REVEALED ON OCTOBER 27-28-29

Banners: Day 1 - Day 2 - Day 3
YouTube playlists of the reveal: Day 1 - Day 2 - Day 3
Hello popheads and time riders, and ようこそシチー・ポップ・レートへ!! (Translator's note: this means welcome to the rate) Me and my co-host, u/welcome2thejam, spent the last few months of our lives driving through the streets of Tokyo after midnight to bring you the best selection of city pop songs to rate, and we did not stop until we got enough! Put on your Walkmans and join us on this lovely trip as we delve further into the Japanese pop landscape of the 80s.

So what is this city pop you are talking about?

City pop is when you make pop music and it’s about city life.
Not satisfied? I guess you wouldn’t be. City pop in this context refers to a movement that started in mid-70s Japan, where a group of singer-songwriters and musicians (who were already Western inspired by this point) took interest in genres like jazz, soul, funk, disco, R&B, soft rock; there were also musicians inspired by samba, chanson and exotica. After synths became more popular in the 80s thanks to the pioneering efforts of Yellow Magic Orchestra, synthpop also became increasingly prominent in city pop songs. Different city pop artists were more interested in one particular genre rather than others, resulting in a fusion genre that is hard to define through its instrumentation or production techniques (hence why I prefer the term “movement” over “genre”). Closest comparison to city pop as a genre is boogie - some Japanese DJs in the 2000s even referred to songs we now call city pop as J-Boogie. But if city pop is not defined by its sonic identity, what is it defined by exactly? Well, let’s go back to point 1.
Now I’m not some delulu 15 year-old in YouTube comments writing a fanfic about my Japanese nightlife experience in the 1980s, so to better understand the city in city pop, I found an interview excerpt from someone who lived in that city! Here’s Toshiki Kadomatsu, a musician who worked with worldwide superstars such as Jackie Chan, describing the urban lifestyle of the times:

On the eve of the bubble, the Japanese people were becoming increasingly extravagant, and ordinary citizens were able to create lives of financial and spiritual freedom. In this environment, young people were building the kind of lifestyle where they could enjoy nightlife in the middle of the week and go surfing at Izu or Shounan in the off-season. Many people were starting to become aware of a two-parter lifestyle: the nighttime hustle-and-bustle of the city during the week, and the beach resort on the weekend. Everything felt full of energy and there was an atmosphere in which new things were always being made. City pop emerged in this stream, and the people who were listening were loving every minute.

This right here is an incredible summary that I could basically explain everything about city pop by expanding on his statements. First, he mentions a “bubble”, which refers to the economic bubble that marked the late-70s and 80s, the period where city pop was popular. The economic bubble resulted in the extravagant lifestyles Toshiki mentions, but it also led to a lot of technological advancements. Most important for our rate was a Japanese corp called Sony (you might’ve heard of them), who produced a lot of means to turn music listening into a “mobile” hobby from a stationary one: The Walkman came out in 1979 and was massively popular come mid-80s, and Sony was the major producer for cassette decks and car stereos; while also being one of the largest music publishers in Japan, becoming the largest record company going into the 1980s. City pop just kind of evolved into the music that would soundtrack your car trips and walks around the city. That also meant its target audience was people who could afford these gadgets (and a car, of course), which skewed towards an older demographic of urban professionals who achieved financial stability. Therefore, the music also aimed for a certain level of sophistication and classiness which could highlight the consumer’s own “refined taste”, so to speak.
Another thing Toshiki highlights is the two-parter lifestyle which led to the two modes of city pop: the nighttime and the seaside. Few would survive a drinking game where one takes a shot every time the song mentions “midnight” or “twilight”. Even fewer would survive a drinking game where one takes a shot every time you see the beach, a swimming pool and/or palm trees in a city pop album cover. The sonic catalog of city pop, whether it’s the nocturnal disco grooves of “Plastic Love”, the sophisti-pop of “Midnight Pretenders”, the synth funk of “Sparkle” or the jazz fusion of “Sexy Dance”; always fits in either of these modes, and is supported by the visual library of metropolitan imagery or the summery, tropical artworks courtesy of artists like Hiroshi Nagai (whose painting with the popheads color scheme you can see as the playlist cover). It is arguably the visual aesthetic, not the music itself, that made city pop stand out during its resurgence in the 2010s.

What resurgence? Why are we even rating these?

As popheads, we’re no strangers to 80s nostalgia. It was at the forefront of pop music in the new decade thanks to albums like Future Nostalgia and it was a foundational value of this community since Carly Rae Jepsen released E·MO·TION in 2015. And city pop carved its aesthetic in a corner of this nostalgia, as some songs like “Plastic Love” and “Stay With Me” became viral hits, and other songs like Mai Yamane’s “Tasogare”, Tatsuro Yamashita’s “Fragile” and Tomoko Aran’s “Midnight Pretenders” were sampled by Playboi Carti, Tyler, the Creator and The Weeknd respectively. Let’s rewind time a little bit to see where this all came from.
City pop faded out of public consciousness after the bubble crashed in 1989, leaving behind the even more Westernized J-pop and the even more retro Shibuya-kei. Many people consider Shibuya-kei the successor to city pop, although by the end of the 90s, the genre was marked by a psychedelic craze that sounds vastly different from its roots in bossa nova and lounge music. Some Japanese indie bands of the 2000s like Kirinji and Lamp sort of reversed this psychedelic phenomenon and aimed for a modern city pop sound. And Japanese DJ’s were also getting interested in city pop as part of their “crate digging” process to find obscure records and bring them to light via playing them at sets or sampling them in their own tracks (shout out to the amazing Sampler Oriented Debuts Rate over at hiphopheads if you want to see some crate digging in action).
Then the internet replaced the physical crate, and suddenly you could find obscure music and footage from anywhere in the world. The potential was limitless, and one of the first people to realize this was Daniel Lopatin, also known as his moniker Oneohtrix Point Never, who was creating audio-visual “albums” sampling and mixing music from 70s and 80s, and more interestingly; ripping off videos of Soviet-era TV programming and Japanese consumer electronics commercials from YouTube and editing them in Windows Movie Maker to create the visual aesthetic of his music. This would later become a genre called vaporwave, and OPN was not the last vaporwave artist to draw inspiration from Japanese visuals. Another example would be the cover art of Floral Shoppe by Macintosh Plus, which has Japanese text and a screenshot from a Fuji cassette commercial from the 80s on the album cover.
In fact, the Japanese influence on vaporwave eventually created its own subgenre, future funk. Future funk drew inspiration from the French house scene to create more upbeat music that was, unlike vaporwave, unironic and unapologetic in its nostalgic appreciation. Samples from city pop songs met modernized house beats. Future funk also utilized visuals from 80s anime like Urusei Yatsura, SDF Macross, City Driver, Kimagure Orange Road and the 90s classic Sailor Moon; likely introducing many Western anime fans to city pop. Future funk artists acted as the initial curators, pointing out the essentials to newcomers to the genre and shaping many YouTube playlists that spread around the internet. The prime example of this is the remix of Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plastic Love” made by South Korean DJ Night Tempo. Night Tempo himself described the remix as heavy, something that young people might enjoy in the vein of EDM but adults would find it crude. As someone who never had a future funk phase, I’m not a big fan of this remix (or the genre), but the fact that this remix eventually got the song popular is a correlation too big to ignore. An 8-minute version of the original Plastic Love (with an extended outro) was uploaded on YouTube in July 2017, forever associating the song and city pop with the single artwork of Mariya’s 1980 single “Sweetest Music”. And the rest is history.
Plastic Love was my gateway to city pop, and I am only one of millions of people who got interested in city pop through this song. Mariya Takeuchi even thanked Night Tempo for popularizing her song. City pop’s popularity only increased since then through YouTube and more recently TikTok, with most notably Stay With Me and some other songs like Taeko Onuki’s "4:00 AM" making their way around the app. Or has it? I have to admit, since The Weeknd’s “Out of Time” dropped in 2022 and probably introduced a bunch of new people to city pop, the discussion around it has grown stagnant, at least from my perspective. It feels like people who got into it when it was viral formed their own communities, and the onlookers moved on to new trends. Night Tempo even called the city pop trend over in overseas and while he’s no authority on this subject, there is also a noticeable shift to 90s music trends among our beloved flops this past year. PinkPantheress actually kinda took it to the mainstream level with Boy’s a liar pt. 2 and even our resident 80s revival queen can’t get enough of those sweet sweet breakbeats. Some terminally online people - like me - have already said that they feel the biggest song of this summer is an Eurodance parody (check out the very Timely! Eurodance Rate also). A part of me wishes that this rate could’ve happened in a more Timely! fashion, but I’m not too upset. We’re rating many songs that are celebrating their 40-year anniversary this year, and if discovering these tracks taught me anything, it’s that class does not age. I hope you all will discover some “new” gems from this rate like I did!

SONGLIST + Notes on Curation

My philosophy behind the curation was to feature multiple tracks by the artists who have become “faces” of city pop and include one song from artists who have a signature hit among the newfound city pop fanbase, as well as featuring some of my favorite city pop adjacent cuts. Some die hard fans of city pop might point out Seiko Matsuda (just an example) isn’t really “city pop” and she makes “idol kayo”, but we have one shot to cover this scene and I think showcasing variety is a good thing! I still tried to touch on every artist covered in citypop’s essentials list though. If your favorite city pop song is not in the tracklist, it is because I just don’t like you personally! At a runtime longer than 4 hours, this rate was unusually longer than average and it still was not enough to cover all the bases. That’s partly because the songs average around 5 minutes in length courtesy of the period, but it’s also just the sheer number of slays simply couldn’t fit in one rate! With that out of the way, here’s your tracklist!

1. Akiko Yano - Ramen tabetai
2. Akina Nakamori - Kazari Janai yo Namida wa
3. Anri - Cat's Eye (New Take)
4. Anri - Windy Summer
5. Anri - I Can't Stop The Loneliness
6. Anri - Shyness Boy
7. Anri - Remember Summer Days
8. Eiichi Ohtaki - Kimi wa Tennenshoku
9. EPO - Doyou no yoru wa Paradise
10. Hiromi Iwasaki - Street Dancer
11. Hiroshi Sato - Say Goodbye
12. Junko Ohashi - Telephone Number
13. Junko Yagami - Tasogare no Bay City
14. Kaoru Akimoto - Dress Down
15. Kingo Hamada - Machi no Dolphin
16. Mai Yamane - Tasogare
17. Makoto Matsushita - One Hot Love
18. Mari Iijima - Himitsu no Tobira
19. Mariya Takeuchi - September
20. Mariya Takeuchi - Morning Glory
21. Mariya Takeuchi - Yume no Tsuzuki
22. Masayoshi Takanaka - Sexy Dance
23. Meiko Nakahara - Fantasy
24. Miki Matsubara - It's So Creamy
25. Miki Matsubara - Cupid
26. Miki Matsubara - See-Saw Love
27. Minako Yoshida - Midnight Driver
28. Mioko Yamaguchi - Tokyo Lover
29. Momoko Kikuchi - Mystical Composer
30. Piper - Summer Breeze
31. Seiko Matsuda - Aoi Sangoshou
32. Sugiyama Kiyotaka & Omega Tribe - Never Ending Summer
33. Taeko Onuki - Summer Connection
34. Taeko Onuki - Tokai
35. Taeko Onuki - 4:00 AM
36. Taeko Onuki - Les Aventures de Tintin
37. Takako Mamiya - Love Trip
38. Takako Mamiya - Chinese Restaurant
39. Takako Mamiya - Mayonaka no Joke
40. Tatsuro Yamashita - Ride on Time
41. Tatsuro Yamashita - Sparkle
42. Tatsuro Yamashita - Christmas Eve
43. Tomoko Aran - Body to Body
44. Tomoko Aran - I'm In Love
45. Tomoko Aran - Midnight Pretenders
46. Tomoko Aran - Slow Nights
47. Toshiki Kadomatsu - If You…
48. Toshiki Kadomatsu - Airport Lady
49. Toshiki Kadomatsu - Step Into The Light ~ After 5 Clash
50. Yasuha - Friday Chinatown
51. Yellow Magic Orchestra - Kimi ni, Mune kyun.
52. Yumi Matsutoya - Shinju no Pierce
53. Yurie Kokubu - Just a Joke

tracks in bold are not on streaming, use the link provided or the YouTube playlist. Tatsuro songs are always on thin ice on YouTube, so feel free to DM me or my co-host if the links are dead, we’ll fix them
Additionally, since my assumption is that there are mostly totally new names singing in a foreign language; there’ll be additional write-ups where I cover each artist and song! You’ll be able to find the translations of the lyrics (for all the lyricheads out there) as well as some background information about the artist. Normally that kind of stuff goes into the main rate post, and my original plan was also writing about the “headliners” of the rate in this post, but I think this post is long enough as is. The write-up series will follow the ballot order most of the time, but tomorrow it starts with Anri and her five songs featured in the rate! I plan on posting the write-ups at the Daily Discussion post, but there’ll be a comment on this post that links to each day’s entry, so feel free to tune in whichever way is convenient.

Artist Writeups

Anri Akiko Yano & Akina Nakamori Eiichi Ohtaki & EPO Hiromi Iwasaki & Hiroshi Sato Junko Ohashi & Junko Yagami Kaoru Akimoto & Kingo Hamada Mariya Takeuchi Miki Matsubara Makoto Matsushita & Masayoshi Takanaka Macross - Mari Iijima & Mai Yamane Meiko Nakahara & Mioko Yamaguchi & Momoko Kikuchi

RULES

• You must listen to and assign a score to EVERY song in the rate. If you submit a ballot with missing scores, they will not be accepted until the missing scores are complete (we will DM you back to notify you).
• Your scores must be on a scale from 1 to 10 and can include one decimal place but no more. 5 and 5.6 are fine. 5.67, 5.670 or 5.6709 are not.
• You may give one song in the main rate a score of 11, and one song a score of 0, for your favorite and least favorite song respectively. These are optional but encouraged if you feel strongly about a song, and comments for 11s and 0s are mandatory.
• Comments are encouraged and appreciated! (but not required) Comments can be added to any song by simply typing after your score, like so:
  • Piper - Summer Breeze: 9 HEY HEY HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEY
• This is the ONLY correct way to write a comment. Any other format, such as the below, will break the rate machine program, and will get your ballot rejected until it’s fixed.
  • Hiroshi Sato - Say Goodbye: 8: goodbye ❌
  • Masayoshi Takanaka - Sexy Dance: it's a 10!! I love Mr. Massive Yoshi!! ❌
  • Mariya Takeuchi - September: (2.1) Do you remember the 21st night of~~ ❌
  • Minako Yoshida - Midnight Driver: giving this song a 7.8 cuz its almost 8 minutes ❌
  • Tatsuro Yamashita - Christmas Eve: The amount of uploads of this song that survive a month on YouTube: 0 ❌
  • Please submit your scores using the prepared message format (alternatively, if your ballot is longer than 10000 characters, you can send it to us as a pastebin link). This makes it infinitely easier for us to record your scores in the rate machine program. You can obviously edit your ballot elsewhere (Word, Google Docs etc.) but keep this general format.

If you want to change scores or add comments after sending your ballot, feel free to send a message to this account or to welcome2thejam. You can also reach us at the Popheads Discord, so if you have Discord you can message us (I go by “beeozan” and my co-host goes by “yoshiheartstaxfraud”). You’re also welcome to join the server's #rates channel regardless, it is very fun to see new faces and it is packed with rate discussion!

BONUS RATE

Those of you with a keen eye might have noticed the glaring lack of two songs I kept mentioning throughout the post: Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plastic Love” and Miki Matsubara’s “Mayonaka no Door / Stay With Me”. The truth is, these two songs have both already been rated as part of our Ratemas and TikTok rates, and their great performances earned them a slot in our Winners and All Stars meta-rates! So we’re using this opportunity to finally decide which song is better! while also giving another song a chance to win the main rate The bonus rate is OPTIONAL and you can ignore it, but chances are, if you are doing this rate then you have heard of these two songs, so you might as well score them, right? You cannot use your 11 or 0 in the bonus rate, as it makes the rate machine hurt itself in its confusion.

1. Mariya Takeuchi - Plastic Love
2. Miki Matsubara - Mayonaka no Door / Stay With Me

LINKS

SUBMIT YOUR BALLOTS HERE

Ballot Pastebin - YouTube Playlist (full) - Spotify Playlist - Apple Music Playlist - YouTube Playlist (non streaming only)

Link to the Popheads Discord Rates Channel

LPT: Bored? You can volunteer remotely to help a variety of people!
Opportunities to Volunteer Remotely
Mostly not covid related opportunities so you can continue volunteering once the shelter in place is lifted.

• ALONE: Support & Befriending service provides companionship to older people in Ireland who would like extra social contact.
• Amnesty Decoders: Support Amnesty International and help sift through documents, photos, and information to expose potential global human rights violations such as oil spills and detainment.
• Be My Eyes: Sighted volunteers can provide visual assistance for blind and low-vision people through the Be My Eyes app (available both iOS and Android). Volunteers can provide assistance through live video call such as checking expiry dates, distinguishing colors, reading instructions, or navigating new surroundings.
• CareerVillage.org: Answer career & college questions for students on a crowdsourcing platform. You can also share with a favorite school and encourage them to share with students.
• Catchafire: Connect with nonprofits who are looking for passionate professionals from many disciplines to donate their professional skills through 1-hour phone calls and/or larger projects. Their projects range from easy to complex strategic issues - this one is great for those looking for a challenge!
• Code.org: Translate the basic coding tutorials that have reached hundreds of millions of students worldwide.
• Hire Heroes USA: Provide support as an online volunteer to create job opportunities for U.S. military veterans and their spouses. The majority of its volunteers participate remotely, helping with mock interviews, career counseling, job search guidance, guidance for preparing resumes and filling out applications, and marketing programs to veterans and spouses. Professional experience in an industry or field is definitely a plus for most of our volunteer opportunities where you will be working directly with clients. However, there are always needs for support functions like fundraising, special events, social media, and so on.
• iCouldBe: An online mentorship platform focused on empowering teens to stay in school, plan for future careers, and achieve in life. The program is embedded into existing classrooms, where one class period per week, students work on e-mentoring activities that focus on academic success strategies, career exploration, and post-secondary educational exploration and planning.
• LearningAlly: Empower dyslexic, blind, and visually impaired students to succeed in school and in life by helping to make LearningAlly audiobooks. Volunteers can narrate an audiobook or listen to an audiobook as part of quality assurance.
• MicroMentor: Create a profile and volunteer to be a mentor to help businesses and entrepreneurs succeed.
• MissingMaps: Help map the most vulnerable places in the developing world so international and local NGOs and individuals can use the maps and data to better respond to crises affecting the areas. This could be streets, buildings, lakes, rivers, etc. Tracing these elements is very simple to do and can be done from your laptop in just a few minutes! The accompanying app, MapSwipe, is really fun and easy to do
• NPower: Register with their database using your LinkedIn profile and they will send you select projects based on your information for your consideration. Skills based volunteering is the best way to impact a nonprofit - it is the most impactful use of your volunteer time.
• Prince's Trust: Provide online mentorship for young people in the UK.
• ScienceBuddies: Register as a volunteer and choose from a list of volunteer opportunities such as project testing, graphic design, image procurement, blog writing in cutting-edge areas of research, and more!
• Sidelines: A USA-based nonprofit providing international support for women and their families experiencing complicated pregnancies and premature births. Most of this support is provided by online volunteers who have experienced complicated pregnancies and premature births themselves - this is a great opportunity for moms to help other moms.
• Smithsonian Digital Volunteer: The Smithsonian Institution is the world's largest museum and research complex. Join over 14,000 digital volunteers to help make historical documents more accessible through the Smithsonian Transcription Center.
• Taproot Foundation Plus Sessions: Help a nonprofit brainstorm, troubleshoot, and diagnose challenges in a one-hour, one-on-one virtual consultation session. You can help in the areas of marketing, HR, finance, and technology.
• Translators Without Borders: If you are fluent in at least one language other than your native language, you can volunteer to translate various texts to support various projects such as medical texts or crisis response documents.
• Trevor Project operates TrevorSpace: An online, social networking community for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ) youth ages 13 through 24 and their friends and allies. Online volunteers monitor the TrevorSpace site and respond to posts in an effort to maintain a safe space for young LGBTQ people online. Trainings for online volunteers are provided quarterly. Online volunteers are also needed on a one-time or continual basis to write program content for TrevorSpace. There are also opportunities to help TrevorChat and TrevorText - two other programs that provide emergency counseling to LGBTQ youth.
• United Nations Volunteer: Connect with organizations across the world who are in need of skills ranging from including translation, technology, training, writing, research and more.
• VocaliD: Create a vocal recording to donate to a human voice bank with VocaliD. English speakers of all ages can help. Join others around the world in sharing the gift of voice. Register and contribute vocal recordings to a human voice bank that will help build the best synthetic voice for everyone. VocaliD believes assisted devices should speak in a way that reflects everyone's individuality and uniqueness.
• Volunteer Crisis Text Line Counselor: The Crisis Text Line is a free, 24/7 text line for people in crisis and is powered by volunteers who work remotely. Volunteers help answer texts from people in crisis through active listening, collaborative problem solving, and safety planning. Training is provided at no cost to volunteers.
• Zooniverse: Do science, anywhere! Volunteer to help contribute to real research and real discoveries through various tasks and classification of data such as counting penguins to transcribing manuscripts.

This list is was found on San Francisco - I couldn’t remember the username to provide credit

Opportunities to Volunteer Remotely
My company compiled a list and sent it out - thought the greater SF community would be interested. Mostly not covid related opportunities so you can continue volunteering once the shelter in place is lifted. If you find yourself with extra time and the urge to give back, here you go:
​

• ALONE: Support & Befriending service provides companionship to older people in Ireland who would like extra social contact.
• Amnesty Decoders: Support Amnesty International and help sift through documents, photos, and information to expose potential global human rights violations such as oil spills and detainment.
• Be My Eyes: Sighted volunteers can provide visual assistance for blind and low-vision people through the Be My Eyes app (available both iOS and Android). Volunteers can provide assistance through live video call such as checking expiry dates, distinguishing colors, reading instructions, or navigating new surroundings.
• CareerVillage.org: Answer career & college questions for students on a crowdsourcing platform. You can also share with a favorite school and encourage them to share with students.
• Catchafire: Connect with nonprofits who are looking for passionate professionals from many disciplines to donate their professional skills through 1-hour phone calls and/or larger projects. Their projects range from easy to complex strategic issues - this one is great for those looking for a challenge!
• Code.org: Translate the basic coding tutorials that have reached hundreds of millions of students worldwide.
• Hire Heroes USA: Provide support as an online volunteer to create job opportunities for U.S. military veterans and their spouses. The majority of its volunteers participate remotely, helping with mock interviews, career counseling, job search guidance, guidance for preparing resumes and filling out applications, and marketing programs to veterans and spouses. Professional experience in an industry or field is definitely a plus for most of our volunteer opportunities where you will be working directly with clients. However, there are always needs for support functions like fundraising, special events, social media, and so on.
• iCouldBe: An online mentorship platform focused on empowering teens to stay in school, plan for future careers, and achieve in life. The program is embedded into existing classrooms, where one class period per week, students work on e-mentoring activities that focus on academic success strategies, career exploration, and post-secondary educational exploration and planning.
• LearningAlly: Empower dyslexic, blind, and visually impaired students to succeed in school and in life by helping to make LearningAlly audiobooks. Volunteers can narrate an audiobook or listen to an audiobook as part of quality assurance.
• MicroMentor: Create a profile and volunteer to be a mentor to help businesses and entrepreneurs succeed.
• MissingMaps: Help map the most vulnerable places in the developing world so international and local NGOs and individuals can use the maps and data to better respond to crises affecting the areas. This could be streets, buildings, lakes, rivers, etc. Tracing these elements is very simple to do and can be done from your laptop in just a few minutes! The accompanying app, MapSwipe, is really fun and easy to do
• NPower: Register with their database using your LinkedIn profile and they will send you select projects based on your information for your consideration. Skills based volunteering is the best way to impact a nonprofit - it is the most impactful use of your volunteer time.
• Prince's Trust: Provide online mentorship for young people in the UK.
• ScienceBuddies: Register as a volunteer and choose from a list of volunteer opportunities such as project testing, graphic design, image procurement, blog writing in cutting-edge areas of research, and more!
• Sidelines: A USA-based nonprofit providing international support for women and their families experiencing complicated pregnancies and premature births. Most of this support is provided by online volunteers who have experienced complicated pregnancies and premature births themselves - this is a great opportunity for moms to help other moms.
• Smithsonian Digital Volunteer: The Smithsonian Institution is the world's largest museum and research complex. Join over 14,000 digital volunteers to help make historical documents more accessible through the Smithsonian Transcription Center.
• Taproot Foundation Plus Sessions: Help a nonprofit brainstorm, troubleshoot, and diagnose challenges in a one-hour, one-on-one virtual consultation session. You can help in the areas of marketing, HR, finance, and technology.
• Translators Without Borders: If you are fluent in at least one language other than your native language, you can volunteer to translate various texts to support various projects such as medical texts or crisis response documents.
• Trevor Project operates TrevorSpace: An online, social networking community for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ) youth ages 13 through 24 and their friends and allies. Online volunteers monitor the TrevorSpace site and respond to posts in an effort to maintain a safe space for young LGBTQ people online. Trainings for online volunteers are provided quarterly. Online volunteers are also needed on a one-time or continual basis to write program content for TrevorSpace. There are also opportunities to help TrevorChat and TrevorText - two other programs that provide emergency counseling to LGBTQ youth.
• United Nations Volunteer: Connect with organizations across the world who are in need of skills ranging from including translation, technology, training, writing, research and more.
• VocaliD: Create a vocal recording to donate to a human voice bank with VocaliD. English speakers of all ages can help. Join others around the world in sharing the gift of voice. Register and contribute vocal recordings to a human voice bank that will help build the best synthetic voice for everyone. VocaliD believes assisted devices should speak in a way that reflects everyone's individuality and uniqueness.
• Volunteer Crisis Text Line Counselor: The Crisis Text Line is a free, 24/7 text line for people in crisis and is powered by volunteers who work remotely. Volunteers help answer texts from people in crisis through active listening, collaborative problem solving, and safety planning. Training is provided at no cost to volunteers.
• Zooniverse: Do science, anywhere! Volunteer to help contribute to real research and real discoveries through various tasks and classification of data such as counting penguins to transcribing manuscripts.

This list is was found on San Francisco - I couldn’t remember the username to provide credit

My company compiled a list and sent it out - thought the greater SF community would be interested. Mostly not covid related opportunities so you can continue volunteering once the shelter in place is lifted. If you find yourself with extra time and the urge to give back, here you go:
​

• ALONE: Support & Befriending service provides companionship to older people in Ireland who would like extra social contact.
• Amnesty Decoders: Support Amnesty International and help sift through documents, photos, and information to expose potential global human rights violations such as oil spills and detainment.
• Be My Eyes: Sighted volunteers can provide visual assistance for blind and low-vision people through the Be My Eyes app (available both iOS and Android). Volunteers can provide assistance through live video call such as checking expiry dates, distinguishing colors, reading instructions, or navigating new surroundings.
• CareerVillage.org: Answer career & college questions for students on a crowdsourcing platform. You can also share with a favorite school and encourage them to share with students.
• Catchafire: Connect with nonprofits who are looking for passionate professionals from many disciplines to donate their professional skills through 1-hour phone calls and/or larger projects. Their projects range from easy to complex strategic issues - this one is great for those looking for a challenge!
• Code.org: Translate the basic coding tutorials that have reached hundreds of millions of students worldwide.
• Hire Heroes USA: Provide support as an online volunteer to create job opportunities for U.S. military veterans and their spouses. The majority of its volunteers participate remotely, helping with mock interviews, career counseling, job search guidance, guidance for preparing resumes and filling out applications, and marketing programs to veterans and spouses. Professional experience in an industry or field is definitely a plus for most of our volunteer opportunities where you will be working directly with clients. However, there are always needs for support functions like fundraising, special events, social media, and so on.
• iCouldBe: An online mentorship platform focused on empowering teens to stay in school, plan for future careers, and achieve in life. The program is embedded into existing classrooms, where one class period per week, students work on e-mentoring activities that focus on academic success strategies, career exploration, and post-secondary educational exploration and planning.
• LearningAlly: Empower dyslexic, blind, and visually impaired students to succeed in school and in life by helping to make LearningAlly audiobooks. Volunteers can narrate an audiobook or listen to an audiobook as part of quality assurance.
• MicroMentor: Create a profile and volunteer to be a mentor to help businesses and entrepreneurs succeed.
• MissingMaps: Help map the most vulnerable places in the developing world so international and local NGOs and individuals can use the maps and data to better respond to crises affecting the areas. This could be streets, buildings, lakes, rivers, etc. Tracing these elements is very simple to do and can be done from your laptop in just a few minutes! The accompanying app, MapSwipe, is really fun and easy to do
• NPower: Register with their database using your LinkedIn profile and they will send you select projects based on your information for your consideration. Skills based volunteering is the best way to impact a nonprofit - it is the most impactful use of your volunteer time.
• Prince's Trust: Provide online mentorship for young people in the UK.
• ScienceBuddies: Register as a volunteer and choose from a list of volunteer opportunities such as project testing, graphic design, image procurement, blog writing in cutting-edge areas of research, and more!
• Sidelines: A USA-based nonprofit providing international support for women and their families experiencing complicated pregnancies and premature births. Most of this support is provided by online volunteers who have experienced complicated pregnancies and premature births themselves - this is a great opportunity for moms to help other moms.
• Smithsonian Digital Volunteer: The Smithsonian Institution is the world's largest museum and research complex. Join over 14,000 digital volunteers to help make historical documents more accessible through the Smithsonian Transcription Center.
• Taproot Foundation Plus Sessions: Help a nonprofit brainstorm, troubleshoot, and diagnose challenges in a one-hour, one-on-one virtual consultation session. You can help in the areas of marketing, HR, finance, and technology.
• Translators Without Borders: If you are fluent in at least one language other than your native language, you can volunteer to translate various texts to support various projects such as medical texts or crisis response documents.
• Trevor Project operates TrevorSpace: An online, social networking community for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ) youth ages 13 through 24 and their friends and allies. Online volunteers monitor the TrevorSpace site and respond to posts in an effort to maintain a safe space for young LGBTQ people online. Trainings for online volunteers are provided quarterly. Online volunteers are also needed on a one-time or continual basis to write program content for TrevorSpace. There are also opportunities to help TrevorChat and TrevorText - two other programs that provide emergency counseling to LGBTQ youth.
• United Nations Volunteer: Connect with organizations across the world who are in need of skills ranging from including translation, technology, training, writing, research and more.
• VocaliD: Create a vocal recording to donate to a human voice bank with VocaliD. English speakers of all ages can help. Join others around the world in sharing the gift of voice. Register and contribute vocal recordings to a human voice bank that will help build the best synthetic voice for everyone. VocaliD believes assisted devices should speak in a way that reflects everyone's individuality and uniqueness.
• Volunteer Crisis Text Line Counselor: The Crisis Text Line is a free, 24/7 text line for people in crisis and is powered by volunteers who work remotely. Volunteers help answer texts from people in crisis through active listening, collaborative problem solving, and safety planning. Training is provided at no cost to volunteers.
• Zooniverse: Do science, anywhere! Volunteer to help contribute to real research and real discoveries through various tasks and classification of data such as counting penguins to transcribing manuscripts.

Hello again /MechanicalKeyboards!   It’s us again, the small team behind https://kaido.io, a marketplace we are building for mechanical keyboards, headphones and hardware enthusiasts.  
First of all we want to thank all of you who participated in the last giveaway. We gathered a lot of great suggestions and added them to our roadmap. (You can see our updated release date features list here and the updated designs here).  
TLDR: Without a doubt, the two biggest requested features were:  

1. Seller and Buyer feedback .  
2. Pricing history for every item being sold  

We already starting work on the Feedback feature, and it will be implemented when we release in the next few weeks. As for Pricing History, it will be implemented, but post release. In order to do it properly, we need to make significant changes to how posts are created. We will work on a robust form system, meaning that every brand, property, color and such will be categorized and selectable from a list or form instead of having to write it down. We are building the platform for the community and we want to make it exactly how you want it.
 
As we told you last week, we have multiple giveaways planned and today we are doing another one. This time, we partnered with...
 
Mechfashion! (aka u/Pitrek7)
 
Maybe you bring your keyboard to the office everyday, or maybe you need a sleeve for when you are travelling. Every reason is a good one to get a custom sleeve that matches your keyboard. Because we do not want your keyboards to get damaged while carrying it, today we are giving away One OR Two sleeves that you can fully customize with Mechfashion! We understand that you want to maximize your chances to win, but we would love to gather as much feedback as possible, meaning we would benefit from having more than 10 upvotes like last time. If the giveaway ends at 50+ upvotes, we will be giving away not 1 but 2 sleeves!
 
To enter, simply comment (Or even better, let us know what you would like to see on the platform!) on this thread and 1 or 2 winners will be selected randomly. The Giveaway starts right now (1:00PM ET) and will end tomorrow, 1:00PM ET so that people in every timezone has a chance to enter.
 
If you would like to follow our progress or keep track of the multiple giveaways we have planned (some are on other subs too!), you can visit our landing page at https://kaido.io where you can subscribe to our mailing list, or you can follow us on Instagram or Twitter.
 
Best of luck to all! ⌨️
 
If you want to see the suggestions we gathered so far, the Feedback document is here -> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IuJPVxnmn3CvD-yAtqZK89VqJuGnHv7v8-BfKSsnKPs/edit?usp=sharing .
EDIT: Giveaway is over! Congratulations to u/reggatronics for winning a custom keyboard sleeve from Mechfashion!

For people who haven't kept up-to-date with Lost Ark, or don't know much about it, or are skeptical about it, doing a write-up based on my own experience playing CBT and information we know based on what was announced. I hope it helps; I expect a lot from this game despite it being a KR MMORPG.
Korean OBT Release: November 7th, 2018. Chinese Release: Planned 2019, signed with Tencent. Potential delays due to new game embargo. Global Release: "We want to focus on existing markets but we are interested in global markets later on."
Requirements to Play Korea: A Korean Stove account with valid KSSN. A VPN that masks your location to Korea.
Monetization: F2P with "pay for convenience". Intent of sale for things like cosmetics, mounts, reviving in non-limited revival content, dungeon entry (presumably towecube dungeon). Intent to allow players to pay to gear up quickly, but unable to pay to buy "high-end" gear which will require grinding. Inventory expansion.
Roadmap: Sequential episode-like updates added in installments.
Engine: Unreal Engine 3. Please read. This game is odd. On any day of the week you'd imagine a Korean UE3 game to have awful optimization. This game's optimization is incredibly well done. Even older i3 processor can run this game pretty well. I encountered no memory leaks in high density zones over several hours in CBT3. Most decent rigs should be able to hold 90+ FPS with ease.
Ping Friendly: Yes! I played with 220ms and could actually compete in PVP and do high-end PVE content. You can actually see a boss telegraph and get out of the way without being punished and hit outside of what you see. My connection to LA felt better to Korea than it does to western servers in other MMORPGs.
World: Several continent land masses connected by a shared-world ocean. Players sail to get from place to place (you can fast travel but it consumes money pretty fast). Movement between maps is between connection points and map edges are rigid (think FF14 maps where you can't move past an edge on the mini-map). Several islands scattered throughout the ocean as well with various things to do on each. Sailing is it's own mini-game other than a mode of transportation. Recruit crew (each with various rarity with unique bonuses), unlock better ships.
Questing: Very sequential up until a certain point in the story, at which point you have options where you can go to continue questing. You'll have to go through all of them either way. For me, the questing felt like the weakest point of Lost Ark, very generic quests (kill this, collect that) in between major events. I actually fell asleep a few times while questing. A lot of sidequests, most I skipped or did not find. Basic temporary region questing.
Story/Lore: Seems okay. Recover the lost Arks (it's more complex than this, just the briefest summation I could come up with). Cinematics are gorgeous in this game for what it's worth.
Time to Cap: It took a casual playthrough of a few days to the CBT level cap of 50. Some people did it in much less. Originally planned level cap for OBT is 60.
Development Path: Lost Ark is aiming to distinguish itself away from being an ARPG clone. It seems closer akin to a theme park MMO with isometric camera perspective. They claim they want to develop their game horizontally instead of vertically, which means offering a magnitude of things to do. To be honest, I'm laughably surprised they didn't add a BR mode like other recent MMOs. Some of the things they've added recently are an in-game card game (think Triple Triad or Hearthstone), a siege PVP mode, and a Roguelike mini-game (not hardcore mode, I guess like an arcade distraction mode where death = start over).
Classes: Not a holy trinity game. Original 12 classes which have been updated and improved upon. 4 additional classes are currently actively in development. The classes are split into 6 base classes with 3 subclasses each. You advance into your sub-class really early on, within the first 30 minutes to an hour. Fighter, Mage, Warrior, Gunner are the original. Assassin and Specialist are the future ones. Besides for their own unique skill set, every class has a unique function called "Identity" which sets them apart from the rest. For example, the Arcana gambling class' identity is the Tarot deck, which draws random bonuses from a deck as she attacks.
Classes gender locked. We don't know if they intend to change this. A recent screen at media day made it look like they might (or it could have just been a new class).
Added in response to someone's deleted question: I don't know if there was proper aggro management for tanks since I played a DPS myself. There are forms of support (e.g. Bard and Warlord) that I appreciated their utility in content like Guardian Raids where we have limited respawns and healing items. I imagine that with the Specialist line-up of classes later on down the line as well, there may be a wider breadth of support available to pick from.
Character Development: Improve your character primarily through improving your item level via new gear and enhancing (+1, +2...). Make skill choices the Tripod System, which has you take a base skill and improve it by selecting upgrades to it that change how it works or visually looks. The more you invest into leveling a skill, the deeper into the Tripod System you can go into to add bigger and stronger upgrades to it. Therein, this system encourages you to focus on just enough skills to fit in your hotbar. Respec is not free.
Many different stats but they're strange and some are unique to specific classes. Can re-roll stats on gear for a low currency cost at an NPC, with gear having a stat cap based on it's item level. Custom set bonuses exist that can further improve a character, but it's an RNG system to get the right set bonuses on all of your gear.
Daily/Weekly Gated: Nope.
Housing: Will exist in the form of making your own island. The game has NPC-affinity as well, so I guess you can court NPCs and invite them to your island.
PVP: Modes originally offered were 1v1, 3v3, and 3v3 squad. There used to be MMR but they removed it between CBT2 and CBT3. 3v3 you determine a line-up with your teammates and each player fights one on one knocking out members of the other team's squad (think DnF/DFO). 3v3 squad is a full on 3v3 where all 3 of each time are fighting at the same time. Stats are equalized in PVP. Balance is not perfect yet; they intend to completely separate PVE and PVP scaling on skills for all classes. Siege/GVG planned. Glyph system that gives you slight bonuses in situational encounters to add some variety to equalized environment.
Endgame PVE: Categorically a lot of choices to progress item level. Chaos Dungeons (harder versions of normal dungeons) with unlimited entry for slow but consistent progression. World bosses that spawn on timers with contribution-based looting. Can get PVE gear from PVP, though it takes a little while. Tower content (clear the gimmick floors) which provide gear on certain stages.
Guardian Raids are literally Monster Hunter-style raids (enter with a group, track the boss, hurt it, track it once it runs, repeat). Only have 3 respawns shared between the party of which party wipes on 4th. Can only bring limited amount of healing items in as well. Attacking certain parts of the boss can 'break' it's body parts rendering it more susceptible to damage. Cannot see boss HP throughout the fight (it'll tell you what you got it to if you wipe though), can only guess what phase it's on by how many times you made it retreat + complexity of it's attacks. Guardian Raids are categorized by a danger rank.
There is crafting of gear that utilizes field boss/Guardian Raid materials that drop.
No DPS meter, don't want people to feel bad or shamed. MVP screen though that rewards people after major fights for things like top damage, top heals, etc.
Bigger raids are planned for future. Don't know if this means 10 or 20 man or so on. Intent to focus on things like mechanics, complexity, and using the map to progress the fight. Dungeons in Lost Ark are very cinematic already so we're hopeful here.
Treasure/Secret Dungeons. You sometimes can obtain a map (often from Chaos Dungeon for example) that gives you a snippet of the world map. Go to that location with friends and find the hidden entrance to that particular dungeon instance and clear it for more powerful equipment. A little like Find Waldo dungeon edition. I admit that several hours were spent just collecting maps and then trying to sift through the world map to locate them before going on a treasure hunt.
There are more ways to get gear and more PVE content that I did not get to experience in my time playing it thus far.
Life Skills: There are professions and I didn't delve into it as much as I should have. Life Skills have a somewhat complex leveling tree separate from normal skills that you can unlock additional beneficial skills for them.
This is a really, really brief write-up believe it or not. I have not experienced everything this game had to offer, just surface level. There are a LOT of other things I did not touch upon and many systems that I'm just entirely unaware of myself. They weren't kidding around when they wanted this game to be a theme park MMO with the isometric camera. This might be overwhelming and some may question that it's adding too much. It was met with complaints in KR that they focused too much on adding too many things to do instead of just releasing the game already.

Hello Robert,
Thanx for your detailed information and support. We will work hard to take care of the issues that you have mentioned.
Thanx!
Robert Patrician robert.patrician@yahoo.com
Greetings. My name is Robert Patrician, and I would like to provide my feedback regarding Dungeon Fighter localization for the United States market. There is one key issue that Nexon US failed to address, which is disruptive behavior mitigation. From having spent a year in The Republic of Korea while in the United States Army, I assert that gamers in your country are well-behaved online and take care to protect their reputation. The KSSN system prevented people from creating temporary accounts they could use to be disruptive. However the lack of a “verified person” system in the global release results in no consequences for disruptive behavior, leading to practices that are detrimental to the experience of all other players. When Dungeon Fighter was run by Nexon US, there were three issues that caused my friends who I convinced to try the game to quit; chat flood, ineffective block user command and clogged team lists. The first issue is the flooding of the chat box, especially in general area chat. Players will use a temporary character to post the same message dozens of times per minute, typically attempting to purchase or sell something at a price extremely in their favor. This prevents any other chat or conversation in the area chat, where a message like “Would anyone be interested in (dungeon)” or “How do I find an (item)?” is immediately pushed off the screen. Just one person engaging in this behavior is bad enough, but there can be many people in the same area attempting to out-flood each other. Nexon US turned a blind eye to this problem, and it gives the appearance to a new player that the game has no enforced behavior rules.
The second problem is the restriction upon the “block user” command. The response in other games to someone flooding the chat is to click their name and ignore them, yet the “block user” function is limited to 10 names. As a result if there are 11 people flooding the chat in an area, it becomes impossible to block all the disruptive users. The block user function is also limited by character names, and the spammers will occasionally change to a different character to avoid any blocks that have been placed on them. As each account can have 12 characters, just one account is enough to get around the block user command.
The third issue is the team list, and how it quickly fills with “abandoned” teams. Consider if a player simply changes windows away from the game at the end of a dungeon: The other players leave the team, but the team listing of something like “(Dungeon) Masters join now!” stays in the list for as long as that players is logged in. As a result the list of teams can have one or two “actual” teams for every seven to ten “abandoned” teams. This is particularly frustrating for new players, who wonder why “none of the teams will let them join.” Team lists are also used by people trying to sell items, or even just to post a nasty message to many people.
There are three things that I feel need to be adjusted in the game before a full release for it to be successful in retaining new players. The first is to create a limiter for general chat messages, based on character level. Most of the chat flooding comes from low-level characters created just for the purpose of flooding the chat. This leads into the second issue: adjusting the block user function to have no limit on how many users may be blocked and have the block apply to all characters on that account. Third, create a mechanic that will remove the “team leader” status of teams with one person where the leader does not respond to any join requests for five minutes. With these changes, I feel that I would have greater success in convincing my friends to play Dungeon Fighter.

• Robert Patrician