It was my pleasure to give the inaugural talk at the first Creative Mornings here in Austin last month. The monthly theme was “The Future,” so I tried to make the talk a sort of rallying cry to encourage future presenters and attendees to open up and share the process of their creative work, not just the products of that process. (That happens to also be the subject of my next book.)

If you don’t want to watch the video, I’ve pasted my notes and a few slides from the talk below. Enjoy.

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It’s weird to try to give a talk about the future, because most of the time, talks like this are actually about THE PAST. A speaker is asked to get up on stage and talk because they’re someone who’s accomplished something, so they must have something to say, some sort of wisdom or experience or advice to impart to the audience.

But I happen to think that most advice is autobiographical — a lot of the time when people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the past.

Now, we usually think that the past is behind us, and the future is in front of us. This seems totally natural, right? But years ago I read about this tribe of indigenous people in South America called the Aymara, and they have this very different way of talking about the past and the future.

When they talk about the past, they point to the space in front of them. When they talk about the future, they point behind them. Strange, right?

Well, the reason they point ahead of them when talking about the past is because the past is known to them — the past has happened, therefore it’s in front of them, where they can see it.

The future, on the other hand, is unknown, it hasn’t happened yet, so it’s behind them, where they can’t see it.

This kind of blew my mind when I read about it. The past is right in front of us, but the future is behind us.

The future is hard to talk about because it hasn’t happened yet — it’s behind us, where we can’t see it.

About five months ago I became a parent.

Now, if you follow me on Instagram, you know that I post a lot of pictures of my kid. I’m so used to sharing stuff on the internet that sometimes I forget that the people in my life actually read what I post.

So a few months after Owen was born, I slipped away to have a drink with one of my friends. He asked me how I liked being a dad. I told him what I tell everyone — that becoming a dad was simultaneously the best and the worst thing to ever happen to me.

I told him that yes, it was wonderful, and that I loved Owen, but I was fundamentally unprepared for what a physical, mental, and spiritual endeavor fatherhood turned out to be.

My kid’s a good baby, but if you’ve ever been around babies, you know that even the sweetest baby in the world can still be a complete monster.

People had told me how tough it was, but nobody quite conveyed to me how distressed and insane sleep deprivation would make me and how absolutely full of despair I would feel for that first month.

As my friend listened to me talk, this kind of shocked and horrified look came over his face. He said, “But, your Instagram feed…everything looks so perfect.”

And he was right: if you looked at my Instagram feed, you might get the impression that I was dad of the year — 100% in love with his kid, 100% in love with being a dad.

There’s been so much talk lately about “authenticity” online — this insane idea that you can really tell who or what someone is and how they are doing just by what they show you of themselves on the internet. That social media is somehow a more “authentic” way of presenting yourself, warts and all, to the world.

As if it weren’t, in fact, making it easier to invent more perfect, alter egos for ourselves — as if we aren’t carefully selecting and choosing the bits and pieces of our life to show each other — and as if “IRL,” we didn’t already choose what bits and pieces to show the world.

Inevitably, you start measuring your own life against what you see of the life of others online. I thought about all my friends with kids I follow on Instagram, and all the cutespam they post just like me, even though I know from our face-to-face chats that their struggles are mostly the same as mine.

I started thinking about my ambivalence, and my conflicted thoughts about parenting, and whether or not I was doing a disservice to all the potential parents out there — painting this rosy, photoshopped, filtered portrait of what it’s like… only telling half of the story.

I wondered if maybe there should be a kind of “shadow gallery” on Instagram — a place where you post pictures of parenting at its worst.

Pictures of meltdowns.

Pictures of you at your most haggard.

Pictures that betray the fact that you really have no idea what you’re doing.

Of course, then I started thinking about a “shadow gallery” for artists.
Because creative work is sort of like parenting — it’s a hard, dirty, and sometimes frustrating process that usually gets portrayed with a heavy dose of romanticism.

This woman once came up to my wife, and she said, “Oh, it must be so inspiring, living with such a creative.” And my wife said, “Oh yeah, it’s like living with da Vinci.”

I think we’re living through this kind of mass fetishization of creativity. You can see it in the way we use the word “creative” as a noun to describe someone. I think we’re in danger of creativity becoming a fashion, instead of a tool in someone’s toolbelt.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes when I read these design blogs, and I see these designers in their perfect lofts, with big windows and hard-wood floors, perfectly decorated with vintage furniture… it gives me this sort of inferiority complex.

Because my life…does not look like that.

Of course, the problem with a Shadow Gallery is the same problem with its opposite — if you tilt things too far either way, that too gives a skewed picture.

Anyways, this shadow gallery idea has got me thinking about the future for Creative Mornings in here Austin. We have this great opportunity — we can make this thing what we want. We can think about the spirit in which we want to present represent ourselves and our work to each other.

In chapter 6 of my book Steal Like An Artist, I laid out what I thought was the “big secret” to connecting with an audience: “Do good work and share it with people.”

But when I was on book tour, I still had people coming up to me asking me for advice, still asking me what was the big secret to getting discovered.

So, I started picking apart this line, and I realized that there are at least three ways to potentially misinterpret this advice.

First up is the word “good.” On the whole, I think artists are terrible judges of their work.

I’m probably best known for these things called newspaper blackout poems. Now, when I first started making these, I thought they were kind of stupid. I just thought they were little writing exercises. But I had just started my blog, and I needed new posts, and I knew nobody was reading it anyways, so I started blogging these.

And to tell you the truth, I only did about a dozen or so of them before I got distracted and stopped making them.

Then, about a year later, a blog called 37 Signals somehow found and linked to this particular poem, and I got a big spike in traffic, and a bunch of new subscribers.

Then about a month later, a newspaper up in Canada ran a full page spread of them.

And I was feeling weird that I was getting attention for something I didn’t even do anymore, so I decided to try making one of the poems a day.

And eventually, because I kept doing them, I got better at them, and they became interesting to me.

And after a year or two of posting a poem almost every day, more and more people took notice, and I heard from an editor at HarperCollins who asked if I’d ever thought about a book, and I said, “hell yes, I’ve thought about writing a book.”

And a few years later, my first book, Newspaper Blackout, came out.

None of this would have happened if I’d only stuck to posting work that I thought was serious, or “good.”

Part of the reason I love the internet so much is that I can put stuff up and if it sucks, nobody will say anything, but if it’s any good, I’ll know, because somebody will tell me.

Half my career has sailed off the wind broken by stuff that I thought was just me farting around.

Second up is the word “work”: most artists know that their work is really a never-ending, evolving process, full of ups and downs. And yet, most artists only choose to share their perfect, finished products.

I’ve always wanted to be a writer, and a huge part of the process of becoming a good writer is being a good reader.

So when I was first starting out, I’d try to go to any book reading I could get to. And I’d bring my sketchbook with me and draw the writers, and take notes.

But then when I got home, instead of just letting my notes and my sketches sit in my notebook, I’d post them to my blog. And I noticed that not only did people seem to dig these recaps, oftentimes I’d hear from the writers themselves. (People love it when you draw them.) That’s when I found out that if you want to make friends with someone on the internet, just say nice things about them. Everybody has a Google alert on their nme.

Then, I figured, well, I’m drawing author readings, why not draw books, too? So I started drawing the books I read.

And this was a really important part of starting out for me when I didn’t have a lot of my own work to show — I could show the work of others. I could kind of learn in public.

And then, when I started posting a lot of my own work, I tried to blog a lot about my process — I tried to make sure that what I posted was the opposite of all those perfect Moleskine sketchbooks you see online. I wanted people to see my thinking on the page, thinking that was often messy.

And after I finished my first book, while I was waiting for it to be published, I tried to blog about the process of making the book, treating it like a movie, posting my special features and deleted scenes.

I did the same for Steal Like An Artist.

And now with the new book I’m writing, I keep a Tumblr where I actually blog about all the research I’m doing in real time, while I’m writing the thing. My tumblr is less like a sketchbook, and more like a scrapbook of inspiration.

And guess what? About five times as many people follow me on Tumblr than my personal blog.

It turns out that a good deal of my “work” has been pointing to the work of others.

Third up is the word “share.” A lot of artists think sharing their work is merely a matter of putting it where people can see it, but sharing really means opening up and having a relationship with your audience, letting them talk back to you and work alongside you, and learning something from them.

When I put out Newspaper Blackout, I decided I wanted to be really open about the technique and encourage people to try it. When I did readings, I made it a point to never read from the book — instead, I’d do a brief slideshow about the technique, and then we’d get out newspapers and markers and everyone would make their own poems. And then this amazing thing would happen — people would actually get up and read their own poems!

And then I’d get emails from teachers who would use the poems in their classrooms, and get all these cool pictures of students displaying their work.

And I realized that there needed to be a place where I could post not just my poems, but other people’s poems. So I started NewspaperBlackout.com, a place where I post my poems and poems from readers all over the world.

And it’s awesome because a lot of the poems are actually really good and people take the technique to places that I couldn’t have imagined — I find a lot of stuff to steal from them.

And guess what? If five times as many people read my tumblr than my blog, over 20 times as many people read NewspaperBlackout.com.

Now, I know that follower count is just a sort of arbitrary measure of success, but even so, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the less of my ego is involved and the more my readers are involved, the more popular my projects tend to be.

So where am I going with all this? Well, I still think “do good work and share it with people” is good advice, but I started scratching around for something else.

Last year, I was reading my friend Mike Monteiro’s great book, Design Is A Job, and there’s this bit about explaining design work to clients, where he writes, “This isn’t magic, this is math. Show your work.”

I decided to take Mike’s quote out of context and steal it for the title of my next book.

Because I think there’s so much that we can learn by opening up and sharing the creative process. I’m really happy that Creative Mornings is here in Austin — but I think if we’re going to do this, if we’re going to get together every month, we should do so in a true spirit of generosity and openness.

So I want to lay down a challenge for us.

I hope we’ll not just talk about finished work, but talk about our works-in-progress.

I hope we’ll show work we’re not 100% sure about yet.

I hope we’ll talk not just about what we’ve figured out, I hope we’ll talk about what we haven’t figured out.

I hope, like the Aymara, we’ll talk about not just what’s in front of us that we can see, but what’s behind us, what we can’t see.

I hope we’ll show our successes, but we’ll also show our failures. The good and the bad and the ugly of doing creative work.

And finally, I hope we take advantage of the structure — the speaker talks, then we all talk. I hope we don’t just see ourselves as speaker and audience, I hope we see ourselves as co-conspirators.

And I hope that somehow by being open and hanging out together and sharing what we know and what we don’t know, we’ll all learn from each other.

Because I think that’s what the future looks like.

I think Austin is the perfect place to do this. Despite all the development and condos and everything, it’s still a laid-back, supportive small town where there aren’t a lot of fevered egos.

So, let’s show our work.

by Mike Dang

Fast Company takes a look at how companies use colors to trigger specific emotions out of people. I mean, Oreos™ are pretty dependable!

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Spend a day at any Partners In Health site and there’s a good chance you’ll hear a phrase you’re unfamiliar with. Perhaps it’s a clunky acronym or polysyllabic drug name. But don’t worry: Keeping up with the ever-evolving world of global health is hard, even for insiders. In Need to Know, we cut through the complexity and deliver the most pertinent and interesting information on a single subject. Today, we fill you in on the Malawi Household Chart. 

What is it?

The Household Chart seems pretty basic at first glance. It’s a two-page, paper form that looks like a simplified medical chart. But this chart—and the data it collects—has revolutionized the way PIH’s village health workers (VHWs) in Malawi do their jobs. The Household Chart is a data collection sheet that helps VHWs gather information about the health and social conditions of the families they serve. 

Why is it important?

Because VHWs live among PIH’s patients and visit them regularly, they’re able to closely monitor the pulse of the community. If a pregnant mother gets sick or a river floods homes that are nearby, VHWs are among the first to know. VHWs use the Household Chart to collect information during monthly visits to each household in their village. The chart prompts questions such as, “Have you been tested for HIV?” and “Have you been coughing for the past weeks?”—questions that allow us to identify patients who are at increased risk and provide social assistance or medical care where needed. PIH uses the combined information from hundreds of VHWs to monitor the health of entire communities. If they require services, PIH will refer or accompany them to the nearest health facility so that they receive the care they need.

Where does it come from?

The Household Chart was developed by the PIH team in Malawi based in part from lessons shared by the PIH team in Rwanda. Working with VHWs and clinicians, the Malawi team identified the information that VHWs could collect, and then designed the Household Chart forms to be as easy as possible to use. 

Why do you need it?

Accurately collecting, summarizing, and using large amounts of paper-based data is a huge undertaking. When summarizing figures from hundreds of different charts into an electronic database, it’s easy to introduce errors that make the data unreliable and less useful for making decisions about PIH’s programs.

How do you know the data collected are accurate?

We partnered with researchers at Harvard Medical School to apply an approach called Lot Quality Assurance Sampling (LQAS) to evaluate the quality of Household Chart data. LQAS is a technique used in manufacturing to evaluate the quality of, for example, a batch (or “lot”) of T-shirts that a factory produces. Instead of having to look at each T-shirt to determine its quality, LQAS allows the manufacturer to take a sample of T-shirts and determine if the quality of the lot of T-shirts is acceptable. PIH uses the same approach with Household Chart data. Using LQAS allows PIH staff to examine only a few Household Charts from a health center (the lot) and decide whether the summary data quality from dozens of VHWs is statistically good enough to produce reliable results.

Does it work?

Yes. The LQAS quality control efforts have made the Household Chart data more accurate and usable, according to peer-reviewed findings published in Public Health Action. Before LQAS started, four out of PIH’s five household chart areas had low data quality; after eight months of using LQAS to identify poor data quality and focus data quality improvement efforts, all five areas had high data quality. The results have been so positive that we’re now exploring ways to use the Household Chart and LQAS at other PIH sites around the world. 

Can I see one?

Sure. Below is a sample of the Household Chart. PIH has made a great effort to ensure the format and questions of the Household Chart are simple and intuitive for VHWs to use.

 

I love Ourit Ben-Haim’s series of photographs of people reading books in the subway—partly because I relate to it, and partly because the portraits are of people whose heads are some place else entirely. They’re almost not even really there, they’ve been transported in a different way.

We  ♥ ”newspaper blackout” artist Austin Kleon. And it’s no secret we also ♥ Stephen Colbert. So imagine our delight when we saw Colbert making his mark on marker art:

http://newspaperblackout.com/post/51224118196/stephen-colbert-shows-you-how-to-make-blackout

Take a metronome. Then take another. Then another. Set them ticking at different times. Look. Lift. (That's the key part.) Watch. Then Laugh. Because you will be dumbfounded.

» E-Mail This     » Add to Del.icio.us

Warning: Your heart may or may not burst.

These two toddlers who had never met before, but decided to hug it out in the middle of an airport terminal.

Source: imgur.com  /  via: reddit.com

This young stranger who offered to help an elderly man to his destination.

Source: imgur.com  /  via: reddit.com

This police officer who stopped to help a limping dog safely cross the street in the rain.

Source: imgur.com  /  via: reddit.com

This rushed airport traveler who cut the line then thought better of it.

Source: reddit.com  /  via: reddit.com

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So you found a new place! It’s all wonderful and exciting until you start to think about how much crap you have.

Pack an overnight bag containing all the essentials.

Chances are, you'll be too tired to unpack your things. You'll want your essentials within easy access, including a change of clothes if you're going back to work the next day as well as all your toiletries. It's also a great way to transport a laptop, which could run the risk of getting stolen during a move.

Source: clutchbags.com

Pack the items you will need FIRST in a clear plastic bin.

This includes things like a box cutter, paper towels, trash bags, eating utensils, select cookware, power strips, phone chargers, toilet paper, tools, etc. The clear bin allows you to see inside; it also separates itself from the myriad of cardboard boxes.

Source: theloudandclear.com

Wrap your breakables (dishes, glasses, etc.) in clothing to save on bubble wrap.

Two birds, one stone: you're packing your clothes and kitchenware at the same time.

Source: blog.makezine.com

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For the release of To Repair the World, Paul Farmer's new book of speeches to young people, we asked supporters to share their advice to the next generation. Here are our top picks.

Believe a better world is possible

Never lose your fierce idealism. Let it be tempered by pragmatism, humility, and a willingness to learn, but never let anyone tell you that the better world you imagine is not possible. It is, through the power of partnership. - Emi K.

The data have done their job

It is our moral imperative to realize global health equity in our lifetime. This is not an easy task, but my murky vision of truth involves conveying the message that we need everyone’s hearts, minds, imagination, resources, and friendship to see this job to the end.  We have mountains of evidence reminding us that all signs point to poverty, oppression, and structural violence. And, until we collectively step up and systematically take care of every single person all of the time, we will find ourselves stumbling back into structures that add to collective despair rather than support human potential. My murky vision of truth tugs at my conscience and constantly reminds me that the data have done their job, and now the time has come to do ours. - Ashley D.

Five words

Five simple words: Be kind to each other. - Aziz H.

Think differently, imagine boldly, and act collectively

Our generation of health advocates stands on the shoulders of giants, to be sure: Giants who have improved the lives of thousands, who have forged change in small pockets of communities across the globe. Now we must find a way to make health justice the rule, to fight for equal health access and opportunity: to change the lives of millions. We cannot do this alone. Rather, we must build trusted partnerships -- across all disciplines, races, languages, and geographic communities -- rooted in our shared values of respect for human dignity, health equity and justice. We must challenge ourselves and each other to think differently, imagine boldly, and act collectively. And we must do it now.” - Amy T.

See through new eyes

In my work, I am fortunate enough to work with refugees from all over the world. Sometimes when I am working with a skilled interpreter, the interpreter will turn to me and say, "This might take a little longer because we don't have that concept in our culture." When we open ourselves to other cultures, we begin to develop the amazing capacity to see through new eyes, to hear through new ears, and to think from different perspectives. When we bring these new eyes, ears, and perspectives to bear on problems that have long been considered intractable, new solutions emerge, new energy is generated to push toward solutions, and new faith enters our hearts that even the most difficult problems can be solved. - Loren B.

Contribute to the next generation

When you actively seek to collaborate rather than passively accepting the effects of collaboration you will find people willing and interested in what you have to say. You may not always convince others to follow your ideas, but every single time you share them you leave a little bit of yourself behind. Please look around you and think of the generations that came before and contribute to the next generation. You are using the resources past generations left for you and you're adding what you have to them for the people who are to come. Spread your ideas wide, share yourself broadly, and collaborate actively. - Greg K.

Be driven by something grand

Some things are easy. Positive world change is not one of those things. My motto is: "You can't not do something, if the only reason not to is laziness." This motto gets me out of bed in the morning, pushes me through my 3 p.m. lethargy, gets my butt to volunteering after work. The reason my motto works for me is simple: I do not want laziness to be the primary motivation of my life. I want something greater, something more noble, something that helps others, to be the determining factor of my actions, and thus, my identity. If you ever think "should I?" but hesitate, or procrastinate, or give up, I can tell you that I was once like that, but am no longer. Let your life be driven by something as grand. Your life deserves it. - Annie D.

Always good advice

Be good to your mother. - Jim W.

The next time you're trying to talk your way out of a speeding ticket, try offering the officer a handful of fuzzy, dawdling ducklings. Police have a big soft spot for baby ducks, sometimes dropping everything just to assist them in crossing the road.

The latest instance of heroic cop-duck action comes from Portland, Oregon, a city known for its everything-bird obsessiveness. This Mother's Day, Officer Mark James clocked a speeder doing 52 mph in a 35 zone and zoomed off in pursuit. He must've been an eagle-eyed fighter pilot before picking up a badge, because somehow he noticed on the gloomy asphalt ahead a fluffy, ankle-high movement. Duuuucks!

"It was pretty good vision on his part to even see them in the road, with the gray weather we had that day," says Sgt. Pete Simpson, a spokesman for the Portland Police Bureau.

Officer James stopped his cruiser right there on Northwest Bridge Avenue and guided the ducks – a mother and her waddling progeny – onto the grassy shoulder. He did so despite there being "no regulation about stopping for ducks," says Simpson, and also risking a chewing-out from the Chief. Which wouldn't happen, actually, because he seems to love ducks, too.

"I think the chief would definitely side with officer," says the spokesman. "While traffic enforcement is important to save lives, running over a mama duck and her ducklings is not going to fare well for the agency."

Would this story have turned out differently if the officer was motoring down upon a family of smelly skunks? Or, say, a frothing-rabid possum?

Nope. "It wouldn't be all right to drive over animals," says Simpson. "We would discourage the intentional ramming of any fauna in the neighborhoods."

As it happens, this isn't the first time Portland's finest have interrupted their normal duties to pluck a hapless animal from doom's snapping maw. When a juvenile red-tailed hawk fell from its building perch in 2011, an officer was there to scoop it from the sidewalk and take it to the animal clinic. And this May, cops rescued a three-foot-long snake slithering around downtown that "looked scared."

Sometimes this animal love can cause problems. Last year, the Audubon Society of Portland reported getting "way too many" ducks "dumped at their door," according to this TV news spot. If you skip ahead to 0:35, you'll find yet another cop going beyond the call of duty to save ducks, this time in Ohio:

Top photo courtesy of thieury on Shutterstock

 

by Jenny Nelson

Amy Poehler has a pretty solid resume as both a comedian and a person. After spending time studying at Second City and iO in Chicago, Poehler moved to New York with friends Matt Besser, Matt Walsh, and Ian Roberts to found the Upright Citizens Brigade, which has since grown into the massive community of learners and performers of long-form improv and sketch that it is today. In more recent years, on her off time from her TV work on SNL and Parks and Recreation, Poehler and friends Meredith Walker and Amy Miles started Smart Girls at the Party, an online network to encourage and educate young women about being smart by being themselves. Along the way, Amy Poehler has proven in countless interviews, podcasts, and articles, that she is smart, kind, and funny, about every topic from feminism to Hell to old TV. Check it:

Appearance

It’s nice to be short, because people expect less from you. [Smart Girls interview with Irma Kalish, 2013]

Being Cool

What worries me the most is this trend that caring about something isn’t cool. That it’s better to comment on something than to commit to it. That it’s so much cooler to be unmotivated and indifferent. Our culture can get so snarky and ironic sometimes and we kind of wanted Smart Girls to celebrate the opposite of that. [HuffPo, 2008]

Bossiness

I just love bossy women. I could be around them all day. To me, bossy is not a pejorative term at all. It means somebody’s passionate and engaged and ambitious and doesn’t mind leading, like, “All right, everybody, now we go over here. All right, now this happens.”  [Glamour, 2011]

Boston

If I wanted to give you advice as a Bostonian, I would remind you that: (with accent) “Just because you’re wicked smart it doesn’t mean you are better than me.” [Harvard College Class Day speech, 2011]

Comedy

It’s very hard to watch comedy for me, when I’m doing a comedy show, because I either watch a show and I love it, and I’m jealous, or I watch a show and I see all the problems with it, and I’m angry that I watched it. But that’s for my shrink, not for you… [Fresh Air, 2009]

Costumes

I hate Halloween. I hate dressing up. I hate – I wear wigs, makeup, costumes every day. Halloween is like, my least favorite holiday. [NPR's Morning Edition, 2011]

Family

They say that sibling relationships are the most important relationship in your life, because they know you for every period of your life. They know you when you were a baby and as an adult, and, hopefully, they know you in your old age. Your parents leave too early, your lovers come much later in your life, but your sibling has been with you. [How Was Your Week, 2011]

Feminism

My least favorite part is when women ask me how I do it… In my case, I’m a lot luckier than some people who have to work two jobs and, you know, I sometimes get to bring my kid to work and all that stuff. But this woman was like, “Oh, my God, your hours! You just work so hard! How do you do it?” And I realized that, “How do you do it?” really means “How could you do it?” …There’s an unwritten rule that women who stay at home are supposed to pretend it’s boring, and women who work are supposed to pretend they feel guilty, and that’s how it works. [BUST, 2010]

Fictional Characters

Laverne and Shirley was physical and broad, and I loved those characters. Law & Order’s Lieutenant Anita van Buren is a great example of a tough lady among men. Omar Little from The Wire—one of the best bad good guys, or good bad guys, on TV. Animal from The Muppets, who taught me when in doubt, go crazy [laughs]. And Cliff, from Cheers. [NY Mag, 2011]

Focus Groups

As an actor, you can certainly, at any moment and at any time, discover 400 people who think you’re stupid, fat and ugly. But focus groups — they can be poisonous as well as informative, I guess. (HuffPo, May 2012)

Genre

I would love to do a serious period drama. Oh, absolutely. I mean, you’ll find most comedians want to do more serious stuff, most musicians want to be comedians, and most serious actors want to be musicians. [About.com, 2008]

Genuineness

I really like playing Leslie, because it’s like the Sisyphean task of trying to get a park built is very emblematic of what’s happening anywhere someone’s just trying to make change happen while everybody tells them it’s not going to happen. She’s one of those people who believe that one person can make a difference; that no matter how small your job is, you still matter… I’m kind of a sucker for pathos, and I was looking forward to turning down the volume a little bit and trying to play someone who—even though she’s kind of grade-A bananas—could maybe exist in the world. [Glamour, 2011]

Hell

[Responding to Taylor Swift's jab at her and Tina Fey in Vanity Fair] I feel bad if she was upset. I am a feminist, and she is a young and talented girl. That being said, I do agree I am going to hell. But for other reasons. Mostly boring tax stuff. [The Hollywood Reporter, 2013]

History

I know from my experience that the people that preceded me certainly paved the way, and I came into the business at a time when there was a real balance, and women were in all positions of power. Television has always been a great place for women.  [Smart Girls interview with Irma Kalish, 2013]

Improv

I’m gonna say there’s really no bad suggestions, because even the stupidest suggestion that you’ve heard a million times can inspire something. And you’re supposed to go with what you’re given. I think the idea that somehow a better suggestion makes a better show isn’t always the case. [The A.V. Club, 2008]

I moved to Chicago in the early 1990s and I studied improvisation there. I learned some rules that I try to apply still today. Listen, say yes, live in the moment, make sure you play with people who have your back, make big choices early and often. Don’t start a scene where two people are talking about jumping out of a plane. Start the scene having already jumped. If you are scared, look into your partner’s eyes. You will feel better.  [Harvard College Class Day speech, 2011]

Sometimes when you get too worried about how you look, or about how something’s gonna go, you kind of lose what made you special in the first place. I think that ASSSSCAT will really do that to you, really remind you that things are supposed to be dangerous, you’re supposed to feel uncomfortable, you’re supposed to enjoy not knowing, trusting your partner, and not falling back on the same stuff, and I think that that does that for me. It’s the kind of thing that every time, even when I’m really tired, or I feel kind of burned-out, or I feel like I don’t have anything—every time I go out and do it, I feel a thousand times better.  [The A.V. Club, 2008]

Influences

I love All in the Family; I think it’s the best sitcom to ever be on TV.  [Smart Girls interview with Irma Kalish, 2013]

I hope and assume that every good comedy writer, no matter the age, has a moment where they discover how great Cheers is. And I would encourage any young person getting into comedy to sit down and watch the best television show that’s ever been on, and see the structure of it. [GQ, 2012]

SNL was certainly a big influence for me in my teen years, but The Carol Burnett Show was by far the first thing I ever saw that not only was a woman running her own show and being in charge, but also being such a magnanimous, benevolent captain, and there being real, genuine love and sense of play among the cast, and I think that most people who watched that show felt like they were a part of it. [Hitfix, 2012]

Inspiration

I would say my interview style is Morley Safer meets Kermit the Frog, with a dash of Christiane Amanpour. And a pinch of Dinah Shore wrapped in the shell of Lois Lane. My goal is to be the Edward R. Murrow of girls.  [HuffPo, 2008]

The Internet

It’s okay to not be looking at what everyone else is looking at all of the time. [Ask Amy, April 2013]

Irony

I don’t believe in ironic watching, you’re either watching or you’re not. [How Was Your Week, 2011]

Music

Right now I’m singing along to books on tape. I typically pop in something like Stephen King’s The Stand, and I love singing along to that kind of stuff. [NY Daily News, 2011]

Los Angeles

L.A. is like a campus where everybody has the same major.  [How Was Your Week, 2011]

People talk to you a lot in restaurants [in L.A.]. People ask you, “What are you eating? That looks good.” It’s strange. It is totally unnerving. My first instinct is to make a fist. And then I realize they’re just being nice. [The Daily Beast, 2009]

New York

[On her quintessential New York day] For me it’s waking up and turning on NY1 — checking the local weather, seeing who got murdered — and then it’s going to the deli and getting a bacon, egg and cheese on a roll. [LA Times Magazine, 2011]

New York is my home… Nobody’s interested in you, in the best way. [How Was Your Week, 2011]

There’s something so romantic about being broke in New York. You gotta do it. You have to live there once without any money, and then you have to live there when you have money. Let me tell you, of the two, the latter is far better. [LA Times Magazine, 2011]

Openness

I loved doing [Weekend] Update. It completely and in the best way changed my experience of doing the show. Lorne Michaels always said to me that the difference is that you will say your name on the show, and it makes a difference… you’re allowing yourself to be yourself on camera, which is hard for an actor to do but really hard for a comedian to do, I think. You’re not hiding behind a character. [Nightline, 2008]

Parenthood

Always remember your kid’s name. Always remember where you put your kid. Don’t let your kid drive until their feet can reach the pedals. Use the right size diapers…for yourself. And, when in doubt, make funny faces. [The Daily Beast, 2009]

I don’t care if it’s a girl or a boy, I want it to marry Alice Richmond, Tina (Fey)’s daughter. We’d make a lovely mother and mother-in-law of the bride. [USA Today, 2008]

[Answering if her son is funny because of his comedian parents] Actually, he has the personality of a French New Wave film. He’s really serious, very abstract. [BUST, 2010]

People

Try putting your iPhones down every once in a while and look at people’s faces. People’s faces will tell you amazing things. Like if they are angry or nauseous, or asleep. [Harvard College Class Day speech, 2011]

Politics

If you look at the history of SNL, there is certainly a case to be made for the fact that everyone has been hit hard, evenly, equally, and I would say fairly and unfairly, all at the same time. [Nightline, 2008]

What has been fun about playing Leslie is getting to a very local level. Everybody’s macro ideas of how they feel about taxes and gay marriage and whatever fade when you are actually doing the day-to-day work. Both conservatives and liberals watch Parks and Recreation, and they each think the show is for them, which is really cool. [LA Times Magazine, 2011]

[On Parks and Rec] People watch our show and they think it’s a red-state show, and then other people watch it and think it’s a blue-state show. I think there’s something fun about the politics of the show aren’t very clear. [NPR's Morning Edition, 2011

Pregnancy

A little person exists in this little body, and he's growing, and getting to meet that person is the coolest part. [BUST, 2010]

Being pregnant and doing comedy is like wearing a giant sombrero in every scene. Everyone is just trying to pretend it’s not there. It can be limiting. It gets boring. [USA Today, 2008]

Relationships

The reason why we liked Blades of Glory so much is that it was such a twisted relationship because they were brother and sister. I think real life couples on screen are kind of deadly. For the most part, they’re kind of deadly. You’d be surprised. Unless they’re falling in love onscreen for the first time, you don’t have quite the same energy for some reason. [About.com, 2008]

Risks

The great thing about taking big chances when you’re younger is you have less to lose, and you don’t know as much. So you take big swings. [NY Mag, 2011]

SNL

That job is so hard, you get a trench mentality where you all were in the trench together. And anyone who worked there will always be able to go back there with you and talk about their experience. It’s a really cool club to belong to. We’re like a bunch of vets. [BUST, 2010]

Standup

Sketch is still uncool… I just remember lugging costumes and wigs and fake blood and stupid fucking props and [standups] putting out a cigarette and walking onstage and talking about [themselves], and me having to be some character in the audience. [WTF, 2011]

Success

I think sometimes with a certain amount of success you get a little disconnected with what it was that brought you there, and you get nervous to take chances. [Nightline, 2008]

Support

When young girls are encouraged to explore what they find interesting, they grow up to be interesting women. [Paste, 2010]

Teamwork

As you navigate through the rest of your life, be open to collaboration. Other people and other people’s ideas are often better than your own. Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you, spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life. No one is here today because they did it on their own. Okay, maybe Josh, but he’s just a straight up weirdo. [Harvard College Class Day speech, 2011]

Television

But let’s be honest, most TV shows are better than movies. [The Daily Beast, 2011]

Unconventional Families

I think the next thing is moon wives. Like having a wife here on earth and then a wife on the moon. And everybody’s cool with it. They’re like, “You’re my Earth wife, but my moon wife and I are also in love.” [Entertainment Weekly, 2013]

Youth

I love, love that age when you’re right on the precipice of teenage years, before you’ve decided that everything’s lame. [LA Times Magazine, 2011]

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I’m pretty excited about arrested development coming back later this month, so I decided to draw out my favorite line from the show.

Just a quick doodle in photoshop after a few days break from drawing.

by Logan Sachon

New York fact that I just learned: Those standalone news stands cannot sell anything for more than $5 before tax. (Another New York fact: The NYT spells it “newsstand” but that double s really bothers me so Billfold Style is to separate the words. Okay. [Mike edit: I prefer newsstand, but will defer to Logan on her own post.]) I would have never bought anything at one of those standalone news stands but I recently made my first purchase from one of those guys who sells fruit on the corner, so I’ll tell you about that.

I walked up to the guy who sells fruit on the corner and I said, “I would like some grapes please.” And he said, “How many grapes?” And I said, “Some,” and then he picked up some and put them on the scale and said, “$6″ and I thought, wow that’s a lot of money for some grapes I think? But maybe it’s just the right amount of money for some grapes. I don’t know really, but I gave him money and took the grapes.

I ate them as I walked and each time I put one in my mouth, I wondered what kind of pesticide I was tasting. Then I was like, Logan, get it together, you are going to die, obviously, but it’s not going to be from eating these DDT seasoned grapes. Probably.

Photo: Raybdbomb

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NEW YORK—According to a new study published Wednesday in The American Educational Research Journal, an overwhelming majority of recent college graduates are completely unprepared to carry the full weight of the U.S.

by A.C. Elliott

Before we traded in our Konigsburg for Kafka and our Dahl for Dostoevsky, the authors of our childhood laced their stories of mystery and imagination with advice on money and finances. Money was something in this stories, but not everything.

From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
Lesson: Be resourceful and borrow—if you must.

Consider the classic tome from the great and recently deceased E.L. Konigsburg. In it, young Claudia Kincaid is confronted early on with the consequences of being a compulsive over-spender. Almost as soon as she decides to run away to the comforts of the Met, she realizes she can’t. She’s broke. Solution? She does what we all do: makes nice with her little brother Jamie (Dad)—who is responsible and likes to save his money—and convinces him (Dad) to go with her (finance her big, New York City lifestyle). She’s also not above fishing for change in the museum fountain, which is great, for obvious reasons..

Once Jamie agrees to join forces, they run away with his $24.43. (How many of us, upon first read, thought that was a ton of money?) But here’s a dark and ugly truth about Jamie’s fortune. He got it cheating at the card game War on the bus with his friends. Somewhere in there is a lesson about dishonest forms of accumulating wealth. But we like Jamie and assume he won’t grow up to exist on ponzi schemes, insider trading, gambling, or whatever else those fat cats do.

 

 

The Secret of the Old Clock
Lesson: Don’t have two wills when one will do.

The entire plot of Carolyn Keene’s The Secret of the Old Clock (THE Nancy Drew book of Nancy Drew books) centers around elderly aunts who were swindled out of their cousin’s will, and thus survive by selling off old jewelry and furniture. Unfortunately, they are also the caretakers of young Judy—a bright girl, who probably won’t be able to attend college because of her aunts’ financial misfortune. Nancy, ever the industrious problem solver, suggests scholarships and financial aid before tracking down the real will. Granted, the whole thing could have been avoided if the old cousin had just been a lot smarter about everything. But at least we have Nancy.

But what do legal wills mean to fifth-grade girls? Close to nothing, except that they need to be in order by the time we die. Thanks, Carolyn Keene.

 

 

The Westing Game
Lesson: Lots of money can, on certain occasions, make people do bad things.

Wills and testaments probably continued to hold little meaning until we picked up Ellen Raskin’s 1979 Newberry-winner, The Westing Game. In this one, 16 possible heirs are thrust into a game and given clues to figure out who is the real heir to Sam Westing’s $200 million fortune. But here, in a book almost completely about money, characters are defined by their attitudes toward wealth. Raskin gives her young audience what is likely their first look at how, and to what extent, money changes people. It is perhaps, a bit much to suggest our 11-year-old souls had the depth to read that much into Raskin’s life lessons here—lots of money makes you do things you’ll regret!—but who among us wasn’t fascinated by Turtle Wexler’s love of the stock market? Like Konigsburg’s Jamie, young Turtle Wexler inspired the budding capitalist in all of us (though we may not have known it at the time).

 

 

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Lesson: Take a chance!

Yes, Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has lessons about money, too. For starters, sometimes a little gambling pays off now and then, right? When Charlie stumbles across a dollar bill lying in the street, his life is changed forever. Why? Because he, in full faith and knowledge of his family’s poverty, took part of it and bought a chocolate bar. He did this, knowing there was about a one-in-a-million chances it would pay off. Spoiler: it did. Call it irresponsible, but that one gamble, er, investment, literally became his ticket to a lifetime of wealth and riches. Well done, Charlie!

 

 

 

The Indian in the Cupboard
Lesson: Some of the best things in life are free

Even the absence of money taught us how to value a good deal. In Lynne Reid Banks’ The Indian In the Cupboard, young Omri is given a used cupboard, found in an alley, in the very first chapter by his older brother. (The brother’s pocket money, we find out, had been stopped due to an “unfortunate accident” involving his father’s bike). But that used cupboard turned out to be THE cupboard, capable of bringing a plastic toy indian to life. Something that cost nothing turned out to be everything.

 

 

 

 

Ramona Quimby, Age 8
Lesson: There’s more to life than money. Period.

Which brings us to an eraser. A cheap, pink eraser given to one Ramona Quimby, age 8. In the sixth book of the Ramona Quimby series, author Beverly Cleary introduces some tough financial times for the Quimby family that, to our young eyes, probably seemed like no big deal. Looking back though, wow! Ramona’s father decides to go back to college to become an art teacher, and he maintains a part-time job at the supermarket. That’s got to put a financial strain on the family. Yet none of this seems to matter to Ramona. While she is aware of the family’s money problems, it’s hardly the center of her world. Thus bringing us full circle to where we started: money is something, but not everything.

 

It is comforting, revisiting these pages from our past and remembering a time when we were told—and believed—that good people do well and bad people don’t. There’s a reason Charlie Bucket gets to inherit the factory and Turtle Wexler ultimately solves the mystery. There’s a reason Romana Quimby can declare she is “winning at growing up” (in Ramona Forever). How many of us can say that now? Mrs. Frankweiler gets it. She’s old and has lots of money, but she doesn’t care. She was just searching for some kind happiness. Why else would she change her will at the end? Lucky for Claudia and Jamie they came around at just the right time.

And what about us? All I know is that somewhere between the Cleary and the Chekhov something changed; I’m still trying to figure out what.

 

A.C. lives in Washington, D.C.

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[Image: Screenshot of our own SimCity—called, for reasons that made sense at the time, We Are The Champignons—after three hours of game play].

(This interview was originally published on Venue).

In the nearly quarter-century since designer Will Wright launched the iconic urban planning computer game, SimCity, not only has the world's population become majoritatively urban for the first time in human history, but interest in cities and their design has gone mainstream.

Once a byword for boring, city planning is now a hot topic, claimed by technology companies, economists, so-called "Supermayors," and cultural institutions alike as the key to humanity's future. Indeed, if we are to believe the hype, the city has become our species' greatest triumph.

[Image: A shot from photographer Michael Wolf's extraordinary Architecture of Density series, newly available in hardcover].

In March 2013, the first new iteration of SimCity in a decade was launched, amidst a flurry of critical praise mingled with fan disappointment at Electronic Arts' "always-online" digital rights management policy and repeated server failures.

A few weeks before the launch, Venue—BLDGBLOG's ongoing collaboration with Edible Geography's Nicola Twilley, supported by the Nevada Museum of Art's Center for Art + Environment and Studio-X NYC—had the opportunity to play the new SimCity at its Manhattan premiere, during which time we feverishly laid out curving roads and parks, drilled for oil while installing a token wind turbine, and tried to ignore our city's residents'—known as Sims—complaints as their homes burned before we could afford to build a fire station.


We emerged three hours later, blinking and dazed, into the gleaming white and purple lights of Times Square, and were immediately struck by the intensity of abstraction required to translate such a complex, dynamic environment into a coherent game structure, and the assumptions and values embedded in that translation.

Fortunately, the game's lead designer, Stone Librande, was happy to talk with us further about his research and decision-making process, as well as some of the ways in which real-world players have already surprised him. We spoke to him both in person and by telephone, and our conversation appears below.

• • •

Nicola Twilley: I thought I’d start by asking what sorts of sources you used to get ideas for SimCity, whether it be reading books, interviewing urban experts, or visiting different cities?

Stone Librande: From working on SimCity games in the past, we already have a library here with a lot of city planning books. Those were really good as a reference, but I found, personally, that the thing I was most attracted to was using Google Earth and Google Street View to go anywhere in the world and look down on real cities. I found it to be an extremely powerful way to understand the differences between cities and small towns in different regions.

Google has a tool in there that you can use to measure out how big things are. When I first started out, I used that a lot to investigate different cities. I’d bring up San Francisco and measure the parks and the streets, and then I’d go to my home town and measure it, to figure out how it differed and so on. My inspiration wasn’t really drawn from urban planning books; it was more from deconstructing the existing world.

Then I also really got into Netflix streaming documentaries. There is just so much good stuff there, and Netflix is good at suggesting things. That opened up a whole series of documentaries that I would watch almost every night after dinner. There were videos on water problems, oil problems, the food industry, manufacturing, sewage systems, and on and on—all sorts of things. Those covered a lot of different territory and were really enlightening to me.


Geoff Manaugh: While you were making those measurements of different real-world cities, did you discover any surprising patterns or spatial relationships?

Librande: Yes, definitely. I think the biggest one was the parking lots. When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don’t think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.

Manaugh: You would be making SimParkingLot, rather than SimCity.

Librande: [laughs] Exactly. So what we do in the game is that we just imagine they are underground. We do have parking lots in the game, and we do try to scale them—so, if you have a little grocery store, we’ll put six or seven parking spots on the side, and, if you have a big convention center or a big pro stadium, they’ll have what seem like really big lots—but they’re nowhere near what a real grocery store or pro stadium would have. We had to do the best we could do and still make the game look attractive.

[Image: Using the zoning tool for the city designed by We Are the Champignons].

Twilley: I’d love to hear more about the design process and how you went about testing different iterations. Did you storyboard narratives for possible cities and urban forms that you might want to include in the game?

Librande: The way the game is set up, it’s kind of infinite. What I mean by that is that you could play it so many different ways that it’s basically impossible to storyboard or have a defined set of narratives for how the player will play it.

[Images: Stone Librande's storyboards for "Green City" and "Mining City" at the start of play].

Instead, what I did was that I came up with two extreme cases—around the office we call them “Berkeley” and “Pittsburgh,” or “Green City” and “Dirty City.” We said, if you are the kind of player who wants to make utopia—a city with wind power, solar power, lots of education and culture, and everything’s beautiful and green and low density—then this would be the path you would take in our game.

But then we made a parallel path for a really greedy player who just wants to make as much money as possible, and is just exploiting or even torturing their Sims. In that scenario, you’re not educating them; you’re just using them as slave labor to make money for your city. You put coal power plants in, you put dumps everywhere, and you don’t care about their health.

[Image: Stone Librande's storyboard for "Green City" at mid-game].

I made a series of panels, showing those two cities from beginning to late stage, where everything falls apart. Then, later on, when we got to multiplayer, I joined those two diagrams together and said, “If both of these cities start working together, then they can actually solve each other’s problems.”

The idea was to set them up like bookends—these are the extremes of our game. A real player will do a thousand things that fall somewhere in between those extremes and create all sorts of weird combinations. We can’t predict all of that.

Basically, we figured that if we set the bookends, then we would at least understand the boundaries of what kind of art we need to build, and what kind of game play experiences we need to design for.

[Image: Stone Librande's storyboard for "Mining City" at mid-game].

Twilley: In going through that process, did you discover things that you needed to change to make game play more gripping for either the dirty city or the clean city?

Librande: It was pretty straightforward to look at Pittsburgh, the dirty city, and understand why it was going to fail, but you have to try to understand why the clean one might fail, as well. If you have one city—one path—that always fails, and one that always succeeds, in a video game, that’s really bad design. Each path has to have its own unique problems.

What happened was that we just started to look at the two diagrams side-by-side, and we knew all the systems we wanted to support in our game—things like power, utilities, wealth levels, population numbers, and all that kind of stuff—and we basically divided them up.

We literally said: “Let’s put all of this on this side over in Pittsburgh and the rest of it over onto Berkeley.” That’s why, at the very end, when they join together, they are able to solve each other’s problems because, between the two of them, they have all the problems but they also have all the answers.

[Image: Stone Librande's storyboard for the "Green City" and "Mining City" end-game symbiosis].

Twilley: One thing that struck me, after playing, was that you do incorporate a lot of different and complex systems in the game, both physical ones like water, and more abstract ones, like the economy. But—and this seems particularly surprising, given that one of your bookend cities was nicknamed Berkeley—the food system doesn’t come into the game at all. Why not?

Librande: Food isn’t in the game, but it’s not that we didn’t think about it—it just became a scoping issue. The early design actually did call for agriculture and food systems, but, as part of the natural process of creating a video game, or any situation where you have deadlines and budgets that you have to meet, we had to make the decision that it was going to be one of the things that the Sims take care of on their own, and that the Mayor—that is, the player—has nothing to do with it.

I watched some amazing food system documentaries, though, so it was really kind of sad to not include any of that in the game.

[Image: Data layer showing ore deposits].

[Image: Data layer showing happiness levels. In SimCity, happiness is increased by wealth, good road connections, and public safety, and decreased by traffic jams and pollution].

Manaugh: Now that the game is out in the world, and because of the central, online hosting of all the games being played right now, I have to imagine that you are building up an incredible archive of all the decisions that different players have made and all the different kind of cities that people have built. I’m curious as to what you might be able to make or do with that kind of information. Are you mining it to see what kinds of mistakes people routinely make, or what sorts of urban forms are most popular? If so, is the audience for that information only in-house, for developing future versions of SimCity, or could you imagine sharing it with urban planners or real-life Mayors to offer an insight into popular urbanism?

Librande: It’s an interesting question. It’s hard to answer easily, though, because there are so many different ways players can play the game. The game was designed to cover as many different play patterns as we could think of, because our goal was to try to entertain as many of the different player demographics as we could.

So, there are what we call “hardcore players.” Primarily, they want to compete, so we give them leader boards and we give them incentives to show they are “better” than somebody else. We might say: “There’s a competition to have the most people in your city.” And they are just going to do whatever it takes to cram as many people into a city as possible, to show that they can win. Or there might be a competition to get the most rich people in your city, which requires a different strategy than just having the most people. It’s hard to keep rich people in a city.

Each of those leader boards, and each of those challenges, will start to skew those hardcore people to play in different ways. We are putting the carrot out there and saying: “Hey, play this way and see how well you can do.” So, in that case, we are kind of tainting the data, because we are giving them a particular direction to go in and a particular goal.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are the “creative players” who are not trying to win—they are trying to tell a story. They are just trying to create something beautiful. For instance, when my wife plays, she wants lots of schools and parks and she’s not at all concerned with trying to make the most money or have the most people. She just wants to build that idealized little town that she thinks would be the perfect place to live.

[Image: A regional view of a SimCity game, showing different cities and their painfully small footprints].

So, getting back to your question, because player types cover such a big spectrum, it’s really hard for us to look at the raw data and pull out things like: “This is the kind of place that people want to live in.” That said, we do have a lot of data and we can look at it and see things, like how many people put down a park and how many people put in a tram system. We can measure those things in the aggregate, but I don’t think they would say much about real city planning.

Twilley: Building on that idea of different sorts of players and ways of playing, are there a variety of ways of “winning” at SimCity? Have you personally built cities that you would define as particularly successful within the game, and, if so, what made them “winners”?

Librande: For sure, there is no way to win at SimCity other then what you decide to put into the game. If you come in with a certain goal in mind—perhaps, say, that you want a high approval rating and everyone should be happy all the time— then you would play very differently than if you went in wanting to make a million dollars or have a city with a million people in it.

As far as my personal city planning goes, it has varied. I’ve played the game so much, because early on I just had to play every system at least once to understand it. I tried to build a power city, a casino city, a mining city—I tried to build one of everything.

Now that I’m done with that phase, and I’m just playing for fun at home, I’ve learned that I enjoy mid-density cities much more then high-density cities. To me, high-density cities are just a nightmare to run and operate. I don’t want to be the mayor of New York; I want to be the mayor of a small town. The job is a lot easier!

Basically, I build in such a way as to not make skyscrapers. At the most, I might have just one or two because they look cool—but that’s it.

[Image: Screenshot from SimCity 4].

Manaugh: I’m curious how you dealt with previous versions of SimCity, and whether there was any anxiety about following that legacy or changing things. What are the major innovations or changes in this version of the game, and what kinds of things did you think were too iconic to get rid of?

Librande: First of all, when we started the project, and there were just a few people on the team, we all agreed that we didn’t want this game to be called SimCity 5. We just wanted to call it SimCity, because if we had a 5 on the box, everybody would think it had to be SimCity 4 with more stuff thrown in. That had the potential to be quite alienating, because SimCity 4 was already too complicated for a lot of people. That was the feedback we had gotten.

Once we made that title decision, it was very liberating—we felt like, “OK, now we can reimagine what the brand might be and how cities are built, almost from scratch.”

Technically, the big difference is the “GlassBox” engine that we have, in which all the agents promote a bottom-up simulation. All the previous SimCity games were literally built on spreadsheets where you would type a number into a grid cell, and then it propagated out into adjacent grid cells, and the whole city was a formula.

SimCity 4 was literally prototyped in Excel. There were no graphics—it was just a bunch of numbers—but you could type a code that represented a particular type of building and the formulae built into the spreadsheet would then decide how much power it had and how many people would work there. It just statically calculated the city as if it were a bunch of snapshots.

[Image: A fire breaks out in the city designed by We Are The Champignons].

Because our SimCity—the new SimCity—is really about getting these agents to move around, it’s much more about flows. Things have to be in motion. I can’t look at anybody’s city as a screenshot and tell you what’s going on; I have to see it live and moving before I can fully understand if your roads are OK, if your power is flowing, if your water is flowing, if your sewage is getting dumped out, if your garbage is getting picked up, and so on. All that stuff depends on trucks actually getting to the garbage cans, for example, and there’s no way to tell that through a snapshot.

[Image: Sims queue for the bus at dawn].

Once we made that decision—to go with an agent-driven simulation and make it work from the bottom up—then all the design has to work around that. The largest part of the design work was to say: “Now that we know agents are going to run this, how do schools work with those agents? How do fire and police systems work with these agents? How do time systems work?” All the previous editions of SimCity never had to deal with that question—they could just make a little table of crimes per capita and run those equations.

Manaugh: When you turned things over to the agents, did that have any kind of spatial effect on game play that you weren’t expecting?

Librande: It had an effect, but it was one that we were expecting. Because everything has to be in motion, we had to have good calculations about how distance and time are tied together. We had to do a lot of measurements about how long it would really take for one guy to walk from one side of the city to the other, in real time, and then what that should be in game time—including how fast the cars needed to move in relationship to the people walking in order to make it look right, compared to how fast would they really be moving, both in game time and real time. We had all these issues where the cars would be moving at eighty miles an hour in real time, but they looked really slow in the game, or where the people were walking way, way too fast, but actually they were only walking at two miles an hour.

We knew this would happen, but we just had to tweak the real-life metrics so that the motion and flow look real in the game. We worked with the animators, and followed our intuition, and tried to mimic the motion and flow of crowds.

[Image: We Are The Champignons' industrial zone, carefully positioned downwind of the residential areas].

In the end, it’s not one hundred percent based on real-life metrics; it just has to look like real life, and that’s true throughout the game. For example, if we made the airport runways actual size, they would cover up the entire city. Those are the kinds of things where we just had to make a compromise and hope that it looked good.

Twilley: Actually, one of the questions we wanted to ask was about time in the game. I found it quite intriguing that there are different speeds that you can choose to play at, but then there’s also a distinct sense of the phases of building a city and how many days and nights have to pass for certain changes to occur. Did you do any research into how fast cities change and even how the pace of city life is different in different places?

Librande: We found an amazing article about walking speeds in different cities. That was something I found really interesting. In cities like New York, people walk faster, and in medium-sized or small towns, they walk a lot slower. At one point, we had Sims walking faster as the city gets bigger, but we didn’t take it that far in the final version.


I know what you are talking about, though: in the game, bigger cities feel a lot busier and faster moving. But there’s nothing really built into the game to do that; it’s just the cumulative effect of more moving parts, I guess. In kind of a counter-intuitive way, when you start getting big traffic jams, it feels like a bigger, busier city even though nothing is moving—it’s just to do with the way we imagine rush-hour gridlock as being a characteristic of a really big city.

The fact that there’s even a real rush hour shows how important timing is for an agent-based game. We spent a lot of time trying to make the game clock tick, to pull you forward into the experience. In previous SimCities, the day/night cycle was just a graphical effect—you could actually turn it off if you didn’t like it, and it had no effect on the simulation. In our game, there is a rush hour in the morning and one at night, there are school hours, and there are shopping hours. Factories are open twenty-four hours a day, but stores close down at night, so different agents are all working on different schedules.


The result is that you end up getting really interesting cycles—these flows of Sims build up at certain times and then the buses and streets are empty and then they build back up again. There’s something really hypnotic about that when you play the game. I find myself not doing anything but just watching in this mesmerized state—almost hypnotized—where I just want to watch people drive and move around in these flows. At that point, you’re not looking at any one person; you’re looking at the aggregate of them all. It’s like watching waves flow back and forth like on a beach.

For me, that’s one of the most compelling aspects of our game. The timing just pulls you forward. We hear this all the time—people will say, “I sat down to play, and three hours had passed, and I thought, wait, how did that happen?” Part of that is the flow that comes from focusing, but another part of it is the success of our game in pulling you into its time frame and away from the real-world time frame of your desk.


Twilley: Has anything about the way people play or respond to the game surprised you? Is there anything that you already want to change?

Librande: One thing that amazed me is that, even with the issues at the launch, we had the equivalent of nine hundred man-years put into SimCity in less than a week.

Most of the stuff that people are doing, we had hoped or predicted would happen. For example, I anticipated a lot of the story-telling and a lot of the creativity—people making movies in the cities, and so on—and we’re already seeing that. YouTube is already filled with how-to videos and people putting up all these filters, like film noir cities, and it’s just really beautiful.

[Video: SimCity player Calvin Chan's film noir montage of his city at night].

The thing I didn’t predict was that, in the first week, two StarCraft players—that’s a very fast-paced space action game, in case you’re not familiar with it, and it’s fairly common for hardcore players to stream their StarCraft battles out to a big audience—decided to have a live-streamed SimCity battle against each other. They were in a race to be the first to a population of 100,000; they live-streamed their game; and there were twenty thousand people in the chat room, cheering them on and typing in advice—things like “No, don’t build there!” and “ What are you doing—why are you putting down street cars?” and “Come on, dude, turn your oil up!” It was like that, nonstop, for three hours. It was like a spectator sport, with twenty thousand people cheering their favorite on, and, basically, backseat city planning. That really took me by surprise.

I’m not sure where we are going to go with that, though, because we’re not really an eSport, but it seems like the game has the ability to pull that out of people. I started to try to analyze what’s going on there, and it seems that if you watch people play StarCraft and you don’t know a lot about it, your response is going to be something like, “I don’t know what I’m looking at; I don’t know if I should be cheering now; and I don’t know if what I just saw was exciting or not.”

But, if you watch someone build a city, you just know. I mean, I don’t have to teach you that putting a garbage dump next to people’s houses is going to piss them off or that you need to dump sewage somewhere. I think the reason that the audience got so into it is that everyone intuitively knows the rules of the game when it comes to cities.

• • •
For more Venue interviews, on human interactions with the built, natural, and virtual environments, check out the Venue website in full.

by Logan Sachon

LS: Okay, Blair White, which is the not your actual name but a name I made up for you. You reached out to talk about your money, which I am so thankful for, and I’m actually going to print part of your email because I liked it so much:

I’m 30 and have a lot of money at my disposal (As in a few million dollars? For some reason the question mark makes me feel less weird writing that). The vast majority is not technically in a trust (it’s all in my name in various accounts), but I sure didn’t earn it! Most of my money is from my dad and available to me, but I do have an official trust fund from my grandparents as well (for which my dad is trustee).

Tell me more about your money.

BW: I always knew that my family was wealthy, ever since the concept of wealth became clear to me. When I was 12 or 13 my dad set me up with an UGMA (which is basically an account in my name that I’d get full access to at 18) and I started buying stocks. At that time I thought I wanted to go into finance, so this was a way for me to learn about it. I bought AOL and the stock shot up and I thought I was a genius!

I also knew I had some sort of trust from my grandparents, but I didn’t know how big it was. When I was 23 or 24 my dad told me I had other money in my name. We were at a restaurant, my mom was in the bathroom, and he told me the dollar number and it was strange.

At that point I knew I had about $500K in trust, and I knew he had invested other money in my name, but I didn’t know it was in the low millions (I don’t remember the actual number at that point).

LS: What was it like to hear that?

BW: It was really hard to wrap my head around it, so for a few years I tried to not really think about it. I thought of the person with money as Virtual Me (that was it I actually called it) and the real me, who had a full time job and was making pretty good money for someone right out of college. I mean it was exciting to think that I was rich, but I didn’t really want to think about it too much, it seemed too crazy.

Basically, there was Blair and Virtual Blair, and the two were different.

LS: So the $500K you knew about was part of Virtual BLair—did you have access to any of the money?

BW: Yes, I had full access to the roughly $2M. It was in various accounts in my name, without any of the limitations of a traditional trust.

LS: It sounds like when you found out about it though, you weren’t wanting for anything—you already had a good job, and no school loans?

BW: Yes. I’m very fortunate that my parents paid for school, and I had a good job. I also am not a super big spender, so I only used it to pay taxes at first. Even though I had a salaried job at around $50K/year, I had to pay the government $60K in addition to what they withheld. I am all for being taxed a lot (I think my taxes should probably go up), but it was funny to write checks that were bigger than a year’s salary.

A few years later I bought a one bedroom apartment, though.

LS: So when your dad told you about the money—did he say how he had intended for it to be used, or how your grandparents had intended it to be used? Did he give you limitations?

BW: My grandparents wanted that money to be spent on education and/or housing. That was made clear. But my dad never said what I should or shouldn’t buy. I think he’s always trusted me with money. I don’t know what I did to earn his trust, but it’s nice to have. And by trust I mean his feeling, not trust fund.

LS: I’m interested in 12-year-old you wanting to go into finance!

BW: Ha! I think I just wanted to be like my dad, because he’s in finance. So it was more me wanting to be like him than anything else. I was just then finding out about the power of wealth, and that interested me. I grew up in a town that was only just becoming the wildly affluent place it is today. I remember having a new middle school friend over for a play date. I thought it went well, but the next day everyone called me Rich Bitch and basically ignored me for a couple of weeks.

So I was trying to figure out what wealth meant, how my house (which is really nice but nothing that shocking) could turn people against me. I don’t mean this as a poor me story, but it was the first time I was really like, huh. Money is weird.

After that I made some pretentious statements about how I didn’t care about money or material things, because they didn’t matter. But then my mom gently pointed out that only rich people can afford to not care about money, which made a lot of sense even then.

So basically, I was super confused.

LS: Your mom is really insightful.

BW: Yes! She’s much more emotional about money because she didn’t really have any growing up, but she has some good insights.

LS: What did you end up studying and doing for work?

BW: I studied history, and then worked in marketing for about 4 years. Now I’m in the middle of an MFA and I also teach.

LS: What kind of financial situation are your friends in, compared to you? Do you talk about it?

BW: One thing that makes me really uncomfortable is how many of my friends do have trust funds or other money. A lot of them don’t, but several of them do. I think about why that is a lot. Some I met in fancy school, so that makes sense. But others I met through work, and maybe it’s just a coincidence?

But I do have two really close friends in a similar situation, and it’s been super helpful to talk with them about how to approach having so much money. Things like to get a prenup? What sort of car does it make sense to buy? What about hiring house cleaners? etc.

That sound ridiculous, I realize. But it’s true. When you don’t have normal financial limitations decisions become tricky. And I don’t mean difficult, I just mean that even without budgetary constraints, you have to make decisions about what’s a reasonable amount of money to spend for what. It’s not actually a difficult decision, just one that requires a modicum of thought.

LS: Do you still think of your money as two different pots, real and virtual, usable and not usable?

BW: Since I currently receive a stipend of $16K for teaching, I’ve been using more of the money from my parents. I’d say I still live as if I’m making $55K, so I supplement.

LS: So do you give yourself an “allowance,” or just spend and let it flow over?

BW: I should give myself an allowance, or have a budget but I don’t. I just spend and sort of refill my bank account as necessary. I am going to make a budget, soon! My husband is going to help me.

LS: Tell me about your husband. When did you tell him about the money?

BW: He’s always known that my family is wealthy, and I think I told him the dollar number a year or two after my dad told me. We were pretty serious at that point, though. Right after we met he gave me a ride to a private plane! It was before the recession. But still. Ridiculous.

LS: Does his family have money?

BW: No. But he’s been really level headed about this whole thing. Although my family is really liberal, I grew up with this model as man as bread winner. So I’ve had some completely low moments worrying about whether he’d earn enough money. Granted, this was when I was on a career path that was making me miserable, and he was pursuing a creative life. But it was ugly, and I was really ugly and hurtful.

He, however, is brilliant at managing and saving money and living a fun, frugal life. So we’re really good for one another. And we have lots of conversations about our financial approach. It just took me a while to think of our financial interests as one.

LS: Did you have a prenup?

BW: Almost! My parents, well, my dad, wanted me to get one, so I found a lawyer. He had to hire a lawyer, too, and in those initial phone calls it was made clear that the process wasn’t this sensible document, as had been suggested to me, but rather something that would be contentious from the start. So we don’t have one, but we also don’t have joint accounts. One of my rich friends has one, one doesn’t. Honestly, I think there’s more pressure if you’re a woman with money.

LS: Was your dad upset?

BW: No. He was ultimately supportive. I got super, duper upset after those calls with the lawyer, so I think he saw how much it mattered to me. Also, interestingly, at first he said I didn’t need one and then he got a new lawyer, so I think the whole thing came from someone else to begin with.

LS: Do you and your husband split expenses equally?

BW: Yes, for the most part. Sometimes I’ll feel like going out to a nice dinner and I’ll pick up the tab. He’s more conservative with spending money, and worries more.

It’s weird for both of us that I’ve never had to worry about money, that I can’t fully understand what that’s like.

LS: Do you feel like the money you have is enough that you don’t have to worry about retirement? Do you talk about taking time off and traveling, or have you done that?

BW: Since we’re both trying to pursue an artistic life, and are likely to never make money doing so, I now view my money as a sort of arts endowment. My life plan is to try and make the arts thing happen, while teaching or finding other parttime employment, and supplementing with my other money. The goal is to live fairly frugally so I can pursue art.

Basically, I feel as if I won the lottery. In thinking of how to spend a life, I think art is important (which is not to say that my own art is important, but rather culture needs art).

But I don’t worry about retirement. And traveling is important to me, so I will always pay for us to do that.

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With 150,000 or so old print maps to his name, David Rumsey has earned his reputed place among the world's "finest private collectors." But the 69-year-old San Francisco collector doesn't have any intention of resting on his cartographic laurels. He continues to expand his personal trove as well as the digitized sub-collection he makes open to the public online — some 38,000 strong, and growing.

"I'm pretty old for a geek map guy," he says. "But I stay young by embracing new technologies all the time."

Rumsey, a native New Yorker, began his career teaching and practicing art — specifically, its intersections with technology — before getting involved in a charity on the West Coast. After starting his map collection Rumsey used that early art-tech interest to stay ahead of the digitization push. He's created a series of interactive maps that layer old prints onto the Google Earth and Google Maps platforms, and this summer he plans to launch a geo-referencing tool (similar to one recently introduced by the British Library) that lets users get involved in the digital mapping process themselves.

While preparing for this next expansion of his online map empire, Rumsey remains fascinated by "the power of putting these images up and letting them go," he says.

"Maps have a way of speaking to people very straightforward," he says. "You don't have to have a lot of knowledge of map history or history in general. To me they're perfect tools for teaching history to the public."

Screenshot of London 1843 from the David Rumsey Historical Maps Collection.

What draws you to a particular map so much that you decide to add it to your collection?

So what draws me to a particular map is how is it showing real space. How can we use it to measure real space? How can we use it to imagine that we're standing in real space? How does it accomplish that? To me, this is totally arbitrary, but I chose the date of about 1700 to begin my map collection, going forward right into present day. Because around 1700 is when you have the real rise of scientific mapping. That means using surveying tools, using triangulation, to really be able to make a map on which you can do reliable measurements and show space as if you're standing in it.

Screenshot of San Francisco 1915 from the David Rumsey Historical Maps Collection.

You're a big proponent of open access. Why do you feel it's so important to make your maps available to the general public?

I think open access for anything — maps, art, books — is an incredible opportunity that the Web allows us to accomplish. It's kind of introducing the public to what I call in the academic world primary sources. The original map, the original book, all of which we've had in our libraries in special collections for hundreds of years, but they've never been available to general public.

The typical post in Twitter about my site is: uh oh, you're going to lose a whole day. Losing a day — think about it. If we didn't have the internet and these viewing technologies, how could you spend a day with these maps in the physical world? You'd have to travel to an archive, they'd have to pull them out. Here you can search on whatever your interest is.

Screenshot of St. Petersburg 1753 from the David Rumsey Historical Maps Collection.

Your Google Earth Collection layers old maps onto new technology. Talk about the process of making them.

First you have a scan of the old map. You open that in a GIS program that is made for doing this geo-referencing. Essentially one window has the old map in it and a window next to it has a new map — a modern satellite view or a modern street map or regular map. Then you use tick points. So I'll take the tip of Florida on the old map and put a tick, and take the tip on the new map and put a tick. You're doing 60 to 100 points. Then you tell it to recalculate the old map into modern geographical space using those 60 to 100 space. And it rebuilds the whole image. So now you can open it in Google Earth. It will automatically appear in the right spot.

Screenshot of Paris 1834 from the David Rumsey Historical Maps Collection.

What do you hope casual viewers, who don't have your experience reading maps, take away from these projects?

To be able to compare the past and the present in a way they've never been able to do before. People look at old photographs of a city. They say: Oh, this is what 5th Avenue looked like in New York City in 1910. Interesting. Old cars. So on. But if you look at the map of the same area, compared to the map today, you look at all the buildings completed, look at the alleyways closed off. You get another way of looking. So I think people sense the change over time.

What is it about the past, more specifically, that you think old print maps can teach us? Is it just something about cartography or something bigger about humanity?

Oh I think it's something bigger about humanity. … These old maps, think of them as archives. Each map is an archive of information.

We put online the "Karte des Deutschen Reiches 1893." This is the national map of Germany created after German unification in the early 1870s. … The Germans are maniacally thorough in everything they show on this map. You can see not just forest cover but five or six kinds of forests. Pine forests are one symbol. Deciduous woods are another. Different grassland, different swamps, all the major public buildings. I was saying, this is an archive of information arranged spatially that you're not going to find anywhere else.

What we do now with text, it's called OCR, Optical Character Recognition — this is what Google does with Books online, it's indexed every word on every page. Imagine if we could do that with maps like any of these geo-referenced maps. If we could start building a database of all kinds of forests. Then we can say there were, oh, one million hectors of pine leaf forest in Germany in 1893. Or make a list of names of all the towns.

Detail of Sheet 269 - Berlin - Karte des Deutschen Reiches 1893

You could probably measure, with regard to climate change, how much different things are.

Certainly they're going to show coastlines, which gets you to inferences about sea level. A lot of them show forest cover. Probably things we can't even think of. I'm hopeful that Optical Character Recognition technology will come about in the next decade. It's pretty tough. A lot of people are working on cracking that problem. With books the texts all go in one direction. It's easy for a bot to catalogue it all. In maps it goes in every direction and we use completely different fonts. One for a river, one for a city of X size, another for a city of Y size. But all that should be capable of being known in terms of computation. That gets me pretty excited.

All maps courtesy of the David Rumsey Map Collection via a creative commons license.

It's about time to get your weekend started. And Y&H has just three words for you: U Street Taco.

For the uninitiated, this quintessentially D.C. sloppy drunk food consists of a Ben's Chili Bowl chili half-smoke wrapped in a jumbo slice. Watch the video below for instructions, then send your best U Street Taco photos from the weekend to hungry@washingtoncitypaper.com.

We will select (and run) the best photos on Monday, and the first-place winner will get a pair of tickets to Wednesday's Best of D.C. Fete, where the city's best restaurants, breweries, and mixologists will be dishing out food and drinks. (You can also still buy tickets.)

The runner-up will get a City Paper T-shirt. After all, we assume whatever shirt you were wearing during the eating of the U Street Taco will be ruined. Also, a disclaimer: Washington City Paper is absolutely not responsible for what happens after you eat the U Street Taco.

Photo by Jessica Sidman