TheDanger

An exact model of Barad-dûr, the Fortress of Sauron, including a roving eye! Sculpted from polystone and coated with a protective layer of polyurethane, each Eye of Sauron Desk Lamp is painted and finished by hand. Plug it into the wall and it will turn its roving eye toward anything it deems worth watching. $299.99

Will make you look like a panda. Won't make you a warrior monk. Probably. Finally! A casual way to dress up like a panda! Bring the Mists of Pandaria into your everyday life with this hoodie - a black and white sweatshirt with ears, pockets and the Pandaria monk paw insignia on the back. $59.99 - $60.99

The worlds smallest 3500 lumen LED flashlight Our top-level flashlight, the Tiny Monster is just that: a pocket-sized flashlight that puts out a whopping 3500 lumens. Yes, that is enough to blind a zombie... or at least stun them so you can run away if you're out of bullets. $54.99 - $389.99

Everyone needs more NERF darts. Everyone needs more NERF darts, so we wanted to make sure you get as many as you need. 12, 30, 75, or 3000. The choice is yours. $6.99 - $799.99

	As new 790 page 'Sams Teach Yourself Windows VISTA All in One' is an easy to understand guide for those who would rather read a book than search On Line for answers to demystify Windows VISTA ! Well set out to assist in searching the usual areas and includes hints and tips for VISTA users. A great book to help you get the most out of VISTA........Only $10
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$5,500 offer expires 11th May Residential block in the picturesque town of Waratah, north-west Tasmania. Located in easy reach of Burnie, Wynyard and Cradle Mountain, this quiet rural setting is a mecca for tourists. Close to Mount Bischoff tin mine, Tarkine Reserve and the Waratah Waterfall. A snowy wonderland in winter! Currently, the cheapest available block advertised in Tasmania. Get in quick! Own your very own piece of Australia and never worry about a mortgage!! Area: 228 ...

Waratah Waratah Area $5,500.00

	HAD TO PUT CAR, TO FILL IN LOL. Fully adjustable drift wing, heavy duty aluminium. For the drift machine or boys toy, off car, ready to go. can fit wagon, van or car LOL even your boat TURNERS BEACH PH 041732XXXX
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[This Elder Scrolls Online post/travel brochure brought to you by Got Your Soul Industries, a subsidiary of Molag Bal, the daedric trickster god.]

COME TO PLEASANTLY BREEZY COLDHARBOUR. Bring your kids! Bring your significant other! Bring your brittle, tenuously tethered soul… wimsuit! Bring your swimsuit. Yes. You thought Skyrim was Tamriel’s number one destination for snow-coated outdoor fun? YOU THOUGHT WRONG AND YOUR LIFE IS FORFEIT. Um, we mean, clearly you haven’t traveled to other planes of existence. You should be more adventurous. Plus, for you native Morrowindians, our trees are all snaky and weird, and you’re in no very little danger of being shouted off a cliff by some crazed dragon hunter. So come join us in Coldharbour, whether you want to ski, snowboard, or have front row seats for the coming End Of Days. We promise, we don’t bite. (Disclaimer: except for Xzanlthor’phlaranx, Dreugh lord of a thousand pointy mouths. He has been known to bite occasionally.)

(more…)

Just in case you've been wishing for an espresso machine that's shaped like a car engine, we bring you the Espresso Veloce V12 Machine ($TBA). Limited to just 500 pieces,...

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For those of you that aren't down with Roman numerals, LXV stands for 65. As in, 65 years of Land Rover. In celebration of this milestone, the venerable 4x4 maker...

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After a tough day of cooking in the lab, it’s time for a nice relaxing bath. Use these Bathing Bad Bath Salts. These bath salts are carefully crafted from all-natural ingredients. Now you can enjoy a relaxing and rejuvenating bath time experience inspired by the hit TV show. This bath salt is much purer than [...]

http://www.paleisthenewtan.com/2010/05/battlefield-earth-barbie.html
http://www.paleisthenewtan.com/2010/09/battlefield-earth-barbie-makes-her.html

Thanks to theDirty.com for the pix.

via afternoonsnoozebutton.com

Previously

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I wonder if the dragging tail helps to stabilize it?

via afternoonsnoozebutton.com

	Elephant animal onesie Brand new never been worn Size~medium Colour~blue No returns, pickup only
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	Male companion aged 18-30years old, wanted for friendship/relationship. If interested contact me via text; 043779XXXX
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Via

[Original article by Terrence Lee]

Finding game sales data is notoriously hard. Video games have traditionally been a "hits driven" industry – the majority of revenue for a publisher comes from a handful of big commercial successes. With so many non-hits being made, publishers try to keep sales numbers a trade secret, as the more disappointing figures can be worrisome to investors. This trend has made discussing sales figures an uncomfortable topic, akin to talking about your salary.

 When we first started working on Dustforce, it was frustrating to not be able to find much data about whether indie game development is a realistic thing to do with your life. The closest thing out there were unofficial sources, like VGChartz, that gathered retail information, but lacked in digital sales data. Fortunately, independent developers don't have the same financial obligations that publishers do. There was a series of helpful articles [parts 1, 2, 3] by David Galindo that talked about the financial details of his game, The Oil Blue. It was just one data point, but a valuable one. Now that we've finished our own first project, we'd like to contribute our own data about Dustforce to the growing trend of transparency in indie game development.

Beginnings

Dustforce started out as the project of the first half of Hitbox Team, Lexie and Woodley. They built the Dustforce prototype during the summer of 2010, motivated by the deadline of a game contest. For four months, they worked in an outdoor shed, living on cheap frozen foods and bulk soft drinks. Lexie worked at a second job during the day, and joined Woodley at night to build their prototype. They finished the game by August, in time for the contest deadline.

In the few days after the prototype was posted online, an article on IndieGames.com drew some positive attention. Woodley and Lexie received an email from Valve, inviting them to put Dustforce onto Steam. This was the motivation they needed to work on Dustforce full time, to turn it from a prototype into a full game. It wouldn't be an easy task – the prototype was far from the final vision, and would take more than just two people to finish the game.

It would take at least a year to do it, and of course it costs money to live during that time. Where would that money come from? Working a second job would cost precious time and energy, and borrowing money from a publisher or investor comes with obligations that can be creatively detrimental to the project. Fortunately, the answer came easily: the Dustforce prototype won the competition, and along with it, a $100,000 grand prize. 

The cost of development

$100,000 USD is a significant amount of money, but is it enough? Well, let's look at a detailed list of all the costs critical to developing an indie game:

• Food
• Water
• Shelter
• Internet

All you really need to make a game is a computer and basic living expenses. Time is money, as they say, and we needed roughly a year and a half to finish Dustforce. How much does a year cost? We were all living in different areas of the world at the time (Brisbane, Tokyo, New York, and Cincinnati) – on average, it would cost us around $20k per person per year to live frugally. A lot of the prize money went to paying existing bills, debts, and traveling expenses. Between three people (the fourth lived off his own savings), the remaining money would last about one and a half years. 
This was just enough time to finish the game, but it was cutting it a bit close - you don't want to finish the project with zero dollars in the bank. It can take up to 90 days to receive the first payment from sales, and of course it's possible that the game might not sell well at all, so it would be ideal to leave a few months of money in reserve.

People often ask: how much does it cost to make a game? Well, the answer is straightforward:

minimum cost to make a game = cost of living × time needed × team size

Bear in mind that we had no formal business structure, no salaries or benefits. We were just four kids who really wanted to make Dustforce, and were lucky enough to have enough cash to not worry about anything else for a year. Also, it's important to note that money is not sufficient to finish a game – there are intangible resources, like motivation and patience, which are just as consumable as cash.

Expectations and results

A year and a half has passed since development began. It is now January of 2012. How is progress on Dustforce going? A few months prior, we gave ourselves a hard deadline of January 17th. It would be too financially risky to work much longer past that date. In addition, motivation and patience are running low, after fifteen long months of hard work. Now, by some miracle, the game is ready to launch on Steam. With a nervous click of the mouse, we upload the final build and await the launch.

---

We had no idea what to expect. We could only speculate, using sparse data points and ballpark figures. Was the past year and a half worth it? Of course it was – we worked the hardest any of us have ever worked, and we created something we were truly proud of. Yet, there was a lingering uncertainty of financial expectations. Our goal was to just make enough money to be able to do it again. If we could work on our next project independently and without being restricted by a financial cut-off date, then we'd consider Dustforce a financial success. 
So if it cost us almost $100k to work for a year and a half, we'd have to make around $67k for every year until we release our next game. However, it would be nice to live a less frugal lifestyle than before, so ideally that figure would be around twice as much. With a rough estimate of three years for our next project, plus a bit of a buffer, we were looking at around $300-400k USD as our final goal. Was that realistic? We had no idea.

---

After a few hours of mashing the refresh button on the sales page, we were able to sleep knowing that sales were doing just fine: on the first day, we sold 4,796 copies - a revenue of $44,141. It was hard to extrapolate this into the long term – obviously we wouldn't be selling this many copies every day, but how long would the initial surge last? After around two months, the trajectory of sales took shape:

 

As expected, the sales declined steadily after the launch. The first three days of sales accounted for half of our cumulative revenue for the first three months of sales. By the end of the second month, we were selling around 30-50 copies per day. Our running total by then was around $243k. Remember, this is just the revenue. After deducting withholding taxes, Valve's cut, returns and fees, we're left with around 63% of that, so that figure is closer to $153k. With that taken into account, Dustforce was profitable (in that it made over the $100k put into it) by January 25, or 9 days after its launch. If you take into account personal income taxes (between 28-36%), then we were personally profitable by around a month after launch.

By the end of April, sales have tapered off into a trickle of a dozen or two sales a day. However, Dustforce was slated to be on a Steam Midweek Madness promotion, at 50% off for the first 3 days of May. At the same time, we finished porting the game to Mac, and also added in the custom level editor and server. Here's what happened:
 
 

Over the 3 days of the promotion, we sold 17,462 copies of the game, more than the amount we sold during the first 3 days of the January launch. Of course, at 50% off, the revenue was a bit less, but it was still an instant 37% boost in lifetime revenue. We were thrilled: it looked like we'd hit our financial goal pretty soon. As a side note, we thought that the huge increase in the player-base would help the long tail with more word-of-mouth sales, but it seemed to taper off back to their original rate within just a few days.

Humble Bundle

Soon after our January launch, we were contacted by the fine folks from the Humble Bundle. They were interested in putting Dustforce on a future bundle, as well as helping us port the game over to Linux. In mid September, the Humble Indie Bundle 6 was released, along with some other great games. Here's what happened:

(Note that for the number of Humble Bundle units sold, we just included the number of copies of Dustforce that were activated on Steam.) The Humble Bundle was a great success: we made roughly $153,915, and unlike the last promotion, we did notice an increase in Steam sales afterwards. With such a huge boost in the number of people playing Dustforce, the amount of daily sales jumped up from under a dozen to around 50 or 60 copies per day.

After the Humble Bundle, we also had three other promotions to end the year on: 50% off during the Thanksgiving sale, a daily deal, and the holiday sale. Although none of them were as dramatic as the previous events, they cumulatively had a big impact, netting $76k in the 45 days between the beginning of the Thanksgiving sale in November, to the end of the Christmas sale in January. This was over three times as much as the revenue in the 45 days prior to that.

Final numbers

The final figure for our income after exactly one year of sales is $489,404 USD (from a total of $668,490 in revenue). Of course, there are also costs to running the business: legal and accounting fees, software licenses, server costs, and some travelling expenses have added up over the past year to take a good $36k or so out of our total income. When you take that into account, along with personal income taxes, we are left with around $295k. In the end, this means that for every $10 copy of Dustforce sold, $4.41 of it ended up in our pockets. We then split this between the four of us.

Dustforce was our first finished game, and we went into it without much experience, especially in the business side of things. Through this project, we learned firsthand that time is money, and that sacrifices have to be made when resources are limited. We were also surprised by how critical promotions were for revenue. We are really grateful to have a strong start, and are very happy with how the game turned out.

We're putting all our earnings back into making our next game, Spire. By being able to remain financially independent, we can continue to develop the game as artists and not as businessmen. Like it was with Dustforce, it is of utmost importance that we make design decisions based solely on making the game better, not on making it sell more.

We are all humbled and elated by how well Dustforce has been received. The joy from our players is enough to keep us making games – the financial success is just an incidental blessing.

---

Update: We've been asked a few questions since posting this article. Here are some answers to the most common ones.

How did you market the game?

Our friend Mary, from IndieViddy, helped us market Dustforce by sending review copies of the game to numerous reviewers and bloggers. She also created and sent out press releases, as well as helped make Youtube videos for us. Her help allowed us to focus purely on the game at a time when we were most busy.

Was it worth it? The numbers don't seem to translate into a very good salary.

Without a doubt, yes, it was worth it. It is true that the final earnings, spread out among four people to account for almost 2 years of development is not particularly impressive, considering that more money could have been made at normal jobs without taking the considerable risks that we took. However, it's important to note that the entire time we were doing what we loved, not for the goal of a monetary reward, but in order to make something beautiful come into existence.

It's not that money isn't important - instead, it was simply that the pleasure of making Dustforce was worth far more than the opportunity cost of working somewhere else. Instead of accumulating the means to an end, we just went straight for the end.

Lastly, our relative success of Dustforce was a fantastic foundation for us as a studio. We now have the financial means to work on our new project for a while; we also have a proven reputation and a community of challenge-loving players. It sets us up to really turn Spire into the best thing it can be. That's something worth more than just the money we made.

Right now, the maximum speed for a consumer connected to the fibre portion of National Broadband Network (NBN) is 100Mbps for downloads and 40Mbps for upload. NBN Co today announced that it will begin offering a series of products that run up to 10 times that speed later this year. Anyone for gigabit? More »
 

Chris Park has revealed that the next game from Arcen (AI War, A Valley Without Wind) will be called Skyward Collapse. So what is it? Well, “it’s a turn-based 4x simulation god-game.” He explains: “Set high in the sky atop a floating landmass that you are actively constructing as the game progresses, you oversee two warring factions (Greeks and Norse). Via solo play or co-op, you play as “The Creator,” helping both sides of the conflict — granting each side buildings, resources, and even new citizens.” It’s a game about balancing conflict, as Park writes: “your goal is to balance this conflict as best you can so that neither side gets wiped out. You win by having the most points generated (read: most carnage) without either side committing genocide.”

There’s a bunch more information through the link. They’re aiming for a beta this month, with the first version of the game appearing in May.

Hurricane. J’Adore. Couture. Excel. Burger. Google. Tron. Hippo. These are some of the baby names that were successfully registered in Australia in 2012. No really. Even more astoundingly, each name was registered more than once. Occasionally though, the Registry Of Births will refuse to register a name. Here are the rules you need to be aware of if you’re planning to saddle your offspring with a ridiculous moniker. More »
 

As above Scribblenauts Unlimited on PC, registers on Steam.

Have not played it on PC (yet) but it was great fun on the DS when it first came out.

You will need a valid US address on your account to purchase from Amazon.

Edit: the other deal of the week is American Pickers the game… for $4.99USD
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00A2XO4P2

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Very glad to hear this is actually in the works! Via Universe Today:

Rumors have been leaking out for over a week, but now according to Alan Boyle at NBC News’ Cosmic Log, a senior Obama administration official has confirmed that $100 million is being sought for NASA’s budget request for the coming fiscal year for work to allow a robotic spaceship to capture a small asteroid and park it near the Moon for astronauts to explore. The spacecraft would capture a 500-ton, 7- meter (25-foot) asteroid in 2019. Then using an Orion space capsule, a crew of about four astronauts would station-keep with the space rock in 2021 to allow for EVAs for exploration. This plan would accelerate NASA’s deep space missions with Orion and prepare crews for going to Mars.

NBC news quoted the official — who spoke on condition of anonymity because there was no authorization to discuss the plan publicly — as saying the mission would “accomplish the president’s challenge of sending humans to visit an asteroid by 2025 in a more cost-effective and potentially quicker time frame than under other scenarios.”

A week ago, Aviation Week reported that NASA was considering this asteroid mission, which was proposed by the Keck Institute for Space Studies last year. Keck’s proposal had a price tag of $2.6 billion, but no cost estimate for the space agency’s version has yet been released.

Then on April 5, the Associated Press quoted U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Florida, Nelson, chairman of the Senate science and space subcommittee, that President Obama is putting $100 million in planning money for the accelerated asteroid mission in the 2014 budget that comes out next week. The money would be used to find the right small asteroid.

“It really is a clever concept,” AP quoted Nelson said in a press conference in Orlando. “Go find your ideal candidate for an asteroid. Go get it robotically and bring it back.”

This would be the first time ever an object in space of this size would be manipulated in such a manner.