Andrea Phillips's Blog, page 21

Twisting the Knife

A young man with a gun walks into a school. Stop me if you've heard this one before.

***

Something terrible happened on Friday. It's been unavoidable ever since. For my part, I disconnected from the internet -- -- from all news and social media over the weekend as a defense mechanism, hoping that I could protect myself from all of the horrible about to unfold, and regarding which I could do nothing.

But here I am on Monday, and the news engine is still fueling itself on personal tragedy gradually shading into politics; private grief made a spectacle for... I don't even know what purpose.

And so I have thoughts. Rambling and disconnected, maybe incoherent. Maybe by writing them down, I can exorcise them. Forgive me.

***

First I think: Newtown, Connecticut is not so far from here. Google Maps says it's an hour thirty-eight minutes by car, and that includes driving through Manhattan.

I think about my own children. My little one is six years old. She's a first grader, but on the younger side. In a school district with a different cutoff, she might have been in kindergarten this year. She's so small and warm. Just a baby, really.

***

We try to make sense of things. We try to imagine a world where such a horror is not possible. So we talk about gun control, about how there is no need for personal gun ownership, and how self-defense is a mere red herring.

The Second Amendment was intended for citizens to be able to defend themselves from an oppressive government. The world has changed since then. Now there is a cell phone and ergo 911 in every room to call the police; there are unmanned drones and bunker busters that no mere personal munition could hope to oppose. Perhaps this Constitutional feature has outlived its function.

But then, but then: My mother lives in rural Michigan. The state has been devastated by poverty, its social support systems cut until they've bled dry. There are families, her neighbors, for whom the venison brought in by subsistence hunting, and yes, with guns, is what makes the difference between living through the winter and... maybe not.

It's complicated.

***

The news told me, before I shut my eyes and refused to hear any more, that his mother worked for the school. And just like that, it's too late for me to escape the perils of a vivid imagination. The writer's brain has begun to unpick the tangle of motivations and consequences that led to this moment. 

I wonder: Was he jealous of the children his mother spent time with her students? Did he feel that she loved them more, and himself less? I wonder: How much has that poor boy suffered, living in a brain where this act was the only path he could see to make it better, to make it stop?

***

We talk about mental illness, its causes, its solutions. Perhaps we could identify those likely to become violent and give them treatment before violence has been done.

This would require a social will and buckets of money America has not been able to muster for a generation. Longer than a generation.

In the 1980s, the Federal government under President Reagan defunded swaths of the social welfare system, including the institutions that once served the mentally ill. This was meant as a cost-saving measure clothed in the language of compassion: that the mentally ill would be more comfortable, feel safer, treated more humanely, in the bosom of their families and communities. 

An estimated 250,000 of America's homeless have a serious mental illness. Our prisons hold another 750,000. As with the lack of maintenance on Long Island's electrical grid in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, those short-term cost savings have been catastrophically eclipsed by long-term consequences, and the human costs they have incurred. 

***

Friday night is the seventh night of Chanukah. We light our candles and give gifts to our children. The writer's brain strikes again: characterizing, humanizing, trying to feel what it would be like if this were me.

The children at Sandy Hook, too, would have had gifts waiting for them. What does a parent do with those ungiven gifts? Do you finish Chanukah? Do you have Christmas this year? Do you ever have it again?

What about your surviving children? All of the other children. How do you explain what happened? How do you help a six-year-old comes to terms with the fact that the world is cold and cruel, and that there are evils nobody can protect you from?

How many will never again feel comfortable in a classroom? How many will never overcome PTSD, never graduate high school? Will the costs of that day end in a year, in a decade, in a lifetime?

***

I pull away from media for a weekend, but of course it isn't enough. On Monday morning, NPR is telling me about a church helping with funeral arrangements for the children. I turn it off again.

And here is another piece of the puzzle, or perhaps another thread in this knot we just can't untie. Grief turned into spectacle. A nation mourning, as though our grief were anything but a pale shadow of the real thing, an imagination game we play at as we hold our own children tight and thank divinity and fortune that they are here when others are not.

News showing little faces, interviewing classmates, as though there were a higher purpose to be served here than the sales of ad revenue. But this is a problem that can't be solved with fundraisers or exposure. All of the empathy in the world cannot make this better, not now. Maybe not ever.

This is a problem that has to be solved. But how can there be a solution, when we cannot even agree as a nation upon the nature of the problem, or even that a problem might exist? 

And yet how can we keep ignoring it, while those small faces flash by on the news, and then are ever gone?

Resolutions for 2013: Depth

There is a problem that troubles me: how to access depth of knowledge in a world increasingly adapted to the three-minute morsel.

There's no question that any of us has access to a huge amount of information these days. Why, if I were to just think of any question, I could probably find an answer to it in no time at all! How many American presidents had moustaches? What kinds of foods does one eat for breakfast in Singapore? Who invented mascara? How do you fold an origami lily? Omniscience at my fingertips. Wikipedia, sure, but also Ask Metafilter, eHow, YouTube, Quora, and any of a thousand thousand niche message boards with communities full of helpful experts.

Resources like Wikipedia may lead us to have great breadth of knowledge -- knowing a small to moderate amount about anything -- but it comes at the expense of depth: coming to learn lots and lots about one narrow topic. Having just your immediate question answered means you're leaving unturned fields of adjacent knowledge that might add relevant nuance to a situation.

And the problem of filter and social bubbles means there could be any number of important and interesting questions we never even think to ask at all.

I recently read a book entirely about salt. It was amazing, and along the way I experienced huge shifts in my understanding of history. Think: Salt as a key strategic military resource, influencing who was dominant and who was targeted for centuries. I learned tremendous amounts about the underlying connections between simple things that form the skeleton of history.

It's precisely these connections between things that are most helpful to shaping an accurate and meaningful understanding of the world. And this is, in turn, necessary to writing that feels True-with-a-capital-T.

When I was a kid, I'd stumble into the school library and devour all of Egyptology, or the solar system, or Rennaissance fashion. Volumes and volumes of information all went into my brain and fermented there, and ultimately all helped to shape who I am now.

But depth isn't something you can stumble into anymore. You have to actively embrace it. It requires a nearly monastic clearing your head of lolcats and Gangnam Style parodies, stepping away from the idle back-and-forth of Twitter and Facebook, and diving into a topic until it's all the way over your head the old-fashioned way: Nonfiction books about knowledge, not about business theory or writing or strategy or productivity, or the hundred other kinds of nonfiction that we think make us virtuous but don't actively teach us much about the world outside our own bubble.

It's hard to do. Hard to find the time, maybe hard to find a topic compelling enough. It's hard to focus on only one thing, even through the boring parts or the ones you don't quite follow yet, when we have so much shiny and fun clamoring at our elbows.

But it's important. So in 2013 I'm resolving to try to dive deep on one subject a month, for the entire year, and I hope you'll join me. Who's in?

Closing Out 2012

That 2012, man. It's been a hell of a year, hasn't it? A hurricane in Manhattan, an election, the Olympics. Disney buying Lucasfilm. A South Korean pop star taking the world by storm. It's been one for the record books, I'd say.

A lot of people I know have had a terrible 2012, but actually... I think I had a pretty great year. I think? Let's boogie on down Memory Boulevard and take a look at all the stuff I did in 2012.

Invisible Projects

Through the first half of the year, I was incredibly frustrated, because I was getting a steady flow of projects... but nothing ever launched. 

A game for a Fortune 500 company that hasn't seen light of day, and as far as I know, may never; a prototype for a human rights game that never went on to further funding; a fair smattering of pitches that never went anywhere. It was kind of a downer, after 2011's eight launches in three months. It happens a lot, I know, but I'm not accustomed to doing much work that never makes it out the door. Spoiled rotten, I am.

All of the work in the world doesn't matter if you don't ship.

Bright Spots

But I did get to do quite a lot of work I'm proud of, particularly in the second half of the year. Perhaps the most notable was Is It a Deadly Affair? for Investigation Discovery. I'm still ridiculously proud of that structure, from both an implementation and a narrative perspective. I also got to contribute to a couple of Campfire projects, always a fantastic experience and a polished result -- The Wow! Reply for National Geographic's show Chasing UFOs, and Pledge your Allegiance for HBO's Game of Thrones. 

And this year, Naomi Alderman brought me in on a few things as well; another prototype, this one for an as-yet-unreleased fitness game (so many!), plus interval training missions for Zombies, Run! which also haven't been released yet, but I am 100% confident that it will happen!

Oh Yeah, That Thing

And then, of course, there was A Creator's Guide to Transmedia Storytelling. It's sort of cheating to chalk it up to 2012, because the writing was all done by Halloween of 2011. But in early 2012 there were still photo permissions and copyedits to sort out, plus June brought... promotion. Sooooo much promotion. Speaking and podcasts and interviews and articles. I'm going to have to properly collect some of that, eventually. And I guess update my projects list with stuff I've done this year, too. Wanion!

The book got a tremendous and flattering reception. I got to launch at Film Society of Lincoln Center! People tell me they like it! And I'm led to believe that it's on the curricula of courses at Columbia, Rutgers, USC, and several other universities. I'm secretly hoping that in next year's roundup, I'll be able to link to a bunch of projects made by people inspired or influenced by my book; helping people to make more and better work was, after all, the whole idea.

Original Work

In my heart, A Creator's Guide is linked with the idea of owning a stake in your work, flying your own flag, putting some skin in the game. This year, I made several steps in that direction -- more than I had thought myself until I started tallying up the score.

First, you may remember that Stitch Media announced the children's book Circus of Mirrors, my contribution to their forthcoming Imaginary Friends line, for which work is ongoing. You guys, I can't wait for the frabjous day when we can show it to you. 

Balance of Powers, the collaborative Kickstarted occult Cold War thriller, also finally launched in August after several painful and ultimately expensive months of trying to figure out how to make a small international business partnership on the legit. The plot has recently very much thickened, so it's a great time to take a look.

There is exactly one notable thing I did this year entirely on my own. Late in 2011, I ransomed a short story on Kickstarter. Early this year, I e-published the rewards from that as Shiva's Mother and Other Stories. This was a tremendous step for me. For all that I've professionally written hundreds of thousands of words, this was the first time I'd ever put just-my-own no-collaborators original fiction out in the world for other people to look at. It's a moody, kind of strange little collection of stories, which is fitting, because I am myself moody and more than a little strange. I'd be delighted if you picked it up and let me know what you think. It's only 99 cents!

Oh, and I, uh, started a vlog?

And last but by no means least, in late March, I started a blog series called Making Felicity, about my transmedia YA serial fiction project. I fleshed out the parameters in public view, but it took me a good long while to get rolling after that, because (see above) I had a lot on my plate.

That ball is inexorably rolling forward now. Behind the scenes, the cogs to make Felicity happen are turning, while I wait here and chew my nails and try not to obsess about it. I don't want to go into specifics because I don't want to jinx anything, but... the process has begun. 

And for 2013?

I'm still thinking about what I want for next year, and how exactly I'm going to go after it. I mean, obviously I want to land a fat nine-figure deal for Felicity and devote my life to her, but that's... shall we say... implausible.

I have a few very promising projects in my pipeline, too, though nothing set in stone (or writing, if you prefer), so if you've ever wanted to hire me, now is a good time to reach out.

Meanwhile, I think maybe I've earned a break. So for the rest of 2012, I'm going to read books, play games, and let the ol' brain-batteries recharge so I can do it all again next year.

Joy and felicitations to you. Here's hoping you had a wonderful 2012, too. Failing that, a colossal and magnificent 2013.

Glitch, Fourth Wall, and Perplex City

Two companies doing work I admire have announced in the last few weeks that they're closing their doors on projects I love: Fourth Wall Studios, creator of Emmy-winning Dirty Work; and Tiny Speck, creator of quirky Flash MMO Glitch.

In neither case is the company itself shutting down. They're both conducting a pivot, as the Silicon Valley lingo goes. Fourth Wall will focus on developing its technology platform and get out of the business of original content. Tiny Speck will pursue chat technologies it developed... not games.

Neither company is continuing the work the founders meant to do when the company was formed. In both cases, nearly all of the staff have been let go.

I know what these teams are going through. I know exactly what this is like, in fact. Five years ago, my employer Mind Candy did its own pivot, switching from making the edgy, pervasive treasure hunt Perplex City to a children's puzzle game. Mind Candy was the rare pivot that was a runaway success: the project they pivoted toward was called Moshi Monsters, and the company is worth hundreds of millions of dollars now. But that wasn't my doing, and I don't have advice or insight for the people who are staying behind.

I have quite a few things to say, though, to the staff at these companies, about how to get through these coming weeks and months. And for other bystanders like myself, I have a few thoughts about this sad story and why it keeps happening. Because in every case, it's the same story.

Once Upon A Time...

...there lived a team with an amazing idea. They formed a company, then lobbied and received venture capital. O joyous day! Then they went out to build their dream with it: A risky but innovative and beautiful new kind of entertainment. The work attracted a loyal and ardent audience. The project was highly regarded by critics. It was clear the company had made something very special.

But it was also a little inaccessible to newcomers, and that loyal, ardent audience wasn't really big enough to justify all the money from that investment. A wider, more mainstream audience, though long hoped for, never arrived.

After two or three years, the company just couldn't afford to keep things going any longer. And everyone was sad that this beautiful, creative thing would pass from the world.

The end.

It's heartbreaking, that's the only word for it. It's heartbreaking as a fan -- I attended Glitch's final shutdown party late last night, and more or less cried myself to sleep after. But as sad as it is for the audience, trust me, it's orders of magnitude sadder for the creators who spent years, literally years of their lives pouring their deepest selves into building a magical thing, only to have it taken away in the end. Not to mention the, you know, sudden need to find a new job. 

But wallowing in misery, while it offers its own comforts, doesn't ultimately help anything. So let's move on.

Without a Net

For the former staff of Tiny Speck and Fourth Wall: It's going to be OK, I promise. If you start to freak out about it, you don't have to take my word for it; go look for yourself.

The nice thing about working on a critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful project is that you still have all that glory to bank on. And if you weren't, say, the CFO, nobody will hold lack of revenue against you. In fact, you may find your late and lamented job unexpectedly opening doors for you two, three, five years in the future. 

In the meanwhile: Give yourself room to grieve. You haven't lost a person, but you've lost a dream, and that can hurt just as much. The first few weeks are the hardest. Be kind to yourself, whatever that means to you: spend more time around people you love and less around people you don't. Eat nice things. Take bubble baths. Hit the whiskey, but not too hard.

If you're like me, it'll be a year or so before you start to remember the joyful parts more. But it will happen.

Don't despair that your best work is behind you, because that's only true if you stop working now. Know that you made one amazing thing, and that means there are inevitably more amazing things in you. Keep going. Fourth Wall: Spread into the studios and networks, and change the face of Hollywood. I know you can. Tiny Speck: Go Glitchify all of the games. They need a good dose of emergent, collaborative whimsy. In being struck down, you have become more powerful than anyone could possibly imagine.

And let me know if you need a shoulder to cry on. I don't even care if we've never met before. It may be hard to find people who understand exactly what you're going through right now. I'm here for you.

But Why?

And now on to the lessons-learned part of the post.

Once or twice might be a coincidence, but the same story three times is a pattern. And I bet if you looked hard, you could find many, many more examples of this same story playing out. So... why? Why do smart people and good intentions and an amazing product keep flaming out this way?

Putting on my pundit hat, I'd say the answer is this: venture capital is toxic to a creative enterprise. 

The reason that people go for venture funding in the first place is to get the money to build a bigger team and a bigger project than they could otherwise afford. Some dreams -- RIDES, for example -- would be harder and slower to build without a big injection of funding. But I'm here to argue that's not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes a leaner company built on sweat and shoestrings is the better bet for the long haul. I think this is doubly true when the company in question has a creative output.

Investors bring problems. One is the need to answer to a higher authority. A funder will always bring new interests and expectations to the table. But few venture capitalists are going to have the savvy regarding storytelling or experience design, and may not recognize the difference between their own taste and objective truth. (Not to say that's what went down in any of these three cases -- but it's a significant risk to the company's output.)

When the party's over, a venture capitalist is looking to make money. Usually on a particular timeframe; usually in a particular quantity. A VC wants to get in and cash out, and no critical acclaim or special community or innovative experience is going to change that. So accepting venture capital puts a ticking clock on your success.

A massive injection of capital can also provide creators with a false feeling that an immediate revenue stream isn't necessary. Consider the case of Glitch: The only way to give the company money was a subscription, which only came with questionable benefits -- extra teleportation privileges, and credits to spend on in-game clothes and house customizations. Now that there are art books and music for sale, many wallets have been opened anew. Fourth Wall Entertainment never had a visible revenue stream at all! Perplex City had its puzzle cards, the board game, and so on... but abysmal distribution outside of the UK. For people in most of the world, you'd have had to spend as much on shipping as on merchandise, which wasn't exactly an easy sell.

And even Perplex City didn't do a lot of the things I consider no-brainers now for scraping up revenue from a creative venture. If you're making media, you should also make sure you're selling t-shirts, art prints or posters, plushies, hard-bound books, jewelry, music downloads. Embrace the philosophy of the thousand true fans, and continually produce a fresh stream of new reasons for them to give you money.

Look at Penny Arcade or MS Paint Adventures, who have taken this kind of organic growth and ruthless monetization and turned themselves into bona fide cultural phenomena. Don't leave money on the table. Just don't. And consider only building as much as you can stand to build out of your own pocket to begin with. Bootstraps and duct tape. If you only commit your own resources to the project, then the only one who can decide when the show is over is you.

Not All Investment Is Bad 

Even if you don't think you can make the project of your dreams without investment, venture funding isn't the only game in town. Consider the case of Zombies, Run!: A successful crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, which led to a great product that people will pay money for. That money led to expansion of the company and the Zombies, Run! product line, even more expansion of the fan base, and to all appearances, a stable revenue stream. It's the picture of successful organic growth.

Crowdfunding may not be for everyone, you say. It's hard and scary, and the outcome is uncertain. But consider this: If you can't conduct a successful crowdfunding campaign, there is a strong possibility that you're making something nobody wants. Or something that you can't explain well enough for people to understand why they want it. Or that you can't market well enough for people to hear about it even if they did want it.

And in all three cases, it's better to find out before you've spent months or years of your life building something -- because if any of those things is true, you won't be any more successful with the product launch than with the Kickstarter. 

There are a thousand reasons that companies fail. Bad marketing or bad management, bad luck and bad timing. Sometimes it's down to interpersonal conflict, legal drama, sometimes the core vision simply wasn't very good.

But for companies to fail, even after building a thriving community, or winning awards, or getting industry kudos for innovation... a tragedy, yes. But with slower growth and more modest expectations, arguably a preventable one. It's OK to make something that isn't the next Star Wars or World of Warcraft -- and that shouldn't be anyone's benchmark to begin with. Success can come in all sizes... not just the big fish venture capitalists are hungry for. 

Press A to Jump

Playing video games is mostly a matter of pressing buttons and toggling joysticks in certain patterns. There are definitely exceptions -- from Dance Dance Revolution to Prop Cycle to Duck Hunt and on to the age of Kinect. But for most people, most of the time, playing a game is an exercise in learning new patterns for button-mashing.

We don't mind this, because the game has provided us a meaningful metaphorical overlay for reality: when you press A, you aren't pressing a button at all. You're jumping. When you toggle the joystick forward or press W on your keyboard, you're really walking forward. You press A or X or the spacebar to jump or shoot or interact with an object you're standing next to.

You see the same basic controls in Halo and Dragon Age and Glitch and Super Mario. It's what we're accustomed to, and so games take on these controls as a baseline assumption in the design phase. Maybe there's a design discussion about what the other buttons should all be doing -- but the basic walking-and-jumping stuff is taken as decided from the get-go.

But this widespread convention is damaging to innovation in games. Assuming that our controls will make us walk and jump and shoot means we're always making games where the mechanic is... walking and jumping and shooting. That closes us off to incredible potential for variety, and that's a creative tragedy.

Do you remember how amazing Katamari Damacy seemed when it first came out? Part of the magic is that quirky King of the Universe, to be sure; the upbeat music, the weird items you roll up. But the underlying mechanic would never have worked with the classic control setup. In Katamari games, one joystick controls which direction one hand is pushing, and the other joystick controls the other hand. This elegant control scheme is what allows the rest of the game to hang together. It could just as easily have used one stick to push and the other for the camera, as is the common convention; but the game mechanic would have suffered for it.

When Wii first launched, the promise of games allowing entirely new metaphors was a powerful sell. We bought Red Steel for the allure of swinging our controller like a sword. (Though it turns out Fruit Ninja is what we really wanted.) We bought Wii Sports to play tennis and bowl. In the end, though, even Wii games kept going back to Press A to Jump. They usually nodded toward motion control, but rarely was that a core element -- probably because the same games were often ported from or to other platforms.

And to be fair, players don't universally love motion control. It's novel, and fun, but also high-effort. It turns out in the end, sadly, those are games we buy and intend to play... but they're not the games we keep coming back to.

But that shouldn't spell the end of exploration for different metaphors for your control scheme -- even if you're using the same old basic console controller. If we're interested in what games can do and where games can go -- if we want to make art -- then every assumption must be questioned. 

And it turns out that "What else could we make a joystick or button do?" can result in some Molydeux-level creativity. Could A mean smiling and B is frowning, the joysticks are a measure of intensity, and the game is to navigate a political summit without starting a war with your inappropriate reaction?

Or maybe you're a weather deity; the joystick controls the direction and intensity of the weather, while the buttons control what kind of weather it is -- wind, rain, snow, lightning. Your goal is to aid your worshippers and smite unbelievers. Or maybe reach a high score based on how tall your trees get, how big your apples get, how bright the flowers grow.

What if A was an earthquake? What if A made you bigger and B made you smaller? What if the two joysticks were your feet on ice skates? Hey, A could still mean jumping!

There is so much we could do in games. So much that we could do, and so much that we're just not doing. And with the proliferation of touch screens, there's a necessity to shed those conventions and adopt new ones. But we should be wary of creating new conventions that mean the same old things. Tap to walk and swipe up to jump? That just leaves us with more walking and jumping games. And I think we have plenty of those already.

Dare Me (For a Good Cause)

Have you ever wanted to get me to do something, but you didn't think you could talk me into it? Well NOW'S YOUR CHANCE!

That charity is Oceanside Community Service. I'll be taking dares for at least a couple of weeks -- but even if you don't have something in mind you'd like for me to do, I'd appreciate it if you helped to spread the word. Share! Tweet! Digg! Or do people not Digg anymore? I feel so... out of touch...

Anyway -- my neighbors have lost cars, clothes, books, entire homes. Together maybe we can make it all hurt a little less.

Andrea's Not Writing: A Vlog

Oh hey look! I made a thing! It is a video.

Laser Lace Letters

Those of you who have been reading my blog may already be familiar with Haley Moore from the Creative Spotlight covering her amazing Etsy project Rule of Three, her Blag-O-Pets, or even amazing work I never even wrote about, like her crazy fantastic Majora's Mask laptop bag. Haley is an artist of the first waters, and she deserves nothing less than rampant support in all her endeavors. Which brings me to the Laser Lace Letters.

Haley is working on a gorgeous combination of story and tangibility. Her Kickstarter is running now, and for only another two weeks. You should support her today. But don't just take my word for it -- see for yourself. 

 This project is going to knock your socks off, I am dead certain. Fund fund fund!

Hurricane Sandy Wrap-Up

The hurricane is over for me now, but not for everyone. Right now, LIPA is reporting 62,000 people still without power. This isn't including the 55,000 customers who LIPA has determined are unable to receive power safely, presumably because these homes and businesses were too compromised by salt water, or in some cases simply no longer there anymore.

Friends and family, my community, will be rebuilding for a long, long time. And I'm trying to figure out what I can do to support them in the days to come. But for me, for now, I'm taking a deep breath and trying to get back to business as usual.

First, though, a grab-bag of things that have been knocking around my head the last several days.

Surprise Winners and Losers

Winners: Physical newspaper delivery, shelf-stable bacon, Panera.

Losers: LIPA, mobile phone and data service, C-batteries.

Lessons Learned

1. My mother was right about everything.

Well, almost everything. I was raised as something of a nutty survivalist -- I remember perusing books that explained nuclear fallout and blast zones, and how to live through them as best you could, when I was a wee girl of 11 or so. 

Thanks to that guidance, I knew just what to do ahead of a natural disaster. My shelves were stocked with bottled water, pasta, tuna, beans, and other shelf-stable foods. We topped up on gas. We filled the bathtub with water. We made sure we had batteries, flashlights, candles, matches. 

Not all of these measures were necessary. The water, for example, is still sitting in our cabinets, untouched. Though we were instructed to conserve water in the first days after Sandy, we never lost water service, nor did our water become unsafe to drink. 

2. We could do it better next time.

We evacuated more hastily than one might prefer, because we didn't get the evacuation order in a timely fashion. For some reason, none of our phone numbers are on the county emergency call list. Go figure.

I did bring our Important Documents folder when we left (yes, this is a real thing I really have) and some photographs, but there are a bunch of things I wish I'd done on the way out -- like disconnecting our gas grill from the house line and stowing that in the garage. I was petrified the grill would blow over, snap the line, start a gas leak, and blow up my whole neighborhood. Fortunately, none of these things occurred.

Next time, we'd also take our game consoles and other valuables up to the second floor of our home, so we at least might not lose our previous save games in the event of flooding. It's interesting how a night of lying awake, wondering what's left of your house and your stuff can clarify what's important to you. 

3. The psychological effects are killer. 

...even when you haven't personally suffered any long-lasting damage.

I swim in social media and IM all the day long. The net effect is, I think, very like living in a telepathic society -- I'm used to being able to share my thoughts with anyone, at any time, no matter where they are in the world. As hard as the physical privations of a freezing 12-day blackout were, being cut off from my virtual communities was equally hard. This is not hyperbole.

These communities are an important means of support that I rely on all the time. Being unable to access that support in the middle of an objectively pretty rough time was... difficult, more difficult than I would even have expected. I lived for the couple of hours in the middle of the night when data service would sometimes work, and for the hour and a half I could chisel out on wifi at Panera. And I wonder what that means about how technology is irrevocably changing how we (I) interact with the world.

Soooo that's it for Hurricane Sandy. Though I'm worried, now, about how many local businesses will be closing because they flooded and don't have the funds to rebuild, or because they lost two weeks of income, or because people broke from having to rebuild their homes are saving every penny they can. And all of the friends and neighbors who have to start over with nothing but whatever scraps they can plead from FEMA and insurance companies.

It's over, it's over, it was over two weeks ago. But in some ways, the actual hurricane was just the beginning.

Five Reasons to Hate LIPA

Still no power. Back at Panera for my morning charge-up, as usual. I'm going to need to buy Panera a nice gift when everything is back to normal.

For now, though, the new normal is hating on LIPA in the cold and dark. But not just everyone at LIPA. In fact, I absolutely salute the linemen and tree trimming crews on the front lines who are making it possible for anyone to have power at all right now. But there's this, from Governor Cuomo's office:

Power Outages as of 10:00 am, Thursday, November 8, 2012:
Con Edison     87,300
LIPA     248,755
NYSEG     1,565
Orange & Rockland     7,052

 

TOTAL     344,672

 

Why, yes, Long Island DOES have more than twice as many outages as the rest of the state put together. Thanks for asking! In the interests of celebrating this, uh, achievement, here are my top five reasons that Cuomo needs to clean house at LIPA, and the sooner the better, for the public good:

1. By their own admission, they didn't hit milestones established on day one. LIPA said they'd have 90% of customers returned to service by end of day yesterday. From the sound of it, even before our snowstorm, the number of people with power never dropped below 164,000, out of a million people affected. That's 16%, not 10%. And that number of unpowered homes doesn't include the worst-hit areas such as Long Beach, Fire Island and the Rockaways -- those numbers have quietly been removed from the rolls, and could well be another 100,000 customers. I'd forgive them because of course the snowstorm set work back -- if that were their only sin against us. But it's not.

2. They're lying liars anyway. Every time I've been in a position to independently verify a statement LIPA has made, it's been factually incorrect. An example: their outage maps say there are less than a hundred homes without power in Baldwin Harbor; but there is no power in the entire area.

Here's another: They said they'd prioritize repairing infrastructure like hospitals, schools, and traffic lights. There are still lights out in major intersections everywhere we've traveled. In my town, Oceanside, seven polling places were relocated on election day because they never got power. Our schools are reopening on Tuesday -- only because the district has located generators. I don't know about you, but that doesn't feel like priority on infrastructure to me.

3. Surprise hoops to jump through. As per yesterday's post, they're requiring inspections before restoring power, a thing that has never occurred on Long Island before, even in storm surge-flooded homes. Yesterday on Facebook, someone made the point that these inspections might well be an important safety concern to prevent electrical fires. Hey, I'm not disputing that. The problem is in the communication and execution of the policy.

LIPA didn't start talking about inspections until a full week after the hurricane -- and homes like my own, that never flooded at all, are being held hostage to this policy, too. This is a symptom of criminally terrible management at LIPA, and makes me suspect they simply never had a hurricane plan in the first place.

To add insult to injury, this new policy isn't even being applied consistently. They've already restored a number of homes in their "affected region" without requiring these inspections. South of Merrick Road, all sorts of homes and businesses have power. Heck, the people who live behind us have been restored, too! Again, we didn't flood, either. Why is it that we need an inspection, exactly...?

4. Ten full days out from Sandy, there is still no plan to carry out these inspections. As of today's Newsday, LIPA has no plan for when and how they'll be doing these inspections. From the sound of it, they're still working on it. Oh, and they say they'll be bringing in up to a thousand inspectors. Now? After a week and a half? Seriously, you guys? You couldn't have done that a week ago? 

So all we can do is wait and wait and wait for LIPA to figure out how to fulfill a policy they only just came up with a week ago, that just happens to give them a good excuse for a very slow continued pace of restoration. I don't know about you, but that seems awfully convenient to me.

5. Zero communication with customers about what to expect. Throughout this ordeal, LIPA has never delivered information to its customers. This is paralyzing. I don't know if I'm going to have power today or in three weeks. Should I be packing up my family to Michigan? Will I have the lights on when I go home from Panera half an hour from now? If only I knew what to expect, I could plan accordingly. My whole life is in limbo right now waiting for LIPA. If it's going to be three more weeks... just tell us so we can deal with it.

Worse, because there's no information on where and when these inspections will be carried out, it's a dead certainty LIPA will cut meters even on functional homes because nobody was there to answer the door. It's ridiculous, in this weather, to make power contingent on someone's ability to sit around for days and weeks until an inspector finally shows up. Maybe they're staying with friends or family who have power, or went out to the grocery store or a gas line or a warming center. Maybe they're at work!

And speaking of work: I'm not talking about this much, but I am freaked right the hell out about my business right now. I'm a freelancer, you guys. When I'm not working, I'm not earning. And there is no significant amount of business I can conduct in an hour to an hour and a half in Panera while also managing my children. Zero income for dayr or weeks and a new roof: I'm going to come out of this kind of poor, you guys. Stay tuned for some serious hustle once our lights finally come back on.