Barsoomcore's Blog

An Unexpected Trove

2011-11-08T15:58:00.005-08:00

Since coming to Toronto, I had heard rumours that the Royal Ontario Museum held an exceptional array of Japanese swords in its archives, unavailable to the public. Finding a way to get a look at those swords has been on my mind for years now, but thanks to some very well-connected friends, Toronto Kenjutsu was privileged to go behind the scenes at the ROM and examine some of its many treasures.

The rumours were well-founded. We stood around in stunned amazement as tray after tray of fabulous works of art were presented to us. Swords of the like I never thought I'd get a chance to look at, much less handle (after very stern lessons on proper handling of priceless artifacts), lay before us in stacked rows. It was truly an amazing experience.

One day was not sufficient to go through all the treasures, but we found plenty to marvel at. There were gorgeously detailed koshirae, classic katana and a number of very strange swords, difficult to classify but fascinating to consider and wonder about. We passed them around, our hands encased in thin gloves to shield the ancient artifacts from our skin and its oils. There were swords that had been made for battle, and many bearing signs of heavy use (though whether on the battlefield or just getting thrown around by an incautious owner, it's hard to say), and then there were some in breathtakingly perfect condition. And not only swords; we examined daggers and spearheads and other edged weapons.

While not everyone finds the Japanese sword AS compelling an object as most of us do, there's no denying the elegance and beauty of these artifacts, and the careful detail that goes into them.

This little moth pattern appeared on a kurigata -- the little knob on the sheath to which the cord is attached. It's no wider than your little finger, and yet so much care was lavished on it. We saw item after item like this, until the mind could scarcely take it all in.

But this attitude, of attaching importance even to the smallest of details, is paramount in our practice. The angle of the feet, the line of the cut -- if these are not understood and performed to the most exacting standards, the sword will not cut. More importantly, if the mind is not fully present, and not truly aware of all these tiny details, then opportunities slip away, and vulnerabilities are not seen or attended to.

It's not that there is only one 'correct', or 'perfect' way to perform the kata. But as I practice, as I strive to attend to every conceivable detail (and Sensei is always able to find yet another detail I am not attending to), I learn to open my mind to what is truly in front of me. To let go of my preconceptions and prejudices and see clearly that which is actually there.

This last illustration came from a massive sheath -- carved from a single piece of ivory that can only have come from an elephant's tusk. It was covered all over with carvings of this sort of detail and delight. Full of samurai pursuing each other, swinging swords and naginata, on horseback or on foot, beautiful images of fighting men in poses and stances that we practice to this very day.

We will never use our arts for the same purpose they did. We will never kill or face death at the end of a sword. But the wisdom those long-ago men learned in that violent, terrifying fashion still serves us today.

We are very grateful to the staff members at the ROM for accommodating us and making this visit possible. It was honestly a dream come true for all of us, and we will always remember that day.

Forging Imperfection

2011-07-16T14:42:00.003-07:00

Is there a perfect blade? A perfect cut?

If there is, I'm not sure I've ever seen one, or at least, I've never recognized it as such. That may say more about my powers of observation than anything else, but while I've been astonished at the beauty of some blades, and some cuts, it wasn't perfection I was seeing. Any piece of steel forged by hand will have irregularities in it. Connoisseurs of Japanese blades seek out irregularities and celebrate them. Smiths strive to produce just the right irregularities in just the right places, to elevate the steel, to display its natural character or to create a specific effect in the viewer.

A beautiful blade is not perfect. My sword, pictured here, is hardly perfect. The afore-mentioned connoisseurs will probably point out that it's not particularly beautiful, either, but never mind them. But I do love my sword, and I have grown to appreciate the beauty it has more and more over the years.

When I watch Sugino Sensei perform the kata of Katori Shinto Ryu, I don't see perfection. I couldn't possibly imagine how it could be improved, but I can see that his version of the kata is different from his father's. It's different from Ishida Sensei's, or Iwata Sensei's. It's of course different from Otake Sensei's as well. All the great masters that I have had the privilege of observing have performed the kata differently.

Those differences appear to me now like the grain in the steel of my sword. Subtle (or not so subtle) variations, all of which work together to make the steel strong and beautiful. If the steel had no grain or flow to it, it would be mechanical and lifeless, but Katori flows through its students, moving onwards from one to the next, and nobody does it 'perfectly'. Everybody's version is irregular somehow.

Through practice, those irregularities can be constrained, or directed, but if they can be eradicated, well, it doesn't seem to be happening in my case. But just as a great swordsmith brings out the natural, inherent character of the steel when forging a sword, perhaps steady practice in Katori can do something with my own natural, inherent character.

Clean Mats, Clean Mind

2011-01-02T16:29:00.004-08:00

One year comes to an end, another begins.

We spent a portion of a year-end afternoon washing the mats at Toronto Kenjutsu. It was a good chance to reflect on cleanliness and renewal in a dark time of the year.

Miyamoto Musashi warns us against spending too much time keeping everything looking good:

"Do not overvalue the things you have."

"Do not become obsessed with having splendid weapons."

And martial arts tales are full of disreputable characters in grubby robes who turn out to be great masters.

And yet, cleaning and maintaining my space and possessions helps me to clean and maintain my mind. Scrubbing the mats, restoring their shine and luster, helps me to come to the dojo with my mind clear and unclouded. Not to mention that a couple of hours in physical labour with good friends is a fine way to spend an afternoon.

And a fine way to look back on 2010 with thankfulness. We were invited to demonstrate at Haru Matsuri at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Center, a great honour for us. Our practice expanded to two classes a week, and is still going strong. We traveled to Sherbrooke to study with Sugino Sensei. And Såzen Sensei came out for a wonderful weekend seminar that students here are still talking about. New students joined, and our little community has grown over the year. 2010 was very exciting. We wrapped up the year with a bonenkai party at Jigan Dojo, a great chance to visit with other Katori Shinto Ryu practitioners around Southern Ontario.

This past year had many great moments for Toronto Kenjutsu. Now that our mats are clean and shiny, we look forward to 2011 in anticipation of many more!

The Principle

2010-08-07T14:17:00.004-07:00

The most important truths in life are few, and yet so hard to set down in words. This is why literature endures, century after century. Each generation, each society, has to find new ways of expressing the same truths. There are many paths to learning these truths -- literature is one that has long held value to me. Likewise, swordsmanship. There are deep truths buried in the practice of Katori Shinto Ryu -- but expressing those truths is almost impossible.

We had another lovely visit with Sozen Sensei this past July. A gifted practitioner of Sugino-style Katori Shinto Ryu (he holds a fifth dan in the style), I know Sozen Sensei from Japan, where we practiced together for years at Sugino Dojo. This year, instead of working on one kata after another, Sozen Sensei spoke of the differences between "principle" and "technique", and we spent the weekend exploring the myriad techniques that arise from the principles of Katori Shinto Ryu.

For example, an early move that must be learned is a way by which uketachi (the partner who receives the attack) may receive an incoming cut from kirikomi (the partner who initiates the attack) in such a fashion as to not only deflect the blow, but place his own sword in position for a thrust, forcing kirikomi to retreat. The principle is simple enough -- bring your sword down in time with your opponent's, the tip directed at his center. Actually performing it is not quite so simple, of course.

And even when it is performed correctly, the purpose of such a move is not always obvious. "If both our swords come down together, " a beginning student may wonder, "why does kirikomi retreat and uketachi advance?"

Katori is a style in which what is seen is not always what is happening. The principle -- the action that is practiced over and over again until it becomes automatic -- is not in fact the technique. We practice the principle in the kata, because in the principle is the simplest truth that must be manifested in that moment. Match the timing, keep your tip in the center. You need not know what you are doing at this point, but if you simply practice it again and again, the techniques that are available in this principle will begin to reveal themselves.

Strike the enemy's sword down. Cut the wrist. Lean in and cut the throat. Slide back and thrust in deeply. These objectives, these desired results, are all techniques, and in any given manifestation of the principle, some techniques may be possible and others may not be. It is impossible to know ahead of time which technique ought to be used. But the principle is always valid.

When we practice the kata, at times these techniques may spontaneously arise, and this is fine. But we should never lose sight of the principles themselves, and we should always return ourselves to these simplest truths that Katori reminds us of. Maintain one's center. Understand the lines of engagement. Manage distance.

Katori is so rich, so full of meaning and depth, that I could never imagine mastering every possible technique. Sometimes I discover a new technique that opens doors throughout my mind. This happened in July, watching Sozen Sensei demonstrate some of the techniques hidden inside hakka no tachi. He pointed out the similarity between one movement and the basic cut of Katori Shinto Ryu, maki-uchi, and I had a sudden moment of revelation. I could only laugh as astonishment flooded me. Hidden inside this kata lay the most basic principle of Katori Shinto Ryu, and I now see it everywhere. What was once a matter of technique has become the flowering of a single principle.

It's impossible to share these insights. They cannot truly be transmitted through words, but that makes them more, not less, important. Our words are a technique. A novel is technique. A cut to the wrist is a technique. The wisdom that lies behind the cut, the novel, or the words -- that's principle.

Great instructors like Sozen Sensei are able to reveal the principles to their students, and share in the boundless techniques that arise from them. We are very fortunate to have such people join us in our practice.

The Gift of Attention

2010-06-13T09:56:00.004-07:00

This past May I was thrilled to be able to attend Sugino Sensei's seminar in Sherbrooke, along with a large number of other Katori Shinto Ryu practitioners from both Ontario and Quebec. For three days we practiced under Sugino Sensei's keen eye. The experience brought back to me thoughts I'd had years ago, about how precious the gift of attention can be.

And while of course receiving such a gift is something to be treasured, in recent days I've been thinking of how simple it can be for any of us to GIVE such a gift as well.

When I face my partner in omote-tachi, or even when practicing kamae (the stances that form the foundation of Katori Shinto Ryu), I am most useful to them when I gift them with my full attention and spirit.

I don't mean that we must put on a fierce face and pretend to be locked in mortal combat, or try to intimidate or startle them. But we can give our attention to them completely, letting nothing distract us from their action. Not only with our eyes, but with our entire being as we perform the kata alertly, attentively, and with a fully present spirit.

It is so rare in our lives that anyone truly pays attention to us. Most people spend every moment consumed with self-reflection, condemning themselves or praising themselves -- usually without nearly as much cause as they imagine -- that they have little energy left over to consider others. Our own lives and worries are so important to us that we ignore the people all around us. This behaviour keeps us from learning, but just as important, it makes it hard for those around us to learn as well. When they do not receive our attention, they do not receive useful feedback that they can use in their efforts to learn and transform.

The practice of Katori offers us an opportunity to put our self-centered concerns aside and engage with others openly, presently. When we perform the katas, if we remain trapped in a selfish inward struggle, we fail to give our partner what they most need at this moment: our attention. This is one of the qualities that makes a teacher like Sugino Sensei so effective -- he sheds himself and focuses entirely on what the student is doing. It is a lesson to myself that regardless of how poor my technique may be, or how tired I am, I can still be of tremendous value to my partner simply by paying careful attention to them.

Photo courtesy of Michel Martin. Sugino Sensei is seated at center. Weins Sensei is seated at right and Mr. Reid (me) is seated at left.

Now Twice the Katori

2010-04-01T17:39:00.007-07:00

We are happy to announce that Toronto Kenjutsu will be offering classes twice a week starting in April.

Classes will now be held every Monday and every Wednesday at Kokoro Dojo, both nights at 8:30 pm.

We are thrilled that our classes have been popular enough to warrant such a step. This group started in 2008 with very modest objectives -- only to provide a space for interested folks to practice Katori Shinto Ryu in the center of Toronto. With the support of senior instructors like Tong Sensei and Wiens Sensei of Tokumeikan, Toronto Kenjutsu has been able to grow and flourish, providing a chance for students of Japanese swordsmanship to practice this legendary art here in Toronto.

Katori Shinto Ryu is best practiced in small groups -- only through direct communication can this subtle and demanding style be properly learned and understood. Each practitioner must have time to listen and absorb what they are learning. Opening a second evening of practice allows us to maintain our small class size and still accommodate more students.

We are very grateful to the tremendous folks who share our practice with us and have made this possible, and of course to Tong Sensei and Wiens Sensei whose support has made Toronto Kenjutsu possible in the first place. Thank you all, and we look forward to seeing you twice as often!

Haru Matsuri 2010: A New Year

2010-03-02T06:38:00.008-08:00

Toronto Kenjutsu was pleased to take part in this spring's Haru Matsuri festival at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre on March 6, 2010. We performed there under the supervision of the senior Canadian instructors of Katori Shinto Ryu, including Wiens Sensei of Tokumeikan, who is Sugino Sensei's senior student in Canada. Also present was Tong Sensei who teaches at Dragon Fencing Academy in Richmond Hill.

This was a great honour for our group and we were very excited to be able to bring the practice of Katori Shinto Ryu swordsmanship to the public in this fashion. The Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre has long been a supporter of our art, and we greatly appreciated this opportunity. We have participated in this event for several years now, and it is always a fantastic event. This year was no exception.

Katori Shinto groups from around Toronto came together to practice and to demonstrate traditional Japanese swordsmanship to the many folks attending Haru Matsuri. These events are always a great chance to practice with folks we don't usually practice with, and to learn new techniques and share our observations on this ancient art.

Working with new people means paying very close attention to each detail. When you always practice with the same folks, you get used to each other's styles and can unconsciously start to anticipate each other's moves. If I start anticipating my partner's moves, then I'm not using my senses to understand what I'm seeing and respond -- I'm interfering in that process with my expectations and my ego. One of the gifts of practicing with new people is that I am stripped of my expectations and am forced to observe, and react solely to what is there, rather than what I expect.

Of course I hope I can act this way even with people I am familiar with, but it's useful to have these chances to put that to the test.

Thanks again to the great people at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre and Tokumeikan for allowing us to take part in this event.

Photos by Owen Jacobson.

Severing the Edge

2009-12-25T15:03:00.005-08:00

It may seem odd to illustrate a comment on Takuan Soho's The Unfettered Mind with an image painted by Miyamoto Musashi, given that Soho is billed on the front cover of this Wilson translation as "Writing to Yagyu Munenori, Musashi's great rival", but when I read Soho's piece on "Sever the Edge between Before and After" I immediately thought of this image.

Steph also brought this piece to mind in a discussion recently about taking action, recalling the decisive stroke that forms the body of the branch the shrike here is sitting on. That stroke is so full of boldness and uncompromising direction, giving life to the concept of "severing the edge" as I understand it. Soho writes:

This [severing the edge] means one should cut right through the interval between previous and present. Its significance is in cutting off the edge between before and after, between now and then. It means not detaining the mind.

Soho's text echoes with meaning for me, even knowing as I do how the English translation must necessarily strip layers of richness and allusion from the original. But this idea, of severing the connection between past and present, resonates especially.

Musashi's line in this image admits no indecisiveness, no clinging to possibilities. Because it seems to me that indecisiveness is just that -- an inability to let go of past truths and untruths, to choose a single present and commit to it fully. If we sever the past from our present, we are left with only the present moment, and we can act with full intention and focus.

In Katori Shinto Ryu, when I practice maku-uchi men, it is this total presence that I am trying to achieve. My aikido instructor Sensei Skoyles used to say that iai practice was all about "cutting away at ourselves", ridding ourselves of weaknesses or failures to seek victory over ourselves. Every cut is an opportunity to loose failure, to let fears and anxieties fall away. Every cut is a chance for perfection, but perfection can only exist in this moment, never in the past where we are powerless to act.

When I raise my sword over my head, I try to release all thoughts, to let my mind move as it must and simply make the cut, fully present and fully engaged, holding nothing back.

It is very very difficult, but not nearly as difficult as doing it WITHOUT the sword. For the true value of this practice is learning to act with such presence and focus in my day-to-day life. Katori shows me a way to be but it is up to me to use that vision and apply it to the rest of my life.

The Mind of the Form

2009-11-21T10:29:00.003-08:00

I'm getting a lot of mileage out of The Demon's Sermon on the Martial Arts. I was re-reading this lovely book recently and found yet another pearl that has stuck with me.

In the tale of "The Transformation of the Sparrow and the Butterfly" we read about how the sparrow envies the butterfly, for the butterfly has transformed from a lowly worm into a beautiful, free-flying butterfly, while the sparrow expects to transform from its current free-flying state into a clam, with no power of movement and forced to exist in the mud and filth of the ocean floor.

Predictably, the butterfly scoffs at such worries, and chides the sparrow for trying to project its current mind into its future form. The butterfly says:

"The mind of the form follows that form. When the form is extinguished, the mind of the form disappears, too."

When I read this most recently, I thought of how the kata we study are composed of a series of forms -- postures or actions. And how often I will have my mind in either the form ahead or the form behind the form I am currently presenting. If I make a mistake, I berate myself through the next several forms, paying little attention to the forms I carry on with. Likewise, if I know a difficult move is coming up, I will anticipate it several steps ahead, reminding myself to get ready, and often moving too soon or without proper mindfulness.

But this is why I practice. The "mind of the form" will come, if I learn to correctly take the form. If I practice my body, my mind will follow. I cannot practice Katori by imagining, or by reasoning, or by any mental process whatsoever. Only practice will bring my mind to the correct place. And once the form is completed, spending any further mental energy on that form is futile. The mind of the form has disappeared.

This is why questions in the dojo are so often unhelpful. It is rarely the case that new information will improve a student's form. Practice is what is required. Until the form is correct, the mind of the form cannot be grasped.

Photo by Lida Rose

The Right Place To Be

2009-09-07T12:41:00.004-07:00

This past August, I was fortunate to be able to join with Weins Sensei and others at his dojo in St Catherines, to practice and study with Sozen Larsen Kusano Sensei, of Kakudokan Norway.

Sozen Sensei is a 5th-dan practitioner of Katori Shinto Ryu, under Sugino Sensei. He is a big man, affable and energetic, with a passion for the art that comes across in all his demonstrations and instructions. Spending a couple of days under Sozen Sensei's expert eye is worth years of practicing alone or with one's peers.

Last year Sozen Sensei emphasized the importance of Responding, as opposed to blindly following the dictates of the kata. This year he spoke about how our practice should not be about trying to "reach" our opponent, but rather training ourselves to end up in the right position.

When one performs the kata with a partner, and has to make a cut, there is a very strong temptation to try and actually reach one's opponent's body as they retreat. Indeed at times I know I myself feel like I've failed if I haven't made contact.

Sozen Sensei emphasized that what's much more important than making that contact is to ensure that one comes to rest in the correct position, ready and balanced, available to make whatever move might be appropriate. Actually connecting with the blow is of lesser importance, and certainly one should never REACH out, extend oneself, in the hope of scoring a "touch". The swordfighting game is not about touching, it is about cutting, cutting deeply, cutting one's opponent down in a decisive blow. If the blow does not come naturally, then one should not reach out in the hopes of making it. Instead, finish the cut, maintain awareness, and adapt to the ongoing situation.

Miyamoto Musashi touches on this with his description of the Chinese Monkey's Body -- "the spirit of not reaching out your arms. Get in quickly, without extending your arms, before your opponent strikes." Sozen Sensei demonstrated how, once the urge to extend is eliminated, the swordsman can move in for a cut or keep a respectful distance, by stepping forward or back. The motion of the cut and the attitude of the body and arms are identical whether stepping in or staying back -- it is only through positioning that we choose between contact and distance.

"Chance favours the prepared mind," said Louis Pasteur. One might suggest that in mortal combat, chance likewise favours the prepared body. In our emotional and social interactions, we could say that chance favours the prepared spirit. In all our affairs, there is a correct manner of conduct, one that brings us to a balanced, stable stance, regardless of how we position ourselves. We may step in deeply, or we may stay clear of entanglement, but either way, the correct conduct remains the same. Acting decisively is a matter of conduct; acting effectively is a matter of position.

Photo by Leia Mendes Cook

A Different Kind of Conversation

2009-06-21T16:23:00.005-07:00

Training with my instructor today he reminded me that "Katori is conversation."

It's a pretty serious sort of conversation, of course, being the sort in which, if you do it for real, somebody ends up dead.

Those stakes make it incumbent upon me as I practice to be constantly aware of what's really at stake here: that this is a conversation of life and death. Only my mindfulness can make it so; that puts the onus on me to ensure I am bringing my full attention and my entire mind to my side of the conversation.

Even in the kata themselves, our posture, our focus, and our swords communicate, one to the other, the life-or-death moment that each strike and each block contain. The topic actually came up today as we practiced a common move in Katori: O-Gasumi.

In this technique, we find ourselves with our opponent's sword laid overtop of our own -- clearly not a position we wish to remain in for long! But the opponent's mechanical advantage precludes simply lifting up. One way to convert this situation to our liking is to turn the sword over so that it is edge-up, and then lift the tip upwards as we step forward. If our opponent does not step back, we may cut his wrists from below, or even slice open his torso with a rising cut.

Performed quickly, it appears decisive and easy. Break it down into its component moves (or more traumatically, attempt it against someone more skilled than yourself) and you will find that your opponent can easily counter-thrust -- IF you fail to maintain contact with your sword against his. That contact is what keeps the "conversation" going. You can FEEL when your opponent attempts a counter-thrust, since their sword is pressed against yours. Likewise, your opponent can feel that no opening is being provided, and has no aggressive options.

Part of practice is learning to hear this conversation between our swords -- so that we are training ourselves to look for the opening when it comes, to recognize the moment so that we can speak our piece when appropriate.

Blindly performing moves, lost in our own worlds, is not the way of Katori. This practice requires open eyes, an open heart and a developed capacity to perceive what is truly being said to us.

The Convo Mark 2: The Online Community

2009-06-09T19:47:00.007-07:00

It's time for the second round of what came to be known as "the convo". The last one led to all sorts of larger conversations and community efforts, but ground needs re-plowing. Seeds need replanting. This time around, I thought we'd target a more narrow topic than last time: What are the characteristics of successful online communities?

Most of us are involved in multiple communities whose primary medium of social exchange is online -- whether that be a Twitter group, a discussion board, email list, or whatever. When positive, these communities can turn into massively productive sources of energy and transformation. Some online communities thrive while others never get off the ground. Some prosper vibrantly for a short time and then wither and die for some reason. More interestingly, some communities (all healthy ones) appear to reach beyond the online sphere and into "real-world" connection and influence.

Are there characteristics shared by successful online communities? What are they? Are any of them necessary qualities? Are any of them sufficient qualities? Can any of them be fostered or nurtured constructively, intentionally? Can they be DESIGNED?

And, perhaps more importantly, what is the purpose or output of these communities? How is economic value generated? In a sense, where does the marketplace begin and end -- to put it bluntly, under what terms can we authentically go after money and seek economic reward in this community without (as RT so delicately put it) being douchebags?

Sign up on the wiki -- we're planning to hold this on the morning of the 23rd, location TBD. Stay tuned and hang out in the comments!

Photo credit: Ivan Avramov.

Summer Holiday is Over!

2009-05-29T18:29:00.005-07:00

We are now safely ensconced in our new location at Kokoro Dojo. The very fine folks of Sandokai Aikido and our little group have moved into our beautiful new home near Dupont Station as of June 15th.

Kokoro Dojo has a lovely place set back from Dupont Street amongst trees and old houses. It's very lovely.

Enjoy thesummer and if you have any questions about Toronto Kenjutsu's practice, feel free to drop by!

Flower photo by oui cool2

Moving Over To A New Homestead

2009-05-04T13:49:00.004-07:00

The "barsoomcore" blog is going to scale back, in favour of a bigger, hopefully better, Scratch Factory blog.

The new and improved Scratch Factory blog will feature, most excitingly, new bloggers! A couple of folks who share many of my eccentric enthusiasms will be posting there, and we look forward to providing you with an even wider mix of things piratical, prehistoric and pulptastic.

Anyway, we're sorry to say goodbye to the old reliable barsoomcore address, but the new home is going to be even swankier!

Well, actually, it's going to look exactly the same. But rest assured big things are afoot. HUGE. HUGE-FOOTED THINGS.

Remember, kids: pick up the new RSS feed!

One Quick Sharp Sound

2009-04-30T20:25:00.002-07:00

One of the things I can remember learning first from Sugino Sensei was how to bow properly at the start of a session of Katori Shinto Ryu practice. It's a very distinctive ritual: from seiza, one bows twice, then claps one's hands twice, then bows once.

I am not the sort of person who asks for explanations, so I never asked why we bow in such a fashion. I have heard that it is a Shinto practice whereby the clapping is symbolic of awakening the god, but I don't know that this is the truth. What I do know is what I have come to experience after years of performing this tiny little act day in and day out: connected.

When people arrive for class, they have not yet shed their individual needs and fears. They bring their anxieties and the business of their lives into the dojo and onto the mat. They are not joined into one group with a shared purpose.

Becoming a community of mutual purpose is what the opening bow is all about. We line up together, and we demonstrate our willingness to humble ourselves. Doing it twice makes sure that it wasn't a mistake. That it wasn't done casually, or without thought for the meaning of the act.

When we clap, we are acting in concert, with immediate feedback as to how united we are. There should be only a single sound each time as every pair of hands comes together simultaneously. At least, when I hear that, I feel a lightness inside myself and I can't help but smile at the feeling of connectedness that fills me at that moment.

It's a lovely reminder of how we should practice Katori throughout the session -- connected to each other, fully engaged and responsive to our partner, our instructors and our fellow students. We need to pay attention to the full reality that emerges before us, and we need to allow our responses to that reality to emerge naturally and completely, without hesitation or preconception.

And each time when we open practice I get another reminder of all that, in one quick sharp sound we all share.

Essential Unknowableness

2009-04-26T15:33:00.003-07:00

I've been rereading an old treasure from our bookshelf: a collection of Byron's letters that S gave me when I went off to Japan. I have been a Byronophile (Byrophiliac?) since my university days, and the older I get and the more about him I understand, the better I like the man.

His letters are some of his best writing. Condensed narratives and scenes from his often hilarious, often tragic life. His heartbreaking letters to his estranged wife contrast sharply with his uproarious tales of life in Venice. It's hard to select passages because as always with Byron, context is so important. He is not a writer of pithy remarks and self-contained couplets but rather a sprawling, ungainly teller of tales who plays on the ongoing context of his works. But reading his letters in a sustained period builds up a very satisfying view of the man. And he never fails to surprise.

This collection is some 800 pages or so, and even at that is but a fraction of Lord Byron's total correspondence. There's an edition of Byron's Letters and Journals that is perhaps more complete: it's published in TWELVE VOLUMES -- and that's only considering his side of the story. Include all the letters others wrote TO him, and there are thousands upon thousands of pages of what is, essentially, data. Data about Lord Byron and those he spoke to, and of.

It's a vast amount of information. Staggering.

And yet there remain so many mysteries about the man. Who he was and what his opinions TRULY were on so many subjects. His writings are filled with contradictions and controversies, with such sly twists of meaning, that people still argue over some of the most basic facts of his life and personality. Was he a sexist monster? A romantic knocked about by the world or a cynical manipulator of public opinion?

All of which puts me in mind of Charles' Stross' astonishing book Accelerando. One of the conceits of this book is the idea that we will, in the not too distant future, find a way of codifying and storing personality. Which is the real key to immortality, of course. Once we know how to record and store a person's character intact (I should think a non-lossy format will be required here), then we can pull them up at any time and they live again. Which I guess means turning off the computer is a form of murder, but fortunately a reversible one. Keep backups.

But is this feasible? Is it reasonable to suggest that there will EVER be enough data to record a person so thoroughly that we recognize a manifestation of them as THEM? Look at the vast amount of data we have on a character like George Gordon, Lord Byron, and consider how feeble our ability to truly understand him is. How much more data will be required to have a definitive recording of a human being's personality?

Perhaps I'm just a Luddite on this issue. But the essential unknowableness is important to me. A friend recently asked for help in dealing with people suffering personality disorders: he found these people so perfectly predictable that it actually became hard to see them as human beings, rather than just objects in the world he could manipulate. We discussed the need in all of us to maintain the awareness that ALL people are capable of surprising us, no matter how many times in the past they may have played right into our expectations.

Heck, DOGS can surprise the most experienced trainers -- how can we imagine that people can be perfectly recorded and duplicated?

As for Lord Byron, people keep trying to reproduce him. I recently read John Crowley's The Evening Land, which purports to be a novel written by Byron. It was a healthy effort, and yet it did not convince in the end. Byron is dead, and he will never be among us again. All we have are the words he left behind, but these must be a pale shadow of the man that was.

But damn, he writes a great letter.

Angry Robots: Who Doesn't Love 'em?

2009-04-18T21:43:00.003-07:00

Come on. When a giant robot gets all cranky, it's comedy.

Via Pulp 2.0.

The SLAVE QUEEN for DINO-PIRATES

2009-04-18T16:24:00.002-07:00

The first official adventure for the DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND game has now been updated to use the official DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND rules.

THE SLAVE QUEEN OF THE RUINED CITY

These rules feature all-new variations on skills like Diplomacy and Intimidate, a revised, streamlined damage system, and completely revamped systems for Reputation, supernatural powers and Recovery. This hard work has been done mostly by the amazing group over at the True20 forums, whose creativity and intelligence has made an already great game even better. It's been inspiring working with that crew, and the game wouldn't be half as cool as it is without their efforts.

The SLAVE QUEEN OF THE RUINED CITY has been run at numerous events, in cities around North America, and it's never failed to provide a great afternoon's entertainment. This package includes maps, sample characters, handouts -- along with the online rules it's everything you need to start playing DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND.

Well, except for some friends. You have to provide those yourself.

Slagsmålsklubben!

2009-04-01T16:48:00.002-07:00

Okay, I don't know what Slagsmålsklubben means (although I suspect it's the name of a band), but it's my favourite new word. And this video is even more clever and charming than you think it's going to be when it starts.

Very very charming.

The First Celebrity Child

2009-03-24T18:25:00.006-07:00

Ada Lovelace Day is being established, and I think it's a lovely holiday to observe. I wrote a brief post on the FreshBooks blog for it, as hundreds if not thousands of people read that blog, and I think perhaps three people read this one, so it seemed the right choice.

But Ada and I go back a ways.

See, Ada Lovelace is not only the First Lady of Computing (if you didn't know that, then you probably didn't know about Ada Lovelace day in the first place, so that's TWO things you've learned today. No, no, just doing my job, here), she's also the only legitimate daughter of the infamous Lord Byron, the original rock star. Byron pretty much invented the whole idea of celebrity — of being famous primarily for being famous.

Of course, Byron is a great writer, one of the best for my money, and his great work, Don Juan, is a masterpiece of rhyme and meter, but to be honest, in the early 1800's, when EVERYONE in Europe knew who he was, and ladies were fainting when he walked into salons, most of the people who knew him probably hadn't read much of his poetry. He was famous for being LORD BYRON.

Now I'm an open and ardent admirer of Byron's. So much so that when I went off to Japan, I took with me Steph's going-away-but-soon-to-be-reunited present: Byron's letters (well, a good few hundred of them, anyway), in a massive volume that offered them as a sort of autobiography. Many of them are hilariously delightful, as much for what he DOESN'T say as for what he does. So I've invested in my Byronophilia. I'm no expert, but I get by. I do get a charge out of software developers sending me his verses — FreshBooks has a clause in its software developer job posting saying that anyone who includes a verse of ottava rima with their application will get it reviewed by me personally. Entirely true, by the way, and since Byron is easily the dominant practitioner of the form in English, I get several verses of his poetry every week.

Usually the same verses, but what can you do? It's still funny stuff.

So ANYWAY, poor Ada grew up in her infamous father's shadow, though she never met him as an adult. But she certainly lived up to his celebrity fame — not with any real celebrity of her own, but with full-on accomplishment. 165 years ago Ada Lovelace wrote the very first computer program in history. She's the Queen of the Nerds. Mother Geek. The Ur-BOFH.

And yet, until 1953, she'd been pretty much entirely forgotten. The sad fate of celebrity kids, I guess — all anyone wants to know about you is what you know about dear old Dad, and since Ada had nothing to say about her notorious sire, I guess she vanished from history.

Until somebody published her translation of an Italian article on Charles Babbage's mad scheme to build an Analytical Engine, and it turned out that in her notes (which are considerably longer than the article itself) she wrote out the instructions of how one would set up the non-existent Engine so as to calculate the set of Bernoulli numbers. She also wrote some fantastically perceptive comments on what Babbage's invention really meant:

In enabling mechanism to combine together general symbols in successions of unlimited variety and extent, a uniting link is established between the operations of matter and the abstract mental processes of the most abstract branch of mathematical science. A new, a vast, and a powerful language is developed for the future use of analysis, in which to wield its truths so that these may become of more speedy and accurate practical application for the purposes of mankind than the means hitherto in our possession have rendered possible. Thus not only the mental and the material, but the theoretical and the practical in the mathematical world, are brought into more intimate and effective connexion with each other.

Obviously, these are the days before Twitter.

But she's seeing that the software/hardware divide (which in 1843 was pretty much human brains on one side, and the rest of the universe on the other) was closing. She was looking down a very very long road and seeing, dimly perhaps, but still, seeing where it led.

We may consider the engine as the material and mechanical representative of analysis, and that our actual working powers in this department of human study will be enabled more effectually than heretofore to keep pace with our theoretical knowledge of its principles and laws, through the complete control which the engine gives us over the executive manipulation of algebraical and numerical symbols.

Keeping pace with our theoretical knowledge — I find this a fascinating way to look at the Information Revolution. We are nearing the point at which one person needs only to imagine something for it to be brought into being. The big problems nowadays in software seem to be largely design problems — which are problems with refining the idea, rather than manufacturing its "material and mechanical representative".

The imagination at work here is fearsome. In another part of the article she imagined that such devices could be programmed to create music! In 1843! No wonder Babbage called her the "Enchantress of Numbers". She was even able to foresee the immense value present in software development:

We have undoubtedly to lay out a certain capital of analytical labour in one particular line; but this is in order that the engine may bring us in a much larger return in another line.

I've been in the software business for over a decade now, and this is a pretty good summation of exactly what this nutty business is all about. Reading Ada's writing, I find it easy to imagine that she would see the necessary progression from the punch cards and rotating drums of Babbage's mad machine to agile methodologies, web frameworks and object-oriented design. She was 28 years old when she wrote that article, and dead less than ten years later, largely unheralded and forgotten until a hundred years later when her article was republished.

How strange that, given my long-standing infatuation with Lord Byron, I find myself spending years in the field created and defined by his daughter. My thanks to the Finding Ada project for bringing all this to my awareness. I think it's quite appropriate to have a day celebrating the birth of the Information Revolution. All we need now are some Hallmark cards.

New To Me

2009-03-17T20:19:00.003-07:00

Okay, okay, I'm late to the table here but HOLY CRAP THIS IS AMAZING. The name is Kutiman. He builds music out of YouTube clips. Beautiful, inspiring music. And videos to go along with them -- videos that actually ARE the music itself.

Wow. That's just. Wow. And poke around, there's more.

I don't think I've been this excited about new music since Portishead appeared out of nowhere and kicked my butt way back in Funabashi. There's so much delight and wit in here, married with such a lovely appreciation and respect for the glorious generosity (inspired by narcissism, perhaps, but there you go) of the goofy human spirit. I remember the first time I heard Coldcut's "Say Kids What Time Is It?" -- this is the same energy, the same determination to build greatness where nobody else saw it. This is what art is all about.

Thanks, Trill, for the find.

march

2009-03-14T22:53:00.003-07:00

So spring has come,
Oh Jesus,
not again.
The cold has sunk too deep; too frozen now
the furrows of my heart; for any plow
would splinter here;
this chill-swept, dark terrain.
No, not for me;
this year, let me abstain.
Let wither further, wither all, allow
cold, stiff corrosion to gnaw at every vow.
Numb every oath, let nothing pure remain.
The only purity
is purity of ice,
for spring's encroachment on the land
brings but a new,
capricious tyranny.
Each year this joke gets harder to withstand:
that leaves sprout new, that swallows come on wing,
that mourners laugh, that winter
melts to
spring.

I still think this is the best thing I've ever written. Originally published in the Filling station calendar way back in, uh, '96 or so, I think. There is one defective line metrically (though I think it's a defensible variation) in the poem: a year's subscription FOR FREE to anyone who can point it out.

Photo by He and Fi.

Expanding the Parameters

2009-03-14T11:22:00.005-07:00

Expanding my horizons and
Expanding my parameters,
Expanding the rhymes of
Sucker MC amateurs

There's things I need to do more of, things I hope to do less of. Habits I need to acquire, habits I need to break. My life has been a steady (if not always directed) process of transformation, and yet so many of the things I do every day are things I have done since I was child. Habits learned long ago and trusted now despite all evidence to suggest they are neither healthy nor helpful.

I guess that's one of the things I like about swordfighting. It is entirely about learning new habits and letting go of old ones, and offers the hope that if we can change our habits in this odd little sphere, perhaps there's the possibility of changing them in other, wider spheres. The lesson of Katori practice, however, is that the process of changing one's habits is slow, frustrating and resistant to logic. You can't argue yourself out of your habits. You can't just decide to take on new ones. You have to PRACTICE.

Well, I do, anyway. And practice and practice and practice and then practice some more, realize I've been practicing the wrong thing and have to change all the stuff I've learned up till now anyway, practice, practice practice, watch myself and discover I'm STILL doing that dumb thing with my foot that Sensei pointed out on like my SECOND class, practice, practice, practice...

Art works the same way. I write and I write, and I hope to god I'm getting better, but I'm not sure I am. I came across a story I'd written back in, oh, probably Grade Three or so. It read pretty much the same as how I write today. Same turns of phrase, same sentence structure, same obsessions I have now. Same rip-offs of the same writers I'm still ripping off today. Writing is a habit. Practice, practice, practice.

It turns out management is likewise a habit-based discipline. Becoming a better manager is all about acquiring the right sorts of habits so that you end up having the right conversations at the right time, and I AM pretty sure I'm a better manager than I used to be.

What about leading, though? Is being a leader a question of the right habits? I THINK so. I think being an effective leader (and there are as many ways to do that as there are to be a great manager, writer or swordsman, I'd say) is about acquiring the habits of taking action. Seeing a gap and dreaming of what might fill it. Putting aside that fear of doing the WRONG thing and replacing it with the fear of doing NOTHING.

I need to expand my horizons. Indeed, my parameters. It seems like I'm always doing that, but I guess I am, so I guess it should seem so. Otherwise I guess I just remain a sucker MC amateur. Practice, practice, practice.

Photo: colinjcampbell

All For One and One For All!

2009-02-28T13:03:00.004-08:00

First of all, THAT is an awesome poster. Nobody makes movie posters like that anymore.

Second of all, HUGE shout out to JD, who told me to watch this film (and its sequel, The Four Musketeers). They were every bit as awesome as you said they would be.

The Three Musketeers is one of the classic stories of male coming-of-age. As Steph observed, the male coming-of-age story is a violent one, and is even more violent when it's presented in a metaphorical context as in Dumas.

We watched the David Mamet martial arts film Redbelt and my issue with it was that it spend most of its life as a gritty, realistic, decidedly NOT metaphorical story, and then at the very last minute tried to resolve itself as a pulpy metaphorical story. Which doesn't work.

Because the pulp adventure story is always metaphorical. We all understand that bloodshed, violence and warfare are horrible, traumatizing things. We don't actually want to be the kind of people who just run around randomly murdering folks, and yet we sure have a good time watching imaginary people doing just that.

The pulp story has useful wisdom for us, even it doesn't present a realistic view of the world or human nature. Pulp stories are our modern myths, the stories we need to tell us truths that cannot be explained or rationalized. Because no matter how smart we are, we must recognize that there are truths, important truths, that we cannot put into words. That's what art is for -- to tell us what we know, but cannot say.

The Three Musketeers tells us things about companionship, and loyalty, but mostly, this time through, I was struck by what it has to say about violence. d'Artagnan is told by his father as he sets out, "Get into as many fights as you can."

Times have changed. Folks nowadays are, I think, less likely to give this sort of advice to their children. Now, Dumas is almost certainly being comic here as he is throughout, but d'Artagnan does live in a world where the cheerful exercise of violent death is just part of being a well-rounded human being.

Well, except for Constance (speaking of well-rounded), but look where that gets her.

It's in the ending that Dumas displays the most sophisticated thinking -- and where he pulls aside a bit of the comic veil he's cast over all the antics up to now. Milady's ending is not comic at all, nor is it entirely... satisfying. There's something bloodthirsty and troubling about this whole affair, and I suspect most people in the audience sympathize with d'Artagnan's desire to interfere. Things get serious suddenly, and I believe Dumas intends for his audience to suddenly wonder about these charming rogues they've been following around up to now.

It was interesting watching the film with Steph, who didn't know the story. She was cheering for Milady throughout much of the film, and hoping that things would work out so that she and Athos could get back together. She rightfully points out that Milady is the only female character with any power of her own (which makes her eventual fate so utterly unsurprising), and yet by the end there's no question that she deserves what she gets.

But Dumas (and the film-makers in this version), do not allow the audience to distance themselves this time from the horror of death and the lack of humanity that must exist those who deal it out. Indeed the character of the headsman, who ultimately performs the deed, seems to exist in part to illustrate the cruelty of those who condemn the woman. As cold and uncaring as the headsman may be, he horrifies us less than Athos in those final moments, when he is ready to kill d'Artagnan should the young man interfere.

Dumas does the opposite in The Three Musketeers that Mamet does in Redbelt; he takes a metaphorical story and at the very end makes it literal and specific. It's a very difficult trick, but Dumas pulls it off beautifully. And the best thing I can say about this fantastic version of the story is that the film-makers appear to have understood it and reproduced it faithfully.

You Know, The 20th Century Was A Long Time Ago

2009-02-06T11:47:00.004-08:00

I saw the ad at right alongside the latest 37 Signals' blog post. Now for all I know Microsoft Expressions is an amazing piece of software that changes the world and humanity's relationship with it. Maybe.

What I do know is that this ad tells me nothing about this software except that I need training to use it.

And frankly, I don't have time to get trained on how to use your software. I have way more solutions than I have problem, to be honest. If you want your solution to be compelling to me, you need to explain to me why it's better than all the other solutions that are currently vying for my attention.

That said, I'm almost definitely not Microsoft's target customer. Maybe this is killing with THEM. Maybe.

Cut The Crap!

2009-01-30T21:59:00.010-08:00

It's no secret to anyone who knows me (or just follows me on Twitter) that I love kung-fu movies. A lot.

And kung-fu movies have some pretty awesome music in them, and I'd been wanting for a long time to jam some of that music on top of some beats and have kung-fu people yell at each other over top of it. Made perfect sense to me. This song uses samples from Kung Fu Cult Master, Swordsman II and Supercop. The folks above are Sharla Cheung (who appears in Kung Fu Cult Master), Jet Li (in both that and Swordsman II), Kenneth Tsang (Supercop), the incomparable Brigitte Lin (Swordsman II) and Leung Kar Yan (Kung Fu Cult Master, and the guy who actually says "Cut the crap!").

"Cut the crap!" is one of those colloquial phrases that pops up in a lot of subtitles, and it always cracks me up. It's the primary sample in this little ditty, getting repeated every bar here and there.

It's also got a nice sort of sideways glance at scratching, which pleases me. I hope the song pleases you.

Listen!

Opening The Gates

2009-01-25T19:05:00.004-08:00

One day a samurai came to see the Zen master Hakuin and asked him, "Is there truly a heaven and a hell?"

"Who are you?" the master asked.

"I am the samurai..."

"You, a soldier!" Hakuin exclaimed. "Just look at yourself. What lord would want you in his service? You look like a beggar."

The man grew angry and drew his sword. Hakuin continued: "Oh, good, you even have a sword! But you are certainly too clumsy to cut my head off with it."

Losing all self-control, the samurai raised his sword, ready to strike the master. At that very moment the latter spoke, saying "Here is where the gates to hell open."

Surprised by the monk's air of calm assurance, the samurai sheathed his sword and bowed before him.

"This is where the gates of heaven open," the master then said.

* * *

That passage was just one of many in a lovely book J lent me after class last week: Martial Arts Teaching Tales. It's a collection of short essays on some of the key concepts any teacher of martial arts most consider, such as "The Snare of Appearances" or "Winning Without Fighting". Each essay is followed by a number of short tales like the one above.

Some are familiar -- the story of Bokuden and the insolent samurai on the ferry, or the teachings of the venerable old ratcatcher (also picked up in The Demon's Sermon on the Martial Arts) -- but many of the tales here were new to me, and all are well-told. Short, to the point and without commentary, challenging the reader to confront and understand them.

There are many stories of untouchable masters who are able to avoid every blow, who cannot be defeated, and a shallow sort of understanding might come away thinking that this book puts forward the notion that becoming Superman is the point of studying martial arts. But I have found myself engaged in very few swordfights over the course of my life. Very few moments of life-and-death violence. So why study? Why read a book that lists one master after another effortlessly defeating thoughtless challengers?

Because to practice is to take action on the belief that you can transform yourself. And not by getting a better job, or a cuter girlfriend, or by winning the big game. These rewards are denied a follower of kenjutsu (these days, anyway. SIGH). But simply by submitting yourself to something bigger than you -- something that has no ulterior motive, asks nothing from you, that just exists, and by existing, challenges you to confront it. These stories are all like that. They want nothing from me, and if I turn away from them, they still exist. Just like the endless kata of Katori Shinto Ryu. But if I face them, and push myself to confront them, they open up within me gate after gate.

And they help me to see that at every moment, in every challenge I face, there are gates I can choose to open.

Parental Guidance Suggested

2009-01-24T15:58:00.003-08:00

This was inspired by an overheard exchange. I'm not usually one for large amounts of profanity, but this really fucking amuses me:

The Sopranos Meet Abbot and Costello

A: They give ball players some funny fucking names these days.

B: All right, fucking wise guy, tell me about the fucking team.

A: Well, we got Who on Fucking first, What the Fuck's on the second and Fuck You on third...

B: You don't know their fucking names?

A: Fucking right I do.

B: All right, who's on fucking first?

A: Fucking right.

B: I mean the fucker's name.

A: Who.

B: The fucker on first.

A: Who.

B: The first fucking baseman.

A: Who is on fucking first!

B: I'm fucking asking you who's on fucking first.

A: That's the motherfucker's name.

B: That's who's fucking name?

A: Fucking right.

B: Fucking tell me.

A: That's fucking it.

B: That's who?

A: Fucking right.

PAUSE

B: Look, you gotta a fucking first baseman?

A: Of course we fucking do.

B: So who's playing fucking first?

A: Fucking right.

B: When you pay the fucking first baseman every fucking month, who gets the fucking money?

A: Every fucking dollar.

B: All I want to fucking know is the name of the fucker on first fucking base.

A: Who.

B: The fucker that--

A: That's fucking it.

B: Who gets the fucking money?

A: Well, sometimes his bitch rolls down and collects it.

B: Whose bitch?

A: Fucking right.

PAUSE

B: All I'm trying to find out is what the fuck's the guy's name on first fucking base.

A: No. What the fuck's the guy's name on second fucking base.

B: I'm not asking you who's on fucking second.

A: Who's on fucking first.

B: One fucking base at a time!

A: Fuck. Take it easy.

B: I'm just fucking asking, who's the guy on fucking first?

A: Fucking right.

B: Ok.

A: All right.

PAUSE

B: What the fuck's the guy's name on first base?

A: No. What the fuck's on second.

B: I'm not fucking asking you who's on fucking second.

A: Who's on fucking first.

B: Fuck you.

A: He's on fucking third, we're not fucking talking about him.

DINO-PIRATES UNLEASHED!

2009-01-18T13:53:00.006-08:00

AT LAST!

The DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND complete rules are now available online. This is a full-blown system reference document for the game, and includes absolutely everything you need to run your own DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND adventures. Create characters, resolve challenges and get on with the cool part of the story-telling. All you need is here. Now. Free.

Except of course for the setting. That's still underway.

But this is a big step for the DINO-PIRATE faithful. Combined with the release last year of SLAVE QUEEN OF THE RUINED CITY, you can now play this legendary game in the comfort of your own home. Without needing to invite me over.

Although I am available for most of January, if you have a last-minute booking you want to make. My rates are very reasonable.

Linkslutting, Jan 17, 2009

2009-01-17T19:54:00.004-08:00

FINALLY caught up on my blogroll. Blogs seem so 2007 all of a sudden. Anyway, some awesomeness for you:

Via Mind Control Division:

Somebody over on Circvs described the Japanese film industry as follows:

Director: "I have an idea for a movie, honourable Producer!"

Producer: "Ooooh. Is your idea TOTALLY INSANE?"

Director: "Yes, honourable Producer! TOTALLY INSANE!"

Producer: "Here is yen. Make your film. Bring us honour. And make sure it is TOTALLY INSANE!"

On a less TOTALLY INSANE moment, here's Oli's latest photo-set: some gorgeous shots he took in Costa Rica:

Browse around his site, there's plenty of staggeringly beautiful images there.

And finally, this sweet, sweet little piece of animation evoking a daughter's memories of her mother:

Just lovely.

Respond With Life!

2009-01-05T20:58:00.005-08:00

After practice tonight I was polishing my sword (no, that's not a euphemism (and yes, I can hear you snickering back there, Joshua)) and D mentioned that while she feels like she's able to do the stances when we're just practicing the stances, she has a hard time recognizing them in the katas.

And I missed out on the classic "Horrible Things Great Teachers Say" moment -- I totally FAILED to say, "Don't worry, you aren't doing them right in practice, either." Damn. That would have been pretty funny.

What I DID say was something or other about how they're supposed to be different, because the kata aren't just there to link together each stance in a particular order so that you can pretend you're swordfighting. The kata are living, breathing intellectual artifacts that only exist because people embrace them, possess them and then pass them on to others.

I said, "It's a practice, not a formula."

So I was riding the Ossington bus back down to King Street and listening to the Propellerheads' version of "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" (which if you don't know is MIND-BLOWING) and thinking about D's question and how that principle of practice over formula really applied at every level of Katori practice.

When I am going through the kata with my partner, I cannot just "do the moves". The "right" stance will be fatally wrong if my partner is doing something other than what I expect. Katori asks you to pay attention with your WHOLE self to your partner, and to adapt your body, your posture, your soul, to what they bring.

To respond with attention and focus and vitality. With life. Respond with life.

And I thought, as John Barry's fantastic horns rose up around me, as the bus turned onto Strachan Avenue, that "Respond With Life" was just a great... I don't know. Thing. Saying. Stance.

Hey, yeah. Stance. The "right" stance in Katori, always, is to Respond With Life. SEE what's really there, shed your expectations and see through to the heart of things, and then see into yourself and find exactly the position, the posture, the STANCE that will make the most of it. That will be alive and vital and strong and courageous.

Respond With Life. It's a stance.

Photo by Arty Smokes

Participate, Don't Originate

2009-01-01T18:11:00.003-08:00

Alan held up that card at the end of a conversation late in 2008 (that's LAST year) and three words echoed in my head.

PARTICIPATE, DON'T ORIGINATE

I grabbed a Post-It Note (there was no shortage of Post-It Notes there) and jotted those words down. I think they're going to be my slogan for 2009.

PARTICIPATE, DON'T ORIGINATE

I have been guilty throughout my life of rejecting opportunities because they weren't MINE. I'd come up with an idea, say to myself, "That sounds worth doing," and then discover somebody else was already doing it, and toss the idea.

Which is selfish and retarded and I realised, in that moment of insight, how dumb I was being all along. I'd beat myself up for not coming up with an original idea, and forget the most important lesson of finding someone already on it: that it WAS a good idea. If somebody else is already on it, then it's probably a great idea. Whereas if nobody is doing it, it's probably a bad idea, no matter how clever it seems to me, odds are it's a dumb idea.

Getting involved in HoHoTO was a real watershed moment for me. Instead of starting something, I was just joining in with others on something underway. My contributions weren't even all that significant, but as I noted in a Twitter conversation, the whole point of events like HoHoTO is about the ability to pull together many many SMALL actions into a meaningful context, so that good things can result.

There's so much going on in Toronto right now. Things with strange-seeming names like #themvmnt, #svc, #tsTO, none of which are "mine", but then they aren't so much anyone else's, either. But they're all things I can meaningfully participate in, maybe with huge contributions, maybe with small ones. The point is that there's stuff that needs doing, and I can help.

Somewhere or other I read the quote: "Don't ask what you can do; ask what needs to be done." This past month has really brought home to me how important that can be, and maybe helped me see a framework within which that statement leads to action, not just musing.

PARTICIPATE, DON'T ORIGINATE

My reluctance to engage in other people's initiatives only makes it less likely that I'll get my own off the ground. Heck, why would anyone want to join in and help me if I haven't rolled up my sleeves and gotten to work on theirs?

I think this is the biggest thing I learned in 2008. So my resolutions are all about participating.

What about yours?

Things That Are Awesome

2008-12-27T22:46:00.008-08:00

This is Donnie Yen's MOTHER, showing how Praying Mantis Kung Fu happens. Holy beautiful:

I'll repeat: that's his mom. Good grief. Why don't they cast HER in more movies?

And this is a guy with lots of time on his hands, making a pretty darn cool action sequence out of World of Warcraft. If only more Hollywood filmmakers showed this much inventiveness and fun:

The Craft of War: BLIND from percula on Vimeo.

And then there is this: The Most Inspirational Video of All Time (thanks to Kyle Voltti):

That is all.

Sustainable Silliness

2008-12-16T10:14:00.009-08:00

On the left there is a picture from the now-legendary HoHoTO party. It's been on TV, it's been in the papers and all around the blogosphere and back again. A group of near-strangers came together and poured their energy into creating a charitable party. Nobody was in charge. Nobody gave orders. Nobody did anything they didn't want to do. And in a matter of days we raised $25,000.

$25,000.

What you're seeing there on the left is the DJ setup on stage (yes, the DJ is dressed as a Santa elf -- and yes, nobody did anything they didn't want to do -- you can figure out what that means), hundreds of people boogieing their faces off, and up on the wall an enormous screen displays live incoming Twitter messages tagged "#hohoto". Folks are making DJ requests via Twitter, and if you go to Flickr right now and search on "hohoto" you will see hundreds of photos people have posted of the beautiful craziness that ensued.

This is pretty awesome. I blogged before about how the future is looking pretty silly, and I think this is another part of the ongoing sillization of human society. And this is a GOOD thing.

Because while there's boogieing and Twittering and elf-dress-up-as-ing, there's also people having hard times, and current economic conditions aren't making that any better. But when people can come together in joy and silliness, and contribute to helping lessen those hard times, I say the world is getting better. I mean, we don't have flying cars yet, it's true -- but maybe there's more important work we ought to be doing besides flying around in cars. Because as cool as that would be, I'd rather there were less hungry people in the world than more flying cars.

HoHoTO was a tremendous success. It proves (if further proof were needed) that self-organizing groups can accomplish great things. I'm not sure it's a model for social change, but hopefully it will help to serve as an inspiration. The Toronto Twittersphere is all abuzz with ideas and movements and the notion of change and growth, and I truly believe that we're just opening the door to what's possible as the internets begin to realise the next stage of their potential. Somebody in there (might have been remarkk) mentioned the idea of "cells" like Resistance groups organized themselves in: each one self-sufficient and no more than distantly connected to the others, but sharing enough ideals and practices that they can work together to effect enormous change.

We don't need grand schemes anymore. We need tiny ones, but ones that infect others and replicate themselves. And silliness, as YouTube shows us, is pretty damn infectious. And as HoHoTO has shown us, it can deliver actual value to society.

Not sure I need to dress as an elf, however.

RIP Anne Filipowski 1970-2008

2008-12-09T21:09:00.003-08:00

This is Anne Filipowski, one of my favourite people ever.

When I first came to Toronto, I was shuttling back and forth between two offices: the offices of BetCorp's software and marketing division, on Richmond Street at Spadina, and the offices of Bodog Music, on Yonge Street -- at FINCH (or thereabouts -- for you non-Torontonians, that's like TEN MILES from downtown). It was February, 2007, and after ten years in Vancouver, Toronto was ghastly. Cold, howling winds, and mile after mile of flat, unbroken cityscape. No mountains. No beaches. No bald eagles. Very very few harbour seals.

The Bodog Music office was a bit of a ramshackle affair, with customer service reps in dingy grey cubicles, office supplies scattered about and my team -- a couple of php developers, a few designers and a project manager -- stuffed into dark offices seemingly as far away from the rest of the company as possible.

There was a really kitchen area, though. And a great balcony, which in Toronto in February is not quite as enticing as you might think.

I knew not a soul in Toronto. I could barely find my way to the office. And Torontonian are, well, Lord love them, but they just aren't quite as... friendly... as Westerners. They try.

Some of them.

So it was kind of lonely for Corey in those first few weeks. But I always looked forward to the long trek up to the Bodog Music office, because I knew I would end up crossing paths and inevitably sarcastic barbs with the operations manager, Anne Filipowski. At some point in my day there would come the solemn exchange:

"Reid."

"Filipowski."

I actually had to practice saying her name so that I could deliver it in the same deadpan monotone she did mine. I'm not kidding. I'd be on the subway, repeating "Filipowski, Filipowski, Filipowski," the whole way up. Maybe the apparent unfriendliness of Torontonians isn't so hard to explain.

But of course, that was only the opening salvo. Then came the exchange of sarcastic quips, sneers, and non sequiturs. The goal was always to make her laugh before I cracked up, but I came off the worse most of the time. Filipowski had a serious deadpan, and had that knack for sprinkling her outrageous sarcasm with enough outrageous sincerity that you were always wondering if she really meant that or if... and then you'd see that grin and you knew she'd gotten you again.

It was exciting because it was a challenge. Filipowski had that effect on people -- she raised everyone's game. You had to pay attention around Anne, because she was so smart and always paying attention and if you didn't keep up, you were going to get shown up. But always with humour and always with respect for others.

Even if Toronto had stayed as unpleasant as it was that February (and it hasn't, by the way; love this town), it still would have been worth coming here to meet Anne. Last time I saw her we went to an Argentinian restaurant for lunch (Argentinian food means steak, apparently) and she told me wacky stories about driving around Greece and we laughed about the lunacy of this business we both worked in. I had hoped at some point that FreshBooks would find itself needing a woman of Filipowski's immense talents, but it never happened.

She also promised to take me out to lunch next time. Damn it.

HoHoTO!

2008-12-05T04:40:00.003-08:00

So I've been involved in the planning of what looks to be the coolest holiday party in Toronto: HoHoTO! This is going to be a kooky event with Twitter DJ request, live video and photo feeds projected on big screens, drinks and dancing and all kinds of fun, all going to the Daily Bread Food Bank.

Sounds like something that took months to organize, right?

Wrong.

Try days. And without any official organization, no club secretary, no corporate sponsor (to start; we've got a bunch of them now). Basically a group of folks started talking about the idea on Twitter, and some of us met up on... Tuesday. Four days ago.

And now there's a website, a venue, a logo, sponsors and tickets selling like mad. Thousands of dollars raised and hundreds of people coming to something that didn't even exist at the start of this week.

It's phenomenal. People can sure be awesome.

Like YOU! You can be awesome -- especially if you come to HoHoTO!

Two Clicks to DEATH

2008-11-21T06:54:00.003-08:00

So we were walking back from California Sandwiches and Gauthier started telling a story about clearing minefields with sandbags and I offered the suggestion that before long, someone would make a mine that compensated for that technique.

Kevin noted that land mine design is really just a special case of interface design. Special and murderous. We decided land mine manufacturers should hire Jeffrey Zeldman or someone to design their land mines. Kevin came up with a slogan:

"Never more than two clicks away from DEATH!"

This is the sort of thing we talk about at lunch. Current events, interface design, and DEATH. I love my job.

Post-Halloween Pumpkin Post (PPP)

2008-11-12T17:04:00.004-08:00

So I originally posted this over on the FreshBooks blog and I kept meaning to post it here but now it's November. Oh well, I still think it's cool.

Fellow Freshbooker Taavi and I came in on the weekend before the big day with a can of spray paint and a defenseless Bondi iMac and today the FreshBooks office is now properly festive for Hallowe’en with our new iMac-O-Lantern!

We got the idea from this awesome Instructables article. Today somebody went and added a FreshBooks leaf to our newest little orange friend, so he’s properly branded.

The face changes every twenty minutes (I made them with OmniGraffle), using the JPEGView application described in the Instructables article. Here are some shots of the process:

Primed and Ready to Go!

Painting the iMac's bottom. He does look pretty helpless, doesn't he? Poor little guy.

And there you have it! Unfortunately, the iMac is kind of noisy — it emits a peculiar sort of high-pitched whine. Which was kind of unpleasant for the poor fellow (Rich) who had it right next to his head. But he seems to have survived and is no more peculiar than prior to the holiday. Which is good, cause we liked him the way he was.

Anyway, it's late, but I thought it was pretty cool.

Sustainable Communities

2008-11-12T04:36:00.004-08:00

The very nice folks at Sustainability Camp 2008 have asked if I would be able to speak at their event on Sunday.

Well, to be honest, they asked my boss. And he said, "No." And they said, "Oh, pooh. We're maybe short a space." And then he said, "Hey Corey, what are you doing Sunday afternoon?"

But after SO MUCH FUN talking at ProductCamp just a few short weeks ago (and I should really write a piece on that, there's a good idea), and of course considering that there are few things in this universe I love more than the sound of my own voice (the sound of Julie Andrews' voice, for instance), it was pretty much a done deal.

So it's not yet 100% clear if I'll be speaking there or not, but my topic if I am will be Sustainability in Communities. I'm fascinated by the problem of building self-sustaining communities -- sustaining from a SOCIAL rather than an economic point of view. How do you create a community that will last? What makes long-lasting self-organizing groups different from those that collapse?

Lots of possibilities there, I think. New-style companies like Ricardo Semler runs (or that Chris and I are talking about), online hobby-based communities, and grass-roots political organizations.

Any thoughts from out and beyond? Any experiences with communities that persisted beyond expectations?

Linkslut, Nov 8

2008-11-06T06:38:00.004-08:00

Some links that have built up over the past while and ought to be shared.

The best commentary I've read on the U.S. election:

Yesterday, we built huge corporations to do tiny, incremental things - tomorrow, we must build small organizations that can do tremendously massive things.

The Homeless World Cup. People can sure be awesome.

Utility-scale solar power. Plus Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Finally, I spent my morning re-reading one of my favourite stories of all times: Bad Aliens, Zombie Toddlers and Drunk Southern Girls With Guns, by the same author as the recent Transformers movie. And about six thousands times more fun (no offense, John, but there just weren't enough drunk southern girls with guns in the movie. Try to fix that in the sequel, okay?). Just so you understand how completely freaking awesome this story is:

“That,” Denis said authoritatively, “was no mutilated cow. It was just mutilated.” When the others stared blankly, he continued. “UFO mutilations follow a very distinct pattern. That cow – if it’s like the others – didn’t have that pattern. It was not clinically dispatched, it was killed, then the soft parts were eaten away by small carnivores. But not the ones you’d think.” He produced an evidence baggie. Within it was a small tooth. “I recovered this from within the brain matter remaining in the skull.”

“Doesn’t look like an animal,” Ross said.

“It’s not.” Denis held it up for all to see. “It’s got a silver filling. This is a human tooth.”

If that doesn't make you giggle with glee then, well, you're probably not a DM.

Colour Coolness

2008-11-04T21:40:00.004-08:00

Notice anything extraordinarily cool about this picture, besides the fact that it's extraordinarily cool? No? Stunned by the extraordinary coolness?

Note the colours in the picture. Notice how they MATCH the colours on this website.

Amazing! How'd I do that?

Simple. I used Tin Eye's outrageous colour-based photo search.

Who thinks this stuff up? Clever people, that's who.

Photo by Vieeto Voom

The Five Stages of Refactoring

2008-10-18T16:00:00.004-07:00

1. Disbelief

"Who wrote this!?"

2. Anger

"I'm not cleaning this up!"

3. Bargaining

"Okay, we'll fix up this module if you promise we'll just rewrite everything else."

4. Depression

"This is never going to get any better."

5. Acceptance

"I'll just create a wrapper..."

Caravaggio's The Incredulity of St. Thomas, there.

Shhh, Peaceful

2008-10-11T21:34:00.003-07:00

I am helpless to explain this. But if you are the person who put that fez on that snowman, and gave him that facial expression, I love you.

Via "UnicodeSnowmanForYou.com". I assume "UnicodeSnowman.com" was already taken.

ProductCampToronto!

2008-10-09T13:53:00.003-07:00

So along with a couple of other FreshBookers I'll be attending next month's ProductCamp here in Toronto Nov 2. I've proposed a session on the Big List so we'll see if folks are excited in hearing about that. If they are I'll make sure to post notes and so on here. For those who don't know, "the Big List" is kind of a cool system we've built at FreshBooks to manage our product management.

This is my first BarCamp event so I'm pretty excited!

If you're attending, let me know and let's try and cross paths.

FreshBooks is also sponsoring the after-Camp reception and we've got a fun challenge for product managers to show off their skills -- make sure you stop by and get your entry form.

Linkslut: October 08

2008-10-04T17:06:00.004-07:00

...and yet more. From the blogroll:

The Price Of Freedom

From WorldChanging: What Else Could We Buy For $700 Billion? How about debt freedom for Africa, for one?

Always Amazing

Some pictures from the always-amazing Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Say "Hi!" to everyone in the NGC 253 Galaxy, only 13 million light-years away. Like somebody once said, if we're alone in this universe, that seems like an awful waste of space.

And on your right you can see a sight much closer to home, but possibly even more amazing. That is a single exposure you're looking at, presumably a pretty long one, but partway through the exposure the photographer set off a flash inside the cave to illuminate it for the film. Fantastic. Read about it here. People sure can be all kinds of awesome when they need to be.

The Dread Blonde

Speaking of all kinds of awesome, the d20 Blonde sums up what has swiftly become one of my favourite games ever: Dread. I played in a game this past year run by the d20 Hubby, and let me tell you, when a Scooby Doo episode turns Daphne into an axe-wielding madwoman, something in the universe has gone terribly wrong. But in such a fantastic way. Anyway, the Blonde does a great job explaining why this game is so incredibly awesome, and her later posts include some great tips on how to run a game of your own, so if you're into having insane amounts of fun, check it out.

DINO-PIRATES and the Importance of Being Ignorant

2008-10-04T14:43:00.005-07:00

Been sick for a few days and coming off that, I'm feeling rambly. Realised I never posted a GenCon report -- so here you go, point form:

Wireless Connectivity at GenCon sucks like something that sucks a lot.

Hurray for Paul coming all the way from AFGHANISTAN just to help me demo a very cool game that I'll be talking a lot more about Real Soon Now.

REFORM SCHOOL NINJA GIRLS was actually MORE fun than it sounds like. I know you're skeptical, but I was there, and you weren't, so I know. MORE fun. Where else can you have ninja chicks cutting boats in half, dressing up like geishas, and building giant transforming Godzilla robots? Only in DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND, I'm telling you.

I'm not as good at improvising adventure stories at three o'clock in the morning as I wish I were.

I am, however, a phenomenal impersonator of Scooby-Doo. I may have found my life's calling.

It's important to know you can't recreate improvisational greatness. Trying to do it again, once it's been done, is a fool's game.

I missed JD.

It's entirely possible to spend almost nothing at GenCon on anything game-related and still have a great time. Assuming you spend a sufficient quantity on alcohol. Or, even better, your roommates do.

I'm sure that answers all your questions. The good news is that all four DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND games went like stink, largely due to the fantastic players at every session.

I also picked up a comic book for Steph that has turned out to beat expectations: Artesia. I met the creator and seemed like a nice enough guy, and the art was very compelling, so I picked up a hardcover compiled and brought it home and I've just now read it and I have to say, I'm planning on collecting the rest. Mark Smylie has really done his research and produced a fantastic story that feels deeply rooted in a world that operates on different assumptions than ours.

Too often fantasy authors produce cultures that operate according to the assumptions that drive our modern world, with ideas on justice or morals or social structure that don't reflect the trappings of the world they're supposed to be a part of. I'm no historian (Hi Stuart!) but even a little bit of research can make most modern fantasy writers pretty much unreadable.

So DON'T LEARN ANYTHING, for crying out loud! It only leads to trouble.

Unless you're Mark Smylie. You keep reading, Mark. Anyway, Artesia was a welcome acquisition and marks a new story for us to obssess over. Hurrah.

In other news, the game we demoed that I'll soon be telling you all about received a solid going-over and some basic usability issues were uncovered that determined craftsmen are even now working hard to eliminate. Determined. Hard. Honest.

And finally, the rules for DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND have finally begun to stabilize. The stunt mechanic is solid now, as is the damage system (thanks, Baduin), and I'm working now with the clever crew over at the True20 forums to normalize the powers and the Fatigue mechanic. Once we're reasonably sure we have something that works, the full rules will become available online, and then ANYONE can play this game. Oh, yeah. DINO-PIRATES for everyone.

Also a quick shout-out to the Boston gang for some fantastic games and good times. Especially K and J, who were kind enough to put me up for a couple of nights. They did, however miss the comical moment where I was walking around downtown Boston and suddenly said, "Hey! This is the same Boston the Bruins play in!" Carl was amused.

So there you have it. GenCon 08. Nothing but good.

Creating Space

2008-10-03T20:22:00.004-07:00

A couple of things came together for me today and as per usual, in my head they turned into ideas about making stories about imaginary people even MORE exciting.

I've been re-reading Harrison Owen's Open Space Technology, which describes a type of meeting ("Open Space") that I've been dying to run for years. Yeah, it's weird. I wouldn't really care what the meeting was ABOUT, I just find the process so thrilling to consider that I just really want to see what it's like in "real life".

"The job of the facilitator is to create the time and space in which the group can realise its potential."

Also Steph was talking about what she loved about the book club she was part of back in Vancouver: that it was a place where each and every person was given time and space to speak and to share their ideas. She loved helping the group create that space, and found it extremely rewarding to be part of what they created.

Naturally I immediately thought of Dungeon Mastering.

I don't think it's quite as big a leap as it may appear to be. The job of the DM, after, is to create space and time for the players -- both in the imaginary sense by describing the scenes and characters encountered, but also in the actual, "real-world" sense. When the players come together at the table, and begin to interact, the DM has to manage the social situation, making sure that everyone around the group gets their chance to shine. While at the same time describing scenes that will give the players chances to do what they each long to do.

Great DMs listen to their players and identify what they need in order to realise their potential. EVERYONE at the table will have more fun if EVERYONE at the table has more fun. The biggest challenge a DM will face is making sure that all the varying definitions of "fun" around the table are manifested without destructively conflicting with each other.

The first step is understanding those definitions, and embracing them without demanding they conform to one's own. No player is ever going to have exactly the same definition as I do, and so it's futile for me to try and bend my players to MY definitions of fun. All I can do is try to understand what my players think is fun, and match that.

Of course, if my players think throwing dice at each other is fun, maybe the whole thing is doomed from the start.

I've remarked before that Dungeon Masters are a strange breed: like goalies, drummers and QA Analysts, DMs must have a very narrow set of skills, traits and interests in order to be good at the job, and not many people come with that mix. But how many other pastimes allow you to create space -- on two levels at the same time?

Photo by Barun Patro

Anyone But Harper

2008-09-28T20:08:00.002-07:00

You've probably seen this already, or something like it, but it's important enough to keep passing around:

Anyone But Harper

That is all.

Them Bitey Jaws

2008-09-15T04:56:00.006-07:00

I've been playtesting a variety of rules for the DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND game, and they're starting to settle down into a pretty cohesive whole. The process has been interesting on a lot of levels, but one in particular struck me -- the ability to adjust one's die roll AFTER one knows if that roll was successful.

Virtually every system that allows such adjustments (through some sort of point mechanic that allows the player to add to their roll or to re-roll a given die) requires the player to apply the adjustment before they know the outcome of the roll. The player is asked to gamble that A) the adjustment enabled by the resource will increase their result sufficiently to succeed, and B) that their original result was insufficient in the first place.

When I started working up the Stunt mechanic for DPoNI, which I originally got from iwatt, I used the same thinking. You could apply bonuses to your checks based on your skill ranks, if you got creative and gave me a good description. But folks didn't use the stunt rules all that often. Usually they'd forget in the heat of battle, or just shrug and hope for a good roll without the bonus.

I hadn't gotten the rules right. This was a cool idea, something very much in line with the feel I want for DPoNI, but my players weren't naturally gravitating to it. I took out a few of the other optional rules I'd implemented, but stunts remained a little-used feature.

It turned out the best way to get players to consider stunts was for me to suggest them -- and this started happening AFTER the die roll. If somebody had missed by only a little bit, there'd be a scramble to look over the character sheet and find some over-looked bonus that might apply. Stunts fit the bill admirably. Because they work as a static bonus, rather than a re-roll, they represent sort of that little extra effort that a character makes, using their existing skills, to just do a little better. And because you can apply them after discovering your roll wasn't quite enough, you don't need to keep track of every possibility while making your decisions -- you can discover possibilities afterwards, when you know you need them.

It means characters in DPoNI are a little tougher than standard True20 characters. They'll make successful rolls some 10% more often, depending on their level. And that's okay. DPoNI is meant to be more about coming up with cool stuff to do rather than managing resources and surviving (once again, like ALWAYS) by the skin of your teeth.

I tend to play more of a style where a player says what they want to TRY and do, and then makes a roll, the result of which tells us how WELL they did. So the actual narration of the event simulated by the die roll naturally comes after the roll is made and success is determined. The Stunt bonus, in this context, is more a function of the narration than the attempt. It works like this:

Player: "I attack! I get a... 14."
DM: "Oh, dear. You need at least a 16 to hit this guy."
(player looks over character sheet and notes she can get a +2 stunt bonus from her Acrobatics skill)
Player: "Okay, but I'm using my Acrobatics."
DM: "Okay, you'll just barely hit if you can do that. How are you using Acrobatics here?"
Player: "I run up the side of the cavern, somersaulting backwards and landing behind him, catching him just off-guard enough to skewer him before he knows I'm there."
DM: "Sold."

When a player rolls well, often the satisfaction of the roll is reward enough -- not all players feel a need to narrate something cool at that point. And likewise when a player completely botches a roll -- they're cranky and frustrated and not inclined to jump in with a bunch of creativity.

But nothing spurs creativity like the knowledge that if you can come up with something, you can snatch victory from them bitey jaws of defeat. So what do you think? Is this a reasonable way to run things? Does it require too much adjudication on the DM's part? Should NPCs get the same benefits?

Fish photo: Gavin Mills

The SLAVE QUEEN Arriveth!

2008-09-14T06:05:00.003-07:00

She's been promised for months, but at last here she is. THE SLAVE QUEEN OF THE RUINED CITY is the first official DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND product available anywhere! On sale now at YourGamesNow.com for the low price of $6.00!

With a fantastic cover from Claudio Pozas (who also provided a number of full-colour character illustrations), this True20 adventure provides plenty of thrills and chills, along with seven sample PCs, two 1"-scale maps of key encounters, new monsters, and handy NPC stat charts, all designed to make the job of turning these 32 pages into an evening's entertainment as painless as possible.

THE SLAVE QUEEN OF THE RUINED CITY promises pulpy goodness from start to finish. This adventure includes all five of the necessary elements for any DPoNI adventure:

Dinosaurs

Pirates

Ninjas

Monkeys

Robots

We're awfully excited about this release, and it's only the first in what promises to be a long line of thrill-laden products from Scratch Factory Productions. This release of THE SLAVE QUEEN OF THE RUINED CITY uses the standard True20 rules, but soon we'll be making the official DPoNI rules available and when that happens, you'll see a revision to this adventure to use those.

Just read the opening paragraphs and if they don't grab you, then what are you hanging around here for, you snot-nosed brat?

Hidden amongst the tangled archipelago off the coast of the Empire, the cliff-ringed haunt of the legendary SLAVE QUEEN is one of the most feared and storied of all. Legend says she lives in barbaric splendour amongst her pathetic thralls, always seeking more captives to bend to her will. Night and day, hellish screams echo out from the high cliff-side caverns. Even in the thrashing midst of a storm like the one you're sailing through, you can hear those screams.

Even over the crash of your ship running aground on the knife-like rocks beneath her cliffs. Your ship is taking on water. The captain just fell overboard. Things don't look good.

Huh? If that doesn't sound like the right way to start an adventure, I don't know what to tell you. I mean, either I had you at SLAVE QUEEN or I didn't, is pretty much my thinking.

The New Big Problem

2008-09-11T17:04:00.005-07:00

At a table during last week's Business of Software conference, I met a fellow whose name escapes me now. Hardly a new occurrence for me, but I do recall the topic we were discussing.

His company does big data migrations for big government agencies. So for example if you're in charge of running the standardized health insurance across Ohio, you need data from every hospital in the state. And of course, each of these hospitals has been storing their data in some insane scheme that was cobbled together by the Pascal programmer who wrote the original record-keeping software back in 1975. It probably wasn't insane, actually. It probably made perfect sense. At the time.

The real problem isn't that this particular Pascal programmer was insane. The problem is that there was more than one Pascal programmer in Ohio in 1975 (I'm guessing, here, but give me a pass on that one). And so the solution that Pascal Programmer A chose for Hospital I was different (perhaps very different, perhaps a little different, doesn't matter) than the solution that Pascal Programmer B chose for Hospital II. Even if the SAME PATIENT was recorded in both hospitals, the data would look subtly different. Pascal Programmer A recorded First_Name and Last_Name as separate columns in a Patient_Data table, while Programmer B made sure NameF and NameL were stored as columns in a Personal_Info table. That's a trivial problem to solve, of course, if you're only worrying about these two databases. It gets more substantial if you're dealing with thousands of databases.

And not all problems in this space are trivial. The same data (or same types of data) can be stored in literally an infinite number of ways, and given the oft-frustrating creativity and ingenuity of people, you can bet that there will be as many variations as there were people involved in the varying.

So this gentleman I met obviously has his work cut out for him, and from what I could tell appears to be doing a roaring business handling this sort of thing. Because if you do want this sort of work done, there's really no solution other than to get a bunch of people to go through all your varied databases and manually map one set of data to the other, then perform whatever complicated trickery is required to do whatever conversion you've decided to implement so that at the end of the whole process, you have ONE dataset that includes everything all the originating databases contained.

And I thought to myself, "Wouldn't it be amazing if somebody figured out how to automate this process? If all the data in the world could just be connected to all the other data in the world? You'd never have to transfer information around, you wouldn't have to keep track of things in various places and forget to update it here after you've updated it there. It would be a transformative thing for the world, if every piece of information we had could talk to every other piece."

I used to think the big problem right now was latency. That the next big innovation was going to appear as some way to accelerate our ability to transfer information from one place to the next. But data normalization on a global scale is BIGGER.

I don't know how it can be done. Just thinking about it, it seems like the most tedious manual process of trivial decision-making imaginable, and yet, how can you derive a process that can look through the masses of databases around the world and understand how they connect to each other? But once you'd done it, well, that would be a world-sized oyster facing you, right there.

I wish I were smarter.

And that's hardly a new occurrence for me, either.

Photo: "network spheres" by gerard79.

Still More

2008-08-30T14:57:00.003-07:00

Been catching up finally on my blogroll, and a few choice tidbits to share around:

Via Drawn -- Gremlins, in other movies. Fans are getting more and more fun to watch.

Via Kung Fu Monkey -- Ninja Tales online, from Boom! Comics:

And lastly, from Evil Bat -- another fan-made video, this time an animation around a Radiohead song. Arresting and original:

Okay, enough with the linkage. Soon, actually writing. Promise.

The Unfold

2008-08-29T11:02:00.003-07:00

The newest trailer for the upcoming open-source movie being produced by A Swarm Of Angels:

Worlds Will Shatter - The Unfold trailer from Nine Orders on Vimeo.

Everything about this is incredibly cool.

Linkslutting, Aug 26, 2008

2008-08-26T21:30:00.003-07:00

Honestly, it's just been crazy. I haven't even told you about GenCon yet. But all I have time for right now is a quick drive-by:

Here's a reminder of why some of us love Steve Jobs so much. Via Community Guy:

And here's evidence I gained a level at GenCon: a player writes a Story Hour of one of my DINO-PIRATES sessions.

Fame, makes a man think things over...

More soon! Pictures of cool cars! New experiments running amok! What you need you have to borrow!

Upwards Accountability

2008-08-08T10:31:00.003-07:00

Khai Pad Kraphao is pretty much the best lunch around the FreshBooks offices. Though I do admit I pick out the chilies -- once I took what I thought was going to be a tasty bite of crisp green bean and found I'd chomped into an entire green chili.

I like the taste, but that was a little much. Not to gross anyone out, but I could tell exactly where that chili was in my digestive tract for the rest of the day. Oog.

But Rich and I were talking over our Thai food today, and in particular talking about the ideas of that crazy Brasilian, Ricardo Semler, and in particular particular, the notion of "public" salaries, and we decided that one of the things we liked best about that idea was how it enforced what we called "upwards accountability".

See, if everyone in the company knows when you give someone else in the company a raise, you'd better have good reasons for that raise or else you're going to have trouble answering their questions. Which forces you to actually THINK about how and why you give out raises, and to have a policy that's defensible in place. It makes you accountable to your employees, and it seemed to us, as aromas of basil, chili, and lemongrass came curling up from our plates, that such accountability is actually a good thing.

Because that accountability forces you to be active and organized, and to maintain your focus on the things that, as a leader, you should actually be focusing on. Defining your POLICY on raises is a more powerful action, a more important action, than deciding exactly how much one individual raise ought to be.

Of course, it's harder. Much easier to focus in on a narrower scope, a single relationship, than to try and design an organization. And yet, organizational design is, in my mind, the real job of a leader.

So policies that encourage or even enforce "upwards accountability" are the sorts of policies that a leader ought to seek out and pursue. We identified public salaries as such a policy. And I think public performance reviews are probably another.

I wonder if there are others?

That's the gas cap of an Aston Martin up there. Photo by Jeffrey van Bijleveld

Management Thoughts, By Me

2008-08-06T13:33:00.005-07:00

I noticed that I've started building up a certain body of thought on management. It's entirely ripped off from other, much smarter (though possibly not quite as intensely good-looking) people, but isn't that part of the beauty of the Internet? The ability to shamelessly rip others off while aggrandizing ourselves. Yes, sir. Anyway, here's a quick round-up of some of the more management-y posts I've made over the past couple of years:

Approach 3: The Path to Hiring Great Talent

The best strategy for finding awesome people is to spend your time making yourself more and more awesome.

Couch Time

They took the couch away, of course, and projects started falling over. Way it goes.

The Zero-Tolerance Inbox

Not doing any work is key to getting lots done. Be lazy!

The 501 Method

See, the receipts in the pocket isn't the clever bit. The CLEVER bit is that when I get home, I take everything in my pockets out of my pockets, and pile it up.

Ding Ding Ding

Every single document that isn't used is organizational noise.

Everything I Needed to Know About Management I Learned From Satan

You stop arguing when you see someone so ready to commit. Logic isn't what motivates and excites teams. Commitment in the face of risk is what gets that ball rolling.

The Secret of the Whiteboard

It's interesting to note how some technologies are so fundamental that they're almost impervious to design improvement.

Art != Guitar

All of us need new information presented to us in the context of what we already understand, or else we just keep forcing the conversation back into our context.

A Purpose Worthy of Commitment

What's drawn me to management, I realise now, is my lifelong conviction that honesty, courage, humility and compassion really ARE the best ways to get things done and to make the world a better place.

GORBACHOV!

2008-07-31T17:08:00.001-07:00

Steph said I should post this:

GORBACHOV: THE MUSIC VIDEO - BIGGER AND RUSSIANER from Tom Stern on Vimeo.

So I did.

Via Dan.

Approach 3: the path to hiring great talent

2008-07-31T14:46:00.004-07:00

A big part of my role right now at FreshBooks is hiring software developers. We’re trying to grow this team, to be able to meet the challenges of our expanding business, and that means hiring hiring hiring.

I’ve talked before about the importance of finding great people. But I wanted to talk here about a potential strategy for doing so. I call it “Approach Three”.

Steve Yegge has an interesting take on the problem, and identifies two basic approaches to finding superhero-level developers:

Approach 1: Get Lucky

Approach 2: Ask Everyone in the Whole World

He recommends #1, reasonably enough. I agree that it’s far more likely to yield positive results. Desperate attempts to network are doomed to backfire since anyone can see through that sort of self-centered socializing.

I think there’s a third approach.

Approach 3: Be Awesome

Great people can recognize not-great people really well — that’s one of the skills you need to acquire if you want to be truly great at anything. If you want to be an awesome tennis player, you need to learn how to evaluate other tennis players so that you don’t spend your time playing against crappy players who can’t teach you anything.

So you need to be awesome. The best strategy for finding awesome people is to spend your time making yourself more and more awesome. The great thing about Approach 3 is that even if you don’t find anyone at all, you’re more awesome than you were. Which makes it even easier to attract even AWESOMER people.

Getting Awesome

Start with recognizing that software developers are not factory workers — software isn’t something you assemble, it’s something you design. The energy that generates it is creative, not mechanical.

Here at FreshBooks we’re focusing on a few key things to increase the awesomeness of our team. We’re making sure our developers get chances to work on stuff they think is important. We’re making it easier and faster to deploy safely and reliably. We’re now managing business priorities separate from day-to-day task management. We’re making sure our developers get to spend the majority of their time solving problems in code, rather than sitting in meetings or filling out forms. Or waiting.

It’s working out. Increasingly we get resumes from people who say, “I’ve heard fantastic things about your company — it sounds like the sort of place where I want to work.”

And there’s a very clear correlation between people who say that and people who seem pretty awesome.

Down the road, what we need to do is to focus externally as well — not just being more awesome, but finding better ways to broadcast that awesomeness. But that can’t take away from our basic need to be awesome. Without that, our broadcasting is just phony PR, and the truly awesome ones will see right through it.

In other news, FreshBooks is hiring. If you’re awesome, click here.

Sunir kicked ass editing this. The original post is over at the FreshBooks blog.

Couch Time

2008-07-27T08:21:00.006-07:00

We're discussing options for growing our office at FreshBooks, and somebody jokingly said, "Couches for everyone!" -- which got me thinking about the Queen.

See, the Queen came to Vancouver a bunch of years ago, and her route took her past our office at NGRAIN. I don't know where she was coming from or going to, but in any event, somehow everyone knew that the Queen would be going by that afternoon. (if you don't know, I'm kind of a fan of the Queen)

And conveniently, my couch was right next to the window overlooking the street. So everyone gathered at my couch and watched a Rolls with blacked-out windows drive by, flanked by motorcycle cops.

It wasn't really MY couch. Originally it had been somewhere else. In a meeting room, I think, where nobody ever sat on it, which troubled me, because it looked like such a comfortable couch. So I think it was Ivan and perhaps Derek and I who one day just picked it up and moved it to the window beside my desk. We brought a potted plant along as well, and so suddenly beside my desk was this nice little nook where someone could plop down and take a break.

Which turned out to be a great information-sharing device. I was managing half-a-dozen projects for NGRAIN at that time, and so I'd have stakeholders and developers and QA folks come round once or twice a day just to flop on my couch and hide from the crazy levels of work everyone was dealing with. And they'd tell me how their day was going, and very often just happen to mention that they were roadblocked on something, or that a date was not realistic, or that they were done a bunch of stuff ahead of time and really didn't have anything to do.

That couch made me about TEN times more effective a project manager than I would have been if I'd had to walk around and ASK everyone how they were doing. Possibly eleven. It was so easy to find out what was going on because folks would just come round and tell me. I didn't have to insist on weekly reports, or complicated time tracking systems, or anything fancy at all. I just needed a comfy couch.

They took the couch away, of course, and projects started falling over. Way it goes. Nowadays they probably pay a couple hundred dollars a month for some project management software, and congratulate themselves on spending so wisely. "Look! I can sort all tickets by estimate time divided by actual time, superimposed on a calendar and translated to the new Gantt 2.3 format!"

Rubbish.

The lesson I learned from the couch was that if you structure your HUMAN environment so that information naturally flows to where it needs to get, AND you make sure that you're open and available for that information, you don't need a bunch of complicated tracking systems. It's less expensive and it makes for a far more pleasant environment.

We're social creatures (demented and sad, but social). The real art of project management is about understanding our social needs and inclinations, and working with those to help a team work together.

The Queen drove by (at least, I assume the Queen was in the blacked-out Rolls; for all I know she took the Skytrain) and the entire project team sat around arguing over whether or not the British royalty had any worth in today's world. No milestones got knocked off that day, and we didn't track that half hour against any project tasks. But as the team went back to work, I remember being pleased that we'd all come together as the social beings we are, and taken some time that didn't need to be accounted for just to share our worlds with each other. Sitting on a couch arguing politics may not seem like something that improves project effectiveness, but a shared world is really what it's all about. Once a team has built that shared view, anything is possible.

It's not my job to tell people what to do. It's not my job to get them inspired and "motivated". My job is actually very simple: to observe how people are communicating and to help alleviate any breakdowns in that communication, so that a shared world can emerge. One of the best tools I ever found for that was a beat-up old couch.

Photo: Kia Abell

ENnies, Here We Come!

2008-07-12T12:27:00.002-07:00

Fantastic news the other day -- our wildly-hyped product Fire and Brimstone was nominated for a prestigious ENnie award (the primary awards of the tabletop RPG industry) in the "Best Web Enhancement" category.

This is really thrilling news for all of us who worked on this product, tirelessly playtesting rulesystem after rulesystem to ensure our elegant yet simple yet not-very-complicated rules properly delivered every nuance of the sophisticated lava experience so many games fail to deliver.

We are thrilled to be nominated for this award, and expect to deliver the lava experience of a lifetime at this year's ENnies show.

New Beginnings

2008-07-08T19:30:00.003-07:00

Nearly two years ago I started thinking about how to restructure my life so that my work, my passions, and my soul could begin to converge. That process has led me on some unexpected journeys, and introduced me to folks I am now honoured to count among my society, and these days, it feels more and more like I've managed to honestly integrate all the things in my life that matter to me.

A lot of things are helping me with this, not least still Peter Senge's wonderful book, The Fifth Discipline, which is what sparked the original idea of all this in me.

And now I've maybe moved on to a new stage. I've joined FreshBooks as their new Software Development Manager (or as my new business cards say, "Chief Cat Herder"). This is a fantastic company that is based on the kinds of foundations I tried so hard to establish at previous places, only to discover that I can't do it myself.

You can't fake a collaborative environment based on the idea of a learning organization. You can't pretend to hand power over to your employees. It's really one of those all-or-nothing things. Either your employees are trusted to handle their responsibilities, or they aren't. Either you care about bringing value to your customers, or you don't.

I've been at FreshBooks for nearly a month now, and they walk the walk. Everyone here is utterly concerned with making sure our customers are insanely happy. And that translates into making sure our co-workers are insanely happy.

So I'm pretty much insanely happy right now.

And more than that! I mean, it gets better.

I can't reveal all the details yet, but there's a few like-minded collaborators, mostly folks I've picked up in my many travels, who are putting the final touches on a whole new thing. A thing unlike anything you've seen. Pretty much.

The DINO-PIRATES are by no means forgotten, nor have they been left to fend for themselves. We've been working on them all along, and darn soon now, we're going to have some SERIOUS revealage to undertake. These fantastic illustrations are just a backdrop to what's going to put a lot of folks into a great big "Holy Crap!" bit of shock and awe.

It's starting to feel like 2008 is gaining a little traction, and as I surmised, it's turning out to be a year entirely unlike any other. I have no idea where it's going, and I don't feel even a little bit in control. But I'm finding the illusion of control is dropping easily from my eyes, and in its place I find the ability to savour the turns and twists that my life is undergoing more satisfying, and more enjoyable, than any sense of my own power.

I tell my co-workers this all the time: "I'm making this up as I go." It worked for Indy alright, why shouldn't it work for me?

I've been reading some of the essays of Montaigne (French guy, 1500's), and came across this passage in the last of them, "Of Experience":

Have you been able to think out and manage your own life? You have done the greatest task of all. To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquillity in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. All other things, ruling, hoarding, building, are only little appendages and props, at most.

I was engaged in a discussion on a message board I sometimes frequent that got into why folks did or didn't choose to follow particular religions. I didn't post this idea, but it occurred to me in reviewing that discussion, that something I have sought in the study of swordsmanship is a practice that can help me to learn how to, in Montaigne's words, "live appropriately".

For some reason I have faith that if I simply focus on living appropriately, and do not spurn the opportunities that come my way, that things will turn out. That I will be able to "accomplish" things and to do what is required wherever I find myself. This faith has grown stronger all my life, and one thing I've learned in all the upheaval and trauma my life has gone through in the past few months is that often the best thing for me to do is simply to relax.

These are beginnings. In a sense, things are always beginning.

Sword and Foot

2008-06-14T17:01:00.005-07:00

"Sword and foot!" is one of those phrases I associate with my time at Sugino Dojo; I can clearly recall Sugino Sensei roaring that at me again and again: "Sword and foot! Sword and foot!"

He was reminding me of a basic tenet of Katori Shinto Ryu: that the sword must act in concert with the body. When the sword starts moving, the foot starts moving. When the sword stops, the foot stops. Sword and foot.

This principle is evident in the most basic fundamental of Katori Shinto Ryu, the straight head cut called maku-uchi men. As the sword rises up, the front foot draws back until, when the sword reaches it apex over our heads, the front foot reaches the rear foot and we are standing with our feet together. And so as the strike comes down; the sword begins its descent and the front foot slides forward, so that at the moment the sword completes its movement, the foot has returned to its original spot and we are once again standing at the ready.

It sometimes seems like an impossibly difficult thing to manage, to cause an external object to move in perfect timing with our own body. I joke that I have never performed maku-uchi correctly, but it's not exactly a joke. Getting the sword and the foot to move in perfect synchronization challenges my awareness and my coordination.

Hence Sensei's constant admonishment: "Sword and foot!"

But learning to work in concert with the world around me has been a fundamental lesson, and it seems that the better I get at making that sword move in time with myself, the better I get and doing the same with other, more abstract features of the world.

It's not just a case of imposing my will on the world around me. That can get me to MOVE the sword, but in order to operate synchronously with it, I need to move myself in accordance with the laws of physics that govern the movement of a piece of steel. I need to enter into a more complex relationship with the sword, one that accepts and embraces its needs as well as my own.

I find the lesson over and over again in my life. Repeatedly I learn to forgo simply directing, or commanding, and to embrace connecting and joining.

Interdependence, not independence.

Especially when dealing with things considerably more complex and unpredictable than swords. Like, say, software developers. I find it very difficult to get software developers to do exactly what I want them to do. Which is probably a good thing, since I'm particularly ill-suited to telling them what to do, not really being much of a software developer myself. Doing my job properly (and by the way, I have a new job; more later) involves very little directing and a great deal of harmonizing. Connecting.

It's kind of hard to describe. Sort of like maku-uchi. I can show you how it's done (sort of), and I practice it a lot, but descriptions never really manage to get the idea across. Likewise managing teams. It's all sort of mysterious and beyond the ability of rationality to encompass. These are things that cannot (and perhaps should not) be put into words, but that can only be embodied in practice.

"Tao" character from Zen Sekai

My Crow Story

2008-06-11T22:22:00.002-07:00

Now, I can't verify this. And I have a terrible memory. And I have a habit of convincing myself obviously untrue things are in fact the case. And I can find no verification of this story online. So take it all with a grain of salt.

But I SWEAR that when I was living in Tokyo, I heard the following story reported by the local news:

People living near a train line began to complain of loud bangs on the line as trains went by. Japan Rail officials inspected the line but found nothing untoward. They did not notice any loud noises as trains went by, but as soon as they left, complaints started up again.

It was surmised that somehow local hooligans (they DO have hooligans in Japan, but of course they're very polite hooligans) were getting into the JR right of way and leaving articles on the rails such as pebbles which then made loud noises as the trains went over them.

Bang! And whatnot.

JR posted guards. The noises stopped while the guards were present, but returned again as soon as they left. Nobody could catch the "train-item-bang-makers" in the act, so Japan Rail installed a surveillance camera where the complaints were most common.

And what did they find?

Flocks of crows would gather, perching on streetlights and power cables, chuckling amongst themselves. One would flap down and plant a rock on the tracks, then join his mates. They'd sit and wait. Pretty soon a rushing, roaring JR train comes screaming by and BANG!

The crows all fly up in the air, shrieking and swearing as only crows can, and then settle down. Another of their number (or possibly the same one, crows being tough to distinguish) would flap down again, select another stone, and do it again.

I love crows. What the heck were they doing? Who cares? But check out Joshua Klein's great talk on crows (thanks to Daryl):

It Has A Sword

2008-06-07T08:55:00.002-07:00

From Larry. Okay, this is really just another random link post, but HOLY CRAP:

The robot has a SWORD.

Da, Da, Da

2008-06-01T14:19:00.004-07:00

Some quick links just to keep your strength up:

The Grand Central Freeze

Via Searching for Tao: A hundred people swarm into Grand Central Station, New York, and freeze simultaneously in place for five minutes. Beauty happens.

New Wave Bondage

Via Pulp 2.0: Fantastic new covers for a hardbound Penguin edition of Fleming's Bond novels. I have most of the old Pan editions that I read as a kid, but I have to admit, these make me want to buy the whole set over again. So shiny.

Senor Coconut

Via Kevin Church: Trendy latino remake of an old techno classic.

The Zero-Tolerance Inbox

2008-05-27T07:16:00.002-07:00

Along the lines of The 501 Method is another simple technique I use to keep myself organize. This one actually does have a name: it's the Zero-Tolerance Inbox.

The basic idea is really part of the fundamental principles of Getting Things Done, but I find GTD a little "heavy" for my daily use. I just try to focus on a couple of very basic techniques and implement them with as much discipline as I can muster.

The Zero-Tolerance Inbox is primary among these.

By Zero-Tolerance I mean that I allow nothing to remain in my inbox. I am not happy unless my inbox is empty, and I do whatever I can responsibly do to get everything that arrives in my inbox out of my inbox as quickly as possible.

Most emails that arrive are signals of some sort -- telling me that an action has been completed. For the most part, these emails can be immediately deleted. Once I know the action has been completed, there's usually no call for me to be involved anymore, so I scan these emails, look for anything out of place, and delete. Simple.

Some emails are requests for action. These have to be either done immediately or moved to whatever the action management system is.

(I sure like the idea of an Action Management System. It sounds like something that organizes car chases or something. Anyway.)

Most software shops have an issue management system, or a bug tracking system, or whatever. Emails asking me to get something like that done (bug reports, requests for data, angry denunciations of our interface design) need to get put into that system and tracked there. Again, simple and quick to do.

For my personal life, I have a very simple To-Do list using 37 Signals' awesome Backpack tool. So if I get an email from someone that describes a thing I decide I need to do, I add an item to my to-do list and delete the email.

Some emails are requests for information. These are often the most effort, but often the truth is that somebody else is better-informed than I (actually, that's pretty much ALWAYS the truth), and so I can dispatch the request to them and again, delete. Sometimes the better-informed person is not quite so available and in these cases I actually have to do some work. You'll note all the previous examples mostly allow me to avoid doing any work whatsoever. Not doing any work is key to getting lots done. Be lazy!

That covers probably 99% of the emails I receive. The remaining 1% are weird things like "I was thinking we should reorganize the company so that we can start selling soft-serve ice cream from the QA department. What do you think about that?"

Or, in other words, emails from the executives. For the most part, these can be safely ignored.

The key, like that of the 501 Method, is to avoid making things easy for yourself in the short term. Embrace the short-term pain of dealing with each and every item the moment it arrives. The Zero-Tolerance Inbox is a way of refusing to allow work to pile up just because you don't know what to do with it. If you don't know, this method forces you to find out. Enjoy it. Make a game out of it.

I mean, not Grand Theft Auto or anything. More like pinochle.

Photo: Dan Mulligan

Robert Lynn Asprin: 1946-2008

2008-05-23T09:57:00.002-07:00

Wow, the past few months have been alarmingly full of significant losses. I guess I'm getting to the age where the folks who were my heroes in my youth are hitting that black wall at the end of the race.

Man, I'm so not prepared for Bobby Orr passing on. There'd better be angels and trumpets, is all I can say.

But today it's Robert Asprin, at 62, the creator of the Thieves' World books (which laid the foundation for the Bordertown books which I know you've never heard of, maybe I need to do another in my "Ones Nobody Knows" series) and the writer of the Myth Adventures books, both of which started off so well I can't help but be indulgent towards how they ended up.

Mr. Asprin was able to communicate a love of the absurd, the zany, and the unrepentantly sentimental. The first couple of Thieves' World books contained some great stories, and the whole idea of a "shared world" anthology was part of the cultural shift that Gary Gygax also contributed to.

In the 80's, fantasy culture began embracing the ideas of world-building, ideas that perhaps had been first developed by early pulp writers like Howard and Lovecraft (working as they did upon speculative writers like Verne and even More), and then suddenly Tolkien put a level of detail into it that went beyond what anyone had seen. Gygax and his cohorts, not content with just doing their own world-building, turned that activity into something with social worth -- if you were willing to put some effort into it, and had the requisite skills, you could gather a social group ("Demented and sad, but social,") and work together to generate stories in that world.

Authors continued to work in that style, and Asprin had the genius idea to bring together a number of well-known (and not so much) authors in a single setting. I remember reading his foreword (or possibly somebody else's, talking about him) to the original volume, and how at first the idea was to bring all the famous characters of fantasy together -- so that you could have Conan confront Elric, or Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser slit purses in Minas Tirith. But that turned out to be impossible -- probably my first encounter with the idea of "Intellectual Property" -- and so a new world and new characters were created.

It was a grand vision. It was a Good Thing To Do. The Sanctuary stories were part of the "gritty" trend in fantasy writing -- more Leiber than Tolkien, and better suited to short stories than to novels.

Sanctuary gave rise to numerous other shared projects, none of which ever carried the same cachet as the original. But the idea has stuck around, and moved into different media, and even for myself, has influenced much of what I think about IP ownership and creativity.

DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND is going to be a shared setting. It will be open for folks to contribute to, and to take from. I'm still working on how exactly the presentation will happen, but when it rolls out, I think it will be quite unlike any fantasy setting ever seen before -- at least in terms of HOW it gets created and fleshed out. It will be an exciting project, and given that I've spent several years of my life just getting it this far, I think it's fair to say that Mr. Asprin has had an immense impact on my life.

Thank you for Sanctuary, for Skeeve and Aahz, and for the lofty idea that creativity is better when it's shared. I believe you were right.

Novelty Lunchboxes!

2008-05-15T21:41:00.003-07:00

I can't refrain from noting that somebody recently came to this site after searching Google for "novelty lunchboxes".

I am NUMBER TWO. Number two on Google for "novelty lunchboxes".

In Canada. If you include the quotes.

But still! Number Two!

The Infinity of Data

2008-05-11T16:18:00.003-07:00

Reading Mr. Tony Judt's lovely elegy for history in the New York Review of Books, I was struck by this phrase: "Most people in the world outside of sub-Saharan Africa have access to a near infinity of data.".

Particularly the use of the word "near".

Is the amount of data to which we have access to best described as "near-infinite"? Or is "infinite" itself a better descriptor?

There are now well over 2 million articles on Wikipedia. There are 24,000 texts on Project Gutenberg. Little Canada published 20,000 new books last year; the United Kingdom published over 200,000.

Even assuming a great deal of overlap, there's a phenomenal amount of data being created on a daily basis in our world. If data is being created faster than anyone can ingest it, doesn't that mean that there actually is an infinite amount of data available to us?

What does that mean? What does it mean to say that nobody can grasp human knowledge? Or even keep up? How do we keep track of where we are if none of us can take in enough of the new data to maintain a "50,000-foot view" of the human race's progress?

I think it partly means abandoning the idea of progress in the first place. How can anything so unsupervisable be referred to as "progress"?

Mr. Judt's axes are sharpening in a different direction; he is taking on the idea that torture could ever be acceptable in a republic devoted to freedom. But I think part of what makes Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib possible is the "infinity of data" that he tosses off -- in a world where we accept that we can never acquire ALL the information, aren't we in danger of being unable to ever trust that we have all the RELEVANT information?

And without all the relevant information, how does each one of us find our way? Step by step, through the fog, always uncertain of our path? It's strange to think that an infinity of data requires us to shrink our horizons, to minimize our worlds. But maybe stepping smaller and lighter isn't such a bad thing.

Bridge photo: Utpal Deka

The NewPulp Manifesto!

2008-05-10T16:00:00.003-07:00

The man declared "The Mad Pulp Bastard" by none other than the original Kung-Fu Monkey has written a Declaration of Intent that describes the emerging idea of NewPulp.

It's a document that captures many of the ideas Scratch Factory tries to embody, and so I'm excited to see other folks sharing similar goals and aspirations to mine. I'm struck by how well the Story Hour fits the NewPulp mode: it's generated quickly, it embraces rather than parodies genre, and it involves its audience often very directly.

Telling stories is fun. It is its own reward. I'm not suggesting that folks who do it really really well oughtn't to be paid for it; hells no. But we all love to tell stories and many of us do so without any notion of ever getting paid for it. Some professional writers get uppity about that but I don't think amateur storytellers present any great danger to the pros; on the contrary, I think a healthy culture of storytelling generates more GOOD storytellers, and if you've ever listened to a publisher you'll hear them lament how hard it is to find a good storyteller.

DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND is likewise firmly in the NewPulp camp, and RPG gaming makes for a natural delivery mechanism. There are going to be some exciting developments in this regard over the course of 2008, so watch this space!

And carry the NewPulp banner proud.

Astonishing Adventures Number Three!

2008-05-07T08:49:00.003-07:00

Published by the good Mr. John Donald Carlucci (who also did the very suitable cover illustration), Astonishing Adventures is 70 pages of pulp story-telling full of verve and style. Hard-bitten mugs and swanky dames fill these pages, influenced by all sorts of crazy stuff -- there's some pretty cool science-fiction in here, some economic theory, and plenty of two-fisted action.

It's free, and it's cool. It's what I call good. Read, and be better than you are.

The 501 Method

2008-04-30T12:41:00.004-07:00

I'm not an organized person by nature. I have a terrible memory.

(really, I'm not kidding. My memory (or rather, the gaping hole in my brain where other people have a memory) is legendary. I've forgotten things you people wouldn't believe. I forgot that I'd planned a department-wide trip to a local gallery. I forgot my family's vacation to Hawaii -- it was only when my Mom came in to find out why I wasn't packing that anybody realised I didn't even know we were going on holiday. That day. As in, the rest of the family was IN THE CAR, waiting for me.)

So in order to make it through an ordinary work day, I have to take some extraordinary measures, otherwise everything I'm supposed to get done falls apart. For example, I have to write EVERYTHING down. Anything that Corey doesn't write down doesn't get stored. As those who know me say, "Corey doesn't use his brain for storing things. Besides dinosaurs."

It's true. My brain does feature a remarkable collection of dinosaur-related data. But career opportunities in the dinosaur field are few and far between. And pay like crap.

So anyway, this morning I was in Le Gourmand, picking up my sandwich, when it occurred to me that one of my principal organizing systems was a little idiosyncratic, and might, at least, provide some light entertainment for my three readers (hi JAmes).

And maybe even be useful, if (like me) you occasionally suffer from memory lapses, and (like me) don't find new toys particularly helpful.

My organization system doesn't require web applications, moleskin notebooks, iPhones or even sticky notes.

I call it The 501 Method. Well, that's a lie. I don't call it anything. But the primary tool required IS a pair of Levi 501 jeans, and The 501 Method sounds kind of catchy.

Actually, any article of clothing with a pocket will do -- though it's best if it's an article you wash regularly. The key here is inconveniencing yourself a little bit. Not too much, but a little bit. A little inconvenience is how I keep myself organized.

Basically, I put stuff in my pockets.

I know that doesn't sound too remarkable, and perhaps it isn't, but bear with me.

See, I HATE having my pockets all full of stuff. And key to this whole process is doing things I hate. So I don't organize this stuff. I don't put it in a neat little wallet or something so it won't get munched up. That would reduce the inconvenience, which is counter-productive for The 501 Method.

The stuff, in particular, is pieces of paper. Receipts, or to-do items, or whatever I need to track. Mostly receipts. Whenever I buy something, I ask for the receipt, and I put it in my pocket.

"Okay," I can hear you saying, "You put receipts in your pockets. Fantastic. Great. Earth-shattering."

But see, the receipts in the pocket isn't the clever bit. The CLEVER bit is that when I get home, I take everything in my pockets out of my pockets, and pile it up in front of my iMac.

The iMac isn't really critical to The 501 Method. I know, neither are the 501s, but I have to draw the line somewhere.

So far, the critical bits are:

1. Pocket (for putting things in)
2. Things (for putting in and taking out of pockets)

So you don't really need the iMac so much just yet. What you do need is a place where the receipts will get in the way. Where you can't just keep piling them up day after day.

Remember, inconvenience is what this The 501 Method all about.

So we've gone from stuffing things in our pockets to piling things up in front of an iMac. Onwards.

What happens now is that eventually I get so frustrated with the pile of receipts in front of my iMac that I take action. For myself, I record expenses in a spreadsheet, but the spreadsheet is kind of like the iMac -- interesting, perhaps as a personal detail (hey, Corey knows what a spreadsheet is), but not a key part of the process.

No, our critical bits list for The 501 Method has increased by one:

1. Pocket (for putting things in)
2. Things (for putting in and taking out of pockets)
3. Place (for putting things)

You'll note that the pocket and the place are similar. In fact, we've already wrapped this process and are back at the beginning, so really, the whole process only involves steps 1 and 2.

1. Have a pocket
2. Put things in it.

It's all about inconveniencing yourself so that you end up having to deal with things. Really, I've just inculcated in myself a certain tolerance towards inconvenience, and a caution whenever I find myself doing something that makes things more convenient for myself. Because typically convenience ends up not so convenient. The 501 Method is about embracing inconvenience.

So I'm skeptical of anyone who tries to convince me that a new tool or a new process will make things more convenient for me. The capacity to get things done doesn't necessarily involve things being convenient.

I know The 501 Method is never going to catch on. It's not complicated enough. It doesn't have enough steps. It would be hard to write a book, launch a lecture series or even a PowerPoint presentation about it. Heck, I can't even turn it into a line of clothing without getting sued by venerable Levi Strauss' great-grand-nephews.

Which would be profoundly inconvenient.

Ding Ding Ding

2008-04-26T19:58:00.005-07:00

One of the things virtually every software office will tell you, usually with a sheepish sort of "Yeah, we know" kind of expression, is that their documentation sucks.

Everyone knows updated docs are critical. Everyone knows outdated docs are deadly.

And yet, I've never walked into a place where people didn't tell me their documentation sucked.

Why this happens is pretty well understood -- everyone's busy and there's always tasks to do that either

A) are more critical to company health; or B) are easier. Usually, it's B.

Because let's face it, updating documentation feels like being the art critic, compared to the artist who's out there fixing bugs or launching new campaigns. In the words of H.L. Mencken, it's like being the bell ringing frantically at the crossing as the train roars past. All the action is really up with the train. Who wants to be the crossing signal?

But the organization isn't just the train, it's the whole map: the tracks, the highways, the farms inbetween, all that. And (bear with me as this metaphor starts to creak under the strain) in that respect, the crossing signals are critical elements in making sure the trains, cars, pedestrians and what not don't run headlong into each other.

I was standing at Spadina and Richmond, the other day, waiting to cross, and watching oncoming traffic, and the light changed and I just stepped out in front of thousands of pounds of fast-moving steel. It occurred to me that I didn't have to make any sort of contact with the drivers of each and every vehicle coming my way in order to be sure that they would stop -- the crossing signal took care of that for me.

It seems like much of our technology can be understood as mechanisms for enabling communication between large groups of strangers. A crossing signal is really a way for me to send a message to a few hundred drivers, saying, "Okay, I'm crossing the street now. Please stop." Because I don't have to create a relationship with each and every driver on the road, I can get to work even though there's thousands of people trying to travel down the same roads I am. If I had to negotiate each and every social interaction as I travelled, it would take me hours to get to work.

Crossing signals simplify social interactions.

So does corporate and process documentation. And, understanding these organizational tools as crossing signals maybe helps to explain why keeping them up to date is so important.

And why, fundamentally, doing so is the boss' job. Not that it's the boss' job to decide on everyone else's process and tell them what to do, but it is up to the boss (note that we're using the term "boss" here pretty loosely. You decide if that's you or not) to make sure that the signals are up to date, that they are actually helping to manage the flow of traffic -- not just flashing pointlessly while everyone moving through the intersection ignores them.

A lot of things can make documents useless: inaccurate information is only one. Besides being out of date, plenty of corporate docs are just boring, if not actually painful. An organization where communication skills are not valued ends up with reams of documents that can't be understood or that just don't connect with readers and get them on board. And every single document that isn't used is organizational noise -- imagine if the city were full of crossing signals, multiple signals at each intersection, some of which were accurate and some of which weren't. In order to get anywhere you'd have to have someone show you which signals to pay attention to and which ones to ignore. This is exactly the situation in most offices -- you get led by the hand through a maze of outdated documents and told which ones matter and which ones don't. The latter list is almost always larger. Much larger.

Tools can help, but whether they use Word or Wikis or whatever, the real answer for most offices is investment in communication skills and the time needed to develop and most importantly maintain documents. This is why (and perhaps I'm biased on this point, what with an English degree and all, but still) solid writing skills are essential for a company to thrive. Along with a boss who understands the value of reliable crossing signals.

Ding ding ding....

Typewriting photo: Roberto Clix. Crossing Signal photos: Michal Zacharzewski

Sad Long Box

2008-04-23T22:06:00.002-07:00

Dave has shut down the Long Box. I am sad.

Dave has provided some of the biggest laughs I've had on the Internet since this whole thing began. But it was his review of NEW MUTANTS #18 that really cemented the one-way relationship. That post marks one of the few times I've ever been compelled to comment on someone's blog post. God I loved that comic.

There's a gift that some people have of being able to illustrate the essential goofiness of something without betraying it; they see the goofiness, and they can show you the goofiness, but they still love the goofiness. They love it BECAUSE it's goofy -- but not in a campy way.

Somebody over on Circvs asked me why I love pulp stories and my answer swerved around this stretch of road. I said something about how I love stories in which the self-importance and essential goofiness of human existence is illustrated, but at the same time the heroic view of the universe is maintained. There's something that happens inside my brain when I read Dejah Thoris shouting "Fly, Sola! Dejah Thoris remains to die by the man she loves!" that manages to simultaneously expand and implode.

Which probably explains the expression on my face at the time.

It's hard to explain Dave's consistent funny. Quotes don't do his posts justice, because he's so good at set-up and then paying off with goofy lines like "Mandroids: big, loveable, and yellow. Just like Big Bird."

See? On it's own, that's not funny. But you read the mandroid post and I tell you, you're dying.

Steph said she recalled some hilarious She-Hulk post. I couldn't find it, but I did read a lot of funny stuff.

I will restrict myself to two of the greatest posts Dave (or any other blogger in the HISTORY OF THE INTERNET) ever wrote:

Clean Underwear Tuesday: Honestly, I don't even know what to say. SIGN SEZ STOP PLEEZ. If that doesn't crack you up, you need a new brain, dude.

No Post For You, Dr. Jones!: Well, there are bears in this one, too. But I tell you, if there were any justice in this world, "Sometimes bears win," would be a total catchphrase.

Thanks, Dave, for three years of hilarity. I'm really glad you're making a living at this now. Those bastards at ABC are lucky to have you. Milk 'em for all they're worth!

Some Things You Just Can't Discuss

2008-04-16T21:27:00.003-07:00

Yes, that is what you might possibly suspect it is. No, I'm not kidding. Yes, I heard about before my (ahem) "departure". No, I wasn't involved. Yes, it's possible that it's worse than you think. No, I didn't get a free copy. Yes, I would have taken one if they'd offered.

No, I can't comment.

Seriously. And anyway, Kevin's already said everything that needs to be said. And he's much better at this than I am.

What would I say? What could I possibly say except, "Yes. I know."

The First Lesson is Walking

2008-04-12T21:57:00.007-07:00

It struck me a few years ago, as I practicing the first kata of omote-tachi -- the foundation of Katori Shinto Ryu -- that the very first thing a student learns is walking. Walking two steps.

Katori is not a practice in which one learns a technique and moves on to the next. It is an endless circle of practice, insight, and more practice. I have been doing these two steps for many years now, and I still feel that even just taking two steps backwards is a process more full of possibility than I could ever completely encompass.

The kata opens with the two participants facing one another, swords at the ready. The senior member (uketachi) advances forward, driving back the junior member (kirikomi). One step. Two steps.

That's it. Just two steps. If you're kirikomi, you just back up two steps and you're done. Hardly a sophisticated maneuver.

And yet, like everything else in Katori, there is much, much more going on here than can be easily seen.

First is ma-ai -- "correct distance". At the opening of the kata, before the steps begin, uketachi and kirikomi are separated by a precise distance -- just too far to reach each other without taking a step. Their swordtips just meet.

As they walk, uke pushes forward and it is the job of kirikomi to maintain ma-ai. Sometimes uke pushes quickly and sometimes he pushes slowly -- nevertheless, kirikomi must maintain the correct distance. After two steps back, their swords must still be in precisely the same relationship as before.

There is also timing to consider. It is uke's forward step that prompts kirikomi's backward one. Tong Sensei says often that swordplay in Katori Shinto Ryu is a conversation, an exchange -- as a junior student I found concentrating on these brief, simple steps a chance to establish that communication with my uketachi. A chance to listen, pay attention to what uke is telling me. One step. Two steps.

One of the ongoing lessons of Katori is that of listening. You must maintain, not just the correct distance, but actual contact with your opponent. Only by fully experiencing their presence, with all your senses, can you hope to attain mastery over them. You must be aware of their sword, their feet, their eyes, all of their intent and their spirit. From any position an opponent can launch a multitude of attacks -- the only way to respond correctly is by sensing them without preconceptions and allowing the correct response to come forth.

Without total attention, you cannot possibly succeed.

And so it has always struck me how, when I first began studying Katori Shinto Ryu, my first lesson was to do nothing more than walk two steps. And when I watch new students walking backwards, with so much of their attention just focused on "What's next? What's next?" I am reminded that just two steps can contain lessons that always need re-learning.

Photo: Jason Conlon

And Tall.

2008-04-11T10:08:00.003-07:00

A co-worker lent me his copy of Tom DeMarco's Slack. I'm reading it with high expectations, since DeMarco's Peopleware is one of my bibles when it comes to running software teams. And so far Slack appears to live up to the reputation of its author.

I was especially struck by his observation on the most common qualities of successful leaders:

Managers who inspire extraordinary loyalty from their people tend to be highly charismatic, humourous, good-looking and tall.

At last, an explanation for it all!

It's good to know my resounding string of success after success isn't just dumb luck. I really am better than the rest of you after all.

Actually, the point of the book is perhaps slightly more weighty than just re-affirming my most deeply-held suspicions about my own awesomeness. Implementing them in my current environment is proving challenging, but then so is anything worth doing, right?

Right?

I will update this space in the future as I push further into Mr. DeMarco's slinky-festooned masterpiece, but I will say that at first glance there's not much to suggest I won't agree with every word of it.

Everything I Needed to Know About Management I Learned From Satan

2008-03-27T20:34:00.003-07:00

On the left is an image of Satan. Perhaps you know him better as "The Bad Guy". "The One You're Supposed To Hate". "The Not Very Nice At All And You Shouldn't Even Stop To Talk To Him On The Street Because Nobody Wants To Know Him Guy".

And yet, you gotta admire the guy. He's got confidence, give him that.

I mean, here is a guy who KNOWS his boss is OMNIPOTENT. Most people won't go up against their boss even if their boss is a feeble old guy who's so cranky everyone hates him and would cheer on anyone who takes a shot at him. But Satan, his boss is God, right? So Satan's well aware of the fact that his boss can do anything. God doesn't have to kick Satan's ass, because God can just cause Satan's ass to kick itself.

And yet, Satan goes up against him anyway. Not only that, but he convinces a whole host of angels -- generally considered to be doing okay in the brains-n-wisdom department, right? -- to do so alongside him. I'd love to have sat in on those planning sessions:

"Okay, Satan, we're with you. Now, what's your plan for overcoming God's omnipotence?"

"You're going to love this, guys..."

I mean, I would think that would be a hard sell. Me, I'd have some tough questions for the guy who's trying to sell me on going up against the guy who not only has all the cards, but owns the table and gets to decide the rules. And deals. I'd probe. I'd start probing.

What's fascinating though, about Satan (or at least Satan as Mr. Milton describes him (yeah, just read Paradise Lost. It's good)), is that he doesn't really do much convincing. He's not a salesman, nor is he a great strategist, nor, let's be honest, is he really thinking all that clearly through much of the story. What he is, however, is a fantastic leader.

Satan knows just what to do to get people excited about stuff, and to keep their spirits up. While God is up there commanding Thrones, Principalities and Virtues to gather around and sing songs about how great he is, Satan is dealing with some cranky and disappointed team members. Morale is low, down in Hell, as well it should, I guess.

But the thing is, if Satan WASN'T Satan, and if God WASN'T God, there's no question that Satan would be the one enjoying Paradisal comforts. And well-earned, too.

Okay, lessons in management from Satan:

Lesson One: Deal

Satan gets kicked out of heaven, plunged God-knows-exactly-how-far and lands, literally, in Hell. Things are, pretty much by definition, as bad as they can possibly get. If they could be worse, then you'd be thinking, "Well, this isn't really so bad," and we can't have people in Hell thinking that, now can we?

So he's in Hell, as are all the angels who signed up for this little project. What does he do? Rant and rail against his fate? Beat his breast and throw a temper tantrum? Start laying blame on his team members? No sir. Not Satan.

Instead, he looks around, and says, "Well guys, that didn't go so well. We didn't get what we wanted, and this place looks pretty crappy. Let's build a huge city and live in it."

Lesson One is "Deal." We used to play a lot of hearts in high school and if someone started to bitch about how crappy a hand they'd gotten last round, the table would mutter, "Shit happens. Deal." Last round was last round, and this round the cards are reshuffled and you might as well use them as best you can.

Think of Satan -- chucked into Hell, he immediately starts his team off on a new project. He knows they need something to give them direction and purpose, and he finds something worth doing right away. He doesn't waste any time.

Lesson Two: Risk

When things have gone wrong, that's time to throw caution to the wind and take a flyer. Not time to start looking for scapegoats and chucking blame around. And that's our Satan. No sooner is he ensconced in his shiny new city at the heart of Hell than he leaves, and not for the comforts of a four-star hotel.

No, Satan announces to his assembled crew that somewhere out in the dangerous, trackless wastes beyond Hell he's sure there's a place where they can live in prosperity. He's just got to find it.

And he doesn't pawn this task off on someone else. He knows perfectly well that his crew will fall apart if they don't see him willing to put himself on the line for their sake. So off he goes into the wild Chaos that surrounds Hell, tossed and torn by the waves of chance and darkness.

Lesson Two is "Take a Risk." You can't lead people if they don't believe you'll go out on a limb for them. You can only lead as you develop an unselfish desire to serve and care for others. Satan puts himself at risk and attempts something truly dangerous in order to find a better life for himself and his comrades. No wonder these angels followed this guy up against God. He puts himself on the front line.

You stop arguing when you see someone so ready to commit. Logic isn't what motivates and excites teams. Commitment in the face of risk is what gets that ball rolling.

Lesson Three: Trust

Satan hands power over to his cohorts readily. He finds the World, all newly created by God, and goes ahead and does his whole bit with the apple and all that, and on his way back runs into a couple of his bestest buddies, who've followed him and have been busily building a handy bridge from Hell to the World.

Does he put them down? Does he worry that they're going to steal his thunder? Not Satan! He invites them on in. He says, "Check it out; it's a whole world and it's never seen anything like us. You guys go on in there and get comfy on the sofa, you're probably pooped after building this fantastic bridge. Lovely millwork, by the way. I'm going back down to Hell (and enjoying the easy walk you've provided) to round up the rest of the gang. We're going to PARTY!"

He has faith in the people who work for him and he celebrates their contributions, and shares what he acquires freely. I was just talking with a friend last night who's had yet another brilliant idea and we laughed and promised to never hold our ideas possessively. Sometimes secrecy is required, but never for long and never for the sake of KEEPING an idea to oneself. The more I give my ideas to the world, the more ideas I seem to have.

Lesson Three is "Trust Everyone." And the more trust I lay upon the people around me, the more I get back from them. As a manager, if I don't operate from a position of total faith in my team and utter support for all the work they do, I will fail.

God doesn't have to faith in his team, of course, because he's God and so he can already do everything by himself, but for the rest of us, having (and expressing) faith in our partners is really at the heart of loving what we do.

Three lessons from an unlikely source. It was interesting reading Paradise Lost from the point of view of a management guide. I guess I read a lot of those, because what I noticed was how God did everything you're not supposed to do as a good manager, and Satan did everything you should, but of course Satan has to lose because God's, you know, God. And what really struck me was how obsessed John Milton seemed with the whole idea of obedience. Every line of Paradise Lost seems suffused with the desperate need to ensure that everyone everywhere at all times is doing what they're supposed to do, and no more. Or rather, with the overwhelming terror that somewhere, someone is NOT. That someone is decided for themselves what's best. In Milton's world that only ever leads to bad things.

The evidence that Milton is wrong about this is pretty incontrovertible. I've read a lot of management guides, let me tell you, and the data is well-established. The more you encourage people to decide for themselves, the more things start going well.

Not sure I'm about to go up against my boss (again), or anything like that. But then, my office is a long way from Hell.

On Our Own

2008-03-19T16:39:00.003-07:00

Our guide is gone. Sir Arthur C. Clarke passed away today. After Gary's departure, this is pretty much the other pillar of my childhood. I've blogged before about Sir Arthur's tremendous impact on me and the way I view the world. and I don't know if I can expand on what I said there: Reading Arthur C. Clarke taught me two of the most important skills I ever acquired, and made me believe that one day we'd see the surface of Titan ourselves. And what do you know.

We've seen the surface of Titan (and even heard the sound of its winds); we communicate around the world with extra-terrestrial relays; we've discovered ways to talk to dolphins and our virtual realities get better every day.

But our Childhood hasn't yet Ended. We are still human beings, bound to our sun and its solar system. I just recently suggested that Childhood's End offers the only compelling future for humanity I've ever read. I don't mean that we're likely to encounter creatures like the Overlords, but that the transformation that book describes is at least metaphorically inevitable.

It was interesting reading Charles Stross' fantastic Accelerando and seeing that vision updated with modern views on technology and social organization. It wasn't quite as compelling as CE, but it's the closest I've seen anyone come.

Blasters and warp drives and space marines are all very well and good, but one of the reasons I read almost no sci-fi is because I grew up reading Sir Arthur's rigorous, deeply imaginative visions of our future. Next to his towering intellect, the rest of the field crawls on all fours.

We are infinitely reduced by this loss. And now we have to imagine our future all by ourselves.

Good Question

2008-03-10T14:41:00.003-07:00

Reading some Ashoka literature today and came across this question:

What is the most critical factor for success in any organization these days?

Traditional factors like technology and marketing are losing their ability to reliably provide long-term advantages. It's too easy to catch up, and even pull ahead.

I agree with the Ashokans when they say it has to be the number and quality of innovative thinkers in the group. How innovative are your people, and how enthusiastically does the organization support their capacity for innovation? Nothing else will keep your group successful. The degree to which you stifle creativity and energy is the degree to which you limit your organization's potential.

It seems that in 2008 I will be spending no small amount of time building organizations. It will be interesting to see what sorts of structures I come up with in order to avoid stifling the members' innovative power.

Forward is Backward

2008-03-04T17:01:00.005-08:00

One of the lessons of Katori Shinto Ryu practice is that just because something looks like it must be one thing, it's never safe to assume that it is. And this lesson seems to go on being taught and taught again, even after you first learn it.

Beginning students often lean back in postures such as ko-gasumi or te-ura-gasumi, since they believe they are blocking an incoming strike, and reasonably decide that the further away they are from that incoming blow, the safer they will be. Even after years of practice I find myself doing that without being aware of it. It's natural, to want to shy away from danger.

The problem of course is that ko-gasumi doesn't have to be a block at all. You learn after some practice that many of the maneuvers that appear to be blocks, and are practiced as blocks, are in fact attacks, carefully disguised to look like blocks. If I step backward, the incoming attack is blocked; but if I step forward, the attack is avoided and instead of blocking I find my sword striking down my enemy at the exact moment he sought to strike me.

If I do it right. And he doesn't see it coming. And a thousand other things that might go wrong don't.

But this is one reason why when we practice our stances, we work so hard to maintain a neutral if not a forward stance. We are never really retreating, and we must never forget to maintain a forward focus. To kill the enemy is the point of entering combat; many texts talk about the necessity to forget about self-preservation and think only of cutting down the enemy, whatever the cost to yourself. These are not empty exhortations, even in the safe sort of practice we engage in. It is something I should always be keeping in my mind. Whatever stance I take, whatever response the kata seems to be asking me to take, I need to constantly consider what is happening and how I can take the initiative, even when I seem to be blocking or retreating.

At the same time, I can't just move forward every chance I get. That's too simplistic for Katori. There are times when increasing the distance between your enemy and yourself is the right choice. I have to wait, pay attention, and learn to recognize when an opportunity presents itself.

The kata of Katori Shinto Ryu are not simple patterns to be memorized. They hold secrets and demonstrate options, many of which cannot be perceived by the casual student. It takes years of practice to uncover these truths, and this journey never truly ends. I am forever discovering assumptions in my practice that only now am I realizing are unfounded, and can be cut apart effortlessly by someone who has seen through them.

And leaning back doesn't help.

RIP DM 1938-2008

2008-03-04T16:35:00.003-08:00

Goodbye, Gary. It's a better world because you were in it, and I'm glad I got a chance to thank you for that. I can't imagine what I would have done with most of my life had you not been the very clever man you were. It was thirty years ago my parents brought home that mysterious box with the blue rulebook, those first adventures, and the little chits you cut up and used instead of dice. Even with the crude materials I started with, I knew this was something special.

My condolences to the Gygax family.

Now You Get It, Right?

2008-02-29T21:36:00.004-08:00

Here's Scratch Factory's True20 Prehistoric Bestiary as an Issuu display. I'm pretty thrilled about that. I mean, that's just cool, right there.

Not sure I'm crazy about the thickness of those borders. Well, it's a work in progress. You know how it is.

The other thing to announce is that tomorrow is Haru Matsuri at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Center, and we of Tokumeikan will be demonstrating. Demonstrations are always very exciting. I will have more to say on this topic (or perhaps some related topic) soon.

Finally, Gordon Liu is only in Peacock King for about ten minutes, but it's worth watching the whole film for those ten minutes. Man THROWS DOWN.

Less Important, More Pretty

2008-02-28T19:36:00.003-08:00

Todd Harris, one of Disney's concept artists, has been one of my favourite artists ever since he did a series of Asian Adventurers PC portraits for Wizards years back -- those pictures ending up inspiring my near-legendary Kung-Fu Angels games.

Anyway, Mr Harris has posted a very cool time-lapse of his rendering process. It's like one of those painting shows that used to be on TV, only instead of painting landscapes with happy little trees, he's drawing a hot chick with a sword.

Truly, a man after my own heart.

The other really cool thing for today is Issuu. I believe these guys have just solved the problem of reading stuff online. And it's not Kindle, folks. It's free.

I'm still checking it all out, but I expect to be uploading all my True20 pdfs and more to come in the near future. This is cool.

This Is Important

2008-02-28T18:08:00.003-08:00

Pay attention: the Tories are trying to pass a bill that will allow the Minister of Canadian Culture to deny tax credits to already-completed TV and film productions. This means that you can get all your financing in place, shoot your production, and then go to recoup your expenses (say, via a Telefilm grant -- which is dependent on your production getting that CanCon tax credit), and then have some bureaucrat, with no accountability to anyone, decide that today, your production doesn't count, and so you're hosed.

We're talking about millions of dollars that WON'T get invested in Canadian productions because nobody will know if they're getting their money back until after they've already spent it.

Denis McGrath tells you what to do. Go and do it.

This bill is already in its third reading, so it could become law any time. Move fast.

Oh Phew

2008-02-26T20:21:00.003-08:00

We're back, and hopefully for good at last.

There's still some hosting shenanigans to take care of, but hopefully that can all go on behind the scenes.

Good grief, what a mess. That's three weeks of my life I'll never get back. Good thing I was unemployed.

It's always a bad thing when your hosting provider calls you and says, "So, do you have any backups of your site?"

Kids, I'm here to tell you to make sure that answer is always, "YES, BY GOD!"

We'll be posting a few things pretty soon, but just wanted to let the world know we're back, and DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND is closer than ever!

A Little Excitement

2008-02-21T21:10:00.002-08:00

You may have noticed that things have been kind of... borked... around here of late. Well, everyone's trying very hard, we assure you. But things are sort of up in the air just at the moment with our hosting. Stand by.

In the meantime, I just have to say that watching Jet Li and Jackie Chan go at each other in the cheeseball-but-kind-of-promising trailer to Forbidden Kingdom raised a few goosebumps. The history alone is reason to go see it, I reckon.

Star Destroyer Potemkin

2008-02-20T11:32:00.004-08:00

(via A Swarm of Angels)

Battleship Potemkin done in Lego Star Wars. By extraordinarily clever people.

PART ONE

PART TWO

Clever, clever, clever.

Art n Stuff

2008-02-16T19:53:00.006-08:00

This guy makes me very happy. Go browse around the site of Erwin Madrid, artist. I love especially the stuff displayed under "Personal Projects", like the image here -- lovely colour work and such specific lighting you can almost feel the sunshine on your face.

A lot of his Drake's Fortune stuff evokes the kind of feel I have in my mind for DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND, the forthcoming logo for which I think I'm probably driving Claudio completely insane over with my endless suggestions for changes. But I know he doesn't mind.

Do you, Claudio?

And the logo is going to be majorly BAD-ASS. And I have previously demonstrated my expertise on that subject, so listen up.

In other news, Chuck Rice over at RPGObjects/Vigilance Press has announced plans to create a Clash of the Roses True20 game. Gaming in the world of Henry IV (parts one and two). As long as the soliloquy mechanic is good, I'm on board.

And my buddy Joshua notes that as AWESOME as Hot Pursuit was, it probably suffered from the "too many rules" disease that afflicted the d20 scene. I agree. And I think the right place to address that problem is the True20 release of my chase rules -- which will probably happen sometime in May.

I got interested in the idea of Passively Multi-player Online Games (I think via Metafilter), which then led me to the ideas of ludology, which have been helpful for me in clarifying what I find wrong about the notion that video-games form an important new art form. Ludology is the study of games AS games (as opposed to the study of games as narrative, or as demonstrations of economic choices, yada yada yada). And I came across this paper that outlined the following definitions of play and game:

Paidea [play] is "Prodigality of physical or mental activity which has no immediate useful objective, nor defined objective, and whose only reason to be is based in the pleasure experimented by the player".

Ludus [game] is a particular kind of paidea, defined as an "activity organized under a system of rules that defines a victory or a defeat, a gain or a loss."

Not bad definitions, all things considered. But interesting to note that under these definitions, RPGs don't actually have to be games. A table-top RPG doesn't have to provide for victory or gain via the rules. Many do, but they don't have to. It's possible to run a game where gain is acquired externally to the rules -- through the story being told, or just by DM fiat.

For example, my Barsoom campaign eschewed such mechanics as experience points -- I simply decided when I wanted my players to go up a level, and they did. There was no rule that defined that gain for the players. Under the definition above, Barsoom was play, but it was not a game.

Well, you can get too tied up in definition. But I've always been fonder of playing without rules than with. I just like making up stories with my friends.

Finally, Steven Brust is a great writer, and he wrote a Firefly novel that's free. Go. Read. Play.

Another Sort of Value

2008-02-16T11:10:00.003-08:00

So a while back I posted on how Paizo is providing a certain kind of value to my gaming. Something interesting in the whole "providing value to gamers" world has been going on over in the True20 world.

Green Ronin seem to be taking almost the direct opposite approach with True20 that Paizo is taking with Pathfinder. Instead of providing specific, encounter-level detail, GR are working on providing genre-level rules detail. I think it's an approach that will bear dividends. True20 is turning into the ultimate DM's toolkit system. Instead of releasing adventures and campaign setting material, GR put out non-genre-specific rulebooks that invite DMs to pick and choose, selecting just the components that will suit their games.

There can't ever be a "standard" way to play True20 -- any incarnation of the game will have to embody a set of choices on the part of the DM as to what the setting will be, what backgrounds will be used, what options will be available to the player. The game is literally unplayable with all the options included. It's fascinating, and very suited to my "kitbashing" approach to DMing.

They're now releasing a set of "Handbooks" for each "Role" in the game -- Warrior, Expert and Adept. And while that may sound like the "Classbooks" that Wizards releases for D&D, the difference here is again that the options provided are not all consistent with each other, and no campaign could ever support all possibilities. The DM has to decide what kind of campaign to run and then make choices as to which options support that.

Green Ronin's strategy appears to be to allow third-party developers to create campaign settings and adventures for their system -- they're opening up the True20 license later this year to make it easy (and free) for folks to create True20-compatible products. Interesting how this is pretty much exactly the strategy originally designed for D&D with the creation of the Open Gaming License. Wizards is moving away from Open Gaming with the forthcoming edition of D&D, and GR seems willing to take up the mantle.

It's an interesting move and it should prove to be a fascinating year in the industry. As a believer of the idea that free markets generate the most value, I'm obviously rooting for True20. But we shall see what we shall see.

In other news, 2008 remains murky.

Ah, Those Wacky Chinese

2008-01-23T21:49:00.000-08:00

This is awesome.

Forbes.com posts an article claiming flights out of Beijing are often delayed.

Beijing Airport Manager says, "Our flights are ON TIME. Also, we're going to start punishing airlines whose flights are too slow."

It just warms the heart, doesn't it? It's like Orwell just couldn't bring himself to go far enough.

Selecting Decent People

2008-01-22T17:45:00.000-08:00

I have proposed a seminar for Agile 2008, being held here in Toronto in August. I want to explore how the Agile Principles expose truths and helpful techniques in hiring. My limited experience has demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that quality of hiring has more to do with an organization's health and success than any other factor.

The proposal has generated some interesting discussion and it seems to be an issue people find compelling. One commenter on my proposed seminar told me to go read some Dee Hock.

Holy good idea. Here's Mr. Hock talking about how he gets people to describe the responsibilities of a manager, and what he thinks the right answer is. I know it's kind of long, but seriously, it's worth reading. (from Future Positive)

I ask each person to describe the single most important responsibility of any manager. The incredibly diverse responses always have one thing in common. All are downward looking. Management inevitably has to do with exercise of authority — with selecting employees, motivating them, training them, appraising them, organizing them, directing them, controlling them. That perception is mistaken.

The first and paramount responsibility of anyone who purports to manage is to manage self, one's own integrity, character, ethics, knowledge, wisdom, temperament, words, and acts. It is a complex, never-ending, incredibly difficult, oft-shunned task. Management of self is something at which we spend little time and rarely excel precisely because it is so much more difficult than prescribing and controlling the behavior of others. Without management of self, no one is fit for authority, no matter how much they acquire. The more authority they acquire the more dangerous they become. It is the management of self that should have half of our time and the best of our ability. And when we do, the ethical, moral, and spiritual elements of managing self are inescapable.

Asked to identify the second responsibility of any manager, again people produce a bewildering variety of opinions, again downward-looking. Another mistake. The second responsibility is to manage those who have authority over us: bosses, supervisors, directors, regulators, ad infinitum. In an organized world, there are always people with authority over us. Without their consent and support, how can we follow conviction, exercise judgment, use creative ability, achieve constructive results, or create conditions by which others can do the same? Managing superiors is essential. Devoting a quarter of our time and ability to that effort is not too much.

Asked for the third responsibility, people become a bit uneasy and uncertain. Yet, their thoughts remain on subordinates. Mistaken again. The third responsibility is to manage one's peers — those over whom we have no authority and who have no authority over us — associates, competitors, suppliers, customers — the entire environment, if you will. Without their support, respect, and confidence, little or nothing can be accomplished. Peers can make a small heaven or hell of our life. Is it not wise to devote at least a fifth of our time, energy, and ingenuity to managing peers?

Asked for the fourth responsibility, people have difficulty coming up with an answer, for they are now troubled by thinking downward. However, if one has attended to self, superiors, and peers, there is little else left. The fourth responsibility is to manage those over whom we have authority.

The common response is that all one's time will be consumed managing self, superiors, and peers. There will be no time to manage subordinates. Exactly! One need only select decent people, introduce them to the concept, induce them to practice it, and enjoy the process. If those over whom we have authority properly manage themselves, manage us, manage their peers, and replicate the process with those they employ, what is there to do but see they are properly recognized, rewarded, and stay out of their way? It is not making better people of others that management is about. It's about making a better person of self. Income, power, and titles have nothing to do with that.

Mr Hock has summed up better than I ever could the truths I've learned in my years managing people. And uncovered even more truths. I used to get angry at the fact that I had to keep managing my bosses. I shrank from managing my peers.

It was wrong of me. But at least I got the idea that hiring well is what it's all about.

Just to review, this sums up my proposed seminar right here: "One need only select decent people, introduce them to the concept, induce them to practice it, and enjoy the process."

Yep. It sounds so simple, when he puts it that way.

I'm very excited about this conference and this seminar, should it go forward. Already the folks discussing the issue are full of great ideas and worthwhile conversation. If any of my half-dozen readers are thinking of attending, I hope they'll join in the seminar selection process and help bring this idea to life.

10 Feet of Henry

2008-01-21T15:14:00.000-08:00

If you were a teenager in Calgary, Golden Rock is the blog you've been waiting for.

This is guy is collecting and posting indie music from Calgary's yesteryear.

Color Me Psycho.

Tau Ceti.

The Ted Clark 5.

Funeral Factory.

Ah, Funeral Factory. Absolutely FANTASTIC version of "Heartbreak Hotel". Still stands up after all this time.

No Same Difference yet, but a little bird told me to keep an eye open. You can read James Muretich's review of Club Notes when it first open, and watch him slag off Skinny Puppy: "Skinny Puppy should've listened to the Bauhaus song: Bela Lugosi is dead." Ha! Muretich changed my life. He was THE GUY when I was eighteen, that's for sure -- I took his every opinion as absolute gospel.

Thanks, Golden Rocker. I am made happy.

Confidence, Crushed

2008-01-20T11:18:00.000-08:00

Some things just seem so obvious to me. Like the notion that Arnold's Conan and Julie's Maria belong together. Sort of. If you, you know, don't think about it too much.

So we watched Conan The Barbarian a while back, cause it's awesome (as you know), and I was listening to Julie Andrews singing "I Have Confidence", which is also awesome (as you also know) (and yes, I have The Sound of Music soundtrack on my iTunes rotation) (but I wasn't listening to Julie Andrews WHILE we were watching Conan, cause that would be annoying), and to be honest, the rest was just figuring out how to use new toys.

Steph got me a digital drum machine last year, and this is the first track I've used it on. It's called iDrum and it integrates fully into GarageBand 2. It also works very well as an independent groove-maker, outputting aiff files you can then drag into GarageBand as loops. Awesomely cool.

So this track features less GarageBand loops than any track I've done so far, I think. Only one pre-fabricated GarageBand loop is used in here -- bonus points if you can guess which instrument it is.

Crush Kittens

Steph again provided useful ideas. She also said I should lose the guitar. This time I couldn't bring myself to take it out. Way it goes.

Lunkslutting, Jan 19

2008-01-19T18:24:00.000-08:00

Just going to post some random collections from around the web. Got twigged to Brianne Drouhard's art from Chris Sanders (who's in my good books as the director of Lilo and Stitch). That yuki-no-onna is pretty righteous, says me. There's not going to be a lot of snowy landscapes in DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND, but I have ideas for an expansion set once DPoNI is the enormous success it deserves to be. Giant Cave Bears + Fur Traders + Insane Japanese Ghosts = FUN!

That enormous success is going to turn largely on the enormous talent of Claudio Pozas, who's putting together some very cool logo designs that we'll unveil here once they're ready.

Three guys recreate the beach landing scene from Saving Private Ryan: this has turned up all over the internet, but it's so awesome I'll link to it on Pulp 2.0, where I first saw it.

Via The Vancouverite: Ezra Levant (who Steph and I went to university with) unloads on the Human Rights Comission, and it's totally awesome. My Albertan heart is proud.

Good for you, Ezra. You showboating right-wing freakazoid, you.

This comes from the SCARY NEWS:

Tom Cruise: Scientologist

If you're on the fence about how insane Mr. Cruise is, you haven't seen this yet. He's a loon, folks. Favourite quote? "Get those "spectators" either on the playing field or out of the arena."

And maybe it's just in the air these days.

Reviews and Love

2008-01-15T09:43:00.000-08:00

We met Stefan in Tokyo -- he was the guy with the biggest collection of videotapes I'd ever seen. He was leaving town and was looking for someone to take his collection away. Me, I volunteered. Numerous large shopping bags full of VHS cassettes were lugged across Shinkoiwa and deposited in our loft. Stefan mentioned a few key ones that were not to be missed and then he was gone and we never saw him again.

We watched a lot of those movies, and they had an immense impact on us. Swordsman II. Bullet In The Head. The Bride With White Hair. Chungking Express.

Classics now, but at the time they were piled up willy-nilly with less memorable titles like Wonder Seven or An Amorous Woman of the Tang Dynasty (you gotta admit, it SOUNDS promising enough). It was hard to push our way through the towering collection without a guide of any sort. A great deal of time was wasted watching absolute crap.

But then a book appeared. A book that laid out Hong Kong cinema of the 80's and 90's, gave solid reviews of many films and placed them in a context so that we could make sense of what we were watching.

That book was Sex and Zen & A Bullet in the Head. Written by none other than Stefan himself.

That's correct. We inherited the video collection of the author of the definitive book on Hong Kong New Wave cinema. And the impact goes deeper than you know.

First of all, Stefan and his co-writer Mike Wilkins articulate so well in this book the joys of these films:

In describing Hong Kong cinema — its excitement, vitality, electricity — film-school polemics fail. There is no pointy-headed, white-wine-and-baked-brie philosophy that adequately describes its "scalding propulsion," the force that blasts you out of your seat and rearranges your popcorn.

But it's in the reviews themselves that this book really shines.

"There is a fine line between horror and humour, and Mr. Vampire does everything but jump rope with it."

"Naked Killer arches its back and spits at you for ninety minutes."

We're still in Chapter One, here. This book is full of gems like that.

"Transfer cracked-shell, evil-egghead brains into killer androids, and stuff like this is bound to happen."

Besides providing us with a guide to what have now become a solid set of our favourite films ever, S&Z&aBitH also provided me at least with a form of writing that I don't think I've ever quite shaken -- the smug, knowing summation of dire events that is nonetheless delivered with heartfelt emotion and some spectacular turns of phrase. Take this comment from their review of the rather crappy Wicked City:

"Tragic potential energy becomes tragic kinetic energy, and almost everyone dies."

Come on. That's a pretty sweet little sparkle, right there.

For some reason I've picked this book up recently and am awed all over again by the energy and obvious love it brings to its subject. The Hong Kong New Wave petered out a number of years ago, and we'll never see films like Full Contact or Drunken Master II again, but this book takes me back to what it was like to first discover this whole world of cinema I'd never even heard of.

A Murky Future

2008-01-03T09:38:00.002-08:00

I don't think I have ever faced a year with so little notion of what it might contain for me as 2008. I don't have any idea what's coming. Really and truly.

It seems like everything is up for change, for collapse or for renewal. Who will I be 362 days from now? Where?

I learned so much in 2007, and yet it feels like maybe I learned it too late. But that's retarded. Too late for what?

Steph has declared this The Week of the 80's, and we watched Blade Runner last night, and could not help but remark on two things: first, the incredible impact this film and its look have had on cinema, on pop culture in general, and second, the intense nostalgia that infuses the film, not just in its evocation (and indeed, overpowering) of film noir's distinctive stamp, but almost it seems the entire twentieth century -- the 40s fashions, the bazaars of 1920s pulp adventure, architecture that rivals Speer's greatest designs, and the grimy streets and bleak realism of 70's procedural drama -- has all been inhaled by Ridley Scott and his team and breathed out in a great exhalation that wrapped up everything the 80's and even the 90's would become.

It occurred to me that I grew up and have lived in that atmosphere of nostalgia nearly all my life. The last few decades have seen little enough innovation in design -- rather, we've recycled each decade's looks and feelings in turn, and now are cannibalizing just the past few years. Steph promulgates the theory that in 2012, which the Mayans reckoned as the end of the world (Aztecs? not sure, let it slide), we'll finally run out of nostalgia to embrace, that our recycling will catch up with our present and the world will... well, something.

I wonder if the Aztecs (or the Mayans, or whoever) weren't maybe off by a few years. It feels to me like I've run out of tricks to recycle, anyway. 2012 is too far in the future to even dream of, for me. I don't even know what February is going to look like.

I believe the primary emotion associated with freedom is terror. I know that what I have to do is embrace this fear that threatens to overwhelm me and keep it from driving me into familiar terrain where I can shrink back into a comfortable posture, refuse to grow and refuse to seek the new.

Steph amended her previous comment on me vs. Dzurlords -- her notion was that at any rate, I feel a lack in myself, a failure to live up to my own self-image, my own principles, that such passages evoke.

That is, maybe the problem isn't that I'm not courageous, it's that I'm not courageous enough to meet my own standards.

Which leaves me with three choices: suffer along in this state, man up and get more courage, or lower my standards.

Here's hoping that as 2009 rolls in I don't look back and decide that 2008 was a bad year for My Standards.

Dzurlords Make Me Cry

2007-12-23T20:32:00.000-08:00

Been re-reading Steven Brust's novels the past few weeks (the days of comfort reading are upon me) and, having worked my way backwards through the Vlad novels (should that be the Dalv novels, in this circumstance?), I am now proceeding through the Paarfi novels, but in the standard direction this time.

And I hit this passage in The Phoenix Guard:

"We can not all be Dzurlords."

"Ah, that is true, and truth be known, I think it would be a dull world if all were." Tazendra, who had drained her glass and filled another by this time, went on to say, "My mother, the Countess, used to say, 'Remember, we are only one part of this great body of Empire. And if we hold on to the valor, then others must needs take care of the rest.'"

And I choked up. I ALWAYS do. Every time I read that damned passage, I get a damned lump in my throat. From Tazendra, of all people. Why?

I'm now reading Five Hundred Years After, and I KNOW I'm going to hit this passage:

"Of course," said Sethra, "You are a Dzurlord, as was he. To the Dzur, there is a ritual to the sharpening of the sword — so warlike and yet so soothing; a preparation for the future, a defiance, a threat, and at the same time, it is rhythmical, and while so engaged, one is given to dream, and to think about the blade, its history and destiny; and to contemplate and wonder, above all, for what one strives — and always one finds answers to this question, for finding those answers is what it means to be a Dzur.

"Sometimes," she continued softly, "those of other Houses laugh, or call the Dzur foolish, stupid, or blind, and there is no good answer to such charges, for to kill for such an insult is often beneath the Dzurlord; yet there is always the sword, whose sharpening breathes of the future, and the glory which is not only in being remembered, but in knowing one has defied the entire world, and pitted oneself against the impossible, and proven, to all who are not Dzur, that there is value and glory in the battle, regardless of the outcome. All of these thoughts come to mind when the Dzurlord sharpens his sword, and looks upon some token of the past until he can feel the wind that blows to the future."

For some time, it seemed as if Sethra were speaking to herself, but at last she fell silent. "You understand," said Tazendra in a whisper.

Just reviewing it in order to type it up here got me feeling weepy. Why? Is it because, as Steph mentioned, I am so terribly unlike a Dzurlord? So unlikely to pit myself against the impossible, against the world, and that reading these passages brings up in me a sense of lacking in myself, a lack that I'm actually ashamed to admit even to myself?

I remember my heart stirring when I read Cyrano's declaration "Not to climb high, perchance, but climb alone!"

As a younger man perhaps I read that as license to reject any notion of working in concert with others, to keep solely my own counsel and to hoard my energies for myself, but nowadays, much more embracing of the notion of interdependence (ten happy years of marriage will do that to you), I understand Cyrano's point in a more sophisticated way — to refuse to seek advancement through RELATIONSHIPS, and rather solely through ACCOMPLISHMENTS. Accomplishments may depend on relationships; that's healthy and worthwhile. But advancement that comes through skill in flattery or in adjusting one's character to one's environment is hollow, because it is not based in the end on the actual delivery of value.

The problem being, of course, that it isn't always perfectly straightforward to demonstrate accomplishment. Especially if one is mistaken about the relationships around one.

I know many folks who are bad salespeople, especially of themselves. I'm one. A common thinking that bad salespeople carry is an unwillingness to convince others that they themselves are worth investing in. I believe the unspoken notion is that if the worth is not immediately evident, making an effort to display it is unseemly. Not to mention unlikely to succeed.

And yet, isn't it a worthwhile pursuit to make worth apparent to those who haven't yet perceived it? Isn't it honourable to help others see important truths? How do I tell when such an effort is worthwhile, and when it is only vainglorious and empty?

One lesson I always took from Cyrano is that doing the honourable thing does not reliably lead to gain. That doing the right thing often exposes one to, well, the weasels. I've paid the price a few times for doing what I considered the honourable thing. I don't know if I'd call myself valiant. I'm no Dzurlord.

But I do regularly get accused of being foolish, stupid, and blind. Maybe all that emotion I feel is actually relief. Relief that I'm not the only one.

In other news, Steven Brust posted my favourite haiku ever on his LJ the other day:

There was a young man of Honshu
Who tried limericks in haiku.
But

Kills. Me.

Stop Telling Us What To Do!

2007-12-21T11:49:00.000-08:00

One of my pet theories (I use the term "pet theories" to refer to ideas I like that I would rather not subject to any actual analysis) is that the real lesson of the 20th century is that as attractive as centralization appears (especially to those doing the centralizing), it almost always less efficient, less effective and less maintainable than de-centralized approaches.

In politics, in manufacturing, and in commerce this lesson seems to keep coming up: putting all the decision-making power in one place never yields the desired results. Autocratic states collapse in on themselves. Decentralizing authority in factories improves productivity. Free markets continue to roll.

Oversight is required, of course, but choosing just the right levers to give the overseers is critical. Monopoly laws hold back one type of imbalance in the market system. Institutionalized lending rates prevent another. One person standing at the whiteboard with a pen does a similar thing in a very different environment.

Perhaps the 2000's will be the century of mass decentralization. Some folks think so. It's interesting to observe this phenomenon popping up in unexpected places.

Like traffic controls. Recently the Telegraph published an article on how REMOVING controls actually improved traffic flow and reduced accidents.

In his book The Intellectuals and the Masses, John Carey argued that the fear of the "mob" that we take for granted nowadays is a social construct engineered by the elites at the dawn of the modern age, as they insisted that masses of people could not be trusted. This idea is a vestige of classism and lies behind every authoritarian model of government produced. The idea is that common people are too stupid, too foolish and too short-sighted to be trusted with any sort of authority. They must be herded and guided. For their own good.

I reject this idea, and it's encouraging to see actual data that supports it. People are smart, and if they are granted space and time in which to make decisions, they generally do a pretty good job. Folks who try to keep power from the hands of "the masses" do so out of fear. Fear, in the end, that their decision-making ability is no better than anyone else's, and if that's true, how will they justify their elite position?

Just A Ski Instructor

2007-12-12T16:19:00.000-08:00

Heck with the Zeppelin reunion; the show I'm agonizing over having missed is the new tour by Kid Creole and the Coconuts.

Here are three reasons to live in the UK:

I Love Girls

Endicott

Gina Gina