Frogmarch

For over a year, I've been trying to get hired to write for computer games professionally. This is one of the harder things I've ever tried to intentionally do. There are many people vying for a very few jobs, and I'm not ideally situated to act on it.

I'm doing it anyway.

I've dithered on whether to include my "game professional" blog link here, because these sorts of new ventures are fragile, and can be killed by premature exposure.

However, my definition of "premature" is often equivalent to someone else's "adolescent." I don't like revealing things until they're basically done. The elephantine problem with that schema is that I seldom have the resources to do something completely by myself. So the half-baked thing is either revealed as half-baked, or worse, never revealed. So I'm kicking this one out while it's still young. It's rough, but I'll try polishing in public and see how that works out.

To further my streak of mixed metaphors, let me add: My good, old friend Tom Briscoe used to say, "If you don't execute your ideas, they die." Most of my best ideas expire before they make it to the executioner's stand.

This is one more halting attempt to get one up to the guillotine.

At your leisure, peruse Dire Curious, my "breaking into the game biz -- again" blog. DC serves several purposes for me.

1. Professional development: You don't have to have a gaming blog to get hired on gaming, but I'm not knowledgeable or well-connected enough (yet) to skip it.
2. Personal marketing: I'm terrible at this, and I need the practice.
3. Experimentation with Wordpress: So far, I prefer Blogger, but everybody says it's great. I need to find out if it is or ain't first-hand.
4. Disciplined writing: I know I'm a more capable writer than I ever show anyone. I can be better. I have to do it more to make it real.
5. Another try: This attempt to "do something" may get left by the curb in a few weeks like so many other projects in my life, and I'll feel the same sort of sickly shame I always feel if that happens. But I'm pretty sure I believe the truism that you have to try a bunch of things and see which one sticks. So this is the next one of the bunch.

I'll keep a link to DC in the Ventures sidebar, but I'll probably never link back. On this blog, I give myself permission to appear neurotic and lazy and unhireable. Those traits don't belong where I'm trying to behave industriously and professionally.

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.

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.

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.

Interesting article: How to Set Goals When You Have No Idea What You Want.

This is a larger problem than most productivity gurus seem to understand. In my experience, when I know what I'm after, I don't have a problem taking the steps to get it (implicit in those steps is the grail of "goal setting"). Even if it's a multi-step process, even if it's a years-in-the-making multi-step process, I'm cool.

For instance, one of the current things I'm after is a return to full-time work in games, and ideally I'd like to work as a writer at BioWare in Austin. Pretty specific! I know what I want. Goal setting is, therefore, commensurately simple.

The thing that makes me surf the Web all day is a failure to discern what it is that I'm after. I'd like to write comics, but where am I headed with that? I dunno. I've got some ideas, some places I've cast around into, but no real goal yet. I don't know exactly what I'm after yet.

I'd like to be internet famous, but there's a whole lot of unknowns there, so I spend more time dreaming about that than goal setting.

This article is (necessarily) vague, but it's the kind of place wandery people like me need to start. We don't need a roadmap. We need a destination.

Finding that is something that "8 Tips to Organize Your Workspace!" will not help to discover. If you're lucky, that kind of "productivity" junk is just noise. If you're unlucky, you start organizing your workspace and think you're making progress.

The role of grit in becoming

Recent story from the Boston Glob, The Truth About Grit.

Executive Summary: Old man science is beginning to agree that hard work and perseverance are key indicators of success, more than intelligence or talent.

I've been thinking more about how one gets things done, intentionally without being a giant dick. I can think of lots of used car salesman types I've known, people who achieve what they want at the cost of good will. Or more gently, people for whom relationships are not as important as their other goal. Being kind or giving does not help that person achieve his or her goals, so those facets get jettisoned.

Single-mindedness is not a fantastic trait by itself. Accomplishing a well-lived life requires a tuned interplay of a number of important things. Some people seem to be able to tease out that fine tuning, seemingly naturally.

I am none of those people, but this reminds me that I need to get back to my freelance writing, away from blog writing. More later.

In the meantime, to find more about the Grit Study, go here: http://www.gritstudy.com

Information: free and expensive

Taken from Wikipedia
Stewart Brand at the first Hackers' Conference in 1984, in the following context:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.


From me
Information is so valuable that there has to be a way to profit from it. It's just that information's value, when decoupled from a physical medium, is extremely difficult to gauge.

Information is unquantifiable. "Cows go moo." seems like a single mote of information, but fractally smaller bits of information are implicit in that three-word sentence. Like what a cow is. How a moo sounds. Why "go" is an appropriate verb in this instance.

At this level, information is so voluminous, that you can only charge for it in bulk. In that way, all books are like newspapers -- you bundle in important parts with the unimportant parts, without knowing exactly what any given buyer deems "important." You hope people will pay to get the parts that are important to them.

Information is also extremely context-sensitive. Noise to one person is life-saving info to another one. Depends on whether you stand next to a train track, or on it. Which one would pay to hear that whistle?

Don't have a point today. Just thinking.

Insight on doing what you "like"

I don't know nothing about Paul Graham. He appears to be some sort of venture capitalist or start-up expert, or something. I haven't bothered to research him. But as I continue on my drunken path toward becoming a person who works for himself and accomplishes things, his essays give good info I don't find anywhere else. For instance, this excerpt from an essay titled, How to Do What You Love:

It used to perplex me when I read about people who liked what they did so much that there was nothing they'd rather do. There didn't seem to be any sort of work I liked that much. If I had a choice of (a) spending the next hour working on something or (b) be teleported to Rome and spend the next hour wandering about, was there any sort of work I'd prefer? Honestly, no.

But the fact is, almost anyone would rather, at any given moment, float about in the Carribbean, or have sex, or eat some delicious food, than work on hard problems. The rule about doing what you love assumes a certain length of time. It doesn't mean, do what will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period, like a week or a month.

The whole thing is worth reading.

Changing blog focus for fun and profit

Who's There? is a pdf by Seth Godin about blogs and using them for business purposes and gaining readership. It's long, but not overly long. In colonial times, they would have called it a "pamphlet."

Godin boils blogs down to three types:

cat blogs – about your life and whatever happens to you
boss blogs – directed at a defined group with an intent to communicate to/among them
viral blogs – meant to spread ideas, written for strangers

I'm not sure those comprise an ideal taxonomy. What is dooce.com? Or kottke.org? These examples seem to straddle all three categories. But sans better alternatives, I'll use Godin's terms.

Quickthinking.net is currently a cat blog. I’d like to think that QT is at least an above-average cat blog, but without data to confirm or deny, that thinking is more accurately classified as “hoping.”

To become Internet famous and stop having to work, I'll need a viral blog. To incorporate 1,000 True Fans, it'll also need to be a boss blog.

I don't think QT is this viral/boss hybrid. I'm not sure yet whether I'd change it if I knew how. But I will need some bloggy Web presence to pull off the IF dream. The thing I haven't discerned yet is: what do I care enough about to become useful doing?

This is the essence of building a following on the Internet. You must be useful. I would hate to think that I wasn't useful yet in life. But again, we run into that think/hope disparity.

Still thinking. (And hoping.) If you have anything to add, leave a comment or email me.

Social networking sites: current thinking

Here in 2008, becoming Internet famous -- particularly the version where you don't have to work -- requires you to be active in social networking. I'm already a member of LinkedIn and Goodreads, but I'm not very active on those, and also those basically don't count.

The ones that count are Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, and Twitter. You might argue that that last 3 are not social networking sites, but I'm afraid you'd be wrong. MySpace is currently decreasing in importance, but still worth the effort if you're planning on becoming Internet famous.

I've never thought that social networking was a waste of anyone's time. I think it's neat! But the upside of social networking has always been outweighed by the downside for me:

1. There are people who want to harm you, and I'm told some of them have Internet access. I prefer to avoid their attention. One way to do that is to not post personal information in a broad forum.
2. I like to look before I leap. Social networking is a brave new world of mistakes to be made, and I would like someone else to make most of them, please.
3. I try to resist being, or being treated as a consumer. Social networking exposes me to a lot of new advertisers -- people who see me as a wallet with eyeballs, not a person to be loved. Quixotic as the attempt is, I still try to limit my exposure to these people.
   

However, if I intend to become Internet famous and stop having to work, these thick doors of behavioral assessment must have chunks removed, to become something more like portcullises.


Here's an article I read recently on how to protect your privacy on Facebook.

They have one fascinatingly ugly hole in their thinking: that you should never put your home address in a publicly visible place.

Of course I agree! But if you are an adult, and your first and last name, and city of residence are available, so is your address. Even if your address is unlisted in the phone book, if you own property, City Hall will tell anyone who asks.

Don't make it easy for identity thieves. But don't think you're hiding anything. Name and city are all a clever person needs to find an unnerving amount of information about you.

Three ideas for professional blogging

Here are three semi-decent ideas I've had for starting blogs and developing an online niche and persona. Any opinions anyone?

Gumption Train: Less a productivity blog, and more a coming of age story. I'm not very good at getting stuff done. But I'd like to be. This idea would combine sort of a productivity blog and a personal journal, with frequent invites and group activities for readers to take part.

Freyq: A monsters blog. News, notes, jokes, and whatnot about monsters and monster-related issues. More of the fun kind of monster than the scary kind, but we'd do scary too. This also ties in to selling my own handmade monsters, and resides at what I think is a rich intersection between crafters and geeks.

Games: I don't have a good hook for this, I just really like games, and would like to be professionally involved in them again, even peripherally. I don't have a voice or a good niche audience in mind for this. Maybe an aspirational thing for people trying to get into games as pros?

1,000 True Fans

Kevin Kelley, who is more than Internet famous in his own right, developed the idea of 1,000 true fans. The idea is practically a toss-off from the bigger concept he helps propagate, the long tail.

In brief, the 1kTF idea is that if 1,000 devoted fans of an artists will pay $100 a year for that artist's output, then that artist can make a decent living, cut out a lot of middlemen, and cater very specifically to those 1,000 fans.

People have criticized the idea for reasons fair and unfair. What I haven't seen in the whole discussion are more realistic permutations of the idea.

The idea I'm more interested in investigating is something like 5,000 fair weather fans willing to pay $20 a year. It's actually a lot of effort to cultivate 1,000 people. But it's less difficult to attract the magpie interests of 5,000 people.

What you'd really want is a mix of say, three different tiers which I will call, off the top of my head: true fans ($100+ a year), casual fans ($50 a year), and fair weather fans ($20 a year). For monetization purposes, I might even add a fourth tier of rat's ass fans, who don't give a rat's ass about the artist or the work, but will spend $5 for a clever little doodad on impulse. Which might well bring us back around to a micro-long tail within a single artist's realm.

Cultivating fans at these three different tiers is probably the more doable way to pull this scheme off.

Becoming Internet famous

I've been considering trying to become Internet famous lately. Mainly because I don't want to have to work.*

Internet famous seems to mean different things depending on who's writing the article, but this is not about attention. The goal is to have my output and persona known in a large, but shallow pool of watchers. And to make a decent living off it.

This will be hard, because I am reclusive by training, and occasionally by nature. But the Internet provides a decent curtain to pull when I want time off. At heart, this is about marketing, which I am bad at, yet intrigued by.

Here is what I think I need to become Internet famous and stop having to work. These may change:

1. A differentiator. Something clever and unusual, but not off-putting that will draw people to pay attention. It doesn't have to be MEMEME!!! It can be an artistic product such as a comic or just a clear viewpoint, well presented.

2. Consistent public appearances. Keep a blog or a Flickr page or a message board or a social networking site, and put in appearances/updates every day or more. Ideally, do all of these things, because more exposure leads to more fame.

3. At least 5 years. This is not a short-term project. One set of Tron costume pictures is a jolt in the right direction, but not the whole race.

4. Something to sell. This is how I stop working. I have further thoughts on this which I will discuss tomorrow.




Links:

Here is a simple how-to for becoming Internet famous.

There is an Internet famous class at Parsons New School for Design in New York. I doubt I'll be attending, but I can study the syllabus at their Web site.

Excerpt from a Time article about the class:

For all the tricks and shortcuts his students have learned — about how to use headlines, keywords and tags to attract the attention of search engines, and how to use social networks to seek out the audience that will be most receptive to what you have to say — Wilkinson said the key to attaining "legitimate famo" is the same as it's always been: quality, tenacity and persistence.

*"Work" does not equal "effort" in this scenario.

Another Jonathan Coulton Post

Here's a New York Times article about JoCo and the phenomenon of the Internet's effect on B-level creators. The author wants to suggest that the price of putting you in touch with your niche is hours every day of contact with them: answering emails, updating message boards, and appearing at online "events."

This is certainly ONE way to do it, and I am ready to believe it's the best way. But is it the only way? That level of interaction is exhausting.

This is not entirely academic for me right now.