World Largest Reseller Of Virtual "Skins" Raises $40M With An ICO

ICO Investors are about to experience something that’s almost never happened in the brief history of the $3 billion market: An offering by a company with an actual product.

Bloomberg Businessweek has managed to find the one ICO being launched to solve the rare problem that could actually benefit from decentralized, monetized tokens. The company is called OPSkins, and it’s the largest skins site in the $50 billion market. The company has raised $41 million in an ICO it launched last month, and hopes to raise another $7 million before the sale ends on Nov. 28. For those readers who aren’t avid gamers, Bloomberg explains that a “skin” is a decoration for the virtual guns and knives found in video games like CounterStrike: Global Offensive. While the concept of building a company around these products might seem silly, some buyers will pay thousands of dollars for the rarest skins.

The two-year-old company has raised about $41 million by selling what it calls WAX tokens, a virtual currency that will become the default way to buy and sell skins on its intercompany skins exchange, the Worldwide Asset eXchange, which will allow buyers to connect to dozens of disparate marketplaces. The idea is to simplify purchases for gamers from different countries and give everyone a clearer sense of what a particular item is worth, using the same kind of digital-ledger system as the cryptocurrency bitcoin.

Previously, the market for these virtual items was highly fragmented, and wealthy buyers would often play intermediaries a premium to root out the best deals on their behalf.

The company bets that making its exchange accessible to rivals, who can then make a broader catalog available to customers, will expand its audience beyond the limitations of an individual website, says Chief Information Officer Malcolm CasSelle, who’s helping lead the WAX effort. In theory, there’s lots of room for new skins buyers, says Chris Grove, managing director at researcher Eilers & Krejcik Gaming LLC. About 200,000 new people buy virtual items through OPSkins each month, but the site sells gear for online games with more than 125 million regular players.

 

“This could be the perfect on-ramp,” says investor Scott Walker, who helped fund the “initial coin offering,” or ICO. Early investors are getting more WAX tokens for their money, but their value will become another variable once the exchange goes live in December.

 

OPSkins doesn’t disclose its financials, but its revenue is growing at double digits annually, says CasSelle, previously chief technology officer at Tronc Inc., the former Tribune Co. Partly, he says, the WAX token strategy is a way to stave off competitors. Over the past few months, rivals including DMarket, KyberNetwork, and SkinCoin have held ICOs to launch or expand their services. So far, though, no other trader has the muscle to create the kind of intercompany exchange OPSkins is building. Starting next year, websites that install the WAX widget will get as-yet-undetermined fees for resulting sales.

However, before you rush out and buy WAX tokens purely for the sake of speculating, It’s worth considering the fact that OPSkins entire business is essentially at the mercy of the giant video game studio that produces many of the games whose wares Skins sells on the secondary market.

The volatility of the WAX token price may make it a poor place to hold money not being used for short-term item buying and selling. But OPSkins’ biggest potential roadblock is the maker of the games. Industry leader Valve Corp., which publishes Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and the other big hits OPSkins exploits, has the power to ban sites from trading skins. Last year, Valve sent cease-and-desist letters to 23 online gambling sites to prevent them from using skins as collateral, a move aimed at reducing teenage gambling on professional video game matches. “Valve has certainly left the door open to an action in the future,” says Grove, the Eilers researcher.

However, the company’s technology chief says it doesn’t need Valve Corp.’s cooperation to build a successful business.

CasSelle says that the new exchange can work without Valve’s help, including as a way to acquire other virtual goods, and that OPSkins is looking to raise an additional $7 million in WAX tokens before it finishes its ICO on Nov. 28. (The company initially sought a total of $63 million but lowered that goal because the flurry of interest around bitcoin and its spiking value has diverted attention from ICOs.) Alexander, the personal shopper for virtual goods, says he thinks the exchange will be good for people like him in the short term, swelling the overall market for skins. “It makes the entire process effortless,” he says. “It is a massive pain dealing with the payment methods available at the moment.” But he’s hedging his bets, having returned to college to finish his degree in economics. He says he eventually wants to get a job in finance or start his own business.

OPSkins doesn’t disclose its financials, but its chief technology officer - who was previously the CTO at Tronc Inc. - explained that the WAX token strategy is a way to stave off competitors. Over the past few months, some of OPSkins rivals, including DMarket, KyberNetwork, and SkinCoin have held ICOs to launch or expand their services. So far, though, no other company has the muscle to create the kind of intercompany exchange OPSkins is building.

If it succeeds in being the first platform to capture a dedicated customer base, maybe - just maybe - the WAX token might have a future.

Unfortunately for investors, most of the other 799 tokens trading on one of hundreds of exchanges scattered across the Earth, probably won’t.
 

Yale Students Love The Idea Of Outlawing Halloween

Authored by Cabot Philips via CampusReform.org,

This year at Campus Reform, we’ve reported extensively how college students around the country have increasingly taken offense to Halloween celebrations, often accusing various costumes of being offensive and declaring students who wear them guilty of “cultural appropriation.”

At campuses around America, students have been discouraged from wearing sombreros, ninja outfits, Native American headdresses, or any other costume which assumes a culture one does not represent.

One prominent example of this trend came last year at Yale University, where students famously protested a professor who simply advised students to wear whatever Halloween costume they deemed appropriate.

Students at Yale and elsewhere have made it clear: they want their schools to take preemptive measures to prevent the wearing of Halloween costumes which could offend.

But would they be willing to support a more extreme measure in the hopes of limiting hurt feelings this Halloween season?

Campus Reform visited Yale with a petition to outlaw Halloween on the New Haven, Connecticut campus.

Posing as a member of the fictitious “Yale Students for An Inclusive Fall Season,” I attempted to garner support for my cause.

I had no idea how easy it would be.

After explaining that my goal was to create a more inclusive campus and limit the number of students made uncomfortable by costumes each year, I received signature after signature.

What was their rationale for signing the outrageous petition? Watch the full video to find out.

Christianity And The Arts

Image source: Pixabay.com

The only artist who is perfect in all forms of creativity . . . is of course God—the God who is Personal.

—Edith Schaeffer, Hidden Art (1971)

 

Come with me to the Alps and look at the snow-covered mountains.

There can be no question. God is interested in beauty.

 —Francis A. Schaeffer, Art and the Bible (1973)

The God of Creation

The Bible has a lot to say, both directly and indirectly, about God’s love for beauty.  Even a quick reading of Genesis 1 demonstrates the marvelous wisdom and power of God in creation.  We see light spring out of darkness, vast reservoirs of water lifted into the heavens, massive landforms rise out of the sea.  We see trees and grasses spring instantly from the earth to bud, blossom, and bear fruit in a day.  We see the sun rise over the horizon for the first time, and the moon climb through the night sky pacing the sun.

We see stars set into constellations and galaxies.  We see multi-hued fish and fowl swarm to fill the seas and skies.  We see great dragons navigate the deep.  We see beasts, cattle, and creeping things prowl and crawl and cavort through the meadows, fields, and rain forests of the new Earth.  And, of course, we also see the first man and woman, unstained by the Fall, lift their eyes to heaven to hear the voice of God.  The whole thing must have been staggering to behold. And it’s right here at this point that adjectives can’t live up to what they’re describing.  In fact, philosophers of aesthetics could write long volumes simply on this first chapter of Genesis alone.

But behind Genesis 1, hidden in eternity, is the beauty and majesty of the Triune God Himself … Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  It’s important to know that this God is simple in His essence.  He’s doesn’t have “parts or pieces.”  He isn’t partly this and partly that.  He isn’t mostly this but a little bit of that.  God’s essence is identical with His attributes.  He is both truth and light.  He is also beauty, glory, and joy.

Put God Back Into History And Teach Your Kids What They Won’t Learn Anywhere Else!

But here’s the interesting thing:

This one, simple God exists eternally as three distinct Persons.  From eternity, the Father begets the Son who then speaks the divine Word.  From eternity, the Son is the Father’s only Begotten.  This divine Logos is the brightness of the Father’s glory.

Implications

Image source: Pixabay.com

From this brief summary of Trinitarian theology, we can make some basic observations about the ontological foundations of the arts.  First, God is coherent and rational.  He is light, “and in him is no darkness at all” (1 Jn. 1:5).  There are no dark corners in His being.  He isn’t evolving or on His way to becoming anything new.  He isn’t in process of being.  In fact, there is no room in His mind for surprises.  His attributes aren’t in competition.  This all-wise and perfectly rational God is … at the same time and to the same degree … Joy, Beauty, and Delight.

Second, it is the nature of this God to reveal Himself.  He expresses Himself both by Word and Spirit (He breathes life).  God delights in this self-revelation and self-communication.  He joys in shared beauty, glory, and truth.

We should then expect that this God would pour out His beauty and glory onto and into anything and anywhere He decides.  We should expect then, that His creation would both reflect and declare His glory.  We also should expect that His spoken and written Word would abound in beauty, wisdom, simplicity, and majesty.

Third, God is Trinity.  He is true diversity in perfect unity.  In God, unity and diversity are equally ultimate.  The universals don’t swallow up the particulars.  The particulars don’t destroy the universals.  God’s nature is harmony, balance, perfect integration, complexity, simplicity, true community, and true individuality.

This is the God who chose to create the earth and more.  The God who made the world, the God who speaks both beautifully and powerfully in His Word.  We should expect God’s Word and God’s created world to be characterized by the same attributes.

It’s A History Must-Have For Homeschool Families

It is no wonder, then, that when we open Scripture, we find that God speaks of Himself as a working Artisan or Artist.  Get this:  He’s a singer (Zeph. 3:17), a potter (Isa. 64:8), a gardener (Isa. 5:1-2), an engraver (Zech. 3:9), a jeweler (Isa. 54:11), an architect and builder (Heb. 11:10), and even a metal worker (Mal. 3:3).

God also speaks of Himself as a work of art:  “In that day shall the LORD of hosts be for a crown of glory, and for a diadem of beauty, unto the residue of his people” (Isa. 28:5).  And, of course, in the first lines of Scripture, we read, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Gen. 1:1).  God is the Artist who makes all things from nothing and who made no two things exactly alike.  Literally everything God has made … speaks of His glory and power (Ps. 19).

Conclusion

Before Scripture ever says in so many words that God is Spirit, it shows us in great detail that God is Creator.  From the very first chapter, Scripture is antithetically “at odds” with any Gnostic, Platonic or Neo-Platonic view of creation or of art.  God made the world in all its wonder, beauty, intricacy, mystery, strangeness, and glory.  In all these dimensions, creation declares God as He truly is.  God made man in His very image.  He also made man to know Him, to commune with Him and to live and work in His world.  My guess is that this is the perfect place to begin any discussion of Christianity and the arts.

For Further Reading:

Herman Bavinck, The Doctrine of God (Edinburgh:  The Banner of Truth Trust, 1977).

Edith Schaeffer, Hidden Art (Wheaton, IL:  Tyndale House Publishers, 1971).

Francis Schaeffer, Art and the Bible (Downers Grove, IL:  InterVarsity Press, 2006).

Gene Edward Veith, State of the Arts, From Bezalel to Mapplethorpe (Wheaton, IL:  Crossway Books, 1991).

H.R. Rookmaker, Art Needs No Justification (Downers Grove, IL:  InterVarsity Press, 1979).

Leland Ryken, The Christian Imagination (Grand Rapids:  Baker Book House, 1981).

Leland Ryken, The Liberated Imagination, Thinking Christianly About the Arts (Wheaton, IL:  Harold Shaw Publishers, 1989).

'Narratives' Are Not 'Truths'

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

The polity is a social organism, of course, meaning that it adds up to more than the sum of its parts, a body of politics, if you will, just as each of us adds up to more than just our bodies. It’s alive as we are alive. We have needs. We have intentions in the service of those needs. Those intentions animate us and turn us in one direction or another to stay alive, and even more than that, to thrive.

The American polity is not thriving. It has been incrementally failing to meet its needs for quite a while now, playing games with itself to pretend that it is okay while its institutional organs and economic operations decay. It turns this way and that way ever more desperately, over-steering like a drunk on the highway. It is drunk on the untruths it tells itself in the service of playing games to avoid meeting its real needs. Narratives are not truths.

Here is a primary question we might ask ourselves: do we want to live in a healthy society? Do we want to thrive? If so, what are the narratives standing in the way of turning us in the direction?

Let’s start with health care, so called, since the failure to do anything about the current disastrous system is so fresh. What’s the narrative there? That “providers” (doctors and hospitals) can team up with banking operations called “insurance companies” to fairly allocate “services” to the broad population with a little help from the government. No, that’s actually not how it works. The three “players” actually engage in a massive racketeering matrix — that is, they extract enormous sums of money dishonestly from the public they pretend to serve and they do it twice: once by extortionary fees and again by taxes paid to subsidize mitigating the effects of the racketeering.

The public has its own narrative, which is that there is no connection between their medical problems and the way they live. The fact is that they eat too much poisonous food because it’s tasty and fun, and they do that because the habits-of-life that they have complicitly allowed to ev0lve in this country offers them paltry rewards otherwise. They dwell in ugly, punishing surroundings, spend too much time and waste too much money driving cars around it in isolation, and have gone along with every effort to dismantle the armatures of common social exchange that afford what might be called a human dimension of everyday living.

So, the medical racket ends up being nearly 20 percent of the economy, while the public gets fatter, sicker, and more anxiously depressed. And there is no sign that we want to disrupt the narratives.

A related narrative: the US economy is “recovering” - supposedly from a mysterious speed-bump that made it swerve off the road in 2008. No, that’s not it. The US economy has entered a permanent state of contraction because we can’t afford the fossil fuel energy it takes to continue expanding our techno-industrial activities (and there are no plausible adequate substitutes for the fossil fuels). We tried to cover up this state of affairs by borrowing money from the future, issuing bonds to “create money,” and now we’ve reached the end of that racket because it’s clear we can’t pay back the old bonded debt and have no prospect for “making good” on issuing new bonded debt. Recently, we have been issuing new debt mainly to pay back the old, and any twelve-year-old can see where that leads.

Reality wants us to manage the contraction of that failing economy, and because that is difficult and requires changing familiar, comfortable arrangements, we just pretend that we can keep expanding the old system. Of course, all the work-arounds and games only increase the fragility of the system and set us up for a kind of sudden failure that could literally destroy civilized society.

Another popular narrative of the moment - a dominant preoccupation among the “educated” elites these days - is that we can change human nature, especially human sexuality and all the social behaviors that derive from mammals existing in two sexes. This set of narratives is deeply entwined with fashion and status-seeking, with the greatest status currently being conferred upon those opting out from being either one sex or the other, along with the biological imperatives associated with one or the other. This has been identified by the essayist Hugo Salinas Price as an updated form of Gnosticism and is now the official reigning ideology of the college campuses. Some call it “cultural Marxism,” but it is really a form of religion. It offers colorful distraction from the more difficult adult tasks of managing contraction and rebuilding the political economy with its social armatures.

So, these conditions might prompt us to ask the more general question: how much longer do we, as a polity, want to pretend that narratives are the same as the truth? As I’ve averred previously, I think reality itself has to force the issue by delivering circumstances so compelling that it is no longer possible to keep telling yourself the same old stories. And that reckoning is not far off.

'Killfie' Nation - India Dominates World's Selfie-Related Deaths

The trend of taking death-defying "killfies" is taking its toll in a Darwinian sense... on India!

The rise of smartphones and social media has paved the way for selfies to become a popular pastime for young people around the world, but as Statista"s Felix Richter notes, sometimes people hunting for the perfect self-portrait get carried away though and put themselves and sometimes others in harm’s way. Tragic as it is, researchers from the United States and India have found that taking selfies in dangerous situations cost at least 127 lives since March 2014.

The researchers scoured the web for news articles reporting selfie-related deaths in an effort to raise awareness and help prevent further injuries or deaths as a consequence of reckless selfie-taking. Ridiculous as it may sound, there are many ways to harm yourself while taking a selfie. The cases found by the researchers include several people falling from great heights, drowning or accidently shooting themselves while taking a selfie with a gun.

Photographers appear to be particularly careless in India where the researchers found the most reports of selfie-related accidents by far.

You will find more statistics at Statista

Shia LaBeouf Anti-Trump Rally Shut Down After Becoming A "Flashpoint For Violence"

After standing in front of a live stream camera for weeks shouting "He Will Not Divide Us", an apparent "art project", an increasingly mentally unstable Shia LaBeouf has finally been forced to move on with his life after the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens pulled the plug saying the site had become a "flashpoint for violence."

Apparently the museum was able to do something that Trump never could, namely "Divide Them."

#HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS pic.twitter.com/NMarcz85NB

— Shia LaBeouf (@thecampaignbook) February 10, 2017

Going live on January 20, 2017, the day of President Trump"s inauguration, the live stream was supposed to keep running for as long as Trump held the White House but unfortunately, at least for the mental health of the the 30-year-old Hollywood snowflake of Transformers fame, it was shut down after just three weeks.

As we noted a couple of weeks ago, the first instance of violence occurred on January 25th and resulted in LaBeouf getting hauled away by cops after allegedly assaulting another protester.

Oh hell no. They arrested Comrade Shia LaBeouf. I"m pissed. #FreeShia pic.twitter.com/V9MOWrNTA5

— TayGo (@taygogo) January 26, 2017

According to the DailyMail, LaBeouf attacked another protester for shouting something into a live camera feed that he didn"t like. 

Police say LaBeouf pulled the scarf of an unidentified 25-year-old man this morning, scratching his face in the process.

Police say he also pushed the man, who refused medical attention.

According to local reports, the protester had said something to the camera LaBeouf did not agree with.

This video allegedly shows part of the assault:

Meanwhile, here is a glorious montage of Shia seemingly going completely insane while repeatedly physically and sexually assaulting a number of other people on his live stream.

Per RT, the museum issued the following statement after pulling the plug on Shia"s pet art project:

“We are proud to have launched this engaging and thought-provoking digital art installation which was experienced by millions of online viewers worldwide,” the museum said.

“Until public safety concerns overrode the intent of the installation, HEWILLNOTDIVIDE.US generated an important conversation allowing interaction among people from many backgrounds and with different viewpoints,” it continued.

“However, ending our engagement with the installation is the most prudent path forward to restore public safety to the Museum, its visitors, staff and the community."

With that, we say so long for now, dear Shia, but we eagerly await your next nervous breakdown. 

Tonight's Forecast Inside the Golden Globes: Lots of Snow with a Chance of Trump Tears

The entire star-studded audience at the Golden Globes practically cried in unison, after Meryl Streep took to the mic to lament over an incident that happened last year regarding what she thought was Donald Trump mocking a disabled reporter.
 
The rift was with NY Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, who said Trump was lying about witnessing Muslims celebrating in New Jersey after 9/11 -- which later proved out to be true. Without delving into old news, Trump said he wasn"t making fun of Serge"s physical disabilities, but instead mocking a reporter who was flustered.
 

I have no idea who this reporter, Serge Kovalski [sic], is, what he looks like or his level of intelligence. I don’t know if he is J.J. Watt or Muhammad Ali in his prime or somebody of less athletic or physical ability. Despite having one of the all-time great memories, I certainly do not remember him.
 
I merely mimicked what I thought would be a flustered reporter trying to get out of a statement he made long ago. If Mr. Kovaleski is handicapped, I would not know because I do not know what he looks like. If I did know, I would definitely not say anything about his appearance.

 
In light of all the horseshit taking place in the world, the fact that the United States is engaged in armed conflicts in 8 different countries and is led by a man who has literally destroyed the middle east, relations with Russia, and has divided this country along matters of race, gender and orientation more than any person in the history of the country, as well as compiling more debt than all of the previous Presidents combined, Meryl Streep decided that Trump mocking a reporter was the most important thing to talk about during her 5 minute speech at the Golden Globes tonight.
 

 
Once icy cold, floating through the air with glee, the snow flakes have hit the ground now and have melted.

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