‘Ballroom Dancing in 10 Minutes‘ at Mekong ICT Camp.
http://jinja.apsara.org/2010/06/bopha-chiang-mai-2010/
(Photo courtesy Aimeng Pattanaiem)

Above: sketches of some of the 60-odd participants :
http://www.flickr.com/photos/slugdog/sets/72157624221483522/ (Photo courtesy Netting)

A snippet of my presentation on ‘BrainQuake and BoobQuake‘ at BarCamp Chiang Mai.

Links: http://bit.ly/quakechiangmai

Discussion on Hackerspaces (maybe for Phnom Penh?) and…

“How To Draw A Comic in 20 Minutes.”

http://www.comicslifestyle.com/profiles/blogs/barcamp-chiang-mai-10-minute

My Favorite Things	Football Sucks
Talking To My Pet Mimi	Shake It!

Beer Camp

MKICT

Back to Phnom Penh: straight off the plane to Swing Sunset at Snowy’s!

(thx Robyn Zellar!)

More comics fun: a surprise visit by John Lent (of the International Journal of Comic Art) and an impromptu roundtable discussion with local Khmer comics wonks.

From left to right: John Lent,  Moeu Diyadaravuth, Chan Pisey, Nhek Sophaleap, Prom Vorleak, Try Samphos. Translating: Soeun Klo of Our Books.

Great to make so many new friends, keep an eye out for more comics and more fancy footwork!

Yesterday I was cleaning up my apartment and ran across an article in the LA Times, featuring a scantily clad Ojai environmentalist.

“It’s OK for children to play video games where they are killing each other, and it’s patriotic to murder people in a war. But women’s breasts in public? You better watch out!” (LA Times)

I’m not about to parade down the street doing ‘The Full Monty‘. But it does strike me as weird: why is violence so prevalent in our media, but the human body so taboo?

(One example: people are way too uptight about public breastfeeding in the ‘1st World’.) If an alien observer from outer space were to base its evaluation of humanity on our broadcast media, it’d assume we spend more time killing each other than having sex.

This morning I woke up, checked my mail, and clicked through a few links. Woah! In response to an Iranian cleric’s comments:

Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes”…”What can we do to avoid being buried under the rubble?” (Chicago Tribune)

A college student (Jennifer McCreight / Blaghag)/ had created a humorous ‘BoobQuake’ Facebook Group that’s attracted over 150,000 supporters- a number climbing fast, thanks to tools such as Twitter. (So fast in fact that she’s been taken aback by all the attention.) So is all the enthusiasm about the protest? Or do people just enjoy a little exposure?

I like ‘BoobQuake’ as a humorous protest, but think the media hype has gotten pretty frenzied.

Short Skirt Protest

In Phnom Penh, where I live, there was recently a rally against short skirts.
It’s great to ’stick it to the man’ when he is thousands of miles away in another country and legal system. But this is very clearly a cross-cultural response via a different language, country and perspective. Iranian women wearing a tank top in public? They’ll get thrown in jail. Women participants in the developing world/traditional societies would risk personal violence and imprisonment, or worse.

An alternate suggestion is that women display their credentials rather than their skin, ‘BrainQuake‘.   BrainQuake’s originator (Negar Mottahedeh / The Negarponti files) has exchanged polite correspondence with BoobQuake and even pointed out that most pundits are ignoring the pseudoscience critique that inspired the protest.

Boobquake will make for fun pop activism; I’d wager BrainQuake has a greater chance for longer term impact. In addition to bare skin, how about bringing some brains to bear on the issue as well?

Both events are tomorrow, Monday, April 26th. It’ll make an interesting start to the week.

Linkage: BoobQuake, BrainQuake.

Tags: cambodia,boobquake,brainquake,iran

(Picture by Heng Chivoan, Phnom Penh Post. Illustrations from BoobQuake / BrainQuake sites.)

Air conditioning… and blazingly fast internet. I love to share tidbits; I think I’ve been using Twitter, Facebook, and other social media services as frequently as I do in Cambodia. So much for my Social Media Diet.

I’d resolved to spend time catching up on some comics twirling around in my head. There’s tourism to be had, art supplies to be had… and some great food too.

Off for noodles!

http://itunes.apple.com/sg/app/kopi/id365253266?mt=8

Photo from Hackerspace.sg

(1st tweeted by early adopter Preetam Rai.)

(From my Cambodian catch-all blog @ Jinja.apsara.org .)

Tiara Shafiq has not been getting a lot of love from the bureaucracy down in Australia, as she tries to land a little paying work. Heck, maybe all she needs is a positive attitude! That’ll fix everything!

Actually, she’s heard that one before – and responds with an elegant dissection of  ‘The Problem With Lifestyle Design Blogs’, particularly the most prominent, ‘The Four Hour Work Week’.  ‘Lifestyle Design’ is the latest trend in the world of self-help, and I’d like to add my two cents by setting the book in context.

The States has a long tradition of self-help / empowerment writing, by authors such as Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich), Earl Nightingale, Tony Robbins (Unlimited Power) and David Allen (Getting Things Done).  The best of the bunch offer some general principles and leave the rest up to you.   I’m a fast reader and enjoy backtracking to find out the intellectual pedigree of the book du jour.  (Is the author a Scientologist, Skinner rat man or pseudoscience adherent?)

‘The 4 Hour Workweek’ was aimed carefully at English speaking USA folks. And there’s definitely an element of class in there: either you’re on the ‘New Rich’ (NR) bus or you’re not.  Clearly, not everyone can be ‘New Rich’, certainly not the outsourcers providing services for them. Ferriss’ book is predicated on the continued existence (and exploitation) of global inequality.

I’m literate, and through sheer luck happened to be born into USA citizenship, and have the benefit of a college education. Which means I’m pretty clearly within the privileged core audience targeted by the self-help crowd. So:

Have these books benefited me at all?
For tips and tricks, as well as amusement, they’re fun to examine and pull apart. I’d enjoy having a coffee and chat with the authors. But a manifesto is NOT a life manual covering every situation. For that you’ll want to turn to your personal beliefs and goals. Sorting out your life is up to you.

What about the rest of the planet?
The further self-help books travel out of their North American context, the less relevance they have. ‘Lifestyle design’ literature posits a global system but courts a developed country readership.

Is outsourcing a viable choice for those with the money to do it?
‘The 4 Hour Workweek’ oversimplifies outsourcing.   It takes a lot of front end effort to  set up a working relationship, and communications can be a challenge even with the best of providers.

You will never swing easy in your hammock unless you have confidence that your new partners are operating in accordance with internationally accepted labor standards, and have ethical standards. Look before you leap. Would you like to make new friends and partners, or do you just expect a magical overseas army to make your problems disappear?

In my view, the best organizations to work with are committed to a more equitable playing field.  That’s a challenge I grapple with on a daily basis, having set up two outsourcing operations.

Self-Help Blogging: who is helping who?
Probably the most fascinating trajectory on the web regarding lifehacking/productivity is of ‘43 Folders’.  It’s Merlin Mann’s exploration of ‘Getting Things Done’, as he explores the system, learns to use it, and then *outgrows* it. Along the way, he comments on the evolution of focus from productivity and ‘lifehacking’ to ‘lifestyle design’:
One particularly gifted arrival on the productivity and self-help scene authored some of the most profoundly useful advice I’d ever heard about attention management — but, then followed it up by showing how those extra cycles could be used to game the system so efficiently that you can sit in a hammock for 164 hours a week while people in India write birthday cards to your friends. That one became a runaway bestseller and, perhaps unintentionally, formed the new template for how to market productivity as an extreme lifestyle. I also have to imagine that it singlehandedly revived our nation’s sagging hammock industry.
… and chides neighbor Zen Habits for getting a bit off course to boot. Merlin now posts sparingly, having found a balance that works for him.

I would like to challenge the self appointed online experts of the burgeoning self-help / lifestyle design industry to actually sit down and write a book.

Some of them haven’t even left their day job. And they’re all so relentlessly HAPPY. Life has ups and downs, but if you’re selling yourself as a model of success, you’re not allowed bad days. Ever.

There’s a lot of people purveying advice who may not be qualified to do so. This torrent of blogs utilizing every form of ‘social media’ are so busy sorting their metrics and pageranks that there seem to be more ‘gurus’ than followers. I find this hilarious. Maybe we can set up a market for followers to rent themselves out, they’re fast becoming a commodity!

Turning back to some key points in Tiara’s post:

Lifestyle Design: let’s retire the term. In Cambodia, where I live, young people might have designs on escaping an arranged marriage. That’s designing a lifestyle optimized for happiness.
Everyone on the PLANET aspires to improve their life in some form. Legal, fiscal, religious and governmental restrictions need to be challenged, not ignored.  If we can’t abolish obstacles overnight, we need to work towards the best possible compromise in the short term, trending towards meaningful long term change.

Optimism is not a panacea. Some people don’t need to turn that frown upside down, they need counseling or medication. Putting on a ‘happy face’ is not going to solve all problems.
The genuinely optimistic people I know are great to work with. Their outlook motivates them to work hard and effectively, because they know that happiness takes effort to acquire and maintain. Hence the term ‘pursuit of happiness’.

Privilege: We don’t live in a particularly fair world. We do live in a profit-oriented one. Tiara’s impressive and concise critique demonstrates keen research / analysis / writing / web-wrangling skills, which there’s always a demand for.

Any employer that can’t recognize those skills might want to see if their hiring practices are affecting their bottom line.  Social justice? Hey pal, you could be losing money there. 

Such is the nature of our modern world.   

@bruces http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qSDPsqyrOg *Pretty much gotta be the Greatest Bollywood Item-Number Ever Filmed.

@GreatDismal RT @GammaCounter: Stunningly beautiful image of ice walls on Mars. http://bit.ly/cVcN2i http://bit.ly/9AKH37 via @dgroundsel

@peteashton Always a bit odd reading notes someone made of your talk but these from @lauralouise90 ring pretty true: http://bit.ly/aRR7FC

@GreatDismal RT @misanthropod: Florence + the Machine do Robert Palmer; gorgeous, cloak-dragging tonal trainwreck results. http://bit.ly/6DHMXm

ChatRoulette Songster is back up:
http://newteevee.com/2010/03/22/chat-roulette-piano-improv-removed-from-youtube/

The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement: “Let’s make a deal: You keep your little monsters under control, and I will continue to slow down in school zones.”

Youtube Performer vs Marketing algorithms: http://www.happyslip.com/2008/06/07/myspace-account-deleted/

An informal gathering celebrating the new Health Care Reform bill.

From left to right:

The DeathPanel: lime juice, watermelon juice, sugar water and a shot of vodka. Mmm.

Obamapocalypso: lime juice, lemongrass juice, sugar water and a shot of rum.

We did not get around to ‘Lipitor On The Rocks’,  perhaps next time.