Supplementing Collectibles with Custom Lego Train Pieces imageLegos have been a renowned building-block toy for children since their debut in 1949. Produced by a Danish company, there have been more than 500 billion pieces sold since then. With tolerances in the...Read More about Supplementing Collectibles with Custom Lego Train PiecesEnglish-speaking users noticed that Google is testing a new interface of the search results page. The test version has affected the panel, which is located below the search box. Moreover, the gearwheel-like icon was replaced by the "Settings» button. Next to it you can find «Tools» icon. It is assumed that the in this way Google wants to encourage users to use the search settings bar more often. It should be recalled that last month the search engine tested another SERP interface. This version is distinguished by a large number of units, designed in the card style with and a number of other changes. Google has added a new setting into the My Business service.
Using the settings users can manage notifications for email and mobile devices. From now on you can modify the following notifications: - important account updates; - feedbacks from customers; - notifications about photos published by the clients; - notifications about new features and offers, which will help to attract more customers and others. More information about the innovation is available in the Help screen in Google My Business.This is attested by the RankRanger information. On November, 2 it was reported that Sitelinks ranked 32% of all search results, and on November, 5 it dropped down to 8.1%. Today, Novemberm 8, it went a little up again and was ranked at 8.5%. According to Barry Schwartz, the editor from Search Engine Roundtable, this innovation affected mainly small references that were previously placed in a row under the snippet. Massive navigation links remain without changes applied. It should be recalled that Google has disabled the URL downgrade rating feature used as a reference site.
Previously, it could help Search Console users to remove improper or incorrect links from the search results. It no longer has this kind of option. Projected number of e-mail users in the U.S. by 2019: 251.7 million. In the April 2015 survey by Manta of small business owners the respondents were most likely to see a return of less than $100 per month from social media marketing. Just 13.5% generated monthly social media ROI of more than $1,000. Fully 55% of small businesses updated social media business content monthly or less frequently, while just 15% did so daily and 30% weekly. This likely means the social followers theses small businesses have—who often demand real-time, or close to real-time, info—are seeing out-of-date content. This week, we’re taking a look at the episode of Batman: The Animated Series I’ve perhaps seen more than any other. After the release of Batman Forever in 1995, I was on a Riddler high. I was already a big Jim Carrey fan, and obviously I loved Batman, so this movie became the pinnacle of all things I enjoyed about everything.
(Fun fact: the Batman Forever soundtrack was the very first compact disc I ever owned. In late ’95, I was gifted a video cassette tape upon which were two B:TAS episodes featuring the green-clad quizzer, and the first episode on that tape was the character’s first appearance on the program, the 40th episode produced and the 41st aired, “If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?” It might be surprising to learn, given how popular the character was and continues to be, that the Riddler, a/k/a Edward Nygma, only appeared in three episodes of the whole 85 episode run of the series from 1992-1995. The Scarecrow, Mad Hatter, and even Killer Croc had more appearances. A lot of this had to do with the nature of the character. Every villain has some kind of clever evil scheme, but Riddler’s had to be the cleverest and most schemey. He’s a genius, after all, so the writers had to think like geniuses. That’s pretty difficult, all things considered. This is why people who can write good mystery stories, like an Agatha Christie, need special commendation for creating a huge puzzle that can logically be solved.
The writers of these episodes only had 21 1/2 minutes. Fittingly, the writer of the Riddler’s first episode is named David Wise. We begin in an unnamed city that isn’t Gotham at the offices of Competitron, a world-renowned computer game manufacturer that just hit the mother load with the release of the monster hit, Riddle of the Minotaur. Unfortunately, the game’s creator, Edward Nygma has just been fired by his greedy boss, Daniel Mockridge, for suing for part of the game’s profits. With an iron-clad contract signed, Nygma lacks any legal recourse, but that doesn’t stop him from plotting his revenge. Two years later, Mockridge is in Gotham pitching the sale of his company to Wayne Enterprises for lots of money, when he is suddenly taken aback and scared at the message scrolling on a marquee on the building across the street. On it is a riddle, “Why do multi-million dollar deals break down in the Wasteland?” Bruce Wayne returns to the Batcave to mull it over while Dick Grayson, home from college, plays Riddle of the Minotaur on the Batcomputer.
He tells Alfred all about the various pieces of the maze-and-puzzle game, including a griffin that blocks you from going back the way you came, and the Hand of Fate, which flies down and picks up the player if they mess up. Once Batman figures out that Mockridge owns a nightclub called The Wasteland, he and Robin go to investigate, just as Nygma, now calling himself “The Riddler,” is in the process of kidnapping his former boss. The ensuing skirmish with the Riddler’s goons leaves the club on fire and Robin trapped in a huge finger-puzzle thing. While driving back toward the city, the Dynamic Duo notices the city’s light’s flashing in Morse Code, a message that reads, “When is the Minotaur’s owner as high as an elephant’s eye?” Through a bit of simple deduction (High as an elephant’s eye = corn = maize = maze), they realize Riddler has taken Mockridge to the unopened Riddle of the Minotaur amusement park. This brings our heroes to the heavily-modified park (which, let’s be honest, would never have been built in the real world), and they have to suffer the Riddler’s tricks, including a griffin that shoots fire, puzzles that could result in death or dismemberment, and a Hand of Fate that really flies around and picks people up.
And that is to say nothing of the Minotaur’s riddle itself, which they’ll have to answer if they get to the center of the maze before Mockridge is impaled by the robotic mythical creature for which the game is named. I just love everything about this episode, and now as an adult I can see how clever writer David Wise was in his handling of the character of the Riddler and the puzzles he creates. He needed to make them complicated enough not to be obvious but simple enough for kids (again, the target audience for this program) to comprehend once explained, or even to figure out before Batman and Robin do. Robin wasn’t a regular fixture of the series until later in its run, but it’s telling that he’s present in all three Riddler appearances. This serves a very practical story purpose: Batman needs someone there with him to talk out the riddles so that we’re not just watching a person think silently for 20 minutes. It’s a similar situation to the companion’s role on Doctor Who.
The casting of John Glover as the Riddler is just another in the series’ long line of amazingly apt choices for their characters, compliments, of course, to voice director Andrea Romano. Glover gives Nygma the requisite confident pretension and overall pompousness that makes him certainly a more thinking villain. The way this version is written, and the way Glover plays him, is much different from the traditional way he’d been portrayed in previous iterations. The most famous to this point was Frank Gorshin’s in the 1960s series, in which he was a cackling and spastic figure, a performance for which Gorshin received an Emmy nomination, in fact. Carrey’s performance in Forever was along these same lines as well, meaning TAS‘s Riddler is truly unique in the character’s history, and perhaps the most interesting as a result. The Riddler would return only a week after his first appearance with an episode called “What is Reality?” but then not again until nearly two full calendar years later with “Riddler’s Reform,” which we’ll talk about in a few weeks here in this column.