You just like to complain.

That’s really my argument, and I could leave it right there. But for fun, let’s proceed down this path for a second.

First, the design changes all the time. My feeling is that you’ve complained every other time, but your behavior has not changed at all. Leading me to question immediately how much you actually care.

Second, imagine Facebook suddenly turned into a pay service. Because, right now, it’s free. Totally free. Yes, they might be selling your information to other people. Yes, you have to look at ads (oh no!). Yes, they make money off of you using them. None of that means the service is any less free by any definition that I’m aware of. And here’s the kicker: you can leave at any time.

So, imagine they want you to pay for it. How much would you pay to keep using the service? $5/month? $10? My guess is it’s a pretty low amount. I think most people wouldn’t pay more than $5 a month.

Why?

Because as soon as that happened, competitors would immediately spring up. Viable ones, not just the usual, impotent upstarts that come along every few months and then disappear with a similar whimper.

And suddenly people would start to investigate other options. Suddenly people would move to a different free service.

Because, at the end of the day, you don’t really care about the design changes. If you leave Facebook because it went pay, but not because of a new sidebar, that means those changes have a smaller effect on your life than the loss of a couple of dollars every month.

Frankly, I don’t think Facebook’s users hate the changes. I think they hate change.

The supposed insight that, “I think ebook readers like the Kindle are neat, but I will always enjoy reading a real book,” is one of the most aggressively pretentious statements that the current generation insists on repeating.

Of course you like real books. Don’t we all? The segment of the population that prefers to read long-form prose on a computer screen or even the unfortunately named “e-ink” is vanishingly small. Your artful swoons about liking the feel and smell of paper books are shared and repeated by almost every single one of your peers.

But you are reading in a blockbuster economy. The industries surrounding and producing books, movies, videogames, and music all operate in the exact same way:

Everyone reads, watches, plays, and listens to the same content (or revenue, at least, is derived overwhelming from very few sources) but everyone still demands that they have choices and vast selections from which to make these same purchases.

What this creates are stores like Borders and Blockbuster that used to sell and rent many copies of the same thing, but were still forced by fickle and predictable customers to stock enormous numbers of untouched merchandise. “Sure, we’re all going to walk out of here with the same thing, but we’re going to spend an hour browsing before we select it.”

(How many of your friends are currently reading The Hunger Games? If you’re like me, almost all of them.)

If you’ve followed the music industry at all, you already know what this means: Increasing digitization and centralized order fulfillment. Kindles and Amazon, basically.

If you want to read something obscure, you simply can’t expect to find it in a small bookstore. Because if it’s truly obscure then a necessarily small number of people will want to buy it. Which means it will sit on a shelf for weeks or months costing that store real estate in which it could have stuck another copy of The Help.

We all want to read real books. But the only stores that can really accomodate this are ones like Amazon, which can centralize order fulfillment among a relatively small number of warehouses. Having a few copies of unread books doesn’t cost them as much as it does your local independent bookseller.

And ebook readers will allow you to read that book that you discovered before all your friends because your local bookstore didn’t have to find and stock it first.

You are reading in a blockbuster economy. If you truly want choice, you will have to stop expecting to shop at the Blockbuster version of a bookstore and move to another, more sustainable, source.

To my writing classes I used later to open by saying that anybody who could talk could also write. Having cheered them up with this easy-to-grasp ladder, I then replaced it with a huge and loathsome snake: “How many people in this class, would you say, can talk? I mean really talk?”

That had its duly woeful effect.

- Christopher Hitchens

I don’t consider myself a great writer, but I typically say writing, if forced to state a strong suit. But perhaps that says more about my other abilities than my way with words.

In any case, I find Hitch’s quote above especially interesting. I’ve found that the best way to improve as a writer has been to improve the way that I talk. Lately I’ve tried to speak slower, more carefully, in more complete sentences. To speak in full ideas, not just phrases.

I don’t know if it’s really working yet. Too soon to tell, at any rate.

But I enjoy it. And if you are trying to become a better writer, I recommend giving it a try.

It certainly couldn’t hurt, at least.

So I wrote a short film that Chris Van Patten is looking to direct and produce.

And we’ve started a Kickstarter campaign to help us get there.

Take a look and spread the word (and donate if you can?)

Dead Space on Kickstarter

Film Synopsis:
The most important facet of any failed relationship is blame. But Evan and Molly find out that analyzing a relationship is a lot like trying to make sense of a dream: assigning meaning to half-remembered conversations and fabricated arguments. But you still have to do it.

From Wikipedia:

In his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, [Kurt] Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:

• Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
• Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
• Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
• Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
• Start as close to the end as possible.
• Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
• Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
• Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Start as close to the end as possible. That’s my favourite rule of writing. It’s my favourite rule of storytelling.

How much does your audience really need to know to get the point? How much do they actually want to know?

You know that person, maybe it’s your husband, your girlfriend, your best friend, who always gives way too many details when they’re telling a story? They didn’t start as close to the end as they could have.

Vonnegut was right. Start as close to the end as possible. It will make your presentation more interesting, your story more interesting, your blog post more interesting. Your awful corporate bio more interesting.

Don’t keep writing just because your story doesn’t seem long enough.

• All those fancy charts you want for your presentation are locked behind paywalls? Do a google image search for what you’re looking for, like “number of Facebook users“.*
• Want to know what “real people” say about something? You’re not going to find it on LinkedIn or Twitter. Use OpenBook.
• Want honest feedback? Don’t ask people if your presentation was “okay” or if you did well. Say, “tell me three things I can do better next time.”
• Always have a plant in the audience prepared to ask a question. No one wants to be the first person to raise their hand.
• Conversely, always be the first person to ask a question, if you’re attending a seminar. Make it an interesting one, but easy. It gets the ball rolling, and it’s the nice thing to do.
• If you’re on a panel, ask questions of your fellow panelists. Your audience came for a discussion, a conversation, not a talk from a hydra.
• Smile and have a sense of humour.
• If people look bored, move on to the next slide or point. It’s your responsibility to be interesting, it is not their responsibility to care. They were probably forced to attend anyway.
• As Kurt Vonnegut said about storytelling, “start as close to the end as possible.”

*IF THE CHART COSTS MONEY, BUY IT. Only use this as a way of seeing what’s available or getting the sense of some statistics. (I’m serious. Don’t be a dick.)

Anyone who knows me knows that The Foggy Goggle is, by far, my favourite bar in Halifax. Well, as they just celebrated their third year in business on Sunday, over at This Needs to Stop we interviewed them about how they got started, things they like, things they hate, and more.

First, happy third birthday! How did the Goggle get started?
Thanks! The Goggle was created to fill a void in our social lives. Nat and I used to eat and drink out a lot, but we couldn’t find a spot that suited both of our needs. Nat’s a vegetarian and I love my meat. I love craft beers and Nat prefers cider or wine. We both love the feeling of a casual pub, but dislike the greasy deep fried food that often goes with it, so we decided to open our own.

What things in Halifax (business, person, anything) do you think are the Bee’s Knees?
DEE DEE’S ICE CREAM! (homemade waffle cone with raspberry sorbet on the bottom and chocolate on top) We have both been addicted to this for years and we used to drive out to Peggy’s Cove once a week to get our fix but now they have a location on Cornwallis.

[The Bee’s Knees: The Foggy Goggle]

Susie’s Shortbreads in Halifax make delicious baked goods. Or so I’ve been told. I’m vegan, so I didn’t pay too much attention to them. I didn’t even follow them on Twitter (why torture myself). But of course I knew who they were because Haligonians are in love with them.

One day, though, everything changed. I saw people keep mentioning me in their retweets of Susie’s announcing that they were testing some vegan cupcakes. My friends kept telling me I just had to go try one.

So, off I went (in the middle of a work-day afternoon, of course), walking the few blocks up the road to the store. I asked the friendly baker if they had any vegan cupcakes left.

She said, “are you the person everyone on Twitter kept telling to come here?”

I was little surprised. I’m not used to the Twitter personalities of a business to be that connected to the in-store personalities. You always hope that’s how businesses operate, but we all know that’s simply not how these things usually play out.

They so often map to different parts of the operation. One side is focused on people, the other side is focused on the product.

But good social media is a symptom of good business. People who care about their customers and want to engage with them take to the internet naturally. They want to reach out, and they’re good at it.

Setting up a website and tweeting the hell out of your latest promotion won’t improve your customer service, it won’t make people like you more.

Good social media doesn’t transform a bad business, it just keeps a few employees busy.

Just a heads up that most of my blogging efforts these days are going into helping my friends Sylvia, Sarah, and Amy with ThisNeedstoStop.com. It’s a Halifax-based gossip, lifestyle, and humour blog. If any of that sounds interesting to you, I recommend checking it out.

Here is my entry for the latest, and final, WarChild Challenge. Please read, watch, and vote over on the site.

Why I should win:
I subscribe to a belief in basic humanism, and that is what I bring to this project. No one decided who would be privileged and who would live short, meaningless lives of suffering. It just happened. We don’t deserve our charmed lives and they don’t deserve their misery. But as humans, the only beings capable of this amount of love and suffering that we know of in the universe, we can do something to help our fellow men and women.

We, the middle-class in the industrialized world, were all winners of a grand cosmic lottery before we even knew we were playing. The universe rolled the dice and almost everyone who’s reading this was born into decent families of decent means in a decent country.

And what did we do to deserve it? Nothing. At worst we try not to squander our winnings and at best we choose to share some of it with those less fortunate.

I admit, at 24 years old, I’ve done little to help the world around me, like almost everyone else. I lead a reasonably charmed life, like so many Canadians and, like so many Canadians, I regularly choose not to share this fortune with many people beyond my inner circle of friends. I give to charity every year, like everyone else, but that’s hardly something to start getting too boastful about.

Why should I win, with a resume this modest? Because this is a perspective I would like to bring to this project and to the whole idea of doing good: The perspective that people like me, regular people, actually can do something. That we should be doing something. That for all our prosperity and success we did little to earn it and less to deserve holding onto it. So why can’t we share our fortune with others, why shouldn’t we feel compelled, if not obligated, to help other people?

Few excuses remain when you begin to think about the world in these terms, and those that do feel insufficient.

And even fewer remain when we approach every situation, even the most dire, in stark, humanist terms. There is no one else out there that will help those in need but us. If there were, surely we would have seen that help by now. The only thing helping other human beings are other human beings.

We can support WarChild, we can support our local programs and projects, and we can do something.

Why Joel? Video
I wanted to demonstrate the perspective I would bring to a WarChild project by creating a video about being a lucky Canadian. I wrote a song called “Have Another Drink” that is, essentially, about squandering your winnings from the cosmic lottery.

It’s about how even the luckiest people in the world can manage to be sad and the only thing they know how to share is their misery.

This, alongside images of me growing up and my life today, shows how easy it is for a lucky Canadian to take for granted the privileged place we have in the world. And when you compare it to a place like Sierra Leone, it shows just how lucky we truly are.

And, ideally, it makes you want to consider sharing your luck a bit more.

Lyrics:
hey baby, we’re lucky
she says after swallowing her pills
god we’re lucky
she says when she’s reaching for her glass
so goddamn lucky
she says when she’s taking off her clothes

maybe tonight you’ll touch me sober
maybe tonight you’ll sleep right through the night
maybe tonight we’ll sleep a little closer
but tonight’s another test of what can last

she cries, i’m leaving
but he knows that’s just a game
she lies, i love you
but he knows everyday’s the same
she smiles, i hate you
and he knows she’s back again

maybe tonight we’ll see that we are nothing
maybe tonight you’ll try smiling with your eyes
maybe tonight we’ll see we are the lucky ones
but tonight’s another night of crying shame

we won our ticket
to happiness and pride
and no one’s asking us to pay
we stand above them
rich and fat and sad
having never learned to share

maybe tonight we’ll learn what love means
maybe tonight they’ll let us play their game
maybe tonight we’ll get to taste their sadness
and wonder why they all cry in their dream