worldmegan

Bolofeesh makes me super happy, and Paul is an awesome dude. (He’s also a fellow Triiibesman!)

Also? I can’t help but link to his Halloween comic(s), it being Halloween and all. ;}

[Edit: Nope, you’re not crazy—this did post yesterday. I had some weird impulse that there were thirty days in October… Ha! So, sorry about that folks! Here are your feesh. USE THEM WISELY!)

You know, I meant to write up one post about the new links in my sidebar, and look what happened! You see, the problem here is just that they’re all too awesome. I can’t fit any of them into the paragraphs I wrote, much less a few sentences that would have allowed me to make one freaking list. Man. The perils of knowing amazing people…

This is the last post, anyway.

It’s about Triiibes, as you may already have surmised. And I can’t link you to the Triiibe—but I can tell you about it.

The reason I can’t link you is because unless you’re already a member, you can’t get in. It hasn’t (to my knowledge) been decided yet whether it will become visible to the public eventually, and I’m leaving that up to the folks in the know. Membership sounds like it will continue to be closed except for limited invites, so that’s right out. But man, the things that happen in there are so awesome. I can’t keep them quiet.

Well. Most of them. Well. Some of them. ;}

Seth Godin started the whole shebang with a barrier to entry: Pre-order Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, sight unseen. Thousands of us did so, leaping in with both feet and shrieking new marketing battle cries. (At least, that’s what I did…) The result is one of the most amazing communities I’ve ever belonged to.

Pace and Kyeli are both members. Cricket is a member now, too, and Marty shouldn’t be far behind (if we’re lucky!). Havi’s a member—and I wouldn’t know about her at all if it wasn’t for Triiibes. For some vast cosmic reason, everything is falling into place for me… and a large part of it is this group of people.

What does Triiibes do? Well, we wrote an ebook. (It’s great.)

We talk a lot—about business, people, the concept of tribes, Seth’s book, marketing, changing the world, making a difference, making something amazing. Triiibes is what Zaadz / Gaia should have been, but couldn’t possibly have managed. It took a closed social network and a readership the quality of Seth’s to accomplish that! Not to mention the quality of leadership Seth exhibits himself, and his ability to bring out the leader in everyone else… that’s something amazing. (Read this book if you have any doubt.)

We’re working on something new, but my lips are zipped—for now. ;}

There’s still more. Being a member of the Triiibe has taught me a ton about tribes in general (and often, in specific). It’s teaching me about community projects and the organic nature of what can be mundanely called “teamwork” but takes on a huger, more significant stature when considered in all of its complexity and variety and spontaneity. It’s teaching me about people, and how many of us are insanely brilliant, full of incredible possibility and potential. I’m talking about the members of Triiibes, but I’m talking about you, too. Triiibes is showing me what the world is capable of, and it is really something.

Triiibes isn’t just a social network. Maybe it started out that way, but it mutated fast. It’s a real tribe now, with people who are truly connected to one another. Joe and I and at least a dozen other people were discussing the question of whether there is a spiritual aspect to the Triiibes community, and I found myself saying this:

I think that the Triiibe IS spiritual, in many ways. It’s the spirit of connection and working together. It’s the spirit of being many parts of a whole, organic and astonishing in millions of different ways. It’s the passion that we feel about the ideas we share, and the willingness (the yearning, even) to help others before thinking of ourselves. Take a look at how we interact, all together, without ever having met, how we already know one another and love one another and care about every person in here. The intensity of this varies across the Triiibe, but it’s there in spades. And it’s amazing. And it’s much more powerful than any church I ever belonged to. This vibration is its own animal, and I would hesitate to say that it lacks spirituality.

It grows and learns and becomes bigger. Not the number of members—the energy and the soul of the connected community. It’s… really spiritual!

It’s all in how you look at the thing. In this case, the thing is great. Not like “this cereal is great!” but instead, This vibration we’ve created, this awe-inspiring bit of a vast connected universe, we are tapping into something truly great. We’re learning more about it all the time.

You know what it is?

It’s just people.

It’s people doing what people can do, which is connect with and raise up and help each other. We are doing it with plans and projects and ideas, but it’s the same. It’s such a joy to be a part of. You should do it too.

You can start any time you want!

I read Penny Arcade pretty regularly. This week they mentioned something called Braid, using phrases like “something that really matters,” and “even within its circumscription their minds are shattered and remade,” and “genuinely huge concepts that hum with stradavarian fullness.”

Like, whoa.

So we bought the game.

It cost $25 to buy enough “Microsoft points” (oy. whatever.) to download it from Xbox Live Arcade, but Marty used the rest on something else he liked, so Braid cost us just about $15. And I’ll tell you something. This is one of the most fantastic games I’ve ever played. I can’t stop playing this game, and I’m not the same since I started.

It’s incredibly simple. It’s a mind game, about moving forward and backward through time and solving increasingly more challenging puzzles. It reminds us a lot of the dinky Flash version of Portal (that we loved so desperately and obsessed ourselves with conquering). But Braid has the basic problem-solving structure of Portal, the brilliant (and sometimes borrowed) humor of the original Mario games, the simplicity of a Flash side-scroller, the depth and beauty of a tragic romance, and the musical-visual high art genius of a mad Aphrodesian heaven.

For it is the artwork and the soundtrack that just blow my mind to pieces.

I loved Yoshi’s Island for the game art, but Braid is Yoshi’s Island for grown-ups. Braid has real brain puzzles and illustrations with the sophistication of oil paints—not vectors or crayons. The mystery and aching of its storytelling alters you in some impossible, unidentifiable fashion. This game, it plucks at your heartstrings; you move through pages of a book, pieces of a puzzle, you feel deeply emotional but don’t know why, the music really moves you, the lush landscapes—vast green meadows with sun-streaked clouds and city skylines billowing sunset flame—reach inside you. Change you.

God, why don’t they make more games like this?

I’m dying to know if a version will be released for Mac. I want to throw money at the creators of this wonderful work. Braid’s website is here; a list of songs in the soundtrack is here, and you can see screenshots here. But there’s nothing, absolutely nothing like playing the game and experiencing all these things moving together, in synchronicity. It’s breathtaking.

Guys, buy this freaking game.

Oh, I get it. I know you.

Yes, I recognize you—I know exactly what you are. You’re that feeling I get when I’ve realized that I can do something—anything—worth doing. Something that affects the world, something that makes it better. Something that makes me stronger.

You’re the feeling that tells me I’m real, relevant and significant here; the feeling that I can make a difference, build something incredible, be noted and remarked on.

You’re the sudden, intense feeling that I am powerful.

You show up a lot these days.

Wanna get coffee?

Why yes—I am posting to shamelessly promote Crow’s workshop on Sunday! No no, don’t second-guess yourself. You’ve got it right on the button. ;}

If I could only ask you to do one thing for me, for a span of about twenty minutes, all week, all month, I would ask you to please watch this video. It’s possible that this feels so profound to me because of material and ideas I’ve already begun to process, but I just can’t pass up the possibility that you might feel the same. So if you feel like trusting me for a small chunk of your time, this one, this one right here is what I’d choose for you.

Stroke of Insight (Jill Bolte Taylor @ TED)

Let me know what you think.

Guys.

This fear thing does not serve us well.

We might think that it protects us, keeps us from harm, furthers our best interests… but it doesn’t.

Unless my fear is getting me out of the path of a rabid, rampaging animal intent on doing me physical damage, my fear is useless to me. It does not protect me. It does not keep me safe. If it has any use at all, it is only to show me where I am afraid—where I must find courage. And even then, it only serves to help eliminate itself.

If you are acting out of fear, you are chaining yourself down. You are creating something that controls you and impedes you. You are not doing the “wise, prudent thing”. You are doing yourself a disservice. You are darkening your light. You are under a freakin’ bushel.

If you are like me, you have been acting out of fear your whole life, and you don’t even notice it anymore. You do things because you’ve learned that they should be done a certain way. You don’t even realize that the reason you still do them is that you’re afraid. You are so numb to the nature of reality that you can only essentially monkey-see, monkey-do—safe, familiar territory.

If you are like me, you feel good when you break out of the pattern, once in awhile. But by and large, you are still under the fucking bushel. You are still doing so many things just because you’re afraid. Unconscious, unquestioned.

I don’t know. Think about it.

I love having partners in crime. The people I work with make me excited to be alive.

Appropriate thoughts for the Monday after Thanksgiving, yes? ;}

The thing that most forget while dreamily looking off into the horizon for the ship of their dreams, Megan, is that such ships never sail in, but are actually built beneath their very feet.

Ohh-wee-ohh,
The Universe

PS. Get my drift, Megan?