Once a week or so I go out and get a big, $7 salad from a salad joint across the street. For the past month or so, they've been giving away free sodas with every large salad.
Sodas don't cost much. That's the point. McDs sells them for $1.29 and makes ~$1.20 profit, including the cost of the ice and cup. Ice is MORE expensive than soda, some studies claim. So, really, looking at it from THAT point of view, it's not like giving sodas away for free is COSTING them much...
Except the $1.20 that they would have made if they had SOLD it instead of GIVEN it away.
I've been trying to think of why they would persue this promotion. It's not something they're advertising (they don't advertise, since they're in the mall food court), they just do it.
Maybe, like me, most of their salad-eating clients don't buy soda. Even when they give one to me for free, I make it a lemonade. If nobody was BUYING soda, I can see taking a small hit to RADICALLY spike customer appreciation.
The only clear thing I get the impression of is that their large salads must be making them a BUNDLE to be willing to lose a dime off their profit with each sale. Has the price of lettuce dropped radically in the past few months?
...
These are the sorts of things I think of, okay? It makes me curious.
Thursday, June 09, 2005
Bubba Ho-Tep
I saw Bubba Ho-Tep a few days ago - I bought it for myself for my birthday. I'm a moderate Bruce Campbell fan and a moderate Ossie Davis fan, so it was like mixing peanut butter with chocolate. Or, at least, a nut with chocolate. :)
In case you haven't seen it, the movie is a redemptive Elvis mummy movie. It's... bizarre. The first third of the movie is excruciatingly slow, and the rest is quite good, in my opinion. Which is an opinion that likes Bruce Campbell movies, so take that for what it is worth.
But the first and most important thing that struck me while watching this movie was the music. Such music!
Most of the time, when I hear an excellent soundtrack, it is a soundtrack which is overwhelming the movie. The poor movie doesn't stand a chance - the soundtrack dominates and destroys the movie. In this case, I was surprised because the soundtrack did no such thing - which is difficult and rare.
Curious, I looked up the guy responsible. His name is Brian Tyler. You probably don't remember him, but he did Six String Samurai. Whose soundtrack I own and I was very impressed by. In honesty, I actually like Bubba Ho-Tep's sound better than Six String's.
So, I looked up other things that Brian Tyler did. Including about a zillion tiny TV shows and movies, he's done music for "The Fast and the Furious", "John Carpenter's Vampires", "Children of Dune", and "Constantine". I have listened to a selection of these and have not really been impressed.
Maybe I'm just a sucker for lonely guitar music or something. Who can tell me what they thought of these soundtracks?
In case you haven't seen it, the movie is a redemptive Elvis mummy movie. It's... bizarre. The first third of the movie is excruciatingly slow, and the rest is quite good, in my opinion. Which is an opinion that likes Bruce Campbell movies, so take that for what it is worth.
But the first and most important thing that struck me while watching this movie was the music. Such music!
Most of the time, when I hear an excellent soundtrack, it is a soundtrack which is overwhelming the movie. The poor movie doesn't stand a chance - the soundtrack dominates and destroys the movie. In this case, I was surprised because the soundtrack did no such thing - which is difficult and rare.
Curious, I looked up the guy responsible. His name is Brian Tyler. You probably don't remember him, but he did Six String Samurai. Whose soundtrack I own and I was very impressed by. In honesty, I actually like Bubba Ho-Tep's sound better than Six String's.
So, I looked up other things that Brian Tyler did. Including about a zillion tiny TV shows and movies, he's done music for "The Fast and the Furious", "John Carpenter's Vampires", "Children of Dune", and "Constantine". I have listened to a selection of these and have not really been impressed.
Maybe I'm just a sucker for lonely guitar music or something. Who can tell me what they thought of these soundtracks?
Wednesday, June 08, 2005
Selling your TIME
I'll admit, I'm not exactly the king of hitting on women. My big problem (or advantage) is that I generally don't have any interest in someone until I've known them for a few weeks, at which point it is a little dangerous to hit on them.
That said, I've been called a 'flirt' several times. Nngwa? Presuming that my general approach to these sorts of things is, in fact, flirting, I will proceed to give hints. Here is my ivory-tower theory on FLIRTING.
I'll be approaching this from a 'guy hitting on girl' standpoint, but it should apply equally well to any sex hitting on any sex.
Universally, there are two ways that guys screw up when hitting on a girl. They either try too hard or don't try at all. Both of these efforts are doomed to failure.
It is a widely distributed meme that between 86% and 96% of the impression you make is in your body language, your vocal tone, your power tie - anything besides what you're actually saying. This was my first tiny window into the sultry world of The Theory of Hitting on People.
The next clue on my path was the immediate dismissal girls give any guy who comes on too hard. These two clues quickly combined into one directive - pickup lines are useless. If you're a desperate, pathetic tub of a man, no pickup line save ones that involve $40 drinks are likely to succeed. Because you are RADIATING SUCKINESS.
Think of it this way: every time you hit on a girl, you are offering a trade. Your time for her time (usually). It's like a marketplace. You're trying to convince a passing prospective purchaser to buy your crappy stuff... but you aren't able to lower the cost of your stuff, because she's paying in time.
So the deciding factor, like in many things, is simply supply and demand. She values her time at a certain level. She values YOUR time at a certain level. In most situations, if she thinks your time is worth at least as much as hers, she is happy to flirt with you and, in all probability, persue some kind of a relationship.
When you approach a situation from a 'desperation' angle, you are offering her a LOT of your time. A large supply without a change in demand means a radical drop in price. Your time becomes WORTHLESS. So she's not going to spend HER valuable time buying your WORTHLESS time.
I think that's why I've been called a flirt so many times. I have no intention of dating them, or screwing them, or any of that crap. I'm not offering them much time at all - just the moments they're taking as they talk. This means I'm not degrading the value of my time.
I suppose you could try to INCREASE the value of your time in this way, but unless you're very bright, all you'll be doing is increasing the transaction cost, and if you push it too high, she'll just assume you're either uninterested or an asshole.
Hence the first rule: Don't try to get her to invest her time. Stay in the present, not in the future. Sure, your goal may be to date her or sleep with her, but the way you'll do that is by making her realize that YOUR time is as valuable as HER time. Once you've established an equal or favorable trade with your conversation, you can broach the idea of a larger investment in the future. If you can't establish that value, consider it practice and move on.
There are many ways to make your time valuable, and all of them boil down to the things you do INSIDE THAT TIME, as they relate to HER. Sure, she might be impressed that you make mucho moneys, but you can wait until she asks. Your time is better spent trying to make her feel that HER time is valuable.
Hence the second rule: Your best shot at increasing your value is to increase her value. Not in relation to yours - don't talk about how much better she is than you. Just convince her that her time matters to you, generally by asking little, vaguely personal questions and offering cheerful commentary. The best balance is 50/50 of her talking to you talking, according to lore.
Remember the golden rule of chatting with people: People feel good when someone asks interested questions about them. That's probably the most important thing you can learn in this post. That's your best bet at increasing her value and, in turn, your own.
Of course, even if you do that, you may run into quite a lot of flat rejections. Why? Because your time is STILL worth less than her time, even undegraded. She's a beautiful girl who gets a lot of offers, you're the overweight guy who likes computers. Your time is worthless.
So you have to fix that. The easiest way to fix that is to hit on girls in your beauty bracket. If you're handsome, hit on the pretty ones. If you're not, restrict yourselves to the less attractive ones. That said, the less attractive ones are just as good a catch. Do NOT go after the less attractive ones after failing at a pretty one. START in your bracket, or they'll be offended.
Those are really the only rules I can give you at the present time.
I can't tell you how to make a good first impression. As my friends will tell you, my first impressions vary between "Spectacular, Spectacular!" and "Hannibal Lector", apparently at random. My strength lies in trying to repair the damage I did during first impressions. (Woefully, first impressions ARE the most important, and if I hit the Hannibal, there is no recovery.)
Unfortunately, the strength of my comeback game is not very impressive, and it's entirely natural. There's no skill involved.
If you go about looking for advice on hitting on girls, most of it is common sense. The rest of it is obviously to increase the value of your time, usually by providing a service ("Your eyes are like the Caribbean ocean") or by humor ("Your eyes are like dank pools of crabshells"). This should allow you to consider any dating advice you're given under a different light.
That's it. If that helps you in any way, let me know. So I can be STUNNED. After all, I'm making this post entirely on the basis of half a dozen girls I hardly know calling me a 'flirt'.
That said, I've been called a 'flirt' several times. Nngwa? Presuming that my general approach to these sorts of things is, in fact, flirting, I will proceed to give hints. Here is my ivory-tower theory on FLIRTING.
I'll be approaching this from a 'guy hitting on girl' standpoint, but it should apply equally well to any sex hitting on any sex.
Universally, there are two ways that guys screw up when hitting on a girl. They either try too hard or don't try at all. Both of these efforts are doomed to failure.
It is a widely distributed meme that between 86% and 96% of the impression you make is in your body language, your vocal tone, your power tie - anything besides what you're actually saying. This was my first tiny window into the sultry world of The Theory of Hitting on People.
The next clue on my path was the immediate dismissal girls give any guy who comes on too hard. These two clues quickly combined into one directive - pickup lines are useless. If you're a desperate, pathetic tub of a man, no pickup line save ones that involve $40 drinks are likely to succeed. Because you are RADIATING SUCKINESS.
Think of it this way: every time you hit on a girl, you are offering a trade. Your time for her time (usually). It's like a marketplace. You're trying to convince a passing prospective purchaser to buy your crappy stuff... but you aren't able to lower the cost of your stuff, because she's paying in time.
So the deciding factor, like in many things, is simply supply and demand. She values her time at a certain level. She values YOUR time at a certain level. In most situations, if she thinks your time is worth at least as much as hers, she is happy to flirt with you and, in all probability, persue some kind of a relationship.
When you approach a situation from a 'desperation' angle, you are offering her a LOT of your time. A large supply without a change in demand means a radical drop in price. Your time becomes WORTHLESS. So she's not going to spend HER valuable time buying your WORTHLESS time.
I think that's why I've been called a flirt so many times. I have no intention of dating them, or screwing them, or any of that crap. I'm not offering them much time at all - just the moments they're taking as they talk. This means I'm not degrading the value of my time.
I suppose you could try to INCREASE the value of your time in this way, but unless you're very bright, all you'll be doing is increasing the transaction cost, and if you push it too high, she'll just assume you're either uninterested or an asshole.
Hence the first rule: Don't try to get her to invest her time. Stay in the present, not in the future. Sure, your goal may be to date her or sleep with her, but the way you'll do that is by making her realize that YOUR time is as valuable as HER time. Once you've established an equal or favorable trade with your conversation, you can broach the idea of a larger investment in the future. If you can't establish that value, consider it practice and move on.
There are many ways to make your time valuable, and all of them boil down to the things you do INSIDE THAT TIME, as they relate to HER. Sure, she might be impressed that you make mucho moneys, but you can wait until she asks. Your time is better spent trying to make her feel that HER time is valuable.
Hence the second rule: Your best shot at increasing your value is to increase her value. Not in relation to yours - don't talk about how much better she is than you. Just convince her that her time matters to you, generally by asking little, vaguely personal questions and offering cheerful commentary. The best balance is 50/50 of her talking to you talking, according to lore.
Remember the golden rule of chatting with people: People feel good when someone asks interested questions about them. That's probably the most important thing you can learn in this post. That's your best bet at increasing her value and, in turn, your own.
Of course, even if you do that, you may run into quite a lot of flat rejections. Why? Because your time is STILL worth less than her time, even undegraded. She's a beautiful girl who gets a lot of offers, you're the overweight guy who likes computers. Your time is worthless.
So you have to fix that. The easiest way to fix that is to hit on girls in your beauty bracket. If you're handsome, hit on the pretty ones. If you're not, restrict yourselves to the less attractive ones. That said, the less attractive ones are just as good a catch. Do NOT go after the less attractive ones after failing at a pretty one. START in your bracket, or they'll be offended.
Those are really the only rules I can give you at the present time.
I can't tell you how to make a good first impression. As my friends will tell you, my first impressions vary between "Spectacular, Spectacular!" and "Hannibal Lector", apparently at random. My strength lies in trying to repair the damage I did during first impressions. (Woefully, first impressions ARE the most important, and if I hit the Hannibal, there is no recovery.)
Unfortunately, the strength of my comeback game is not very impressive, and it's entirely natural. There's no skill involved.
If you go about looking for advice on hitting on girls, most of it is common sense. The rest of it is obviously to increase the value of your time, usually by providing a service ("Your eyes are like the Caribbean ocean") or by humor ("Your eyes are like dank pools of crabshells"). This should allow you to consider any dating advice you're given under a different light.
That's it. If that helps you in any way, let me know. So I can be STUNNED. After all, I'm making this post entirely on the basis of half a dozen girls I hardly know calling me a 'flirt'.
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
Crossovers, anyone?
Lots of people don't like crossovers. I like them.
The biggest problem with crossovers is that they make main characters into secondary (or at least marginalized) characters. If you have the super-cool main character dudes from two different IP interacting, the real question is: Who Will Win? Who is cooler? Whichever is chosen, fans of the other IP will feel gypped.
There are ways around this. For example, if one of the characters is a bad guy, you know he'll lose. It's just a matter of how cool his showing is before he goes down. You can have characters who excel at different areas, or make characters not interact.
But that's in movies and other noninteractive media. Games don't have to worry about that crap.
Games were MADE for crossovers.
Each character has a specific game dynamic. Each character can be balanced and added to the game as a whole. You can let the player choose a main character, and next time through they can choose a different character.
If you're a big fan of SnobKillerX, and Lucy likes Victor Telepath, you'll naturally pick those characters for your first run. And you'll think to yourself, "Wow! Cool! This is exactly as it should be!"
Games are the ULTIMATE platform for crossovers, so long as your balancing is good.
Why do I bring this up? Evidently, there's a Namco & Capcom crossover game coming out (but not for us, of course).
Now, I don't actually LIKE either Namco or Capcom games. Street fighter is among the most boring games I care to play, and Darkstalkers is only marginally more interesting. But Capcom is the KING of crossovers, and so I really like their crossover games. I like getting to play as these stupid characters against other stupid characters. WHY? WHY AM I INSANE LIKE THIS?
Yeah, it's really stupid when Wolverine takes on Ryu. Who cares whether Lilith or DigDug is stronger?
I looked back at my posts on action, and the answer came to me.
All of these characters are ESTABLISHED THREATS. Even characters like Bomberman and DigDug are long-standing icons who are known - at least to somebody - as being unstoppable and strong. They have histories and they have power.
Compare this to a game with new characters. Those characters only have the history you MAKE for them within the game. Girl X defeating Guy Y really doesn't do much, because we don't really know what their power levels are, and they have no pre-established patterns.
Furthermore, there's an element of excitement to crossovers. The characters have proven power, yes - but the scale and effectiveness of their power is unknown. It's a little like a gamble, at least for a while. How will Storm fare against Little Red's firepower? Lilith against Akuma? Watch two known patterns clash - what will happen?
THAT is why I like crossovers. The new take on old and powerful patterns. :)
The biggest problem with crossovers is that they make main characters into secondary (or at least marginalized) characters. If you have the super-cool main character dudes from two different IP interacting, the real question is: Who Will Win? Who is cooler? Whichever is chosen, fans of the other IP will feel gypped.
There are ways around this. For example, if one of the characters is a bad guy, you know he'll lose. It's just a matter of how cool his showing is before he goes down. You can have characters who excel at different areas, or make characters not interact.
But that's in movies and other noninteractive media. Games don't have to worry about that crap.
Games were MADE for crossovers.
Each character has a specific game dynamic. Each character can be balanced and added to the game as a whole. You can let the player choose a main character, and next time through they can choose a different character.
If you're a big fan of SnobKillerX, and Lucy likes Victor Telepath, you'll naturally pick those characters for your first run. And you'll think to yourself, "Wow! Cool! This is exactly as it should be!"
Games are the ULTIMATE platform for crossovers, so long as your balancing is good.
Why do I bring this up? Evidently, there's a Namco & Capcom crossover game coming out (but not for us, of course).
Now, I don't actually LIKE either Namco or Capcom games. Street fighter is among the most boring games I care to play, and Darkstalkers is only marginally more interesting. But Capcom is the KING of crossovers, and so I really like their crossover games. I like getting to play as these stupid characters against other stupid characters. WHY? WHY AM I INSANE LIKE THIS?
Yeah, it's really stupid when Wolverine takes on Ryu. Who cares whether Lilith or DigDug is stronger?
I looked back at my posts on action, and the answer came to me.
All of these characters are ESTABLISHED THREATS. Even characters like Bomberman and DigDug are long-standing icons who are known - at least to somebody - as being unstoppable and strong. They have histories and they have power.
Compare this to a game with new characters. Those characters only have the history you MAKE for them within the game. Girl X defeating Guy Y really doesn't do much, because we don't really know what their power levels are, and they have no pre-established patterns.
Furthermore, there's an element of excitement to crossovers. The characters have proven power, yes - but the scale and effectiveness of their power is unknown. It's a little like a gamble, at least for a while. How will Storm fare against Little Red's firepower? Lilith against Akuma? Watch two known patterns clash - what will happen?
THAT is why I like crossovers. The new take on old and powerful patterns. :)
Shootering - Ho ho!
I got a lot of good responses to my earlier post. Darius - you're still posting on Haloscan. Can you tell me how, so I can make it impossible?
Darius: Ikaruga I'm familiar with. It's half fun, half really irritating. At the moment, I'm not looking to make something that complex. I'm trying to keep the game dynamic 'pure' - one play action. If I went the Ikaruga route, I would have to nix guns and use pure shield-swapping.
textual harassment: Wow! rRootage is the most interesting shooter I've seen in a while! I am now going to discuss it with myself. Feel free to chime in, everyone.
First, I'm not sure what the quality of the programming is in rRootage, but I get some pretty pathetic slowdown at high bullet counts, and it doesn't give me back memory when I quit. That, however, is not a game design thing, just an irritating technical thing.
But there are a lot of interesting choices they made. I don't know whether they INTENDED to make these choices or not. I'll contrast and compare my ideas with theirs.
For example, they made the decision to have one big boss instead of waves of enemy followed by a boss. This isn't a bad decision, but it is an important one. That means that dodging is dying. If you aren't shooting, you're not advancing. One of the features of most shmups is that you can just WAIT until the enemies leave the screen, to deal with the next wave. In fact, many shmups have timers on the boss, so you can just wait them out, too.
I like this feature and plan on keeping it. The power of this feature is that it is a built in level of 'slack'. In rRootage, once you start to get overwhelmed, you either STAY overwhelmed or DIE. In a game where enemies are transient, if you get overwhelmed you know that if you can just ride out this wave, you'll be able to break into the 'clear' and take on the next.
Also, the transient enemies allow you to put in a clear feeling of progression by simply making the next wave a bit harder, or of a different enemy. There are moments of silence between waves of waves, and there are moments of fevered pitches. Generally, boss fights have no such 'sine wave' of tension, which is necessary for extended play.
Another thing rRootage did - perhaps by simple necessity of manpower - is that they didn't have any kind of gun progression. Again, for a short game, it's not necessary to receive power-ups. For a longer game, it's the cheapest way I can think of to allow for significant PAC manipulation. Every new gun radically changes the game's dynamic and gives the game a feeling of progression and accomplishment.
The last major difference I can think of is that rRootage and I are taking dramatically different approaches to filling the screen with bullets.
rRootage's primary method of allowing the player to dodge is by making the screen VERY LARGE. Your ship is TWO PIXELS WIDE. This means you can see the bullets coming from a 'long ways out' and are small enough to dodge into unlikely holes. Then they fire so many bullets that the game becomes, essentially, a terrain-navigation game.
But almost all of their bullets are of the same type: a stream from a particular location at the top of the screen. These radial attacks are certainly nothing to shrug about, but they turn the whole game into a flat, bizarrely noneuclidean version of Tempest. All of your dodging orbits around the single, multi-noded enemy.
My method is unlike rRootage's in that I DON'T have an excessively high grain and I DON'T rely wholly on radial assaults. This produces a very different feel.
But rRootage is very fun! It's just not a game which has a whole lot of staying power because of the lack of variation in the pattern.
Essentially, it boils down to this: rRootage is like my game, but my game has Pattern Adaptation Control systems to extend and control play.
Darius: Ikaruga I'm familiar with. It's half fun, half really irritating. At the moment, I'm not looking to make something that complex. I'm trying to keep the game dynamic 'pure' - one play action. If I went the Ikaruga route, I would have to nix guns and use pure shield-swapping.
textual harassment: Wow! rRootage is the most interesting shooter I've seen in a while! I am now going to discuss it with myself. Feel free to chime in, everyone.
First, I'm not sure what the quality of the programming is in rRootage, but I get some pretty pathetic slowdown at high bullet counts, and it doesn't give me back memory when I quit. That, however, is not a game design thing, just an irritating technical thing.
But there are a lot of interesting choices they made. I don't know whether they INTENDED to make these choices or not. I'll contrast and compare my ideas with theirs.
For example, they made the decision to have one big boss instead of waves of enemy followed by a boss. This isn't a bad decision, but it is an important one. That means that dodging is dying. If you aren't shooting, you're not advancing. One of the features of most shmups is that you can just WAIT until the enemies leave the screen, to deal with the next wave. In fact, many shmups have timers on the boss, so you can just wait them out, too.
I like this feature and plan on keeping it. The power of this feature is that it is a built in level of 'slack'. In rRootage, once you start to get overwhelmed, you either STAY overwhelmed or DIE. In a game where enemies are transient, if you get overwhelmed you know that if you can just ride out this wave, you'll be able to break into the 'clear' and take on the next.
Also, the transient enemies allow you to put in a clear feeling of progression by simply making the next wave a bit harder, or of a different enemy. There are moments of silence between waves of waves, and there are moments of fevered pitches. Generally, boss fights have no such 'sine wave' of tension, which is necessary for extended play.
Another thing rRootage did - perhaps by simple necessity of manpower - is that they didn't have any kind of gun progression. Again, for a short game, it's not necessary to receive power-ups. For a longer game, it's the cheapest way I can think of to allow for significant PAC manipulation. Every new gun radically changes the game's dynamic and gives the game a feeling of progression and accomplishment.
The last major difference I can think of is that rRootage and I are taking dramatically different approaches to filling the screen with bullets.
rRootage's primary method of allowing the player to dodge is by making the screen VERY LARGE. Your ship is TWO PIXELS WIDE. This means you can see the bullets coming from a 'long ways out' and are small enough to dodge into unlikely holes. Then they fire so many bullets that the game becomes, essentially, a terrain-navigation game.
But almost all of their bullets are of the same type: a stream from a particular location at the top of the screen. These radial attacks are certainly nothing to shrug about, but they turn the whole game into a flat, bizarrely noneuclidean version of Tempest. All of your dodging orbits around the single, multi-noded enemy.
My method is unlike rRootage's in that I DON'T have an excessively high grain and I DON'T rely wholly on radial assaults. This produces a very different feel.
But rRootage is very fun! It's just not a game which has a whole lot of staying power because of the lack of variation in the pattern.
Essentially, it boils down to this: rRootage is like my game, but my game has Pattern Adaptation Control systems to extend and control play.
Acheivement and Acheivers
I had one of those "durrr" moments this weekend. Well, actually, I had a LOT of them, but I'd like to talk about one in particular.
It's one of those things that you suddenly realize, then go, "Well, duh, everyone knows that," then you start to THINK about it. I think most of the stupidity in the world is caused by not extrapolating what you know ACROSS TIME.
Here's the simple thing I realized: People who are doing well don't much care to change the world, save in controlled increments. They do pretty well by the world. People who AREN'T doing well WANT to shake the world and turn it upside-down, because the world is screwing them. An increment isn't a big enough change.
Well, duh, right? Everybody knows that. It's why nothing important ever changes - the people in charge shell out good money to STAY in charge, and the only changes are from their attempts to weasel into gaining more power.
Occasionally you'll get an outlier - Gandhi, for instance, or someone who feels the overwhelming urge to take over the world even though they already own a big chunk of it. But these are rare, and are probably just different angles on the same basic philosophy.
So, why don't people acknowledge this?
I mean, look at the obvious results when you apply this over a changing situation. A company is founded. It competes its hardest - it wants to shake up the industry, because that is really its only hope for success. Usually, it either dies or becomes successful.
After it becomes successful, it stops innovating, stops TRYING. Suddenly, all it has to do is 'well enough', and the only changes it looks for are small ones which consolidate or further its power.
This is UNIVERSAL. ALL companies follow this basic path. PEOPLE follow this path, too.
You'll find a lot of people who are not satisfied with the way things are going. They really want to change the world. Whether they want to become a world-renowned lawyer, or want to be the baddest gang leader in town, or want to convince the government to treat people better. It's all the same basic concept: they want to shake the world, to turn the world upside-down.
This is because they are on the bottom. (Or they have a lot of free time, which in many ways amounts to the same thing.)
What happens once they start to succeed? What happens when you find you've got supporters and a good chunk of change? You've suddenly got a good thing going. Your urge to change the world fades, because the world is treating you well.
In essence, the more people and money you throw at trying to change the world, the less chance that you will succeed.
This sounds really out there, doesn't it? Kind of counter-intuitive, almost assuming that humans are nothing but self-serving automitons. Well, that's not really true - but we are ADAPTIVE CREATURES. Once you're on top of the thing you were trying to change, you can no longer SEE the bottom.
I think this is why Gandhi did so well, why Martin Luthor King, Jr. did so well - these people lived among their folk, insisted on living AS their folk. Because of this, even when they were beloved, even when they had power, they were still immersed in the bottom tier. They couldn't adapt to their new situation fully, because their new situation was superimposed on their OLD situation.
But people with less socially immersize ideals - people who want to go into space, people who want to revolutionize data management, people who want to provide health care - they don't (or can't) stay immersed in their original environment.
As soon as they get a little successful, their ideals begin to fade - and continue to fade as they get more successful. They can still be good people, but they simply aren't exposed to the thing they tried so hard to fix.
Before you dismiss this idea, think about it. Think about how we throw billions of dollars into helping people, but nobody's situation improves. Think about any successful people you know - they probably still have the fire and personality they had before they became successful, but do they still have the idealistic drive?
I don't know ANY successful people who actually TRY to shake the world. I know some that try to change it - but only by degrees. They set such limited limits.
Right now, I want to shake the world. I'm on the bottom: I'm getting paid a tiny amount to do monkey-work, I don't know very many people here, I live in a studio, I get very little respect, and I certainly don't have much money.
With that urge inside me, I am accomplishing quite a bit. Games, software, art, writing - whether or not it is good, it is better than what I produced while I was relaxing in college.
I only realized this because I was treated so well this past weekend. I could FEEL my urge to shake the world dwindle. Perversely, when I realized this, it grew stronger, but the core idea remains.
What would happen if I got a good job? Would I lose my idealistic drive to shake the world? I think so, almost certainly. If that's the case, do I WANT a good job? Is this where fear of success comes from?
It bears thinking about, and I'm sure I'll post other, related posts.
By the way, if you ever get the chance, the restaurant "ABBA" on Cape Code has tuna steak well worth the price you pay. Make sure to order it rare. Yyyyum.
It's one of those things that you suddenly realize, then go, "Well, duh, everyone knows that," then you start to THINK about it. I think most of the stupidity in the world is caused by not extrapolating what you know ACROSS TIME.
Here's the simple thing I realized: People who are doing well don't much care to change the world, save in controlled increments. They do pretty well by the world. People who AREN'T doing well WANT to shake the world and turn it upside-down, because the world is screwing them. An increment isn't a big enough change.
Well, duh, right? Everybody knows that. It's why nothing important ever changes - the people in charge shell out good money to STAY in charge, and the only changes are from their attempts to weasel into gaining more power.
Occasionally you'll get an outlier - Gandhi, for instance, or someone who feels the overwhelming urge to take over the world even though they already own a big chunk of it. But these are rare, and are probably just different angles on the same basic philosophy.
So, why don't people acknowledge this?
I mean, look at the obvious results when you apply this over a changing situation. A company is founded. It competes its hardest - it wants to shake up the industry, because that is really its only hope for success. Usually, it either dies or becomes successful.
After it becomes successful, it stops innovating, stops TRYING. Suddenly, all it has to do is 'well enough', and the only changes it looks for are small ones which consolidate or further its power.
This is UNIVERSAL. ALL companies follow this basic path. PEOPLE follow this path, too.
You'll find a lot of people who are not satisfied with the way things are going. They really want to change the world. Whether they want to become a world-renowned lawyer, or want to be the baddest gang leader in town, or want to convince the government to treat people better. It's all the same basic concept: they want to shake the world, to turn the world upside-down.
This is because they are on the bottom. (Or they have a lot of free time, which in many ways amounts to the same thing.)
What happens once they start to succeed? What happens when you find you've got supporters and a good chunk of change? You've suddenly got a good thing going. Your urge to change the world fades, because the world is treating you well.
In essence, the more people and money you throw at trying to change the world, the less chance that you will succeed.
This sounds really out there, doesn't it? Kind of counter-intuitive, almost assuming that humans are nothing but self-serving automitons. Well, that's not really true - but we are ADAPTIVE CREATURES. Once you're on top of the thing you were trying to change, you can no longer SEE the bottom.
I think this is why Gandhi did so well, why Martin Luthor King, Jr. did so well - these people lived among their folk, insisted on living AS their folk. Because of this, even when they were beloved, even when they had power, they were still immersed in the bottom tier. They couldn't adapt to their new situation fully, because their new situation was superimposed on their OLD situation.
But people with less socially immersize ideals - people who want to go into space, people who want to revolutionize data management, people who want to provide health care - they don't (or can't) stay immersed in their original environment.
As soon as they get a little successful, their ideals begin to fade - and continue to fade as they get more successful. They can still be good people, but they simply aren't exposed to the thing they tried so hard to fix.
Before you dismiss this idea, think about it. Think about how we throw billions of dollars into helping people, but nobody's situation improves. Think about any successful people you know - they probably still have the fire and personality they had before they became successful, but do they still have the idealistic drive?
I don't know ANY successful people who actually TRY to shake the world. I know some that try to change it - but only by degrees. They set such limited limits.
Right now, I want to shake the world. I'm on the bottom: I'm getting paid a tiny amount to do monkey-work, I don't know very many people here, I live in a studio, I get very little respect, and I certainly don't have much money.
With that urge inside me, I am accomplishing quite a bit. Games, software, art, writing - whether or not it is good, it is better than what I produced while I was relaxing in college.
I only realized this because I was treated so well this past weekend. I could FEEL my urge to shake the world dwindle. Perversely, when I realized this, it grew stronger, but the core idea remains.
What would happen if I got a good job? Would I lose my idealistic drive to shake the world? I think so, almost certainly. If that's the case, do I WANT a good job? Is this where fear of success comes from?
It bears thinking about, and I'm sure I'll post other, related posts.
By the way, if you ever get the chance, the restaurant "ABBA" on Cape Code has tuna steak well worth the price you pay. Make sure to order it rare. Yyyyum.
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