higher. It'll be harder and harder for smaller developers to fund a team that can build this out. And the teams that can be funded will require costly bets.

For those who love these games though, the years to come should only bring more of what you love. And to those with the foresight to deliver on it will come the spoils.

Read this article:
10+ Lessons from the History of Mobile 4X Strategy - Gamasutra

Never has the world been more united than in our fight against covid19.We keep seeing 'Flatten The Curve' messages all around us. But not many of us understand whats flattening the curve. Or even if we do, we tend to forget or forget its importance. To drive communication on flattening the curve, FCB Ulka came up with graph representations that drive this message.

The graphs by FCB Ulka show people staying at home, so that they contribute to Flatten The Curve.

According to the data, reducing human-to-human contact by 75% can take the predicted number of cases of COVID-19 needing hospital care below the line of available hospital beds at any given time. Measures like staying at home is the best possible way to flatten the curve.

Swati Bhattacharya, chief creative officer, FCB Ulka, said, I am really proud that UNAIDS took this piece of work and shared it all over Europe. Never has the world been more united than in our fight against covid19."

The agency added that FCB Ulka found support in UNAIDS Geneva, which released the campaign as static posts on the big Easter weekend when people had plans to step out of their homes. FCB made the static posts into a digital film with fuel content, that offered content creation solutions in an end-to-end format, it added.

Mahesh Mahalingam, director, communications and global advocacy, UNAIDS, said, Flatten the curve was an attempt to make an epidemiological concept understood in practical ways by the public. We wanted to make staying at home less stressful and more fun at a time when COVID-19 was spreading across the world. FCB Ulka helped us in bringing home the message of staying home in a witty yet factual fashion.

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Stay at home and help Flatten The Curve' - ETBrandEquity.com

It was May 8, 1991, and Id returned to my Hollywood office after lunch to find a pink phone message tacked to the board with an unlikely haiku: Mr. Dylan appreciates your magazine. He will be in touch.

At first I suspected it was a joke. Id been trying to land an interview with Dylan since 1987, when I was appointed editor of SongTalk, the journal of the National Academy of Songwriters. But it was no joke; the call came from the office of Elliot Mintz, who was then Dylans press rep.

The arrangements surrounding the interview were cryptic and incremental. Elliots assistant called me periodically, each time divulging a little more information. At first I was given no time or location, told only that it would take place in the middle of the week at a hotel somewhere in the middle of Los Angeles. Also that I should come alone. It felt like arranging a meeting with Batman.

On the designated day I was summoned to the Beverly Hills Hotel, the big pink lady where stars have stayed and played since the birth of Hollywood. In a bungalow far in the back, Bob Dylan was in a giddy mood. He sang a few lines from the song People. Yes, that People, the Jule Styne-Bob Merrill standard from Funny Girl made famous by Barbra Streisand. People who need people, he sang a capella in that most famous nasality ever, are the luckiest people in the world Then he paused to ask, with much seriousness: Do you think people who need people are really the luckiest people in the world?

That he would even know this song, let alone question its premise, says a lot about this man. He thinks deeply about songs, even unlikely ones like this one. Unlike the prevalent perception of him as someone far removed from life as we know it, Dylan pays attention. Searching for some clue as to why he agreed to do this interview with me, he muttered, somewhat in passing, Man, you and Paul Simon sure talked a lot, referring to my recent extensive interview with Simon.

The People exchange, however, was ultimately omitted from the final interview at the insistence of Mintz, who also demanded the deletion of a few other sections, including one in which Dylan questioned if kids who watched Hendrix burn the flag would do so themselves. Mintz also ended the interview himself by physically turning off both of my tape recorders while Bob was in the middle of discussing his song Joey, about the mobster Joey Gallo. Im still not sure why he was impelled to stop our talk then, but I knew Bob could have kept talking for an hour easy. But it wasnt to be.

What was to be was Bob having a lot of fun talking about this elusive art form so profoundly impacted by his own hand. His love for songs and songwriters was palpable as was his curiosity. When I told him I loved playing his songs, he asked, On guitar or on piano? He wanted to know. Never before or since has he spoken so directly and extensively about songwriting itself, about walking that fine line between unconscious and conscious creation, and ultimately achieving what he defines here himself as gallantry.

When you read this, keep in mind that he was smiling.

Ive made shoes for everyone, even you, while I still go barefoot

From I and I

Songwriting? What do I know about songwriting? Bob Dylan asked, and then broke into laughter. He was wearing blue jeans and a white tank-top T-shirt, and drinking coffee out of a glass. It tastes better out of a glass, he said grinning. His blonde acoustic guitar was leaning on a couch near where we sat. Bob Dylans guitar. His influence is so vast that everything that surrounds takes on enlarged significance: Bob Dylans moccasins. Bob Dylans coat.

And the ghost of lectricity howls in the bones of her face Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place. The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain

from Visions of Johanna

Pete Seeger said, All songwriters are links in a chain, yet there are few artists in this evolutionary arc whose influence is as profound as that of Bob Dylan. Its hard to imagine the art of songwriting as we know it without him. Though he insists in this interview that somebody else would have done it, he was the instigator, the one who knew that songs could do more , that they could take on more. He knew that songs could contain a lyrical richness and meaning far beyond the scope of all previous pop songs, and they could possess as much beauty and power as the greatest poetry, and that by being written in rhythm and rhyme and merged with music, they could speak to our souls.

Starting with the models made by his predecessors, such as the talking blues, Dylan quickly discarded old forms and began to fashion new ones. He broke all the rules of songwriting without abandoning the craft and care that holds songs together. He brought the linguistic beauty of Shakespeare, Byron, and Dylan Thomas, and the expansiveness and beat experimentation of Ginsberg, Kerouac and Ferlinghetti, to the folk poetry of Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams. And when the world was still in the midst of accepting this new form, he brought music to a new place again, fusing it with the electricity of rock and roll.

Basically, he showed that anything goes, Robbie Robertson said. John Lennon said that it was hearing Dylan that allowed him to make the leap from writing empty pop songs to expressing the actuality of his life and the depths of his own soul. Help was a real call for help, he said, and prior to hearing Dylan it didnt occur to him that songs could contain such direct meaning. When I asked Paul Simon how he made the leap in his writing from fifties rock and roll songs like Hey Schoolgirl to writing Sound Of Silence he said, I really cant imagine it could have been anyone else besides Bob Dylan.

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky With one hand waving free, Silhouetted by the sea, Circled by the circus sands, With all memory and fate Driven deep beneath the waves, Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

from Mr. Tambourine Man

Theres an unmistakable elegance in Dylans words, an almost biblical beauty that he has sustained in his songs throughout the years. He refers to it as a gallantry in the following, and pointed to it as the single thing that sets his songs apart from others. Though hes maybe more famous for the freedom and expansiveness of his lyrics, all of his songs possess this exquisite care and love for the language. As Shakespeare and Byron did in their times, Dylan has taken English, perhaps the worlds plainest language, and instilled it with a timeless, mythic grace.

Ring them bells, sweet Martha, for the poor mans son Ring them bells so the world will know that God is one Oh, the shepherd is asleep Where the willows weep And the mountains are filled with lost sheep

from Ring Them Bells

As much as he has stretched, expanded and redefined the rules of songwriting, Dylan is a tremendously meticulous craftsman. A brutal critic of his own work, he works and reworks the words of his songs in the studio and even continues to rewrite certain ones even after theyve been recorded and released.

Theyre not written in stone, he said. With such a wondrous wealth of language at his fingertips, he discards imagery and lines other songwriters would sell their souls to discover. The Bootleg Series, a recently released collection of previously unissued recordings, offers a rare opportunity to see the revisions and regrouping his songs go through. Idiot Wind is one of his angriest songs (You dont hear a song like that every day, he said), which he recorded on Blood On The Tracks in a way that reflects this anger, emphasizing lines of condemnation like one day youll be in the ditch, flies buzzin around your eyes, blood on your saddle.

On The Bootleg Series , we get an alternate approach to the song, a quiet, tender reading of the same lines that makes the inherent disquiet of the song even more disturbing, the tenderness of Dylans delivery adding a new level of genuine sadness to lines like people see me all the time and they just cant remember how to act. The peak moment of the song is the penultimate chorus when Dylan addresses America: Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull, from the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol.

On the Bootleg version, this famous line is still in formation: Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your jaw, from the Grand Coulee Dam to the Mardi Gras. His song Jokerman also went through a similar evolution, as a still unreleased bootleg of the song reveals. Like Idiot Wind, the depth and intensity of the lyric is sustained over an extraordinary amount of verses, yet even more scenes were shot that wound up on the cutting room floor, evidence of an artist overflowing with the abundance of creation:

Its a shadowy world Skies are slippery gray A woman just gave birth to a prince today And dressed him in scarlet Hell put the priest in his pocket, Put the blade to the heat Take the motherless children off the street And place them at the feet of a harlot

from Jokerman on Infidels

Its a shadowy world Skies are slippery gray A woman just gave birth to a prince today And shes dressed in scarlet Hell turn priests into pimps And make all men bark Take a woman who could have been Joan of Arc And turn her into a harlot

from Jokerman on Outfidels, a bootleg

Often Dylan lays abstraction aside and writes songs as clear and telling as any of Woody Guthries narrative ballads, finding heroes and antiheroes in our modern times as Woody found in his. Some of these subjects might be thought of as questionable choices for heroic treatment, such as underworld boss Joey Gallo, about whom he wrote the astounding song, Joey. Its a song that is remarkable for its cinematic clarity; Dylan paints a picture of a life and death so explicit and exact that we can see every frame of it, and even experience Gallos death as if we were sitting there watching it. And he does it with a rhyme scheme and a meter that makes the immediacy of the imagery even more striking:

One day they blew him down In a clam bar in New York He could see it coming through the door As he lifted up his fork. He pushed the table over to protect his family Then he staggered out into the streets Of Little Italy

from Joey

Yes, well, what can you know about anybody? Dylan asked, and its a good question. Hes been a mystery for years, kind of impenetrable, really, Paul Simon said, and that mystery is not penetrated by this interview or any interview. Dylans answers are often more enigmatic than the questions themselves, and like his songs, they give you a lot to think about while not necessarily, revealing much about the man.

In person, as others have noted, he is Chaplinesque. He possesses one of the worlds most striking faces; while certain stars might seem surprisingly normal and unimpressive in the flesh, Dylan is perhaps even more startling to confront than one might expect. Seeing those eyes , and that nose , its clear it could be no one else than he, and to sit at a table with him and face those iconic features is no less impressive than suddenly finding yourself sitting face to face with William Shakespeare. Its a face we associate with an enormous, amazing body of work, work that has changed the world. But its not really the kind of face one expects to encounter in everyday life.

Though Van Morrison and others have called him the worlds greatest poet, he doesnt think of himself as a poet. Poets drown in lakes, he said to us. Yet hes written some of the most beautiful poetry the world has known, poetry of love and outrage, of abstraction and clarity, of timelessness and relativity. Though he is faced with the evidence of a catalogue of songs that would contain the whole careers of a dozen fine songwriters, Dylan told us he doesnt consider himself to be a professional songwriter. For me its always been more con -fessional than pro -fessional, he said in distinctive Dylan cadence. My songs arent written on a schedule.

Well, how are they written, we asked? This is the question at the heart of this interview, the main one that comes to mind when looking over all the albums, or witnessing the amazing array of moods, masks, styles and forms all represented on the recently released Bootleg Series. How has he done it? It was the first question asked, and though he deflected it at first with his customary humor, its a question we returned to a few times. Start me off somewhere, he said smiling, as if he might be left alone to divulge the secrets of his songwriting, and our talk began.

Arlo Guthrie recently said, Songwriting is like fishing in a stream; you put in your line and hope you catch something. And I dont think anyone downstream from Bob Dylan ever caught anything.

Dylan: [Much laughter]

Any idea how youve been able to catch so many?

[Laughs] Its probably the bait.

What kind of bait do you use?

Uh bait Youve got to use some bait. Otherwise you sit around and expect songs to come to you. Forcing it is using bait.

Does that work for you?

Well, no. Throwing yourself into a situation that would demand a response is like using bait. People who write about stuff that hasnt really happened to them are inclined to do that.

When you write songs, do you try to consciously guide the meaning or do you try to follow subconscious directions?

Well, you know, motivation is something you never know behind any song, really. Anybodys song, you never know what the motivation was. Its nice to be able to put yourself in an environment where you can completely accept all the unconscious stuff that comes to you from your inner workings of your mind. And block yourself off to where you can control it all, take it down. Edgar Allan Poe must have done that. People who are dedicated writers, of which there are some, but mostly people get their information today over a television set or some kind of a way thats hitting them on all their senses. Its not just a great novel anymore. You have to be able to get the thoughts out of your mind.

How do you do that?

Well, first of all, theres two kinds of thoughts in your mind: theres good thoughts and evil thoughts. Both come through your mind. Some people are more loaded down with one than another. Nevertheless, they come through. And you have to be able to sort them out, if you want to be a songwriter, if you want to be a good song singer. You must get rid of all that baggage.

You ought to be able to sort out those thoughts, because they dont mean anything, theyre just pulling you around, too. Its important to get rid of all them thoughts. Then you can do something from some kind of surveillance of the situation. You have some kind of place where you can see but it cant affect you. Where you can bring something to the matter, besides just take, take, take, take, take. As so many situations in life are today. Take, take, take, thats all that it is. Whats in it for me? That syndrome which started in the Me Decade, whenever that was. Were still in that. Its still happening.

Is songwriting for you more a sense of taking something from some place else?

Well, someplace else is always a heartbeat away. Theres no rhyme or reason to it. Theres no rule. Thats what makes it so attractive. There isnt any rule. You can still have your wits about you and do something that gets you off in a multitude of ways. As you very well know, or else you yourself wouldnt be doing it.

Your songs often bring us back to other times, and are filled with mythic, magical images. A song like Changing Of The Guard seems to take place centuries ago, with lines like, They shaved her head/she was torn between Jupiter and Apollo/A messenger arrived with a black nightingale. How do you connect with a song like that?

[Pause] A song like that, theres no way of knowing, after the fact, unless somebodys there to take it down in chronological order, what the motivation was behind it. [Pause] But on one level, of course, its no different from anything else of mine. Its the same amount of metric verses like a poem. To me, its like a poem.

The melodies in my mind are very simple, theyre just based on music weve all heard growing up. And that and music which went beyond that, which went back further, Elizabethan ballads and whatnot To me, its old. [Laughs] Its old. Its not something, with my minimal amount of talent, if you could call it that, minimum amount

To me, somebody coming along now would definitely read whats out there if theyre seriously concerned with being an artist whos going to still be an artist when they get to be Picassos age. Youre better off learning some music theory. Youre just better off, yeah, if you want to write songs. Rather than just take a hillbilly twang, you know, and try to base it all on that. Even country music is more orchestrated than it used to be. Youre better off having some feel for music that you dont have to carry in your head, that you can write down. To me those are the people who are serious about this craft. People who go about it that way. Not people who just want to pour out their insides and they got to get a big idea out and they want to tell the world about this, sure, you can do it through a song, you always could. You can use a song for anything, you know. The world dont need any more songs.

You dont think so?

No. Theyve got enough. Theyve got way too many. As a matter of fact, if nobody wrote any songs from this day on, the world aint gonna suffer for it. Nobody cares. Theres enough songs for people to listen to, if they want to listen to songs. For every man, woman and child on earth, they could be sent, probably, each of them, a hundred records, and never be repeated. Theres enough songs. Unless someones gonna come along with a pure heart and has something to say. Thats a different story.

But as far as songwriting, any idiot could do it. If you see me do it, any idiot could do it. [Laughs] Its just not that difficult of a thing. Everybody writes a song just like everybodys got that one great novel in them. There arent a lot of people like me. You just had your interview with Neil [Young], John Mellencamp Of course, most of my ilk that came along write their own songs and play them. It wouldnt matter if anybody ever made another record. Theyve got enough songs.

To me, someone who writes really good songs is Randy Newman. Theres a lot of people who write good songs. As songs. Now Randy might not go out on stage and knock you out, or knock your socks off. And hes not going to get people thrilled in the front row. He aint gonna do that. But hes gonna write a better song than most people who can do it. You know, hes got that down to an art. Now Randy knows music. But it doesnt get any better than Louisiana or Cross Charleston Bay [Sail Away]. It doesnt get any better than that. Its like a classically heroic anthem theme. He did it.

Theres quite a few people who did it. Not that many people in Randys class. Brian Wilson. He can write melodies that will beat the band. Three people could combine on a song and make it a great song. If one person would have written the same song, maybe you would have never heard it. It might get buried on some rap record. [Laughs]

Still, when youve come out with some of your new albums of songs, those songs fit that specific time better than any songs that had already been written. Your new songs have always shown us new possibilities.

Its not a good idea and its bad luck to look for lifes guidance to popular entertainers. Its bad luck to do that. No one should do that. Popular entertainers are fine, theres nothing the matter with that but as long as you know where youre standing and what ground youre on, many of them, they dont know what theyre doing either.

But your songs are more than pop entertainment

Some people say so. Not to me.

No?

Pop entertainment means nothing to me. Nothing. You know, Madonnas good. Madonnas good, shes talented, she puts all kind of stuff together, shes learned her thing But its the kind of thing which takes years and years out of your life to be able to do. Youve got to sacrifice a whole lot to do that. Sacrifice. If you want to make it big, youve got to sacrifice a whole lot. Its all the same, its all the same. [Laughs]

Van Morrison said that you are our greatest living poet. Do you think of yourself in those terms?

[Pause] Sometimes. Its within me. Its within me to put myself up and be a poet. But its a dedication. [Softly] Its a big dedication. [Pause] Poets dont drive cars. [Laughs] Poets dont go to the supermarket. Poets dont empty the garbage. Poets arent on the PTA. Poets, you know, they dont go picket the Better Housing Bureau, or whatever. Poets dont Poets dont even speak on the telephone. Poets dont even talk to anybody. Poets do a lot of listening and and usually they know why theyre poets!

[Laughs] Yeah, there are what can you say? The world dont need any more poems, its got Shakespeare. Theres enough of everything. You name it, theres enough of it. There was too much of it with electricity, maybe, some people said that. Some people said the lightbulb was going too far. Poets live on the land. They behave in a gentlemanly way. And live by their own gentlemanly code. [Pause] And die broke. Or drown in lakes. Poets usually have very unhappy endings. Look at Keats life. Look at Jim Morrison , if you want to call him a poet. Look at him. Although some people say that he is really in the Andes.

Do you think so?

Well, it never crossed my mind to think one way or the other about it, but you do hear that talk. Piggyback in the Andes. Riding a donkey.

People have a hard time believing that Shakespeare really wrote all of his work because there is so much of it. Do you have a hard time accepting that?

People have a hard time accepting anything that overwhelms them.

Might they think that of you, years from now, that no one man could have produced so much incredible work?

They could. They could look back and think nobody produced it. [Softly] Its not to anybodys best interest to think about how they will be perceived tomorrow. It hurts you in the long run.

But arent there songs of your own that you know will always be around?

Whos gonna sing them? My songs really arent meant to be covered. No, not really. Can you think of Well, they do get covered, but its covered. Theyre not intentionally written to be covered, but okay, they do.

Your songs are much more enjoyable to sing and play than most songs.

Do you play them on piano or guitar?

Both.

Acoustic guitar?

Mostly.

Do you play jazz? It never hurts to learn as many chords as you can. All kinds. Sometime it will change the inflection of a whole song, a straight chord, or, say, an augmented seventh chord.

Do you have favorite keys to work in?

On the piano, my favorite keys are the black keys. And they sound better on guitar, too. Sometimes when a songs in a flat key, say B flat, bring it to the guitar, you might want to put it in A. But thats an interesting thing you just said. It changes the inflection. Mainly in mine the songs sound different. They sound when you take a black key song and put it on the guitar, which means youre playing in A flat, not too many people like to play in those keys. To me it doesnt matter. [Laughs] It doesnt matter because my fingering is the same anyway.

So there are songs that, even without the piano, which is the dominant sound if youre playing in the black keys why else would you play in that key except to have that dominant piano sound? the songs that go into those keys right from the piano, they sound different. They sound deeper. Yeah. They sound deeper. Everything sounds deeper in those black keys. Theyre not guitar keys, though. Guitar bands dont usually like to play in those keys, which kind of gives me an idea, actually, of a couple of songs that could actually sound better in black keys.

Do keys have different colors for you?

Sure. Sure. [Softly] Sure.

Youve written some great A minor songs. I think of One More Cup Of Coffee.

Right. B minor might sound even better.

How come?

Well, it might sound better because youre playing a lot of open chords if youre playing in A minor. If you play in B minor, it will force you to play higher. And the chords youre bound, someplace along the line, because there are so many chords in that song, or seem to be anyway, youre bound someplace along the line to come down to an open chord on the bottom. From B. You would hit E someplace along the line. Try it in B minor. [Laughs] Maybe it will be a hit for you. A hit is a number one song, isnt it? Yeah.

When you sit down to write a song, do you pick a key first that will fit a song? Or do you change keys while youre writing?

Yeah. Yeah. Maybe like in the middle of the thing. There are ways you can get out of whatever youve gotten into. You want to get out of it. Its bad enough getting into it. But the thing to do as soon as you get into it is realize you must get out of it. And unless you get out of it quickly and effortlessly, theres no use staying in it. It will just drag you down. You could be spending years writing the same song, telling the same story, doing the same thing.

So once you involve yourself in it, once you accidentally have slipped into it, the thing is to get out. So your primary impulse is going to take you so far. But then you might think, well, you know, is this one of these things where its all just going to come? And then all of the sudden you start thinking. And when my mind starts thinking, Whats happening now? Oh, theres a story here, and my mind starts to get into it, thats trouble right away. Thats usually big trouble. And as far as never seeing this thing again. Theres a bunch of ways you can get out of that. You can make yourself get out of it by changing key. Thats one way. Just take the whole thing and change key, keeping the same melody. And see if that brings you any place. More times than not, that will take you down the road. You dont want to be on a collision course. But that will take you down the road. Somewhere.

And then if that fails, and that will run out, too, then you can always go back to where you were to start. It wont work twice, it only works once. Then you go back to where you started. Yeah, because anything you do in A, its going to be a different song in G. While youre writing it, anyway. Theres too many wide passing notes in G [on the guitar] not to influence your writing, unless youre playing barre chords.

Do you ever switch instruments, like from guitar to piano, while writing?

Not so much that way. Although when its time to record something, for me, sometimes a song that has been written on piano with just lyrics here in my hand, itll be time to play it now on guitar. So it will come out differently. But it wouldnt have influenced the writing of the song at all. Changing keys influences the writing of the song. Changing keys on the same instrument. For me, that works. I think for somebody else, the other thing works. Everything is different.

I interviewed Pete Seeger recently.

Hes a great man, Pete Seeger.

Go here to read the rest:
Bob Dylan: The Interview, Part 1 - American Songwriter

The campaign has been conceptualised and executed by Mixed Route Juice.Edible oil brand, Dhara has re-launched the tune Dhara Dhara Shuddh Dhara, that takes the audience back to the glorious days of past. Back in the early 90s this tune had kick-started the Anokhi Shuruat of a dynamic journey for the edible oil brand.

Dinesh Agrawal, business head Dhara, Mother Dairy, said, Dhara has been deep rooted in the Indian value system since 1988. This phase of lockdown has taken us back in time when people enjoyed even the smaller joys of day to day life. As we spend time with family and travel back the memory lane, we want our consumers to also travel back and relive those moments with us on an emotional journey. Dhara tune has ruled our hearts then and continues to rule now and forever. With this campaign we want to hold our consumers in an emotional bond and stir nostalgia with the melody of the ad.

Amrita Sharma, creative head, Mixed Route Juice, said, Indian Ocean brings back to ones mind space the memories from a golden era, where bonds amongst people were stronger. The current situation too has brought an all new realisation that has given family time more precedence over the rest of the things. With this campaign, we wanted to bring back the same goodness that once a prime part of everyones life. The connect of the band with what we wanted to do for the brand was perfect.

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Dhara brings back memories from the yesteryears - ETBrandEquity.com

Don Farber is a photographer deeply influenced by his understanding of Buddhist practice. In March, Throckmorton Fine Art opened a show of his Buddhist pictures in New York and Don was heading there to be part of it when his plans were disrupted by Covid 19. The show stayed up but few got to see it and thats a shame because these are pictures worth seeing. The good news is you can view them here today and also learn something of how they came to be in this interview.

Hi Don, Lets start here. How did you start taking pictures?

When I was a kid, I had a few Brownie cameras and a Polaroid camera, too, but my main connection to photography then was spending hours poring over the great photography magazines including Life, Look, Vogue, and National Geographic and the books, The Family of Man and the 1950s Year annuals of picture history. My parents were both artists and graphic designers and we lived in Laurel Canyon. I used to ride the school bus which would stop at a corner where there was a wall with the words LET UNDERSTANDING GUIDE hand painted across it. Those words were seared in my mind. This was mainly a community of artists, musicians, and all sorts of creative, left-leaning people kind of a utopia.

The Vietnam War was raging and there was no way I was going to fight in that war. I had a friend who told me that he was going to Australia and that if you registered for the draft before your 18th birthday outside of the Western Hemisphere, you wouldnt be drafted. So, I planned to do this by going to Europe and registering for the draft in England.

In the summer of 1968 when I was 16, I took a class with photographer Seymour Rosen who brought us to see an exhibition of Dorothea Langes photography at LACMA. I was so inspired by her work that I decided right then to become a photographer. I flew to Europe and hitch-hiked around with my backpack, guitar, and cameras photographing the beauty I found myself in. I was a young hippie and I was introduced to Yoga philosophy and vegetarianism by some Western yogis I met in the south of France. I always wanted to see a bull fight, and while photographing one in Madrid, very high on weed, I witnessed a bull being killed by a matador seeing it through the magnification of a telephoto lens. This was a major catalyst for me to become a vegetarian (Ive been a vegetarian ever since).

In my senior year at Hollywood High School, I got into a work-study program to apprentice with Seymour and I worked with him every day after school to learn camera and darkroom technique. He inspired me to know the work of many great photographers and I began collecting photography books starting with the work of Henry Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Eugene Smith, Dorothea Lange, and Edward Westin.

When I was 17 and had just graduated high school, I returned to Europe to avoid the draft and study at Manchester College of Art and Design. At the school, I was introduced to the photography of many European photographers less known in America and I received a solid technical understanding of photography, plus I got a lot of support to explore photography artistically.

After about ten months, I was too homesick to stay any longer, so I returned to LA. I would take my chance with the draft with the hope that I could keep a student deferment or get out of the draft through the lottery. It was the summer of 1970. My mother designed a calendar datebook for the anti-war group, Another Mother for Peace. I volunteered to do the photography for the datebook by photographing mothers and their children around Los Angeles. Then in the fall, I began studying as a photography major at the San Francisco Art Institute. Among the teachers I studied with was Richard Conrat who had been Dorothea Langes assistant, John Collier, Jr. who was Langes colleague as a photographer in the Farm Security Administration, and the historian of photography, Margery Mann. One day, I had a giant sigh of relief when I received news that I wouldnt be drafted to fight in Vietnam because I had gotten a high lottery number.

For my last year at the Art Institute, I did an independent studies project, spending 9 months photographing organic farming in North San Diego County, where I lived and worked on a communal farm. A woman I met on the farm kind of woke me up, basically saying theres more to life than being cool. Theres the spiritual life for you to discover. Someone else I met on the farm introduced me to the Vedanta Temple in Hollywood and I began attending talks and services there. While I had been listening to Alan Watts on the radio and read some of his books on Zen, going to the Vedanta temple in 1973 was my first direct experience with Eastern spiritual practices. I would listen to the talks given by the swamis and when they finished, they would chant, with their eyes closed, shanti, shanti, shanti, peace, peace, peace. As they did this, I could clearly see their auras radiating out around them, which blew me away. I moved back to LA and got a job as a staff photographer for public relations at Santa Monica Hospital. It was the beginning of my career as a freelance professional photographer.

During the 70s, I was also photographing demonstrations against the Vietnam War and the Anti-Nuclear movement of the late 70s. I became active with a group called the Alliance for Survival, designing their logo and photographing demonstrations and concerts we organized at the Hollywood Bowl. I also volunteered by doing graphic design and photography for political campaigns by Democratic candidates. While I believed and still do believe that these movements are critically important, I also found that more than a few of the people I worked with in these movements seemed to be afflicted by emotional problems and I began to think, if we are going to build lasting peace in society, we need to address the psychological and spiritual conditions of society. In the tradition of documentary photographers who were committed to making social change through photography, including those who photographed wars, famines, and all the ills humanity faces, I wanted to focus on spirituality as a path towards lasting peace.

As an extension of the Hippie movement, something of a spiritual renaissance blossomed in the 70s as people shifted from psychedelics to meditation. Seminars of the human potential movement were booming. I found great benefit from some of these seminars and attending talks given by teachers from the East including Krishnamurti, Swami Satchidananda, Swami Muktananda, and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. My first project to photograph spiritual life was documenting the rehearsals and performance of the Cosmic Mass, which was directed by the Sufi master Pir Vilayat Khan. People representing many faiths came together recognizing the underlying unity of the worlds religions.

In 1975, I met the Vietnamese Zen master Dr. Thich Thien-An, who had founded the International Buddhist Meditation Center in LA near downtown Los Angeles. He told me that when the Vietnamese refugees arrived in California after the Fall of Saigon, he met them at Camp Pendleton and brought many of them to stay at the meditation center. Soon after, he bought an old apartment building to serve as the first Vietnamese Buddhist temple in North America. Then in 1977, I had an assignment from a learning resource center to produce educational materials for the Vietnamese refugee children, so I met with Dr. Thien-An and asked him if I could photograph at the temple for this project and he welcomed me.

When I entered the courtyard of the temple, I saw an old Vietnamese barber giving haircuts, children in uniforms playing, and upstairs, elders, monks and nuns were chanting prayers and prostrating. It was about 1 years since the war ended and it was as if a small village from Vietnam had been transplanted or airlifted into LA intact. I was so moved, especially by the elderly women who welcomed me there that I decided that day to make a book about life at the temple. I became a disciple of Dr. Thien-An and I decided that Buddhism would be my path. I would go every Sunday for ten years to photograph, participate in the religious practices, and interview members of the temple. It was also a chance for me to heal from all the years of sadness I felt for the senseless death and destruction of the Vietnam War. This is where I developed my understanding of how to serve as a photographer in a Buddhist community. I learned to work as unobtrusively as possible and stay mindful of the sacredness of the moment while looking through the camera and carefully exposing the film.

How did you get into photographing Buddhist life internationally?

It started with photographing Buddhist life in Los Angeles. Dr. Thien-An invited Buddhist teachers from many Buddhist traditions to give teachings at the International Buddhist Meditation Center. I photographed many of the teachers who came there including the 16th Karmapa and His Holiness the Dalai Lama during his first visit to the US. Also, in those years going to the Vietnamese temple, I was photographing other Buddhist traditions including at Tibetan, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Thai temples. After Dr. Thien-An passed away in 1980, I spent a few years practicing and photographing at the Zen Center of Los Angeles, which was founded by the Japanese Zen master Maezumi Roshi.

In the mid-eighties, I became a student of Dr. Thien-Ans best friend, the Tibetan master Ven. Geshe Gyaltsen who had a Buddhist center in LA. I realized that the Tibetan Buddhist way of life was in great danger since China had destroyed many of the monasteries in Tibet during the Cultural Revolution and many of the Buddhist masters who had not fled Tibet were imprisoned. I decided it was critical to photograph the last of the great Tibetan Buddhist masters who had received their training in the old Tibet, so I began making portraits of these masters when they came to Los Angeles to give teachings.

In 1988, after my book, Taking Refuge in LA: Life in a Vietnamese Buddhist Temple was published and I had made two trips to Asia, I decided to move from photographing Buddhist life in microcosm in LA to photographing Buddhist life in macrocosm with the goal to photograph Buddhist life in all the traditionally Buddhist countries in Asia as well as Buddhism in the West. I took a leap of faith and gave up much of my freelance photography business and started traveling.

I had photographed the great Tibetan Buddhist master, Kalu Rinpoche, when he came to the US in 1988 and the following year, I went to India to photograph the last ten days of his 49-day funeral. Right after that, I rushed back to LA to photograph the Dalai Lama. Geshe Gyaltsen had invited the Dalai Lama to give the Kalachakra teachings in Santa Monica over a period of two weeks and he allowed me to serve as the official photographer.

After that, I began living in Japan part time. My teacher, Dr. Thien-An, had received a Ph.D in Buddhist studies in Japan, so through his friends who were fellow Buddhist priests in Tokyo, I was able to connect with people and organizations in Japan who believed in the work I was doing and they sponsored me. Tokyo became my base and from there, I would travel to photograph in many Buddhist countries.

In 1997, I received a Fulbright Scholarship to spend a year photographing and researching Tibetan Buddhist life in India and Nepal. With my wife Yeshi who is Tibetan and our daughter Palmo who was then two years old, we went to live in my wifes village, the Tibetan refugee settlement of Bir in Himachal Pradesh. I traveled to many parts of India, as well as Nepal, to carry out the work. Ive concentrated my photography mainly on Tibetan Buddhist life since then, including making portraits of more than 100 Tibetan Buddhist masters and my photography of the Dalai Lama spans nearly 40 years.

What made you want to focus on photographing Buddhist life?

I found great benefit from my experiences with Sufism, Taoism, Vedanta, and really from many of the worlds religions, including Judaism, which I was born into. I grew up in a secular Jewish family, but my parents were atheists, so I had little contact with my religion except from family Passover dinners at the home of my mothers cousin and her husband who were Holocaust survivors, which was deeply meaningful and precious. I came into life with a clean slate where I could freely find my own spiritual path. I mentioned the wall in Laurel Canyon with the words, Let Understanding Guide. As I journeyed through the various spiritual paths, somehow, I connected with Buddhism and its emphasis on direct experience. The Buddha taught not to blindly accept his teachings, but to check them out oneself through meditation and contemplation and applying the teachings in ones own life and seeing if its true or not. Then we have true understanding. Actually, I feel very connected with Sufism and its broad universal view embracing many faiths, but Ive specialized in Buddhism. Swami Muktananda said, choose one faith as though its like being on a magic carpet and I chose Buddhism. I gravitate toward Buddhist life because I find it endlessly inspiring to be a part of and I believe this way of life, which emphasizes loving-kindness, compassion, wisdom, and non-violence, can have a critical role to play in the survival of the planet.

Written by Andy Romanoff

Don Farber http://www.buddhistphotos.com

Throckmorton Fine Art https://dfarber.wixsite.com/throckmorton

Andy Romanoff words https://andyromanoff.zenfolio.com/

Andy Romanoff Pictures https://andyromanoff.zenfolio.com/

Go here to see the original:
Don Farber, Visions of Buddhist Life by Andy Romanoff - The Eye of Photography

My friend Susy Powlesland, who has died aged 90, was a radical educationist. With her husband, John, she set up the alternative Kirkdale school in south London in the mid 1960s. The school adhered to principles of self-sufficiency, equality and creative learning, focusing on the particular interests of the individual child. It ran for over a decade and created a community that still exists today.

Susy was an only child born to Jewish parents, Emilie (nee Preis) and Felix Michlowitz, in Vienna, where her father ran a watchmaking and jewellery business. When she was nine the family managed to get on the last train out of Austria before the border was sealed at the approach of the second world war. They were billeted initially in London but were driven out by the blitz, and taken in by a woman in Reading, where Susy never felt fully at home.

She attended local schools, and after leaving Kendrick girls grammar school at 16 trained as a nursery nurse in Reading, then was accepted for teacher training at the residential Gypsy Hill Training College, in Kingston, Surrey. She taught at primary schools in Stratford, east London, and in Leicestershire. She met John Powlesland when they worked together at Forest School camps. They married in 1954 and later settled in London.

Susy was keenly attuned to racial and religious intolerance, and had a passion in particular for the underdog and outsider. In his 2007 book The Islamist, Ed Husain describes a terrifying incident when a group of National Front thugs threatened him and other Muslim school children in a local playground. Susy and the other teachers raced to the side of the children and roared at the shaven-headed bigots.

Susy lived in Tower Hamlets for more than 40 years. During her headship at Sir William Burrough school (1980-95) she had a huge impact on the children and families. She went out of her way to support newly arrived Bangladeshi children, especially those without immediate family. In the 1980s, she learnt some Sylheti and travelled to Bangladesh to learn more about the cultural background of her pupils.

In 1984 she was the driving force behind the establishment of the Limehouse Housing Project, whose chief aim was to improve the lives of black and minority ethnic communities through the provision of good quality housing. In 2003 she co-founded a new local charity called the Globe Community Project, which aims to provide activities for young and old residents from diverse communities. She was appointed MBE in 2007 for services to BAME people in east London.

After retirement, she became interested in meditation and Buddhism and was ordained into the Triratna Buddhist Order in 2003, taking the name Shraddhapuspa (Flower of Faith). She brought her dedication to children and families into her Buddhist life and remained active in her charity roles and her Buddhist teaching commitments until the final weeks of her life.

John died in 1977. Susy is survived by their children, Stephen, Helen, Frank and Ayen, and grandchildren, Zak, Jasmin, Zain and Zachran.

See the rest here:
Susy Powlesland obituary - The Guardian

In the Himalayas, where the ontology of water is not always premised on the creations of boundaries between nature and culture, the condition of water, whether abundant or scarce, has key implications for cultural life.

What causes water scarcity when water is understood on a paradigm that does not separate nature and culture? When water is seen not only as a substance, but as an element that binds the realms of the social and the ecological in principles of reciprocity?

In the Himalayas, where the ontology of water is not always premised on the creation of boundaries between nature and culture, an approach typical of the scientific rationality, the condition of water, whether abundant or scarce, has key implications for cultural life. Water is often conceived by local populations of the Himalayas as being part of a network of reciprocity and produced through ethical actions. Its materiality, that is, waters properties and qualities, is seen as a manifestation of how people are acting in the world according to a locally-defined set of moral values. As per these values, humans have a moral responsibility to care for the animals, the land, and divine beings.

Today, water stress is increasingly putting pressure on farmers and herders of the Himalayas. Snowfall and glacial melt, two crucial sources of irrigation water, have decreased, forcing some farmers to leave parts of their land uncultivated. These changes are taking place amid intensified production activities by different states in the Himalayas, from the building of roads, the development of hydro projects, heavy militarization, state management of natural resources in minority areas, and the promotion of tourist activities. While these changes bring with them a lot of anticipation and speculation about how the region will be transformed, they are also seen by some as having implications for the production of water as they do not hold the promise of preserving values with which communities have long identified.

In a recent study, Karine Gagn of the University of Guelph reviewed empirical studies that illuminate the realm of beliefs and practices linked to water in the Buddhist Himalayas, a notion that refers both to a geography, and to the perspectives that are informed by beliefs that can be associated with Tibetan Buddhism. While this illustrates how water is seen as being made through ethical actions in the Himalayas, it also offers insights on the perceived implications that developments currently taking place in the region have on the state of water. This review contributes to narratives about the Anthropocene, the era in which human activity impacts the planet. The Anthropocene is often conceived in terms of the major ecological crisis it signals. But as scholars have argued, the Anthropocene is not just an epoch characterized by the acceleration of the loss of nature, but also the loss of culture.

These reflections have much resonance with how people experience changes related to climate change in the Himalayas, which are often interpreted along registers of loss. While farmers and herders of the Himalayas understand the changes brought about by climate change through the same observations as those conducted by science for instance, receding glaciers they see these phenomena as having a moral origin. For in the Buddhist Himalayas, the secular, the sacred, and the moral intermingle in peoples interpretation of the world. Accordingly, changes to water (such as reduced snowfall, melting glaciers, drying water sources) brought about by climate change have a specific local cultural resonance. Here, climate change is not something that transcends the local scene, but rather, is a phenomenon for which local people have a direct responsibility. It is seen as a consequence of the erosion of human values and dispositions toward nonhuman others, or changing morals defined by increasingly prevalent anthropocentric values.

Considering water as the materiality of ethics means asking how the qualities of water resonate for people in specific localities, at a specific moment in time. To do so, the review focuses on three perspectives of the production of water: how water is produced as people interact with a sacred geography, how snowy peaks are produced as objects of morality through affective attachment and encounters, and how water is produced as part of multi-species assemblages, a process that has implications for the current changes in the climate, the weather, and the environment. Together, these three perspectives shed light on some of the specificities of the Anthropocene in the Himalayas. This is important because as a planetary narrative, the Anthropocene can obscure the fact that it has specific local realities.

Written by: Karine Gagn, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology & Anthropology, University of Guelph

Reference: Karine Gagn , The materiality of ethics: Perspectives on water and reciprocity in a Himalayan Anthropocene. WIREs Water (2020). DOI: 10.1002/wat2.1444

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Water, reciprocity, and the anthropocene in the Himalayas - Advanced Science News

A recent poll shows Trump is in the lead in 15 key states. Let's investigate.

Hannity reports Joe in Trouble: Trump Beating Biden in 15 Battleground States

A shocking new poll spells big trouble for Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden; showing President Trump beating Biden in 15 battleground states that will likely decide the 2020 election.

583 People Surveyed

The poll was conducted by SSRS for CNN.

The CNN Poll was conducted by SSRS May 7-10 among a random national sample of 1,112 adults reached on landlines or cellphones by a live interviewer, including 1,001 registered voters and 583 voters in battleground states, defined as the 15 states decided by 8 points or less in 2016 -- Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.

Survey Math

583 people / 15 states = 38.9 people per battleground state.

Surveying less that 40 people per state then averaging them together is of course ridiculous.

So, let's dive further into individual state polls.

Latest State Polls

Those are not in date order. Rather, they are in the order in which FiveThirtyEight presented them.

The SSRS poll is clearly ridiculous, but that is what happens when you poll an average 39 people for 15 states then lump everything together.

Shocker

If you are looking for a shocker, look no further than Georgia.

Georgia was not supposed to even be in play for Biden, yet the more recent of the two polls has Biden in the lead.

Not a Shocker

Hannity all of a sudden believes a poll sponsored by CNN.

Mish

Continued here:

Trump in the Lead in 15 Battleground States? Don't Believe It - TheStreet

If, like MDJ editor Jon Gillooly, you want to visit your fragile grandmother, but dont want to infect her with plague, consider taking a spin by Kennesaw State Universitys main campus as he recently did to be tested for the coronavirus.

Jon drove over just before lunchtime on Wednesday, May 13.

If you have parked there over the years as he has to hear various campus speakers from Ann Coulter to Angela Davis, you may find it disorienting to see Georgia National Guardsmen in uniform and facemasks waving you in instead of students with backpacks walking this way and that.

The first guardsman instructs you to roll up your window and drive into the deck. Another asks for your license.

Do you have an appointment? You do not, but all is well. You simply call a number provided and tell the operator your information.

Next, youre advised to drive ahead to the testing station set up on the ground floor of the deck, a station with tables stacked with various testing paraphernalia. The masked nurses are washing their hands as a guardsman approaches your car door and tells you to put the car into park. This will prove important in a bit. A nurse, masked and wearing a face shield, greets you at your drivers side window and warns not to move your head as she unwraps a long strip of material.

Yes, she nods, at which point she inserts the strip into your left nostril, pushing it so deep inside your head its a good thing your car is in park.

Count to 10, she orders, but really, when youre impaled like this, all you can do is pray for it to be over.

Pulling out the first strip without any noticeable mercy, she inserts a second one, this time into the right nostril, driving it so far back it meets your earliest childhood memories.

For some reason you had thought the test would involve something easy, like licking a postage stamp. Wrong.

Eventually, though, a friendly guardsman appears to say its all over, and to call this number after 48 to 72 hours for the results.

You see him mouthing the words, not understanding a thing he said.

48 to 72 hours, he repeats.

He could be speaking in tongues as far as youre concerned.

He patiently repeats himself a third time, at which point you get the message and thank him for his service before driving out of the deck, never to return. All told, less than half an hour from entrance to exit.

Jons results came the following Monday, a little long to wait, in his opinion, but a relief that he could safely visit his grandmother, who is in her nineties.

Would he do it again, he is asked, now knowing what to expect?

Let's just say Grandma, sainted though she is, will be getting phone calls rather than in-person visits for the next good while.

OPENING UP: In an interview published by Education Dive, former Cobb Schools Superintendent Michael Hinojosa, now superintendent of the Dallas (Texas) Independent School District, was asked what advice he has for superintendents making decisions to reopen school. Hinojosa, who preceded Chris Ragsdale as Cobb super, answered the question this way:

Dr. Michael Hinojosa Staff/file

As you make these big, important decisions that a lot of people are depending on you for, you have to realize that you're at a different stage than everybody else. First, people are angry, then they're in denial, then they grieve, and then they accept.

So what happens is when you're making these decisions, you're probably already at acceptance.

But a lot of people are at different stages they're just now getting angry, they're just now going into denial. So you've got to take that into consideration.

No matter what you do, you're going to get criticized. So you need to think about what's in the best interest of your students, your families, your staff, your community. Realize you're going to take some heat. That's the cost of doing business when you're the CEO of a public entity like this. But you've got to be able to empathize that people are in different stages of [processing].

And then you can't be wishy-washy. Normally, you can be overturned by the school board and by the mayor. But at some point, people are looking to you for leadership. And that's the penalty of leadership: You sometimes have to make a tough call when you're out there by yourself.

But you have a lot more information than everybody else has as they're starting to process everything that's about to happen to them.

REPORT CARDS: The Atlanta Coalition for Educational Equity, a group of educators, administrators, parents, students and community leaders, who advocate for policies and practices that expand educational opportunities for metro Atlanta students, have given some of Cobbs school board candidates their report cards.

The group, created in September, has so far weighed in on Democratic Post 5 candidates Dr. Julia Hurtado and Tammy Andress, as well as Democratic Post 1 candidate Vickie Benson.

The boards Post 1 seat is held by Randy Scamihorn, and the Post 5 seat is held by senior board member and Vice Chair David Banks.

The ACEE flunked Banks and one of his Republican challengers, Matt Harper, for not answering a questionnaire sent to all candidates. Though a post on the groups Facebook page shows Republican Post 5 candidate Shelley O'Malley, Post 1 incumbent Scamihorn and Post 7 candidate and school board Chairman Brad Wheeler did not respond to the questionnaire, they have not yet been given a report card.

Democratic Post 7 candidate Lindsay Terrebonne is said to have answered but has also not yet received a grade.

The highest-rated candidate so far has been Benson, who the group gave an A.

The groups questionnaire includes four questions: 1. Will you fully commit to working with other board members to reopen board public comment? 2. Will you commit to supporting the creation and funding of a Chief Equity Officer role who will conduct an equity audit of Cobb County Schools? 3. Do you commit to supporting policy solutions that arise from the equity audit? 4. Will you commit to prioritizing the establishment of a Community and Family Engagement Office to serve as a liaison for families, community partners and school councils?

Candidates respond with a yes or no.

In Bensons case, every answer was yes, and from the candidates survey answers, the ACEE says it has concluded she has a strong commitment to equity, backed by a plan that is well thought-out.

The group says Benson advocates for the implementation of data-driven policy solutions and offers ideas about engagement activities outside of currently existing structures (i.e. PTA, school council, etc.).

Andress, meanwhile, has received a B. All four answers were yes. The ACEE says Andresss responses show she is committed to equity among students and supports a nonpartisan approach to governance. The group also says Andress believes in the need for better communication between the school board and the community.

Hurtado received a B-, placing her just below Andress. All four answers were yes. The ACEE says Hurtado is strong on issues of equity and believes an chief equity officer role should be a priority in the budget but lacks specifics on a plan for achieving equity.

SPEAKER CIRCUIT: The Cobb Chamber of Commerce is hosting a business recovery webinar on the legal guidance for reopening. The event is from 11 a.m. to noon on Wednesday. The panel includes attorneys Neera Bahl, Dave Cole, Scott Gregory, Christina Moore, Justin ODell and Chamber Chairman John Loud.

GALA CANCELED: The Center for Family Resources says it will not reschedule its postponed annual gala in 2020, opting to hold the next one in 2021. The CFR had to cancel its Diamonds in the Garden Anniversary Gala in March due to the pandemic.

The decision to reschedule the event will allow CFR staff and supporters to focus on providing emergency assistance to those financially impacted by the pandemic. The CFR staff are busy working through support requests from hundreds of families in need. More than 1,000 calls have been received since March from those impacted by COVID-19, the center reports.

See more here:

AROUND TOWN: On being tested for COVID-19 at Kennesaw State University - MDJOnline.com