I’m about to start writing a web front end to a PostgreSQL back end. After looking at oodles of choices (Nenest, OpenToro, Alpha Five, php, JSP, cocoon, Plone, etc.) I’ve narrowed it down to either Ruby on Rails or Django. Ruby on Rails has more hype, but Django also sounds really good, and I’ve heard good things about Python. I don’t know either Python or Ruby yet; I know Lisp, Java, and a smattering of Perl. I’ll post again with more details about my decision process and my perceived pros and cons of each, but first I want to get some input without biasing y’all. Does anyone have any experience with Ruby on Rails or Django? How about Ruby or Python? Any input would be much appreciated; I’m planning on making this decision by Tuesday.

This is a clear example of control paradigm business vs. connection paradigm business. It’s a true story about two realtors. One was pushy, required a contract, and used sales techniques like sunk cost and building rapport. All these aspects are rooted in control — trying to make the customer do what you want. The other realtor wasn’t pushy and didn’t require a contract; instead he was talented, genuine, and remarkable. It’s the connection paradigm — he made a genuine connection with the customer instead of a “schmoozy” connection which is really just another form of control.

Guess which realtor got their business?

Three game elements that are particularly fun for me are:

1. collecting things
2. becoming richer and/or more powerful by collecting those things
3. exploring deeper and deeper, where the depth you can explore is bounded by a combination of skill and resource limit

I’ll talk about some games that exemplify some of these elements.

Atelier Iris 3 definitely has 1, and sort of has 2 and 3. It has a rich crafting system wherein you collect things directly as well as collecting crafted items. Technically you do become richer and more powerful, but it’s more by leveling than by collecting, and you’re pretty overpowered anyway. It does have a system of exploring deeper and deeper — the Alterworlds each have a time limit, so if you piddle around instead of heading straight for the deepest part of the Alterworld, you’ll run out of time and be forced back outside. That would be a really cool and engaging element if it were more difficult to reach the ends of the Alterworlds and if there were more skill involved.

Solar Jetman is a pretty good example of all three. The game’s goal is to collect things, each of which makes you either richer or more powerful. Exploring deeper and deeper into each planet is bounded mainly by skill; you always start off with enough fuel to reach anywhere in the planet. There are a few items that are useful to get past certain areas on certain planets, but other than that it’s not resource limited in that way.

Motherload is the best example I’ve seen of all three. You start out only able to penetrate into the upper layers of the planet, but you collect minerals and sell them for money to upgrade your ship so you can mine deeper and get more valuable minerals so you can sell them for more money to buy more upgrades… It’s very addictive and compelling to me. There are only two things it lacks. One is a lot of skill. The depth to which you can mine is bounded mainly by fuel (resource limit), not skill. The second lack is interesting changes as you go deeper. More valuable minerals appear, boulders appear, then lava pockets appear, but that’s it. It’s exciting to see the more valuable minerals and to watch your fuel to make sure you have enough to get back to the surface, but there isn’t really a lot of exploration per se since there aren’t many interesting features to discover. Despite this lack, however, I find myself drawn to play through Motherload once a year or so.

What other games do you know of that have two or more of these features? Do you find these elements as appealing as I do?

…we’ll get to that in a moment.

I have this big mental paintbrush that tends to roll over my recent past with a thick coat of misery paint. I remember the bad things that happen, but not so much the good things. As a result, I tend to feel like I’ve had a really awful week when really, only a few difficult things have happened in a slew of good stuff.

Sound familiar?

I found a way to combat this.

One of the things we talk about in the Usual Error presentations is the power of endings. For example: think of a book you particularly enjoyed, right up to the ending, where something awful happened in the last five pages with no explanation or denouement. Think of a movie where the main character dies right at the end for no good reason. Even if the movie was fantastic, it’s likely we won’t remember it well. It’s all about endings.

Our brains remember the most recent events most clearly, except for bad or challenging or difficult things – those we remember with eerie clarity. They’re big black spots on our mind-maps. In an effort to help myself remember the good stuff without such a heavy focus on the bad, I’m using the power of endings to my advantage.

Every night before sleep, but after I get in bed, I review my day. My family and I, all cozied up in bed together, talk about the good things that we remember happening throughout the day and discuss how happy those things made us. We don’t even discuss anything negative; the point is to just relax and focus on the positive of our day. Now, as I look back on my week, the good things are there, standing out among the bad – they now have equal importance and equal marks on the mental map of my life.

This is outstanding! How this one simple thing has really changed my life!

Today was a good day because I wrote this blog entry. I had one of my favourite lunches. I spent several hours curled up on the couch with my lovely wife. I cleaned up my office space so I could work in it again. I finally installed my camera software so I can upload my new pictures to my Flickr account. I found some money squirreled away in my desk! I watched some of my favourite shows and had a really yummy dinner, played fun games with my family, and snuggled a lot.

What an awesome day!

Recently we watched the Babylon 5 episode “Believers“. It’s just like Jim Britell said, “From now on I will divide the books I have read into two categories – the ones I read before Ishmael and those read after.” This episode, and a lot of the human/alien interactions that take place in the series, feel very different than they did the first time I watched them, because I’m now viewing them from a perspective of “There is no one right way to live.”

Minor spoilers ahead, but nothing that will spoil the episode for you.

The episode focuses on the ethical dilemma faced by a doctor who cannot save the life of a boy without surgery, but the boy’s parents will not permit surgery due to their religious beliefs. They believe that the soul escapes if the skin is pierced. The episode handles the “conflict of ethical systems” and “respect for others’ culture” aspects of the dilemma very well, but it takes a very pragmatic approach. But nowhere in the episode does it actually raise the following issue: maybe the aliens are actually right. Maybe the soul does escape if the skin is pierced. Who’s to say?

The episode is really well-written, and it’s no surprise that the humans don’t take the aliens’ spiritual beliefs seriously. But it also feels like the episode doesn’t take their spiritual beliefs seriously. As good a series as B5 is, it’s still written from a control paradigm perspective, and the control paradigm mantra of “there is only one right way” sometimes seeps in insidiously.

Recently Kyeli and I played through Zillion, one of my favourite games for the Sega Master System. She remarked that I beat it very quickly, especially after not having played it for 15 years, so I decided to do a speed run of it. I know I’m not a speedrun-quality player; most of the speedruns you’ll see on Speed Demos Archive and similar sites have runs with very few mistakes that are played almost perfectly. I’m just a dabbler, not a hardcore speedrunner. But perhaps my first “straw man” attempt will inspire someone else to do a better job of it. (:

Here is the route that I intend to take through the game. The pink line is the route in, and the yellow line is the escape route. I think it’s an optimal route without saving Apple or Champ, without using Warp B, and without exploiting any glitches, but I might have missed something. The curved arrow after getting the first Zillion gun upgrade is a Warp A.

I’m still practicing — I’ll post a link to a video as soon as I get a clean (albeit slow) full run.

Radiohead’s newest album, In Rainbows, will be released online on October 11th, and fans can choose how much they wish to pay for it.

I predict that this will be the wave of the future for music. Music is already easily accessible for free; the only remaining solution for musicians is to trust your customers and ask nicely to be compensated for your work.

This reminds me of a startup idea I had a long time ago, which is still viable to the best of my knowledge. Start up a website, like musicdonations.net or something. Allow the user to enter the names of musical artists and amounts of money they wish to donate to each artist. Process the payment using PayPal. Behind the scenes, have a process to contact the artists and verify their identities.

Profit can be made either by ads (opt-in only, customized for the artists you like) or by adding a percentage fee for each donation. I think that music sales in the future will have a model like this; musicdonations.net is just a patch until the industry catches up.

What is the connection paradigm? First, I’ll explain what I mean by “paradigm”. A paradigm is a shared reality, co-created by its participants. A culture or a society has certain values and filters that are imposed by default on its members; a paradigm is the same sort of thing but on an even more basic level. Paradigm is almost invisible to most people these days, because there’s only one dominant paradigm right now. People know of the existence of multiple cultures, but almost all of these cultures are within the dominant paradigm. This makes paradigm a pretty tricky thing to talk about and point at, so I’ll try to be more concrete.

The dominant paradigm in today’s world is the control paradigm. There are pervasive assumptions of control throughout all major cultures and throughout all aspects of life. Businesses seek to dominate the market and crush the competition. Farmers seek to isolate their crops from “outside” influences and engineer their genes for maximum yield. Governments seek power over their people. Jealous lovers seek to control their mates. Marketers seek to convince others to buy their products. Bosses seek to manage their resources, thereby keeping control of those “under” them. Parents raise their children. Political groups fight for their rights. Scientists seek to harness Nature. All these words are control words. What is a harness? It’s a device you put on an animal to better control it. Many of these words have positive connotations, but if you take a closer look at them you’ll see that they are all rooted in the control paradigm.

The control paradigm is so ubiquitous, it’s hard to see around the blinders of its assumptions. But imagine with me for a while, and let’s see where we can go. Imagine a world like this. Businesses care about their customers and want to help them. Farmers grow food in harmony with the surrounding ecosystem. Governments seek to serve their people. Lovers love their mates. Marketers seek permission to offer their products to those who might be helped by them. Workers seek to support their co-workers. Parents nurture their children. These words are connection words. The connection paradigm is an alternative to the control paradigm.

“But you’re describing a fantasy world,” you might argue. Well, it might seem so now, since the control paradigm is currently dominant. But even a small step toward the connection paradigm will help make the world a better place, so even if you don’t agree with all aspects of what I’m saying, maybe we can each do a little bit to help out in our own way.

The connection paradigm is all about connection instead of control. Connection with others and connection with ourselves. Isolation is a control paradigm value because we are more easily controlled when we are isolated. But we are lonely. We desperately want to connect with others, but in the control paradigm, the ways in which we are allowed to connect are very limited. We have also become disconnected from ourselves. We numb our minds with TV, video games, and drugs, and we lose connection with our hearts. Seeking therapy is seen as an embarrassing weakness that you have a problem that needs to be fixed, instead as a commendable effort toward self-improvement. We’re stuck in the control paradigm because we don’t know a better way to be. Well, I don’t have all the answers (I don’t think there is one right answer), but I intend to ask some pretty good questions that might inspire you and that might get you thinking. Keep reading this blog if you’re interested in our thoughts and ideas about how to make the world a better place.