My Junction Triangle t-shirt featuring the serpentine streets of Symington and Sterling

I woke up this morning and discovered a tweet of mine was getting some attention.

I imagine there are 12 people in Toronto who will find this amusing. Maybe you're one of them? #jtriangle pic.twitter.com/z3vlYfspcj

— Ryan Bigge (@biggeidea) July 19, 2015

I have no interest in getting into the hyper-local, non-lucrative, t-shirt business, so here is the jpeg I used to make my shirt. I bought my shirt at H&M and went to Toronto Tees to get it printed.

One Woman For Every Five Men

Baby Favela

At first we barely noticed the baby hobos. Their encampment on the edges of our suburb was unruly, yes, but small. Tins of Enfalac heated over small fire pits, the occasional odour of amateur s’mores wafting into our cul-de-sac.

But strength in numbers should never be underestimated, and the babies eventually reached critical mass. They migrated south, from Markham down to North York and then still further, until the toddler tribe alighted upon the Danforth. By then they were hungry for all that they had been previously denied. They squatted on patios, in dive bars. The moment they saw weakness, they would bully or intimidate.

(Inspired by a photo from Rob Elliott).

The Gearyfication of Geary Ave has begun

Stuart Berman wrote a funny and smart Toronto Star article about the gritty pluck and changing fortunes of Geary Ave: 

Though located just steps north of heavily trafficked Dupont St., the unremarkable, one-kilometre-long Geary Ave. — beginning at Ossington Ave. in the east and terminating just past Dufferin St. in the west — exists in the no man’s land between downtown and midtown, an area so unconcerned with keeping up appearances that its modern-furniture knock-off stores actually have names like Modern-Furniture Knock Off.

However, as someone who uses and enjoys the Rehearsal Factory, I'm concerned that this article signals the start of rapid Gearyfication.

Or, to put it in language that everyone understands, "Stuart you ho this is all your fault."

Return on Collision: The Tony Hsieh Story

Excerpts from “Tony Hsieh Is Building a Startup Paradise in Vegas” by Susan Berfield published December 30, 2014 in Bloomberg Businessweek.

When Hsieh met Ashton Allen, co-founder of Rabbit!, he called it a “serendipitous collision.” That was in 2010, at a conference in Hawaii.

[…]

“We’re maximizing long-term ROC and ROL, return on collisions and return on luck. We’re accelerating serendipity.”

[…]

“We’re starting to understand what opportunities there are that could potentially both generate profitability and also a return on collision,” says Maggie Hsu, who’s focused on business development at the Downtown Project.

[…]

Now there’s a consultant who advises entrepreneurs. His company is called ROCeteer (ROC, as in Return on Collisions).

[…]

Downs says the Downtown Project is considering leasing some unused property to other developers. Hsieh would become a landlord, earning a return on investment if not collision.

[…]

“When we first started, we thought we had to invest a lot in residential, we thought we had to build high-rises or lots of small spaces to get a return on collision,” he tells the executives.

[…]

“Someone like me, I’m out in a collisionable way three or four hours a day, seven days a week. So I’m worth about 1,000 collisionable hours a year.”

[…]

“We did the math on Jake. When he’s here, he’s out about 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 12 weeks a year. So he’s worth 1,000 collisionable hours, too.”

Hsieh began to apply this metric to investments that might not make money for a while. “Say we want 100,000 collisionable hours a year from an investment. That works out to 2.3 hours per square foot per year,” he says, with a slight smile.

[…]

“We’re kind of agnostic about what goes into a space. It’s ‘are you going to yield those collisionable hours?’ If not, we can say no without judging the quality of the idea.”

Determining the number of interactions between people and their value had been Jorgensen’s job. He was the collision scientist, until he was dismissed.

[…]

A recent public document from the Downtown Project says: “Goal: 10 million collisionable hours per year inside the llama footprint.” Llamas are Hsieh’s talisman; the 60 acres he owns roughly form the shape of one.

[…]

The former collision scientist is in an Airstream. Hsieh has one, too.

The Year of 2014 for Ryan

My 2014 was better than my 2013. Here are some reasons:

Take This Job and Love It

I began 2014 gunning for a full-time job, but to repurpose Hemingway’s quote about bankruptcy, I decided to go freelance gradually, then suddenly. I was a freelance journalist for about a decade, and by the end of that cycle I was exhausted with the lack of money, the solitude, the irregular hours and extremely irregular payment schedule.

Content strategy consulting is a much different beast. There are client meetings, office visits, collaboration sessions and other social elements. And when I need to concentrate, I have the flexibility to work from home. From January to June I was gradually busy, followed by a sudden whoosh of projects and presentations. By the end of it all I was tired, but also a bit smarter and a bit richer.

Along with doing, I was able to augment my brain by reading:

* Why We Fail (Victor Lombardi)

* Service Design (Andy Polaine)

* Exposing the Magic of Design (Jon Kolko)

* The New York Times Innovation Report

* UXPin Guide to Minimum Viable Products

I also attended UX Thursday, the best $100 I’ve ever spent on a conference.

Adventures in Mid-Fi

In June I found a bass player for my indiepalooza cover band. Shortly thereafter I found a drummer. And by November we were sounding pretty darn okay. More importantly, we’d agreed on a name (SubPox). But then we had to switch drummers (amicably) and the mad rush of December happened. But I feel 99% confident we will play live in the spring of 2015.

Along the way I bought a life-changing reverb pedal and a life-affirming delay pedal. Together they cover most of my guitar noodling requirements. Which means I’m only two more pedals away from not buying any more pedals for a very long time.

All The Pretty Pictures (and Pixels too)

* Hearing Richard Turley, Erik Spiekermann and Andrew Zolty talk at Design Thinkers in early November.

* Enjoying Pulse Room by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer in a nearly empty Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal in July.

* Playing all the indie games at the AGO’s Fancy Videogame Party in February.

* Admiring all the kickass KAWS at This is Not a Toy exhibit (Design Exchange).

* Seeing the work of Tori Foster at Pari Nadimi.

* Experiencing Jacqueries on a warn August evening.

* Nuit Blanche-ing with Between Doors plus Everything and Nothing.

* Touching a bunch of fun stuff at digiPlaySpace in the TIFF Lightbox.

* Loving and not loving the Douglas Coupland exhibit in equal measures at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Word Nerd

* I was Handling Editor for an RRJ feature that won third place from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in the “Specialized Business Press Article” category.

* On June 16 I shared embarrassing moments from my Grade 5 diary at Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids in front of many people at The Garrison. In August my performance was broadcast on CBC radio.

* I wrote about hidden gem Black Mirror for Hazlitt.

* My byline appeared in Applied Arts and Report on Business.

* I volunteered a few times at Story Planet, but it wasn’t until I took part in an Alpha Workshop that I really felt useful. Twenty kids collectively develop a story up to the crisis point and then each writes their own ending. The whole thing takes two hours and somehow it works.

* I went to see Guillaume Morissette read at The Ossington and I’m glad I did.

This Content Isn’t Going to Strategize Itself

As I’m fond of mentioning ad nauseam (because I have SEO-whore tendencies just like everybody else), I organize the Toronto content strategy meetup. This year we were able to get Karen McGrane to give a guest talk. She was very generous with her time and insights and I’m grateful I was able to have dinner with her beforehand.

My other guest speakers were equally smart, accomplished and insightful.

The Other Stuff

* My friends Graeme and Nadine had a second child in February.

* My friends Adam and Bri got engaged in December.

* I built a foldaway cabinet standing desk thingie.

* My friend Chris threw a delightful house party in January.

* I went to the RC Harris Filtration plant during the February long weekend for an ice-tastic walk.

* I had the “SuperBeautys 2” breakfast special during a 28-hour trip to Montreal in July. It isn’t a great year without one of those.

* I quit Facebook on October 11. I thought it would be a three month absence, but I now think I’ll never return to big blue.

* On April 11 I reached peak Galaga at Get Well with a score of 150,650.

* I finally bought a super-slim Bellroy wallet and it was worth every penny.

* I’m now the sort of person who owns a wheelbarrow.

Snackable content about adaptive content

Negotiating by the word

Last week I received an email from an editor of a glossy magazine based in the U.S. Not the A-list, but not the C-list either.

The editor wanted me to write a feature, about 1,800 words, a company profile. The fee was half of what I normally receive for magazine work. So I told the editor what my normal rate was, and that I would lose money writing the feature at the fee offered. (I do a lot of consulting and copywriting these days, so I’ve developed a nasty habit of calculating projects at an hourly rate.)

In my email, I asked the editor if there was room to negotiate. Instead of emailing me back with a counter-offer, the editor asked “What number would work for you?”

My answer was double the fee I was offered.

The editor then emailed back to say my fee was too steep and explained that the magazine is “a very small family-run indie magazine … that carries very little advertising.”

What’s curious to me is why the editor didn’t say that earlier in the process. Perhaps the editor was hoping my counter-offer would be within their budget. Perhaps the editor is bad at negotiating. But what if the editor had responded to my overtures to negotiate with the following:

“Hi Ryan. The most I can offer is $HighNumberThanFirstNumber. I’d like to offer more, but we’re a small indie magazine without a lot of advertising. Let me know if you can make that number work.”

I’m willing to bet that kind of transparency would have made me far more likely to say yes.
 

Scare me once, shame on you

I voted out of fear in the recent Ontario provincial election. I’m not proud of this decision, but it was clear that Hudak was willing to destroy the public sector to win some kind of ideological bet he made with Mike Harris. Since Toronto barely survived the last Conservative government, I voted Liberal. The fact that Andrea Horwath ran a terrible and pandering campaign made this decision a little easier, even though Jonah Schein is clearly a good dude who deserved better.

I will not make the same mistake on October 27. It’s clear that no matter how many times I vote, Olivia Chow will not be our next mayor. But I’m still going to vote for her. Doug Ford is a bully. We should have stood up to him four years ago, but for a variety of complicated reasons, we were unable or unwilling.

I’m not afraid of big brother. Nor should you. Fear of Doug Ford is not a good enough reason to vote for John Tory. Doug will be lucky if he gets more than 25% of the vote.* I doubt he has the machinery required to mobilize supporters and get them to the polls.

John Stuart Mill believed that humans try to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Voting for Tory is about minimizing pain. Our shattered city will gain no pleasure from four years of Tory.

It’s a shame that an absence of pain is the best Toronto can do.

--

*Fair warning: I pulled this number out of a magical hat in the back of my closet. But I’m going to stick with it regardless

Leaked list of upcoming BlogTO brunch posts

Through some daring and complex espionage, I secured a top secret list of BlogTO's upcoming brunch posts. Highlights include:

* The top 10 underwater brunch spots in Toronto

* 5 Toronto brunch spots that even Shawn Micallef could love

* Toronto top best 10 10 brunch best best brunch brunch brunch Toronto 2015 1947 1867 2002

* The top 10 late evening brunch restaurants in Toronto

* The top 10 brunch places in that area south of the Junction but west of the Junction Triangle, I think the neighbourhood is called Junc-Tri-High but I'm not entirely sure and at this point I'm ruining our SEO which means I'm fired, aren't I, even though I don't technically get paid for these articles in the first place, sigh

* The top 10 tattoo parlours that serve brunch in Toronto

* Best brunch lineup in Toronto

* 10 Instagram photos of screaming Toronto infants in oversized strollers ruining brunch for everyone

* The best shitty brunch servers with attitude in Toronto

* The top 10 Liechtenstein brunch spots in Toronto

* Black History Month brunch in Toronto 2015