Anyway, I just had to make a post about the recent gaming drama due to this quote from a halfhearted “my side of the story” article:

Hardworking people, including myself, spent thousands of hours away from family and friends working on Duke Nukem Forever. The game is what it is, but we poured our hearts into bringing the game back from video game purgatory. That single story hurt and I acted rashly, vented my frustration and I am paying for my actions, more so than you know. Shouldn’t the journalist have to pay for his? Should I continue to support him?

So you poured your heart/money/time/whatever to something and it turns out that it sucks. Then someone calls you out on it.

Asking for pity is the worst thing you can do in this situation.

For one, it’s illogical. If you worked hard for something should it automatically mean that your product is worthy of praise?

Also, if the criticism is indeed irrational and unfounded, then why the hell aren’t you taking taking it seriously? Shouldn’t you just ignore it, or just provide a clear and simple rebuttal on why it’s wrong? Why go the “victim” route?

I’ve seen this happen so many times ever since I got on the internet and it would’ve been amusing if it’s limited to deluded kids who think the traces they post to DeviantArt are the best thing since sliced bread.

But it’s not; as we see above, even a PR firm for a multimillion dollar production was stupid enough to do this.

Moral of the story: If sometime in the future I give a scathing review to you, your company, your product, your event, etc. and you respond by saying “we worked hard on this, you have no right to say that”, or worse, play the crab mentality card on me, I will seriously fuck you up.

For the interest of those who find it preposterous not to have Facebook always open in a browser tab, here are my reasons why I stopped using Facebook:

The signal to noise ratio is low

Unlike some people who have deleted their Facebook accounts, I understand that Facebook is a very useful tool. It has an integrated “mail” and “chat” service. You can create picture albums. It allows you to organize events. There are a crapload of apps in the platform.

However, the main feature of Facebook is always its social aspect, whether it’s sharing your status or tagging people in pictures. And this is where I don’t like Facebook: this social aspect is always full of noise.

“Oh sure,” the Facebook fanatics will tell you, “but why don’t you just hide or block the noisy people/apps?”

Well if I do that, I’d block 95% of my friends list. It’s so much easier to just not visit Facebook.

Social circles overlap

I can’t seem to find a link to a similar article I saw a while back so I’ll just say it with my own words.

In high school, I had 3 social circles. In college, everyone went to La Salle so I made 4 new social circles. After college, I got another social circle. After I got fired, I made two new social circles.

Long story short, I can post something totally appropriate for one of those many circles while totally offending another.

It’s like attending a really big birthday party with people shouting things for all to hear. Again, too much noise.

It’s also the reason why I’m only using Twitter nowadays: my current Following list only consists of a single social circle.

I am not dependent on social interaction

It’s not obvious, but I rarely use my cellphone. I can go on weeks or even months without texting someone. I started wearing a watch when I realized it would be a hassle for me to dig for my phone in my pocket just to get the time.

It’s the same thing with Facebook. A lot of people are dependent on Facebook the same way they are dependent to their phones: they need to keep in touch with their friends and family.

And I don’t.

How I got to this is a long and complicated story, so I’ll just take a cue from a certain NDS game and just say that I believe that when you become too dependent on social interaction, your world ends with you and your friends.

There are a many great wondrous things in this world, and I choose to see, feel, and experience them rather than waste my time and thoughts to wondering who’s dating who or what drama this group of people are involved in this time.

This is the third time an Indian dude (I checked the IP address) took time to go to my contact page and answer the CAPTCHA just to send spam about SEO; I think it’s a good time to speak my mind about SEO in general.

But first, let’s talk about how wrong this approach is.

If you’re going to offer to do business with me, you should have at least read my About page. There you should have realized that (a) I’m not doing this site for money, popularity, or the like and (b) I am an experienced software engineer and I could probably do better than you in SEO if I put some effort in it.

This display of ignorance alone is enough to make me throw your mail into the spam folder of my mailbox.

And now, back to the topic of SEO.

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To me, Search Engine Optimization is like investing in stocks. You can go the slow-and-steady Warren Buffett way, or you can go the “get rich quick” day trading way.

Most SEO (including the spam I got) falls under the latter; both this “hardcore” SEO and day trading promises huge profits for little effort. In reality, it’s the opposite—in the long run, the costs of using these two approaches often overshadow whatever profits you would gain.

A better approach for both SEO and trading would be to stick to the basics and take things slow. Here’s just some of the basics:

• Make your site SEO friendly, but don’t go overboard. For a WordPress site, this would mean getting a domain with your name on it, enabling pretty permalinks, installing All in One SEO Pack and Google XML Sitemaps, and adding either Google AdSense or Google Analytics somewhere in your themes. Anything beyond that is overkill IMO.
• Write interesting posts. Getting people to want to read your posts is really the best SEO you could do.
• Rubbernecking or writing stupid controversial things are fine (hey, it’s your site!), but I personally won’t recommend it. You might get a lot of hits at first, but don’t expect that to last once you get labeled as a douchebag.
• Join relevant communities and talk to people. If you’re nice and interesting enough, you don’t even need to advertise your site address—they’ll be the ones to look it up.
• Be consistent. You don’t need to post something everyday, but try not to leave your site un-updated for more than a few months.

Granted, some of the basics take a lot of effort (like writing interesting posts) and may even take more time and effort than “hardcore” SEO, but you’ll be more certain of getting higher exposure in the long run. The key here is that you shouldn’t focus on putting your site on the top of the result lists. Instead, you should focus on the quality of your site: getting on the top of the result lists will automatically follow.

Problem is, even if I focused on just anime and manga instead of the entire Japanese hobby culture scene (which would include cosplay, collectibles, etc), I still have literally dozens of possible topics to talk about.

After thinking about it for a day, I went with the topic that I could say that I am really passionate about: the story of how we reversed the fortunes of UP AME; from being a hopeless anime organization into a thriving one. Not only is it a significant part of my life, the topic would also be relevant for most of the audience (I doubt that most of them aren’t inside a club or community of their own).

–

I put a decent amount of effort into this talk, not only because I don’t want to embarrass myself or the org, I also don’t want do look like a hypocrite after bashing the presentations in last year’s Y4IT.

Most of my effort went to the slides. It took me at least 3 days to finish them mainly because of my lack of experience (dammit, I’m a software engineer, not a graphic designer!) and because I had to look for good pictures from various sources. I also had to re-read Presentation Zen since it’s been a long time since I’ve made presentations.

Preparation for the talk itself was difficult, though it’s not as hard as the slides. I’d have to thank Scott Berkun for this part, his Confessions of a Public Speaker as well as his Ignite talk on giving Ignite talks gave me invaluable tips for making my talk.

One thing I learned on my own about Ignite was that Ignite presentations are more like song performances than presentations when you have more than 4 points to make. My talk had 7 different points so the timing is important. It didn’t worry me, though, since I have experience singing in front of a lot of people. I just had to practice enough that my mouth goes auto-pilot when on the stage, ignoring the inevitable effects of stage fright.

My script went through at least a dozen revisions throughout my practice sessions. With at least 3 runs per revision, I’m guessing that it took me 60 partial runs (just a 1-minute section) and about 30 full runs to get the hang of things. As you would see below, even with all this practice, I still had to ad-lib and adapt to the situation.

–

Oh and yeah, Ana Santos of Sex and Sensibilities talked before me. Talking about hardcore geeks after a talk on sex was kinda awkward. D:

–

Script, slides, and side comments below the cut.

Those of you who are into the local Japanese hobby culture scene, possibly the Go guys there, should be familiar with the University of the Philippines Anime Manga Enthusiasts, better known as UP AME. This university org is probably best known

[ "Org peeps holding the legendary tarp" picture from from Szusza's CAL photoshoot album. The source was bad so I had to crop it to look good.

The Go shoutout was added at the last minute to add the impression that at least some people in the audience knows what anime and manga is. Mikong was also a former co-worker, and PGA had a booth AME no Jidai.

The slide transition in mid-sentence was intentional. If I waited for the transition, I would not have enough time in the next slide for pauses. ]

for pulling off events that are on-par (or even better) than anime conventions held by commercial companies.

However, the org’s situation wasn’t always this rosy.

Let’s go back ten years ago,

[ Pictures from UP AME DeviantArt gallery. I chose to crop or use teasers instead of the posters in cases where they would look better in the grid.

Multiple pauses in this slide. The timing is important because the next slide has a lot of spoken text. ]

when a local TV station turned Japanese cartoons, aka anime, into a fad. A small group of anime and manga fans decided it was a good time to start an org in UP. As expected, a lot of people signed up like myself.

[ Instead of having to add another attribution to copyrighted material, I just cropped Deng from the AME no Jidai poster and used a simple scanline effect.

Forgot to add the TV picture's source to slide 20. Source is http://www.flickr.com/photos/pablo_perez/3256295059/.

As I said, this slide has a lot of spoken text. I need to define "anime" as well as introduce the org's founding. In my practice sessions, the "like myself" often goes to the next slide.

The "people" were just simple ellipses and gradients. And yes, the number of people is not far from the actual membership size.]

After a semester of monthly meetings, it was apparent that there was a problem with the org. People were losing interest and just stopped showing up, founding members included.

[ Again, a pretty accurate rendition of the number of active members at that time. ]

At this point, the org’s days were pretty much numbered. It doesn’t take much to see that this geek community would have gone the same way as other similar geek communities that came before it.

And this brings us back to the topic of my talk:

[ Forgot where I got the clipart for the tombstone. Oh well.

The "back" part is ad-libbed because every talk is preceded by a slide containing the title of the talk. Had there not been a "slide 0", I would've not said the word "back".]

How did we save this dying geek community? What did we do to turn things around?

Looking back, what we did wasn’t really that complicated.

To start things off, we went beyond meetings and

[ Drought pic, as mentioned in the final slide, came from http://www.flickr.com/photos/georgiesharp/371472003/.

Mid sentence transition is important again here. The next few slides only allow 1-2 seconds as a margin of error. ]

actually started doing things. We had a week long merchandise booth, a lobby exhibit, and we even joined the Lantern Parade complete with our own float. This had a couple of side effects.

[ Robert gave me a bunch of old AME pics from his old stash. I've uploaded a copy of the pics here.

The merchandise booth pic is obviously not from 2001. I got it from Fra's multiply album. I blurred it a bit to make it fit in with the pictures.

After a lot of experimentation, I found out that a seamless mosaic is the best way to create slides out of multiple pictures. The location of the text in this slide as well as the next two slides are also a result of trial and error. ]

First, the longer mingling time allowed people to bond with each other. And when people start to look forward to meet each other on a regular basis, they’re a lot less likely to leave.

The larger activities also acted as a filter:

[ The top two pics come from Robert's stash. The bottom left comes from Fra while the bottom right comes from Mic. ]

it weeded out the slackers while it brought to light the passionate people, those who are willing to contribute their time, skills and talents for the org.

Now, when passionate people bond with each other

[ A combination of one of the first (lantern parade 2001) and the one of the most recent (AME no Jidai) large-scale activities of the org: working on the float, hosting (from Wigi/Triccie), painting haori (from Wil), and painting the org banner. ]

a community’s culture is formed. Culture is important, as a bad culture would eventually destroy an org. Fortunately for us, what we got was this “fun org” culture. The “fun” part’s easy,

[ Four slides, four important points. I have to elaborate what this slide means in the next two slides, though. ]

We’re an anime org. We do fun stuff like talking about stuff that would get us weird looks from most of you guys here. We also do other fun stuff like, say, wear costumes. But part of our culture is that

[ Upper row: post-2001 lantern parade, pre-Gakuensai (from Krinkle), X-mas party 2007 (from Tiff), 8th Avenue (from Klaine).

Bottom left is from the post-Gakuensai photoshoot (from Krinkle), middle right is a tambayan pic (from Szusza), and bottom right is from 8th Avenue (from me).

The "most of you guys here" is ad-libbed. Had there been more obvious geeks in the audience, that should have been "most people" instead.

It was only after I submitted these slides that I realized that there are more presidents here than in the next slide. Oh the irony. ]

we know when to draw the line and focus on the important org matters like planning for future events, managing finances, marketing, publicity, and so on. Not so obvious from an anime org, huh?

[ Except for the first picture which is from the 2009 applicants orientation (from Krinkle), all of these pics come from the EALM 2 years ago (from Krinkle again, here, here, and here).

The "Not so obvious from an anime org, huh?" was ad-libbed. I sort of panicked when I realized that I was going too fast, around 4 seconds early. ]

And now we have this list. As you can see, there’s still one important thing missing. Those of you in communities should be able to figure this out. Any guesses?

[ The summary + rest slide. The pause at the end allows me 3-4 seconds of rest while the missing entry provides a small amount of unexpectedness to keep the tension/attention up.

Red and probably Frank guessed "Sex!" prompting me to answer "No, not sex!". XD ]

Applicants. Remember, we’re college students, and regardless of what you’ve heard about UP, most of us actually graduate on time. Thus the need for a constant supply of new members.

[ Pic from 8th batch buddy bidding (from Krinkle).

The UP thing was one of the last things I added to the official script. Just a deadpan comedy attempt to loosen up the audience. ]

Recruitment isn’t that simple. though. We have to have a balance here too. We don’t want to scare away potential passionate members, just like these guys who are just fine with our unusual culture…

[ One Piece cosplay pic from buddy dress up (from Fra) ]

but we don’t want the really passionate people, those who could damage the org with their antics. Probably like these guys.

[ Pic from the interwebs.

I really screwed up in this slide. I don't remember how much of the script I followed here. ]

And here we have this list. Follow these and your community will last for a while.

Before I end this talk, I’d like to share one last thing, what you might call the “secret sauce” behind UP AME’s successes.

[ Summary list. The "but wait there's more" turned out to be a good idea as it's hard for the audience to know if you're at the 5 minute mark or the 4 minute mark. This allowed me to keep the attention up for a minute longer. ]

As an org, we know that the best way to grow would be to take risks, to push ourselves beyond our limits.

A good example would be Una kAME!, the first collegiate anime fair in the Philippines. At that time

[ Pic from AME no Jidai (from Wigi/Triccie).

Not-so-obscure anime reference here. ]

we had no money, no experience, and our venue wasn’t that good. But in the end it was still a resounding success, raising the bar for other anime conventions and was a significant stepping stone for our org.

[ Pics from UP AME's photobucket account. Since the pics are all low-res, a mosaic with pictures of different sizes won't work here. I had to make a collage that looks decent.

The "raising the bar for other anime conventions" was partially ad-libbed. During my practice sessions, saying only "success" and "stepping stone" was the reliable approach. Luckily, I was going too fast so I was able to fit that part in. ]

So whether you’re currently in a geek community or just planning to start one of your own, I hope this talk gave you a couple of ideas to think about.

Thank you for listening, and good night.

[ As Scott Berkun explained in his talk, the first and last slides are usually wasted, hence the "thank you" slide. ]

I’ve been wanting to write a proper post on “crab mentality” ever since I noticed that my post on Ako Mismo unexpectedly got into the first few pages of Google’s search results, but I didn’t feel like writing about something so trivial.

Unfortunately, some idiot tried to use that term as a rebuttal in a Facebook hate group that I passed by earlier today and it looks like it’s a good time to share my thoughts about that Filipino derogatory term.

As I see it, there are two uses for the term “crab mentality”:

As a catch-all rebuttal

You’re just saying that because you’re insecure.
You’re sour grape-ing; just because you don’t have xxxx, you’re attacking it.
Why do you keep on criticizing xxxx? That’s crab mentality!

If you’ve taken high school English or college Philosophy, you know that these are fallacies, not arguments. However, even while knowing this, people will keep on flinging fallacies at each other whenever there is a point to be argued.

To understand why people degenerate to using “What you’re doing is crab mentality!” and other fallacious statements in arguments, we must step back and understand how humans think and how they respond to certain situations. You don’t need to be a psychologist to find the answers to this problem; there’s a book you could find cheap in second-hand bookstores that explains it well.

Yep, How to Win Friends & Influence People, a book so well known that its cliche/parody status has prevented people from actually picking up the book and reading it.

Anyway, one of the chapters in the book neatly explains why flame wars tend to end up ugly in the long run. The title of the chapter?

You Can’t Win an Argument

Here’s Dale Carnegie’s explanation:

You can’t win an argument. You can’t because if you lose it, you lose it; and if you win it, you lose it. Why? Well, suppose you triumph over the other man and shoot his argument full of holes and prove that he is non compos mentis. Then what? You will feel fine. But what about him? You have hurt his pride. He will resent your triumph. And—

A man convinced against his will
Is of the same opinion still

When people see their beliefs being attacked by other people, or even when people just feel that their beliefs are threatened, human nature will make them leap to the defense of that belief. At first, arguments may be logical, but there will come a point in a debate where the fact that humans are not logical animals will come up. At this point, logic will be thrown out of the window and fallacies will start to show up.

The end result is always the same: neither side will concede, and both sides will consider themselves the victor.

This is the reason why when I see people accusing other people of crab mentality in a flame war, I stop watching or participating in it. It just isn’t worth it. Heck, my years of trolling arguing with people with strong beliefs have taught me to stop way before that point, usually when I notice that someone has said something subtly contradictory (i.e. stupid).

In short, this use of “crab mentality” is improper because it’s no different from other catch-all rebuttals. The only proper use of the term is:

As a term to describe a certain human behavior

Pulling other people down instead of working together.

When you think about it, it’s not exactly a Filipino-only behavior. I mean, the Seven Deadly Sins has “envy” and ancient history is full of usurpers. I even quoted Machiavelli once about something that could be classified as crab mentality.

It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.

- Niccolò Machiavelli, “The Prince”

In other words, it’s a substitute term for a concept, just like using “cosplay” for wearing a costume regardless if it’s Halloween or not; and “color of the bike shed / pissing match” for trivial debates. I guess the term stuck because Filipinos are so deep into learned helplessness that they’d rather blame circumstance that shut up and do something about things.

The term, while depressing in the Filipino context, is actually pretty decent as a substitute term. It’s a bit ambiguous and not that popular outside the country, but terms like these tend to be like that.

The problem with “crab mentality” as a term is its use in arguments. The most obvious problem is that it’s a fallacy when used as an argument. The other not-so-obvious problem is that you can’t use it in an argument because there’s no way you can differentiate “having crab mentality” with “playing devil’s advocate” (which can be malicious or not). You don’t know whether that person is pulling you down or pulling you out of the fire.

That said, there’s no reason why “crab mentality” should show up in a serious debate.

IMHO, the correct response to it would be to raise an eyebrow and suppress a chuckle. If the one saying it doesn’t realize how stupid his approach is, it’s a hopeless case.

Seth Godin and a bunch of other prominent Internet personalities / 21st century thinkers are giving away a free ebook of micro-essays on what you should think about in the coming year.

Here's the deal: it's free. Download it here. Or from any of the many sites around the web that are posting it with insightful commentary. Tweet it, email it, post it on your own site. I think it might be fun to make up your own riff and post it on your blog or online profile as well. It's a good exercise. Can we get this in the hands of 5 million people? You can find an easy to use version on Scribd as well and from wepapers. Please share.

Seeing that I still have a lot of bandwidth available on this site for this month, I might as well host the file to lessen the load on his blog:

What The Blogosphere Wants More Of:

Blog readers want to see more:

• original research,surveys etc.
• original,well-crafted fiction
• great finds: resources, blogs, essays, artistic works
• news not found anywhere else
• category killers: aggregators that capture the best of many blogs/feeds, so they need not be read individually
• clever, concise political opinion consistent with their own views
• benchmarks,quantitative analysis
• personal stories, experiences, lessons learned
• first-hand accounts
• live reports from events
• insight: leading-edge thinking & novel perspectives
• short educational pieces
• relevant “aha” graphics
• great photos
• useful tools and checklists
• précis, summaries, reviews and other time-savers
• fun stuff: quizzes, self-evaluations, other interactive content

Blog writers want to see more:

• constructive criticism, reaction, feedback
• ‘thank you’ comments, and why readers liked their post
• requests for future posts on specific subjects
• foundation articles: posts that writers can build on, on their own blogs
• reading lists/aggregations of material on specific, leading-edge subjects that writers can use as resource material
• wonderful examples of writing of a particular genre, that they can learn from
• comments that engender lively discussion
• guidance on how to write in the strange world of weblogs

I particularly like this debate not only because it’s pretty easy to win at, it’s also a great opportunity to educate people about the so-called “anime subculture”.

My modus operandi was simple: I choose to defend dubbing in the face of hordes of rabid anime fans.

Don’t get me wrong, a good number of “rabid” anime fans are quite open-minded about this issue. I don’t recall any of my orgmates having an unreasonable hatred for dubbing. But the people I used to debate against in message boards and forums back in the day were a different bunch. Fortunately, that makes them an easy prey for trolling educating.

It’s easy to win (well, technically you can’t win in an intenet debate) against them because of their narrow viewpoints. They’re so caught up with their elitism that they fail to see the many drawbacks of subtitling as well as the many advantages of dubbing. The tropes page lists them down:

• translated subtitles are also prone to error,
• subtitles distract you away from the action (i.e. anime wasn’t made for you to spend a large percentage of your time with your eyes at the bottom of the screen) and this can get annoying when characters fight and talk at the same time,
• dubbed series reaches out to a larger audience than subs, thus giving a better return on investment,
• dubs can be good or bad; focusing just on the bad dubs is just unreasonable,
• and so on…

My favorite part in the debate is when someone brings up the “with dubs, you hear the authentic emotions of the original Japanese voice actors“. Well, that’s true. However, spoken dialogue isn’t just about emotions, it’s also about context, and some of those contexts just don’t work well in direct translated English. I could go on how different Japanese dialogue can be between genders and social statuses, but I prefer to relate one encounter about half a decade ago.

Basic story: Level Up Games and ABS-CBN broadcasts (the admittedly crappy series) Ragnarok: the Animation. There was the usual whining about dubbing vs subbing, but what was interesting was how an unusually large number of people were asking “WHY THE HELL DID YOU MAKE [character name here] SPEAK IN A BATANGUEÑO ACCENT?!?!“.

I blinked in disbelief. Then I answered.

“Duh. It makes sense because the original character was speaking in Kansai-ben.”

(And yeah, according to LU, the voice actress was using her native Marinduque accent. It’s a cross between Batangueño and Bisaya.)

We’ve got all of these whining self-proclaimed experts at the Japanese language, and yet none of them knows that Japan, like the Philippines, has regional dialects — one of the things you can’t easily translate via subbing.

Educational Pwning. Good times.

Here’s yet another nice bit of information I found while browsing Wikipedia last year. I’m sure many of you would be able to relate to the scenario described below.

From Parkinson’s Law of Triviality:

Parkinson’s Law of Triviality (also known as the bicycle shed example, and by the expression colour of the bikeshed) is C. Northcote Parkinson’s 1957 argument that organisations give disproportionate weight to trivial issues.

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The concept is presented in C. Northcote Parkinson’s spoof of management, Parkinson’s Law (1957). Parkinson dramatises his Law of Triviality with a committee’s deliberations on a nuclear power plant, compared to deliberation on a bicycle shed. While discussing the bikeshed, debate emerges over whether the best choice of roofing is aluminium, asbestos, or galvanised iron, rather than whether the shed is a good idea or not. The committee then moves on to coffee purchasing, a discussion that results in the biggest waste of time and the most acrimony.

A nuclear reactor is so vastly expensive and complicated that people cannot understand it, so they assume that those working on it understand it. Even those with strong opinions might withhold them for fear of being shown to be insufficiently informed. On the other hand, everyone understands a bicycle shed (or thinks he or she does), so building one can result in endless discussions: everyone involved wants to add his or her touch and show that he or she is there.

So the next time your boardroom meeting degenerates to a “pissing match” over trivial things, you now have a less vulgar term to describe it.

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Further reading: Why Should I Care What Color the Bikeshed Is?