Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak out because I was Protestant.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

According to Wikipedia, which is black today in protest against SOPA, “First they came…” is a famous statement attributed to pastor Martin Niemoller (1892-1984) about the inactivity of German intellectuals following the Nazi rise to power.

If you think that SOPA doesn’t apply to you, and you have a gaming or any other kind of pop culture blog, you are very much mistaken. They are definitely coming for you. Those screenshots and frapsed video? Definitely someone else’s intellectual property. You could try and argue fair use, but I think that the pockets of most bloggers are much shallower than those of game companies.

If you post strong opinions about businesses or politicians, or if you review books or movies, SOPA applies to you.

Even if you live in a country which allows you to do things like post links to other sites (even if you are not providing pirated property at all) SOPA will apply to you. America (or rather the corporations behind every politician) have already won the right to extradite people who have committed no crime in their own country.

Posting lolcats? Better not. Ok, that is taking things to a silly extreme of course, but the point is that anyone will have the right to take your site down without hearing or proof. And they will do it.

The Oatmeal had the best anti-SOPA protest today; this says it all.

On a minor level, I’ve seen my own artwork pirated. I’ve seen it used on other sites and presented as other people’s work. I’ve written some nasty emails and had work taken down. If I was making any money at all from my art, then that would theoretically be costing me money. Would I stand behind something as corrupt as SOPA and PIPA to keep that from happening? Not in a million years.

Yes, I am a Bad Person. I admit that I do download things like TV shows and some music. But you know what? I wouldn’t be doing it if this media was sold at a fair price, or (in the case of TV shows) sold to a global market. Do you think that I want to watch my favourite shows a full season behind the US, after I’ve already read tons of spoilers? No, I want to experience it at the same time as everyone else. I would totally pay for ALL music if I didn’t feel that it was morally corrupt – the artist will be getting a few pence from every CD sold, and the music and movie industry is full of asshats. I don’t want to feel dirty – give me a way to buy music without supporting corporations that do so much harm in the world.

If I was prosecuted for downloading the odd Castle or True Blood episode, I would have to hold my hand up and say “yes, I did that and I knew it was wrong.” But having my site taken down because I post a negative review of a game and add some screenshots? Wrong.

So speak out. Don’t wait until there is no one left to speak for you.

For a long time I’ve been wanting to split the site between artwork and blog, and make more of a feature of the art section. I use my various deviantART and Behance profiles as portfolios, but they’re obviously not optimal as a showcase to try and get a bit of work happening.

Because I really, really need to start bringing in some money. Phil brings in money from freelance copywriting, but it isn’t enough to pay the bills. Because my last place of employment was such a negative, costly experience and due to the fact that as an older woman in a predominantly male environment, I’m really going to struggle in trying to go back to web development or project management. We have another couple of months, and then the savings are gone…a scary place to be. But as always, we keep shovelling: networking, updating all of the various social media and networking sites, sending out emails, sending out CVs.

Anyway, the new site. Since the book that I’ve been working on is kind of a steampunk fairytale, I’m thinking a steampunk theme, homepage split between art and writing. I’m sticking with WordPress, of course – I think it is the best blogging and community software out there. I’m looking forward to a shiny new place to play. :)

I’ve been working on Clockwork Bluebird edits and revisions, and have just finished today. The thing really needs a proper title but I am completely blank. WTB title plz.

We have old friends coming to stay with us on Friday, which is very much looked forward to, and tomorrow our Christmas present from the in-laws is being installed. Since the kitchen is the only room which has the original 100-year-old windows still in place and is cold enough to keep ice cream frozen on the counter, double-glazing is very much appreciated. Now if we can just find the money to fix the leaking roof, or get the slowly-tilting Chimney of Doom replaced…

Still playing way too much SWTOR, and very much enjoying the class storylines and character arcs. My Sith Inquisitor had some flirt options available for a very smarmy NPC, which I took, and all of a sudden he was leading her to a convenient bedroom where he promised wine and nibbles. They went into a clinch, and I was like “AAAAAAGGGGHHHH!!!” and covering my eyes. The next morning my pirate companion Andronikos Revel was quite snippy about it, and claimed to have had his own night of fun with a stable girl. I’ve been frapsing some of the interaction between Ravven and Andronikos, and will do a post on virtual relationships at some point. Even though the interaction is scripted and the other party is a character in a game, it’s still well-written enough that there is some fizz there as the relationship unfolds. Nicely done.

Back to work. 2012 is going to be my year to realise some dreams, after all, and I am putting everything into making that happen.

Fair warning about the video below: I quite liked it, but Phil came in the room and asked if someone was killing a cat. Your mileage may vary.

My new year’s resolution is to be in a much better position in 2012, and make up for this holiday. I want family and a tree and presents and good cheer.

A pic from an older, happier Christmas (before everything fell apart), unbrushed hair and no makeup and all:

At the time we started, you couldn’t watch or read the news without seeing a story on how schools and parents were trying to deal with keeping kids safe on social networking sites such as MySpace. (Yes, this was before MySpace tanked and Facebook rose to ascendancy.) Everyone was wringing their hands about all of the online predators waiting in line to access kiddies’ social media profiles, and every adult was considered to be a threat to children. I was hired as project manager for a startup founded by a man who had made his money in corporate incentives. His initial idea was that if you could incentivize salespeople to succeed, why couldn’t you incentivize children the same way? And so we started.

Quickly the project grew into a social networking site. As you have to build account management and profile functionality as part of any membership site, it was a natural step. And then it dawned on us that what we were actually building was a communication platform between kids, parents, schools and businesses. It was the perfect opportunity to build a safe, secure social networking site that allowed kids to express themselves and have fun in a safe environment. It felt like an epiphany, or a revelation: the only way that you can be sure that a child is actually a child is to have the schools verify identity. You can’t have parents do it, as they may not be parents, and the child may not actually be a child. Problem solved.

The project took two years, and during that time we created an absolutely amazing system. I learned a very important point about feature creep during this project, as we actually went on to build all of the cool things that we thought up. The resulting site was perhaps too feature-rich, as it was difficult to present and sell concisely. In the end, we had a networking site that offered:

1. Safe social networking, as above. Kids could connect with other kids all over the world, along with businesses that wanted to mentor kids (future employees, of course!) and teachers. I kept using the analogy of the traditional village, wherein kids had contact with people of all ages from child to elderly, which I think is very positive if handled in a safe, secure manner. Basically, no communication could happen privately unless it was between two verified children. Everything else was open and public, which makes it difficult to groom a child.

2. Profiles where you could update statuses, blog, share pictures and video, and have a friends list. The normal stuff. Schools and businesses also had profiles and community areas.

3. The incentives section, where parents or schools could set goals or tasks for kids, and reward them with points for achieving those goals. We were in discussion with Amazon for the shop backend, which would have given us a virtually limitless selection of rewards.

4. From the start I designed the system as a game, loosely based on MMO activities. Gamification is a hot topic right now, but at the time only Raph Koster had written about it in his A Theory of Fun. Along with the material incentives, users also gained points by social activities. I’ve unfortunately lost the white paper that I wrote as part of my project plans, features and functionality specs, and so on; I was very proud of it. Basically, there are several basic game mechanics that related to our site: collection, wherein people collected material points, or friends; levelling, wherein users gained different levels of respect, titles and so on; vanity goods, which aren’t tangible but fun fluff to add to a profile, etc.

5. Virtual spaces in the browser as part of the page. This was a cool area, which I loved building – but when I mentioned feature creep above? Yep, this is it. :) Using X3D, which at the time we had a lot of hope for, we built personal rooms that could be added to a profile and furnished. We used Flash in the admin area where users designed their rooms and chose their avatars, and then displayed them using X3D (which unavoidably required a plugin, something I was never happy with).

6. Parents had a clear view of what their kids were actually doing in school, and could communicate with teachers regarding any potential problems. As a parent, I can tell you that if you ask a kid if they’ve finished their homework, they’ll usually tell you yes. Trust me, it’s not always true.

7. The virtual spaces were also used in the VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) areas. A VLE is used by a teacher to build lessons online, test the students, and capture information regarding completion, time spent, and test score. They can be as clunky as a framework to upload Word files into, or a cool as…well, as what we built. The interface was very similar to WordPress, and teachers could easily add text, images, videos, and create a virtual space to drop into the space. Teachers are notoriously technophobic, and making this simple enough for a teach to use was HARD. Excuse me if I’ve offended any teachers, but you all know what I mean.

An example of the VLE area that I used often in presentations was: Imagine that you are teaching about ancient Egypt. Rather than dry text and some images, imagine a page where kids could watch videos of Egypt and even do a virtual walkthrough in a tribal marketplace, or through a burial tomb. That is immersive – you can practically smell the spices in the air and feel the sun on your head. It was easy and fun. Choose an environment, choose objects from the libraries, drag them around on the screen to suit and save – you’re immediately a game designer and also the coolest teacher that any of your kids has had!

8. Virtual classrooms with video and shared whiteboards for distance learning, tutoring, and so on. This was also intended to act as a way of keeping in touch with far-flung family members. A dad in Iraq could read a bedtime story to his child, and so on. Teachers could get together and hold meetings from home.

Google contacted us out of the blue and asked to see a business plan, which is the scariest frackin thing that has ever happened to me. Trust me, you feel a bit like Nemo facing the giant shark…are they going to eat us up? Will they invest, or will they see what we’re doing and create their own in a fraction of the time with the massive resources available to them? In our case, they received the business plan and never wrote back. Disappointing and a bit of a relief at the same time.

We presented to the Boy Scouts, and they were interested in bringing all six-million-whatever members on board. We started working with their backend people.

And then, just as we were in a frenzy of pitching the project to schools and organisations around the country, the recession came along and bashed our little heads in.

The company had been funded by a single person, who put everything on the line. He had investors, but tried to hang on to the bulk of the company. By then I’d been offered a spot on the Board of Directors for my contributions. There were warning signs that we were running out of money…and then it was over, and all of our hopes and dreams gone with it.

A week before Christmas, I had to stand in front of a very large group of loyal people, who had all worked their guts out over the project, and tell them that paycheques were going to be short. I could feel my knees trembling as I spoke, and afterwards I went to the bathroom and threw up. Four or so months later, we were gone.

I don’t have the heart to write the rest of it. Creating this amazing, mammoth site was my biggest accomplishment professionally, and failing tore me apart. I’m thankful that I had the chance to work on a project of that level, and am eternally grateful to have worked with so many very talented people. But it still hurts.

And that is my startup story.

Happy Holidays and peace to you all. May you always have a lamp to guide you through the darkness.

]]> http://www.ravven.com/blog/2011/12/happy-holidays-3/feed/ 1 http://www.ravven.com/blog/2011/12/fear-of-failure/ http://www.ravven.com/blog/2011/12/fear-of-failure/#comments Thu, 08 Dec 2011 16:49:02 +0000 Ravven http://www.ravven.com/blog/?p=3719 Today I have read approximately 5,678,987 tweets and pretty much everything in the blogoverse. I have stared at blank white screens in Scrivener for hours. I have thought about doing a thousand really important things, but I haven’t done any of them.

I’m not a lazy person. I approach pretty much everything from art to writing to gaming with that Type-A must-succeed-at-all-c0sts mentality. I’ll get up at the crack of dawn and work all day…unless I am paralysed with doubt and fear.

That is my big problem: that internal voice which says “you can’t,” and “you’ll fail.” I think that is why I’ve gone above and beyond in every job that I have ever had; I throw everything at a project in order to still that sneaky little voice that tells me that I’m not good enough. Never have been, never will be. Best to not even try.

I hate that voice, but sometimes it is all that I can hear.

This year wasn’t the best year ever, as I went from a horrific work environment to quitting my job in an extremely shaky economy. It hasn’t been all bad, however, since I finally had the opportunity to do a lot of creative work that I haven’t had the chance to do before (stress and anger not being conducive to anything creative that doesn’t involve cutting and welding metal into sculptures). I did some art for book covers, and I wrote part of a book.

I’m thankful for a lot of things, not the least is that I’m still here. Last spring I thought dark thoughts about suicide almost every single night – no exaggeration. And now I’m happy most of the time. We’re on the thin edge, as a lot of people are, but we’re still here, and we love each other. And that is pretty damn fine.

Raise a glass, and have a wonderful day with the ones you love. And be very thankful.

My parents (before my Mom died)

My Sisters

As my father has terminal cancer, I can’t say that it was exactly a fun-packed trip, but it felt so good just to sit together and talk. This will probably be the last time that I see him, and we were both very aware of that. It is difficult to live far away across oceans, and to an extent you lose your place in the family a bit. The last time he went into the hospital, I read about it on Facebook before anyone thought to call me. Yes, I admit to throwing a bit of a princess snit over that one. ;)

Being offline for ten days was quite weird. How did any of us get along before broadband? On dialup I could barely load mail in Gmail, and anything else was impossible. Since getting back -and plugging back in- it’s been difficult to catch up on things. I have a metric buttload of blog posts to catch up on, I haven’t written anything myself, and Twitter I gave up as a lost cause in terms of trying to catch up with everyone.

As always, I got a bit twitchy about no gaming for so long. What can I say, I’m an addict. Hello, my name is Monica and I am a MMO addict. Take me away from my games for any length of time, and I start to get the shakes.

If I can get a handle on the current insomnia problem (I’m talking fullblown awake until 4:30 am sleeplessness) and can put words in sentences coherently, I need to start updating again regularly. I miss my blog.

Back to regularly scheduled (which in the UK they pronounce with a “shed” while I insist on saying “sked”) programming.

*******

Must. Stop. Using. So. Many. Parenthesis. (Seriously.)