Movies December 2009

Gilmore Girls, season 7, disc 1
We had heard that this final season of GG takes a quality nosedive due to a lack of Palladinos. This wasn't bad, but it was missing something that I haven't homed in on.

I Am Legend
I had read the meh reviews, but I like sci-fi apocalypse, and Will Smith can be entertaining, and what the hell. On viewing, both M and I agree, its deeply stupid parts mar the whole. Not terrible, but not an experience for willful repetition.

Gilmore Girls, season 7, disc 2
This is where the show gets the worst of all fates... mediocre. Not bad, just miserably average.

Samurai Champloo, disc 4
Good, but Mugen's background story was confusing.

G.I. Joe Resolute
I watched this about three times, studying it. It was built for the Web, in segments, meaning that in addition to telling one large coherent story, it had to tell 7 or 8 coherent miniature stories within that had their own matryoshka doll structure and cliffhangers. The initial setup is so fast and choppy you really don't know what's happening the first time you watch it, but the rest of it flows well enough. It makes perfect sense that they got a comic book writer to do this (Warren Ellis). He's already wired to do this.

The anime stylings were gorgeous, and from the extras I learned a new term for this kind of IP: "military fantasy." Well done, lads!

Sherlock Holmes
Much better than I thought it would be! It was more of a reverse caper movie than a mystery, but man, mysteries are dang hard to do well in film. This was just fine. I like a kinetic self-absorbed genius Sherlock Holmes. And I like most things Guy Richie does. So not only did I not mind the liberties taken, I enjoyed them.

Avatar
Here's my tip from my Lucasfilm days: When advanced press spends a lot of time talking about the technical wizardry behind a movie, it's probably because that's the movie's strong suit. M hated this movie so hard, but I thought it was ok, except that every single thing that happened was as predictable as gravity. There were some fun comparison to Aliens--particularly matching Carter Burke up with Parker Selfridge.

Eh? Separated at birth? Eh? Eh?

John Mackey on corporations as do-gooders

Part 54 zillion in a series of musings about capitaltruism, an excerpt from a New Yorker article about John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods:

[Mackey] "...This is a paradigm that has polarized our country and led to bad thinking. It’s holding the nation’s progress back. It’s as if there were a wall. And on one side of the wall is this belief that not-for-profits and government exist for public service, and that they’re fundamentally altruistic, that they have a deeper purpose, and they’re doing good in the world, and they have pure motives. On the other side of the wall are corporations. And they’re just selfish and greedy. They have no purpose other than to make money. They’re a bunch of psychopaths. And I’d like to tear that wall down. Human beings are obviously self-interested. We do look after ourselves, but we’re capable of love, empathy, and compassion, and I don’t see that business is any different.”

He went on, “We’re trying to do good. And we’re trying to make money. The more money we make, the more good we can do.” By this, he had in mind not the traditional philanthropic argument that more money earned equals more to give away but, rather, that a good company—that is, his company—which sells good things and treats its employees, shareholders, customers, and suppliers well, can spread goodness simply by thriving.

This was a variation on what he calls “conscious capitalism,” which some people, smelling an oxymoron, or worse, snicker at. His idea is that business should have a higher purpose—that, just as doctors heal and teachers educate, businesspeople should be after something besides money. It may be an easier argument for a grocer to make; he feeds people, and if he feeds them properly he heals and educates them, too. But it borders on humbug when you apply it to, say, Wall Street. Consciousness, as it relates to capitalism, is in the eyes not so much of the beholder as of the capitalist.

via Kottke.
Read the whole article at your leisure.

Yuletide Existentialism

I've just finished the checklist, and now I'm certain that we have every physical object we need in this household. Everything necessary for a full and healthy life is contained in this building. We also have many of the things we want and enjoy on top of that.

Now what?

If I can't answer that question, what was I collecting shit for in the first place? Why have a thing if you have no purpose for the thing?

Why does everyone else roll their eyes when I start talking like this? Am I missing something obvious? I'm willing to be the dumbass if someone will just explain it to me slowly.

I don't want to go all Charlie Brown Christmas Special here, but if it's about Jesus, then where the fuck is Jesus? I didn't see a lot of him on December 25. I saw a bunch of people open boxes of crap they didn't need or even want all that badly and act delighted about it. And I participated. And I felt dirty about it.

I'm a pretty miserable Jesus follower. But it's funny that I seldom feel like a miserable Jesus follower when I really am being miserable at it.

I'm done with this mealy-mouthed Christmas shit. I always feel a little sick and disconnected going into Christmas, and I'm not doing that any more. I'm not going to play along next year. I don't know what I'm going to do, and I hope I don't alienate my wife in the process, but I don't have the stomach for make-nice any more.

Trust in the Lord

I am told that God loves us, and rescues us from our sins and enemies.

But God also leaves us to suffer the consequences of our insistent foolishness, and to suffer other people's foolish consequences as well.

This is one reason why I don't trust God. Even when I ask him to save me, he might not. How can I trust that?

Consignment

Every once in a while, someone sees something you got and wants to talk to you about combining your thing with their thing. Maybe they want to hire you, or perform with you. In college, the student ministries director thought I'd be perfect to preach in Guam for a summer.

These propositions are a little magical. They mean someone looked at you and saw merit and wanted to risk a little something on you.*

Historically, I stumble all over these offers. I get self-conscious and either back away thinking I can't live up to it (cf. Guam) or freeze up when called to produce (cf. lots of other things).

But this year, I told myself the next time one of these offers came I would grab it with both hands.

At Art Shop this year, a consignment shop owner, Square Peg Artery near Rittenhouse Square, was cruising the aisles looking for talent. We talked, we traded business cards, and she followed up.

It's not a big opportunity, but it's big enough to start with. I'm learning marketing with my bare hands, and this is another round of class. Get the product out there. Make money if you can, lose it if you must, but get eyeballs on your goods.

I'll try real hard not to fumble this one. And if I do, I damn well mean to learn something from it.

The picture, by the way, is of a monster available at the Artery. Swing by their store at 108 S. 20th St and take a look around while you're out xmas shopping.


*Precluding scammers and the deluded. Those types are usually easy to spot if you're doing due diligence. I'm talking about the genuine article here.

Your New Flying Car

This is not your new flying car, the post title is totally misleading, I don't know who wrote that.

But it strikes me as an eminently more doable flying car than the plane-like things people try to pass off as flying cars. Anything that requires you to think about a mile ahead will not become mass market. The ramifications of momentary inattention are too dire.

But something sort of helicoptery, I could see that for taxis and getting around Rio de Janeiro and such.

Art Shop 2009 Post-Mortem

Art Shop is over, and I did pretty well! I'm about to go into a long review, mainly for my own benefit, so feel free to drop out any time this gets boring.

I have only two data points: last year and this year. So I'm not sure how meaningful my conclusions are. But I'm trying to draw some anyway.

The overarching lesson this year is from my neighbor Liz, who was selling smart-looking hand-knitted sweaters. The lesson: "Business is fickle." You do your homework, and you hedge your bets, and then you show up and hope. You don't know when it's going to go well or go badly. You go anyway.

More specific observations:

• This year's commercial breakthrough was diversification. I had a few normal monsters (fewer than last year), a bunch of pattern monsters, some tetris magnet sets, and random stuff I glued googly eyes onto. This provided a nice price spread from $40 down to $1 for the Things With Eyes. (I also sold coasters for my sister-in-law, Alison).

• The ratio of "Cool!" to "Sold!" is about 10:1.

• I didn't bring some things I wanted to. I wanted to make hats, but I never did the R&D to be able to churn out a bunch, and I didn't want to show up with only one or two. I also had meant to make pillows out of t-shirts, but the dog ate my homework there (literally), and I was already staying up late finishing monsters and freelance as it was. So I let it go. It's probably just as well -- the table was full enough. But I coulda sold the headlice out of hats, I think.

• Got lots of compliments, and someone said to me, "Everyone is talking about your stuff!" Meredith pointed out that it must feel good to hear people say nice things about my work. And it should. I've tried to figure out why it doesn't.
  
  My guess is that I have a subcutaneous cynicism that distrusts inert talk. Telling me you like my work is swell, but like it with your wallet, and I'm more inclined to believe you.
  
  I mean, regardless of origin or intent, a compliment is a compliment, and kindness is not so abundant that I'm willing to wave it away. But there's still a stark line in my heart between "talk" and "walk."
  
  Cynicism is low on my list of favorite character traits. But it's often coupled with a constructive shrewdness. I haven't discerned how to gerrymander my feelings to properly segregate "good judgment" and "bad faith." But at least I'm happy I've discovered it's important to do that.

• Everybody DOES love monsters, but everybody also loves utility. Based on some half-verbalized semi-criticisms, I got the impression that many people think stuffed monsters are only for children. Items that look fun and cool are ok for children, but not adults. Had I ingrained some sort of usefulness into the product (here's where a hat would have come in handy) I would have had more admirers and customers.

• I can't tell whether low-pressure sales is better for business in dollar terms, but I can tell I feel icky about applying pressure. I only want to sell to people who already want to buy. I get no joy from persuasion.
  

• Some of last years' monsters didn't sell, and I brought them home thinking that they must have been defective in some way. They were unbeloved, and therefore I had failed. I took them back this year anyway, to fill out the ranks. To my surprise, they sold, to people who seemed happy to have them.
  
  So the new conclusion is that some products hit certain people a certain way, and you don't know who or when. There might be some genuine stinkers in the bunch, and you hope to weed those out as soon as possible. But sometimes a creation's buyer just hasn't come along yet.

• Last year I sold a bunch of stuff on Friday, and Saturday was dead. Low point: Some woman spent most of an hour letting her daughter amuse herself at my booth while she talked, and then bought nada. However, my goal had been to make enough to cover my new sewing machine, and I did that, so mission accomplished.
  
  This year, I did only so-so on Friday, and going into Saturday I did a lot of hand-wringing about how bad I feared business would be, especially after a quiet first hour. I heard people say "Friday is more social; Saturday is the day more people buy." But that hadn't been my experience.
  
  Turns out, people were right. Saturday mysteriously picked up around 1:00, and I did decently thereafter. When I tallied up sales, I made a significantly larger amount of money this year compared to last year.

• I dropped my prices a little on magnets and big monsters on Saturday after disappointing Friday night sales. Both sold better on Saturday. I don't know whether it was because of the price drop or the motivated Saturday shoppers. For monsters anyway, my hunch is $40 is a breaking point for a lot of people. They'll bite at $35, but $40 is too much.

• When I say I did "decently", we're still not talking a lot of money. I probably did a little better than break even on the hobby this year. Which is cool with me. I'm interested to turn this into more of an income stream, but a self-funding hobby is sufficient gratification.

• An artsy consignment shop downtown wants to sell my monsters. Sweet! I'll probably have more to say about that in a couple weeks.
  

• I've set a goal to attend at least one more art/craft show in 2010 as a vendor. I need more data points.

If you came out to Art Shop this year, whether or not you bought a monster, then my sincere thanks. If you DID buy something, then I hope it brings you joy and amusement. See all y'all next year.

Blogaday 2009 Wrap-up

Another Blogaday ends. Time for the wordy wrap-up!

• This year, I did 61 days instead of the previous 30. I have gone into this before with about 2 weeks of semi-prepared content with the expectation that I'd get back to the rest of it later. This time, those 2 weeks were 25% of the total content instead of 50%, so mid-November left me with some head scratching.
  
• The head scratching point is where the magic happens. Not saying that was the best content, but that's where I have to start thinking and stop coasting.
• "Start thinking and stop coasting" should be tattooed on my arm or something.
• Will Rogers used to write a daily newspaper column. He wrote it daily, in the field, and he made it funny. For most other humans, an essay a day is hard work. After my realization that I'm not built up to write an original piece of polished thought every day, I started posting pithy stuff, some that could have just been Twitter fodder. That was okay too.
• I still prefer essays here.
  
• It's actually not hard to think up something to put on a blog every day. I'm walking around thinking alla time. What's hard is noting that something I'm thinking could be put on a blog. The blog has to occupy a balcony seat in your head. I imagine there's a list of things in your head that you compare new experiences to, that you use to contextualize experience. A blog just has to make it onto that list.
• I missed a day in late November again. One of these years I'm going to try not to miss a day.

I'm also trying to top last year's post count, so I'll probably post more in December. It's Advent again, and Art Shop is this Friday -- come by if you're in Philadelphia! -- so I'll have things to talk about. Peace out, blogaday bitches.

Movies November 2009

Samurai Champloo, disc 1
I started watching this on Cartoon Network a few years ago, but never made time for it. The interplay of the late Edo period setting and hip hop is still pretty neat! It distracts me that the English voice for Mugen is the same guy who did Spike in Cowboy Bebop. The voice is too strongly associated with that one character for my ear to just let it slide into another one.

Scrubs, season 1, disc 1
I decided to rewatch this to learn. It's still funny! But what interests me more is how in-your-face the A-B-C plots are for each episode. I rarely notice when TV shows shift plots and acts, because I'm taking it in rather than studying it. But Scrubs just has really obvious set-ups and twists. Normally, obvious is bad, but this time I don't mean obvious = predictable or boring. It's just that when one of these bones of the show happens, it's sticking out of the flesh. Helpful!

Samurai Champloo, disc 2
This story is filling out nicely, and showing more intriguing Japanese history. The sex is strange here, because it's all sit-com sex, i.e., it never happens because of untimely turns of event. Plus Fuu is supposedly 15 years old, but drawn and sexualized older. And even though there was no age of consent in Tokugawa-era Japan, the modern context they made these stories in and the modern U.S. urban anachronisms they include confuse me as I try to figure out whether they're saying something about sex, or just titillating. Regardless of all that, I still dig it.

Samurai Champloo, disc 3
Ditto.

G.I. Joe: Season 1.1: Disc 1
Part research, part nostalgia. It's pretty bad for art, but ok for a 10-year-old's action-adventure fare, even today.

Fantastic Mr. Fox
Fun movie! It's a weird adaption, taking a children's book and making it a story about middle age. But that's Wes Anderson for you. It's no Royal Tenenbaums, but I can love it for what it is just fine.

Return of the King (extended)
Good times with my awesome LotR-loving wife.

Once you condense a mote of wisdom into an aphorism, it becomes more ornamental than instructive.

Yeah, I bought stuff

In case you were wondering.

Buy Nothing Day 2009

I haven't decided yet whether I'll participate in BND this year, but I'll promote it here like I do every year.

I 've heard that In This Economy, you need to take advantage of every sale, and retailers will be giving babies away with every purchase, and you don't want to miss that. Hell, I saw one major retailer who claimed to be open today, on Thanksgiving, to try to pick up a few more dollars.

And I don't know who you are, maybe you have a real need, and if you do, friend, go buy something tomorrow.

But if you're closer to my situation, you could stand to take a day and think about the stuff you already have in your life. New stuff will neither improve your condition, nor make your relatives love you more.

The act is only symbolic, but symbols have power when you give it to them. And you're probably going to give that power to some symbol. Why not make it a symbol you choose instead?

You haven't lived until...

Certain phrases trip the neuron set in my head that starts my teeth to grind. One of them is this intellectually poor man's version of the simpler, more urbane, "I recommend...".

A brief list of behaviors Internet tells me I haven't lived until I've done:

• eaten beefaroni with a hello kitty spork
• been to the Mayan Beach Gardens
• eaten a "Bacon Explosion"
• seen a 3 yr old sing ABBA
• felt your way along a jungle path in utter darkness, rounding a corner and spotting a pack of hyenas in a pool of light twenty yards away, with no apparent fence between you.
• witnessed a gargantum fireworks display set to Bee Gees (Staying Alive), MJ, U2 and The Prodigy
• LARPed*
• exsperanced pantanal**
• caught one of those high hard ones
• screwed a Catholic girl
• tried to explain arcane primary procedures and nominating rules to an eleven-year-old watching his first Democratic National Convention on C-Span
• shaked your ass of to house music in Barcelona!

Oh my wasteland of an existence.

*I've done this one, and can say with authority that its absence doesn't bar you from life.
** Totally true.

Why does the future still suck?

Spent two hours working on a Web site tonight, and nothing to show for it so far. But perseverance is key in these sorts of things, I hear. Must... have... operative... site... before... Art Shop....

Yo Mon

I watched the first disc of the G.I. Joe cartoon season 1 (1983) this weekend, and the primary thing I'm left with is the theme song played over and over in my head, except instead of the brass and strings of the original theme song, it's played with a steel drum that sounds slightly synthesized, like someone sampled it into a Moog.

I don't have time to expound on this, but yes, it is maddening.

Thunderstruck

I just realized this morning that I Wish I Were a Little Bar of Soap and If You're Happy and You Know It are the same tune.

Happy birthday, Meredith!

Today is the day we celebrate my wife's birth! I love my wife (seen here with Abraham Lincoln). She is kind to me, and works hard at our marriage, which is one good reason things go well between us -- underwater, she's paddling like a duck.

Here are some more things to know about her:

• Meredith loves warmth, and hates cold, even more than I do.
• She loves our dogs.
• She likes order and symmetry. She likes making it, and a lack of it bothers her.
• She likes assembling things: furniture, puzzles, equations.
• She dyed her hair purple earlier this year, and it looked great. I love it when she tries new things.
• She likes babies. Anybody's babies.
• She's going to quit her job in February, and that will be such a huge adventure.
• She is so liminal right now, and it is so exciting to be next to her while she's doing it.

Happy birthday, baby.

Anticipating Advent

Advent is coming up again in a couple weeks. Last year, as you may recall, I decided I didn't have much faith, and that Jesus didn't seem to be doing much for me. Not that it's Jesus's job to "do things" for me, but I hit that same old wall of feeling fine, but essentially alone, footprints in the sand be damned.

I decided not to stress out about it, and just keep showing up. As a result, this year has been pretty unspiritual, but not wracking. I've gone to church events and participated, sometimes wholeheartedly, sometimes skeptically. But there was still the nag in my head that I didn't get it. And I didn't feel like banging my head to try.

So I didn't. I didn't even think about it most of the time. I just kept showing up, but I'd drop out of things that felt false.

I don't think anything has been resolved, as such. However, I do find myself rested, willing to try again.

Sort of. Once or twice, I've been tempted to think along worn lines, and it's interesting how quickly I recoil, like I found a snake in my bedroll. That gives me the most confidence that I'm headed somewhere real. My built-in bullshit detector is firing.

There is a divine aspect to detecting and rejecting bullshit. God is the arbiter of reality; bullshit is not of God. When something feels fake, it is good and right to find it and excise it.

I've been reading a book by David Benner, The Gift of Being Yourself, which addresses some of the same ideas.

Here's another idea in the book I've been playing with: Benner recommends a meditation where you imagine things about Jesus. You read a passage from the Bible where Jesus is doing something, and you just imagine details into the scene. Details about Jesus. The point is to imagine some personality and life into guy who is supposed to be the incarnation of God, but often comes up as a cryptic weirdo.

Since you can only imagine what you already know, I 'm wary of the line where that you start imposing your own limitations on Jesus. But I can trust that the Holy Spirit is riding herd on the exercise, and keeps me from wandering off.

So I did that every day last week. Some days more vividly that others. No epiphanies, but it did help me to feel like Jesus was realer, closer, and that's what I'm after. Intellectually, I'll continue to have questions, but if I can find a feeling of trust, of humanity... well, that's what I've been missing, isn't it?

I'm looking forward to seeing what happens when Advent trundles by this year. I'm hoping for something imaginative.

Further adventures in junk

Ever since I found the box of cameras, I've been more conscious of finding stuff on Wednesday walks. And I haven't had any great finds since. I have noticed other people on the job though.

Reflections:

1) There are pros out here. Other people have been at it longer, are better at it, and plain care more than I do. I see beat-up trucks cruising the streets piled with scrap metal and random stuff in the back. I see beat-down looking older people with roly carts looking for cans and bottles to turn in. This is what these people DO. I'm amazed I find anything at all with them on the circuit.

2) One man's trash does not automatically make another man's treasure. Seeing value is a matter of experience and opportunity -- that goes for garbage or stocks. Today I found a bunch of ball Christmas ornaments someone was throwing out. That's not going to be very interesting to professional scrappers, but it's just the sort of thing I plan to glue eyes to and try to sell in a couple of weeks.

3) Stay easy. I've been looking for more big, sexy scores like the vintage Apple computers I found. If I had been focused on that, I'd have missed the fun I picked up today. Not every day will be great, but the wider your definition of "great" is, the more likely you are to have one.

Interesting times for D und D

Last week, Goodman Games announced that they will start selling 3rd edition D&D stuff again. I am so far out of the loop these days I need binoculars to make out that there even is a loop anymore. But even from here I can see the sparks this thing is throwing off.

Goodman Games basically exists because of the Open Gaming License (OGL), which let outside publishers freely make D&D-compatible game products. It started with their weirdest product, Broncosaurus Rex, combining dinosaurs, science-fiction, the wild west, and the Civil War into one wonderful mashup that screamed, "Now I can publish my secret home campaign for reals!"

Things quickly got more commercial, and Mr. Goodman has made a nice little company out of the whole deal.

Goodman Games was maybe the first and definitely the loudest independent publisher to jump on the official 4e bandwagon. They proclaimed they were all in before the paperwork was done explaining exactly what "all in" meant.

But when the paperwork did come down, it said that official 4e publishers had to not produce any 3e stuff, and couldn't use the official "3e compatible" logo anymore (seen at right). Which meant that anything with the logo printed on it either had to get sold quick, junked, or covered with a sticker.

For most publishers, this meant, "sold quick, and junk the leftovers."

I don't know anybody's sales numbers for 4th edition-compatible products, although Mr. Goodman himself flashed around some comments earlier this year pronouncing the sales were good enough considering the market (my words, not his). However, I humbly submit that if 4e sales were all that great, Goodman Games wouldn't be reprinting old material.

If you thought sales of recent product were sufficient, if you thought they were going to be strong, you wouldn't go back to offering old product. You would invest in more new stuff. Yet one of the most successful independent publishers, who was ready to burn his boats a couple years ago, just refitted and relaunched the fleet. A fleet that potentially competes with his latest offerings.

From a symbolic standpoint, this is kind of a slap for 4e. From a reading-between-the-lines standpoint, this means that nobody except Wizards is making good money on it. And I wouldn't bet on Wizards, frankly. In fact, professionally speaking, I haven't.

Fjurthermore at 467

Bet you'd thought I'd forgotten about good old Fjurthermore, huh? Huh?

Well, maybe for just a while. But every couple of weeks I check in on it, and Meredith checks in on it, and the yeti hideaway grows bit by bit.

The place has grown large enough to require a police department now, but crime is kept very low thanks to vigilant volunteer abominable snowmen and women.

The best Fjurthermore has ever done in the rankings is 89th, and currently, it's at 95th. It's sort of interesting to be right on the neglect threshold.

Want to stop by and add to the population? Then click here!

Affiliated

I'm an Amazon affiliate now. When I mention various purchasable media here, I'll be including links to buy the thing on Amazon.

To many bloggers, this is a Duh-level decision. But I have always quietly deemed QT an ad-free zone. This blog was about writing down things I think, and would serve no other master. So I had to consider the decision to commercialize it via any third party. (Pushing my own stuff is fair game.)

I decided to do it based on a few factors. Amazon links are:

• unobtrusive
• substantively informational in addition to commercial
• testing grounds for my bid to become Internet Famous

I have to imagine pretty hard to see how this could become a problem. But just in case it does, I declare now that I will try to sell out as little as possible, and to be up front about it when I do.

Now go! Go and click on yesterday's board game links, and from there, commence all your Christmas shopping at Amazon in one purchase, without closing your browser window, within 24 hours of first click-through.

Today was a great day

Today was so full, I'm technically writing this on Sunday.

The important thing is that we went to some friends' house tonight, M and I had dinner with Jason and Kim (and Kim's brother, and their kids), and then a bunch of people came over for board games. I am blessed and happy to have such giving friends* and a loving wife.

Also, I kicked ass at Dominion and Power Grid, and Meredith won her game of Pandemic. High fives all around!



*And not just in Philadelphia. I have great friends all over. If you're my friend, then thanks, man (or lady)! You've probably been a better friend to me than I've been back, particularly if you're Monte and I haven't called you back even though you've called me twice now, and what is my problem anyway? Anyway, thanks, friend.

One trick at a time

I don't like repeating. That's one reason why I fear I'll never make much money off monsters -- once I've made one, I don't want to make another one like it. I'll never be an Ugly Doll maker, because Ugly Dolls, while wonderful, are basic, repetitive. I want to keep trying new things.

Here's a picture of some pattern monsters I've been making. (Most of them still need mouths.) Unlike my regular monsters, I have a pattern, I cut it out, I sew all the pieces together. This was supposed to make monsters faster so I could charge less, and theoretically make it up on volume.

Two competing conclusions come from this:

1) They all have the same basic shape, but they come out looking different anyway, so the differentness is good.
2) They same-basic-shapeness is still sort of boring, so I wind up trying to do different things to keep myself interested, which takes longer, which is bad.

Ultimately, they are faster than one-at-a-time monsters. If I focus, I can bang them out. I'm pleased that I natively prefer craftsmanship to commerce, but seriously brain, let's value commerce a little more highly, ok?

I was at the local Family Dollar store today, and this sign accosted me:


I'm a terrible eater, and even I was horrified to think of trying to make a meal out of the products shown there.

Who you know

Realized that there's a large-ish pool of good-enough writers in the world, of which I am a member.

After that, it's a matter of who you know and who likes you that determines who gives you what work.

There's a whole other stratum of high quality writers who get work according to merit and notoriety and making their own damn luck. But guys like me, it's about who you know.

I've been using this principle for a while to get the work I do get, but my network is small. Feels a little deflating it took me this long to come to that conclusion consciously. Maybe I need to start caring more about Media Bistro.

Update: Media Bistro kind of sucks for Philadelphia residents.

20 years of whut?

I don't remember anything about what happened 20 years ago. This whole Berlin Wall deal everybody's talking about, I remember hearing about it in my first year of college, but it doesn't resonate with me like the news tells me it's supposed to. It was this thing that went on in a place.

What else happened 20 years ago that I forgot?

• The Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska
• Tiananmen Square massacre
• Soviet forces pull out of Afghanistan (glad that Afghanistan issue is solved!)
  
• 6.9 earthquake hits San Fransisco

I remember all that stuff, but none of it clearly. It's like I stored it all on a 5 1/4" floppy.

Kiva: complex transactions continue to be complex

Remember a while back when I tried to get you to join my Kiva team? Well you still can, but a story in today's New York Times reveals that the money may not be hand-delivered by trained monkeys riding rhinoeroses straight into the wilderlands as I had hoped!

More likely, it goes to a microfinancer, who then throws our money into a big pile that funds a bunch of people:

Mr. Ogden goes so far as to question Kiva’s role in the lending process. “Kiva’s new documentation explains, if you read it, that Kiva is a connector not of individual lenders to individual donors, but of individual lenders to microfinance institutions,” he said. “If Kiva’s users want to be connected to an individual borrower, Kiva doesn’t do that, and so the big question is, do Kiva’s users want to be connected to a microfinance institution — in which case, why do they need Kiva?”

This is disheartening, because you to like to feel you're giving your $25 straight to Mr. Abubakari to help expand his grocery business, when you're really giving it to Sinapi Aba Trust, who, for all you know, might have given the cash to him six months ago, and now SAT has used your money for some other purpose altogether.

Ultimately, Kiva still appears on the level, and the funding you want to get done is still happening. It just appears to be less direct than the fiction we want to spin. I can live with that. Maybe you can too when you join the Quickstart group and we fund some other charitable microfinance group?

A day of rest from blogging

No, not really. Freelance deadlines, Art Shop in less than a month, and relationships to maintain every day. Doesn't leave a man as much time for blogging as he'd like. I'm selling a few RPG books again on eBay. Perhaps you'd like to look at those?

The Celebrity Normalization Plan

I was thinking about little Blanket Jackson today, about how those kids will basically never have a normal life. I can’t save them.

But there are thousands of celebrities in the world I can help. People who might have had a kernel of normalcy at one point, but now are so far into their loopy celebrity lives that they don’t know...

• Who to trust?
• Who to listen to?
• Who will say things that approximate reality, instead of what they want to hear?

I’m Jeff Quick, and I’d like to talk with you about my groundbreaking new Celebrity Normalization Plan. Here’s how it works:

You are a celebrity, who has realized that your coterie of sycophants won’t help you understand reality.

You leave them behind and come live at my house for an intensive two-week training course in how real people live their lives. We’ll cover:

• Budgeting
• Conversation
• Parking
• Reasonable clothing options
• Making your own meals
• Not getting what you want all the time
• Responding well to criticism
• Manners
• And much, MUCH MORE!
  

You may be wondering, "Jeff, why should I join your CNP instead of the thousands, perhaps millions of other normal people in the world who can help me?"

The answer may surprise you... I am not normal. I've never been normal, nor have I received any formal degrees or normalcy certifications.

What I do have is a lifetime studying normal people -- how they live, how they talk to each other, how they behave in public. And after a life of study, I have developed a totally convincing approximation of normality! I'm so seemingly ordinary that many of my closest friends would tell you that I am "normal."

I can do it for you too!

Get in touch with me through the following address: CNP +@+ q u i c k t h i n k i n g . n e t (please remove all spaces and plus signs before you send—this is actually fairly normal) and I'll get you started on the road to normalcy. Just imagine:

• Having realistic expectations
• Drinking in moderation
  
• Keeping romantic matters private

The normal life can be yours with my revolutionary Celebrity Normalization Plan!

Email today!

Self-check

Been reading a biography of Warren Buffet, and man, does that guy think differently from me.

On reflection, I decided today that writers get hired because of the specific, different, and useful ways they think. Writing is not the hard part. The act of writing is actually so easy, you get fat from inaction. Thinking is the hard part.

So I thought about my thinking, and I think I'm an undisciplined thinker for purposes of making a profit. I've never bent my brain in one direction long enough to have a unique, salable topicality.

Thanks to almost 4 years of blog-keeping, I've now got a record of the kinds of things I think about hard enough to put into non-paying words. Extrapolating from tag counts I see that I write about:

• Dungeons and Dragons
• games in general
• religion (American Christianity, mainly)
• writing
• creativity
• media

And in a meta sense:

• introspection
• vague ideas about making money

I'm not sure why I care so much about making money. I've always liked to think of myself as a person who didn't, but evidence refutes this fancy. I apparently want to be rich.

I just don't want to be a callous douchebag in the process. I don't want my life to get absorbed into a business. (Unless I love it. Then it's fine.)

So many small business owners talk about being exhausted from some marathon thing they just finished or some associate who just screwed them or something. Something stressful and draining. And man, I just want to be a hobbit, you know?

But I must not want it too bad, or I wouldn't keep wondering what's in Bree.

I'm beginning to think that a large part of a life well lived is learning the disparate set of tricks that circumvents your specific set of neuroses.

To do: Stay busy

I've got some freelance I need to be finishing, and I'm coming off a cold, but goddammit, today was the day my professional-painter next-door-neighbor had an open spot, and it wasn't raining, and it wasn't too cold, so today was the day he and I waterproofed the stucco on the side of our house.

Tonight I was seriously going to get something done, but tonight is the night that my friend with the new house and the brand new 2-weeks-early baby needs staples pulled because the floor sander comes on Friday and he doesn't have as much time to pull staples as he thought he would, and man, listen, regular Wednesday night Bible study is just going to get done later. My wife is taking them dinner, and I am about to go help pull staples out of the floor.

Other friends and acquaintances of mine are having problems which I will not go into here, and to the best of my limited ability, I am helping. I am being helped and I am helping.

Being busy is ok business. I like sloth, but basically busy is better. Jeff out.

Adult anxiety dream

You know that one dream where you show up for the final exam, and realize you haven't gone to class all semester and you're freaked out?

I had one of those a couple days ago, only with Art Shop. I dreamed I was setting up my booth, and I had almost nothing to sell.

As of now, at t-minus one month I've got:

• 7 big monsters done, 2 without faces.
• 2 mini monsters mostly done, with another 1 in process.
• 0 hats done, with 1 in process.
• 0 tetris magnet sets done, but all of them in process.
• 1 pillow done, 1 in process, raw materials for 2 more.
• probably 6 or 7 googly-eyed items done, with an unknown number coming. Depends on how many interesting objects I find in the trash in the next month.
  

The goal this year is to diversify offerings, both in product and price spread. Informal polling reveals that hats will likely be the big seller.

I'm not sure what conclusions I'll be able to draw. Realistically, I'm on schedule to have enough stuff done. I'm usually only comfortable though if I'm ahead of schedule. Tonight: magnets!

Review: Beasts of Burden

Let's get my bias out of the way: I like stories with talking animals. I was predisposed to like Beasts of Burden. I don't like scary stories, so I usually don't like horror comics.

But when I saw issue number 2 on sale at the comic store, with Evan Dorkin as writer, and Jill Thompson as illustrator, I immediately went to the back issue bin to find number 1. Bought them both, love them both.

The premise: A group of dogs and a cat band together to be the occultic protectors of a small town.

The review: Dorkin and Thompson do such a wonderful job of pulling you in. The characters are funny, and they have clear personalities based on their breeds, like a war movie. The art is a pleasant watercolor. There's banter, and then the horror clicks on. You can see the formula, but it's still so fresh.

Issue 1 was sort of weird, featuring a rain of frogs. A corgie. A character dies. Issue 2 was fantastically macabre. I was totally suckered by the horror of that story. I still think about it.

You can read the short stories where these characters debuted online at the Dark Horse Comics site. It's worth a few minutes to read.

you can also read the first 10 pages of issue 1 at the Dark Horse site.

Then go buy the comic to support this great thing.

Phil 'er up

I am willfully a Johnny-come-lately Phillies fan.

I care when a Philly team is doing well, and nod politely the rest of the time. This strikes me as just good citizenship.

This World Series makes it frustrating to be any kind of Phillies fan. Most of the Yankees' runs seem to be the Phillies' faults. Meanwhile, the Phillies are knocking balls out of the park, just not when any runners are on base. That's happened twice tonight (bottom of the eighth now.)

Movies October 2009

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
Fun! Funny fun! The animation wasn't Disney/Pixar too, which I liked. I like to see different animation succeed.

Spaced, Disc 1
Early Simon Pegg is rough. Didn't like Spaced much.

Where the Wild Things Are
Jonez and Eggers made the movie a thing that the book isn't. Many people's responses to the story are based on that. The movie deals with child-like emotions, but not in a child-friendly way. I liked it, but I'm still unclear about whether I enjoyed it. The hard-edged jostling of children, the monstrous part of childhood, comes through. That was hard to live through the first time... I'm not keen on being reminded of it.

30 Rock, Season 2, Disc 1
More big laffs.

Come Drink With Me
What sounds like a moody European art flick is actually a moody Chinese kung fu flick. It was ok.

The 36th Chamber of Shaolin
The training scenes were fantastic! They're going into my D&D game somewhere.

Web 3.0 is conceived

Cnet reports that ICANN has approved non-Latin character domain names.

Till now, the United States has ruled the Internet so thoroughly, it barely occurs to us that there's a not-United States on the Web. If you wanted on the Web, you needed to learn English or one of the more popular European languages.

Starting pretty much immediately, we will see that change. Also please note, there are somewhat more Chinese people than there are United Statesians. They will put up more Web sites than we will.

Before now, we've been the store. Now, we'll be one of the shelves.

Furthermore, this is an ALL NEW domain name land grab open for entrepreneurial types in Russia and China. All the Cyrillic sex puns are open for business.

For a little while, it will produce walled garden life for monolingual users, but that won't last. This Babel-esque turn will spawn new translation services, new keyboard applications, new businesses that most of us haven't even thought of yet, but a dozen people are already working on. A new Internet.

Cheating at Internet

I have written things this week, and been unhappy with them, and so shelved them to work on later, a typical ploy.

But simmering doesn't become a daily schedule. I've wound up back-dating things two days later, still dissatisfied. This is not how you do daily content, it's how you lie to historians. Back to work today, now with less ambition!

The repopularization of RPGs pt 2

Fourth edition D&D has been correctly identified as inspired by MMOs. This is a good idea on paper, but that inspiration was a doomed choice by Wizards' game designers. It would be better to capitalize on what tabletop is good at (i.e., interaction), and minimize what it is bad at (fiddly mechanics). Instead, they chose to create a game that largely removes judgment calls, yet apes a complex game form, while reducing the complexity.

Thus you get neither the full human involvement of tabletop games, nor the full complexity of MMOs. The worst of both worlds.

The only way this makes sense is if 4th edition is preparation for a 5th edition, a game where people sit around face to face with computers doing the complex mechanical parts. This mythical 5th edition D&D would play to the strengths of both forms of games simultaneously, and could herald a resurgence of tabletop RPGs.

This is not a new idea, but the technology has never been so tantalizingly real. Before, it's just been imaginable as a good idea. Now, we can do it.

Laptops seemed to embody this promise, but in practice the form factor has been too clunky.

The Surface would be excellent for this, except:
1) It's not even available to the public.
2) It's wildly expensive.
3) The surface of a Surface is small. It's like trying to play D&D on one of those sit-down cocktail Ms. Pac Man machines.

Those are all surmountable in 10 years or so. Problem number 4 is not:

4) A single character sheet contains far too much information to display on the play surface itself.

For most tabletop RPGs, the character sheet is the most-used, and I'll go so far as to say, most important reference tool in the game. This concept has come over pretty much unchanged to computer RPGs, where the game takes you to a separate screen/tab/what-have-you to present your character's capabilities.

The amount and detail of information is so dense, there's no way to put that on the same computer interface everyone else is trying to use. You need a dedicated "screen" for every player.

This is what the Apple tablet is for, and what the iPhone can do right now. It's theoretically inexpensive enough that every player could have one. Someone will write an app that keeps track of fiddly things for you. (Character sheet apps are available now.) All the tablets/iPhones logged into the same session could talk to each other. And human interaction returns to its proper role as arbiter of information.

This will require another revision of the rules, however, because 4th edition rules will be naively simple for all that processing power. And with the useful complexity shuffled behind the technological curtain, it will be more open for new and younger players.

Roleplaying games are coming back. It will never be a popular fad again like in Gygaxian times of yore, but only because it will never be a fad again.

The repopularization of RPGs pt 1

This video has been making the rounds of geekdom lately. It's a rough demo of D&D playable on the Microsoft Surface. It's popular with good reason, because it is the nascent future of tabletop RPGs.

D&D is nowhere near as cool as it was 20 years ago (much less 30 years ago), but it still has millions of players worldwide. World of Warcraft touts their 11 million subscribers. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that many people also play D&D once a month.

Eleven million people is a decent customer base, and professional hobbyists have programmed extremely complex programs (Campaign Cartographer and Fantasy Grounds to name two) which cater to them.

People talk about the wonderful social aspects of MMOs, but building and maintaining a friendship in an MMO is like building a ship in a bottle -- a lot of delicate work done through a desperately small opening.

The very best social platform is F2F. In games, you can only do this with a LAN party, a LARP, or around a table. LAN parties and LARPs are very resource intensive. They go away after a certain stage in life. Tabletop games remain viable regardless of age, station, or income.

The part of games that MMOs do best is automating tedious, precise mechanics. Players have complained about the difficulty of running 3rd edition D&D, but even that is checkers compared to the multiple thousandths-of-a-percentage mechanics a single home computer adjudicates running WoW.

More on this tomorrow.

Two Gen Con stories

When Gen Con was still in Milwaukee, the local Christian evangelists took to the streets to save souls through signs and pointed questions and pestering. I never scorned them -- they're brothers in Christ, even if they're from a branch of the family I don't talk to much. But as a gamer, I could see their tactics were poor.

I felt bad just ignoring them, so I would acknowledge them when I passed, which was usually the opening they wanted.

Except I don't need re-saving. I was exactly the person they didn't want to talk to. Yet somehow, that never seemed acceptable to them. I got into some strange conversations with evangelicals looking for something to convert rather than someone to love.
Story 1
A guy with long, stringy hair a beard, a baseball cap. Pictures and scripture painted on his truck. A sign condemning sinners stands in the street, next to the sidewalk. It was the day before the con started; all of us were still getting warmed up. A friend and I were walking back from Kinko's to the convention center.

"Do you know what you have to do to be saved?" he asked.
"Yes," I said.
"What is it?"
"Don't you know?" I asked him, confused.
"I do, I want to know if you do."
"What do you say it is?" (Jesus judo ends theological arguments way faster.)
"Don't you know?"
"Yeah, but I want to know what you say."

We did that routine two more times before he revealed,

"Read the Bible every day!"
"That's not it," I said. "You have to believe in Jesus to be saved. That's what the Bible says."

He was indignant. My friend was already half a block ahead of me, so I left to catch up. I saw the dude later in the convention, but I crossed the street because I didn't want to talk to him again.

Story 2
As I walked by a man with a sign and a Christian t-shirt, I said hello.

He asked me if I knew what would happen to me if I died that night. A classic hard-sell evangelical opener, one I've never used myself, because it's such a theological crotch kick.

I actually had somewhere to be, and was with friends again, so I didn't stop to talk. We had this whole conversation while I was on the move.

"Yes," I said, walking by him. "I'll go to Heaven."

"Well let me ask you something else," he said as I walked on, looking back. "Will you go to Heaven if you commit suicide?"

This is the Catholic test. If you think Catholics aren't real, true Christians, you can sometimes lure the confused (I mean, open) ones into a conversation this way.

"Yes." I said louder, because I was farther down the block now.

That's right!" he shouted.

"I know!" I shouted back.

New NPR shows

Thanks to a successful fall fund-raising drive, NPR will be featuring some brand new shows this winter:

• I Concur
• Quiet Sorts
  
• Movies on Radio
• Apply Liberally
• On Further Consideration (spin-off)
• Listening to the Listeners
• One Would Think That
• Barely Distinguishable Accents
• Pun With Sounds
• Marketplacebo (spin-off)
  
• Sincere Pretensions

Art Shop 2009!

Hey speaking of hats and entrepreneurship, Art Shop is coming up in five or six weeks.



I'll be selling monsters and hats and tetris magnets and some weirdo stocking stuffers. Stop by for FREE high fives!

Adventures in junking: Watch the birdie

My new favorite hobby is walking the dog on trash day. I always find something interesting in other people's garbage. Occasionally, it's interesting enough to bring home.

About a month ago someone left an Apple IIcPlus and a Macintosh SE on the sidewalk. I know! I sold them on Craigslist for $10 a piece, and found out later that I way undercharged for the IIcPlus.

A couple days ago, I was almost done with a walk and had found nothing worth bringing home. I was feeling a little sad about it when I wandered by a TV and a blender box. I wish I knew what to do with old TVs, because people junk them regularly in my neighborhood.

While Autumn nosed over that, I looked in the blender box, wondering if there was actually a blender in it. There wasn't.

It was incongruously full of mid-20th century cameras!



Here's a Brownie Hawkeye:



Here's an Argoflex Seventy-Five:


Here's a Kodak Duaflex III. (It has its original flash and instruction manual.):



Here's a bunch of plastic shoe inserts that were also in the box:



According to Internet, there's a community of photographers who use these to do Through the Viewfinder (TtV) photography, hooking up their digital cameras to take pictures through the viewfinders of these old cameras. I've clicked through a few galleries in Flickr, and I love that people are doing this! Hooray for people!

These cameras are not super-duper rare or expensive. But they might bring a few bucks. Plus, they're neat. If you know someone who might like to have one of these for a reasonable price, email me, k?

Haunted House

Two months ago I was killing time in a grocery store for some reason, looking through the magazine rack. One of the things I leafed through was a "Halloween crafts" special from some home decorating magazine.

Now I'm no mom or anything, but I saw a project inside that was cool, easy, and best of all, could be made from junk. It was like a snippet from Quickthinking Magazine.

Two nights ago, I finally got around to finishing. Here's the finished project in our front windows -- Ghosts! Super-cheap, fun ghosts!


They're made of milk jugs and white Christmas lights. Draw on faces with a Sharpie, and you're all done.

Happy Ghost close up:

Jesus and D&D

Every once in a while someone in my extended circle puts together the idea that I'm a Christian and a professional D&D writer and asks my advice on how I resolve conflict in those two things. The true, but uninformative answer is that there is no conflict, and now would you like some pie?

I don't usually give that answer, because it's not really the question being asked. The real question is, "I'm intellectually stuck between my religion and my joy. Can you get me unstuck?"

I usually can't, because that's between you and God, friend. But sometimes I can offer some helpful ideas the person hasn't come up with on his own. (It's always a dude.) Here are anonymized excerpts from what I wrote the other night to a friend who asked me that question:

Whenever I've talked with people about this kind of stuff, one of the primary things I try to get across is that God is the main thing. There's nothing particularly satanic about D&D/fantasy/speculative thinking, but if it's getting in the way of God, then God gets to win. I've talked to people who have a lot personally invested in D&D, and who, in conversations with family members, try to "win" their point. That's a tenuous place to even start, much less finish. God must be the main thing you're trying to get to, or else you're going to spin out on some useless tangent.

I find this to be true for me, and I suspect for you as well: There is something true and deep that fantasy sparks in you. Like pretty much everything in a world bent with original sin, it isn't inherently evil. Football, sailing, welding, D&D -- anything can be twisted toward evil if you go that way with it. It can also be straightened to bring out love and truth.

But since fantasy has particular meaning to you, it's more likely to do you good or ill than say, welding. Especially if it's affected you deeply enough that you've ever struggled with it.

Therefore, removing it from your life might protect you from harm. But it also walls off the potential good that could come. Which is more important to you? To God?

These are not rhetorical questions, and you might find they have different answers at different times. God might want you to back off from something at some point to protect you, but that doesn't mean God always wants that. That's why we have a new covenant. Jesus lets us replace law with relationship.

As a result, categorically eliminating things that have potential to be spiritually destructive becomes problematic. It creates a religion that forces you into a tiny, contorted shape.

Instead, look to a living, interactive God for answers, rather than a set of principles designed to protect you from evil. From this perspective, the way forward becomes: Spend as much time as you can going toward God, and as little time as you can trying to get away from evil.

The essential problem I have with the sorts of ideas concerned Christians typically espouse here is that they focus on the evil. That's not an inherently bad goal, but evil is a vanishingly small blot in the infinite light of God. If you're spending much energy on evil -- sensing it, fighting it, escaping it, protecting others from it -- you've started in the wrong place. You start from God. Then you depend on God to tell you if evil is going to be a problem. You don't need to suss it out yourself. God is the one in charge. Your job is to love on God.

God makes all things good. God will pull truth and love out of whatever you're in. There is nothing too "evil" for God to redeem; even genuinely evil things (without the irony quotes) can be redeemed.

If what you're doing wanders into sin territory, the Spirit will convict you about that. In the meantime, ferreting out sin is not your job.Your job is to love on God. Wherever you are, whatever you're into, count on God to make it good. Because He will. He does. All the time.

I'll end with scripture, since that's one of the means we're supposed to use to make sure we're not kidding ourselves with trumped up ideas. Philippians 4:8 says, "Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things."

If D&D points you toward true, noble, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, and praiseworthy things, then think about D&D. If it does not, follow the thing that does point you toward those. Do not spend any more time on Satan than you must. God is sovereign, and knows what you need. Pay attention to God, and you will be steered well.

Interestingly, the real problem between Jesus and D&D -- which no one has ever asked me about -- is the idea that you solve problems and advance in the world by slaying your opposition. That methodology is wildly unChristlike. Killing your enemy is exactly the opposite of what Jesus said to do. It has no place in the Kingdom of Heaven. A major premise of the game is a lie.

But it's a fun lie, so I keep playing.

The secret to slowing down time

Sunday I was at a baby dedication pre-party. My friends, Brian and Jill, had twins a few months ago. Sunday night the twins were "dedicated" at church, which is a little ceremony some of us Protestants like to do, where parents dedicate their children to God, and the community promises to help raise them well.

I think it started as a desire to do something for families with more liturgical leanings, when the church's prevailing theology doesn't allow for baptizing or christening. New parents seem to want to do something religious with their baby.

That's all secondary to the story I was going to tell.

Sunday afternoon, before the dedication, Jill had a little to-do at her house. Because she likes to-do things. So do I. They're nice.

Several of us were discussing why we liked our 30s better than our 20s. Mainly the answer seemed to be because you were an adult, but no longer a flailing jackass.

Brian's father was standing near the conversation. The man claims to be 73, but looks much younger. He is normally laconic to the point of invisibility. Nonetheless, I turned and asked him, "Which decade did you like best?"

Maybe it was the babies, or the room full of young eager ears, but apparently I had asked him just the right question. He was suddenly full of words about his personal history, his time in the Air Force, and the decades of the 20th century.

He shared with me the secret of making time go slow. "You know how when you're in high school and you're counting the days until you get out? And in the service, you count the days? As soon as you stop counting, time flies by."

"So keep finding reasons to count the days?"

"That's right," he said.

I expected some homily about not counting down, about living in the present. Goes to show what I know.

Monster hats

A few weeks ago, as a prototype, I made a monster hat. It eats your head.

In a seemingly unrelated incident, we went to Linvilla Orchards last week (I should be getting ad revenue from these people) and Meredith wore it around. Here is a picture of Meredith wearing the hat, holding an adorable child we picked at the farm.



A dude working there saw Meredith, and admired the hat. M said, "My husband made it."

Dude said his head was too big for most hats, and I said, "That's no problem, I can make you one."

Here is the hat I'm about to send to him.


In the past, I've said that I was more interested in the making than the selling of stuff. That's still true. But this year I've become more interested in the selling bit. How does one get one's product assembled and sold in these United States of America, I wonder?

I'm going to look into that some more. I never wanted to be a businessman; I wanted to be a creative. I'm becoming more willing to entertain the idea of mixing them though.

Ever dream this man?

I don't know if this man is real or fake or both, but I want it to be real.

Supposedly, this man has appeared in over 2000 peoples' dreams.

There's no attribution on the site, and no facts to be checked. Smells like it might be part of an ARG.

But I'd like it to be real.

Google Wave: invited

Ok, thanks to Jon, I have a Google Wave account. So far, I'm a little baffled.

My friend, Dave, summed up the stutter-start with Wave (on Google Wave):

Hmmmm. There's a lot of interesting and useful tech here. Now all I need is an idea big enough for it to fit into. you know, a reason to use it.

I can see the business application easily, but the social media-esque applications are missing me, especially with limited choice of people to talk to.

Furthermore, and I think this is my central dromedary hump, I have a mindset that works well with unbroken streams of time. The regular Internet is a pretty hefty distraction as is, but talkative friends whose work styles differ from mine, or whose jobs don't require as much focus, can wreck an afternoon.

I'm still very interested in Google Wave. I particularly like the idea of using it for event planning with large groups of people. I can also envision a robust PBEM DnD game. I plan to make time to fiddle with it in the upcoming weeks.

Smart, rich pt 2

Yesterday I started talking about how being smart and $3 still only gets you a latte.

I was having this conversation with my friend Steve on Monday out at Linvilla Orchards, a 300-acre farm where a third or so of those acres are dedicated to something like a harvest-time amusement park. All over the place, somebody at Linvilla has been exercising business canny.*

Now Steve is an intelligent guy. What you call a classic "idea man." A musician and actor, with a different set of networking contacts and personal inclinations, he could do well in advertising. As we discussed good ideas (or more accurately, as Steve doled out good ideas and I agreed with them), I came upon my own: funnel cakes.

Nobody doesn't love funnel cakes. But you only ever see them at special events: fairs and carnivals and such. Why don't funnel cakes make it into everyday life? Why don't restaurants sell them as dessert options? Why don't food trucks that already have built-in fryers sell these on Philadelphia street corners?

I don't know. I don't even know how to know. And all modesty aside, I'm a pretty smart guy. I should be able to figure this out. And then sell a crapload of funnel cakes.

Some people seem to have business canny easily, but that doesn't mean it can't be learned. The question for me is not even my usual Step One question, "Do you want it?" but maybe the Step 1.1 question: "What are you willing to give up to get it?"

This is, I think, the difference between business canny and your average smart person. The business canny person has sacrificed a lot to get that way. If BC guy was ever curious about tapirs, but couldn't see how to make money on them, tapirs got left. A smart person curious about tapirs gets a zoology degree and makes $35k shoveling tapir dung.

There must be some way to walk a middle line there, to meld curiosity with capitalism. The classic question, "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" is a misunderstanding of what smarts is good at. But it's not a bad question.

*My favorite application was a row of apple slingshots. All the apples that the orchard couldn't sell to eat, they sold for you to shoot at scarecrows with industrial strength slingshots. Turning garbage into money is fascinating to me.

If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?

We think intelligent people are kings in modern America. Even nerds in high school don't have it quite as bad as they used to, because everyone recognizes that nerds can grow up to become filthy rich. In America, even the classic "jocks" understand the brute strength available to the rich.

Interesting thing about making money though -- you don't need to be smart. Smart might even be a hindrance. A business canniness exists independent of intelligence, the kind that makes used car sellers wealthy and college professors lower-middle class.

(Business canny is related to, but separate from business savvy. Savvy is a practical understanding of business. Canny is a knack for working the angles. Both are different from being "smart.")

Here's a New York Times editorial from Calvin Trillin on the topic, entitled Wall Street Smarts.

“The financial system nearly collapsed,” he said, “because smart guys had started working on Wall Street.” ...

I reflected on my own college class, of roughly the same era. The top student had been appointed a federal appeals court judge — earning, by Wall Street standards, tip money. A lot of the people with similarly impressive academic records became professors. I could picture the future titans of Wall Street dozing in the back rows of some gut course like Geology 101, popularly known as Rocks for Jocks.

I've spent a lifetime being smart, and that's only gotten me partway to where I want to be. I'm going to talk about this some more tomorrow.