Recently, I had a bit of a problem: I needed to buy a handheld vacuum. Easy, you might say: Stop by Wal-Mart or Target. That’s the problem: I don’t shop at Target or Wal-Mart.

This is not due to a ”big companies are evil” mentality; I happily shop at department stores and order from Amazon.com. But both of these companies have done things I find distasteful.

The Wall Street Journal has reported memos from senior management, telling stores that if any employee tries to form a union, that employee is to be “made redundant” (e.g., fired) as soon as that can be done without raising eyebrows. That’s illegal, besides being nasty and unpleasant.

Last Christmas, senior management at Target sent a memo to stores telling them they were to not allow Salvation Army reps in front of their stores, as they “might make customers uncomfortable.” Might. They received no complaints; it’s just a possibility.

What concerns me about these memos is that they seem indicative of the overall style of management at these stores. They’re not simply isolated incidents; this seems to be how senior management at these stores normally operate.

So, I refuse to buy from them. I went to Bed, Bath, and Beyond and found my handheld vacuum there.

Consumers have so many choices these days that companies now have to be aware of their behavior. Everyone sends messages.

Five years ago, this was inconceivable:

The world changes faster than we realize.

How does one make oneself change the world?

I don’t mean to ask how one would take over the world, or push the world in a given direction. I mean: Most people I know have at least one idea, one dream that would change the world. A service to provide, a product to sell, a helping hand to hold out. How does one go about making this actually happen?

Because it has start within the self. Nobody else is going to do it, obviously. So how does one make oneself into the person who would do this Great Thing?

David Allen suggests that one of the best ways is to identify two things: (1) Exactly what you want to accomplish, and (2) the next physical, real-world action that you need to take to accomplish it. That “next action” might be cruising the web for similar services. It might be a phone call. It might be half an hour of concentrated brainstorming. Whatever, as long as it’s something that will move you one step forward towards the goal. And when you’re done with that, you can move on to the next action.

I tend to agree, and I notice how true it’s been with Otherspace. I wanted to make beautiful, life-affirming animation. So, after joking around with a friend about an animation idea, I wrote it down. Then I wrote a detailed script. Then I drew out each shot on paper. Then I called local colleges to see if they could recommend art students who would help me. Then I met with art students and gave them work to do. And suddenly, I was making animation.

PointlessWasteOfTime.com has posted an excellent article entitled, A Gamer’s Manifesto, listing “20 things gamers want” from game developers. Lots of swearing and stuff, but excellent reading about simply poor design decisions, and a few forehead-slapping obvious solutions to pervasive problems.

I saw the completion of two things this weekend: the Star Wars prequels and Mobile Suit Gundam Seed. An interesting juxtaposition.

The Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith screening was fun mainly for all the things George Lucas didn’t do. SW has become something so far beyond Lucas himself that much of my enjoyment of the films come from the little things created by CG artists or fans. The screening was full of an excited buzz, and when the ”Long Time Ago” title came up, everyone cheered and hollered. Throughout the movie, Yoda received several rounds of applause. That made the movie much more fun.

And it was little bits of the movie that I really enjoyed, much more so than Lucas’ dialogue or plot. Obi-Wan travels to some…planet…or other to track down General Grievous. Okay, fine, whatever. But that lizard thing Obi-Wan rode was an amazing sight, a perfectly realized creature straight from Ray Harryhausen’s imagination. Anakin and Obi-Wan are fighting over lava. Okay, great, nicely done. But it’s the little worker droid that flies up next to them, takes one look, breeps in alarm and flies away, that sells it.

This is not to suggest that the film’s plot or actors are poor; everyone does a fine job (though to my surprise, I found Natalie Portman’s performance mediocre; she was much better as the leader of a resistance than as a doting wife). But that’s all it was: fine jobs. Good work, and all that. It’s like a line drawing: the edges define the beauty of the work, not the blank spaces in between.

Gundam Seed had similar problems, really. Characters are introduced, then have almost nothing to do for ten episodes, other than exist as characters to cut to and hear their shocked intakes of breath. The story itself is a borrowed collage of early Gundam storylines, which is enjoyable to a point. At some point, I would have liked to see some originality, if just in exploring the consequences of these borrowed plot elements.

But if nothing else, Seed demonstrates tremendous respect for its characters. It makes you want certain characters to get back together or have a greater role, then grants those desires as appropriate. Several great characters die, but even their deaths feel right.

Death is an important part of Seed and Gundam in general. Characters die. Good characters die. And they tend to die in ways that are important. Very few characters die pointlessly, and even when they do, that’s also used to drive the other characters. I’m reminded of a quote by Chiaki J. Konaka: “Just as there is no such thing as a meaningless life, there is no such thing as a meaningless death….[In writing Digimon Tamers,] I felt that we must not treat death itself lightly.”

But it’s the little things. After two important characters are finally reunited and achieve a certain peace with each other, one speaks to the other by having his Gundam’s hand clasp the shoulder of the other’s Gundam. It’s an intimate, brotherly gesture. What a wonderful way to show that these characters had re-connected.

All in all, I saw two great endings this weekend. Can’t complain.

As is typical, I haven’t been posting here much mainly because little of note has happened in my life lately. I tend to post more when I’m extremely busy.

Saturday was a bit of a downer—my allergies flared up, and while the Otherspace meeting went well, I felt unpleasant throughout it. I then went to Redemption, which was a lot of fun, though I was rather tired for that too.

But I started role-playing with a few friends at the tail end of the Redemption meeting. I’m running a game set in a Cowboy Bebop-like world, in which the players are working their way up through the mafia. I’m a scared and excited GM, as I have miniscule experience with tabletop RPGs at all (I only attended half a dozen sessions of one game that never went anywhere), but the other participants have no experience at all, so I’m the natural choice. Everyone seems to be having fun, though.

I spent all day Sunday at home, tearing through minor chores (house cleaning, etc.). Experienced the unique frustration of returning a phone call only to realize that I didn’t have the appropriate person’s phone number stored anywhere (Brennen, in this case). All these storage devices and not one of them “caught” that phone number.

Today was extremely quiet at work, which was a nice break. I should get much more work for the rest of the week, and I’m looking forward to that. I don’t like being bored, especially when I’m being paid to do something.

How would you like a webpage that links to, in total, over one million free mp3s? Here you are.

Last night was Errands Night, in which I give up any hope of productivity at home and spend the evening striding down aisles and trying to coax smiles out bored clerks. Really, I do; I look them in the eyes and smile genuinely. Usually, they smile back, though sometimes it’s a nervous smile, as though expecting this to be a prelude to my head splitting open and launching a brain-devouring proboscis at them. I don’t want to pull them into the abyss of a Conversation With A Complete Stranger (which is a great title for a book); I just want to insert a slightly less boring, slightly more happy moment into their day.

Anyvay. I came out of Home Depot with a few things and was metaphorically slapped in the face with a cloud. This Home Depot sits atop a hill that overlooks several miles of town, so most of one’s vision is taken up by sky anyway. But this was a huge battleship of a cloud, flared with indistinct tentacles, glowing with a purple aura. Amazing thing.

I glanced around at the ten or so people in the parking lot. Nobody else was even looking at the sky. Everyone had their heads down, hurrying to their SUVs (mostly), wrapped up in their own thoughts.

How sad.

I’m always a little awed by the pervasive optimism of early science fiction art. It’s not that they suggested that space travel would be easy, or loads of fun. There were plenty of dangers, and the astronauts were portrayed more often as stoic, serious men than as grinning explorers. But there was a sense in this art that space exploration was a fundamentally good, noble thing.

I’m thinking about this because I was directed to Space Art in Children’s Books, a wonderful example of what I’m talking about. Sure, some of the details are wildly inaccurate, but then, details often are. What’s more remarkable is the pervasive positive tone. It feels as though the artists are whispering, “This may be dangerous, and costly. But it’s important.”

No responses yet