The Caring Contiuum
Over the last few years or so I’ve developed a personal slogan of sorts: Who cares, wins. As is always the case with me it’s a lame twist on something awesome: the motto of the United Kingdom’s Secret Air Service. With project based work this always made sense. You can be on your game mentally and physically, but if you don’t love your work then it won’t be any good. There is a reason why a home grown military is preferred over mercenaries. When it comes to the productivity stuff, Merlin Mann (the best) always says “First, care”. If you really want to do something, you will. You don’t need a distraction free environment to play that game of yours. It’s just what you care about at that time.
This is not how it’s been working for me lately. Investment has an opposite effect. Rather than a source where answers are found, its a place where problems start. It’s not a problem of raised stakes causing the latter in “fight or flight”, but rather too much doubting, over thinking. I am not a perfectionist by any means, but some part of me wants to be. Best avoid this. If there’s no passion, everything flows in an idiot savant sort of way. Worry later. Somehow it always works out.
I don’t have a bigger point to this. Just that I’ve noticed this inverse relationship.
Title stolen from this unrelated, always awesome graphic. Also, honey badger don’t care, honey badger doesn’t give a shit.
On Parks & Rec
Cory Barker writes:
Someone might ask me what I’m watching, what’s good, etc. and if they’ve already made up their minds about Parks and Rec, it’s difficult for me to sell them on all the specific reasons I love this program in such a short time…
I’ve realized that I just have to simplify the message…As an overall product, Parks and Recreation is already better than The Office has ever been. Let me say that again. Parks and Recreation is most certainly better than The Office. This includes the halcyon days of The Office in seasons two and three. I’m not saying it’s a major gap, but it is my belief that Parks and Recreation is simply the better program…
I don’t write this column to be particularly controversial because for the most part I assume that it won’t be. I’d imagine that this sentiment is fairly common among the television critics who watch both series.
I like to keep the pop-culture stuff on Twitter, but after tonight’s episode I felt compelled to throw this up here because I wanted to explore why I’m drawn into it myself. In his piece Barker compares Parks and Recreation with The Office and in turn highlights how the creators of Parks—the same people who ran The Office for the first four seasons—upped their game with Parks.
Barker points to Parks optimistic quality. In comedy it’s easier to do negative than positive. For ex, making fun of accent. Easy laughs. Of course it’s not always so cheap, there is much genuinely fun is to be had with strife: look at Jim/Dwight or many scenarios in Arrested Development. Still, it’s much harder to do humor when the characters generally respect each other and have a positive outlook on life. Somehow in Parks, they’ve got it to work and it’s the bedrock of the whole show.
A lot of it has to do with Leslie Knope, Park’s “Michael Scott equivalent”. In The Office, my favorite Michael Scott moments are when he “wins” by virtue of being genuinely himself. Michael is a misguided soul, but I’d like to think he has it when it counts. Take a look at the The Client where he, being himself, closes a deal or Booze Cruise where he encourages Jim to just go for Pam. This doesn’t mean, he can’t be goofy; I just like Michael when you can really root for him, and unfortunately he is not always that person
One week he’s socially awkward but well-meaning, the next he’s pathetic and bitter and the next he’s warming and misguided. It didn’t matter as much when the episodes around Michael were so good and quickly became a huge problem once the rest of the program was a mess
You might think that it’s impossible for Michael to be constantly “winning” (ugh). That it works better when if his and competence is low, but Leslie Knope somehow is what I’ve always wanted Michael to be. The difference:
With Michael, we’re often left to feel sorry for his actions and outbursts and then get surprised when he actually makes a right call at work. Leslie is sort of the opposite. She’s always making admirable choices
even if those choices get her into some minor trouble.
Just these tweaks—an optimistic attitude and Leslie Knope—set it apart from The Office. There’s more technical stuff Barker points out, such as how the show seems built to last (i.e. not built around a Jim & Pam well that will run dry) and has a more serialized storyline.
Since this blog was always meant to be a design place (or something. I had bigger plans for it before :/) I’ll leave you with Brand New’s assessment of NBCU’s new logo which has a nice Parks shout out.
I linked to The Nerd Handbook on twitter last week and wanted to say more about the overall subject here. What I’m adding is only tangentially related, but I thought to link to Rand’s piece again because it captures that new definition of nerd*—people who are passionate in what they do/like— and how they operate.
* In comparison to the old world definition ie. how 50 year old people think nerds act. Star Trek, they talk funny. So hilarious! LOL.
Anyways here’s what I want to add.
Shared Knowledge Base
When it comes to fields that nerds are interested in, there is a certain level of unspoken knowledge or (more accurately) understanding. This can make it difficult to communicate with non-nerds about the same subject.
For the design world there is just a base understanding that spec-work is bad. It wouldn’t occur to a non-nerd that design contests can be bad for all parties involved. It might be difficult to explain why
This doesn’t mean all nerds have the same preferences or know the same things in their chosen subjects. I like TV, but I haven’t seen the best show of all time*. I still think I’m a bit of a TV nerd though. I have a general understanding of what’s going on there and can converse with fellow nerds.
* The Wire. This is actually true for me for a lot of dramas.
This base understanding lingers in the background when nerds engage with each other and dialogue is built out from this understanding. NBC’s Community is a critical darling because of a lot of the humor is derived from pop-culture (TV/movie) references which speak directly to the critics knowledge of the medium. I catch few references myself, it’s non, but I’m still able to enjoy that aspect because I have an understanding of what they’re going for.
Plus, the non pop-culture humor is pretty good too and brainy. “You’re the AT&T of people” was used as an insult in last night’s episode.
There is a variable aspect to this. Let’s say you’re into the tech news. Apple, Google, smart phones, computers. That sort of thing. How do you keep up to date? A non-nerd will probably catch the latest news in Newsweek or whatnot. A nerd might go to one of many tech blogs out there. The biggest nerd? Probably one man experts/pundits and the like, Gruber and such. Each successive outlet requires and is made better with more nerd knowledge.
Recognition of the Auteur
Nerds can’t enjoy an end product by itself. They care about process and creative vision and will seek to find out everything they can about it.
Sports nerds can’t just enjoy a game at face value. They need to have an idea of stats, the strategy behind the lineup, player narratives at work. Knowing the back end details is as important as what happens in a game itself.
Nerds like to dissect. This can simply be looking up a movie’s Wikipedia page after you’ve seen it. A fun example is the
The Three Glees Theory. Each episode of Glee is wildly different in tone to the point where it seems like three different shows. People wanted to know what was up with that and came up with the theory as the result.
Licenses and intellectual property play a part here. Disney was moving ahead with sequels to Pixar’s films before the buyout. Imagine Toy Story 3 without Pixar. Crazy right? If it happened there would’ve been a Buffy-without-Joss-Whedon type of revolt. Non-nerds probably wouldn’t care and would go see it anyway.
You can find a lot of examples of this in video games where the developers behind a property changes. Guitar Hero isn’t in the hands of the original creators anymore (they made Rock Band). The whole
Infinity Ward fallout also comes to mind. Basically, nerds
Elitist Jerks
There is a tendency to come off as one. This post.
I took around 40GB of photos in New York last month. It’s been a few weeks since I’ve been back and I still haven’t sorted through them yet.
That’s because I have something better to play with—GPS data for my entire trip, logged with my old iPhone running Motion X GPS. Everywhere I went, how long I stayed, what routes I took…all of that has been recorded.
It’s been fun manipulating the data in different ways such as calculating more efficient routes I could’ve taken*. And of course the killer app is combining this data with photos, tweets, credit card statements to create a more complete and compelling account of my trip.
* I was walking in circles a lot and not making optimal use of the subway for the first few days of the trip.
Going in, I didn’t plan on doing this nor did I read any blogs on people who have done something similar so the data and my methods aren’t perfect. A standalone GPS unit would’ve been better both in terms of battery life and antenna strength. I had to recharge my old iPhone twice a day and there are gaps and inaccuracies in the GPX files. The good thing is that any inaccuracies have supporting data in the form of geotagged photos and foursquare check-ins.
From there, it’s really easy throwing everything up onto Google Maps/Earth, but what would really be neat is an interactive front end with Feltron-eqsue graphics. Make it completely automated and you have yourself a hit.
In a way this is already here in the form of fitness apps with RunKeeper, Nike+ GPS*, Google My Tracks. There’s also Twitter for iPhone (“nearby tweets”) and Flickr. Better yet, take Daytum and add location services and automated tracking. What I am thinking is something that automagically tells a story / replaces a blog post** by
- pulling data from a portable device (smartphone really) that logs GPS coordinates, steps taken, and whatever else hardware the is capable of.
- aggregates data from other services like Flickr and Mint
- runs statistics*** on 1 & 2
- spits out cool interactive graphics from 3.
* I’ve been using Nike+ (for runs) and Nike+ Active (daily steps taken) for about a year and still enjoy the stat tracking and graphics. Someone else get this so we can compete.
** I paused for a minute to think if this blog post be automatically generated. How meta. But no, what I am referring to of course are blog posts that recount events e.g. “Today I went to X, saw Y, and bought Z.”
*** I have an Excel spreadsheet of some data and that’s been fun as well even with my basic knowledge of statistics. Food was my biggest expense. Avg for a meal was $12 with StdDev 5. Most interesting regression results: Yelp ratings for the places I ate at (taking into account # of ratings as well as the score) tended to be higher when I had a meal closer to the average price.
Again, in a way this is already here in some respects, but not quite the implementation I’m looking for. It can’t be too far away. Ten years ago, most people still used film cameras. Now everyone has a DSLR that can record photos and videos. Three years ago most people had a phone that could record a different sort of data—tweets. Now a lot of people have smart phones. Soon everyone will have one that has enough battery life—all that’s needed really—to automatically track and process the necessary information.
At Shake Shack (★★★★) $10 got me a Shack Burger and Strawberry Shake. The wait was 30 minutes and I got my food 12 after minutes later. I took 19 photos in the area.
