"Quintessential Eugene" Experiences

... but how'd he get so close the curb?

Yelp reviews are riddled with the phrase "Quintessential Eugene." In an attempt to distill what exactly constitutes the Quintessential Eugene experience...

Rollerderby- Tone Windy City down a couple clicks (Tequila Mockingbird was paralyzed in my first Chi Derby, the EMTs didn't even make an appearance at this bout). Add a bit less clever burlesque and a bit more "skin" in the game. Amp the cosmic bowling lighting to obscure the slower, sloppier blocker pack. Roll through the rules in painstaking detail (thank you!!). Hold it across the street from my house (rather than braving West Chicago Skidrow in rental vehicles) and voila! Quintessential Eugene Experience.

Bikram Yoga- Take your yoga studio of choice, add 35 degrees and pervert door draft stoppers to bust the temp to 105... add wall to wall carpeting (prudent?). Ape awkwardly off the poses struck by your neighbor, Speedo Man (complete with matching tanlines) as he drips a visible puddle off his "costume" onto his mat. Alternate between trying to ignore the pungent aroma emanating from the carpet and burying your nose in your own industrially fragranced armpits. Namaste!

Saturday Market- Take your farmer's market of choice... Double the selection, halve the price, add artesianal hippies (tie dye to pet tags). To give you a sense- my landlord let out a low whistle as he walked by the bonsai booth, "Those trees are expensive!" ($10) versus...

The Coast- Cheating a bit, as "The Coast" is actually a 45 min drive from Eugene. Take your beach of choice... Superimpose desert sand dunes instead of beach. Decrease the temperature 30 degrees, add wet suits, swap surfing in the water for surfing down the dunes themselves. Bring in a couple dune buggies and ATV's for good measure. Killer clam chowder. Voila! Quintessential Oregonian experience.

Gas Station- Take your typical gas filling experience. If you are from anywhere but New Jersey, proceed to next sentence; New Jerseyites, skip ahead. 49 states: Replace opening the door with rolling down your window. NJ: Replace rolling down window to scream obscenities about "hurrying it up" for awkward small talk with overly attentive attendant who literally wants to know what you have planned for the day.

But wait! There's more!

• Militant bicyclists (many double wide BBW's-- you go girls!... unless you're edging me off the sidewalk instead of hanging out in the bike lane 5 feet over, yeah, I know, dayglo "wide load" vests are a niche item)
• Elaborate dietary restrictions (and the fringe benefit of getting decent veggie burgers everywhere and organic over-running the produce section even at the college Safeway)
• Inability to drive (overly polite to the point of capricious yielding = catastrophe. Evidently parallel parking causes 6 neighbors so much stress, they're more comfortable killing trees to compose and deposit nastygrams under our windshield wipers than learn when to turn the wheel hard right)

If my schedule allows, look for further reports on the annual hippie migration aka the Oregon Country Fair, "brew pub" crawls for local "samplers" (as if Mocha Beer wasn't enough, I'm jonesin to try a Chocolate Stout Float), forays into bike ownership, art walks, and more!

Elegy for "Elegance"

I was informed last Friday that "elegant" has been buzzed to meaninglessness, no better than "the web 2.0." Bit disappointed as it was one of my favorite words and, for me, absolutely laden with meaning-- the ideal of moving only in ways that are massively effective rather than scratching and clawing together something that will work for now. Very Zen.

That it has gained traction as a buzzword doesn't bug me that much. Yesterday, teetering on the precipice of an improbably steep sand dune in a ridiculously lumbering DUC-boat looking Dune buggy, I heard a kid yell appreciatively, "Oh SNAP!" I was joined by other chucklers as this is not the sort of context we ourselves would deploy the phrase in (if at all)... but did I feel that our lexicon was in peril because some kid was scrambling up the verbal learning curve? No.

Even misappropriating a phrase is a nod to its influence. Chances are, we've seen some version of this in watching how the language evolved in our totalitarian cautionary tale of choice (V for Vendetta and Clockwork Orange for me). That a sentiment is viral to the point of buzzwordy, even at the expense of some ambiguity in use, is a comforting sign to me. We need more respect and devotion for elegant solutions.

Take scientific theories. If they hang together in a breathtakingly simple "why didn't I think of that?" way, your patron may demand his money back, but the theory itself has a lot of mileage. Evolution is elegant. If instead, they've got a lot of exceptions or convoluted rationale, we've jammed the wrong piece into the puzzle. Things may hold for now, but it won't be long before we find a more "elegant" explanation. Heuristics and biases research is not elegant.

As IP VC's, maybe we're best served tackling the concepts we find hardest to learn and internalize because chances are they could use a debugging.

In the process of searching for "elegance" at a meta-level, there is a risk that we'll need to scratch, hack, and otherwise proliferate crappy first drafts at a tactical, day-to-day level. Leo has a solid post describing why we need what I perceive to be "hybrid engines" and can't rely solely on motivation to move us, plus some tips to get the ball rolling and tide us over until our next breakthrough...

Retweetable

Crazy, Sexy, Cool stuff I stumbled upon and was still thinking about the next day...

Pretty, but Shallow: She's my Hero- how would you react to a 300 lb woman in a swimsuit (with frill) polishing off a tub of chicken solo at a local eatery?

Sasquatch Music Festival- The Tipping Point in RL (off Danc's reading list -- Awesome blogger for game designers, thanks for the lead, Alex)

8 Categories of Game Players- Bartle's 4 major motives for game play plus their dark side expansion pack, oh my!

3 Categories of Game Players- Why shell out $1k for an iphone app that does nothing? Gambit blog just earned itself a spot in my Google Reader.

Innovation In the Wild

Random rave about sleeping bags....

I'm a city girl due to nonexistent driving skills and unrestive camping experiences.

It was always something. Sometimes a buddy conveniently "forgot" a sleeping bag and I found myself "sleeping" in close quarters. Or perhaps a crazy Caribbean aroused me from my alcohol-assisted coma with drunken mating calls. Or perhaps a hardcore scout leader insisted we camp on a lake in the dead of Minnesotan winter even when Operation Igloo caved in... and I thought "cotton kills" referred to the Civil War.

The way I see it, camping preceded real estate by a couple millenia. Campers are a pretty resourceful set to boot. You would think that they had hacked their equipment to the full extent of possibility by now. So I expected to waltz into REI and pick out one of those sleepover bags I had known in my childhood that is really just a blanket ensconced in nylon and a zipper... Perhaps with a less retro color theme. My garden level apartment occasionally dips into the 50's which can be both a blessing and a curse... alas. The inventory of the store more closely resembled an egyptian tomb full of space age mummy bags. Not a rectangle in sight... But the product design of Big Agnes intrigued me...

• Sleeping pad pocket- I roll off Thermarest mattresses faster than I roll off ox in a ditch consulting projects. This rig is just the kind of good-for-you bondage us roll our own-ers need. Plus it allowed thinner insulation on the underside of the bag, same heat, less to carry.
• Pillow stuff sack- n00b error 1 is to schlep a pillow into the woods. Way easier to stuff a sack with a change of clothes. But even those involve some positioning risk and forever fumbling for a stuff sack in the flagging light or when it's time to decamp. BA integrated the stuff sack inside of the mummy sack's hood, allowing you to fill it, wake up on top of it, and never inadvertently forget it or roll it into a collapsed tent.
• Petite sizes- both the bags and pads to match... Less to carry, warmer feet, and more forgiving price tags (I think of it as our first step towards a fat tax)...

While I'm still not convinced I can unplug the technophilia for more than a few hours to go native, once I'm out, I may at least be able to sleep off the withdrawal symptoms.

You are where you live

I was first introduced to the psychotropic properties of heroin in Leitzel's "Regulation of Vice" class back in spring of '05. We'd been talking shop about how much agency an addict really has over their decisions.

Seems like conventional wisdom arrays drugs along a spectrum. On one end, there are "gateway drugs," like Marijuana. On the far end are the "abandon all faith ye who inject here" varietals, like heroin. Simple, elegant... true?

I want to snort at Edward Cullen and Bella for endulging their hormone-addled teenage brains, "Your scent is my own personal brand of heroin." Yeah, right, save the century-old vampire experience, you guys are teenagers, there's no way you're effectively affective forecasting a week out, let alone an eternity. But then having myself fallen irrevocably for the spicy shaving cream androgeny of YSL's Opium, but mostly for Occam's sake, I want to believe we can boil the whole thing down to a continuum so neat, elegant, liberating us from accountability.

We'd started the conversation by talking about how cultural norms effect the experience of a drug. Acceptability of substances can vary over time-- whose great-great-great grandfather didn't sport a snuff box? Acceptability of substances can vary across cultures -- one man's native american vision quest might be another's bad trip at Burning Man. The fact that your Japanese hosts can sake bomb you under the table may not be purely due to acclimation and metabolic evolution. The cultural norms surrounding sake might also give them an edge. At any rate, a culturally-agnostic narcotic continuum was clearly under fire at this point.

Then we move on to everyone's favorite poppy-orange agent. Heroin. Soldiers in Nam were into this in a big way. With recovery from heroin addiction clocking in at 5-15% of cases domestically, you'd think when we pulled out of Vietnam, we'd be able to film a poor man's version of Trainspotting at any VA. Not so. A spat of studies found that upwards of 50% of soldiers recovered from heroin addiction after decamping; many without any formal treatment.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying go nuts with the white stuff. What I found most intriguing about this discussion was how profoundly influential one's environment is on one's experience. It seems like there's two basic schools of thought towards effecting change...

People who favor "small steps" want you to build sustained momentum. Self-discipline is everything; environmental circumstances are nothing. Ed Boyden quipped in on neurotech lecture on the importance of reflecting and learning from experience, "Imagine if you could incrementally improve a couple percent over time. That adds up."

But there may be some support for an alternative approach. Self-discipline only takes you so far. Sometimes you have to breathe and reboot. Clean slate. Start over. If you completely overhaul your environment, you have the opportunity to break up a lot of entrenched habits it would take ages for you to unlearn a percentage point at a time.

Intro to Ops brought this succinctly to the fore by reconciling process reengineering (reboot) punctuating a series of gradual inclines through TQM and incremental improvement (small steps). Should you find yourself a stranger in a strange land this summer, you might want to take the opportunity to reboot. I know I have in spite of myself. I may still be nursing a caffeine and sugar addiction, but I'm accidentally consuming copious quantities of veggies (farmer's market), walking (car prejudice), and sleeping (boredom) a ton more.

The Price is Right

For the business & gaming geeks in the back-- Quick overview of pricing strategies as they relate to virtual items...  (framework lifted from netmba)

Cost plus (freemium/subscription +):  the nuance here is that the incremental production price of a virtual item rapidly approaches zero.  So you can bet the farm charging nothing and hope to make it up on a march of dimes towards an uber desirable item OR you can drag your dev & support costs within reason for a subscription model and try to pay your folks' bonuses on incremental in game item sales.

Value based (monkey see-monkey do):  baselining the price off comparables in other games--hours of game play needed to unlock.

Psychological (monkey see-monkey do pII):   baselining the price off comparables in other games--similar items.   

Target return:  I actually haven't found anyone explicitly trying this.  Conceptually, you'd use demand forecasting to determine player willingness to pay at various price points and only pull the trigger on items whose development cost yielded a satisfactory rate of return through in game sales.  From a planning perspective, it's one of the more complex pricing approaches and requires some critical mass of econ/finance gurus, which isn't exactly a common skill set to screen for in studios these days... 

So it doesn't make sense at first-- there's the potential to wield tremendous power when you have 100% visibility into and are the final word on virtual transactions within your economy.  However, the trickiest thing about these virtual economies is that it forces the game company to wear so many hats... 

Hat 1:  a merchant in a sea of casual/serious/MMO etc. games which customers can flit to ficklely (potentially because they can catch a glimpse of hat #2 and their subsequent road to serfdom).

Hat 2:  a monoplistic tyrant within their own economy (unless they support user generated content and p2p sales) where customers are beholden to them and their pricing structure to get their fix.

Hat 3:  regulatory body responsible for equilibrating the earn rate (which can draw from disparate areas like marketing promos, gameplay on earnable currency, and customer cash infusions) with burn rates (which can draw from development release schedules for in game items, partnerships/reciprocity arrangements out of game, currency redemption value, etc.)  

In short: lots of moving pieces.  So in the 90's and aughts we saw the revelation that post launch, communities within games required care and management.  Moving into the teens, we're going to see a huge need to plan in more robust back office reporting and logic to manage the complexity of this creation.