Angela Natividad is online.

The whole thing wraps nahcely with our homegrown takeaway relationships-in-advertising advice. And there’s a few stories in there that as usual will probably get us all into trouble. We live dangerously in these here internets.

Salem was thrown into prison last Thursday for carrying medical equipment to injured protesters at Tahrir Square in Egypt. That same morning, he'd published this incendiary piece of blogging magic, and his blog was consequently shut down most of that day. After a hefty beating and the destruction of his goods (including his car), he was released when the police failed to put two and two together identity-wise.

As he says in the interview, “Every generation has a moment.” To that point, we dive deep, past Elliot Spitzer’s CNN segment on him to where this all started.

The skinny on the other things we covered:

• An overview of what's happening in Egypt now (here's the latest, with decryption, as of Saturday)
• Social media's role in igniting the people (you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll Poke with pride)
• How people who are social by nature manipulate technology to meet ends unintended by authorities or enterprises
• How the internet becomes your outlet
• The regime’s “attack enemy communications” philosophy - and how that all went horribly wrong for them
• Communications between the people versus from the media, the regime and overseas
• Why a seething Egyptian secularist youth movement needs batteries (hint: it involves Dance Dance Revolution!)
• How Egyptians feel about ElBaradei (@Elbaradei) ... here's a glimpse
• What happens next? ...and at least one winning solution
• Why the Danish education system rocks better than yours, ours and everybody’s

Colleen the Socialist, ironically, is not a fan of social media, because she thinks it's still "nascent" and doesn't really have its shit together yet.

"I'm sure the first thing that came out of the Gutenberg press wasn't that great," she said.

"The Bible?" asked the startled moderator.

"No, I'm sure there was a lot of crap before then..."

"No, I think the Bible was the first thing."

I love this article. It draws blood, but kind of gently, like a blood drive nurse who's bored with your come-ons and takes a little too much a little too fast.

The ending's great too. Grilled cheese sandwiches aren't the only great sustained legacy of market creativity; it also bequeathed us tacos as we know them, White Strips, and the teenager -- whose merits we can all argue to our sulky inevitable deaths.

Via.

This weird infographic by Heat and iThink has been circulating.* It pits the social media use and sentiment of ad and marketing people against those of "normal" people, but curiously also tosses in sections on who's more likely to:

• Use illicit drugs (us by 26%, versus 3% of the general populace)
• Throw up from drinking (us, 37% versus 9% of Norms)
• Hook up with a coworker (us, 26% versus 8% Norms)

From maureenjohnsonbooks:

1. Most fashion/lifestyle magazines make A LOT of their money from ads.
Ever notice how those glossy mags are made up of lots of ads? (Ever notice how a bridal magazine is pretty much ALL ADS? There’s a story in itself.) There’s not really a lot of actual magazine content in there. Because the ads are of primary importance, the content must not be offensive to/wildly contradict the aims of the advertisers.

This, in and of itself, is not an evil thing. It’s just the simple fact of the matter. Glossy mags are often advertisement collections with thin wafers of story nestled between them.
2. The point of advertising is to make you buy something. Which means you must create a perceived need.  

Hey, did you know how you HAVE to buy an engagement diamond? How that has always been the thing, since all of time? Oh, except, no it hasn’t. The whole “diamond engagement ring” thing was made up by DeBeers with the help of an advertising firm in the 1930s. They made up the phrase “A diamond is forever” in 1947. They wanted to sell diamonds, so they made up a need. You HAVE to have a diamond for your engagement! It’s the DONE THING!  

Advertisers make up all kinds of needs! You need a bigger/smaller television/computer/phone/car. You need this diet to be thinner. You need this pizza with actual cheeze deposits in the sides. YOU NEED IT. LACK OF IT MEANS FAILURE.
3. Ads create an (often/usually) fictitious worldspace in which whatever product being advertised is the answer to a problem or a deficit. Sometimes, a deficit you had NO IDEA YOU HAD. 

You’re just wrong! Didn’t you know your hair is wrong? You eyelashes are too short! Your white, glinting teeth cannot be seen from the moon. Your phone is a source of shame and embarrassment to your family. Frankly, everyone hates you and your sandwich. Loser.

This doesn't make me proud, but it was so much fun to read. I recommend sitting for the whole damn thing. And maybe take your engagement ring off so you don't have to look at it.

Another fun fact regarding diamonds and De Beers: diamonds are actually not worth that much; in terms of objective value they are roughly in the same neighbourhood as rhinestones. This is also De Beers magic: every time somebody finds a diamond mine someplace they set up a shop nearby, announce that the diamonds aren't up to snuff, and wait for the harmed would-be competitor to crawl to the doorstep on its knees, sniveling and begging for buyout.

This is probably the only thing I remember from college physics. That, and my teacher's theory about why time travel is impossible.

From usagov:

Social media is a part of daily life, but what happens to the online content that you created once you die? 

If you have social media profiles set up online, you should create a statement of how you would like your online identity to be handled. Just like a traditional will helps your survivors handle your physical belongings, a social media will spells out how you want your online identity to be handled. 

Like with a traditional will, you’ll need to appoint someone you trust as an online executor.

I know we totally need this and it's very important, but it's such a surreal thing to see on USA.gov.

Yes, more surreal than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Safety Guide for a Zombie Apocalypse. But it is possible my judgment on this point is skewed.

"Connecting things" -- behind that is the premise that the full picture was already there; it just needed the lines that connect the dots.

I'm currently reading The Case for Creativity and there's a full chapter about originality and our industry's obsession with it. Being accused of copycatting is often just as condemning as being outright guilty of the act. But it's a lot easier than we think to have the same idea at the same time as another person; examples proliferate in science, technology, art and -- obviously -- in advertising.

Many thinkers have surmised that when it's "time" for something, that idea just appears in the ether, ready and waiting to be claimed by unconnected minds who start thinking in its direction. (Maybe that's why execution is considered a lot more valuable than ideas. On the other hand, artists work fiercely to protect their ideas; in a way, they're the only babies we get to have. But that's another discussion entirely.)

This notion of ideas hanging in the air like ripe fruit resembles a theory biologist Rupert Sheldrake has called "morphic resonance": the notion that once you have an idea, it is that much easier for another human to conceive it -- in the same way that once a rat gets through a maze, the exit is instantly that much easier to find for all other rats in the universe.

We're somehow all psychically connected to a fast-moving energy hive that doesn't care who thought what first; once a thought or a sentiment's there, it's there for the taking. I know this all sounds mystic as hell, but in any case it's interesting to think about.

And if morphic resonance just rubs you wrong, that's okay, too; environment, our shared news streams, technology's "logical next step", the circles we run in and conversations we have all make it more likely two unrelated people will conceive similar ideas at the same time.

Or maybe they really are copying. *Shrugs*

I like the show precisely because it succeeds in shining a bright light down into this dark abyss that is Adlandia's massive ego problem. If you go back and look at the staffers' faces at SK+G, you can see how unhappy they are, and while it's hard to watch, it's also great footage. When you work in a toxic cesspool of cluelessness, you have to recognize it, and choose to save yourself.

A colleague told me last week that the necessities of working in advertising have been reduced to a hasty copy-pasting of other work people have done -- often straight out of presentations from other agencies, procured via backchannels of disgruntled agency folk or elbow-rubbers with slippery typing fingers.

I said this was sad, that all agencies don't work like this. "AKQA doesn't," I added with maybe too-obvious naïveté.

He gave me a thoughtful smile, one of those "oh-you'll-learn" expressions where the sides of the mouth tip upward just enough to appear well-meaning. "Of course there are exceptions," he said, "but they are exceptions."

We've chosen a thankless industry that takes everything from us and grinds personal ethics, often your entire personal life, to fine dust. One of the icons I respect and trust the most said the biggest mistake I make is that I'm too holistic about work and play; what the industry needs from me is to be schizophrenic. "Unless you're being asked to do something truly compromising, you are not being paid for your values," he emphasised, gently but firmly, over the dinner table. His eyes bore into mine. It wasn't a condescending look, an I-mean-well look. It was a this-is-life-here's-the-facts look. It is the look my dad gives me when he's tossing me a life jacket.

David Burn's words are particularly resonant tonight because fuck, I am tired. Eight years into the thick of advertising and marketing, I maintained the conviction that you have to fight to produce good work, fight to listen to people -- despite the clients, despite your boss -- and painstakingly construct that silken thread that will ultimately connect a brand to those it serves. Over time, I thought, that thread will harden. Everyone will get it. You just have to keep at it.

Someone, I thought, needs to do this for advertising: remind it of its importance in the lives of people, and what responsibility accompanies that importance.

It wasn't until I stopped blogging for bread and started actually working at agencies that I understood why creatives got so angry with me for being hard on their work. In the end, it is easier to do bad work than it is to do good. You don't want the battle for quality to be your baby, not when it's so obviously not what the client wants or what your team is equipped to produce. You can't do this alone; you just want to go home after 8, and hopefully not take your work with you (it so often sneaks into your handbag anyway, ready and waiting for the moment you try going to bed).

Little by little you start to crumble. Things matter less; you're just trying to get through the goddamn day. Your life becomes a question of constant comparison. Who's making more? What the fuck, why?! The answer is usually not merit. It eats at you; you chew on your pencil, at your nails, on your soul. You look at the guys giving presentations from Ogilvy: their slick hair, their piles of bullshit wrapped in lip service about storytelling and "logic": just more words, really, vainglorious and ultimately unactionable if you're not Ogilvy, talking to a client who is not LVMH. Your limbs grow cold.

So what is supposed to happen to you?

MIT's developed CNSILK, a robot-slash-silkworm that, in the near future, will be able to sense its structural environment and build around it. Here is that same spiderbot constructing a living space out of thread (which will eventually be replaced by a nylon that's flexy when wet, then hardens once dry).

Earlier today I also read about Narrative Science, a company that uses algos to take raw data and spin stories out of it. Some people are optimistic about this tech's capacity to replace journalism.

When increasingly complex systems are being developed to replace complex human work that traditionally required sharp eyes, a sense of intuition and constructive creativity on-the-fly, I wonder two things:

• How do the people who once did these jobs naturally evolve into a more useful position?
• What kind of advertising, what kind of media, could be produced as a result?

Constructing a living space around an existing environment isn't that different from building a social network. (That's why books like this are so popular with software architects.) Would robots do this better than we have?

Posted on AdVerveBlog and Disruptomatic.

I'm usually the first to jump on a "look how cute and human Obama is!!!!!!" moment, but watching this left me with the nagging feeling that we've turned our President into a reality TV character.

Worse, it's almost as if he feels pressure to maintain it (like a still-jovial Jon Stewart) to hold our fickle affections, which clearly can't be won by simply being the rare President who reflects before acting, builds for the long term, maintains dignity amidst so much baiting, and repeatedly opens negotiations with a party that'll do anything to unseat him, even believe that ideas once adopted half in jest are now real causes.

marilynstays:

Yes, it’s delicious, but some folks need to stop dancing around the fact that we’re eating chocolate sandwiches. I’m a grown woman, I know when I’m eating a chocolate sandwich. I accepted that as soon as I licked my finger and went “goddamn that’s delicious, find me something edible I can spoon this shit onto before I just start scooping it out with my hands!” I’m good with it. 

What I’m not good with are these yuppies who are trying to pretend that that’s not what’s going on. What happened is, they got a spoonful of it in their mouth for the first time and all of a sudden shit was way too real. They lost their goddamn minds and couldn’t come to terms with their circumstances. 

“You dunno what you’re talking about! Its hazelnut spread- with cocoa! It’s got a subtle chocolate flavor, that’s why I like it!”

Okay, motherfucker, really…that’s what you’re bringing to my doorstep? Whatever you have to tell yourself. I know and YOU know that you’re spreading icing on a biscuit. Let’s stop bullshittin like we’re not buying a jar of chocolate and get serious.

I thought this was awesome in light of recent news that Ferrero USA plans to reimburse any Californian who bought a jar of Nutella between August 2009 and January 2012, up to roughly $4 per person and $3.05 million in total. (Get your bids in quick, wounded yuppies!)

This is to quell outrage that Nutella is, in fact, pretty fucking fattening, which was discovered by a mother, hoodwinked by Nutella's positioning as part of a healthy breakfast. The discovery of that traumatised genius -- namely, that Nutella is fattening -- led to a class action lawsuit.


Progrès à l'américain. If you can't be held responsible for what you push down your digestive tract (or those of your spawn), put heat on the company. That way, you can eat banana chocolate sandwiches and be reimbursed. Beats reading the label!

@PatStansik's produced this video about being in your early 20s, which @CandaceHetchler showed me as part of an ongoing discussion we're having about whether or not Girls is a depiction of reality.

I tried to dislike this video but it was hard to, because this is what my early 20s were like: my parents paid for the gas, I paid for everything else; Trader Joe's was the organic supermarket of choice because Whole Foods is wallet rape; and coming in early to work was a way to show enthusiasm as well as a symptom of the ever-present paranoia that you could get canned for sucking at any given moment.

This isn't my time anymore, but I remember it because that's what it was like. I still can't find anything remotely relatable about Girls, though, and at the very least now I know that it's not just because I'm too old. If Judd Apatow's big "joke" is that he's put some smart privileged girls on the screen to prance around ruining their lives and being abjectly unfunny and mediocre, that's cool ... but the schadenfreude needed to make that consistently funny is separated from me by too many degrees.

When you think about it, all Mary Poppins did was bust those kids’ balls while demonstrating how amazing she was in her own universe hidden from the rest of the world. I suspect it is the only reason why she was in childcare: among adults (barring our chimney-sweep homie whom she mildly resents and who is obviously in love with her), she would just never get away with it.

This is a moment of clarity.*

----


*Nighttime is a fertile time to reexamine childhood movies because that's what French TV likes to play. The night before last, I rewatched Jumanji and felt soothed by the idea that every family-oriented '90s movie in all of life seems to end with a Christmas scene. I still thought the game was beautifully styled, and it still made me tense to watch Alan and Sarah throw it into the river. What made them think that was going to last? Many recurring evils recur because their accidental vainqueurs seem to think death by drowning is the answer. Consider the One Ring.

This is Agent Provocateur's latest for the classic Margot line. Generally I love AP ads but this one is almost willfully sloppy. We'll ignore the fact that there's no HD; why is a girl with underwear that sexy and expensive otherwise so poorly dressed? Was it all to match her hopeless shoes, lovingly chosen for spontaneous moments of heroism?

This week I contributed an article to MyBankTracker.com, which asked me to recount the torrid* tale of my financial life before and after France, a task that proved surprisingly very hard and felt almost embarrassingly personal. (Then again, until recently I was one of those people who felt that your character could be judged by your FICO score.)

The article was published this morning and is called "Unthinking the American Dream." Here's an excerpt.

Over the course of my short working life, a lot of money has come and gone. Most of it came and went in the U.S. I spent much of that time believing my value as a human was tied to my ability to consistently turn some money into more. I concede that this was largely driven by my own obsession for untold riches, but that’s also the dream we’re sold. Under the shadow of Silicon Valley, where I grew up, it’s a noble enough reason to neglect your family and friends: people who don’t support you aren’t really constructive elements, are they? And if you do it right, you’re putting in three years of endless work in exchange for 60+ years of leisure, aren’t you? 

In another country you don’t just learn a new value system, you learn new dreams: live within your means, do work you care about and still make time for the people that matter. To be able to find balance in work and life ought to be a definition of success, because it’s surprisingly difficult. Things come and go, ambitions change: I realized I wanted a life that resembled a rich, carefully-constructed tapestry, not a bar graph.

---

*Okay, it's not like I was a pirate on the high seas or anything.

Listen to the show.

Yesterday I joined The BeanCast for its 198th episode alongside some illustrious and fun folks: social media/digital director Chris Baccus of AT&T, vp marketing/social Jeremy Epstein of Sprinklr, and founder Joe Jaffe of Evol8tion. We covered a lot of ground, including:

• The value of earned media (versus paid)
• Advertising on The Olympics
• Mid-roll advertising's video virtues
• Geofencing: is this THE YEAR?
• Crowdsourcing with Starbucks

One of my favourite things to do in the year is attend MIPTV and MIPCOM as an official liveblogger. Both conferences serve as real-time deal-making spaces for TV networks and production firms, and the biggest thing this industry's been wrestling with is how their business models are changing as a response to online services and shifting user behaviours. The heads of networks fall at different extremes: open and experimental, or shut-off and defensive.

With that said, it's with happy surprise that I found Reed MIDEM (which runs MIPTV and MIPCOM) has been open to our experiments and discoveries in making the conferences themselves more social. In addition to liveblogging, we tweet, track progress and play around with new tech, like Soundcloud bytes and video posts. It hasn't just helped to make the conference seem more relevant to young producers and developers; it's also warmed me to an industry facing torrents of scary change.

On the train ride home this year, my fellow liveblogger Stuart Dredge and I were texting gossip and jokes back and forth. Between laughs about how often we heard the word "disruption" that week, Stuart -- half in jest -- suggested we start a disruption blog. I made up the name, he bought the URL and we quickly told MIPBlog community manager James Martin, who immediately joined us.

That's how Disruptomatic was born. It's the fruit of our tongue-in-cheek (but generally optimistic) wombs -- mine, James' and Stuart's. Our axe is "technology disrupting media" -- it covers significant changes in TV, gaming, publishing and mobile. (Probably more, once we think of them.)

It sounds general but I do think this picks at a scab nobody's fully ripped off: real lay coverage of how seemingly fixed industries are mutating, forging digital roots and mutating again. And most of these industries were lucky: they had years to cash in on a business model that hasn't changed much in over two generations.

As technology advances with increasing speed, so does disruption: some people are already demanding disruption in SoLoMo, which hasn't had time to sort out business models that are nearly as fixed.

I also think we are well-positioned to give these topics the balance and multiple perspectives they deserve: Stuart regularly writes about music and apps, James is deep in the trenches of music and TV, and I regularly cover ads, technology and user behaviour.

Note that this version of the site is basically our "beta". We'll be launching a new design in the month to come, as well as an official logo.

For now, read along for the fun of it and follow us on Twitter: @Disruptomatic.

Meet David, the robot you want so desperately to have for a friend (if only because he's such an upgrade! from Data).

This jarringly real-ish promotion for "Weyland Corporation's" David is actually a promotion for Ridley Scott and Damon Lindelof's upcoming film Prometheus, which follows the crew of spaceship Prometheus as it explores an advanced alien civilisation, part of a quest for the origins of humanity.

What is interesting about this campaign is how hard Fox has worked to make the film's promotion as standalone-consumable as possible over the 'net and at events. This video, separated from its ties to a movie, could easily hold its own as a provocative and even bittersweet expression of the future we seem so eager to hurtle toward.

Prior to this, Fox treated February TED attendees to a TED Talk from 2023 by Weyland Corporation's own CEO (played by Guy Pierce). The promotion remained loyal to the spirit of TED, giving us plenty to think about while priming palates for the movie to come.

I am so walking all the way into the theatres and sitting down to see it. There may or may not be popcorn.

Originally posted here (new project! More on that later).

I just finished MIPTV, where I was liveblogging like crazy with fellow journo/blogger Stuart Dredge. This year MIPTV held an event called MIPCube, which focuses on better acquainting TV producers and network execs with the digital folks of whom they're so wary.

Over the weekend MIPCube hosted a Hack Day event in partnership with Rewired State. In short, a passel of hackers were put on a yacht and given less than 48 hours to hack something that would improve our TV experience. On Saturday night they presented all their projects, a whopping 12 of which 10 properly work and are now online.

But only one could win judges' hearts, and that was GrabMagic!, featured above. It was developed by Aral Balkan.

What I love about this Kinect hack is that it really does feel magical. It doesn't just produce a fluent connection between your TV and phone; it creates one between you and those devices as well. You behave like a connected organism, moving muscles without thinking, and that's beautiful.

During the Hack Day presentations I asked Aral how he avoids feature creep in his design. This was his response.

 As a designer, your greatest asset is the ability to say no. But that's simplistic - sometimes it's not your inability to say no, it's the structure of the organisation itself that doesn't allow you. If the organisation is design-led, it's easy; but otherwise designers may not have the authority.

A lot of organisations, because of their corporate cultures, because of their corporate structures, make simple design impossible. It isn't because of a team. That's very low level.

User experience begins at the top and trickles down.

See the other projects from the boat hack at MIPCube.

I'm at MIPTV to liveblog the sessions alongside The Guardian's Stuart Dredge and Fearless Leader James Martin. Here is our first-ever videoblog. More to come, and I'll be doing them, so huzzah for experiments!

This afternoon we'll be meeting a bunch of hackers on a yacht called the Mojito. Their challenge: to hack up some game-changing TV-mutating magic in the next 48 hours. Can't wait to see what they've got on the plate, but more crucially: will there be hot tub hacking?

Instead of embarrassingly self-important potential trainwrecks like The Pitch,* advertising could use a mockumentary-style series on what it is actually like to hear things like this all day. It can be a nice postmodern response to Mad Men that brings to light how many wrong turns you can take on your merry route to finding a brand's soul, not to mention the ongoing battles between clients and agencies on how that soul should manifest.

We'll just use satire to protect the innocent, and maybe along the way there will be those rare moments of gold and of conviction. But most of our players aren't Don Draper, though they all bloody well believe they are, and that can be part of the fun.

And the conferences! God, you could devote a whole thread to the conferences alone. Most industries use them to get trashed and forget work for a week; only in advertising do you find that people are getting trashed because they think it's making their ideas richer, fuller, more palatable. But after 4 days of sleeplessness and your eighth drink of the night, all that's really happening is that you've lost all capacity to catch subtle (and ever-increasing) human cues of disinterest and derision.

---


*It's possible that I'm being too hard on The Pitch. In a way it could be exactly the mockumentary I imagine, except not on purpose, and that will be just as good.

What work! Elegant, seductive and curiously timely given Mad Men’s return. After a day when most of the stuff you see and hear sounds verifiably insane and dangerously front-loaded, it feels almost like a wash to see an ad like this.

Not that today was like that. Today I had one of those meetings that actually yields something, with people who are smart and dry witted like vermouth, then got to travel home on a train, which is one of my most favourite things in the world to do. (They remind me of Amtrak trips down the coast with grandma.) So the last 24 hours were doubly awesome because I did those things and got to revisit this.

Designer Silvio Teixeira developed a poster that can be cut into 100 business cards which can also be brought together as a flip book. That sounds reasonably cool already, but the video makes it about a thousand times cooler. From Teixeira:

100 Ids is a project that defines my identity as a designer and it is also a self promotion campaign. The poster (50×70 cm) is cut to become 100 business cards and 1 video. The logo is a pseudo coat of arms that is reinvented in many ways to present my individuality.

Him: Salut. Have a good weekend?

Me: Yeah. You? Do anything special?

Him: Not really, I just relaxed.

Me: Yeah, me too.

Pause.

Him: If you really want to know, I planted tulips.

Me: Ooh. Yeah, I guess the weather was good for gardening.

Him: Not really, the weather was horrible. We just brought some bulbs back from a trip and I planted them.

Me: Oh.

Pause.

Me: So, plans to start the next Tulipomania?

Him: What?

Me: Never mind.

In keeping with AdVerveBlog reader Zed's incendiary appropriation of Banksy's anti-advertising manifesto, Melbourne's Art Series Hotels attracted guests and plenty of earned media by inviting them to stay the night and try to steal Banksy art hanging on the wall. If you could get it out of the hotel without getting caught, it was yours.

The hotel tracked the thieves via GPS so it could contact them afterward to send authentication documents and campaign follow-up. This looks like it was lots of fun and the hotel's stories about the burglary attempts are great. Even celebrities got in on the theftery. More importantly, it apparently also resulted in a 300% ROI and nearly 7 million impressions on Twitter alone.

So what are you guys waiting for? Go disrupt, go make culture. In the world of subversive anti-art, all's fair.

You can’t change your life all at once, but you can improve some things, and I suppose spring is as good a time as any because you’re in dust bunny-slaying mode anyway.

So here are a few nice changes I have made and quite like:

1. Regular cooking. It helps to have a partner in this programme, which I’m lucky enough to have. With time my eating experiments have become less hazardous, and hey, who would have guessed that zucchini had so many facets? A few months ago, who would have cared? (Short answer: not me.)
2. More physical activity. One thing I discovered about myself is that I get bored with over obvious rituals, so I’ve managed to keep this up by registering for a variety of things: the tango, swimming, yoga. It is okay if I only do one of these things a week, but on a great week I do all three. And sometimes I reward myself with hammam, which in my mind also counts as physical activity because wow, sweating is tiring.
3. Taking an online class on model thinking. This is actually pretty rigorous, but now I know how to calculate standard deviation and build decision trees. Think of all the applications!
4. Joining a writing workshop. It happens in April but the teacher has already given me homework: five minutes of daily freewriting on a random theme, which will apparently teach me how to divide my writing capabilities between the daily-grind mercenary stuff and creative pursuits. Today I wrote about mice, and curiously, five minutes is not nearly enough time to say everything I want to say about them.

Maybe in a year I will be significantly different as the direct result of one or all of these changes. But even if not, hopefully I’ll still know how to calculate standard deviation.