2010

Travel Diary: Paris pt1

Vincennes

This is Vincennes. It’s a suburb just outside of Paris where the family and I are going to be based for the next few months. It’s actually a lovely area with a beautiful park and a castle with a moat but no lava or dragons in the moat which is kind of a rip off if you ask me but whatever. Point is it really is a quaint and charming area. I took that photo all for effect.

I wanted to get in a travel diary update before I bounced out to the next place, while we are technically “based” here till the end of August I’m flying out at the end of this week for 2 weeks back in the US in various cities. Tara and Ripley will still be here though, and her mom is coming to visit them so they won’t be alone or bored, but you know, being alone and stuck in a lovely 3rd floor apartment overlooking a part in Paris.. worse things could happen.

My Travel Diary posts have not been as frequent as I expected them to be, however I unfortunately can’t say it’s because I’ve so caught up in writing the book. That is even more neglected. Well, neglected in the ‘failing to contribute new and valid content to’ meaning of the word, not neglected in the ‘staring at it every day without typing anything and thinking about it nonstop while doing things other than staring at it without typing’ kind of way. I’d blame writers block, but it’s really just me sucking. I need to stop, and I will, just so far I’ve been busier on this trip than I’d expected to be. I haven’t been completely unproductive in the authorial sense, and in fact wrote a piece for BoingBoing about an all too brief trip to Dublin that I took last week which should be live before too long (I’ll link to it when it is) and I have been making a lot of notes of things to spend more time on. I think there’s going to end up being more narrative bits in it. Originally I was thinking it would be more 2nd person philosophical rambling, but I’m thinking some more first hand stories will find their way in there.

OK, enough writing about writing.

I’m liking Paris much more this trip than I have in the past. I actually enjoyed my last trip here too, but this time feels much more comfortable. Staying in an apartment rather than a hotel (thanks Harold!) gives a much more homely feel, in a good way. And being in Vincennes rather than directly in Paris is nice. It’s a neighborhood, and when I say Bonjour to the lady at the corner market she seems to remember that yesterday I was there buying something else from her. That wouldn’t happen in the city where 500 other tourists have passed through the doors in between my visits. Of course I stick out a little bit because of the tattoos and all, but people don’t seem to mind and it’s really nice to be remembered. That’s kind of the obsession part of localism anyway isn’t it? Finding the place not only where you think you fit in, but a place that thinks you fit in. Being remembered by a corner market shop keeper is a pretty good fitting in marker I think. And it hasn’t hurt walking through some parts of town that feel a bit like Los Angeles, parts I definitely wouldn’t have seen if I was in a hotel off a main drag.

Paris streets

Except LA doesn’t have as many man purses.

What I haven’t gotten use to is the super long days. It’s fully daylight out until 10pm and dusk for another hour after that. The deceiving part is places still close around 8pm and on several occasions I’ve though about running to the store before it gets too late only to realize it’s already 9:30pm and everything is already locked up for the night. This messes up my schedule even more because I’m used to working many hours into the evening, which if my body doesn’t think evening begins until almost midnight makes for some really late nights and it’s hasn’t been infrequent to wake up realizing it’s already noon. That said, this isn’t a horrible thing for many reasons, not the least of which is the afore mentioned next leg of this trip to NYC that begins in a few days. This staying up super late and sleeping in super late is actually pretty much on normal hours for New York, so I won’t really have any adjusting when I get there.

It’s taken me almost 3 hours to write this little bit since I keep getting distracted by e-mails and twitter and whatever else so I’m going to just cut it off and will hopefully have more success another time..

Travel Diary: In Between

Passed out at NRT

We are currently back in Los Angeles for a few day pit stop between the Singapore and Paris legs of this trip. The main reason for this stop over was so Ripley could see his doctor for his 4 month check up. Dude turns 4 months old today and is apparently healthy as sin and in the 95% sizewise or something like that. Point is he’s doing good so no worries. The secondary reason for the trip was to swap luggage – drop off some of the ‘super duper hot weather gear’ we brought to Singapore and pick up some of the ‘it gets a little colder at night’ gear we might need for Paris. But since this trip also include jaunts out to Dublin, New York*, Denver*, Las Vegas*, Toronto, Montreal and Costa Rica (*for me at least) it takes a little bit more thinking ahead of time. I’ve had a bunch of random thoughts and observations flying through my head but non seemed worthy of their own post so I thought maybe I just collect them into a big cornucopia of randomness in one shot. Like to hear it here it goes.

  • This is the first time I’ve been to Los Angeles since moving here in 2001 that I didn’t have a place that was mine to “come home to” so to speak. We’re staying with friends, and I suspect that for the rest of my life I could always visit LA and stay with friends but doing so makes it feel like I’m visiting. And the feeling of visiting the place you think of as home is weird. To me anyway. I’ve talked about trying to figure out what home even is before, but for me it’s been Los Angeles. Not a specific place, just the city. Though without a specific place in it that is just mine, well it’s weird that’s all I can really say.
  • Sort of continuing on that same thought, this is short term and I know it. Even though some people jumped to conclusions I never planned to move out of LA, and this trip is still just a trip. When the trip is over, the final leg of the flights will end at LAX – but it was stupid to keep paying rent while we were going to be out of town for most of the year. So when we get back we’ll find a new place. Originally where that place would be was up for discussion. I wanted east side, Tara wanted Venice. We decided we’d have to weigh out pros and cons and compromise, but every time we talk about it there seems to be less compromise and more “we’re just moving to Venice.” I won’t lie, I dreaded the thought of moving west, but Venice surprised me and there are many things about it that I really like, but I also know Silver Lake still feels very much like my neighborhood and I miss it. I don’t really have a point to this other than that I’ll probably have a Venice address again before the end of the year.
  • Stuff I brought to Singapore and never once used: hooded sweatshirt, Jeans, beard clippers, cycling cap. Stuff I brought but used very very rarely: long sleeve dress shirts, long sleeve zip up t-shirt thingy. Stuff I brought multiples of that I probably could have brought a few less of: socks, underwear, cameras, headphones. Stuff I brought and used all the time and could have used more of: short sleeve Ben Sherman shirts. Stuff I brought and used but probably won’t take on the next leg: Clever Coffee Maker, baseball hat, big ass suitcase. Stuff I didn’t take on the last leg but will probably take on this next one: Hario V60. Stuff I didn’t have but wished I did: a Bike.
  • Speaking of the clever coffee maker vs the Hario v60. The CCM has it’s charms for sure, but I just could never get it dialed in just right. I was messing with grind size, messing with brew time, remessing with both of those and I just never felt like I had it right. With the V60 I’ve never felt like I had it wrong. It’s also smaller, so I’ll be swapping that out this time around. Bringing the V60 does present a little problem in that for it to really shine you need to use a slow drip kettle, like this one. I have one here in LA, but it’s really not good for traveling because it’s big and the spout is delicate and long… I just know that something is going to happen to it while it’s in my suitcase. I looked all over and there isn’t a more travel friendly version out there. There really should be. you’d think somewhere in my network of friends would be some industrial designer who could whip something up for me. Yeah, me too.

  • I’ve been failing on my writing goals, but also failing on my reading goals. This is likely because I “worked” a lot more in Singapore than I was expecting to. Lots of meetings. There are fewer people in Paris that I’ll need to meet with every day so I hope to make up for the slacking of the last month.
  • Some friends were telling me the story of how some delivery guys moved the wrong thing in their house the other day and accidentally broke about $10,000 worth of crystal that they’d had for some 20+ years. It was heartbreaking for the obvious reasons, but times had changed and that isn’t the kind of thing they’d spend money on these days and really only had for sentimental reasons. Now that it was forcefully removed from their lives, they both sad to see it go but had no intention of trying to replace it. This is interesting and fits right into what I’ve talked about in regards to stuff and how it ends up owning you. As long as we have it we fight for it and defend it and keep it with us all both physically and mentally, and that is hard to get away from and the thought of opting out of that is very difficult (would you just give away everything you had or could you find reasons to keep this or that?) yet when their feelings didn’t play into it, when they had no choice, when it was just gone, it was kind of a relief to them. I know people who have had their houses broken into and felt the same thing -stuff that was taken, that they never would have given away, they didn’t want to replace after the fact. I’ve felt the same thing, things I lost when my first marriage ended, that I didn’t think I could live without, once I realized I could, I didn’t want to replace them.

    This all makes me think about the stuff I still have and that I’ve been clinging on to. If it was gone tomorrow how much of it would I feel the need to replace? That is really hard to say objectively and abstractly, but honestly if every single book I have was just gone tomorrow I’d be really bummed, but I probably wouldn’t replace a single one of them. Same goes for DVDs. There are some CDs I have that I actually worked on that I think I’d have to get copies of again for my own archives, but not really because I ever listen to them in that format anymore. What about clothes? In talking about that previous discussion another friend was talking about travel and luggage, and how lost luggage means lost clothing, and even if the airlines pay to replace what is lost, they are replacing “2 t-shirts and a pair of pants” not “that t-shirt that I bought in Japan and when I saw that band play and is cut just right” or “those jeans I’ve had for 10 years and that fit me just perfectly and I love like a stepchild.” Part of my whole ‘uniform’ thoughts on clothing means I don’t have those attachments – yes I do have a box of t-shirts that were given to me at some point and mean something to me, but I never wear them. The clothes I wear are more utilitarian and replicateable. I can buy Dickies pants anywhere. Short sleeve plaid shirts are classic and ubiquitous. So while I would of course need to replace lost clothing because I don’t think walking around naked forever is a good idea, I don’t think I’d miss those “specific” articles.

  • I didn’t really trim my beard the whole time I was in Singapore and it’s getting a bit scary. I kind of hate it, but at the same time am hesitant to chop it off because I’ve got a whole month put into it so far. It’s actually itchy and annoying and I don’t really like what I look like with it. What the hell is my problem?

Clearly I’ve diverged into just rambling and since it’s almost 2am now I’m calling it a night. Will keep chewing on the above thoughts, we’ll see where they lead.

Why Neighborgoods Matters

The topic of having too much stuff isn’t new around these parts, and in fact I talk about it a lot. It’s a constant struggle for me as most of my life I’ve been a hyper collector of “things” and over the past few years I’ve been moving more and more in the direction of getting rid of it all. I’ll never really get rid of it all of course, but I desperately want to get it down to a bare minimum.

For me, this started a few years ago when some friends and I started sketching up the idea of Multibasing, specifically this part about hardware. The Multibasing think tank, as it were, was talking about what items we’d need to replicate in each of the locations. What are those things that everyone has but has little use for, that we’d be better off with just one that we all had access to. Do 6 people who are somewhat sharing a living space all need to own the same book? Like most of the Multibasing plans this never ended up happening, but it led to a lot of very thought provoking discussions among our group and bits and pieces of the overall idea have been realized in different ways.

One of the people who helped me shape those ideas was Micki Krimmel. She had the idea that it was pointless for her to go buy something when her friends had that same thing sitting unused at their house. Take a ladder for example – In most cases 99% of it’s life will be spent sitting in a closet or garage waiting for someone to use it. I actually owned a ladder when I lived in Gainesville, I bought it because I needed to get something out of a tree. I used it once, then moved it around for 3 years from apartment to apartment but never used it again, finally I gave it away. During that time I know many friends who had a need for a ladder and went and bought their own, only for it to suffer the same fate. Micki noted that if we’d all known who had a ladder and who needed one, we probably have just borrowed it instead of each person buying a new one.

This is a genius idea because of it’s simplicity, OF COURSE borrowing is better. It saves money, which can then be spent on things that are actually needed. It reduces the demand for an item, which means fewer of them will be sitting around unused at peoples houses, which means fewer of them will eventually get thrown out and end up in landfills. It makes things more useful, which means things that are designed to serve a purpose actually get used for that purpose. It reduces excess, there simply doesn’t need to be 10 copies of an item when one single item can be shared by 10 people just as effectively.

The problem is organizing who already has what, and what is available to be loaned out. Last year Micki launched Neighborgoods.net to deal with that problem specifically. It’s a quick and easy tool to list what you have that you are willing to share with your friends, and see what your friends have that you can use. Have a power drill sitting in your closet unused? List it on Neighborgoods and next week your friend might borrow it from you rather than buying their own, which would just end up unused in their own closet. Need a backpack for a trip? Check Neighborgoods and see if any of your friends have an extra one you can borrow rather than going out and buying one you only have a short need for. Because in most cases if you are going to borrow something from a friend, they probably need to live near you, the launch of this service was limited to Southern California. We were the lucky ones.

Since then she and the Neighborgoods team have been constantly tweaking, fixing, and upgrading the site. Talking to the users and finding out what works and what doesn’t and making it easier to use and offering better options. Want to share something only with a small subset of your connections? No problem. Want to make a group for new parents to pass around baby stuff that gets outgrown while it still has plenty of use left? Done. Have something you aren’t using, and probably won’t use that you just want to give away or maybe even sell? Got that covered too. Of course you could do all of these things before in various different ways, but they were all time consuming and daunting Do you really want to call 25 friends to see who has an umbrella you can borrow for your weekend trip to Portland? It’s easier just to go to the store and buy one for yourself. But Neighborgoods makes it easier to borrow instead.

Neighborgoods has been refined and perfected over the last year, and now it’s available nationwide.

I’m not just being exaggeratory here, I firmly believe that Neighborgoods will change the world. This is a world changing service. The best products/services/ideas are the ones that make your life easier – they shave you time, they save you money, they save you hassle. Neighborgoods does those all of those things while at the same time reducing the amount of waste we will generate that will end up in landfills. It saves you from buying things you don’t need, and lets the things you already have be put to better use.

But it also allows us to be social within our neighborhoods again. There was a time when people actually walked next door to borrow a cup of sugar from their neighbors. Nowadays most people don’t even know what their neighbors names are. Neighborgoods allows you to share your stuff with only your friends, and/or also with people who live near you. Our society is increasingly told not to talk to strangers -but everyone is a stranger until you have a reason to meet them. Neighborgoods makes it OK to be friends with the people who live near you again. It’s not just good for your wallet, for your storage problems, for the environment, it’s actually good for society as a whole. I whole heartedly believe this, and I’m so excited for and proud of what they are doing and I can’t wait to see where it goes from here. People launch sites and products every day, but few of them have the ability to impact your life for the better as much as Neighborgoods does. If you live in SoCal you probably already know this. If you live somewhere else in the US, this just changed your life and you don’t even know it yet – go sign up now.

(or watch this video, then sign up)

Watch This Intro Video! from sparky rose on Vimeo.

It actually makes a tangible difference in the overall health of our communities.

Audience vs Monetization, which comes first?

This topic has come up a several different times in many different circles over the last few weeks so I thought I’d make a post about it just to sort of document some of my thoughts on it. I’ve been talking to companies and groups about their situations and trying to help them isolate their current problem or bottle neck. Often times people know something isn’t working right, but aren’t sure exactly what the problem is and an outside perspective can sometimes help make things more clear and that is where I come in. It’s been a little surprising to me how frequently the problem has boiled down into one of two things:

1. They have an audience but don’t know how to monetize it.
(aka traffic but no business plan)

or

2. They have a good business plan but no audience or idea how to attract one

Which of these problems people have often comes from their approach – are they trying to make something cool or are they trying to make a business. Not that there is anything wrong with either of those approaches, and in fact both should be on your mind, but one without the other will lead to one of the above problems, and one of those problems is definitely better to have than the other. People often confuse this with the “build it and they will come” idea which isn’t really reliable because some people think “it” can be anything, but really “it” needs to be something awesome for that to work. Most people aren’t awesome product factories so there are other aspects that need to be considered.

“Would I want to use thing?” is a fantastic question to ask yourself. I asked an entrepreneur that the other day about the product they were pitching me on and it stopped him cold, he thought about it, and then told me he wasn’t really the person he was building it for and it would be much more helpful to a different kind of person. I don’t need to tell you anything else about that other than that and you should know it’s likely going to fail because the guy isn’t invested in his own product. He’s not trying to solve a problem he is having, he’s trying to solve a problem he thinks someone else is having. Really it’s a solution without a problem. And while it might have positive numbers in all the right places in the business plan, if no one ever uses it.. ? Well, you get the idea.

I think in a lot of situations people have this idea of getting everything perfect before they launch so drilled into their heads that they lose sight of the original idea. At some point they thought of this product and thought it might be fun or useful or cool for people, or might make their own lives easier and decided to get it built. But along the way they got more focused on the finances and exactly how much they will make from each user and by the end what they’ve built isn’t fun or useful or cool and doesn’t make anyones life easier. It doesn’t matter if you will make $100 from every user every month if only 1 out of ever 10,000 people to your site signs up, and you only get 10 people to your site a day. See the problem?

Conversely if you make something cool, something that people find useful and that makes their lives easier, they will use it and they will tell their friends to use it. Having thousands upon thousands of people going to your site or using your product is great even if you don’t know how to capitalize from that, because that allows you room to figure it out. Doing tests on an existing audience is easy, not so much the other way around.

It’s because of this I’ve been telling people to stop worrying about perfection, get their produce out there and see if people find it useful, if they don’t, what changes can be made to make it useful? Tweak, tweak, tweak until it makes sense to the users – then figure out where the cash is. If it doesn’t make sense to the users, well, time for a new idea.

Travel Diary: Singapore pt1

Astute readers will know that a few weeks ago I packed up all my worldy possessions sans a suitcase or two and put them in storage. Tara did too and we gave up our lease in Venice Beach in favor of a loose 9 month travel plan. It’s part opportunity, we had some offers come up all at the same time that made sense to accept, it’s part experiment, to see what it’s like to live without a set place of residence for an extended chunk of time, part reminder that stuff just gets in the way of life, and it’s the experiences that really make it worth waking up every day.

The first 30 days of this journey find us in Singapore once again. I’ve been here several times over the last year though Tara hasn’t been here since the first “guided tour” trip that brought us here last September. Because of that I’ve seen a bit more of the real Singapore and she’s had nothing but that “one office building to the next” viewpoint to go on, I was hoping to change that a bit with this trip. Because of the work I’m doing with Neoteny Labs and HackerspaceSG I expect to spend some time here every few months at least so it can only help to have a better grasp of the territory.

I originally thought Chinatown was going to be culture filled bastion away from the overly clean and sterile majority of the country, but having spent a bit of time there I don’t find it to be that different from any other Chinatown in any other city. Maybe a few more temples and street vendors, but for the most part it’s not too new. What I do find new, and admittedly this could just be because of my lack of experience with these cultures, but I really enjoy the Arab Street area. The hackerspace is located just off Arab St and we’re hoping to get the offices for Neoteny Labs there too.

People told me the food there would be the draw but really that’s just a small piece of it, because shockingly there isn’t a ton of veggie options there. There is an all vegan spot called Living Greens but as you might guess from the name it’s a little more on the hippie tip, but it’s good for sure. There is a lot of middle eastern food around, but nothing that really jumps out to me as amazing. My friend Bassel from Syria says not only is it not stand out, it’s not even good enough to be considered a reasonable attempt. But it’s a quieter area with a lot of shops selling colorful fabrics and cafes with tables spilling out onto the sidewalk where people hang out eating and drinking coffee (or what is called kopi here, which is really the furthest thing from coffee) all day which makes it pretty comfortable. And it gets better at night when the sun goes down and the breeze picks up and the smell of hookas is in the air. There is also a mosque there which broadcasts the call to prayer a few times a day which just adds to the atmosphere and even though I’m not religious at all makes it feel pretty welcoming. This is also the area of town where the graffiti artists have opened up street wear shops so it has that going for it as well. Of all the streets in the area, Arab St is actually the largest and most traffic filled which makes it the least cool to hang out on.Brassorah St and Haji Lane are much better, Haji especially which is basically a walking street that is barely wide enough for one car to drive down, and at night it’s so full of people hanging out on pillows and folding chairs it’s definitely foot traffic only.

Anyway, that is Arab St. There are people dressed in traditional middle eastern robes with big beards hanging out next to Singaporian hipsters and hackers. I love it.

Dinner panorama

Where I have been finding good food is Little India, which probably isn’t surprising at all. There are tons of South Indian and “pure vegetarian” spots which have more than enough to fill my belly. I’ve been eating tons of idly recently thanks to this. And a gang of dosas. One of the first nights in town Tara and I walked through Little India with Ripley to meet some friends for dinner at a little half gallery, half cafe, half community center called Post Museum (where I had an awesome soy, almond, date smoothie thingy) and she said it was definitely the closest thing to India she’d ever seen outside of India, but noted that even in that it was a lot cleaner. And in Singaporian standards it’s not really that clean. It’s definitely packed with character and there are people hanging out on the corners and curbs and parks at all hours but given that it is Singapore you can walk down dark alleys with not much concern. And it’s one of the few places in central city you can see cats and dogs walking around which I think is kind of a good thing.

I’ve been spending a lot of time working and bouncing between meetings in assorted university and governmental buildings but we did get a chance to break from the norm and head about 10 minutes away by taxi to the Bukit Timah nature reserve the other day and saw monkeys all over the place. It’s easy to forget sometimes, when traveling from one air conditioned mall filled with Rolex and Timberland shops to another airconditioned mall filled with Adidas and Starbucks shops via their air conditioned underground tunnel, that we are kind of in a jungle right on the equator. Going out to the nature reserve was a good reminder of that, and while we didn’t really go hiking or anything like that, having monkeys all over the place – around you, above you – is the kind of thing that you could never experience in North America. You don’t always realize those things until they smack you in the face, almost literally.

I brought my biggest suitcase with me on this trip, a large size zero halliburton which I previously used to transport artwork in. I thought it was indestructible. I was wrong. All three of the big metal clasps that keep it closed were ripped the hell off somewhere between LA and here which means I won’t be returning with it and need to find a replacement. I’m thinking of getting something one size smaller both to make it easier to travel with as well as to help restrict the things I bring with me. It’s been two weeks and there are a few things I brought that I haven’t touched and obviously didn’t need to bring, as well as a few things sitting in LA that I wish I had. We checked out some of the luggage shops in the larger malls and they are really pricey, which I don’t mind because I need something that can withstand a lot of use, but we’re going to check out this other place called Mustafa as well which I’ve been told can have all kinds of hidden deals. Either way I’ll likely be picking up a new suitcase in the next week or two so I’ll let you know what I decide on when I get it.

The sun is starting to go down which is my que to get mobile and head out for some kind of adventure so I’m going to wrap this up here. Let me know if you like these kind of diary posts, I kind of enjoy putting it all down on paper but I’m not sure if it’s interesting to anyone besides me.

Creativity is just connecting things

This quote by Steve Jobs has been flying around recently even though it’s a few years old but it’s really good and I wanted to talk a little about it. Here’s the full thing:

“To design something really well you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to thoroughly understand something – chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that. Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask a creative person how they did something, they may feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after awhile. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or have thought more about their experiences than other people have.

Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. They don’t have enough dots to connect, and they en up with very linear solutions, without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better designs we will have.”

This isn’t just really good, it’s really, really good. That’s 2x the really. Really. It’s so good because while it’s specifically about design it actually applies so much more, and actually goes a long why in helping me describe what it is that I do – even though that answer might still be confusing to some people.

Steve is talking about design, and likely product design at that, but I think the essence of this is the need for lots of points of reference and lots of dots to connect. And the need fully digest something to be able to isolate those points worth connecting. Think about your favorite movie, how many times have you seen it? I’ve talked to people before who when mentioning a movie say something like “oh that is one of my absolute favorite movies ever! I’ve probably seen it 5 or 6 times!!!” This doesn’t make any sense to me because movies that I simply enjoy a lot I’ve seen over 10 times, and movies I really love easily over 100. I couldn’t even tell you how many times I’ve watched The Big Lebowski for instance, but it’s enough that I know almost every line by heart and have stared at each scene and studied how they were put together for hours. This is the difference between just watching something and really getting it. Of course Steve isn’t talking about watching movies, and neither am I really, it’s just a simple example of how really getting into something means different things to different people.

It’s no secret that I’m a very obsessive person who has to regularly fight the compulsion to collect things. I’ve been this way my whole life even if I only realized it in the last 5 years. I find something interesting and for some chunk of time that becomes my entire world. I fall asleep and wake up thinking about it. I dream about it and day dream about it. I endlessly research it and try to find the people who know the most about it and try to soak up as much of that information as possible. I immerse myself in that world until I feel like I get it. Sometime I get it in a few weeks, sometimes it takes years. And once I do feel like I’ve really “groked” something, I rarely leave it behind, even if it doesn’t continue to be my all encompassing daily routine. In fact, often it continues to expand – usually because of bits and pieces I fine in later obsessions.

In many cases my obsessions take up so much of my time that I end up needing to find a way to justify the time I’m spending on them and end up turning them into businesses. If you look at my history this becomes pretty obvious. My record label spawned from an obsession with punk rock in general and subcultures like youth crew straight edge hardcore movement specifically. My record distribution company spawned from an obsession with how those subcultures grow and manifest themselves. My design firm spawned from obsessions with advertising in general and the emotional responses imagery can provoke in people specifically. While I never actually started a real business from it, it was my obsession with old Japanese toys in general and Jumbo Machinders and Sofubi Kaiju specifically that drove me to the web and got me creating things there. Before these toys and the community I found around them online I mostly used the internet for one off communication and minor games, the toys gave me a reason to write articles, do research, take phones and try to actually build something. (My first “blog post” predates blogs considerably, and was a guest article in the mod 90’s on Alen Yen’s Toybox about an 18″ knock off Getter Robo figure I’d won on ebay.) Continued obsession with arts, and my growing connections to visual artists as the creative director led to my involvement in the art gallery world, and continued obsession with web communities and relationships led to the launch of blogging.la.

Not everything has had a justifiable business come from it – lots of the things I’ve collected have been from obsessions that lasted only as long enough for me to track down a bunch of them, learn enough about where they came from and what was drawing me to them. Sometimes I just collect images of them. Some of those things stick around, some are sold to make room for the next thing, but the info and knowledge I amassed from studying them carries on into everything else. I learned print production from designing concert flyers at kinkos. I learned product design from seeing the difference between how Ark and Popy designed toys for the same robot characters with vastly different results. (image above is a rendition of Baltan by Popy on the left, and Ark on the right) I learned marketing from touring with punk bands. I perfected trend spotting by hanging out in fixed gear bike shops in LA and Tokyo. I sharpened attention to detail by watching baristas at Intelligentsia craft the perfect cup of coffee again and again. I learned business best practices by sitting in the lobby of technology conferences and listening to what people said about others -who did they have respect for and why, and who didn’t they. Most recently my obsession with the D.I.Y. culture that fueled much of my punk rock years has drawn me to hackerspaces. I spent years hanging out in European hackerspaces before attempting to open one myself. It’s a different world for sure, but many of the underlying themes are constant. That chapter in my life is still being written.

Travel has also been a massively important piece of this – going to many places regularly and surrounding myself with interesting people gives me a much better perception of who is doing what and why, and where similarities pop up and dots that need to be connected. When I talk to people and companies, I’m able to draw from all these experiences. Otaku level knowledge only comes from immersive obsessions, and I’ve spent a lot of my life collecting obsessions.

This existence isn’t all roses and sunshine – part of the trade off with always trying to find new and exciting things means to make room in my head for it I often have to leave less shiny uninteresting things in the past. In means I need to see a pattern developing before I recognize new threads. It means I’m rarely content with my surroundings and when I have 5 free minutes I need to find something to fill them with. It means I go through cycles of insomnia because something I’m so excited about something new that I can’t shut off my brain to sleep.

But I wouldn’t have it any other way. I can’t imagine looking at the world through any other viewpoint and I love being able to help people see their projects from another perspective. I love tying things together. And these things all become part of my repertoire, part of my arsenal. I know that doesn’t really answer the “what do you do” question any better, but hopefully it sheds a little more light on the process.