Entries from November 2008 ↓

I was watching The Amazing Race Asia with Jon, and one of the contestants claimed, “I’ve never failed at anything.”

Someone needs to tell that poor misguided girl that failure isn’t always a bad thing. True, failure to brake when driving behind a slowing police car is a bad idea. Failure to notice that medicine is only meant to be taken externally? Also not good. But in general, failure is a good way to learn.

I fail at things all the time. When I fail to communicate with someone effectively, I learn something about their communication style. When I fail to listen carefully, I find out why certain chemicals should not be poured into the same container. Just this morning, I failed to put on clothes that were not pajamas. I frequently fail to understand the reasoning behind our government’s decisions.

You only really fail when your failure doesn’t teach you anything and you repeat it. As painful as failure can be (especially when it’s a public failure), your original action is much less important than your reaction.

As to the old adage, you only fail when you don’t try, it’s only partially true. Don’t give up before you start, but realize not everything is a good idea. For example, if you are considering doing something absolutely stupid (like performing dentistry on a live shark), then it’s okay not to try - the failure here is 1) you didn’t quite think this one through and 2) you didn’t make good enough friends in kindergarten, because if you had, one of them would stop you.

Finally, if you’re truly serious about attempting to take over the world, you have to be prepared for some failures. Russia’s a tough nut to crack, and next Tuesday will be my third or fourth attempt. But do I sit down and cry? Well, maybe. But then I LEARN from my mistakes and adjust my strategy. For example, we certainly won’t be using mountain elks this time. Lazy )#$*#@)ing elks.

What fun things have you failed at lately?

And Introducing…

Welcome to Tropico, a fantastic world domination game developed by PopTop Software in 2001. This game is not for the faint of heart. You are an evil ruler of a resource-rich island and you are determined to wring it for its last drop of profit.

Alternatively, you can just choose to build a lot of goat farms.

What’s Tropico About?

Basically, you choose a dossier of character traits, each with benefits and drawbacks. I like to be a religious zealot, because “zealot” is one of those words that is just not used enough in conversational American English these days. I also like to have a lot of money, so I generally choose a few financially productive character quirks.

So, you travel to your island, turn off the stupid cloud effects, and start building mines and houses and pineapple farms. There’s a lot of strategy written about this game (which elevation to plant specific crops, how you can keep your population happy) but it’s a lot more fun to just behave in a dictatorial fashion and increase your troops whenever there’s unrest.

Why Should You Play?

1. The announcer calls you “El Presidente” every time he speaks to you, with a straight face.
2. The music is great - that “wepa wepa wepa” moves the soul.
3. You get the cathartic experience of assassinating your enemies.
4. You really can have a goat farm.
5. The joy of expansion. When 15 construction workers are banging away on the roof of your apartment building, you know pure happiness.
6. In this world, government funds can actually go directly towards public education.
7. You can indulge your voyeuristic tendencies and click on people to know what they’re thinking. True, the thoughts are generally pretty boring, but telepathy is just fun on principle.

What’s Next, El Presidente?

While Tropico doesn’t offer the immersion of a MMORPG like World of Warcraft, or the shiny happy imaginary animals of new console games like Viva Pinata 2, it’s still highly entertaining, and a buzz for anyone seeking the experience of world domination without consequences.

So: If given complete power over a small nation, what would you do first?

For those of you expecting warm, fuzzy feelings, go someplace else.

Being pregnant is like having a small, quiet parasite living in your stomach. You can’t eat, you can’t sleep in anymore (nature calls) and you get an intimate appreciation of what your food looks like after it’s decided that your stomach is a stupid place to be, and it now craves open air.

They call this the first trimester.

The good things: You can’t scoop cat litter anymore because the bacteria will kill you (mild exaggeration, don’t be alarmed, fellow preggos), so this is no longer your job. You don’t need an excuse to find the smell of toast disgusting when someone fails at using the break room toaster oven. You get to buy really nice fruit (we’re talking fresh cut pineapple and berries) and nobody complains that you are wasting money. Of course, you will probably not keep that pineapple in your stomach, but it’s pretty nice going down.

The better things:They’ve invented pasteurized everything. So, you can still eat feta cheese, which means Greek salads aren’t dead to you for 9 months. They’ve invented lollipops just for you. You get real close with your doctors, because they introduce you to your ovaries with the ultrasound machine. Your husband gets really extra nice, and that sack around your belly? It’s not fat! It’s BABYJUICE.

Finally, people get absurdly happy when you share your news. I don’t know about you, but it’s pretty nice to make people absurdly happy with absolutely no effort on your part at all. I wish everyone took all my news like that.

I’d say “I went to the store.” And then you’d say, “You went to the store!? I went to the store once!” And someone else would chime in, “I own a store! Stores are the best, just wait ‘til you go to another one.” And people would email you all the time with advice like, “The green store is more fun than the red store. You should totally try the green store. We all love stores.”

Of course, by that point in their lives, no one remembers that the store made them puke 12 times a day, and forced them to give blood every 2 weeks. To be fair, it’s possible that this isn’t normal, and my physicians group is made up of highly educated vampires.

Anyway, welcome to the news. I hope it has made you ridiculously happy. I hope that you jump up and down, at least once, if not with general delight in all things baby, in delight that you will never know your toilet as well as I now know mine.

It’s going to be a heck of a lot of fun when it’s born – I’m going to teach it secondary and tertiary colors instead of rainbow order, and the ABCs backwards, and then watch all the other kindergarten kids’ minds break when I send it to school. That’s what YOU get, children of traditional thinkers.

Muahahahaha.

This week, 999 or so search marketers, social media experts, fellow tech geeks and I showed up in Las Vegas for the Pubcon conference, by Webmaster World.

So far, I have seen a man put a garden rake into a blender (somewhat disappointing, as he only blended the handle, not the spokes) heard a middle-aged woman sigh in complete contentment on the monorail and say, “Oh Doreen, this is the life,” and watched Brian Carter give away a pony stuffed into a handbag.

I’ve also learned how search and social media go together like PB&J, how online marketing and B2C interaction is changing, and where to scope out your nemeses (or competitors, for the conventional) and learn all their secrets.

I’ve discovered that personalization and engagement are the future of online advertising and confirmed that people are looking for relevant, useful content rather than sales pitches with scads of corporate blather. Also, apparently people, we’re getting smarter.

That last one was a real shocker, because we are the reality TV generation that, at one point, embraced the macarena. But they say we’re actually technologically smarter these days.

Consumers now have websites and blogs. We’re familiar with Facebook or LinkedIn or Digg or Twitter. We read newspapers online, and watch and create shared videos regularly. We have proved our intelligence by uploading episodes of My Little Ponies onto YouTube, so that the Baby Sea Ponies and the Flutter Ponies will never be forgotten.

In addition to the useful content provided by Pubcon speakers, the conference was a hit because I got toys. I got a couple of hats, some silly putty, a very sad chicken salad (but hey, free food), and a first aid kit with many band-aids. I plan to use these band-aids at a later date to create a Great Work of North American Art, which I’m allowed to do, because my degree says so.

Best of all were the little OCD pocket notebooks. How did you know that the color-coded mini post-its would fill the obsessively organized with light and joy? Oh, you clever Pubcon, you.

Overall, nice job Brett Tabke & Company. Great show, and many new things learned.

Reasons to Vote Today

1. Free Ben & Jerry’s ice cream (thanks to Kahn for the heads up)
2. Free Starbucks coffee (thanks to the guys on 114 for making mine iced)
3. Participating in the decision-making of your country (If you don’t show up, don’t harrumph about it, you had your chance.)

Only Acceptable Reasons Not To Vote

1. You are frequently mauled by irate, unpatriotic bears, and have consequently lost faith in the democratic system
2. You are severely allergic to elementary school children, and cannot enter the polling place lest you die
3. You are deceased and considered ineligible

What Will the Voting Bring?

1. The first African-American president in the United States of America
2. Blatant cheating followed by completely ineffectual attempts to correct it
3. A landslide victory for the Green-Rainbow Party followed by the realization that there are more than two valid political parties

And You?

Go out on a line here, and make a prediction. I won’t hold you to it.

Unless you are right. Then you will be my new authority on all things psychic, and I will get you your very own silverback gorilla (I know a guy), which you will have to hide from PETA because they may or may not be endangered.