Call Me What You Want's List: Pedagogy

“What people should bring for portfolio reviews — and this is for everywhere they do portfolio reviews or send them in — is always bring photocopies with your name and contact information at the top or on the back,” McCann said. Photocopies can be either 8 by 11 inch or the larger 11 by 17 inch size standard of most art boards.

The artwork itself should demonstrate a variety of skill sets, according to McCann, who adds that he’ll be looking for examples of pin ups, sequential art, backgrounds, and use of perspective.

“A lot of people can draw [pin ups]…but, you pretty much don’t break in as a cover artist,” he said. “You will break in as a penciler so you need to be able to show your sequentials.”

Sequential art, which is the practice of telling a story from one point to another using sequential images, came from Will Eisner, inventor of the graphic novel. But being familiar with this concept isn’t essential if you can show examples of good storytelling in your portfolio.

“If you don’t know who Will Eisner is, at least know modern storytellers. Know the basics…basic anatomy. You’d be surprised at how many people don’t know basic anatomy.

Aspiring creators should not be scared to ask questions, according to McCann. People who have never had their portfolio reviewed have used the critiques to learn more about what editors are looking for in a good story, portfolio, or whatever position may be.

“Just showcase what you’ve got. Don’t be afraid to come and get pointers,” he said. “I had a couple of people who were just students — I’m talking, they were kids. Their parents brought them up and obviously a 12-year-old is not going to get published… (usually).”

If you have the confidence to get your portfolio reviewed, be prepared for criticism that shouldn’t be taken personally. The risk of coming off as arrogant is the last thing that will bring someone closer to their dream of making comics, according to McCann.

“People should be professional and open to what is being said,” said McCann, — even if what’s being said is harsh and unpleasant. You can be professional when you hear critiques but when you’re arrogant it shows right away. It’s a very unattractive quality.

Actually, Libertarians don't believe that you should just trust everyone and they will be nice.

We are realistic and assume that most people will act in their own best interest, even if they claim to be doing what is best for the greater good. In fact, we believe that the people you should trust the least are the ones who say that they are going to help you out by relieving you of your money.

We believe that people should behave as adults- adults who are capable of being reasonable and rational but who are also motivated to play fairly by the knowledge that they will be held accountable for any ill actions that they take against anyone else. Personal responsibility is one of the most important concepts of Libertarianism. I haven't seen much of that in the government for a long time.

I assume that libertarians accept the need for effective laws, and institutions such as an independent judiciary and police force to implement them. In other words, that these bodies should be in place to protect one citizen from another.

I presume also that "personal responsibility" doesn't extend to personally enforcing your rights against the gun toting, tatoo'd, Hell's Angel next door who doesn't believe you're entitled to them.

If this is the case, and libertarians acknowledge the need for such institutions to police society, and protect them from malefactors, then why shouldn't there be some type of government regulation to police the financial world?

Could it be that libertarians welcome government intervention when it is protecting their interests (eg shielding them from physical harm etc), but shun it when it seeks to protect the interests of others (eg those who neither pay heed to, nor particularly understand, the free market system but who, in the event of a crisis, invariably suffer the most)?

Even in this fast moving age specialization can be ok if you’re a person, but what if you’re a service, catering to thousands or millions of people? Sure, if the conditions around you don’t change much, you can satisfy the needs of a certain group very well, but if you exist in a fluid, everchanging medium such as the Internet, where everything shrinks and expands and overlaps all the time, the power that you offer might work against you in the end.

From this notion a new paradigm has arisen. Less is more. Simplicity is power. Create a solid foundation, and let others build a thousand different houses, each catering to a different need, and you’ll never go out of fashion. Simplicity is the key that unlocks the web. Bear with me.

The Twitter Dilemma

I, as many other authors, have bashed my head against the wall thinking: how is it possible that Twitter remains popular despite their frequent technical problems and the fact that there are other similar services out there which offer more? It is an unprecedented situation: normally, a service with solid competition which has the advantage of not having technical difficulties that prevent their user base from using the service (whether or not Twitter’s competition is better with this regard is debatable, but based on current data anything seems to be more reliable than Twitter) would have been dead and buried ages ago. Twitter, however, endures. Why?

The answer is simple: Twitter belongs to a new breed of services, perhaps accidentally discovered, that win by doing less, not more. It’s a foundation upon which hundreds of new applications were built, yet, in itself, it is little more than an API for a simple one-to-many short message broadcast system. I, myself, have thrown my hands up in frustration and tried to find an alternative I can stick with - Pownce, Plurk, and countless others. Unfortunately, it seems, all these services are too good to be a viable alternative.

How can this be? The web, most experts agree, is a platform - a platform for any service that has to do with information of any kind. Unfortunately for developers, as far as platforms go, it’s a very undefined one; there is no universal API for the Internet. Furthermore, the damn thing changes all the time. Web portals were once huge; now they seem clumsy and cluttered, because many new applications have created more elegant ways to start your online day. If you want to develop an application for the Internet, you must first find a way to channel and organize the information that’ll flow through; if you jump on the wrong train here in the very beginning, your application might be doomed.

Some smart developers have thus began to understand that it’s better to build a very simple service that caters to a very basic need, and slap an API on top, than to try and create a specific, complex service that does a lot right from the start. The first type of service, if executed well, has shown to be very resilient: once it breaks the initial attention barrier, competing against it is practically impossible.

By catering to a basic need, creating a service that satisfies it in a simple way and opening it up through an API, you’ve unlocked, or perhaps deciphered, a small part of the web as a platform. You’ve created a mini platform which everyone is going to use because it’s, simply put, good enough. As long as people have a need to send short messages to other people from wherever they are, Twitter is going to be a highly sought for commodity. Unless someone else makes it even more simple.

Less Is More

Add a couple of features to Twitter and it’s Wordpress. Why is a Wordpress minus a couple of features so popular? You have to stop thinking in the traditional way and adopt the new “less is more” philosophy to understand that.

Once upon a time, if you wanted to create a successful application, one of the keys to success was to offer a lot of features your competitors don’t have. Adobe’s Photoshop is one such application. If you need to edit some photos, it’s the best, period, because it has every tool you could possibly need.

But this is the disconnected world we’re talking about. On the web, things change. It’s not only important what you can do; you also want to be able to do it from wherever you want; you want to plug in into other services, you want to work together with other people. Furthermore - and this goes even more for mobile applications and services - on the Internet, complexity is looked down upon. People don’t want big applications that can do everything; they want simple, widgety applications that cater to a specific service.

Partly, this is because complexity makes web applications slow and clumsy. Partly, it is because the attention span of an average Internet user has shortened, and partly, it is because his willingness to learn the nuts and bolts of a complex application has diminished. Most importantly, it is because the Internet constantly changes and it’s really hard to build something big and complex on such shaky grounds.

The Magic Formula

Determine a basic need -> Create a service that satisfies it in the simplest way possible -> Open it up.

“how is it possible that Twitter remains popular despite their frequent technical problems and the fact that there are other similar services out there which offer more?”

A possible answer might be that if one day Scobbles or other “twitter-popular” guy/girl left Twitter it’s possible that many of us would follow him/her where he goes for various reasons. Coz in many cases you dont stay at Twitter because of its simplicity or functionality but because there are some people out there that you follow and interact.

I’m having a tough time separating out ‘web service’ vs ‘online software’ here. This theory applies to a web service like Twitter, for sure, but not as cleanly to online software like Flickr.

What made Flickr so popular isn’t the fact that it is simple to upload photos, but that they added in a whole set of additional functions that made it possible to create all sorts of communities around the photos. If you want to make Flickr simple, you’d remove those extra features and reduce Flickr to a web service to store and display photos.

I think with social networks, people will go to the site where their friends are at. What exactly starts the trend (say, from MySpace to Facebook), well, social media experts are getting paid a lot to try to figure that one out.

There have been a lot of historical studies that examine cultural fads/trends (and I think Twitter qualifies as one) and there are so many different factors that can influence their development–economic, social, political, technological influences as well as generational and gender factors. And sometimes, the popularity of a phenomena is simply illogical. Why did Crocs appear out of nowhere and suddenly be ubiquitous footwear for children? There probably was a business plan but sometimes it’s just the Zeitgeist, a fortuitous blend of timing and luck.

But as a person who doesn’t work in technology, I appreciated your analysis. There is a whole simplicity cultural movement that runs counter to the more consumption-driven trends.

Looking at your examples of Twitter and Google back in the day, it seems that’s how it works.

You offer some interesting opinions on why simple applications tend to succeed, but I think you hit the nail on the head when you said that users’ “willingness to learn the nuts and bolts of a complex application has diminished.” I’m not sure that it’s diminished, but simply that we’re catering to a new crowd now. Then years ago, how many people spent multiple hours a day browsing the internet? Hardly anyone compared to the world of today — probably only your most techsavvy friends. I’d argue that these are the people who are and have always been willing to learn how to get the most out of any complex app, but that these new casual users are not. And since a social networks is only valuable when it has lots of users, it’s best to cater to these casual people as well by focusing on simplicity.

The other I’d say that turns people off about big, do-everything applications is overlap. Nobody really wants to use a service whose features they already make use of at other locations, even if this service provides some different features as well. For example, I don’t know a soul who makes regular use of Facebook chat, because everyone already uses GTalk/Chat, AIM, and other services.

With that said, features are not a bad thing: they make good services better and more powerful, and I doubt there exists someone who’d refuse to use a service because it’s better and more powerful than it otherwise could be. What’s important is being smart in implementing these features, so they don’t make your sight overly complex and turn-off casual users. Equally important is releasing the features at a gradual and easily-manageable pace. Once you have millions of users, it’s okay to pile on the features and improvements — people won’t like them to begin with, but if these features are actually worthwhile then your users will adjust. Hopefully at this point your user-based is being propelled by virtually-unstoppable viral growth, so you app is valuable enough that new users are willing to take the time to learn about your features.

Facebook is a perfect example of this style of development in action.

100% in total agreement. The need for simplicity also reflects the maturity of the market (ironically). The new users are by their nature more technical, more interested in pushing the limits of the product/service. When the market becomes more mainstream, you find that the majority of users just want to use the core functionality. The introduction of whiz-bang bells and whistles just overwhelms the user and adds confusion to the interface. Two examples are… Tivo vs the the VCR/DVD controllers of the past. And the Flip videorecorder vs digital camcorders.

Because Qlubb’s market comprises the mainstream audience, we made a VERY conscious decision to take out functionality rather than add functionality. But it has not been easy; it’s too easy to fall into the feature-race trap.

But as with all markets, a big developing market will need to differentiate among the various user classes – one size does not fit all. And one of those markets will comprise the basic, mainstream user who wants simplicity.

Datum 1. At first I thought being struck by a bullet falling straight down would be no worse than getting hit over the head with a two-by-four--not the average guy's idea of fun, but not fatal either. What goes up must come down, but it needn't do so at the same speed. You run up against what's known as "terminal velocity." A bullet fired straight up will slow down, stop, then fall to earth again, accelerating until it reaches a point where its weight equals the resistance of the air. That's its terminal velocity.

For further insight, we turn to Hatcher's Notebook (1962) by Major General Julian S. Hatcher, a U.S. Army ordnance expert. Hatcher described military tests with, among other things, a .30 caliber bullet weighing .021 pounds. Using a special rig, the testers shot the bullet straight into the air. It came down bottom (not point) first at what was later computed to be about 300 feet per second. "With the [.021 pound] bullet, this corresponds to an energy of 30 foot pounds," Hatcher wrote. "Previously, the army had decided that on the average an energy of 60 foot pounds is required to produce a disabling wound. Thus, service bullets returning from extreme heights cannot be considered lethal by this standard."

If 30 foot pounds doesn't mean much to you, the bullet made a mark about one-sixteenth of an inch deep in a soft pine board. About what you'd get giving it a good whack with a hammer.  Note that we're talking about bullets shot straight up here. If the bullet is fired more or less horizontally, it may not lose much speed before returning to earth and could easily kill someone.

Datum 2. Then someone sent me an article from the Los Angeles Times about the problem of falling bullets in L.A. around New Year's and the Fourth of July.  According to the article, doctors at King/Drew Medical Center, a major L.A. trauma center, published a report in a medical journal (Journal of Trauma, December 1994) saying that between 1985 and 1992 they treated 118 people for falling bullet injuries around New Year's Eve or the Fourth of July. Thirty-eight of the victims died.

"There is some skepticism about the numbers reported by the King/Drew team," the article continued. "The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and the Los Angeles Police Department--which serve a vastly larger area-- reported only about half a dozen deaths in the same period. . . . Other hospitals contacted by The Times . . . reported few cases."

King/Drew handles a lot more gunshot cases than other L.A. hospitals. But the King/Drew doctors also used fairly liberal criteria to identify falling-bullet victims (no gunshot heard or weapon seen, wound consistent with bullet falling from above, etc.). Given how confused trauma victims and witnesses often are about what happened, the numbers reported are probably high.

Datum 3. Still, the question isn't how many people get injured or killed by falling bullets, it's whether such things are possible at all. On further investigation, it appears the 60 foot-pound injury threshold cited by Hatcher may be misleading--a falling bullet's kinetic energy (foot pounds) alone is not a good predictor of the speed it needs to inflict a wound. B. N. Mattoo (Journal of Forensic Sciences, 1984) has proposed an equation relating mass and bullet diameter that seems to do a better job. Experiments on cadavers and such have shown, for example, that a .38 caliber revolver bullet will perforate the skin and lodge in the underlying tissue at 191 feet per second and that triple-ought buckshot will do so at 213 feet per second.

Mattoo's equation predicts that Hatcher's .30 caliber bullet, which has a small diameter in relation to its weight, will perforate the skin at only 124 feet per second. It's easy to believe that such a bullet falling at 300 feet per second could kill you, especially if it struck you in the head. In fact, maybe I need to rethink my dismissive comments about the danger of throwing a penny off the Empire State Building, although I still think the penny's tumbling in the updrafts would render it harmless.

3. When actually doing something, doing something that isn’t the most important thing right now.

One of the easiest habits to get stuck in, besides procrastinating, is to keep yourself busy with unimportant tasks.

To be effective you probably need some kind of time management-system. It might be something really simple, like using the 80/20-rule at the beginning of each day. The 80/20 rule, or the Pareto Principle as it´s also known, says that you´ll get 80 percent of your results from only 20 percent of your tasks and activities. So you need to focus most of your energy on those few important tasks to be effective.

When you have prioritized using this rule just write down the top 3 most important things you need to do that day. Then, from the top, start doing them. Even if you just get one of the things done, you have still done the most important thing you could do today. You may perhaps prefer some other system, such as GTD. But however you organise your work it’s still of highest priority to find the most important tasks so you don’t spend days, weeks or months doing busywork that isn’t that essential anyway. Just getting things done faster isn’t that useful if the things you get done are unimportant to you.

4. Thinking too much.

And thereby seldom taking action. Paralysis by analysis can waste years of your life. There is nothing wrong with thinking before you do something. Do some research, make a plan, explore potential upsides and problems.

But compulsively thinking and thinking and thinking is just another way to waste your time. You don’t have to examine everything from every angle before you try it. And you can’t wait for the perfect time to do something. That time never comes. And if you keep thinking you’ll just dig yourself down deeper and deeper and taking action will become more and more difficult. Instead you just need to stop thinking. Shut of your mind – it just helps you up to a point – and go do whatever you need to do.

5. Seeing the negative and downsides in just about anything.

When you see everything from a negative perspective you quickly punch a hole in your own motivation. You find faults everywhere and problems where there are really none. You cling to details. If you want to find a reason to not do something then that’s no problem. From a negative viewpoint you can find ten reasons every time.

And so very little gets done, you whine to anyone who wants to hear – and many who don’t – about how crappy your job, life and boss is. Which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as you create the life that is appropriate considering how think and see your world.

A solution is to realise the limits of a negative perspective. And that your perspective isn’t some kind of 100% true picture of the world. Then try other perspectives. For instance, trying to establish a habit of seeing things in a more positive and optimistic light can be quite useful. In that vein, you may want to try the Positivity Challenge. It´s not easy, but if you do the challenge and try to only think positive thoughts for 7 days it can give you an insight in how much your perspective and beliefs changes how you interpret your world. And what results you get.

being closed to outside influences.

It can be hard to admit that what you thought or believed was not the best alternative. So you cling to your thoughts harder and harder and keep your mind closed. This makes it hard to improve and for instance to become more effective. Even really considering the possibility that you can change your life can be difficult in this position.

One solution, obviously, is to open up more. To open up and learn from the mistakes of others, from your own mistakes and from other sources like books. This is easy to say though. It can, as almost anything, be harder to do. One suggestion I have is to, like I said about the previous habit, realise the limits of what you know and the way you going about things. And then just try something new.

7. Constantly on information overload.

With information overload I don’t just mean that you read a lot. I pretty much mean an overload in all input. If you just let all information flow into your mind it will be hard to think clearly. It’s just too much stimulation. A few more potential downsides to this habit are:

- Some of the input you receive will be negative. The media and your surroundings often put a negative spin on things for various reasons. If you aren´t selective in what input you want in your life then you’ll be dragged into this negativity too. This affects how you think, feel and act.

- It creates an urge to keep up with what’s happening but there are always ten more things happening so you can’t keep up. This makes life stressful.

- It becomes hard to make decisions and take action if your mind is constantly bombarded with information or trying to sort through it all. Personally I find that if I get too much information it leads to a sort of paralysis. Not much get´s done. Or you get stuck in habit #3 and keep busy, busy, busy at high speed with low priority activities.

To be able to focus, think more clearly and take action it´s useful to be more selective in what you let into your mind. When you work shut out as much distractions as possible. Shut off the phone, internet and shut the door. It is strange how much you can get done when you aren´t interrupted every fifth minute or have the opportunity to procrastinate by checking your RSS-feeds or favourite websites.

Now I´m not suggesting that you should stop reading all blogs or newspapers. But think about what you really want to read and what you read just read to fill your time. And have a look at other areas of input where the doors are wide-open.

“ineffectiveness” is Nature’s way of telling you that your lifestyle sucks. Find ways to lavish your skills on yourself instead.

You have heard “Those who have the gold, make the rules.” But, let an INTP say, “Those who make the gold, break the rules.”

Save the environment, procrastinate away.

Be paralyzed by thought as opposed to thrashing by action in the wasteland we call corporate America, at least you’ll do less damage.

90-95% of jobs / careers are meaningless, you probably have one.

No need to become effective at the production of meaningless junk to sell to the mindless drones of overconsumption throughout suburbia.

To what end? Ineffectiveness is the most effective tool to slowing production and doing the least damage to the unarmed citizenry advertisers, salespeople, marketers target and the environment in general if you had just taken a moment to think.

while I realize you are trying to limit yourself to 7, may I suggest an 8th: Don’t keep records–appointments, contact information, important documents– all the things people use to schedule their time, their activities, and their progress.

That seems to be a key component of the highly ineffective people I have been unfortunate enough to have close contact with.

There are always more than one side to any issue and it is often good to be able to see more than just the one. Not all apsects of an argument or debate are going to be good, some are likely to be negative. Surely it is good to be able to see the negative or downside, so long as you do it for the reason of finding ways of avoiding or overcoming them!

Where I agree with you is that always seeing the negative or downside is likely to stop you moving forward or doing anything!

3. Batching.

Boring or routine tasks can create a lot of procrastination and low-level anxiety. One good way to get these things done quickly is to batch them. This means that you do them all in row. You will be able to do them quicker because there is less “start-up time” compared to if you spread them out. And when you are batching you become fully engaged in the tasks and more focused.

A batch of things to do in an hour today may look like this: Clean your desk / answer today’s emails / do the dishes / make three calls / write a grocery shopping list for tomorrow.

4. First, give value. Then, get value. Not the other way around.

This is a bit of a counter-intuitive thing. There is often an idea that someone should give us something or do something for us before we give back. The problem is just that a lot of people think that way. And so far less than possible is given either way.

If you want to increase the value you receive (money, love, kindness, opportunities etc.) you have to increase the value you give. Because over time you pretty much get what you give. It would perhaps be nice to get something for nothing. But that seldom happens.

5. Be proactive. Not reactive.

This one ties into the last point. If everyone is reactive then very little will get done. You could sit and wait and hope for someone else to do something. And that happens pretty often, but it can take a lot of time before it happens.

A more useful and beneficial way is to be proactive, to simply be the one to take the first practical action and get the ball rolling. This not only saves you a lot of waiting, but is also more pleasurable since you feel like you have the power over your life. Instead of feeling like you are run by a bunch of random outside forces.

6. Mistakes and failures are good.

When you are young you just try things and fail until you learn. As you grow a bit older, you learn from - for example - school to not make mistakes. And you try less and less things.

This may cause you to stop being proactive and to fall into a habit of being reactive, of waiting for someone else to do something. I mean, what if you actually tried something and failed? Perhaps people would laugh at you?

Perhaps they would. But when you experience that you soon realize that it is seldom the end of the world. And a lot of the time people don’t care that much. They have their own challenges and lives to worry about.

And success in life often comes from not giving up despite mistakes and failure. It comes from being persistent.

When you first learn to ride your bike you may fall over and over. Bruise a knee and cry a bit. But you get up, brush yourself off and get on the saddle again. And eventually you learn how to ride a bike. If you can just reconnect to your 5 year old self and do things that way - instead of giving up after a try/failure or two as grown-ups often do – you would probably experience a lot more interesting things, learn valuable lessons and have quite a bit more success.

7. Don’t beat yourself up.

Why do people give up after just few mistakes or failures? Well, I think one big reason is because they beat themselves up way too much. But it’s a kinda pointless habit. It only creates additional and unnecessary pain inside you and wastes your precious time. It’s best to try to drop this habit as much as you can.

8. Assume rapport.

Meeting new people is fun. But it can also induce nervousness. We all want to make a good first impression and not get stuck in an awkward conversation.

The best way to do this that I have found so far is to assume rapport. This means that you simply pretend that you are meeting one of your best friends. Then you start the interaction in that frame of mind instead of the nervous one.

This works surprisingly well. You can read more about it in How to Have Less Awkward Conversations: Assuming Rapport.

9. Use your reticular activation system to your advantage.

I learned about the organs and the inner workings of the body in class but nobody told me about the reticular activation system. And that’s a shame, because this is one of the most powerful things you can learn about. What this focus system, this R.A.S, in your mind does is to allow you to see in your surroundings what you focus your thoughts on. It pretty much always helps you to find what you are looking for.

So you really need to focus on what you want, not on what you don’t want. And keep that focus steady.

Setting goals and reviewing them frequently is one way to keep your focus on what’s important and to help you take action that will move your closer to toward where you want to go. Another way is just to use external reminders such as pieces of paper where you can, for instance, write down a few things from this post like “Give value” or “Assume rapport”. And then you can put those pieces of paper on your fridge, bathroom mirror etc.

10. Your attitude changes your reality.

We have all heard that you should keep a positive attitude or perhaps that “you need to change your attitude!”. That is a nice piece of advice I suppose, but without any more reasons to do it is very easy to just brush such suggestions off and continue using your old attitude.

But the thing that I’ve discovered the last few years is that if you change your attitude, you actually change your reality. When you for instance use a positive attitude instead of a negative one you start to see things and viewpoints that were invisible to you before. You may think to yourself “why haven’t I thought about things this way before?”.

When you change you attitude you change what you focus on. And all things in your world can now be seen in a different light.

This is of course very similar to the previous tip but I wanted to give this one some space. Because changing your attitude can create an insane change in your world. It might not look like it if you just think about it though. Pessimism might seem like realism. But that is mostly because your R.A.S is tuned into seeing all the negative things you want to see. And that makes you “right” a lot of the time. And perhaps that is what you want. On the other hand, there are more fun things than being right all the time.

11. Gratitude is a simple way to make yourself feel happy.

Sure, I was probably told that I should be grateful. Perhaps because it was the right thing to do or just something I should do. But if someone had said that feeling grateful about things for minute or two is a great way to turn a negative mood into a happy one I would probably have practised gratitude more. It is also a good tool for keeping your attitude up and focusing on the right things. And to make other people happy. Which tends to make you even happier, since emotions are contagious.

15. Write everything down.

If your memory is anything like mine then it’s like a leaking bucket. Many of your good or great ideas may be lost forever if you don’t make a habit of writing things down. This is also a good way to keep your focus on what you want. Read more about it in Why You Should Write Things Down.

I work at a tech startup, and one of my coworkers has a favorite saying: “All engineering problems eventually come down to heat.”

In general, most fields will have a reasonably specific problem which is the cause of any trouble you have 90% of the time. So if you’re having a problem and you’re not sure why, think of that one first.

Also, item 15 is probably the best advice to give anyone, ever. Not because it’s the most important, but because it’s extremely important and people hardly ever mention it.

Fantastically comprehensive list of life lessons.

For the philosophically minded - I humbly submit the following lesson: Only preach to the converted.

When I found out about the hidden world of government malfeasance and financial cabals that are responsible for so much misery in this world, and that exist with the help of the media’s complicity, I naturally assumed a lot of people would want to know.I spent all sorts of time and emotional energy on my soapbox, to be met with bored stares or snide remarks. The only time such speech-making and arguing was productive was when I had found someone already inclined to my way of thinking who was looking for answers, as I was.

So Liberals, stop trying to convert Conservatives, and vice versa. Veggies, leave those BBQ eaters alone. If you want to change the world, start with yourself so as to provide an example, and then only preach to people who ask for a sermon!

Excellent suggestions. The thing is, that what we call a “university” in the usa today is actually many trade schools pulled together onto the same campus. And yes, a person in her or his early years at college is required to take classes in all the different trades.

The things that you bring up here, are not things which are specific to any trade, and thus they are never taught.

I would love to see a new kind of college education - where perhaps the philosophy department could expand to become the overall auspices of the school. This would be a school for folks who want to learn how to think critically, and reason independently. Woven into the curriculum, there would be training in all the tools a person needs in this modern world, to start her own business. Computer programming, web design, introductory economics and business courses would be important. This would be a school for both thinkers, and for entrepreneurs.

Great list of useful skills on your list! I’ll add a couple I wish I had been taught in School.

1. To read at a useful rate (not subvocalizing)

2. Maximize my quality of sleep (therefore minimize sleep time)

Know your weaknesses and then either work to correct them or surround yourself with people who offset them.

Some weaknesses are things we care about, but we just haven’t had time to address. Others are things that we either are not capable of correcting, or really, really don’t care too. As an entrepreneur, you don’t have to know all aspects of business, technology, finance, marketing, etc, if you surround yourself with the right people.

While your list has some valuable life lessons, they really don’t seems like things that would be ‘Taught’ in school.

I think our schools should teach us systems for filing and retrieving information so that we can manage the great deal of information we come across in our lives.

I think schools should spend time to teach ‘Personal Finance’ budgeting, saving, investing, credit use and maintenance. We live in a consumer society and schools do very little to prepare us.

Cooking! Everyone has to eat and many people mess up their finances by spending way to much money eating out. You can eat better and save money if you can cook.

Basic maintenance. How to fix a toilet, how to change your oil, simple troubleshooting for the day to day technical difficulties which we all encounter.

It’s quite amazing when looking back (I’m 27) all the things you THOUGHT would happen after high school that didn’t. I had a horrible time with bullying in school. Although I knew it was just a school thing and as soon as I got out of there it would be “a lot better” I didn’t think of it as “100% better” as people don’t do constant barrating and name calling like what happens in schools.

Some things I wish were taught in school: I forget the percentages but something like when you are in a class, immediately you are going to forgot half of it. Within a year you’re going to forget 90% of what you learn and/or experience. Basically to focus on what you most cherish from any moment and hope that’s the 10% you still remember.

Nothing is free. Something happened to my train of thought within the past couple years that now whenever I sign up for some service or someone offers me something for free I ask myself “what are they getting from this?” With my brother, for example, always like to give me stuff he no longer uses, which was nice and all. Problem is he never let me forget that. Whenever he wants something in return that cost me money and I don’t want to give up (say copying a game) he starts pulling out “but I gave you …”. When signing up at websites I try to guess what is their motivation. Is it ad revenue? going to charge later on? Now for some people, the “fee” is just knowing so many people use your service and benefit from it. Other’s want to monetize it.

Here’s one, the trilemma or the art of trade-offs. (I never heard the word trilemma used to describe the principle but I learned it a long time ago and it’s a very useful tool to approach many (any?) projects.

The classic example is managing a project where three major variables are time, cost, quality. Out of the the three you can only really choose two variables, the third one will be ruled out by virtue of the other two being present.

Here’s a discussion of trilemmas:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilemma

So if alignment systems have a place in many different styles of gaming (and they do), which of the many options out there best rises to the challenge of helping players model their characters' belief systems? The first such system that most gamers probably think of comes from the game that popularized the word "alignment" in the first place - D&D. Even thirty years later, the nine alignments generated from the opposing axes of good vs. evil and law vs. chaos provide a simple, elegant, and easy-to-understand way of depicting a character's moral compass. It's no wonder that the general outline of what alignment is and how it works has persisted through all editions of D&D, and that so many other games have borrowed from this concept. For these reasons, the classic D&D alignment system often provides a good jumping-off point for incorporating codified character morality into a game.

Of course, this means that the alignment system has been around long enough for it to become one of the more resoundingly criticized aspects of D&D. Like any attempt to put a complicated real-world issue into simplified game terms, D&D's alignment system has been blasted for being overly limiting and simplistic. Indeed, at its worst, alignment can become a straitjacket, with bad DMs using alignment and sessions degenerating into endless debates about whether a certain action is really Lawful Good enough.

Alignment can be useful, maybe even essential, if the setting relies on Evil and Good (or Law and Chaos, or Butter and Margarine...whatever) as actual external forces. Certain races and creatures, absolutley certain items and spells; these all rely on the system that they were designed for. With the system and it's individual crunchy components being designed around the assumption that all the components are semi-nonnegotiable it makes it hard to remove one part without changing a bunch of other things.

That's the main reason that rather than remove alignment whole-cloth with one stroke of the GMs eraser, I spent years making it go away through the actions of characters within the world. At first, the PC (who was the greatest saintly Good-guy, er...Good-girl?...to ever walk the world) didn't realize what she was involved in though. She was under the assumption that she was on a crusade to eradicate evil. it was only much later (and thankfully her Wisdom score was much higher by then) that she realized that removing both frm the spectrum of mans influences was a Good thing to do.

I see your point about low-level PCs and how those things don't necessarily affect them at those levels. I've just always been of the mind that if it exists, it exists all the time. Let me explain that; I can't sleep at night knowing that the only reason alignment specific items or spells aren't affecting the PCs in my campaign is because they aren't at that level yet. Those things are still out there somewhere, and as such I need to know how the interact with the PCs even if they aren't going to. That's where the sliding scale comes in (or at least, where it used to come in before I got rid of alignment in favor of a system we find more preferable yet still flavorful;))

In my mind ignoring it until the PCs are high enough level is the same as saying that there aren't any dragons in those woods...yet. Come back in a few levels and the kobolds won't be here, the great green will be.

On a limb, I'll suggest that the real reason that games have alignment is because of cultural influence from religion. And politics. We learn it from school tv, parents. Zoroastrianism certainly had the abstract Good and Evil. Christianity. Islam. Buddhism has, in my opinion, realistically embodied good and evil by keeping it where it belongs, in the mind of humans. So something like this is universally human. When angered repeatedly by someone, you might come to feel hate, loathing, want to do things that will hurt them. You might have a feeling about them that we can call, if we agree, a feeling that they are evil. Regardless of that, they're certainly causing you to somehow fill yourself with bad stuff. You know your friends, you know those who aren't. D&D has an abstract alignment system, but our lives have something else, like a socio-emotional alignment. It has ethics and morals, and I personally think these are driven powerfully by emotional reactions, and focused and tinted by the lens of our life experience. Poets and prophets and lovers have felt evil and felt good. It's in the water, so it got into the games.

Did I mention I think alignment systems are weak?

In some ways the UA approach shouldn't be considered in the "Alignment" discussion because it lacks the breadth to speak to morality. It is a specific rule; and while it may suggest a morality, it certainly cannot encompass one. That has typically been my criticism of other morality systems -- they try to be general. Because each person comes to morality through the lens of personal perception, these generalizations do not fit the individual metaphor of psychology that we all have. Some systems work well for some people because they resonate. If we step back from whether we like it or not, we could examine whether the rule system encompasses a variety of perspectives. A general system that tries to address everything will fail. A system that is specific and allows a player to fill in the blanks with the yardstick by which they will measure themselves will satisfy. In essence, I believe players should build their own individual alignment system.

There are many ways to read a book (schools of literary criticism). There are many ways to interpret behaviour (schools of psychology). They all have their merits. A game that keeps its rules specific avoids building a bias into the interpretation of things.

I totally agree with Gilgamesh's last post here. Morality is, ultimately, a personal matter, as in that we each live by a personal code, and the longstanding problem with morality systems in roleplaying games is that they try to generalize something that is deeply personal, and so most of us have trouble with this, particularly those of us that aren't particularly religious or are willing to part a little from standard Christian ethics.

But, still, when reading gamerchick's article, I had some trouble with UA's system, though it seems to satisfy the requirement that it be personal. This could be attributed to a strange fanboyism for one of my favorite games (told you I'd take up Lorthyne's standard), but I think it goes deeper than that. The fact of the matter is UA doesn't satisfy what I'm looking for in a moral system.

It also all comes down to what your looking for. If all you want is something simple that says "me good, you bad," than D&D's got you covered. If you're looking to go deeper but still focus on fun, I think UA's system is a good system. WoD goes deeper and aims for a much greater importance given to morality and it's labrythine passages. I think the best system will have to be developed by us, however.

We should combine UA and WoD's systems. Have a scale people go up or down on, consequences for going down (preferably psychological) to cover judgement and consequences, keep the abstract system concerning willpower and virtues and vices, though letting players come up with their own (perhaps naming a few of the traditional ones as suggestions). Then slap on UA's system for motivation in the moment, adding the personal element but not devaluing judgment. What do you think? Ideas on how to do it?

UNKNOWN ARMIES

Unknown Armies has the Madnees Meter. Remember the name. It is not something that measures morality, it measures Madness. What I love about the madness meter is that the situation and the role you make determines wether you would run away and curl up in a ball, or just stand there and think what was happening was not really that interesting. You are crazy either way. And that is all the Madness Meter does. Do you fail a check, and therefore recoil from what caused you to fail the check next time, or did you pass the check, and therefore have a better chance of not really noticeing it. It is the difference between hiding scared in your fox hole, or telling the scared soldier "I decided when I landed I was already dead".

The Madness Meter does not measure morality. The Noble/Wrath measures are the closest measure and like every other system I know they are just as black and white as any other. However they do allow player choice and thefore control. Still they are very specific and can therefore be extremely narrow. Making pretty much every other thing in the world something that washes over you. They do come close to allowing you to create a personal morality system. But if we did that we would really be helping those players that like portraying people with the PLAYERCHARACTERGAMER alignment...and that is not always what we want.

It is however a very powerful roleplaying aid. But another question. How often have you played Unknown Armies in comparison to a White Wolf product? Why?

Very well said, bartmoss. huh, it seems like there's somebody else now that gives dissertations every time they leave a comment :). I think I could make a book from my comments on this site.

I particularly like what you said concerning nWoD's western perspective. What they should do, then, with this in consideration, is release a book that focuses entirely on virtues and vices, how they can be changed, and perhaps different ones for different cultures or religious views, like Islam, Confuscianism, etc. It should also talk about these religious morals and such in depth to help people play them as accurately as possible. I would totally buy that. That's one thing I've always like about GURPS books, is their almost scholarly content that fills the books. You can learn a lot from just those books. Anyway, WoD should totally come out with a book like that. That'd be cool. It could even have sections on how a Storyteller can best use this mechanic. That's the problem with the mainstream rpgs, is that new books have always got to be new material, you know, 50 new monsters, 18 new prestige classes, etc. What I'd like to see is more discussion on what's already there. A book dedicated to Morals and virtues and vices from WoD would be awesome. Something like that from D&D would be cool, too, really. I dunno. No more new rules - just flavor text. At least WoD's got the flavor text covered.

I am not sure where you are in the world, but I will guess you are in the USA. Therefore you were probably taught to drive at a young age. Look at the Drive Skill in NWoD, if you do not have a dot in it, you are a bad driver. You are relying on your innate attributes at a negative modifier. I know you are not supposed to roll a dice unless you are stressed, and perhaps if you were ever in a car chase you should be in negative modifiers...but some systems are even worse than this, they force a level of specialisation that creates very odd characters. I have oftne played characters who were capable of many accrobatic feats, stealth on a level that is scary, could shoot a pin head. But obviously never went to high school in their life (even in those games were I was palying an officer in the millitary). All because I was creating someone good for an RPG.

An RPG by its nature is asking you to develop a character that exists in a Fictional World. RPGs allow you to model characters for this purpose, what they do not do, and to be honest, should never do, is model a person who exisits in our real world. It would be ridiculous to try. However it does mean most characters in modern day campaign worlds do look as if they could not function in our reality. I will stress again, this is not a problem. Dramatic characters exist for Drama not life.

The new policy where I work is that all system administrators get background checks. You can thank morons like the guy who locked the San Francisco city government out of their computers for this invasion of privacy.

Incidentally, one of the things you'll find about sites like Monster is that most of the ads are from temp agencies and placement companies. Many of the jobs don't really exist in the form they're listed. I've had far better luck checking local newspaper ads (many are online), the government-run job sites that some states have, or even the websites of individual employers in the area that I think I'd like to work for.

I hear some companies/agencies are running credit checks as part of the application process. Apparently, people with good credit scores are the best workers. [sarcasm].

Also to add to the list, be aware of "payment processing" or "medical billing" work-at-home type jobs. You could be laundering money for pyramid schemes and 419 scams.

So here is a question for someone. I am currently looking for a job. And I had one potential employer ask if they could run a credit check on me. The employer was a hospital and I was having a face-to-face interview so it was ligit. Now I can maybe understand a bank wanting this information, but what do they think it is going to prove? Oh lets hire this person cause he has excellent credit. I was quite outraged by them asking. And the funny thing is that my credit score is well above 750 so I certainly have nothing to fear...I just thought it was such a stupid policy that I was unwilling to cooperate.

Anyone else run into this or know why they would need it to work at a hospital?

I'm getting a lot of "sell insurance and make 100k a year!" emails via Monster.

So far, they have been legit companies and real emails. I've conversed with two of them on the phone. I didn't give any personal info nor was I asked for any.

I did tell both parties that I was currently seeking a _______ position (my industry) and would not consider a job that involves leads generation, cold calling or working on commission. Both people were very polite and wished me well.

FWIW - yahoo hotjobs seems to be getting more traction than Monster these days.

so if someone here takes your advice and their credit is locked down by the bureaus -- as requested by them...what if they now get a job and the company can't seem to run a background ?

#1. Do the credit bureaus charge to locked down your credit?

#2. If yes, do you need to pay to unlock it once you get a job?

if no to ? #1, do u pay to lock/unlock it ??

This is actually a good idea considering someone like me who is seeking employment..might try this if there's no penalty for doing so

Actually, they may need your SSN for a criminal background check. Or at least, it could help.

My neighbor was having the damnedest time getting any kind of job for almost a year before she found out that background checks were coming up with someone with the same name with fraud convictions.

"The job requires the employee to wire money through Western Union or MoneyGram"

People fall for that? Seriously, this is like natural selection in the modern age.

"1. Employer e-mails are rife with grammatical and spelling errors"

Wait, that sounds like my boss...

"6. The salary and benefits offered seem too-good-to-be-true"

Oh, wait, nevermind, that's definitely not my job...

for those legitimate employers seeking new hires on the web, be as detailed as possible in your postings. i've responded to a few postings that seem genuine, but are real vague on information (like a company website &/or specific location). instead, they ask that interested applicants email a contact for more info. in my experience, the response is almost always a link to a b.s. $10,000/hr scheme. now i just pass over any posting that doesn't give me enough info to decide if it's a real post or not.

& hr managers should be canvassing sites to ensure that their company is not being spoofed - i've also encountered this, with "apply now" buttons redirecting to "_real_company_.XXXXXX.com"-type domaines.

finally, i've limited my info/resumes on job posting sites (monster in particular) after a rash of emails from illegitimate employers. careerbuilder still seems to have some integrity in this area - i don't know if they actually have an approval process for employers seeking access to resumes or if the cost to view them results in less "scams", but whatever they're doing seems to be working for now.

With my resume being public on monster.com for about 3 months now, I've only gotten 1 or 2 insurance/marketing/sales type "offer" emails. On Yahoo HotJobs, I had literally 2 a day for a week until I made my resume private again. Just for that I'm much more inclined to use monster.

I second the recommendation above to use indeed.com. I never would have found the job that I just got an offer for if I didn't.

The "ever changing" website, appears to be for research reasons. I believe they give out a different number based on the time/channel/whatever critera they want. This way they know when there advertising dollars are best spent.

This is solely conjecture, but it appears to be the only logical conclusion, assuming of course that they aren't wasting thousands of dollars on domain name registrations.

From my experience, job-seekers should avoid listings that do not explicitly state what you would be doing on the job. I see this metioned in previous posts, but it needs to be repeated for the naive. If they won't disclose what you need to know over the phone or by e-mail, they're probably out screw you.

Most online listings I've encountered were nothing more than attempts to coerce me into an interview for a job that doesn't really exist. Once there, they attempt to low-ball you into some pointless, skill-irrelevant position that is a fraction of the compensation mentioned. What a waste of time.

Also, beware of any offers that want to "acquaint" you with the company before continuing the interview process. I've fallen for this once before and it turned out to be nothing but a huge marketing spiel about how you need to have their certifications to "make it" in the industry. I got up, told the speaker to fuck himself and left the building with about half of the people in attendance following suit. Good times.

A few things I've noticed...

Affiliate sites - There are sites out there who will email you and say they have positions they think you are qualified for and you can learn all about them by clicking the link to their job site. Either this is just a random job site or some affiliate pulling in links from other job sites. I usually respond that I am only interested in the specific positions they email me the text description for.

Sales - Somehow insurance sales people think my background (which has zero sales experience) would be a good fit for them. I just delete these now...should probably setup a gmail filter for them too.

Headhunters - There are good ones out there and there are crap ones. Try searching around for industry specific recruiting firms...I know in the ad industry there are specific ones for media, account management, creative, etc.

Placement firms - Companies like Aquent, Acquity Group, Creative Circle, etc. A lot of these are subsidiaries of Robert Half...a giant scam and a half. It is very insightful to look in the forums on Indeed.com about these specific companies. Plenty of fun complaints to read there.

OK, there might be marketing geniuses out there who can accomplish attraction and conversion all in one sentence. For the rest of us a headline has just one real job to do.

And that job is?

To get people to keep reading.

Asking Out That Lovely Someone You Adore:

There was this girl I really liked back in high school. At first I was scared of asking her out even though we shared a decent friendship. K was absolutely gorgeous - her eyes, her smile, the way she walked… all so very gorgeous. I wanted to tell her but I just couldn’t. I was afraid of getting the same vicious “no” I got from another girl previously.

Then one day, a seemingly super popular guy asked K out. She rejected him! It turned out, what seemed popular to many people, wasn’t to her.

Eventually I built up the courage to ask K out and to my happy surprise, she said yes. We dated for about a year and it was great. Today K and I are very close friends and so far, we’ve known each other for almost eight years. :-)

Make your move. If you get a “no”, sure, it might sting a bit - momentarily. But at least you won’t be busy wondering what if the answer was “yes”. At least you’ll know and with time, the fear of approaching someone you adore will go away.

Getting rejected by that special someone you like is not a dangerous thing. It doesn’t have to make you fearful. Redefine it!

2- Ride the Roller Coaster

Fear can have the power to cripple you - if you allow it to. It can also be a very powerful thing that motivates you. The secondary real key is not overcoming fear but utilizing it to your own advantage.

Have you ever been on a roller coaster? It’s scary seeing that thing twisting and turning. Worse still are the shouts and screams. Well, at least that’s how it was like the first time I went to ride one. I didn’t. Just before running to the queue I remembered an article I read about some guy who fell off one and died.

All the kids had fun that day. Some went on the roller coaster more than twice. All of them enjoyed it except me. I went back home feeling bitter and full of regret.

About two months later we went to the theme park again. I thought to myself, the probability of dying in a car accident is probably more than that of falling off the exciting joyride. And so on that unforgettable afternoon, I went on the roller coaster three times. In a row.

I did it because I was afraid… afraid of missing the fun.

8. Healthy food
Sit in your local mall for about an hour on a Saturday afternoon and people-watch. You will see great number of young people, flaccid, greasy, flabby, spotty young people, many with shit-colored teeth. Kids who grow up pampered and catered to tend to be picky eaters and to like food that will make them look and feel like shit. They imagine themselves to have time, time to one day change their ways and get healthy, but they don’t, you don’t morph from being a lazy slacker just by getting older, it takes sacrifice, and the best time to learn to sacrifice is when young. Kids need to know that or they may will die before you, forcing you to buy caskets with your retirement money.

As an educator I found this to be a really interesting article. I'm all for people using the internet to look up facts and question a lot of the rote memorisation that goes on in classrooms, but that doesn't mean that trainees won't need to pick up a vocabulary for the field of study they're engaged with, or an understanding of what things are possible in that field.

Both of these types of knowledge are essential for making good search strings in Google ^_^ and both require a fair amount of memorisation before the student can move from the 'I suck' stage to: 'I rock'. The less time they spend in 'i suck' the more likely they are to persevere and progress to the more interesting aspects of the subject at hand, and Piotr seems to have done some great work in this area.

I was wondering the same thing as marlborotestmonkey7 - this, to what end? Self realization and personal satisfaction? What's the point in becoming a "genius" if you only reach the goal just before you die? And what "few million" items do you choose to learn? Memorization is not the same as understanding or the ability to apply your knowledge.

Don't get me wrong - I'm very interested in the software and I may try it. Certainly this work seems very valuable. I wonder why he didn't collaborate on it? It would be nice just to be able to license his algorithms and plop a decent interface on top :)

"So you believe in trying things for yourself?" he asks.

"Yes."

This provides his opening. "In that case, let's go swimming."

At the edge of the sea, I become afraid. I'm a strong swimmer, but there's something about standing on the beach in the type of minuscule bathing suit you get at the gift shop of a discount resort in Eastern Europe, and watching people stride past in their down parkas, that smacks of danger.

"I'm already happy with anticipation," Wozniak says.

"Will I have a heart attack?"

"There is less risk than on your drive here," he answers.

I realize he must be correct. Poland has few freeways, and in the rural north, lines of cars jockey behind communist-era farm machinery until they defy the odds and try to pass. There are spectacular wrecks. Wozniak gives close attention to the qualitative estimate of fatal risks. By graphing the acquisition of knowledge in SuperMemo, he has realized that in a single lifetime one can acquire only a few million new items. This is the absolute limit on intellectual achievement defined by death. So he guards his health. He rarely gets in a car. The Germans on the beach are staring at me. I dive in.