Lelling

Some of the stuff we know so far about 2020: It will be on May 16 2020, in the Rotterdam Ahoy arena. Semifinals are May 12 and 14. The beloved Jon Ola Sand will be stepping down as Executive Supervisor after 2020, ending the 10 year sandy era. There's no word on who might replace him. A bunch of song / artist announcement dates have already gone up - earliest song announcement date so far is Albania with December 2019 Belgium is the first country to select and announce their artist - Hooverphonic! They selected them internally (i.e., without a public voting selection). Their song will be announced in February. A little fun fact about the Belgian selection, which is somewhat unique at Eurovision. Belgium is represented by two national broadcasters - Flemish VRT, and French-speaking RTBF. and they alternate which broadcaster sends the representative. Hooverphonic is being sent by the Flemish broadcaster. Imo this is something that the UK might want to consider, since various Scottish and Welsh national broadcasters have expressed interest in participating, and the BBC's own entries have very much circled the proverbial drain in terms of scores for the last 20 years ?

So anyone who's spoken with me for more than half a second knows that I am unironically a huge fan of the Eurovision Song Contest ? I like what it represents, I like the drama and shenanigans, I like the event that it is, with millions of people having memories of watching it with friends or family, people all over Europe coming together for this one event that we can all talk about, and, importantly, I also like a lot of the songs! While Eurovision 2020 is still more than half a year away, what Eurovision fans term "Eurovision season" is already on ?! Pretty much the only first rule for Eurovision song entries is that they must be original pieces of music that have not been released or performed before September of the year preceding the event, and we'll soon be seeing the first national selections happen! I tend to follow this stuff and there's always something interesting, or at the very least, silly to share with people so I figured I might as well start a thread about this ?

Hexagons are my favorite shape, and I decided I'd make a town based on them in Cities: Skylines! I spend a while figuring out exactly how to do it, but then I just decided to start making roads of equal length with 120° angles, and voila, hexagons! Although there does seem to be a tiny margin of error, despite the angle text saying 120°, which results in some occasional discrepancies, but nothing too major ? It's not the clearest screenshot but I might get some more down the line ? I started with the little district on the right, and the industrial section on the left, and then expanded when the demand for homes increased! This map has no rivers, so unfortunately I had to sacrifice one of the lakes to pump sewage into it, but cleaning it will be a priority later ? Right now I'm planning to make the middle bit in between the three sections into a giant nature reserve, which I think will make it look really nice! Then, the next thing I'll be looking into is expanding the city with some high density living spaces, for which I might use slightly bigger hexagons, but I'm not really sure how exactly I'm going to be pulling that off. These hexagons, although quaint, do have the problem that they're too small for certain more important buildings.

Hey everyone! A while back we asked people what kind of stuff they'd like to see as supporter shinies, and by far the most requested thing was mouse mats! Well, after some iteration, they're finally here, and with them, the new supporter tier! We also updated our donate page with new goals to make it easier for members to direct their donations and see their impact! Glorious Supporter Adding to the progression from Heroic, you can now become a Glorious Supporter! The new rank comes with all all new website & Teamspeak badges, as well a mouse mat, which can be shipped anywhere in the world! Your supporter rank progresses by donating to OpenCommunity or any of our sponsored charity events, and any donation you make adds up in the set, for as long as the set is active! This means members who can only donate smaller amounts, will still be able to unlock higher tiers over time! For more details on the supporter rank, check out our Donate page! OC Mouse Mat Behold, the OpenCommunity mouse mat! The mouse mats come in two different options - with border and without. The top is a fine smooth cloth, and the bottom is a soft flexible rubber. The picture features 36 Bibi icons of members of our community, drawn by @Atila! You can click here to see a more detailed close up. I never used mouse mats before because I just didn't like them, but I'm definitely keeping one of these for myself! I like the stitched border myself, as it protects the edge from fraying, and doesn't feel hard enough to bother me, but some members said they preferred it without the border so we're giving people the option for either! Once you've unlocked the Glorious Supporter rank, you'll be able to choose your preference from the Package Tracker! Donation Goals Recently, we've also slightly updated our donate page by adding donation goals! These goals allow members to direct their donation towards a particular goal, and help us illustrate more clearly how much money is needed to keep the community running. You can see these goals on our Donate page. When donating, simply select the goal from a dropdown to direct your donation towards that goal. You can also donate to "OpenCommunity General", which will cover various costs not included in goals, such as shipping out supporter rewards to our members, or be kept as a rainy day fund in case any goals are not met in future. Thank you so much for over 4 years of standing behind OpenCommunity! We couldn't get here without your amazing support!

A quick follow-up: Anyone who helped us order the Pink Day pins & magnets will be receiving a handful of them, and the rest will be sent to Barbie at GGB so she can distribute them on her own. Any in-game donations that we've received will also be forwarded to GGB for Pink Day.

Hi everyone! @Viridian and I have been thinking about our announcement blog, and we've decided on some changes to the way we'd like to make announcements. In the past, we've always put a lot of effort into wording our announcements in just the right way to both interest as many people as possible, as well as create a narrative of hype and excitement. We've always felt our members were a bit apathetic and constantly being on the receiving end of abuse or criticism from people who misunderstood announcements, we would put in hours and hours into writing announcements, going back and forth with multiple drafts, making sure the wording couldn't be misconstrued or used against us. Ultimately, this took a lot of our time and meant that announcements would take days or weeks to finish, since we wouldn't always have the time, or the right mindset, to constantly correct ourselves over minute details of how a sentence is constructed. As a result, not only were those announcements late, but these days, I also always dread "oh no, we'll have to make an announcement about Pink Day", and I usually write announcements way later than I wanted to, just because it's something that feels like such a big task. And we just don't want to do that anymore. We feel that we should be able to put out our thoughts and announcements easily without having to spend hours thinking "How will people turn this around to make us look like bad guys?" We want to feel comfortable in just writing and posting announcements, and speak and be treated like human beings, rather than the staff of a faceless organisation. This will also be better for the community, since we'll hopefully be able to put out more (but much shorter) announcements, more thoughts, share more about what's going on and our thoughts about things, as we don't have to spend hours and hours formalizing them, meaning everyone will be in the loop a lot more. We can post about works in progress more easily, as well as detail small changes as they happen, rather than wait for big announcements. As a side effect, you'll also be seeing a lot more 1st person singular rather than plural ? Our philosophy about that in the past was guided by the fact that using "we" instead of "I" and "us" instead of "you", as with commanding, is more inclusive and makes it less likely that people will feel excluded, and puts the focus on the group, rather than the individual speaking. However, in some contexts, this had the effect of alienating people since the language used feels more corporate. Future announcements and blog posts will thus be shorter, less rigidly structured, more informal, and hopefully more frequent.

September & October is Pink Day Season as Pink Day in LA preparation, pre-events and main event are happening, with several weeks of events, tons of prizes and opportunities to win shiny stuff and / or get involved and help out! ? Pink Day in LA is the annual cancer research fundraiser that we've participated in every year since OpenCommunity's inception, actively organising one megaserver and pre-events since 2015! This year, we are also getting involved, with the first pre-events starting in September, and then we will have pre-events happening every single week until Pink Day in LA finally happens on October 19th! Quaggan Waddle - September 21st, 16:00 CEST Quaggan Waddle is the journey of pink quaggans through Tyria, as we try to spread the word about the Pink Day event and let people know how and where to get involved! We'll be starting in one corner of Central Tyria and waddling our butts to the opposite, while having fun, chatting and hanging out on Teamspeak! You don't need anything specific to join, just hop onto Teamspeak and join us in the Quaggan Waddle channel to get involved! Volunteer Meeting - September 28th, 19:00 CEST We'll be having an open Pink Day volunteer meeting that everyone is invited to on September 28th at 19:00 CEST, on Teamspeak at solts.org (password: franticzebra). Hope to see you there! If you can't make the meeting, just private message me on discord and we'll get you set up. More info at the bottom of this post under "Get Involved"! Fashion Wars - Saturdays & Sundays, Sep 29-Oct 13 Fashion Wars is a 5-part event, made up of 5 separate events, where each time, members of a specific race compete in a themed fashion contest, revealing a racial category winner, and after the event, the overall winner will also receive an additional mega prize! Join us every Saturday & Sunday from September 29th to October 13th with a member of a different race! More details to follow pending an official announcement from Gamers Giving Back! Mini Pre-Events - Extra Waddles, World Boss Runs In addition to the six pre-events above we're also hoping to do some other more spontaneous small and fun pre-events, to spread information about the event and possibly get some prizes. If you're interested in joining events like these, keep an eye out in-game, on teamspeak, or on the OC discord! Pink Day in LA 2019 - October 19th The main event is on October 19th, officially starting at 19:00 CEST, with the possibility of some pre-events earlier in the day, if we get volunteers interested in organising them! The event will last a couple hours, with tons of mini-events, legendary giveaways, and more! We've got some brand new event ideas planned out that we're really excited to try out, so we can't wait to see you guys there! More details to follow in early October pending official announcements from Gamers Giving Back! Get Involved! If you'd like to get involved, please contact me either here on the website or on Discord! There are many ways you can help or get involved, even if you can't make it to the volunteer meeting or even the main event on October 19th, so feel free to get in touch! You can also join the GGB discord or the OC discord to get in touch more easily!

OK so this is just a short little post, but I wanted to tease something that I'll be writing about in an upcoming announcement on the website ? So, ages ago we were talking about what we might want to do for the next supporter tier, and we had a couple ideas flying around. Scarves, pillowcases, OC-themed dice, even some other more mad ideas, but also mouse mats! I went to explore and look for a good place to find decent mouse mats, and I found a great place. When we were talking about the OC mousemat, we knew we wanted something simple. We don't really have any artists on hand so we can't afford to go all out with something wilder, so we thought what would work is a black / dark background, with the OC logo in the corner. Just something sleek and neat that people could use at home or in their office, without it being too distracting. So I got to work. The basic idea was something like this: A simple dark background, 1 accenting decal on the top side, and the OC logo in the corner. Then I was experimenting a bit with different backgrounds, I came up with this wave design but I didn't really know what would go with it. The squiggly line was just a placeholder for an actual decal, but I couldn't come up with something that wouldn't absolutely clash with the waves. The wave design is already so busy that the decal should be super simple, and after waffling about with various stuff for a while (that I wish I'd saved to show off now ? ) I just scrapped that idea and tried something else. I figured I would try to add a splash of color to the background and maybe play with irregular patterns a bit. I liked the concept, but not the execution, and felt it needed a little bit of polish. So I worked on another version of this and ended up with our final version: It's sleek, it has irregular patterns, the background has a decent splash of color while the front decal isn't too garish, and the logo is smaller and fits in better than in the above version. So, thinking I was done, I decided to sleep on it. ... ... And then the next day I just scrapped everything and tried something crazy So basically I think we're gonna scrap the above ideas and just go with that! ? OK that's it BYEEE

I've been looking at the responses, and taking into account that Saturdays often have to give way to things like meetings and special events, and my Fridays are already taken, I think the best time is going to be Wednesdays ^^ However, please note that just because I'm doing it on Wednesday, doesn't mean you can't do it on Fridays & Saturdays, there are clearly enough people who are interested in those two days, so if anyone wants to start their own game night, feel free to shout here ? So, if you're interested, join us on Wednesday at... shall we say.. 19:00 CEST, on Teamspeak! We'll be in a group channel somewhere ?