The Price of Green Power

Is apparently lower than regular power.

You'll remember earlier this year when I implored Puppeteers to consider switching to green power for only $16 a month, and mentioned that PSE gave me coupons to buy CFL bulbs to replace the regular bulbs in our house. That was a follow-up to previous posts about my switch to green power. I spent those coupons and about $40 more on switching to green power, and since I just got my PSE bill for the last month I wanted to note a trend.

For the fifth month in a row, my power bill has been below $100. Last summer - I just checked and did the math - my average bill was $114.59. Since, if anything, I've been running the Xbox 360 more this summer than last, I can't help but think those CFL bulbs had something to do with the savings.

PSE told me my bill would be about $15 more a month, but instead it's dropped by about $16 a month. When compared to last summer's power bills, I've already saved the cost of the CFL bulbs and from here on out the savings are just money in the bank. Or, it offsets and even one-ups the cost of "going green."

Rethinking the whole green power thing? Yeah, I would too.

So what have you done lately?

Blogging Habits Revisited

At the end of May, I wrote that my blogging habits had changed considerably since I started this blog back in 2003. With the addition of the Share feature in Google Reader and the new widget on the side of this blog, it's changing even more. Posting a quick link with some commentary is now redundant, especially because Google Reader looks like it will let us comment on shared items in the future as well. But the shift in habits I noticed before seems to be continuing as well; the last couple of posts I made about marketing took several hours to write apiece. At least, I wrote them over the span of several hours, putting them down and coming back as I would a magazine article rather than a quick one-off blog post.

That's how I've started to treat the blog - more like a personal magazine I'm publishing rather than a list of links or an account of what I had for breakfast. I think the end result is better (and hopefully the Puppeteers agree!), and it's awesome that Google gave me the tools to really focus on adding more valuable content to the Puppet Show while still continuing to share the things I think are cool.

I'm sure I'll be updating this thought thread yet again in six months, so stay tuned.

Yummers!

It's safe to say Google Reader has completely changed how I receive information. I'm basically living in an RSS world now; Google Reader has become a second inbox where I obsessively look for updates on blogs, conversations and other sources of news (I love that my Xbox 360 activities are streaming through an RSS feed - say what you will about Microsoft and the Xbox 360, they hit a grand slam with the machine's Web 2.0 capabilities.) And the best part is, I can easily share interesting posts (see the new sidebar, which has - yes - supplanted my blogroll) and keep them for later - and as of a few days ago, I can search them too.

A long time ago I signed up for Del.icio.us, but haven't really used it for much. I gave it another look last night, and realized that I can stream my bookmarks as an RSS feed right into my Google reader, removing yet another degree of utility spread out over too many applications. Now I have a "Del.icio.us tag" button on Firefox, and when I read an interesting webpage it's a matter of tag, label, receive in RSS and share/store if I want.

What a great toy.

The Value of Engagement, Part Two

For context, catch up with The Value of Engagement Part One.

So in the last post, I alluded to engaging with blogs as not the destination, but the first step in online marketing. So where does it go from there? What's at the end of the river, and where does the rabbit hole lead? More literary references and mixed metaphors?

This isn't comprehensive by any means, but if the Internet is the next evolution of media then the Opinions page really is the precursor to online conversation, whether that conversation is taking place on a forum, in a newsgroup or in a blog post's comments section. The analogy isn't perfect; you could make the case that the Talmud is an extremely long community dialog between Torah scholars, for example. And it's true that newsgroups predated actual news websites by several years. But even in those mediums discussion had a logical starting point, whether it was an interpretation of the book of Genesis or early discussions (with spoilers!) of Return of the Jedi.

Of course, I was a little late to the party by Usenet standards, rolling into the party at 1990 or so when I first dialed into Prodigy (my 2400-baud modem was too fast for the phone lines in the area, so we had to dial it at 1200 baud.) It's also worth noting that I beat the Long September by almost three years, but more and more that's no longer a point of pride as a point of "oh Christ, I'm old!"

BBSes followed soon after, but Prodigy was my first real taste in real-time online conversations, and not coincidentally I was discussing games online with other gamers. My game of choice was Wasteland, still one of my favorite RPGs, and what made discussion on Prodigy awesome was that a representative from Interplay occasionally signed on to discuss the game with us. I still remember that first taste of online marketing - if you can call talking with fans of a 2-year-old game marketing - and how inclusive it feels when a company representative is talking to you directly.

That's the taste I tried to bring to WizKids when I engaged fans on the forums there. Sure I was the guy who dropped hints about new characters in coming sets to "chum the waters" and get them excited about what was next, but there's also a certain value to being able to interact directly with a company representative. One of WizKids more mercenary brand managers rightly called it an "added value," and I absolutely believe this is true when broken down into its simplest (IE, Business 1.0) form - online interaction is adding value to the end user experience.

OK, online interaction? What the hell is that? Let's do a step-by-step:

1. Get on the Internet and find sites related to what you're talking about / selling / marketing / whatever. This is also the time to figure out things like how often people on those sites are talking. You want to make sure, at least at first, that you're hitting the most active sites. Ideally these should be sites created by the company, but we all know it's not a perfect world.
2. Create an account if necessary, then start interacting.

Easy peasy. Maybe what I didn't say is more important. Note these not-steps:

-1: Email the blogger without an introduction sending a press release.
-2. Spam a forum with a press release or announcement with a zero-post-count account (one you just created just for that purpose, and you'll never use again.)

These seem really really obvious to me, but for the 99% of traditional marketers out there, they want to wring their hands and go [DRAMATIZATION] "why? Why must I do this? If I have to spend all this time actually interacting with my customers, when will I have the time to create workback schedules and smarm up with reporters? When will I have the time to flood my coworkers inboxes with step by step accounts of the useless old marketing strategies we used today?"

I kid, but there is actually a massive debate occurring in new marketing circles about this very topic right now. A few weeks ago, a popular and "influential" blogger in England named Tom Coates, who runs PlasticBag.org, was outreached to by a PR rep to sell something even though Coates didn't want to be solicited for anything. Coates himself blogs about social media, and attacked the problem from a social media angle - by creating a post and a now-famous Flickr image to make it very clear what happened and his stance on further solicitation. This was really the opening salvo of the debate.

Edel-colleague Simon Collister in our London office made an excellent post about this topic the other day, and weighed in with the following opinion - one I agree with 110%:

So... [two penneth alert] for me the issue is two-fold: it's retrospectively about how the PR industry is missing the point about the social web and going forward how PR can engage with the online environment properly.

Firstly, the PR industry misses the point with the social web/live web/blogosphere/whatever because it is far too process driven. PR people are ever used to writing a release, creating a media list and blanket mailing it out. This is partly the problem at the heart of Tom's predicament... [snip]

However, working in an online social environment the PR industry needs to abandon process and adapt to working in a networked world of individuals. This invokes real effort, spontaneity, trust, genuine dialogue with real people. It's the stuff PR should have been about from day One but which got lost in the world of mass communications.

It would mean that PR people would know who Tom is and know not to appraoch him. Tom is vociferous about not receiving press releases from people/companies/etc but other bloggers aren't.

But it also means more than just pitching bloggers which is really a glorified version of media relations, but media relations done properly.

PR done in the real way of the social web will - and I say 'will' because we haven't got there yet - mean companies (both PR and clients) being social. That way there will be no crow-barring of bloggers and social networks into horrible mass marketing campaigns. The social worth of an organisation will be there for people to choose to engage with from the outset.

The problem is, of course, that this requires giving over control of the campaign to the 'crowd' and that is a huge wrench for most marketing and PR types. This means that their beloved 'process' is taken over by other people - YIKES!

Simon hit it out of the park with this by articulating something I've felt and attempted to implement for a long time. It's an uphill battle, because we're literally fighting decades of tradition - lazy tradition, the worst kind. The kind of tradition that doesn't want to change. The kind that says "this is the way it's always worked for us in the past, why should we do anything differently? Or my favorite label for it, dinosaur tradition.

Frankly Coates' case was just the beginning. This July at the BlogHer conference (a conclave of women bloggers, mostly but not exclusively mothers) the women there voiced this opinion, and last week as I was composing this post professional colleague Kaitlin Wilkins posted the "Blogger Outreach Code of Ethics" at Ogilvy PR's blog (source: link from a coworker on Friday.) They label the below as "take one," and I agree there needs to be some refinements (but I work for the competition, so others' mileage may vary!) but the code as it stands is:

• We reach out to bloggers because we respect your influence and feel that we might have something that is “remarkable” which could be of interest to you and/or your audience.
  
• We will only propose blogger outreach as a tactic if it complements our overall strategy. We will not recommend it as a panacea for every social media campaign.
  
• We will always be transparent and clearly disclose who we are and who we work for in our outreach email.
  
• Before we email you, we will check out your blog’s About, Contact and Advertising page in an effort to see if you have blatantly said you would not like to be contacted by PR/Marketing companies. If so, we’ll leave you alone.
  
• If you tell us there is a specific way you want to be reached, we’ll adhere to those guidelines.
  
• We won’t pretend to have read your blog if we haven’t.
  
• In our email we will convey why we think you, in particular, might be interested in our client’s product, issue, event or message.
  
• We won’t leave you hanging. If your contact at Ogilvy PR is going out of town or will be unreachable, we will provide you with an alternate point of contact.
  
• We encourage you to disclose our relationship with you to your readers, and will never ask you to do otherwise.
  
• You are entitled to blog on information or products we give you in any way you see fit. (Yes, you can even say you hate it.)
  
• If you don’t want to hear from us again, we will place you on our Do Not Contact list – which we will share with the rest of the Ogilvy PR agency.
  
• If you are initially interested in the campaign, but don’t respond to one of our emails, we will follow up with you no more than once. If you don’t respond to us at all, we’ll leave you alone.
  
• Our initial outreach email will always include a link to Ogilvy PR’s Blog Outreach Code of Ethics.

Overall, I agree with what they're trying to do here and think this serves as a fine reference point for conversation (and others agree - see Jeremiah Owyang's post for more.) I'm not sure this goes far enough to address the point Simon so elegantly made in his post:

[W]orking in an online social environment the PR industry needs to abandon process and adapt to working in a networked world of individuals. This invokes real effort, spontaneity, trust, genuine dialogue with real people. It's the stuff PR should have been about from day One but which got lost in the world of mass communications.

The Code still treats online PR as a process rather than working in a social network of individuals. In a network - in the "real world" - there are simply things that don't fit into a structured set of rules, into a process.

I have said before we need to figure out "how" to do this - frankly, we know how. It's a challenge dealing with individuals, but that's how you have to do it. It really is throwing out the old rules of engagement (to use CC Chapman's description) and not so much writing a new process as dealing with things on an individual level. You can no longer spam a press release to 500 people, get 100 hits and call it a success. But one good post on a forum related to your target audience, where 500 interested and passionate individuals might see it - now you're cooking with gas.

Next post: the rights and the wrongs of community interaction, from a couple of case studies in (what else?) games.

The Value Of Engagement

I had an interesting discussion yesterday with a coworker who asked a common question when dealing with the folks here in EIS: "what value are you adding?" If I had a dollar for every time I've heard that, I'd have a lot of dollars.

But underlying that question is a sentiment that lies at the heart of both PR today and specifically what I do, and where I think we need to go from here. We (meaning, the New Marketing folk) have trained the traditional marketers to see the Internet as something of which they need to be aware, and in which they need to participate. That's good, but it's only the first step on a long road and unfortunately it seems that more and more, traditional PR practitioners see it as the destination rather than that first step.

The traditional PR "comfort zone" modus operandi is this:

1. Examine product or service and create a catchy strategy for getting people exited about it.
2. Call or write or email (aka, "pitch") magazine or newspaper with catchy product idea. This can be a clever press release, a press kit that may or may not relate to the product itself, or a "product sample" that the reporter can play with and then choose to keep. Or a combination thereof.
3. Set up an interview with the reporter, where the PR person prepares the company's spokesperson with a series of questions the reporter could ask, the important things the spokesperson needs to talk about, and a little bio about the reporter that details what the reporter likes and dislikes.
4. After the interview, the reporter writes the story, and PR provides them with images, answers follow-up questions, and so forth.

I realize I squeezed a lot of traditional PR know-how into four sentences and obviously glossed over some things, but if you reduce the total to four main components, it would look something like that.

Traditional PR people like that because it's safe and controlled (to a certain degree), but more importantly they can measure the value in such a thing. Another way of saying "what's the value" is "what's the ROI" (return on investment.) That's a marketing and advertising term that bled its way into PR after people realized the importance of our industry, and advertising and marketing people started migrating over to PR jobs. ROI can best be expressed by an equation:

ROI = ((X*Y)^Z)/A, where X is the number of stories about a product, Y is the tone of those stories measured on a standard scale, Z is the circulation numbers of the publications, and A is the "investment" in time and resources (AKA $$$) spend on securing the coverage.

There's a reason people like this method: it's quantifiable, it's trackable, and in the end you can present hard numbers to a superior (or an auditor) and say "look at what we did with our budget!"

Author's Note: I was not a PR or business major, so I'm sure someone who studied this stuff will correct me on the formula and definitions above - but the spirit of it is correct.

So when faced with the Internet and "the blogosphere," it's not surprising to see traditional PR people looking for something sane and familiar. They see blogs and think: "blog = news outlet, blogger = reporter" and want to engage and measure appropriately. Several times I have run into the question, "why are we planning on outreaching to this blog when this other, completely unrelated blog has a much higher readership?"

Here's the thing: this really is the first step in a much larger process, and "success" should not be measured by the number of stories appearing on blogs and the total readership of those blogs. Why? Because that isn't where the interesting things are happening on the Internet. Sure, you should try to get bloggers to write about your stuff, but what's really interesting is in the comments sections in the blogs, and on the forums and newsgroups and email lists where real people are sharing their opinions of the product. The real measure of success isn't stories, it's sales, and you can have all the great stories in the world - but it ain't the reporters who are going to line up to buy your product. It's the people doing the commenting, the people engaged in the conversations.

Here's another way to look at it: when I was a tyke, I read two sections of the newspaper every morning, the comics and the Opinions page. The comics because they're funny, and they were still publishing Calvin and Hobbes back then. And the Opinions page because it was the most interesting section of the newspaper. Who wants to read the news, when you can read what people think about the news? What gives you more insight into your community (I use that term here to indicate "the town in which you live") - news about your town, or what the people in town think about the news about your town?

Of course, a lot of bloggers put their own opinions into stories, which is good - and it's one of the things that differentiates them from traditional news sources. Just like in literary studies, there's kind of an unwritten rule in blogging: if you're quoting a source (say, an article you picked up somewhere else or a song you're posting), then you should write at least as many lines discussing the quote, if not double the number of lines. It's a rule I haven't always followed, but it's one I try to follow as best I can, and many other bloggers do too.

But like the Opinion pages of yore, the most interesting perspective of the online community is in their discussion of goings-on. At WizKids, I used the community's reactions to identify short-term problems but also long-term trends, which we could then use to adjust our overall strategy. It's definitely an investment in time, but it's one that companies would do well to invest in more often.

UPDATE: Next post in series: the current debate about how to engage bloggers, and why it doesn't go far enough.

Memo: RE: Early Adoption

To: Early Adopters
From: The Management
Re: $200 Price Drop of iPhone After 2 Months on the Market

Body text:
BAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAH
HAHAAAAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAH

cough

BAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHA

BAHAHAHAHAHAA
HAHAHAHAH
HAHA

A Public Service Announcement From the Subversive Puppet Show

The Smashing Pumpkins are:

• Billy Corgan
  
• James Iha
  
• D'arcy
  
• Jimmy Chamberlin

I will also accept:

• Billy Corgan
  
• James Iha
  
• D'arcy
  
• A drum machine replacing Jimmy Chamberlin

The Smashing Pumpkins are not:

• Billy Corgan
  
• Jimmy Chamberlin
  
• A bunch of people I've never heard of
  
• A shitty new album with exclusive tracks that you only get at Best Buy or Wal-Mart, depending

Beware imitators. The fake Smashing Pumpkins could be touring near you. Proceed with caution and protect your memories with earplugs at all times.

The (f)Utlilty of Art [UPDATE 1]

During a long weekend of camping, I can lose myself in thought about things I don't normally get to think about during work. This weekend, I've been turning over something about art and creation that I read on SA last week. In the thread discussing Inland Empire, someone commented that Lynch's latest movie was nothing more than "masturbation" - a charge I've often seen leveled against art in many forms, be it movies, poems, abstract sculpture, whathaveyou. It's also something wielded in more academic circles (and those Puppeteers who run in such circles have a much better concept of this than I do, to be sure), with the label "academic" or "intellectual masturbation."

This label is something used almost exclusively as an insult, as it was originally used in the SA thread about Inland Empire. But this got me thinking about something near and dear to my heart as a writer, and one working in a creative field: what does "artistic masturbation" mean, and why is it an insult?

Masturbation has a lot of negative connotations, and this post isn't designed to be a discussion of sexuality and whether those connotations are deserved or not, so I'll leave it at that. But it's a selfish, solo action designed (most of the time, I'll grant you) for the pleasure of the person doing the deed. It's for no one else; it's (again, usually) a private affair and one that specifically pleases the individual nature - likes and turn-ons - of the masturbator.

So what is a movie created as "artistic masturbation?" Read the definition again, but instead of imagining some scary guy with his hands down his pants, imagine a painter standing in front of an easel, and replace a couple of sexually charged words. "It's a selfish, solo action designed (most of the time, I'll grant you) for the pleasure of the person doing the deed. It's for no one else; it's (again, usually) a private affair and one that specifically pleases the individual nature - likes and taste - of the artist."

Isn't that what we want from our artists? How many times have we heard the refrain "well, he's sold out. George Lucas sold out with the Star Wars prequels. Billy Corgan sold out when he released the new Smashing Pumpkins album without two key band members. Cormac McCarthy sold out when he went on Oprah to promote "The Road."

So which is it? Do we want artists to create art solely for themselves, or do we want art that "sells out?" This was a conflict I ran into at WizKids quite a bit: what role, if any, did the marketing department play in game design? On one hand, I heard game designers claiming that marketing interfering with the game design process ruined the process, the "purity" of it. On the other hand, if a game failed, it wasn't because of bad design, it was marketing's fault for not selling it correctly - even if marketing raised some serious concerns about the game.

I suspect the answer lies somewhere in the middle, for a multitude of reasons. You may not be "selling out," but you have to pay your bills. You may not be "selling out," but if you're working for a game company, it makes sense to work with marketing to make a game that will sell so you and the fine folks over in marketingland will both continue to work for said game company. Should you write exclusively to pay your bills, or design exclusively to sell? No, because that invites a kind of cynicism that ruins the "spirit" (for lack of a better term) of what you're creating. Something designed only to sell will sell, but it's the Backstreet Boys compared to the Smashing Pumpkins. Seven years later, which would you rather listen to?

And to loop it back to David Lynch, making movies like A Straight Story, Dune and The Elephant Man give him the leverage to make the movies he wants. True artistic "masturbation" is a luxury afforded only by the rich (or the financially sound), the absolutely principled, or those too poor to give a fuck. For the other 95% of us, we have to continue to ride that middle road. But just as the principled and the rich should consider that we're putting food in our mouths when we work, so too should we consider that the principled and the rich are doing what the fuck they want. Neither "sell out" nor "masturbation" should be wielded in weaponlike fashion as they are; both can be compliments, or at least signs of respect.

Update: Roger made an excellent and informative post in the comments worth repeating here, both for context and fact:

"Intellectual masturbation" is nothing more than a reactionary non-argument against a work of art because the one making the argument can't connect to it. I never listen to those arguments because they are self-affirming prophecies. There is no argument that can counter an "intellectual masturbation" claim.

The phrase was first coined, incidentally, by Byron when he was first reviewing Keats's poetry. Keats's poetry, to him, was "a sort of mental masturbation" and he thought that Keats was "frigging his Imagination." Byron also referred to Keats as the "self-polluter of the Human Mind." Leon Waldoff argues that Byron was reacting to not only the language of Keats's poetry but to the fact that Keats was trying to rise from his working middle class background and become a leisure class poet like Byron. Not surprisingly, "intellectual" and "mental" masturbation is often an argument reserved for lower class or young upstarts who are trying to enter into the inner sanctum of the art world.

Ironically, after Byron used the phrase against Keats, it was eventually used against him by reviewers in a literate middle class who was tiring of poetry in general and turning to the form of the novel. Poets started to be labelled as "highly sexual" producing work that did nothing and created desires that were hardly kosher with the increasingly conservative values of the proto-Victorian world. The novel emerged as the literary form for the working bourgeoise and poetry became increasingly marginalized, a process that continues today.

You Really Can Hack Everything

I believe I have reached the proverbial end of the hacking road: a project to hack a Big Mouth Billy Bass.

Using Linux, natch.

Is it bad that I want one?

Spotted in an unrelated discussion on SA.

Vis a Vis: Emily Dickenson and Poe

A fellow Allit sent this poem to me this morning, and it reminds me of the song beneath it.

One Need Not Be A Chamber To Be Haunted by Emily Dickenson:

One need not be a chamber to be haunted,
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.

Far safer, of a midnight meeting
External ghost,
Than an interior confronting
That whiter host.

Far safer through an Abbey gallop,
The stones achase,
Than, moonless, one's own self encounter
In lonesome place.

Ourself, behind ourself concealed,
Should startle most;
Assassin, hid in our apartment,
Be horror's least.

The prudent carries a revolver,
He bolts the door,
O'erlooking a superior spectre
More near.

Haunted by Poe:

Come here
Pretty please
Can you tell me where I am
You won't you say something
I need to get my bearings
I'm lost
And the shadows keep on changing

And I'm haunted
By the lives that I have loved
And actions I have hated
I'm haunted
By the lives that wove the web
Inside my haunted head

Don't cry,
There's always a way
Here in November in this house of leaves
We'll pray
Please, I know it's hard to believe
To see a perfect forest
Through so many splintered trees
You and me
And these shadows keep on changing

And I'm haunted
By the lives that I have loved
And actions I have hated
I'm haunted
By the promises I've made
And others I have broken
I'm haunted
By the lives that wove the web
Inside my haunted head

Hallways... always

I'll always love you
I'll always need you
I'll always want you
And I will always miss you

Come here
No I won't say please
One more look at the ghost
Before I'm gonna make it leave
Come here
I've got the pieces here
Time to gather up the splinters
Build a casket for my tears

I'm haunted
(By the lives that I have loved)
I'm haunted
(By the promises I've made)
I'm haunted
By the hallways in this tiny room
The echoes there of me and you
The voices that are carrying this tune

Father :
What is it Annie?

Daughter :
You think I'll cry? I won't cry!
My heart will break before I cry!
I will go mad.

Blog Day 2007!

I didn't know about this until I read it on Leah's Blog a few moments ago, but today is Blog Day. What, you might ask, is Blog Day?

BlogDay posting instructions:

1. Find 5 new Blogs that you find interesting
2. Notify the 5 bloggers that you are recommending them as part of BlogDay 2007
3. Write a short description of the Blogs and place a link to the recommended Blogs
4. Post the BlogDay Post (on August 31st) and
5. Add the BlogDay tag using this link:
http://technorati.com/tag/BlogDay2007 and a link to the BlogDay web site at http://www.blogday.org

So here's my five blogs, in no particular order:

1. My Old Kentucky Blog: I ran into this blog back during the Vista outreach days, but it kind of fell off my radar until I was looking for something this morning. Now that I'm cramming my Google Reader full of everything, I subscribed and have been going to back to check out all of his posts. Really great site for music.

2. Copy, Right?: Along the same lines as #1, Copy, Right? is an MP3 blog devoted to nothing but cover songs. There's some great stuff on here (and this, incidentally, is what I was looking for this morning.)

3. HorsesAss.org: the other leftie Seattle political blog. I actually cheated and found this yesterday, following a link from the Slog, but whaddyagonnado.

4. Londonist: News and goings-on in London. Part of the Gothamist network, of which regular read Seattlest is a member.

5. Post-Apocalypse.co.uk: Their site sums it up best: "Welcome to the post-apocalyptic (PA) movie page, where we are in the process of reviewing and logging as many trashy wasteland based post-nuke films as possible." What's not to love?

So what about you, Puppeteers? Got anything worth reading? Get your comments all up in my comment grill.

The Portishead of J Alfred Prufrock

Another one to add to the "I should have done it when I had the idea" bin. In college, I thought mashing up TS Eliot reading his own poetry with electronic music would be awesome. Apparently, so this this fellow. Via MeFi.

Turnabout is Fair Play

By now, I'm sure you've seen the Miss Teen South Carolina geography gaffe videomeme that's been floating around. And I'm sure you've had a good laugh at her expense, when she talks about maps and "the Iraq." Blonde beauty queens are so stupid, laff out loud amirite?

In one of the most amazing bits of turnabout and fair play (Seth sent it to me), Lauren Caitlin Upton hosts a quick little video geography quiz on People.com. She gets a chance to snicker at you as you stumble through some pretty simple geography questions.

This is pure goddamned new media genius, and here's why.

1. It's clever. It's not overly sarcastic. It communicates its message without being overbearing. It's not in your face, but its obvious enough to get. It's subtly subversive, my favorite kind of response. "Sure, you laughed at me, and yeah I fucked up. But I can laugh at you a bit too." Fucking brilliant.

2. It's viral. Because of the set-up of the quiz, they can't put it on YouTube (and the site is getting pounded as I write this) but the link is already going around. Seth sent it to me, and I Twittered it and emailed it to my coworkers. It's already on forums as well. Why? It's easy to use, easy to approach, and not intimidating. Again - the simple response is sometimes the best response.

3. It's fast. When did the Miss Teen SC video first go up, Tuesday? Monday at the absolute earliest? This is Thursday - an eternity in "Internet time," but still four days to create something that's obviously professional, that took some thought and creativity, and is polished. It's ludicrously fast to get something like this online considering how traditional media and traditional PR typically works. Bravo.

I'm not sure who's responsible for this, but they deserve an award. Excellent, excellent work, new media people.

A Moment of Clarity

It's odd: every moment of great or profound change or insight in my life is almost always preceded by a moment where I recognize that I am sublimely happy with the people I know and the friends I have.

I'm not trying to be cagey, and I'll post more about this in the future.

And Now.. My Facebook

I'm expanding my social networking horizons. I'm now a Facebook member! You'll have to be logged in to see my profile, but if you're on, add me.

16 Observations on Social Design

I grabbed this off Leah's Twitter stream: the 16 Observations on Social Design by Joshua Porter, on his blog Bokardo. It's a good read, and these are good things to remember whenever you're interacting with people (specifically in groups, IE forums) online. #16 is probably my favorite: "Because life in not deterministic, we cannot always predict human behavior."

Anyone who doesn't believe this should sit by and watch months worth of carefully-laid plans about an announcement start to crumble as the community picks up on something you never dreamed they'd care about, and turn your positive announcement into something that's going to make you pull a "long weekend" shift. HeroClix fans, I'm looking at you.

That Post Below? Irrelevant.

After a good midday conversation with Seth, I've discovered that I can now simply share my Shared items in Google Reader via an RSS feed.

Subscribe to my Shared Items.

Link Roundup

I hate doing this, but I've got so many cool links stacking up that I am going to put them all into one post without much commentary. If it sounds interesting to you, check it out.

• Via Lifehacker, the 7 Habits of Highly Successful Freelancers. Work on your craft every day: I cannot stress this enough.
  
• Via Lifehacker, Keep Windows XP Running for the Long Haul. I appreciate simple tips like this to keep my machine in working order.
  
• At The Long Tail, Why I Gave Up On Second Life. SL was, until earlier this summer, the flavor de jour of social media and New Marketing. But perhaps the Emperor has no clothes? One of my favorite thinkers about the online space, Chris Anderson, weighs in.
  
• Via Lifehacker, Eight Foods You Should Eat Every Day. I'm trying to be more healthy - shouldn't you?
  
• Via BoingBoing, Is It Fucked Up? If So, What to Do. BB was posting a lot of flowcharts last week, this one was the funniest.
  
• On Simonsays (a blog run by a coworker at Edelman), Public Relations and Public Relationships. An excellent discussion of how PR should be engaging bloggers - in Simon's own words, "about how the PR industry is missing the point about the social web and going forward how PR can engage with the online environment properly."
  
• On Web Strategy by Jeremiah, the The 3 Spheres of Web Strategy and the Skills Required. Oddly enough, I seem to be inside that middle sweet spot. Perhaps that's more rare than I think it is.
  
• Via BoingBoing, Opus Being Censored. What is this, the Reagan 80s?
  
• On the Slog, a Greek restaurant recommendation I'll be trying the next time I'm in Greenlake. Always on the lookout for good Greek.
  

That's all folks. Until the next time my Starred Items pile up in my Google Reader.

Fallout 3 Community Questions

The Fallout 3 Blog posted a list of 25 questions about Fallout 3 generated by the fan community. Bethesda has taken a slightly different approach to the Fallout community with this game than I might have taken, but it's great to see that a) Bethesda is making a good effort, and b) the questions are really good and really responsible (not a single instance of "rape the franchise.") In other words, company and community have met on a middle ground, and I hope this is the start of a good relationship.

I'm not kidding anyone - I'll be picking up a copy of Fallout 3 on the day it's released even if it's nothing more than Brahmin dung in a box (which I don't think it will be.) But I'm very curious about the questions the fans asked. It's also interesting to note how many of the questions relate to gameplay mechanics and interface. Game companies, take note: release fewer trailers and more videos of gameplay in action. Rockstar, I'm looking at you.

When You Were 12

Saw this on SA and it was too good not to share:

When You Were 12

Interviewing A New Boss

It's always strange interviewing someone who might be your new boss, or a person of authority to whom you would be accountable. It always makes me think of this:

If you want this choice position,
Have a cheery disposition.
Rosie cheeks, No warts,
Play games, all sorts
You must be kind, you must be witty.
Very sweet and fairly pretty
Take us on outings, give us treats
Sing songs, bring sweets.
Never be cross or cruel,
Never feed us castor oil, or gruel.
Love us as a son and daughter,
And never smell of barley water.
If you won't scold and dominate us,
We will never give you cause to hate us.
We wont hide your spectacles so you can't see.
Put toads in your bed and pepper in your tea.
Hurry nanny, many thanks
Sincerely,
Jane and Michael Banks

The Fictional Galaxy Anyone Can Edit

Too cool for school: via Boing Boing, "Galaxiki, the Fictional Galaxy Anyone Can Edit.

Dynamic, open-source fiction: galactic empires could literally rise and fall based on the creativity of the writers, the amount of time invested, and it can happen in "hyper"time - faster than real time. Entire histories can be written and changed in a matter of minutes.

Or, it could end up a mud-mire of vandalism and egoism.

Either way, it's a hella-cool, interesting experiment.

The New View From My Office

My old office was four white walls in an interior hallway with no windows.

It was lonely to say the least.

This is what I see when I turn around in my cubicle at my new office.

Not too shabby, eh?

Also, I love the way the clouds look in this shot. Anyone who says clouds can't be expressive has never been to Seattle.

(Picture credit to a coworker who asked to remain anonymous.)

Getting "Away"

I spent the lion's share of this past weekend on an overnight backpacking trip in the Cascades. Crabby found a good trail about 10 miles east of Steven's Pass: a little more than 2 miles and about a 1000-foot gradual elevation change into an alpine meadow with plenty of water sources. Perfect for my first backpacking trip in more than 12 years. So we set out on Saturday and hiked in, spent the majority of the afternoon reaching the meadow and relaxed for the rest of the day. It was very peaceful and extremely remote: there were two other groups of hikers on their way out, but that night we were likely the only human beings for about 15 miles in any direction.

It rained most of Saturday night and all of Sunday, including for our hike out, but it wasn't a downpour - more of a Seattle-style sprinkling. I managed to soak my boots because I didn't wear long pants, but we came back in the middle of the afternoon a little waterlogged but much relaxed.

Which leads me to something I've been thinking about lately. Why is it we - I - feel the need to get "away" to get away? I find it very difficult to relax in a situation where the pressures of my job/home projects/etc. are around me. When I'm at home, every time I walk past the kitchen door I think "that trim needs to be painted, that wall needs a bit of patch and paint." At work - well let's just say that my email pretty much turns me into a freak the entire time I'm here, and most of the time I'm away from work as well. I'm tethered to my Windows Mobile Device(tm), which in turn tethers me to my office.

Why "away" to be away? Is it that hard to relax in my own surroundings? Aren't houses supposed to be homes, places of refuge where you go at the end of the day to unwind?

I'm not complaining, I'm genuinely curious about this odd habit, because I know I'm not the only one who does this.

Prepare to Poop Your Pants

Remember when you bought your Soundwave Transformer back in the day, and Soundwave looked like a tape player but didn't actually, you know, play tapes?

Then Seth sends me this: the Soundwave MP3 player.

Anyone have a fresh pair of drawers?

A "Virtual" Minefield of Spoilers

I'm very excited about BioShock coming out next week. I downloaded the demo and played it through, and I'm planning on another playthrough in the next couple of days. Except for the demo being linear (which the final game is expected to address somewhat), I have no real complaints.

But after Toys 'R Us broke BioShock's streetdate, the Internet is now a minefield of spoilers. So much so that I'm taking every measure I can not to read anything about BioShock at all anymore.

Spoilers are a tricky thing. As my wife can attest, 99% of the time I spoil things myself. I look up a movie on IMDB so I know the twist (if I haven't guessed it already.) I read the last few pages of a book so I know how it ends. Most of the time, I don't really care.

But I realize I'm in the minority. There's people who spoil things maliciously, and I don't understand that. For example, before the Harry Potter book hit, I lost track of the number of posts on Something Awful designed to spoil the book. There's video of people walking into a bookstore and spoiling who died and didn't die to crowds of children. The "manliness" of what is essentially beating up a child notwithstanding, I don't get why people have to be killjoys about these kinds of things. Just because I know the ending doesn't mean I'm going to go ruin it for anyone else. It's tacky and it's selfish and it's probably a little sociopathic, not unlike hurting a defenseless creature or person.

At any rate, I enjoyed playing System Shock 2 a lot, and the "big reveal" about halfway through that game is easily one of my favorite moments in gaming, if not my top favorite. I expect BioShock to have similar reveals, and I don't want to fuck it up for myself by accidentally reading about it. In fact, if it happens with the lights off at 3 AM just like the reveal in System Shock 2 happened to me, all the better.

And for those of you who intentionally spoil things for people: you're a bunch of morons and to paraphrase Shepherd Book, there's a special place in hell for you along with child molesters and people who talk at the theater.

What's In A Name?

Naming things is the single-hardest thing about writing, at least for me. That's not actually true - self-discipline to write is the single-hardest thing about writing. But naming things comes a close second.

I have spent hours staring at computer screens, trying to decide what to call a character or a place or an institution. And not just when I'm writing. Take the rousing game of Civ 4 I've been playing: after I've run through all the towns in which I've lived, places from fantasy books I like (Lord of the Rings followed by Game of Thrones followed by Ravenloft with Arrakis thrown in for good measure), what do I start naming my new settlements?

The thing is, I'm just not very good at it. I hate naming NPCs in my RPGs for the same reason. A name should be something significant. It should say something about the character or place that rewards the reader, or makes the character or place stick out in the reader's mind (what this has to do with naming cities in Civilization, which no one but me will ever see, I don't know.) There's a lot of pressure in a name. A name must deliver.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled puppet show.

Mike Wieringo RIP

When I was getting back into comics in the early 2000s, Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo's amazing run on the Fantastic Four was a primary reason why I started picking up the funnies again. I read this morning on Mike passed away this weekend at the age of 44. Not your typical geek, he was a vegetarian and in great health according to the Newsarama post about it.

Wieringo's art style was just on the cartoony side of realistic, and he drew a sexy Sue Storm. More importantly, he clicked amazingly well with Mark Waid on their FF run. It's rare when an artist and writer click as well as they obviously did (Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale come to mind as another team that clicks), and it's sad to know that a reunion will never take place.

Thanks Mike, for making a True Believer out of me again.

Writing Things

Is what I've been doing this weekend. The creative juices were flowing (and the deadline was approaching) so I cranked out a short story for the next Blue Kingdoms anthology. The first draft is done, but I think it's going to need a little more work to get it to where I want it to be. Sometimes it can be hard to do genre-writing without being ironic or even sarcastic, but I think I walked the line pretty well in this story.

While I'm on the subject of writing, Lifehacker posted a link to an awesome online writer's resource - a massive collection of links to various online tools. It's like that "writer's toolkit" software I used to have back in high school and college, except online and free. Worth bookmarking for sure.

Can't Blog:

Playing Civ 4: Beyond the Sword.

Jericho Seyz "Thanks!"

I wish I could have been at Comic Con this year. Some of my friends were, and I even mentioned those friends should check out the Jericho panel. I doubt those friends did, but CBS was kind enough to release the "thank you" reel from that panel (NUTS!) on YouTube. I know that's two Comic Con-related, YouTube posts in a row, but who cares. Contains raw footage of Season 2 with spoilers. NUTS!

Via the SA forums.

Mother of God (Futurama)

Futurama's coming back, coming back, coming back! And they showed a trailer at Comic Con, which I didn't get to see.

But now thanks to the Internet (and CrunchGear, the trailer is now online! See YouTube below.

Oh Jimmy crack corn, and Bender's great. Jimmy crack corn, and Bender's great!

My New Car, or How I Became a Community-Based Corporate Shill

In the war of "my giant money-grubbing corporation is better than your giant money-grubbing corporation," many of my peers have taken sides. Some like Apple. Some like DC (comics for you noobs out there.) Some like WotC and the d20 system (RPGs, noobs.) Some like Harley-Davidson motorcycles.

This is what new marketing people dream about when we sleep, when we're not dreaming of Great Cthulhu that is. Community members so attached to a product they paid money for that they will go out, for free, and advertise that product. They'll tell their friends and write about it in their blogs. It's the online equivelant of wearing a brand on your t-shirt, or your favorite NASCAR racer's jacket with his corporate sponsors' logos all over it - you're paying to do a company's work for it.

I used to think I was better than that. Above it. I'm on the inside, right? I ought to know better?

Yeah, well, then I got a new car. My brand-spanking-new, a little more than 100 miles on it Toyota Prius. And boy howdy do I love it and you're going to hear about it.

We decided on the Prius at the culmination of a six-month car search. We had the following criteria for a new car:

• Low road noise. Our old car was a real rattletrap, especially above 40 MPH or on rough roads.
  
• Good gas mileage. Even if it meant paying more, I'd rather that money was going to a company that was trying to innovate gas-saving technology rather than an oil company. Also, fuck you Dick Cheney.
  
• A comfortable ride. I'm a big, tall guy. My lower back starts hurting when I'm crammed into most car seats.
  
• Red. This was actually Liz's preference; I could care less what color a car is.

So we test-drove five or six different cars that fit those criteria and also fit into our budget. I'd been impressed with Audis in the past, and we had a nice test-drive of an A4, but the mileage wasn't great and the frankly it wasn't as comfortable as the Prius. The Civic was far too small. The Jetta was also uncomfortable. And the Mini doesn't have a backseat to speak of.

But the Prius was an advanced winner almost from the beginning. The car is really roomy - surprisingly roomy, actually. The backseat is bigger than the Taurus I rode in when my parents were out last month. It feels like a midsized car, and it handles exceptionally well. Not quite as good as the Audi, but that's not really a surprise. For its price and size, it was more than enough.

And yeah, it's a hybrid and it gets great gas mileage. I test-drove a Prius back in 2001 for a magazine article, and at the time the car seemed more of a gimmick than an automobile - like a Go-Kart, Liz said. I agree. This feels like a real car. It's great to ride in, the gas mileage is superb, and I'll get a tax credit for it this year. Not too shabby.

So look out people: I'm now a Prius evangelist. If you're around me for any length of time, prepare for my spiel on how awesome this car is. You've been warned.

Also - pictures here.

Where Have I Been? (Where Is My Mind?)

Doing something new and exciting. More post and pictures coming soon.

Fallout: Can't We All Just Get Along? Also, a Gift to Fallout Fans [UPDATE 1]

If you take a look at my gamertag on the right nav, you'll note that my picture is now the famous Vault Boy from the Fallout series.

It's safe to say I like Fallout. A lot. Enough that, back in college, I wrote and subsequently managed a pencil-and-paper version of Fallout (and doing so earned me my only entry in a Wiki that I'm aware of.) I didn't start with Fallout; its predecessor, Wasteland, was one of my favorite computer games growing up. The post-apocalyptic setting, the open environment, the different quests, the involving storyline - the game really was the first of its kind. It was the first C-RPG I actually completed, playing through all the way to the end. I participated in (and moderated) discussions about Wasteland on Prodigy back in 1990 and 1991, where Brian Fargo was an active and transparent member of the community.

My first real "short story" was post-apocalyptic, as was my first novel. I have an entire bookshelf devoted to PA fiction, and studied it in college for honors credit. Working on the Fallout PnP game was my first real introduction to game writing, and to the power of what a community could accomplish together. It's safe to say that my involvement with Wasteland and eventually Fallout had an extremely profound impact on my life.

I even signed up for the now-canceled Fallout d20 project from Glutton Creeper Games. I did my part, the check cleared, and that was that. Some projects just weren't meant to be.

So when the first Fallout RPG (sorry, I don't count Tactics) in nine years is announced - that would be Fallout 3 - I got interested. And excited. And even more interested when it wasn't Interplay or Black Isle behind it, but Bethesda, who I knew best for Oblivion and the original Terminator FPS.

They started teasing it at E3 last year, and this year we got a teaser trailer with Ron Perlman's voice and a look at a nuked-out Washington, D.C. and a member of the Brotherhood of Steel strutting around. And then the magazine previews began, and the fans starting going nuts.

Not Jericho nuts, this was more of a frenzy of "what the fuck?"

Fallout fans (and I consider myself a member of this group) are some of the most passionate, driven and vocal online communities. They never hesitated to let me know what was wrong with the Fallout PnP game, and their input helped make it better. But one middling (Tactics) and one awful (Brotherhood of Steel) game later, and they aren't really a trusting lot. I signed on to Duck and Cover (one of the two major Fallout communities, No Mutants Allowed being the other) in the early days of the Fallout d20 game to tell them to "wait and see" before calling the game bad.

I've been following the Fallout 3 discussion on fallout 3: a post-nuclear blog, which is doing an excellent job of capturing the various interviews and nuggets of information around the web and allowing fans to respond. One of the two reasons I'm writing this post is to suggest once more to my fellow fans that we need to take the same "wait and see" approach to Fallout 3. I've read some pretty terrible things online from the community - intentionally making a mod like "Hot Coffee" in an attempt to get the game banned being one of the more egregious - but we seriously need to wait and see.

Which isn't to villanize the community at all - their voice needs to be heard. But it's better heard if delivered calmly. I offer as evidence the Jericho community's reaction to their show being canceled. They didn't cry "CBS is raping the franchise!" They organized, presented their point of view (NUTS!), and got the network to reverse their decision. Most importantly, they were positive in their approach and the appropriate people responded to that.

I share many of the communities' concerns about the game. It's set in the East - awesome. Did it have to be the Brotherhood of Steel and super-mutants? Nuke-tossing grenade launcher? Ugh. My biggest complaint (and one that probably won't be changed) is the lack of turn-based combat, or even something turn-like (see: Tactics.)

First-person point of view, I don't care about. Some of the other things sound downright awesome. The idea of integrating character creation into the story of your character's early life is fucking awesome. And the graphics, if they can pull off half of what we've seen in early screenshots, are going to rock my socks.

But I've been fooled by early looks at video games before. It's more than a year before the game comes out, so again, I'm going to go back to "wait and see." I suspect we've seen only a fraction of what Fallout 3 is going to be, and I have a feeling that it's not too late for them to make some changes if necessary (like, say, the look of the super-mutants.) To put it more bluntly: some of the fans need to chill out. If it comes time, organize and be positive about it. Use what happened with Jericho as an example of how to get something done with an online community And for fuck's sake, stop using the term "rape" to describe what Bethesda or anyone else is doing to Fallout. The number of times that term is thrown around would make one wonder what kinds of Freudian things are going through our (the communities') subconscious.

The thing is, I've been through this before. Fallout was "inspired by" Wasteland. But it was a different game, and a lot of the things that the community is saying about Fallout 3 (some deserved, some not in my opinion) were things I was thinking about Fallout when it came out. When I held the box in my hand and read it, my first thought was: "this isn't goddamned Wasteland. How could they even put that on the box?"

And it wasn't Wasteland. It was something new, with its own awesomeness and its own problems. Oh, were there problems. The grinding parts of Fallout 1, facing rats and ants. Woe to you, player, if you created a character other than a brawler your first time through, and even then you could count on reloading once or twice. Or Fallout 2, rushed out the door so quickly it was (and still is) almost unplayable without a massive patch. But I adapted, and love Fallout for what it is, flaws and all. Will Fallout 3 be the same? I'll wait and see.

At any rate, here's the real point of this post. I've been toying on and off with the idea of an RPG that's user-created and user-edited. Kind of like Wikipedia, but for a game system. What could the community come up with for a PnP if turned loose on a system and a setting, with the same degree of responsibility and the ability to edit in Wikipedia?

So, fellow Fallout fans, I contacted my friend Ausir who runs the Vault. Although I've toyed with the idea of working on a new version of the Fallout PnP, unless it was a paying gig I couldn't justify the time. Mercenary I know, but them's the shakes these days. So I turned over all my PnP materials to Ausir to convert to a Wiki, and the result is this: the Fallout PnP game Wiki, completely open-source and available to the fans to edit, take apart, restructure, correct, and change as they see fit. It's not complete yet, and Ausir has some materials I don't have, but I encourage everyone to check it out.

Additionally, as I have been asked for these on several occasions, I zipped up the last version of the document I worked on along with all other Fallout PnP-related items I could find and uploaded them to my website. Get that file here. Ausir promises me that a larger, updated .zip with more materials will be available on the Wiki soon, at which point I'll either mirror that file or simply take mine down (but I'll update when I do.)

The resources in this .zip:

• Fallout PnP "Unlimited" (a never-released, partially completed revision) .doc format
  
• Psionics rules, .doc format
  
• Great Wastes sourcebook, .doc format
  
• The Enclave 2.0 sourcebook, .PDF format
  
• Tribes sourcebook, .PDF format
  
• Waterworld total conversion, .txt format
  

Have at it, guys. Do me, and us, proud.

Update: I talked with Ausir a little bit about Fallout 3, and he mentioned that a lot of people online would be OK with it being called Fallout X, where "X" is something other than "3." Kind of like how Heroes of Might and Magic isn't Might and Magic 10, because it's slightly different than Might and Magic. And kind of how Fallout: Tactics wasn't Fallout 3 because it's a different kind of game.

I'm not 100% convinced such a move would be the right thing to do (after all, technology has changed a bit between Might and Magic 1 and Might and Magic 8), but it's one worth considering.

I'll update with the new .zip file later.

It's a Strange World

Today I witnessed something truly odd.

As I'm getting a shot of Espresso, a Mercedes turns into a parking garage nearby and nearly clips a pedestrian. It might have actually brushed him with its mirror or hit him, I'm not really sure. But the guy yells at the Mercedes driver through his open window to watch where he's going.

The driver yells something back.

The guy walks towards the window and starts doing the whole macho posturing thing.

The driver pulls into the parking garage.

While he's taking his ticket (for which he had to roll his window down all the way), the guy grabs his arm. Then he reaches in and opens the door.

Then, the guys start fighting on the sidewalk.

The best part is? They're both white businessmen, and both were probably in their 50s.

I was cheering for the guy on the street, personally. Fuck guys who own Mercedes.

A Gershwin Morning

After a week of cloud and gloom, the sun decided to grace Seattle with its presence this morning, making the morning commute downright happy. The drive was easy. People were laughing and joking on the bus. Several folks smiled as I walked to my building. And I kept hearing things that reminded me of Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" - the whine of the bus' brakes as the opening oboe trill, the rhythmic pounding on a dumpster the clashing of cymbals.

Maybe it's because I lived in New York (or saw Woody Allen's Manhattan, but that wasn't until later) that I somehow associate "Rhapsody in Blue" with the odd and impure joy that comes with being in a teeming mass of humanity in all its filthy and flawed glory. Days like this make me love the city, any city, Seattle or otherwise. I'm part of that pulse, and the people around me are taking a break from their own personal dramas and foibles to simply enjoy being part of it too.

So here's a little present: Gershwin's original recording of Rhapsody in Blue from 1924. Via the SA forums. Enjoy. And have a great day.

It is Your Patriotic Duty to Buy This DVD Set

That's right, Puppeteers - if you don't buy this DVD, you're not an American. In fact, you're probably a freedom-hating commie fascist terrorist.

It's Jericho: Season One! I'm sure you've been watching on CBS Friday nights at 9 pm (8 central), but you'll definitely want this DVD set - loaded with extras, and ready for viewing at any time.

In fact, if you have friends who aren't into Jericho yet, grab a copy for them too!

Fair warning: some of my friends who read this blog aren't into Jericho yet, and will probably be receiving this set as a gift from me.

The first hit is always free! Free, like the opposite of communist fascist terrorism! Free like Jericho!

And here, for your viewing pleasure, a fan-made video celebrating Jericho's return:

Potterweekend!

Friday at midnight, I met Angela and several of her co-workers downtown for the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. We hit Elliot Bay, a charming independent bookstore between Seattle's meatmarket-club district and Seattle's largest concentration of homeless people. Both groups were represented en masse, but a good time was had before we retreated to the comfort of our quiet neighborhood, a place where you won't be insulted for your race and hit up for money every twenty feet by people who smell like they've been drinking rubbing alcohol.

I digress, but experiences like that make me glad I'm both married and comfortably established and my worries at home include watering my lawn rather than who (or what) is looking in my windows at night.

At any rate, I celebrated Potterweekend by watching the entire Lord of the Rings: Extended Edition trilogy. Why wasn't I reading the book? Well, claimed it first (and she finished around 3 AM this morning) and I read a pirated copy off the Internet.

Seth pointed me towards the story on Tuesday, and although none of the downloads were working anymore, someone posted a link in a comments section and that did work. So I grabbed it. It sat on my desktop, and while I was tempted, I didn't give in.

For about 24 hours. Then I told myself, "I just want to read the end. I'm going to read the end of the book first anyway, so let's just find out who lives and who dies and whether Snape really is evil." So I read the last thirty pages or so.

Then I told myself, "I'll just read the first chapter."

Yeah right.

So I read the whole thing.

I rationalized this (and I'm not saying I'm right) by reminding myself that I had preordered not one, but two copies, one of which was not discounted at all and would be going to support a major Seattle institution/indie bookstore.

The book was good. Very good. Not "great," but very good. The body count wasn't as high as I expected, but it is a children's book after all. Most importantly, it was an extremely satisfying end to a series that I really loved reading. I was a bit of a latecomer to Potter, and say what you will about the literary merits (or not) of the books, reading them was like stepping back into a childhood sitting on beanbags or in my room at home with my nose stuck in a good book.

These are the kinds of books that help kids realize what good stories are and can be, the kind that inspire the next generation of writers. The magic in Harry Potter is not all in wands and spells, it's in the series' ability to help readers see possibilities. As a writer, that's pretty damned awesome.

Pottertime

Time to go buy the final book in a series I have truly enjoyed reading.

The Series of Tubes as a Tube Map

Continuing Map Day here at the Puppet Show, a map of the Series of Tubes (AKA the Internet to the non-morons out there) as a map of the Tube (AKA the London Underground,) via Boing Boing.

Gaming Alert - Inverted World Map [UPDATE 1]

Seth sent me an inverted world map where the oceans are land and the land is ocean - perfect fodder for a role-playing campaign if you ask me. He also steered me towards an inverted world explanation that might give potential GMs an idea of the ecology of such a world. Beware random furry image 3/4 of the way down the page.

UPDATE: The blog from which the map came, strange maps, is awesome and now part of my RSS feeds.

Twitter! What is it Good For? Well...

Good question. Twitter is a Web 2.0 tool where users create an account and are given what is basically a "micro-blog" where they can record posts up to 140 characters in length - typically about enough for a sentence. These posts, called "Tweets" (yes, both "Twitter" and "Tweet" sound like something related some kind of drug), are then posted online and are automatically fed to people who have subscribed to your blog (not necessarily people who you allow to see them.) In this instance, it's a marriage of instant messenger and RSS aggregator/broadcaster: you can see what other people are Twittering about, and it can be as simple as having it delivered to a desktop client or an RSS reader. Whichever makes it easier to read.

My first thought was, OK, that's interesting - what would I use it for? So I logged in and signed up and gave it a whirl. Twitter informs you that you're supposed to use it to tell people briefly what you're doing. For example, a Tweet might be "I'm riding into work" (you can post to Twitter through the web, through text messages on your phone, or through an IM client - I use a Firefox extension, but to each their own.) That's kind of the first application.

Then there's the second, the one upon which my ilk has seized: it's a marketing tool. In fact, it's so much of a marketing tool that the New York Times has taken notice: a great blog post by Saul Hansell details how marketing and PR people have begun using Twitter to great effectiveness - not to tell the world that they're making breakfast, but for quick and informative updates their audience will care about. For example, "the art assets for Ninja Captain 3 are online at www.tinyrul.com/314149/" might be a Tweet from a marketing person.

Third, and somewhat related to the second, is the use of Twitter as an IM client when you know the person you want to talk to is on your friends list. This is frankly the least attractive use of Twitter I can think of: IM is insecure enough as it is, and if I'm going to write someone a short message, I'll just use IM to do it unless they aren't on IM, in which case I'll use email. "@Jimmy: Man you were right, the Fantastic Four movie was great but Galactus sucked LOL" is an example of this kind of Tweet.

And then, the fourth application, and so far my personal favorite: I've been using Twitter kind of like a school notebook. Not to write down notes from class, but to put random brain droppings into. These can be song lyrics, especially if I'm having a hard time getting the song out of my head, or funny phrases, or just random things I think are funny. Going back and reading my Tweets, it's a pretty eclectic and random collection of crap. The kind of thing you might find in a modern George Carlin book, and I don't mean that in a complimentary way.

So what is it good for? The marketer in me definitely sees the application of a tool to inform a large number of people in a relatively small space that something's available, but hey - don't we already have email for that? How does this bring us closer? If anything, the 140-character limit forces an unnatural end to conversations that might otherwise be more informative. Maybe it's my reaction, because I tend to have diarrhea of the fingertips anyway (as Stephen King once so eloquently put it), but 140 characters isn't enough to have meaningful anything. It's barely enough to put a line from a song or draw a stick figure with a gun.

Online discourse doesn't have to be shorter, faster, better. In fact, I think that's one of the main problems with a lot of online discourse these days - it lacks the depth of traditional media and even face-to-face conversations. Not that Twitter is a bad tool, not at all. It's great for my stupid scribbles and as a marketing tool - but it's not a substitute for other kinds of discourse, either.

Web 2.0 it may be, but other than that it's just one more thing in the old Bat utility belt.

IM IN UR ADZ WITH MY LOLCATZ

OK, I admit: I think some LOLCats are funny. I thought they were funny three years ago, before the rest of the Internet discovered them.

What the fuck is an LOLCat? Chances are you've seen one but didn't know it had an "official" name. In short, according to the free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit:

A lolcat is an image macro featuring a photograph of a cat with a humorous and idiosyncratic caption

But yeah, some LOLCats are pretty funny. They're even LOL funny. But so far, I've only really seen them on SA. And, of course, the LOLCat-specific Blog "I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER," which I may or may not have as a feed in my Google reader.

So imagine my surprise as I'm browsing the classified ads today and run across the LOLCat-inspired ad attached to this post. Is there a term for a phenomenon that crosses over from obscure Internet joke into something that an advertising agency is using as a banner ad on a major newspaper's website?

If not, there should be.

Derrida, Blogging, Running Water

The Slog has a great post about one of Derrida's last interviews, where the philosopher and writer expressed worry that his work would not continue after his death. Charles Mudede, the author of the post, compared Derrida's worry to blogging:

I blog, I go away, I die: It is impossible to escape this structure in our post-newspaper, post-book age.

True, there’s more death in a blog than in a book, but it still has its beauty: Blogging is like writing on running water.

True, blogging is a bit like writing on running water. Blogs are fluid things, because you can (and I do) go back in, tinker with things you've written before, even if it is just correcting a typographical error or fixing a link that doesn't work.

But even so, perhaps a more appropriate metaphor is that blogging is like dropping rocks with words painted or carved into them into a fast-flowing stream that empties into a lake. As quickly as information flows through the "blogosphere," it does go somewhere, and even though I can change old posts there are programs that have captured what I wrote the first time, even if it's blogger's database or a Wayback Machine crawler. Nothing you write online will ever permanently disappear.

And yet, it will. If the planet were pounded by strong enough solar flares tomorrow, there is a chance that the event could theoretically wipe out enough technology to make this blog and many others irretrievable. If civilization started to collapse and in a thousand years computers were just coming back, it's unlikely that any of the Internet as we know it would survive.

This is the rub of push-button publishing: we're creating a permanent but non-permanent record of our civilization. We're more culturally attuned to each other than ever before, but unless archaeologists thousands of years from now are using Windows XP, a good deal of our cultural knowledge stands to be lost.

I don't know how I feel about that.

From a Fellow Allit

Fellow Alliterate (and really nice guy) Wolfgang Baur has taken his Open Design / patronage experiment to the next level with Kobold Quarterly, a journal devoted to Open Design and D&D. I haven't ponied up for my subscription yet, but interested parties should definitely check it out. Wolf's Open Design project is a fascinating - and by all accounts, successful - experiment, so it's great to see the next chapter in that particular story.

Which reminds me: Open Design was nominated for an ENnie Award, a really big deal in the gaming world. Voting is done by the public and starts July 16. Maybe you should give non-Corporate, people-driven game writing a nod this year.

Book Recommendation: Ancient Rome on 5 Denarii A Day

Yeah, it's almost 11 and I'm still working. But that doesn't mean I can't recommend a kickass book.

This book was a happy accident - I ran into it yesterday while looking for the newest Richard K. Morgan novel, and it's title grabbed me. It's a history book about life in ancient Rome circa 200 AD, but it's written in the style of a Lonely Planet-like travel guide - complete with color pictures (well-done computer renders), maps, places to stay and sites to see. See if the first paragraph doesn't grab you:

All roads, they say, lead to Rome. But choose carefully which road to take, and just as importantly, when to take it. Go too early, and you will struggle against winter storms. Go too late, and all the festivals and spectacles will have finished, and everyone who can will have fled the summer heat to the seaside resort of Baiae, or the cool of the Tuscan hills. Really late arrivals will be jus tin time for the first damp of autumn - the unhealthiest time of year in an eternally unhealthy city.

And it just gets better from there. The style really grabbed me, because it does an excellent job of conveying what everyday life might have been like in terms that are easily accessible, especially to an audience not necessarily familiar with history books. It's also a really cool conceit: I'd love to do a series of role-playing sourcebooks in the same vein, similar to the Ravenloft Gazetteers or Castle Falkenstein.

But I digress. Check it out. Buy it from the link above and support this site. It's definitely worth a read.

The End of the Flat Blogosphere

Via The Stranger, a fairly high-concept story on the new liberal blog Open Left about "The End of the Flat Blogosphere." While it is very much a deconstruction of the liberal/progressive blogosphere, the lessons here apply to blogging in general - especially blogging as a form of social networking. Perhaps the best way to compare what the article says about blogging today is to see what it says about blogging in 2002:

Back in late 2002, there was a nearly universal, structural format for progressive blogging, that centered around the following five, ubiquitous characteristics:

1. Individual. A single writer produced virtually all of the front-page content. Group blogs were extremely rare.

2. Independent. Five years ago there were virtually no "official" blogs for electoral campaigns, party committees, politically focused news outlets, think tanks or advocacy organizations. Whatever blogs were around were independent of established media and political outlets.

3. Hobbies. Five years ago, political blogging as a profession simply did not exist. Advertising was non-existent on progressive, political blogs. Fundraisers for the proprietors of blogs were extraordinarily rare. No one blogged full-time and no one used blogging as a primary source of income. Blogging was a hobby that operated almost entirely outside the market economy.

4. Limited Communities. Comment sections were not moderated in any way, shape or form. Registration was never required to post a comment. Opportunities for reader generated content, such as diaries, were limited. Comment threads were sparse by today's standards.

5. Less varied and original content. Original reporting and research almost never took place. Multimedia options such as video were equally rare. Guest posts from prominent media and political figures were unheard of. There was comparatively little in the way of direct activism on behalf of candidates and causes. Overall, at the time, content in the political blogosphere could be accurately characterized as micro-punditry on current events that was driven almost entirely by reporting from established news sources.

To get the state of the blogosphere today, basically reverse those ideas. However, the writer acknowledges that the "long tail" of the blogosphere - about 95% of blogs - still follow the above rules, but the "short head" tends to do the opposite. The short head, in this instance, are giant blogs like Daily Kos that comprise a relatively small part of the 'sphere, but constitute a great majority of its traffic.

The term for large blogs like that in PR circles is "influencers," bloggers whose stories are constantly picked up on smaller blogs - the "head" influencing the "tail" if you will. I'm actually not entirely sold on the author's comparison to the long tail, because that's really more of an economic model of profits that doesn't always accurately describe what's occurring on smaller, more personal blogs, but it's a minor point. The insights about the changing nature of the blogosphere are certainly worth checking out.

If you're worried about the liberal bias, you can just substitute "conservative" for "liberal" and "Free Republic" for "Daily Kos" and the article reads exactly the same.

Why I'll Never Understand Fashion

I've never been the kind of person who paid much attention to fashion. Sure, as a kid I recognized that big basketball shoes were fashionable so I went through a phase where I wanted those, and in high school I did the whole "anti-fashion fashion" thing by wearing white t-shirts and jeans. Now I know enough to not look ten years out of date, but for the most part I just dress nicely and things work out. That's the extend of my knowledge of and participation in the "fashion scene."

A few weeks ago, at the start of Seattle's summer - AKA the "not so rainy season" - I noticed a lot of girls wearing colossal sunglasses. My first thought was, and I'm not kidding here, "wow, there sure are a lot of girls getting beaten up by their boyfriends/husbands." I guess being a social worker for two years still has some effect on me.

I asked Liz and it and her response was something along the lines of "oh yeah, the Jackie O glasses are back," and it took very little Googling to determine that we can yet again thank Paris Hilton (who did more time than Scooter Libby - how's that for a comforting thought?) for this latest trend. I'm still not seeing the end of the "little chihuahua in a giant pink purse" trend either. In fact, just last night outside our local Mexican restaurant we saw a little chihuahua on a leash wearing a little doggy cowboy shirt and a little doggy pair of jeans. Putting pants on a dog is bad enough, but to make matters worse the pants were open at the ass, thus negating the point of pants - to cover up your butt and give the pants-wearing creature a sense of smug superiority over the other, ass-hanging-out residents of the planet.

I just don't understand fashion, and I don't understand accessorizing with something not meant to be an accessory - like a dog.

On a completely unrelated note, do you all have your iPhones yet?

Jericho's On Tonight!

I get a lot of emails from people asking "Jason, when can I watch Jericho?" The answer is of course - right now! You can see it on CBS' website, download it from iTunes and Xbox Live Marketplace, and as of tonight you can watch it in its native habitat - your television!

Jericho reruns start tonight, and CBS did something pretty smart. They're running the first episode, then a recap of some of the early season, and picking up about midseason when the show started getting really good. So set your DVRs, tune in your TVs, and get ready for some awesome post-apocalyptic action-drama!

Nuts!

America: Fuck Yeah

Happy Independence Day, Puppeteers. Not only is today the birthday of the United States, it's my wife's birthday as well. One of those two things is older than the other, but you'll have to figure out which.

My neighborhood, being a thin slice of unincorporated King County, is one of the few places in the greater Seattle area where people can set off fireworks without fear of being fined or thrown in jail. I've complained about it before, but oddly enough this year it hasn't bothered me. It's actually kind of neat that people go to the lengths they do here to celebrate the 4th, especially since jaded anti-Americanism seems as popular as iPhones these days. So this year we're having some people over, cooking out, setting off a few fireworks of our own and we'll enjoy the show.

I also did something today I've never done in my adult life: I bought an American flag. There wasn't really room to display one at any of our apartments, and the house came with one - but I never really felt compelled to hang it before this year - partially because we were out of the country or out of town the last two 4ths, but for personal reasons as well. This year, I wanted to hang it. I have some great memories of the 4th as a kid, from the Granville street fair and fireworks after to taking a blanket to a lawn somewhere and listening to an old tinny radio play the 1812 Overture somewhat in time with the fireworks show. I guess in college and the last few years, I was partaking of a bit of that jaded anti-Americanism myself.

It's not like there aren't problems here (the Chimp in Chief being only one of the most obvious), but the principles upon which America was built - there is nothing wrong with that. Life, Liberty, the Pursuit of Happiness. My ancestors packed themselves on boats and came over from Prussia, Poland, Lebanon, Hungary. They sailed through Ellis Island looking for those things. Some ways it was harder for immigrants and the lower class then, than it is now. I'm proud (and admittedly happy) they took advantage of that opportunity when they did.

I don't feel like I should have to explain my patriotism today, and yet here I am giving reasons to a group of people that are largely my friends and family why I'm displaying a symbol of my country. Is that odd? Have I come so far that it is out of the norm to feel pride in principles upon which our country was founded? Is the problem even myself?

I don't know. I think I'll go get the brats ready, lay out the fireworks, check on the flag and go sit outside and enjoy a fine summer day in the middle of what would normally be a work week.

Incidentally, if you're looking for some patriotic (for us Americans - sorry readers in the Great White North) video games to play today, here is a suggested list, by no means comprehensive:

• Duke Nukem
  
• Rush N' Attack
  
• America's Army
  
• Freedom Force
  
• Fallout
  
• Bad Dudes
  

Getting My Game On

Off and on for the last three and a half years, I've run a pirates role-playing game on Wednesday nights. The characters have progressed from level 1 to level 17 (this is D&D), and in the process have become world-famous pirates and are about to save the entire human race from extinction.

But the last fight will very likely bump them up to level 20, and I have no experience running epic level games. So I'm going to try my hand at something else: running a more traditional fantasy RPG. I've been making sketches on what the world is like ("word-building") and having a hell of a lot of fun doing it. Even if I don't end up running this game, I'm still pretty happy with the 20 pages or so of notes I've got about the game world and can probably find something interesting to do with it.

On a sidenote, I'm also using it to test Google Docs. The more I use Google's tools, the more I like them. A lot.

Maybe I can even set the calendar so I don't forget important days? Say, friends' birthdays? We'll see.