The Colour of Pus

4 watchers

GregP Oct 2012 5:30pm, 18 Oct 2012 63,205 posts	0 GregP Aye. I strip my bark, too.
JenL Oct 2012 5:30pm, 18 Oct 2012 22,742 posts	0 JenL Exfoliation, even
GregP Oct 2012 5:37pm, 18 Oct 2012 63,206 posts	0 GregP
Wriggling Snake Oct 2012 5:39pm, 18 Oct 2012 2,969 posts	0 Wriggling Snake I floss, Hamstrings, hip flexors and pecs, honest
Wriggling Snake Oct 2012 5:41pm, 18 Oct 2012 2,970 posts	0 Wriggling Snake http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts2fVuUwh70
GregP May 2013 5:29pm, 13 May 2013 67,286 posts	0 GregP The man behind Candy Crush 1 of 2 Riccardo Zacconi, the CEO of King, the company behind Candy Crush Susannah Ireland/The Times Post a comment Print Share via Facebook Twitter Google+ Riccardo Zacconi, the CEO of King, the company behind Candy Crush Susannah Ireland/The Times Ben Machell Published at 12:01AM, May 13 2013 Every day, some 66 million of us play his computer games. We ask Riccardo Zacconi how he created a global addiction The first time you play Candy Crush Saga — the most popular computer game in the world — it doesn’t seem that special. You’re presented with different coloured sweets arranged in a grid, you move them around to form lines of three or more matching colours, they vanish and you win points. It’s easy. Almost childish. It’s bright and colourful — and pretty much everything you do seems to result in wild success, in cheery celebratory crescendos and smiling cartoon faces congratulating you on being so awesome. You roll your eyes. It’s silly. You play the next level and then, because you have a little time on your hands, you play the next. You notice it’s getting harder, so you put a bit more effort into getting to the next level. And then on to the next. You can see where this is going. Six months since its launch, tens of millions of people play Candy Crush every day. They play it on their phones, on their iPads, on their computers via Facebook, sharing and comparing their scores with friends. It is the perfect example of the booming popularity of “casual games” — distracting, disposable and easy to learn, enjoyed by people who wouldn’t dream of spending a weekend playing World of Warcraft or Call of Duty but want something to keep them occupied on their commute or during the TV ad breaks. We consume these little games without thinking about it — they are either free or cost peanuts — but our appetite for them is striking. According to recent figures, gaming accounts for more than 40 per cent of the time we spend using smartphone or tablet computer apps. By contrast, social networking takes only 26 per cent of our time and following the news a mere 2 per cent. Even David Cameron, famously, enjoys playing Angry Birds. We are all gamers now — and if not we soon will be. Which is good news for Riccardo Zacconi, the CEO of King, the company behind Candy Crush. Every day, some 66 million people play King games. The main HQ is in Central London, where rows of developers work quietly in an aura somewhere between a toy factory and a Tin Pan Alley songwriting setup. They churn out a new game every three months and upload it to their website, King.com, for anyone to play. They identify which ones we play and enjoy the most — puzzle games such as Bubble Witch (fairytale witches that shoot bubbles) or Pet Rescue (you save cute, doe-eyed animals) — and develop them into bigger, flashier versions we can download to our phones or play on Facebook. Revenue comes from online advertising and the fact that, within the games, extra lives and bonuses can be bought for about 69p a pop. King’s revenue is reported to have quadrupled from its £84 million at the start of 2012. Zacconi is a thoughtful, slightly wry 47-year-old from Rome. After moving to the UK in 2001 to work in tech, he founded King in 2003, specialising in developing small, browser-based puzzle games. He lives in London with his Chinese-Swedish wife and their two-year-old son, and admits that the ubiquity of Candy Crush still takes him by surprise. He recalls a recent journey to the US: “I was speaking to the woman at passport control, and usually these people look pretty tough. She asked what I did and I said I do games. She wanted to know what kind, so I said it’s a game called Candy Crush.” The scary passport control lady suddenly shrieked with delight. “She looked up and said: ‘Oh my God! I’m on level 50!’” Later he was at a sushi restaurant, and it turned out that the chef would play at his workstation whenever he wasn’t preparing fish: “He was on something like level 180. He was amazing at it.” In Hong Kong, one in three smartphone owners plays Candy Crush, equivalent to something like 1.2 million people. “I thought we had a problem with our data,” he frowns. “But then I realised it was a mass phenomenon, bigger than I ever thought.” It’s already part of the mainstream pop culture in much of Asia. The South Korean pop singer Psy — the Gangnam Style man — plays Candy Crush Saga in the video for his latest single. You can account for this success in a couple of ways. For a start, there is the pace of life. According to Zacconi, as modern life becomes increasingly frenetic we demand more and more out of every free minute. “We hope to get the maximum out of every moment of time,” he says. So, during any pause, we instinctively reach for our phones. Secondly, Candy Crush is a fine piece of game design: it’s pretty, it’s absorbing to the point of being mildly hypnotic, and its appeal isn’t limited to any particular gender, culture or age. Then there’s the Facebook connection: you can play the game through the social networking site and have your progress posted to your Facebook page. This in itself is not unique: there are plenty of titles you can play through Facebook, usually slow-burning strategy and resource-management games — most notably Farmville, where you literally have to run a farm. But these games don’t let you continue the game on your phone when you leave for work. Only Candy Crush allows you to play all day, meaning that you come home to find your scores and progress have been shared online. Zacconi claims that the game is actually driving people to sign up to Facebook, and he has dinner meetings with Mark Zuckerberg, its co-founder. “We have a good relationship,” he says. So the idea is that a solitary pursuit is suddenly made social, like a book group for a game. “It’s bringing in an element of comparison with others: what are my peers doing? How did they complete that level?” Zacconi says. He believes that these interactions happen in the real world as people get their phones out and play together: “Like Monopoly in the old times, with the family round the table.” But this vision of gaming might sound a little optimistic. When my girlfriend and I play Candy Crush it is in furrowed-browed silence. Zacconi says that, in order to prevent players spending too much time on the game, they are required to endure a cooling-off period of about 20 minutes after losing five lives. And although it is possible to bypass this by simply buying more, he says that, “over 90 per cent of players who finish Candy Crush on their mobiles don’t pay”. When he has time to think about it, Zacconi says that there is something nice about bringing small moments of enjoyment to so many millions of people. And sometimes, in the evening, he’ll pick up his phone and play Candy Crush too. “I remember one night,” he says. “My wife is a good player, but she had been behind me for a long time. But that night she overtook me. And I was infuriated. I have to confess that I started buying all the extra lives and bonuses — which I never normally do — just to get back ahead of her. I thought: ‘It doesn’t matter, I must win at any cost!’” He smiles, a little embarrassed: “I didn’t sleep all night.”
Argie May 2013 10:46pm, 13 May 2013 9,891 posts	0 Argie This is the gayest thread you have ever started. applaudes
Johnny Blaze May 2013 11:11pm, 13 May 2013 17,945 posts	0 Johnny Blaze I once bought Mrs B a £25 Clinique gift voucher. She went to spend it at House of Fraser - I imagine she spent quite some time with the Orange Ladies in the makeup section on the ground floor. When she came back i asked her what she had bought and she pulled out of a paper bag a tube of what I believe is called foundation. Me: Very nice. And? Mrs B: And what? Me: the rest? Mrs B: what rest? There is no rest. Twenty five quid for one tube. Whoever heard of such a thing. I never made the same mistake again.
McGoohan May 2013 11:44pm, 13 May 2013 7,912 posts	0 McGoohan Exfoliation? WTF are you putting on your skin? Agent orange?
quimby May 2013 11:56pm, 13 May 2013 3,891 posts	0 quimby I've yet to be convinced by any standard face creams above the level of Nivea Q10. It's medium expensive; works fine and you don't worry about sweating it off because it cost so much. I do go for a slightly more expensive cream for the eye area - Boots No 7 Lift & Luminate. What I would recommend is this stuff: reviews.boots.com Used it to fix my winter gnarly skin last spring and got great results. Proper chemicals and stuff, but you don't turn into the Joker.