I've been using this avatar for years and years now, but I never made any cards with it on them. The best time to start was five years ago. The next best time to start is now.
Right? I'm about out of my old Less Than Three cards which I don't really like giving out anymore, because I don't do 3 as a consultancy anymore. I'm going to New Orleans for RubyConf right soon, so I figured I should pull the trigger on new cards. Here's what they look like.
On September 13, 2001 the band that I was in was supposed to play a show opening up for Randy and Propagandhi at the Emerson Theater in Indianapolis, Indiana. Our band, Rise Over Run, was a vegan straightedge anarchist pop punk band from 2000-2003 from Bloomington, Indiana.
Two days before the show day, planes crashed into buildings. The day after the plane crashes, we got the phone call: Propagandhi went back to Canada and the show was cancelled. They never rescheduled that show. At least never before we broke up and I moved away.
To this day Propagandhi is still one of my favorite bands and I've still never seen them live.
I'm now unemployed! Yesterday was my last day. And in typical fashion I sent out a "goodbye / this is how to contact me in the future" email. This is what it said.
See you in hell, suckers!
I'm out of here.
It was nice knowing you all. There are lots of really bright folks here that I had the great pleasure of working with and learning from. You know who you are.
This is my last email from this account, so don't bother replying or replying-all. :D
If you ever want to get ahold of me, I'm pretty easy to find on the internets.
veganstraightedge@gmail.com
(801) 898-9481
http://iamshane.com
http://twitter.com/veganstraightedgeYour heart is as free as the air you breathe.
The ground you stand on is liberated territory.
Never surrender.I wish you all the best of luck in your life and adventures.
Best
Shane Becker
It's that time of year again where we reflect on the past 12 months and make predictions about the next 12. All future, all past. It's as if The Now doesn't exist. Like there's no present at. (That's a whole post or probably book for someone else to write or to have written already.) So, here it is, me getting all reflecty and predicty.
This was my list of resolutions, before I heard about Amy Hoy's Year of Hustle jam.
Let's call them Goals, because you're on your way once you set your goals.
And this was my Year of Hustle goals.
Inspired by @amyhoy's 2009 year of hustle, I'm doing my own.
To recap, I didn't: build a dam wiki, write/publish any books or read many books for that matter. I didn't publish 6 issues of Razzle Dazzle, only one. I didn't build anything more that a prototype of an Activity Stream aggregator. We didn't sell many shirts, but we did hand over the company to some friends for them to run.
All of that is to say, I didn't do the really big projects. But I did manage to cross some shit off the lists.
The biggest one, I got the fuck out of debt. I can't begin to express how amazing this felt / feels. Unless you've ever had massive debt, you'll probably never really know. This also means for the first time in my life, I'm actually able to save money which is interesting and a little bit weird. I was able to GTFO of debt was a result of 3 things: I met a girl, I stayed in town, I got The Job. In that order.
Stacey and I both wrote our versions of how we met. We found a totally rad pool house to live in. Eventually, I the job where I met a bunch of really bright talented people and I got better at what I do. I stayed focused on getting out of debt and was able to to do it in mid-October.
I did publish one issue of Razzle Dazzle called Origin Story. I was happy with it, but wrangling content from other people (especially for free) is like herding long-tail cats in a room full of rocking chairs. I've since handed off the editor/curator reigns to my friend Sarah Godlove to handle issue 2 (Finding Our Voice) which is coming along swimmingly. Future issues will have a rotating cast of editors/curators as well.
January was going to be book writing month with some homies, but alas that fell through because of scheduling conflicts. I mentally closed the doors on a handful of projects that were still on my backlog, but aren't important to me anymore or aren't ever gonna happen. That felt good to jettison some weight.
I also managed to not only redesign my blog, but totally rebuild it behind the scenes too! It's no longer running on WordPress.com (who I still think is totally awesome and I'm glad they exist), because I wanted to do some things they don't offer and to have more control over it. , my site contains both my long form articles/notes and my statuses. It also has a few products. The plan is to have all of my content in one place (more on that below).
So, while I didn't hit all of my goals, I did do a bunch of awesome stuff and laid the foundation for twenty oh eleven really well.
It's almost 2011. We still don't have jetpacks, time machines or hover-boards/cars. Although, we do have an always connected (to the entirety of the world's knowledge) computer in our pocket. That's not nothing. I won't be hovering, jetpacking or tearing through the space-time continuum, but I will be doing a thing or two.
I'm probably biting off more than I can chew. I tend to do that. But as of right now, those are my goals for 2011, The Year of the Time Machine.
I've been listening to Planet Money since the beginning. Actually since before the beginning, since the This American Life episode. I love it. The most recent episode about the life span of a t-shirt moved me to leave my first comment. It went like this...
Whilst visiting Chile for a month in 2009, I experienced a similar sort of moment in the Long Story of a T-Shirt.
I was staying with some kids who were kind enough to put me up for month even though we had just met. They took me around to see all the stuff in their life. One of the stuffs was a weekly illegal market in one of Santiago's big parks. It was like a flea market without tables. Everyone used blankets on the ground because you could quickly hide it when the cops came by. But it was HUGE... probably 5 blocks long and 2 wide. Sincerely.
So we walked around for a good while and I saw lots of stuff that would've been fine gifts for friends who enjoy knick knacks and trinkets. I was living out of my backpack and didn't want to add weight to my very spartan inventory (~10 pounds).
But then I saw it: a D.A.R.E. t-shirt.
Not just any D.A.R.E. t-shirt, mind you. It was the original design from when the tagline was still "To Keep Kids Off Drugs" before they changed it to "To Resist Drugs and Violence".
I went to Catholic schools as a kid and we never had the D.A.R.E. program. That meant I never had an old D.A.R.E. t-shirt lying around in box in the basement when I got older and involved in the straightedge scene. That D.A.R.E. t-shirt was super popular in that scene and I always wanted one. And now after all that time, there it was.
I still have that shirt now. I wear it often. It's soft and worn in a way that new clothes can't match (even the pre-distressed ones).
Here's the hilarious thing, it cost me fifty cents (whatever the conversion was at the time). 50 cents and 15 years and 6,000 miles.