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.

Monopoly City

I give Monopoly a lot of crap, but that's only because it deserves it. Hasbro is a game company that, on a corporate level, decided to make quality in games a second-tier consideration. To use an analogy, they built hotels on St. James Place and Tennessee Avenue -- not the "best" properties in the game, but the ones you land on most often.

Hasbro has milked Monopoly like the prize cow it is. Everybody with an IP has licensed the game (which is really just lawyer insurance because you can't copyright or patent a game mechanic). And every few years, they produce a new clutch of games with the word "Monopoly" on the front, and I assume those sell well enough to make it worth doing.

This year Hasbro produced Monopoly City. On boardgamegeek.com the reviews boil down to "It's not that different. If you didn't like Monopoly already, you won't like this one either."

BUT! There's a free Web game to promote it, Monopolycitystreets.com. Great idea Hasbro! It's got a good gimmick, in that you're buying real-world city streets courtesy of Google Maps. It's fun to look at your neighborhood and buy your street and build tall buildings on it.

It's still a crappy game though. There's a little strategy, but not a ton. Like board-game Monopoly, it's a game about wheeling and dealing, because the cheap stuff you start with won't get you to the top. You'll need to save up money and buy other players' more profitable streets, because the best stuff is already taken. Except why would a player sell their best stuff?

The only reason I can think of is that the player got bored or distracted and dropped out. Player interaction is extremely limited, so you can't negotiate well. The nominal endgame (Be the richest real estate magnate in the world!) is sort of boring. Only the highly motivated will work on it. Find a half dozen of those people (who I'm pretty sure they're already playing) and the top of the game will stagnate.

The good thing though, is that you can see on the blog that the people running the game are taking this seriously. There's room for improvement too. Right now, it's a really nice skeleton of a game, and they could make it more. If tended properly, this could become the Hasbro's own social networking platform. That's worth keeping an eye on.

Regardless of my callous criticisms, it's fun for a while. In case you want to get into it, you can read tips and FAQs at the fan site: monopolycitystreetshq.org.

Also, if you're related to me in Philadelphia, I already own your street. OH IT'S ON.

More ooky science

I wish the future would hurry up and get here already. I'm tired of all this mortality.

Baby goop heals wounds 3x as fast
They call it "baby butter" in the story, but my term is more marketable, I bet.

Grow teeth like sharks
Wouldn't it be awesome never to have to brush your teeth again? M and I are both (unfortunately) dedicated teeth grinders. This would allow us to not have to solve our deep-rooted stressors! Great idea!

Synthetic lethality kills cancer tumors
I'm frightened and thrilled by the phrase "synthetic lethality." That's a dystopian term waiting for application. Who knew it wouldn't involve androids and laser pistols?

Pixar, stickin' it to the Man!

I wrote the skeleton of this post a few months ago, and forgot to post it. During Blogaday though, nothing goes to waste.

How is Pixar stickin' it to the Man?

By not caring about the Man. That is the very best way the Man gets stuck:

Perhaps Wall Street would not care so much if Pixar seemed to care a little more. The co-director of “Up,” Pete Docter — who also directed “Monsters Inc.” — said in a recent question and answer session with reporters that the film’s commercial prospects never crossed his mind. “We make these films for ourselves,” he said. “We’re kind of selfish that way.”

John Lasseter, a co-founder of Pixar and now Disney’s chief creative officer, routinely says in interviews that marketability is not a factor in decisions about what projects to pursue. Instead of ideas that feel contemporary, he aims for stories that are rooted in the ages.

“Quality is the best business plan” is one of Mr. Lasseter’s favorite lines.

I don't know what my takeaway from this is, but I like remembering and posting things about creative ventures that inspire me. And really, who doesn't Pixar inspire?

Empire of Animals

I ran across a bit about the ravens of the Tower of London, and how King Charles II ordered that there was to be at least six ravens at the Tower at all times, to forestall the fall of the British Kingdom.

Among all the peoples of the Earth, the British most enjoy taking nonsense seriously. So to this day, there is a full-time Raven Master among the guard at the Tower, and numerous raven understudies are kept in the wings lest tragedy befall the main six.

As I read this, it seemed like Britain had several of these superstitions. A couple quick searches netted:

The London Stone
This is the rock the Romans used to measure distances from throughout their British holdings. According to the BBC, the rock was mentioned in works by Shakespeare, William Blake, and Charles Dickens. The legend is that as long as the stone is safe, London will flourish.

The Barbary Apes of Gibraltar
These monkeys, or possibly apes -- macaques, whatever those are -- live on the rock of Gibraltar. It's said that if anything happens to these monkeys, Britain will lose control of Gibraltar. I've actually been there, and those monkeys don't seem all that politically savvy. I think Britain's put a lot on a longshot here.


Anybody know any other objects or animals that could lead to the downfall of the British empire? Mad cows? Simon Cowell?

Nobel Prize 2009: from Oslo, with prejudice

I almost didn't want to mention the president's receiving of the Nobel Peace Prize. I wasn't sure I had anything to add to the embarrassingly universal understanding that the award manifested as a bald political statement this year.

But Maggie's Farm pointed me to a collection of other 2009 nominees, and I hope that maybe I can do just a smidge to help bring attention to people who might have been more deserving by spreading that information.

The partial list is at the Weekly Standard blog. This is only a partial list because the Nobel Foundation does not reveal the nominee list for 50 years. They have revealed that they received 205 nominees, 33 of which were organizations. Some nominees were made public in other ways, however.

Some of the nominations appear to be merely symbolic. (They're all symbols, it's just that some are only symbols.) A couple, notably Dr. Denis Mukwege, are doing good, hard work in the world, and could probably get a lot done with a cool $1.4MM.

However, even the revealed nominees deserving of honor do not seem to meet the criteria set forth in Alfred Nobel’s will, that the prize be be given, “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

Despite the roused rabble, President Obama seems to have made strides in that direction. His administration has made unambiguous noises toward nuclear disarmament, Middle East peace, and diplomacy with pugnacious nations. But those strides are not fraternity or abolition. They are just overtures. Nobel's original goals appear lost and irrelevant to the considerations of the recent Prize Committee.

Despite his original misgivings, maybe this year we can all agree to remember that Mr. Nobel invented dynamite instead. At least its constructive potential is clearer than what the Prize has become.

Paint fumes: the solution

My latest million damn dollar idea: Scented Paint.

We've been painting our bedroom, and the work has been dormant for several days due to travel, sickness, and ennui. But even dried paint still smells a little bit like wet paint.

BUT! What if it was lilacs instead? Or bubblegum -- whatever people like to smell, I don't know. What if you could engineer a way for that smell to linger, so your freshly painted bedroom smelled like lilacs for months after? You could make it scratch 'n' sniff. Unscrupulous landlords could hide odors AND stains by painting over them.

Some chemical scientist get on that, and send me my royalty check when you're done.

Le Voyage dans la BOOM

We shot a missile at the moon. We punched the moon.

I think we can all agree that humans in America got problems, but I'm gonna risk some hyperbole to say I don't think there's ever been a more amazing time to be conscious.

Kiva.org microlending

My sister-in-law, Alison, gave me a gift certificate to Kiva last Christmas, and I've enjoyed it a lot. If you haven't heard of Kiva, here's my plug.

Kiva is a charitable microfinance organization. You put, say, $25 into the system, and choose a borrower to lend it to. A bunch of other people throw in some money too, until together you reach the amount the borrower asks for. A few months later, the borrower has invested the money, seen a return, and pays you and your co-lenders back. Sweet!

I've been doing this all year, and it seems to work great. I've already made 3 loans, mostly with the initial gift certificate moolah. In fact, it works so great, that I decided to start a lending team! And you can join!

If I were to send you an email inviting you to join, this is what it would say:

I want to recruit you to my lending team, Quickstart, on Kiva, a non-profit website that allows you to lend as little as $25 to a specific low-income entrepreneur across the globe. You choose who to lend to - whether a baker in Afghanistan, a goat herder in Uganda, a farmer in Peru, a restaurateur in Cambodia, or a tailor in Iraq - and as they repay the loan, you get your money back.

If you join my lending team, we can work together to alleviate poverty. Once you're a part of the team, you can choose to have a future loan on Kiva "count" towards our team's impact. The loan is still yours, and repayments still come to you - but you can also choose to have the loan show up in our team's collective portfolio, so our team's overall impact will grow!

I wouldn't try to replace conventional giving with this (some people don't have the wherewithal to pay you back, even though they still need help), but I love being part of it. Join Team Quickstart, and start loaning money today! Like, now!

It's official: Monopoly might last forever

According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, the numbers have been crunched, and a game of Monopoly has a 12% chance of never ending:

Anybody who has ever played Monopoly knows the feeling. The game can be interminable, with no victor ever seeming to emerge.

That's a real mathematical possibility, Cornell University researchers said in a new study. They calculate that there's a 12 percent probability of a simple, two-player game of Monopoly never concluding.

Does this make Monopoly an even more quintessentially American game?

Thanks to Purple Pawn for the tip-off.

SkyMall demographics

Spending a quarter of a day on airplanes this weekend (and another quarter in airports), I had a lot of time to peruse the literature. I did the crossword puzzle twice, and looked through the SkyMall catalogue a bunch.

As far as I can tell, SkyMall thinks its customer has:

• children (or grandchildren)
• an ornamental interest in geography
• strong fear of home burglary
• a small dog
• a cat
• a large dog
  
• a number of minor aches and pains
• annual income over $200,000
• a pool
• hypochondria
• a preoccupation with getting the best or most in anything they acquire
  
• poor judgment in consumer goods

It's like they know me!

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.

Google Wave hello

I have a reductive approach to complexity. When anything starts to get complex, I try to do without it. This is a principal reason why I would never be a good engineer.

Sometimes I wonder what I miss by eschewing complication. I'm aware of technological generalities, but almost never the specifics. I don't get trendy things until they're not trendy anymore. Sometimes that means I don't get them at all.

It also means I spend a lot of time in the boondocks. I often wonder if I've made a mistake for valuing things the way I do. But man, two roads diverged in the yellow wood, you know what I'm saying?

Enter Google Wave. I think I'm supposed to be excited? I am a little excited. Curious. Interested. But, like when gmail started up, you can only get in with an invitation.

So I applied. This is what I said:

I'm a semi-neo-Luddite, a late adopter, but a curious one.

I want to see how this thing works. I want to see if it's something I'll want to use, or if it will be another distraction, another new system to learn that becomes outmoded in 18 months.

I want to see. Let me see.

So we'll see.

On Twitter a couple days ago, Merlin Mann said:

Guess I'm resistant to any tool that thinks my REAL problem is not having fast enough access to what 1000s of strangers just typed.

That is my flavor of Internet cynicism right there. If someone at Google gives me the nod, I'll report here.

The Rules

For all the time QT has been around, I've operated with a set of rules I've never spelled out here. I've never done it mainly because it's almost a full-on swipe from someone else, who made such great rules, I wanted to follow them too.

His name is Robin Laws, a writer and game designer who seems to have the personal resources to do nearly anything he desires, and has chosen to write for roleplaying games. Fascinating.

Here are my rules, based lavishly (though not slavishly) on those of Mr. Laws:

1. I must strive to be interesting. I owe it to you and to me to make something worth reading when I write.
2. I will not write an entire post apologizing for a long absence. If you see a long absence in writing, it is because I have not taken the time to work at being interesting. When I make the time again, I will skip straight to the interesting part.
3. At no point will I tell you what I had for breakfast.
4. I will avoid links and one-liners to the latest Internet point of interest. The dramatic chipmunk was truly hilarious. It was hilarious all those other places you saw it too.
5. My writing will not serve as a bulletin board for petty complaints. I shall seek to avoid detailing:

• Minor illness. Unless it is integral to the more interesting anecdote I am relating.
• Computer problems. This one actually isn't about you. I find this boring.
• Bureaucratic annoyances. Although I have many.
• Anything else that might characterize a tween's cat blog.
  

Sometimes I break my own rules. I recommend not analyzing the rules too deeply. Trust, gentle reader, that I am looking out for you, and that there are guidelines to help the process.

Movies August-September 2009

Five Deadly Venoms
I came to this movie out of duty, because it is a "classic" of Asian cinema in America. But then I liked it. The dubbing was awful, but beyond that, the movie is lean and low. It starts fast, and gets where it's going. The who's who plot is so ambitious, I didn't expect the movie to follow through on it like they could have -- it just would have been wildly confusing. But because of that, the gears of the story were in the open. There's no character development or storytelling filigree to distract from how things go down. A major character dies, and you keep on rolling. Superb.

Knocked Up
I didn't find the main story here terribly enjoyable or believable. The performances that stay with me are Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann. Their relationship and interactions and thought processes are fascinating. They're not a great couple.

You know these people? They don't work well together. Their habits and tendencies and preferences fight on a fundamental level -- they drive each other crazy. But they're still hanging in as a couple. They're holding it together through main strength. Fantastic depiction of that dynamic.

Like Pineapple Express, I listened to the commentary track hoping for creative insights, and the string of anecdotes that Apatow and Rogen deliver disappoints a little. But the more I think about it, the more instructive it becomes. It's not class. The learning is between the lines.

30 Rock, season 1, disc 3
Slightly less funny? But only slightly. I feel bad for Liz Lemon that her boyfriend moved away. The commentaries were awful. One person, alone, who basically just watched the episode, laughed sometimes, and complimented every new actor that appeared on screen.

3:10 to Yuma
This was a fine western, and a fine movie. Great characterization. S'funny that the two lead actors in this story set in the American West were British- and New Zealand-born. Also, Ben Foster did a bang-up job as Charlie Prince. I want to see more of him now.

Kung Fu Panda
Sometimes I'm torn, because if I had one really good character, and I made scads of money playing that one good character very well, I would consider it a blessing and a virtue. But When Jack Black does it, it seems boring and lazy.

Miss Potter
Here's what I found most interesting about this movie about Beatrix Potter. There was very little resistance in the main character's arc, and what little came about was mostly solved by other characters. She didn't have an arc, she had a long line, and then a violent bend about 3/4 of the way through the movie. Beatrix Potter in this story was a prettified cipher, and talking to her animated paintings made her appear to the viewer as psychotic rather than charmingly imaginative. Maybe I'm being too harsh? If you're reading these words, I haven't changed my mind yet. The animation was lovely, however. Wish there'd been more of that!

Heroes of the East
Another Shaw Bros. martial arts movie, and another fun kung fu story. More please!

Blogaday 2009 -- Now!

Blogaday has become a yearly phenomenon here at QT. On some level, I'd prefer Blogaday to be perennial rather than annual. But I collapse under pressure.

Instead, I slide challenges to myself casually, leisurely. If I were to direct myself to begin writing on my blog every day, I would fold like an accordion. However, if I conduct a series of increasingly demanding "experiments" on myself, I come closer to achieving whatever goal I'm actually after. My mind balks at conquering the mountain, but clambers happily if it thinks we're just scaling to take in the view. I do not understand it, but it is so.

This is all my roundabout introduction to Blogaday 2009 -- the 60-day trial! In previous years, Blogaday was a November occurrence, my nonfiction response to NaNoWriMo. In just 3 years though, it's become its own animal, a modest self-experiment with discipline, consistency, and composition.

This year I'm experimenting with doubling the length. Please, stop back every day for the next two months. I will strive to be interesting! And hope in your good nature when I am not.