Little Green River

I don’t usually make them. Not because resolutions can’t be useful or effective, but because I change whenever during the year I feel motivated to, not because of the holiday. But it’s January 4 and I felt like kicking my own ass and making a list of things to do in the next year. So I guess these count as New Year’s resolutions.

• Finish my grad school apps.
• Get some sort of job.
• Stretch every day.
• Re-connect with people my own age in MN.
• Finish online Python programming course.
• Attend at least two rock concerts.
• Resume work on my book on self-employment for new grads.
• Read and finish at least three books on UI design.
• Build my first web application.
• Start a brand new webcomic.
• Visit Philly at least once.
• Visit California at least once.
• Start grad school full of energy.

I just attended part of my sister’s final debate tournament, Blake. The LD debate resolution for this tournament is “Resolved: Economic sanctions ought not be used to achieve foreign policy objectives.”

Jen had a round with one of the top debaters at this tournament, with Jen affirming the resolution and the other debater negating. The other debater (let’s call her C) ran a case where the WTO was the actor of the resolution, with her entire case* based on the WTO needing economic sanctions to have any power and arguing that without the WTO a wide variety of bad things would happen, including global war. C also ran an observation saying that she claimed the right to determine the actor of the resolution and arguing that only arguments that applied to the WTO should count.

As Jen told me about the round (she got creamed–C is very good :) ), a blindly obvious response occurred to me. Can you guess what it is? More on that later.

Jen said that, because of Jen’s typically-low speaker points, she often debates against C. Frequently C tests weird or somewhat wacky cases on Jen to see how they go. She figured this negative case was one of those.

Later at the Blake tournament, however, I saw C compete in octofinals. She won the coin toss and chose the negative side. As we watched, she ran the same case as she ran against Jenny. I guess it WASN’T an experimental case.

Her opponent dropped a lot of stuff in the 1AR and, failing to conclusively win the standards debate, quite legitimately lost. The opponent, too, failed to make that one extremely crucial point, blindingly obvious to me, that might well have saved her the round.

The madness must end.

Here’s how the cross-examination in that octofinal round should have went:

O: So, in your case the WTO is the actor. What does ‘WTO’ stand for, again?
C: World Trade Organization.
*snickers from the audience*
O: So it’s a global trade organization–there aren’t any trade organizations bigger than it?
C: Yes.
O: It has jurisdiction across the entire world.
C: Yes.
O: So what, pray tell, would be ‘foreign’ to the WTO?
C: …
O: Alien trade organizations on other planets?
C: …
O: Is the WTO a government?
C: No, but–
O: How exactly does a global non-governmental organization have ‘foreign policy objectives’?
fin

“Resolved: Economic sanctions ought not be used to achieve foreign policy objectives.”

The WTO CANNOT use economic sanctions to achieve foreign policy objectives if it does not have a foreign policy. Which it doesn’t, because it’s NOT a freaking COUNTRY. It’s outside the scope of the resolution. And with that ten-second statement, there goes C’s entire case and a good chunk of her rebuttals against the affirmative.

Does C have responses planned for this line of rebuttal? It seems unlikely: there’s no reason to put yourself on such weak footing on purpose. Perhaps she does, though. In any case, for God’s sake, question her on these grounds so we can hear it out!

Somebody stop the madness, people.

* Arguably, there is actually one cross-applicable point within it. Not really important.

I attended a liberal arts college. They taught us to analyze social institutions and their interactions as complexes, systems of power. Well, here goes.

College expenses in the US are absolutely insane. When my parents went to school, you could realistically work your way through college. Today nearly all of the better-ranked liberal arts colleges charge more than $40,000 a year–the entire income of an average American household. How did we get here? Liberal arts colleges across the country have raised their tuition faster than inflation every year, year after year, for decades. When times are bad, they claim their endowments are hurting. When times are good, they claim they need to charge more to improve the academics or athletics or build a shiny new dorm to stay competitive. No matter what, like clockwork, colleges are draining generations of students and their families faster than their incomes improve. It’s been long enough to say that these excuses are bullshit.

For extra infuriating context, consider that in most civilized countries, university is *free* to those who are admitted. No needing to save for kids’ college from zygote to age 18 instead of funding your 401k. No crippling student loan bills that beggar graduates, force young workers to stick with jobs they hate instead of taking risks, and have brought about the boomerang generation and the endless delay of adulthood that social conservatives bemoan. Think of all of the possibilities that are squelched by this ever-increasing drain on our populace’s resources, productivity, and well-being. (The parallels with our lack of universal health care are dire.)

So why hasn’t the market intervened? Why haven’t tuitions leveled off? A major cause is the normalization of student loan debt. Student loans, both federal and private, are guaranteed by the government–even if you declare bankruptcy, you have to give the banks their due. So banks have been giving student loans away like candy–they know young people are good for it, even if they end up living in their parents’ basements to pay them off. College financial aid offices count on this; by default they include student loans as part of their packages, as if deferred penury is the same thing as actual aid! And since the FAFSA punishes savers and completely f***s middle-class families–defined as families whose money comes solely from income, as opposed to the rich whose money comes from wealth–expected family contributions are usually unreasonably high. Thus, even those few schools that claim that their financial aid packages include zero loans are lying through their teeth. For their part, institutional lies and mischaracterizations aside, high school students have zero grounding in basic personal finance–it’s not part of nearly any high school curriculum. Even if they knew, up front, what debt level attending a given school would entail, they don’t have the skills to evaluate whether or not that level is sustainable. (Look how many young people have gotten screwed by credit card debt–which by law is far better documented!)

At the same time, elite schools have convinced generations of parents and students that through their hallowed halls lies the path to financial security. Without a solid education, they say, kids today have no chance of making it. And, indeed, if at the end of racking up all this student debt, graduates were quite likely to find plum jobs that could easily pay that debt back, perhaps it’d be justified.

HA.

The sad thing is that they’re mostly right about their schools being the gatekeepers to the middle class. With the exception of a few trades, statistically it’s basically impossible to “make it” without a bachelor’s, and pretty darn hard without one in the liberal arts or sciences. But although it’s a necessary condition, it’s no longer a sufficient one. There are basically no jobs for new grads anymore. Scripps’ career center does one-year-out surveys of each of its graduating classes. Even in 2002, there are comments about how it’s been hard finding a decent job because of the economy. It was hard in 2007. It was hard in 2008, when I was first looking–even before the banks collapsed in the fall. It’s been nigh-impossible for the grads of 2009. The jokes about liberal arts majors working at Starbucks were funny jabs from the engineering kids in 2004. Only now have we realized it’s the reality.

A couple months ago I interviewed for a job barely paying enough to live on that mostly consisted of testing and shipping widgets, with a nominal bit of web marketing and design associated. I told a friend about it and his response: “Oh. Shipping?” I said, “What?”. He said, “Nothing,” but thirty seconds later proceeded to tweet, “This recession is beating the enthusiasm and ambition out of my generation.”

(I didn’t get the job.)

Now, a year and a half out of school with a variety of new media production, research and writing, and startup development experience under my belt, I’m living with my parents and applying for part-time internships and retail positions at big-box clothing stores. I hate to think what he’d say now. Yes, I know I’m capable of so much more than this. So are most of us. But the creative, white-collar jobs aren’t there for us, and I just can’t afford to try and do cool things on my own anymore.

I still hold out some hope that someday when I’m older I’ll develop a career that will enable me to achieve my parents’ standard of living, even if the statistics don’t bear that out: people who graduate college during a recession are basically screwed for the rest of their working lives. I must admit that between offshoring, business oligarchy, American economic incompetence and cowardice, ridiculous debt levels across the board, and the lack of spending on US education and R&D, I have some doubt as to whether or not there’s going to be a middle class in America when I’m 40. I’m not the only one. But right now? Yeah, I guess the recession, and being unemployed, and everything else that’s been going on have beaten the crap out of me.

So, no. Don’t even try to justify your ballooning costs based on lucrative employment upon graduating. Our income isn’t rising alongside your tuition increases; liberal arts majors are f***ed more than ever right now.

This situation is completely inexcusable. If university presidents are congenitally incapable of capping or trimming costs, they should resign. Immediately. Cutting college costs–yes, including the “sticker price” that they lie and say no one actually pays–is their job and their responsibility. Hang the market forces that have enabled them to shirk it for so long! If they can’t bring themselves to give a damn about financial sense, boards of regents should find people who can. If liberal arts colleges do not even try to keep education affordable enough to be within range of all Americans, without heavy debt, they are NOT fulfilling their mission. They’re just diploma farms with an over-inflated sense of superiority and no head for business.

Because, truly I tell you, the day of reckoning is coming. How many articles this year have focused on parents and college seniors’ new wariness of excessive tuition bills and student debt? Perhaps the prospective engineering, science, economics, and CS majors will still be able to justify elite colleges’ insane bills–studies have found that they still stand a good chance of making money when they graduate (at least, so long as they don’t become teachers). But the rest?

My sister, a high school senior, is very smart and works way too hard. She’s a first chair violin, captain of the debate team, a karate instructor, and fluent in Spanish–among other extra-curriculars and accomplishments. With her grades and resume, there’s a decent chance she could gain admission to any school in the country. BUT…she wants to become a math teacher, potentially in low-income/Spanish-speaking schools. She’s seen my financial difficulties, even with my marketable webcrap skills and the (sadly) relatively low amount of student debt I have. Thus, she has completely ruled out any college that would require her to take on student loan debt: teachers hardly make a living wage, let alone with loans on top! Short of a miracle, this will eliminate her top choice school, whose yearly bill has increased about $10,000 since when I applied, yet caps its merit scholarships at half tuition. It already eliminated any number of top schools that she refused to even consider.

St. Olaf, I can tell you right now that you’re going to lose out big. And, if you don’t get your shit in shape, so will the rest of you liberal arts hypocrites over the next decade or so. Yes, you’re already hypocrites and have been for years. But now you’re running out of families rich enough or foolish enough to pay you for the privilege.

Barring divine intervention, I’m going to be moving away from Philadelphia in a week. This makes me sad. Since the summer of 2006 when I had an internship in the Philly suburbs, I’ve always liked Philadelphia. It was the place on the East Coast that reminded me the most of Minneapolis, primarily because of its lack of pretension; Philly’s not go-go or stuck-up like New York or DC. And the trees and fireflies are pretty. Now that I’ve lived in Philly proper for a little while, I have more specific examples of Philly’s awesomeness to point to. So I’m going to enumerate the ones that come to mind here.

Food Trucks: Most places, your street food choices are comprised by hot dogs and sketchy kebab. If you’re in LA, maybe you have access to a decent taco truck. Not so in Philly. Around UPenn’s campus and in Center City, you have trucks that serve ribs and catfish. You have trucks named ‘Frites and Meats’. There are trucks that serve fruit salad. And there’s a Middle Eastern food truck by the comics shop run by this ridiculously charming old Lebanese dude who upon your first visit insists that you get the fava bean falafel instead of the baba ghanoush because “it will make you more happy.” It’s cheap, tasty, and in the form of a truck: what’s not to like?

Food Trucks II: There’s some sort of initiative in Philly to make reasonably-priced produce accessible to everybody–since often poor urban neighborhoods don’t have much in the way of grocery stores. What this means is that during business hours, there are four different trucks full of cheaply-priced fruits and vegetables parked within easy walking or biking distance of my apartment. This is in addition to the Saturday farmer’s market two blocks away. In DC, most of my produce–and much of my other groceries–came from Whole Foods. But here? Who needs Whole Foods?

Rice & Spice: There’s an Indian grocery store here which, in addition to selling frozen paranthas and huge reasonably-priced bags of cashews, cumin, and cardamom, has a secret restaurant in back where you can get super delicious, authentic Indian food for $4.50. What. And there’s always a Bollywood movie playing. There are other cheap restaurants in West Philly that are good too, like Saad’s Halal or Lee’s Deli, but Rice & Spice is just full of win.

Local 44: I didn’t used to like beer. Then I went to Brussels and made an exception for Belgian fruit beer. Then I went to Local 44. Everything’s draft, the beer prices are reasonable, and I’ve actually liked most of the beers I’ve tried there. And they have quiz night!

Bikeability: There’s bike lanes to most everywhere. Even where there aren’t bike lanes, enough people around here bike on a regular basis that the drivers are mostly used to sharing the road. (Mostly. Can’t expect too much…) And, except for the hill around 44th and Spruce, the area is basically flat. Whee!

Public transit: There are two trolley lines within walking distance of my apartment, one of which is less than a block away. There’s also a regional rail station within walking distance. And biking up to Market and taking that subway line is no big deal. I do wish it were easier in Philly to get to places other than Center City–a trolley line down to Queen’s Village where the IKEA and Target are located would be lovely, for instance–but getting to and from Center City is ridiculously easy.

Public art: There are murals EVERYWHERE. They’re beautiful. Most are permanent, but some rotate: for instance, right now, there’s a series of murals painted along the Market-Frankford line where each panel is a part of a love letter. How adorable is that?

Thrift stores: Up at 45th and Locust, there’s a group of thrift stores all called Second Mile — “Second Mile”, “Second Mile Too”, “Second Mile Also” — that occupies like half the block. I guess they just took over more space as they got more stuff. Half a block of thrift store. What.

Phillies: I don’t actually like baseball, or give a crap about most sports. But during the playoffs this fall–this is a city that really gets behind its sports teams, and the feeling’s infectious! You’re walking down the street and the UPenn bike cop pumps his fist and shouts, “YES!” You ask why, and he reports that the Phillies just scored two runs–he’s following the game on his walkie-talkie. You can’t help but whoop “WOO!” in response. The baseball stadium is at the ass end of south Philly — way far from my apartment –yet when the Phillies made it to the World Series the cheering and honking horns made it back here. And that enthusiasm’s not just true about sports. I’ve seen a lot of evidence that Philly natives have a lot of pride in their city and get genuinely excited not only by when it is awesome, but also by ways to make it even more awesome. I never felt that vibe in LA or DC.

Quakers: Quakers are basically great. How could a religious sect that promotes simplicity, egalitarianism, and quiet introspection bother anybody? Nelson, Sam, and I visited the Quaker meeting in West Philly last week. It was just a bunch of people in a room in someone’s house–30 people sitting and meditating together on couches and the floor. It was warm and cozy and gorgeous.

And lots of other, little things. The trees waving and the autumn leaves flying in your face as you bike by UPenn. The lights on the water as you walk across the Schuykill at night. The pots of basil and cherry tomatoes that practically everyone was growing on their porch. The kids’ LARPing day camp that takes place in Clark Park. The smart, sensitive local live theatre scene. Philly CarShare, the local, non-profit car sharing co-op that predates ZipCar. The cute kitties wandering everywhere. The beautiful old houses and landscaping on the professor blocks. House parties with campfires, smores, singalongs, and homebrewed beer. And on and on. Lately the weather’s been really dark, rainy, and drizzly–the kind of weather that set off my seasonal-affective in Denmark. It should be telling that despite the rain–despite everything else that’s been going on lately, actually–I’m still mostly happy here.

I’m telling myself that moving’s not so bad. Because it really isn’t. I’ll go to Minnesota for a while, be there for my sister’s senior year of high school and get my dose of Real Winter. If all goes well, I’ll hopefully move to the Bay for grad school and find all the geeks and tech startups I ever wanted. But once I’ve got my career going and get tired of paying a king’s ransom in rent every month… I could see settling down in Philly.

So in the meantime, I’ll be sad that I’m leaving.

Or, at least, 10 fabulous, stomach-wracking minutes of it.

OpenHatch from Shotput Ventures on Vimeo.

This is the pitch Asheesh, Raffi, and I gave on Demo Day for OpenHatch at the end of the Shotput program. I start speaking around 7:40. Yes, despite our best efforts, they misspelled my name. At least the misspelling’s in the video itself, so I don’t have to change my name to ‘Rustard’ to get the Googlejuice.

This post is part of a series on applied game mechanics that I’ve been writing for the OpenHatch blog. The original is located here.

Last you heard from us, we were discussing the various common types of game mechanics and game players, including examples from both traditional games and game-like web apps. Today we’re discussing a few of the websites that most inspired us to employ game mechanics and, more fundamentally, try to make OpenHatch addictive.

1.) thesixtyone

thesixtyone is a music discovery site. The site’s stated mission is to make music more meritocratic and help good unknown stuff rise to the top. To that end, users of the site are given a certain number of ‘hearts’ each day. Users listen to songs and, if they like them, can give them one of their hearts. The incentive to only heart stuff you like is 1.) songs that get lots of hearts tend to get pushed to the front page of the site and 2.) if a song gets lots of hearts after you heart it, the song pays you dividends in the form of ‘reputation’ (the sixtyone’s equivalent of points). It’s basically mechanizing the “I listened to them before they were cool” cliche.

thesixtyone also makes heavy use of quests, which teach new users how to use the site and reward older users for particular kinds of site participation–listening to older songs or late at night to make sure that good songs don’t fall through the cracks, for instance. When you complete a quest, you are rewarded with reputation and extra hearts. When you reach a certain level of reputation, you level up, where higher levels receive more hearts each day and, eventually, get the privilege of adding multiple hearts to a song.

thesixtyone does a good job of making it easy to feel like you are connecting personally with the music and musicians on the site. When you feature a song on your personal homepage, thesixtyone suggests that the band should buy you a drink. If you give the maximum number of hearts to a particular song, the site remarks, “Holy Shit!” in deep bass. You can comment right on individual songs or on the artist’s “wall”; if you feature an artist’s song or make a particularly nice comment, often the artist will reply back on your profile. The Growl-esque notifications that appear with popping noises in the bottom right corner make affectionate reference to Pop-Up Video, which I, at least, remember fondly. Also, if you use Adblocker, thesixtyone has a special message for you.

Overall, thesixtyone is an exercise in UX design that is both clean and full of personality. And there’s some damn good music on there. It’s probably our strongest influence.

2.) OKCupid

OKCupid is an online dating site that puts special emphasis on user generated content. Indeed, it may be better known for its collection of quizzes and tests contributed by users than for its dating functionality. Its use of game-like functionality goes beyond quizzes, though. When you first visit OKCupid, you’re greeted by a robot woman who encourages (or goads, depending on your perspective) you to sign up. Once you have, instead of quests you are then encouraged/goaded by a completeness bar which suggests the next thing to do (answer N questions, upload a photo, hit on someone) to make your profile more complete.

3.) Stack Overflow

The fundamental function of Stack Overflow is asking and answering questions about programming on a forum. Doing this does not require you to play or care about Stack Overflow’s reputation game. However, as you participate on the site, you do get reputation for getting good feedback and providing good feedback to others. This reputation gives you more privileges; high-reputation users are nigh-indistinguishable from moderators. In addition to reputation, Stack Overflow also has small, automated badges with moderately clever names classified into bronze, silver, and gold classes based on difficulty. You get a badge for completing various tasks on the site — visiting the site every day for 30 days, or having a question voted up 25 times, for example. The badges aren’t anything special to look at, but they still manage to motivate behavior. There’s a bit of a scoreboard aspect in that you can see which badges have been received by more or fewer users on the Badges page–rarer badges, presumably, feel more special.

4.) Gaia Online

Gaia Online is a gigantic MMORPG-esque forum for anime fans. It makes ridiculous piles of money selling clothes, accessories, and other upgrades that users can apply to their avatars. I won’t go into depth in how their site works, as their evil addictive genius can pretty much be assessed by what they have on their home page:

Now that you’ve seen our mad scientist senseis and slick inspirations for applied game mechanics in web apps, tune in next time for the result of this research: OpenHatch: The Game.

This post is part of a series on applied game mechanics that I’ve been writing for the OpenHatch blog. The original is located here.

So. Game mechanics. There’s a good lot of material out there about game mechanics as applied to typical game formats–board games, video games, etc. All of the examples on the ‘Game Mechanic’ Wikipedia page fall in this category. So too do most of the papers at GAMBIT, MIT’s game lab. But surely it’s obvious that game mechanics can be applied much more broadly, n’est-ce pas? From the Wikipedia article, the definition of a game mechanic is “a construct of rules intended to produce an enjoyable game or gameplay.” Substitute ‘user experience’ for ‘gameplay’ real quick and we get something really useful to think about. Thinking about game mechanics this way allows us to blur the line between games and social networks, explain the success of many of the most popular Web 2.0-era websites, and, most importantly, engineer ways to make OpenHatch fun and addictive.

Strangely, though, there aren’t that many resources out there right now for learning how to apply game mechanics to things that are non-obviously games. Currently, there are only four hits on Google for “applied game mechanics”. That’s like 0.02% of the number of hits for “gay mechanics”! So the point of this post is to share what my fellow OpenHatchers and I have learned in our research about how to apply game mechanics to non-game websites.

(There is more where this came from … )

This post is part of a series on applied game mechanics that I’ve been writing for the OpenHatch blog. The original is located here.

Game mechanics. Game mechanics. Game mechanics. Say it three times fast.

Is it so terribly awful that most of our discussions of game mechanics over the last three months were punctuated by tittering? I’ve been saving this illustration for WEEKS.

Anyway. Actual discussion of game mechanics and how it applies to OpenHatch coming soon!

I stopped updating, and then I failed to update because of all the time that had passed. Breaking the cycle here.

So. Since my last post, I:

• Decided not to go to law school. (Mostly for financial/risk management reasons–if I did law school, the over $100K in debt associated would shackle me to a biglaw job even if I hated it)
• Quit my job.
• Tried freelancing again while Nelson left for Atlanta to found a startup, OpenHatch, with two friends.
• Failed at freelancing because I got horribly depressed sitting around in an empty apartment.
• Joined Nelson in Atlanta and worked on OpenHatch for free. Eventually got semi-hired for real (in exchange for room and board) as ‘Director of Research and Design’, whatever the hell that means.
• Attended talks and met all sorts of entrepreneurial people via Shotput Ventures (the program that funded OpenHatch). So many stories.
• Went through the lovely dramatic process of Nelson resigning from OpenHatch.
• Helped pitch OpenHatch to a room of 200 investors, entrepreneurs, and journalists. KICKED ASS.
• Spent a week in San Francisco catching up with college friends and meeting relevant business contacts.
• Spent a week in Minnesota.
• Moved to Philadelphia.
• Determined that I won’t be working for OpenHatch after the end of this month since they only raised enough money to support two people for a year and I’m not a coder.
• Attended the Global Creative Economy Convergence Summit in Philly; saw some interesting talks and met a few people.

And here I am. Three weeks left in my startup adventure. Wish I could start my own–I’ve got another web app-based business idea I want to build–but I can’t code and all the developers I know like their jobs. I alternate wildly between feeling like a confident, artistic, self-starting badass and a near-broke, finicky, antisocial, and useless liberal arts major. Going through the job search process isn’t really helping.

I support quite a few of Obama’s policies and decisions thus far in his administration. However, when it comes to the future of civil liberties in America, Obama’s tenure makes me MORE worried than I was under Bush.

Yes, you read that right.

I didn’t look at immigration websites during the last eight years. I figured sooner or later the madness had to end. But now I find myself semi-seriously considering attending school in Canada and/or positioning myself for a career that could potentially take me to continental Europe. (NOT the UK; that island has been positively hurdling toward fascism over the last eight years. Frickin’ “New Labour.”)

Why? Obama’s DOJ is making the same–if not worse–arguments for expansive executive power. We’re still being wiretapped–and Obama voted for immunity. Sure, Obama may use these powers more responsibly. And stopping torturing people and giving the folks in Gitmo trials are good things to do. But if the powers to wiretap and deny judicial scrutiny over any rights violation with the scantest of national security claims aren’t dismantled, it doesn’t MATTER if Obama never uses them. They’ll still be there when future, potentially crazy/intolerant/power-hungry presidents come in.

If we can’t get rid of the big red authoritarianism button now, with this administration, it will never go away. And that scares the shit out of me.