New Mission: Guerrilla Compliments

I have become enamored by the concept of guerrilla movements. The Princeton Dictionary defines a guerrilla as "a member of an irregular armed force that fights a stronger force by sabotage and harassment." Typically, the term guerrilla refers to warfare. People who fight with guns and bombs to inspire fear and terror in the enemy. I prefer a broader interpretation of the definition, where any tool or medium might be used to inspire any emotion.

During February 2010, the Washington DC area experienced what came to be known as "The Snowpocolypse." Almost 4 feet of snow over the course of a weekend paralyzed most of the area. Events like this are stressful and dreaded by most adults, but to an equal intensity excite kids and teenagers everywhere because it means two things: 1) No school, and 2) snow shovels come out and it's time to make some money.


This has become a normal part of life, and no one is really opposed to kids making a bit of money by doing some hard physical labor. But my friends and I had another idea. We adopted a guerrilla shoveling strategy: We'd pick a house (often one we knew had older residents), swarm up, shovel the driveway (because there were six of us, we'd clear a driveway in 2 or 3 minutes), and then we'd quickly evacuate out of sight. We wouldn't knock on the door, we wouldn't charge them or even tell them who shoveled their driveway. We did this throughout the neighborhood (We got caught only once. It took us 5 minutes to convince her we really weren't looking for money. At this point, she came out and gave us apples and ginger ale. We decided this was a valid payment and graciously accepted it). I found out later that we apparently hit the editor of the community newsletter. She saw us running away, saw what we had done, and was inspired to write a whole article called "Snow Angels." An excerpt from the article she wrote:



"I was left with much more than a cleared driveway. More importantly, I was left... 
...with a greater faith in the character of the upcoming generation,
...with a hope, that the example of their kindness be recognized and spread,
...and with a sense of charity, that we all recognize the generosity of others and continue to pay forward the good will which we are blessed."


Since then, I've become interested in this concept of anonymity - doing good not only without expecting to be thanked, but by making it impossible to be personally thanked (or at least very difficult). During a conversation last night with Jesse Danger, I was hit with an idea. I call it "Guerrilla Compliments."

I took a pad of Post-it notes and wrote a short, positive message on each. Some were cliche sounding mood-boosters (The world is beautiful, and you are too), some were positive suggestions (Dreams are not just for when you are asleep), and others were calls-to-action (Make moves, not excuses). I wrote about 15 unique messages, stuffed them in my pocket, and went to campus for the day.

I've used about half of the notes I wrote so far. A few places that I've put Post-it notes today: Snuck one into a girl's open backpack. On a janitor's floor scrubbing machine. The 5th tray from the top of the stack of food trays in the dining hall. Each time, I take a picture of the post it note (on the target if possible, although most times I take the picture earlier so I can decide on a target at the last second), and then post it to Twitter through Twitpic with a description of where I just put it. I'm tagging each post with the hashtag #guerrillacompliments.

I hope that people are surprised when they find a yellow Post-it note somewhere they weren't expecting. And I am hoping that this surprise will encourage them to read, consider, and really embrace what is written on it. Maybe they will just throw the note away without reading it. But maybe one of these will brighten someone's day. Maybe it will inspire them to engage in their own spontaneous act of kindness. Maybe the encouraging Post-it notes telling people that "The only difference between dreams and reality is action" will cause someone to stop hesitating and take some action to change their lives. So many people go days, weeks, or months without a single positive or encouraging word said to them.

Lets change that.

Guerrilla soldiers fight a stronger force by sabotage and harassment. Lets be guerrilla soldiers, waging a war against unhappiness, with Post-its and pens as our weapons. If you want to join my war, I welcome you to show support by posting your own attacks on unhappiness to Twitter with the hashtag #guerrillacompliments. Don't have a Twitter? Then don't worry about it. The important goal here is to get out, and do good.

I'm going to inspire hope and joy where ever I strike. And I will strike every day. Will you?

Ah, Sweet Misremembered Youth

This is an excerpt taken from the editor's note of the August 1986 edition of Analog: Science Fiction, Science Fact magazine. Analog is one of the longest running science fiction literature magazines, and authors from Timothy Zahn (of Star Wars Expanded Universe fame) to Isaac Asimov have written for them.

I found this issue in an antique shop in Seattle, and the message here really spoke to me. I wasn't able to find a copy of it online, and I think this is something people should be more aware of:

"Once upon a time there was a little town in the midst of a sea of fertile farmland. it had a downtown - not a big one, to be sure, or truly bustling, by cosmic standards; but a central district where a few main highways came together and townsfolk and farmers from the surrounding countryside converged to do business. One day this town decided to make all its downtown streets one-way - and many onlookers, both residents and outsiders passing through, wondered why. It didn't seem to them that the actual volume of traffic required such action, and in fact the resulting confusion seemed more of a headache than the "congestion" the new arrangement was supposed to alleviate. Some of these perplexed observers thought the matter over at some length, and the best explanation they could come up with for a tranquil little town's making its streets one-way was this. Much as a little girl might like to dress up in her mother's clothes because it makes her feel "like a big girl," a little city might adopt big-city traffic patterns to make itself feel like a big city.

A bit far-fetched, you may say, but several years later I still haven't heard a better explanation. Admittedly such analogies between the behavior of individual organisms and that of social units are imperfect, at best. There are such obvious differences as the fact that the decision to make streets one-way was made by a few individuals, not by the town as a whole (though that difference may not be as great as it appears, since the little girl's decision to dress up was made by a similarly small group of her cells). In any case, there are also clear similarities in the behaviors of organisms at individual and group levels. It can be at least mildly entertaining, and perhaps even instructive, to look at what they are.

The one I'm particularly thinking about today concerns a common tendency among adults which you've probably noticed in others and very likely exhibited at least occasionally in yourself. How often have you heard an adult beset by some problem like taxes or work pressures of family responsibilities sigh nostalgically that he wishes he were back in his childhood, without any worries? I've heard it often - and I've always considered it a clear sign that the adult's memory of childhood is, at best, exceedingly vague. Any child could remind you that childhood is anything but carefree. Every day is filled with concerns like what's-my-teacher-going-to-do-to-me-if-I-forget-my-book-report and is-that-bully-going-to-catch-me-on-the-way-to-school and am-I-growing-up-the-way-I-should and why-don't-boys-like-me.

"Ah," the adult smiles wistfully, "but those are such TRIVIAL problems compared to mine!"

To which I reply, with all possible respect, hogwash. The measure of a problem is not how big it is compared to somebody else's, but how big it is compared to your own perception of your ability to solve it. In those terms, a child's problems are not one whit less formidable than an adult's, and they may even be far more so. (Especially when you consider that the current crop of children are exposed to an unprecedented amount of information about current events and are well aware that many adult problems directly affect them, but are completely beyond their control.) A child's problems may loom large primarily because he lacks the perspective to accurately judge their real seriousness. If he's lucky, by adulthood he will be able to evaluate them more realistically and thus be less likely to let his worries get out of proportion to their causes (though many adults, alas, are not that lucky)."

The article goes on to talk about how this applies at a cultural and global level, which is just as important, but for another time. What do you think of this editor's note? Do you agree? Disagree?

Safety has EVERYTHING to do with Fitness

Based on a forum post where someone stated that advanced practitioners were more likely to get hurt than beginners:

Safety is largely a skill/mental attitude. You can go about a difficult jump with safety in mind, using spotters, progression, and building up to it - or you can just go for it. Most of us choose to go the route of safety - but sometimes someone doesn't know how to be safe. It's an inherent skill to some extent, but must be actively developed or TAUGHT (which is something all three gyms (APEX, Primal, PKV) focus on.) To address later points, these gyms don't just say "Do X and Y and never do A and B." They teach with safety in mind, and through that teaching style students learn how to be safe on their own.

However, I do think Rafe is right about the quote "Safety has got nothing to do with fitness." being incorrect. On Saturday, I took either the worst, or the second worst, bail of my life (parkour, flipping, gymnastics, martial arts, slacklining, firespinning, waterskiiing, wakeboarding all included). The only reason I am probably not paralyzed right now is because of my strength, fitness, skill, and experience.

I wasn't doing anything dangerous, just a simple step up to crane with my off leg. I stepped, leapt, my foot landed on the top, but I had a little bit too much forward momentum and I pitched forward, head first, feet in the air, toward the concrete on the other side. It was about a 4 foot drop, and all I remember is a snapshot of the concrete about 2 feet from my face, and my right arm outstretched toward the ground.

Based on the map of my (extremely minor) injuries and scrapes, I contacted the ground with the blade of my right hand and braced with the palm of my left, lowered myself down into a roll. I hit my thigh on the corner of the wall, and I must have hit my knee at some point - probably during the roll.

I ended on my back, eyes closed, on the concrete. My right leg was extended, and my left knee was bent about 45 degrees. The person I was training with came over, and I calmly asked her to extend my knee and help me unzip my jacket so I could breathe. I walked away about 2 minutes later, and now about 36 hours later the only remaining pain/tightness/soreness is in my thigh, which is greatly diminished.

I was doing something easy and simple. This was something a beginner could probably do. I am sure, however, that this was not something a beginner could have walked away from so easily. I consider myself somewhat strong, but I still do things that are largely not risky. I take great care not to put myself in any unnecessary or excessive danger. This was a technique that was not excessively dangerous. But just like any technique, if the right thing goes wrong at the perfect time...

Physical strength is JUST AS IMPORTANT as mental strength. You can not say that a beginner is exposed to less danger because it simply isn't true. You can not say that because I am stronger, I have to take more risks. Because I was stronger, I am able to move my fingers to type this right now. Life is a long road and we must be strong in order to walk it to it's destination.

Last Night's Dream

So I had a dream last night, and I'd like to share it with the world.

It started off and we were at the Whole Foods near Jesse Danger's house (there is no Whole Foods near Jesse's house), and there were a bunch of parkour people hanging out. Someone comes up and tells me they got the car, and we go over. The car looked kind of like the Corvette LT-1, but about a billion times shinier and better. They handed me the keys and we got in. There was a stickshift, but I never needed to shift between gears. There were, however, about 12-15 different orientations it could be in (including some sort of turbo boost).

So we started driving down this highway. We were going pretty fast, I looked down and it was about 35mph. I thought "We can go faster than this." So then I hit the gas and we sped up to about 80-90mph. I hit the "turbo boost" somehow, and then we were going about 300mph. At one point we saw a turn coming up and I said to the guy in the passenger seat "Oh crap." I pulled the e-brake, executed a perfect skid around the corner, and then we kept going.

Finally, we drive into this cave. There is still road, but the walls are right up against the edge of the car. I hit the turbo boost and we're going about 400mph when the view switches to 3rd person of the car. Jet fighter wings fold out from the car, scraping and sparking against the walls. The whole car is on fire - but it's white fire. Then we hit this massive jump and glide for about a mile.

Next, it's me and my friend in this cave (no car), and we get to a door. "You have to write something insulting to get in" he says. So I inscribe with my feet on the ceiling "Write and die." We enter a living room style area. My friend Graham is there, along with the guy we were going to meet. The guy immediately jumps up and starts demanding who we are and how we got in here when Graham interrupts and says that we're with him.

The guy suddenly becomes friendly and welcoming, but in a very "mafia boss" kind of way. There are other people around who seem to be there for the same event as me. I mash some macaroni and cheese with chicken in it on the guys face (that's what was expected of me) and then the dream ends.

Someone woke me up in the morning and I immediately reply "I was having an office space dream." I'm not sure what that means, or if I was having a dream about office space afterward - but I'm glad I remembered this one instead.

Decentralizing Parkour Jam Planning using Twitter

One of the major problems with parkour communities right now is jam planning and coordination. Currently, Rochester uses Facebook to plan jams. Honestly I wish it hadn't turned out that way. The only way to announce your jam was to post on the discussion boards (which no one checks with any real frequency in ANY Facebook group) or to send out a message. Only administrators of the group can send out messages though, so unless I made everyone an administrator, only a few select people could effectively plan jams.

I recognized how detrimental this was to the community and I made a push to start using the American Parkour forums. As it stands, almost all typical parkour communities use forums to plan their jams, and it works pretty well. Forums allow anyone to post a jam, they facilitate easy discussion and planning of the jam, and it leaves a public record of past events. The problem is people had no incentive to check APK because any event we planned was blasted to them through Facebook. Additionally, it's difficult to reach critical mass on a forum (as defined by the amount of activity occurring to keep it interesting enough for people to keep coming back and generating more activity). So short of the leaders of the community abandoning Facebook entirely. I had to find a way to solve this problem in order for the community to be sustainable. How could we decentralize jam planning without destroying the community?

Then the idea. Twitter. It all fell into place, and the solution is SO much cooler than you think it is.

A quick rundown on Twitter lingo in case you aren't familiar. A Twitter update is called a tweet. You can do something called "retweeting" which is basically quoting someone. It's typically used as a way of saying "hey. This guy is pretty cool, you (your followers) should hear what he has to say." Then there are hashtags, which is Twitters keyword system. You can end a tweet with #08DebateTopics, and then whenever someone who was interested in 2008 election debate topics searched for that hashtag, tweets about energy policy, Iraq, and the economy would all come up.

So here is how my solution works:

• Step 1: start a hashtag, #parkourjam. If I want to go train, I write a tweet like "Tuesday. Five PM. In front of the library. #parkourjam"

• Step 2: Run a Twitter search for the hashtag, and then save the RSS feed for that search.

• Step 3: write a perl script to scrape that RSS feed and republish it. (this is necessary because Twitter uses nofollow links, which will screw up the next step.)

• Step 4: run your new RSS feed through Yahoo Pipes. Apply some clever filters and regular expressions to strip out the data you want, clean it up a bit, and the republish that as a new RSS feed.

• Step 5: run that RSS feed through twitterfeed.com. This will check for updates every 30 minutes, then will actually update a Twitter account with the new information.

So what we just did is essentially create a retweet bot. It will automatically search Twitter for new tweets using the #parkourjam hashtag, do a bunch of technical mumbo jumbo back-end magic, then republish any tweet it finds under its own account.

This is obviously useful because now everyone doesn't have to follow everyone else, people only have to follow a single bot.

Cool right? Yeah. But we're not done yet.

Twitter is super phone friendly. You can register your phone with your account, and then you can actually text updates to Twitter. So I can be on campus, find out class is canceled, then without having to go home I can tell people to meet me outside the library in ten minutes to train.

Sweet, right? Sure, but then everyone else still has to be at their computer to see my update. And this is when the project REALLY gets cool.

Remember when I said that Twitter is super phone friendly? Yeah. SUPER phone friendly. You can actually set Twitter up to send you a text message whenever specific people update their Twitter accounts.

Yeah. So suddenly, I can tell everyone who follows this retweet bot that I'm outside the library and I want to train. Where ever they are.

So if your Economics 101 professor is droning on and on about the laws of supply and demand and it's an amazing day outside... You know there is someone who wants to go train. Or if your home alone watching television, or if you dropped the kids off at a birthday party and have a few hours to kill. Suddenly the entire community is at your fingertips. Anyone can plan a jam- either days in advance or minutes in advance.

I feel like this is what Twitter is going to be used for more and more in the future. With a bit of creativity, out of the box thinking, and knowing what tools are out there and what they're capable of, you can decentralize planning while centralizing community.

5 Cool Things Zac Has Done

5. Challenged Housing Department to get our basements back:

 Housing is more or less constantly trying to pull a fast one on RIT students. They often get away with it, but sometimes they just take things too far. Here's the story of how Housing tried to lock the basements of all the townhouses in my complex, and how I started a movement and stopped them by using social networking and a the power of rallying people behind a cause!

4. 72 Hour Fast:
I grew up in an upper-middle class family with a fully stocked refrigerator. Sometimes we were out of peanut butter, but we were never out of food. So I decided to find out what it was like to go three days without eating. I did not alter my schedule at all, and I used Twitter to keep a constant log of how I was feeling.

3. Trip around the country:
I was faced with a choice. Should I look for a summer job, or should I blow a fair deal of my money and travel to 20 different cities across the country meeting new people, seeing new places, and training Parkour? No real contest. I took planes, trains, and busses and never spent a dime on housing by staying with parkour friends. Read the stories (be sure not to miss the Plane to San Francisco one), see the pictures, and watch the videos of my 8 week trip.

2. Rochester Parkour:
When I came to RIT as a freshmen, there were only two other people training in all of Rochester, and they were about 45 minutes away. Since I founded Rochester Parkour one year ago, we've had special Beginner Workshops with over 100 attendees, host training sessions with over 40 regulars, have had two television interviews and five newspaper articles, been featured by the Rochester Area Community Foundation nonprofit organization, negotiated to teach children's classes out of a gymnastics gym, and led free children's workshops for the Strong National Museum of Play.

1. Backflips!


And undoubtly the coolest thing I've done... Backflips! What most people don't know about backflips is that they're also semi-legal tender in some places. I've done backflips for raffle tickets, backflips for cheese, and backflips for cash!

I Fought Housing... and I Won

I am by no means spoiled. But when things don't go my way, sometimes it is necessary and proper to throw yourself on the ground, scream, flail, and thrash around for a bit. This is pretty much how I ensured that the basements of my townhouse complex remain unlocked...

I live in an on-campus townhouse complex called Colony (which falls somewhere between "the slums" and "low-income housing" on my scale of RIT Housing). Despite the distance from campus, disrepair, and the smelly, ant-and-bee-infested swamp I have for a backyard, I really enjoy living there. One of the major draws is the basement - the only RIT housing option with a basement. We have two rooms, a "family room" and a "utility room."

According to the RIT Housing website, the Family Room is 12 x 21, and the Utility Room is 13 x 21. There is a very thin, poorly constructed wall (with holes in it) between the two rooms, and a door connecting them.

I was back home in Maryland this summer, but my roommate Charles Moreland stayed in our townhouse. One day, he emailed me and was furious that "Housing was locking our basement."

...What? I didn't get this email. I had him forward me the email, which stated that "this necessary work is being done to address past occurrences with fire code violations and maintenance issues. These incidents include: inappropriate storage of combustible materials near the furnace and hot water tank, and the sump pump being clogged with debris (resulting in flooded basements)."

I assumed my email was waiting in a queue somewhere, and was bound to arrive sometime that night. Over 24 hours passed, and I still hadn't received an email. That's when I realized that Housing was trying to pull a fast one on any residents not actively living there over the summer.

And that's when I got angry. And to quote the Hulk, you wouldn't like me when I'm angry.

I thought for a moment, then came up with a plan.

Phase I) Write an email. I wrote an email that started off by thanking them for locking our basement. I told them that I was glad that they were going to lock off 273 square feet of our townhouse, but I was confused as to why they didn't mention the $704 I would save in rent that year! I continued this implication that they were lowering our rent for a while, and told them I planned on using the money to buy food and textbooks - things I wasn't able to afford both of last year.

I acknowledged I was being sarcastic, and then I pointed out that this yet one more problem in a long line of "miscommunication issues" that Housing was facing. I was part of a Housing Committee that Housing disbanded (because these were the kind of issues we were bringing up. You know, real ones.). I pointed out that they weren't updating their Housing Guidelines handbook, they weren't informing students of changes to policies (or weren't until it was too late), and that they inconsistently enforced other policies. It was also unacceptable that they kept this a secret from most of the people it would effect (school-year residents). I offered my contact information for further discussion, and I promised they would hear more complaints.

And then I sent it 15 people. Everyone from the Director of Housing to the President and Vice-President of Student Government to the Director of Student Affairs. One person could ignore it... but fifteen couldn't.

I got an email from the President of Student Government telling me he was "looking into the situation," and then I got a call from one of the higher-ups in Housing. We spoke on the phone for some time, and he insisted that this was the way it was, and there was nothing I could do.

So then I got serious.

Phase II - Spark a Social Wildfire. I knew they could ignore me and my opinions, so I needed to get the word out. Which, I believe, is why Facebook was invented. I wrote a Facebook note that briefly informed people what was happening, why it was happening, and what I was doing to stop it. Then I picked one of the people from my email list, and I told everyone to email that person one person and complain. I was trying to ensure that the complaints would be concentrated. I posted an alarmist status update ("Do you live in Colony? Housing is trying to lock your basement! Read my note to learn how to stop it!"), and then asked people to repost my status update and my note.

I also contacted several social activists on campus and we were beginning to plan a Walk on the Housing office.

It spread quickly, and while I have no idea how many emails my target received, it must have been enough. All Colony residents (ALL residents, summer and school-year) received an email a few days later that "after phone conversations with several students residing in the Colony Manor townhomes as well as reviewing feedback posted on Facebook and through email, I’ve decided on a compromise."

Phase III- Resolution. They came in and marked off an area around the furnace where we couldn't store anything, and they put a grate over the sump pump. This was a perfectly legitimate, appropriate, and valid response to the problem, whereas locking the entire room was punative and disproportionate to the problem.

So while some people get an email like that, say "Damn, that sucks" and shrug it off, other people get up and complain. When that doesn't work, but you know that your needs and goals and just and right, then it's time to throw yourself on the floor, scream, flail, and thrash wildly until you get your way.