My Week with Green Dot

This week I was in in Martin doing Green Dot training. Honestly, I wasn't really looking forward to it. I'm away from my wife and kids and it's a week out of my summer. I know that Green Dot's mission to prevent personal violence is a good one, but what could I really do?

It's crazy how I played directly into their hands.

Before coming, it seemed like a program. I don't really like programs. Programs are zombies: thoughtless, moving only under momentum, slowly, and certainly dangerous in their unfeeling mass. Unfortunately, people act in groups, and if we can emphasize the personal relationships we all have, we can help.

Green Dot focuses on proactive things, not reactive--healing the wounded is good, but preventing wounds is better. Along those lines, Green Dot hinges on two things. First, it doesn't ask us to identify as a potential victim in need of defense or a potential aggressor in need of restraint, but a bystander who needs to act. It's easier to identify as a bystander than either of the other groups, so it's easier to prepare to act before an emergent situation. Next, Green Dot emphasized the dilemma of a bystander's action/inaction, excluding any middle neutral path. We don't all do the best, but, as Yoda says, we do or do not, although in this case trying is rounded up, not down.

It's a program, yeah. It has a brand--it even has a logo, the eponymous Green Dot. But it focuses on on action more than "activism"; us ourselves rather than "community." I was afraid of a program that focused on keeping women from getting hurt and keeping men from doing horrible things. I discovered a conversation about how bad things happen to all sorts of people, but primarily how all sorts of people can help each other stay safe--most directly, it's about how we protect other people.
We good people outnumber the bad people, and the only way to stop bad actions is to replace them with good actions--interpersonal violence hurts too many people, so we the majority needs to act in each other's lives, to help each other out, even to look out for chances to help.

The Gods of Our Amorites

Some hold that the Reformation held within it the germ of modern atheism, as the emphasis on personal choice for God also must allow for the personal choice against God. On a long view, however, that must have been the point from the beginning. God desires that nobody would fall, but desire implies a lack of domination, an acceptance of the possibility or even probability of rejection. In all, we know that the straight path is narrow and the wayward path is wide.

This is what Joshua told the people of Israel. We concentrate on the "choose this day who you will serve," but there's more there. Joshua emphasized choice in serving God, but in particular he was speaking to those who did not want to serve God, those who in his words found serving God "evil" in [their] eyes." Joshua emphasized his own choice of God, but confronted the rebellious, disgruntled Israelites with a dilemma: either serve their fathers' God, or serve the Amorites' God. There are only two paths, after all, and either we must choose to submit to the God who loves us, or submit to the gods of those who hate us and want us dead.

For our Amorites, whether philosophically atheist or simply uncaring, want not to glorify us but to glorify themselves. They don't want to save us eternally, but to prolong the suffering of this world under the guise of "preserving life." Our Amorites praise the man as opposed to the God who has brought us this far. Our Amorites praise the seemingly immortal god Mammon, who shall be destroyed with his gold in the fires that end the world, as our God and his faithful look on, sad for the great loss but safe eternally. Our Amorites worship science but not the Creator of nature, asking questions of the universe that provoke more questions, not seeking solace in the God who satisfies fully in the waters that satiate all thirst.

Our God made this world for us, and brought us into it, but we are here because of him and the service he asks of us. While in this world, it tries to distract, distort, taint, and corrupt, and destroy us. The gods of the Amorites demand death and blood unending, while our God desires clean hearts and loving service. The King of all that is came to us as a pauper, serving us to his own death, and begs us to let him in to our hearts, knowing that he has made the rock he cannot lift: he has given us the keys to our own hearts.

A beast, a monster, a demon might compel us to be his slaves. Our God asks us quietly, in hopeful patience, and the only time limit is our own.

Busyness as Usual

At the beginning of the semester I have everything to do. And right now, a week in, is when it hits me: until December, I won't not be busy. Every second of every day, I've got something to do—something I could be doing. As I write this, I could be grading essays or working on my conference paper or finishing my gradebook or preparing for next week's classes or smoothing out Blackboard.

I'm wasting my time writing all this.

But no, I'm not. It's not because it's almost 2 am and past time when I can competently grade. It's not because this is a form of mental work and mental work is good. It's not so I can build up a body of blog posts or even for me to look back on when I'm feeling the squeeze at the first of next semester or next year.

I'm doing this because I want to, because I find it rewarding. Writing down my thoughts makes me feel good, right now, and feeling good, though it is a tautology, *makes me feel good*.

I'm not getting behind every second I sleep instead of grade. I'm not getting behind every time I watch an episode of Doctor Who instead of grade. I'll get my work done, but what makes me good at my job—if I am—is that I am human, and being human means caring about stuff, doing things because they make me feel good.

It also means not watching *another* episode of Doctor Who, or fussing with my gradebook instead of grading essays, let alone checking Twitter again. Tomorrow, I need to grade a bunch of essays. And really, I'll enjoy it, and feel better with it done than I did before. And then I'll work some more.

But right now, I wanted this time to write.

The Minority

We know, because Jesus says so, that the only path to Heaven is a narrow one. This can only mean that the minority of humans will be in Heaven, and that the minority of humans at any given time will be faithful—do we expect that this minority is 49%, or much, much less?

In our society, in our world, majority rules. The government is run on elections more than inheritance or appointment, and the popular mob dominates culture, and so we faithful must always expect that the government will be outside us. Some governments value protecting minorities, but that's never something we or any other minority can depend on or put our trust in. We are aliens in a foreign land, our king ever-present but seemingly distant.

We are the minority in a sinful world; by very nature of a narrow path this is so. Luke 6 holds us to bless those who hold themselves as our enemies, not to gain power over them, to force them to obey in body but not in spirit, but rather to allow them to boss us around and dominate us, and to serve them lovingly. Our subservience is our mission technique; our oppressors are our mission field.

If we seek to be the majority instead of seeking to minoritize its members, we seek the trappings of this world and their impermanence. If we seek thrones rather than to serve at God's throne, we seek revolution and strife, not the peace of service—service as loved sons and daughters. We are salt and light, and salt and light are very small things, things that project their flavor, their radiance, far outward. That is our mission, our goal, our path in this lost world.

Adventures and Quests

One of the things that regularly irks me is the use of the word “adventure” in general culture, and roleplaying culture in particular. Yes, as a descriptivist, I admit that definitions change and that they’re ad hoc at best: if people at large use a word to mean X when I alone think it means Y, I’m wrong and they’re right, because words are not eternal, but only for shared meaning. Still. The original idea for adventure was caught up in the idea of randomness: it’s from the French  aventure, or “at random” or “by chance.” A knight on the Platonic ideal of an adventure mounts his horse and goads him on without touching the reins. Whatever happens, happens, and he surrenders control over the situation. When a person sets off on an adventure, he’s saying from the outset, “I have no idea what’s going to happen. In fact, I’m planning to make sure.”

By stark contrast, questing has a purpose. The most famous quest literature affords us, the quest for the Grail, has a set beginning, middle, and end. While an adventure is a serial story, a quest has the beginnings of something greater: a plot.

Both have their advantages, but again, I want to turn my attention to words and definitions, because I believe that this differentiation between adventure and quest—the de-synonymization—doesn’t limit us, but instead opens up our expression. Did you have a plan that turned out differently? That quest became an adventure. Did you just do whatever came into your head, only later realizing that it all linked together and set up a conclusion, not just an end? That adventure turned into a quest.

Through this terminology, we can even describe many smaller quests as part of a larger adventure through life, or many episodic adventures as part of a greater destined quest. When a person organizes a game (such as my friend Ian has been theorizing about), differentiating between the two is helpful. After all, if you want to set off into the unknown, or if you want to pursue a set goal, isn't it nice that we have specific words to mean each concept?

On Stealing Ideas

I like art and literature, and therefore I also like remixes and adaptation. I've been hearing a lot of Picasso's T.S. Eliot's "good artists borrow, great artists steal" maxim. Also, I've been teaching Milton, who in Paradise Lost not only adapted Genesis but also blatantly stole from Ariosto.

The problem with that quote is that "borrow" seems good, and "steal" seems bad. The quote makes it sound as if the True Geniuses of Mankind are all jerks, and that only by being jerks can they exert their Geniusness.

That's missing the point entirely. Stealing ideas is better than borrowing ideas. If I borrow a book, I have to give it back. If I steal a book, it's mine. However, like Cory Doctorow on "buying" licenses to DRM'd digital works vs stealing those digital works—the one you steal will never get arbitrarily deleted if the DRM company goes bankrupt—borrowing and stealing ideas is different. Contrary to public opinion, there is no shortage on ideas. There is no idea deficit. Ideas come out of the ether, they sublime from books and movies and human interactions. They just pop in your head and you can't control them. That's ideas for you. If I use your idea, you aren't suddenly without it any more. No, now we both have it. Ideas are not zero-sum.

So how do "borrow" and "steal" even apply? OK, here we go. If I "borrow" an idea, just like when I borrow a book, I know in every waking moment that it's not mine. It's not a part of me, and I'll be very careful around it because I see it chained to someone else. Whenever I talk about that idea, I'll reference someone else not simply to preserve attribution and good faith and all that, but because I'm uneasy around that idea. It's not mine, in the same way that to me a given funny story will never be mine, but always my father's. If I tell my daughter, though, she'll assume it's mine unless I tell her where it came from. I do that now, with my students. I tell them where I get a lot of stuff, because I'm uncomfortable claiming any (fleeting, transitory, meaningless) honor of "I came up with that."

When I get beyond that, if I get beyond that—when I realize that ideas and apothegms and proverbs and metaphors are just floating around, I can get it and use it. That's not your book, that's my book—I borrowed it years ago, but I've possessed it ten times as long as you did, and it has my notes in it and it's been a major part of my life, not yours. Those creases in the spine are mine, not yours. If you want it back, my duty is not to return it but to buy you another copy.

This works not only horizontally across friendship, but vertically, across generations. I have some books that are mine that used to be my dad's. They're mine in a way they never were his. He gave me ideas that live in my head, ideas that he tossed off one day that will stick with me forever. In a sense, I've stolen myself from him. I was his son, and now I'm my own man. In a non-zero-sum world, relationships don't change, information doesn't abandon its source—it just finds a new place. If I steal it, I make that place a home.

Why I'm Excited about OSX Lion

I’ve been excited about Lion for a while, partially just because I like new OS versions, but when I talked about my excitement with one of my friends last week, he said that the whole thing seemed unimpressive. Let’s face it: this is not the same as the shift from DOS to Windows, Pre-Ubuntu-Linux to Ubuntu, or System 9 to OS X^[1]. I was and am really excited about Lion, and couldn’t imagine a person who wasn’t. Of course, as a contrarian, I’m excited for subtle reasons^[2]: I’m not excited about all of Apple’s big bullet points, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be excited about.

I’m excited in four basic areas:

1. Apple tried to make it look pretty


2. Apple tried to make it like iOS


3. Apple tried to make it unbreakable


4. Apple tried to extend its awesomeness

1. Looking Pretty

Here’s what looks better in Lion:

• Textedit: the icons more integrated with titlebar. Since I hardly ever ⌘Q this application, this is big for me.


• iCal and Address Book are skeuomorphic. Since I like actual things (as opposed to virtual things), this is nice. If you don’t like skeuomorphism, I understand, but I think it looks pretty.


• Full screen apps everywhere. While I don’t always like this (right now I’ve got Notational Velocity opened in a window and TextEdit in another), I can’t deny the appeal of the ability to run an app full-screen at some point. Running Preview, iCal, Mail, Terminal, and TextEdit full-screen (with a system-wide API and keyboard shortcut) seems like an obvious good thing. I love the full-screen mode in the latest iPhoto


• iCal Heat Map: There’s a new year view (!), and iCal will show via colorized heat map which days and weeks are most and least busy. Instant information, at a glance. BusyCal, plz reproplicate.

2. Just Like iOS

Here’s what’s (wonderfully) iOS-like in Lion:

• The scrollbars. Hail iOS-like scrollbars. In a year we’ll all wonder what we did without them. “How can I tell how far I am in a document? That doesn’t matter as much as being constantly forcefully reminded how far you are in a document. I’m in TextEdit now and even though I haven’t finished a full page, I see a greyed-out space for a scroll bar. Honestly, this should have come years ago.


• Menubar notification for location services. Hear me out on this one. I know we all have too many icons in our menubars already, but this one just pops up every now and then. Now, Google or Facebook or whatever can request our physical location from a browser. Like most of us, the first time it happened I clicked “OK and stop bugging me.” Now I have no idea when it happens, and honestly I don’t want a giant pop-up each time. A transitory menubar icon seems right, and after using iOS a lot, the little purple ➤ jumps out at me.


• Color (!) Emoji font system-wide. I can’t wait to start using this with Typinator, even if it’s just for personal usage. I expect it to be standard on Windows 8 (or maybe Win8 SP1) after Apple takes the lead. Potentially annoying, yes, but must-need for mobile/desktop compatibility.


• Character-picker: Hold down a key and instead of getting “nooooooooooooo” you get “n+[oóòôøõö].” If this does not seem cool to you, then either A) you type “nooooooooooo” too much, B), you only ever type in English, or A+B.


• Auto-correction: If the word is misspelled (or potentially misspelled), you’ll get a pop-up with a little X next to hit. Click X to keep the current spelling. If this also works with doublespace → period-space, I’ll be in love.

3. More Unbreakable

I don’t want my anything to break, but I know it will eventually. Here’s what mitigates that:

• Time Machine works on the go, away from a backup drive. Blink, take a drink of water, go for a walk. Blink. Scream as loud as you can. Yeah, it’s like that.


• If you have to restart your system (admittedly rare in Mac compared to Windows already), you don’t have to close your apps. As far as I can tell, even the ones with unsaved files. They’ll be there after you restart—same window positions, same highlighting, same cursor and mouse position. Again, feel free to scream a bit.
• Auto-save and Versions: “Microsoft Word already auto-saves. Time Machine already stores backup versions.” This is true. But this adds A) system-wide APIs for auto-save that every application can use, and B) non having to go through Time Machine to get to the previous version of just one file. Have you ever used Time Machine to go eight directories deep to check on one odd file? Either you haven’t and you’re confused or you have and you’re excited about Lion.

4. Extra Awesome on Top

I think Mac OS X 10.5 & 10.6 are the best operating systems ever, for the same reason I think the SNES controller is the best ever. Think of slider bars that feature “functionality,” “beauty,” and “ease”—every time you adjust one, the others move two. 10.5 and 10.6 have those bars pushed up farther than I knew they could go after 10 years of Windows experience and 4 years of Linux experience. There are tradeoffs, but they’re small. 10.7 Lion only adds to the awesome:

• Preview is the best Mac app, and it’s now even better:

  
  
  • Add signature to PDF documents. Hold some paper with your signature up to the iSight/Facetime camera, and Preview captures it and puts it on a PDF. Boom.
  
  
  • Preview supports iWork and Office. Concerning system resources, Office » iWork » Preview—that is, iWork for me starts twice (or more) as fast as Office, and Preview feels like I’m on an SSD. Unless I want to edit a file, I’m going to want everything to open in Preview from now on.



• Quick Look, my 2nd favorite part of Mac, after Preview. As much as I talked about Preview, I think I’ll be living even more in Quick Look, although I almost include them as the same app. Here’s what’s new:

  
  
  • Now it’ll support addresses (through Google Maps), Address Book contacts, and more.
  
  
  • In Finder, less-focused on popovers, but now actual windows. “Open in…” buttons.
  
  
  • Everywhere else (Spotlight, Mail, and other places you don’t want full windows) using popovers. Definitions included. Wikipedia included.
  
  
  • 3-finger double-tap to look up a word in Dictionary/Thesaurus/Wikipedia, just like the ⌃⌘D of 10.5-10.6.

Bottom Line

Okay, that’s a lot of stuff. Mind-blowing? It’s not as cool as a new iTunes that allows you to read your iBooks on a Mac would be. It’s not as cool as AirPlay to the Mac would be. It’s not as cool as the revolutionary 10.5 Leopard (Time Machine, Spaces, Boot Camp, Preview, prettification), or even 10.4 Tiger (Spotlight, Automator), but it has a few distinct benefits:

• Cost: It’s $30. Yes, this is obvious—Paying over $150 for Leopard is one thing, but isn’t ⅕ the price worth these things? I’ve covered 18 things, which comes out to $1⅔ each. Just buying single-use apps to do that stuff would cost at least twice as much, and I haven’t even covered AirDrop, FaceTime, gesture customization, iChat unification, Launchpad, Mail Conversations, Mission Control (each desktop can have its own wallpaper!), QuickTime can rotate video or export audio only, Drag-and-drop from Spotlight, system-wide vertical text support, or being able to play albums from the iTunes album art-tile screensaver. $30. $30. $30.


• Access: It’s not just $30, but $30 no matter how many machines you run. My wife and I have two laptops using the same iTunes Apple ID, but Snow Leopard cost us $50 for the multi-user pack. For us, to upgrade two computers, Lion will essentially cost us $15 each.

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1. The relative importance of all of these shifts, and others I haven’t mentioned, are arguments all to themselves—arguments I’m not going to address right now.


2. Everything from the main Lion features page here