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Aaron Bishop, creator of Egoboo, has posted a couple short videos from the forthcoming Secret of Ultimate Legendary Fantasy Unleashed (SoulFu, remember?) on Google Video.

They are a Soldier Video and a Wizard Video.

Enjoy.

I’m reading Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point right now, and one of the things I find intriguing about it is that much of the contents are applicable, after the fact, to the phenomenon of the book itself. How did a book comparing social trends to diseases become a bestseller? Did the fact that the book, in a sense, tries to distill the elements which cause things to be “bestsellers” (in their respective fields), contribute to its being a bestseller? And if it’s simply the fact that the book is interesting, then why is it interesting?

I’ve been planning to read The Tipping Point for well over a year now — ever since seeing it recommended on about half a dozen blogs within a few weeks, simultaneously being referred to Gladwell.com by a co-worker.

The first article I read on Gladwell.com, a few years ago, was the article about ketchup.

Ketchup is not the first thing that comes to mind when one tries to think of potential interesting topics. Yet the article was exactly that; interesting, and thought-provoking. Why?

The second thing I heard from Gladwell was not an essay but a recording of a talk he had made at some convention or another, wherein he talked about office chairs. Specifically the Aeron chair, but still — office chairs are also not an intuitively interesting topic. Yet the talk was interesting, all the same. Why?

A few ideas present themselves. Although Gladwell often portrays himself in the Tipping Point as not being particularly charismatic, not a Salesman or a Connector, perhaps he’s one of those people who are so passionately interested in things that we become interested in spite of ourselves. Alternatively, perhaps most people really are interested in things like ketchup and the design of office chairs — we just don’t know it. Or rather, we’ve never considered them in a way that could be potentially interesting.

What makes something “interesting” anyways?

It’s necessarily subjective; the first response I can think of to the question is “Interesting to whom?” But the success of Gladwell’s book and his essays on topics that are not necessarily what we’d normally think of as interesting, implies that there are some things that a lot of people are interested in. Furthermore, they are things that one would not necessarily assumed people would find interesting.

If we were to assume that self-interest was the reason people find topics interesting, that would fail to explain it. It is difficult to see how an essay about ketchup and mustard appeals to the reader’s self-interest. Also, if self-interest, the “What’s in it for me?” model, were the sole contributor to what is interesting, then why aren’t more people passionately interested in financial markets and investing? After all, people are interested in money, right?

That might make a good example; after all there are two different ways you could be interested in money. You might just be interested in having more of it. Or, it could be that you’re interested in it’s history — how money works, how inflation and interest affects the value of it, how financial markets really work, and why, and how they came to exist.

Trivia is a good example. Why are people interested in trivia? If you go to the reference section of a large bookstore, you can find shelves full of lists of different sorts of trivia, facts, lists, and other generally useless information. Why are there so many? Simple economics would suggest that all these books exist because people buy this sort of book; in other words, people find trivia interesting. Most of this sort of information is called “trivia” for a reason — it is trivial. It cannot possibly make you a more effective worker, a better parent, or a more capable human being. From reading the book jackets of such publications, it’s clear that one of the ideas behind knowing such things is that you might use them in conversation… that is, that you, yourself, might be more interesting because you know them.

This still doesn’t answer the question of why such bits of information are interesting in the first place.

Some quick definitions of “interesting” found on the web: arousing or holding attention. Exciting curiosity. To be of importance or consequence.

All of these, to me, still seem somewhat circular. If something holds my attention, then why? If a topic makes me curious about it, then why? Why would I be more curious about some topics than others? What makes one thing worthy of curiosity, and another unworthy? If something is important — if it matters — what prompts me to think of it that way?

The only thing that I can suppose is that things which we call interesting are things that are thought-provoking — they make us think. It might not be earth-shaking philosophical thinking, but they are new thoughts, or a different sort of thought than we are used to thinking. I suppose that for some people — maybe a lot of people — the actual feeling, the actual experience of thinking this new or different thought is inherently pleasing for its own sake. That could be why, for most of us, ketchup was never an interesting topic until it was presented in a way that was thought-provoking — that is, why do we have many different kinds of mustard, but only one type of ketchup?

In other words, I propose that, for many people, it actually feels good for our brain to work. I don’t mean “work” like difficult calculus or problems, like we usually think of as “brain work,” but just working in the sense of thinking new or different things. If this is actually a pleasant experience, then it stands to reason that we might seek out topics and ideas that are “interesting.” We don’t think of it in any other terms other than “I think this subject is interesting.”

What we might really be saying is, “For some reason, these ideas are fun to think about.”

Funny math at haha.nu. Some of these are excellent.

One of my favorites is #5, which isn’t really “funny,” but is rather misleading. Can you figure out the problem? (Ideally, without scrolling down to look at the comments.)

I recently began reading Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, and one of the things I found most interesting was the general complexity of the milieu, in contrast with the Average Fantasy World.

One would argue that this is because Stephenson’s book takes place largely within a genuine historical context, which is nothing if not complicated, and was probably even more complicated in reality than even Stephenson is able to convey in his mammoth tale.

I can’t help thinking, however, that if your average “made up” fantasy universe even attempted to contain societies and sub-cultures as convoluted as those which genuinely belong to world history — we simply wouldn’t believe it. It would seem to preposterous that such things, such conspiracies, cults, alliances, betrayals, splinter groups, and relationships, could really occur.

In the historical context, we accept it, because we have heard of many or most of the events and personages, know that they are real, and we have no choice but to accept the general complexity of the milieu whole cloth.

I’m reminded of Robert Jordan’s Eye of the World series — perhaps a bad example, because I consider it to be a pretty bad example of good fantasy writing to begin with (sorry, any Jordan fans out there). Jordan’s world tries to be complex, but mostly winds up being broadly stereotyped pastiches of our own historical cultures, simplified and then cut-and-pasted into his universe. That city-whose-name-I-forget, for example, where the “great game” of court intrigue is played non-stop, seems like nothing more than a crude parody of Versailles, for example. The religious army which begins to loom large, nothing more than a parody of the Spanish Inquisition. I could probably go on, but it’s been a long time since I read them, and I’ve no intention of subjecting myself to that torture again.

Tolkien is a better example. I happen to like Tolkien very much, but even his fully realized imagined historical setting is profoundly simple in its people groups and cultures compared with our own histories.

In both cases, both Jordan and Tolkien, this is not necessarily a criticism — just an observation. The reasons for this, I have already speculated on — I think if our fantasy writers attempted to create worlds as convoluted as our own, we simply wouldn’t believe it.

The other problem is that it is very difficult to create a genuinely unique fantasy culture — I don’t think many writers even attempt it. Most fantasies that I’ve read contain cultures which are more or less deriviative of real historical cultures, whether they be far-eastern, Native American, or some sort of European culture or another. Again, this is not meant as a criticism, just an observation. The point, in this case, is that the more “complicated” someone might try to make one of these derivative cultures, the more it would come to resemble the real culture it was based on, until the story approached historical fiction with the names and maps changed around, and that’s all.

The Baroque Cycle, so far, is excellent. I’m a bit of a prude, however, and I’m not a big fan of some of the language Stephenson occasionally uses, nor some of the situations he describes, no matter how historically accurate they might be. In general, so far, the sheer excellence of the story and writing have out-weighed these objections (which are somewhat Puritanical, I admit… which is a bit ironic, as you’ll agree if you’ve read it), and I’ve continued to read. The main subjects — the development of mathematics, physics, and modern finance — have proven quite fascinating so far. I wish my other history books were this interesting.

I rode a lot of buses in the Greater Vancouver Regional District, but I only recently started using the bus here in the Minneapolis area. Imagine my surprise, then, that not everything was intuitively the way I expected; that they do things differently in Minnesota.

There are two different kinds of “different” between the Vancouver and Minneapolis transit systems: ways in which the bus systems are different, and at least one way in which the people are different.

In Vancouver*, you can use the bus to travel around the city. Yes, I know; it’s a radical idea. You can actually get almost anywhere that you care to go, all day — throughout the suburbs, the various smaller cities around Vancouver, the less populated areas past the edge of town where there are still farms with cows and strawberries — everywhere (more or less) can be reached by bus.

Minneapolis? Minneapolis is not so kind in this respect. Much like Henry Ford’s Model-T, which came in any color you want as long as that color was black, in Minneapolis you can take the bus anywhere you want — as long as the place you want to go is Downtown. If you were really really determined to take a bus to the suburb which is only ten miles west, well, you can take a bus 16 miles south to downtown Minneapolis, and if you’re lucky find a bus going eighteen miles northwest to that suburb you were trying to get to in the first place. I’m not exaggerating (at least, not much).

So unless you are commuting downtown, the bus in the Twin Cities is pretty much not an option. I am commuting downtown, so it is actually quite convenient for me, thanks for asking.

In Vancouver, you pay for your ride when you step on the bus. This seems reasonable (or, it always has to me). Is this the way they do it in Minneapolis? Oh no! Not here.

It would be fairer to say that sometimes you pay when you step on the bus, and sometimes you don’t. In general, in the morning, you pay when you step on the bus; in the evening, you pay as you step off.

Yes, you read that right.

Don’t ask me to explain it, I still don’t understand it. My guess is that it only really works because the only people using the bus are mild-mannered commuters who will always dutifully pay their busfare as they step off the bus at the appointed place. Yeah, it’s a little weird, but it works here. Taking another guess, I suppose they want to speed the process of getting people onto the bus when they are leaving the downtown area (at the cost of slowing them down when they arrive.).

It is this second thing, this practice of paying as you leave the bus, that seems to have spawned the third thing I noticed, which was strange to me.

In Vancouver, when the bus arrives at it’s destination, you stand up, walk to the door, and get off the bus. If the person sitting in front of you does not stand up right away, you walk past them. The quickest people are off the bus first. I know, it seems like the rational way to do it — some of you are wondering if there even is any other way.

It turns out that there is.

In Minneapolis, if you are at some major stop where you are dimly aware that most of the people on the bus are all getting off at once, everyone simply stays seated and politely waits for the rows ahead of them to stand up and start moving before they stand and begin to move themselves. Oh, certainly, if you just stand up and walk forward, you can walk past all the other nice Minnesotans and be among the first batch off the bus; no one will say anything to you, though they may look at you disapprovingly and whisper to their neighbor, I don’t think they’re from around here. If you do this (I did it once… it’s what we did in Vancouver, after all), you quickly realize that you’ve somehow broken a rule of protocol. The sensation of being horribly out of place, and insensitive to your fellow passengers, is almost tangible. If you were Catholic, you would probably feel compelled to confess the action to the priest. It is, you soon see, simply wrong… no, not wrong so much as just not nice.

So those, as I see them, at the main differences between using the bus in Vancouver and Minneapolis:

• In Vancouver the bus is a full-fledged metropolitian transit service that gets you anywhere at (almost) any time, in a consistent way, with mutually self-interested passengers who will walk right past you if you are slow.
• In Minneapolis, it’s a glorified downtown shuttle service with strange, malleable rules for paying, and people who are too nice not to file out of the bus in an orderly fashion. It’s a weird city.

* — I’m referring, really, to the Greater Vancouver Regional District and the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area respectively, but to save time, space, and sanity, I’ll just say “Vancouver” and “Minneapolis”.