This blog is all about stories, especially personal stories, so obituaries are actually something relevant.  In my first job out of high school, I was a small town radio DJ.  One of my most important duties (after keeping the GM from putting his foot in his mouth) was reading off the obits as part of the noon news report.  You want to seriously torque off small town old people?  Mess up an obituary.  That’s all I’m saying. The phones will ring, and you will spend 20 minutes getting dressed down for leaving out the deceased’s second cousin once removed who “stayed with her every day three years ago when she was down with the cancer.”

Sorry.  I digress.  For what it’s worth, my own life experiences eventually taught me to appreciate why it was so important to those folks that I get the obituaries right.

Anyway… local publications have always printed obituaries, obits drive a certain number of subscriptions, so to a certain extent, publishers have always profited from these notices.  Taylor may be doing so a bit more directly, but the fact remains, that those who serve the bereaved professionally in some capacity are essentially profiting from death.

That’s not what I really wanted to talk about here, though.  Whether you like what Jeff Taylor is doing or not, some time in your life, your name will likely be in the “survived by” list for someone close to you.  In the last four or five years, I’ve personally lost my mom, my grandpa, and my grandma  (all three to tobacco-related illness;  so, yes, I basically think Tobacco Companies = Satan).  I’ve also lost to some aunts, uncles, and other more distant relations over the years.

Bereavement is a really difficult life passage.  Obituaries aren’t really for the deceased; they’re for the bereaved.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:  stories are how we process and contextualize our lives.  We find the meaning for our little adventures here on earth by telling ourselves the story of those adventures.  Sometimes they are comic and sometimes they are tragic, and sometimes a mixture of both.  An obituary is effectively the epilogue of someone’s story, told for the benefit of those left behind.

We need an ending, or in psychology-speak, we need “closure,” when someone we love’s story is cut off.  Obituaries and other memorials are symbolic “endings” that help us process the loss.  My theory is that our souls, being eternal, don’t really ”get” death.  They need symbols to make sense of what has happened.

During my mother’s passing, the funeral home and both newspapers which printed her obituary misspelled her name.  Despite the great care we took to spell her unusual name and have the spelling read back to us, both the funeral home and the Courier-Journal actually misspelled both her first and last names (there was no listing for “Reginia Beckham”–just “Regina Beckman”).  In an already painful time, it was an insult added to injury.  I tried to contact an editor at the C-J for a correction, but got no response, and eventually decided a correction wouldn’t really make a difference.

It’s a small thing, really, but at the time it loomed a lot larger.  And it made me sorry for the way I had mentally blown-off those callers back when I was a know-it-all 18 year old deejay.

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As a new media geek and storyteller at heart, I also love Alternate Reality Games (ARGs).  In addition to LOST’s previous two ARGs (The Lost Experience and Find815), movies such as The Bourne Ultimatum, and video games like Halo (ILoveBees) have used the format to successfully create great viral buzz and engagement.  (In fact, I got to participate in a viral campaign at my previous job that was very ARG-like, although I can’t really talk about it.  Suffice it to say it was very cool.)

So of course, when I saw the “commercial” for Octagon Global Recruiting during the season finale, I was all over it, and managed to wait out the server crush to sign up.

Today I got my first email from Octagon.

It basically confirms that LOST, and some element of the new Octagon-related ARG will be at Comic-Con in San Diego July 24, 2008.  Not surprising, since the show typically has a presence at Comic-Con.   Last year, they revealed a new Dharma Orientation video that hinted at this season’s time travelling bunnies, and prior to that, a character from their first ARG turned up and started protesting the Hanso Group at the Con.

The email also indicated that even if you were unable to attend their “recruiting session” at Comic-Con, their “full recruiting program” would be available online after July 27th.  The email also mentions an “exciting aptitude test” to give applicants a chance to show off their “unique talents.”

The email was cc:d to a “Hans Van Eeghen,” which is a name that simply screams “Anagram!” but I don’t have the time to unscramble it.  An email to his address prompted an out-of-office reply stating he was “currently on assignment in the field.”  I expect to be hearing from Mr. Eeghen at some point this summer.

An ARG is a complex game that sometimes blurs the line between fantasy and reality.  ARGs strive for an immersive interactive experience where the players feel as if they are involved in a real adventure or mystery that takes place via multiple communications media: web, email, IM, phone calls, voice mails, text messages, and in some cases, real-world events (like a character from the story turning up at Comic-Con).

When it comes to audience engagement, it doesn’t get much deeper or more powerful than an ARG.  They’re incredibly complex and involved to pull off, but when done well, particularly for a traditional media property like a movie or television show, they give the most ardent fans an opportunity to feel like they’ve literally jumped into the fictional world alongside their heroes and heroines.

To find out more detailed information about ARGs, check out unfiction.com.

Oh, and a hat tip to Mack Collier, who let me know on Twitter that the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight, has also been up to some ARG goodness.

img courtesy mzacha on sxc.hu

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I’m currently a somewhat lapsed devotee of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) system for personal productivity and organization, FlyLady’s household management system, David K. Reynold’s Constructive Living therapy, Dr. Willard Harley’s Marriage Builders program, and Sacred Space/Pray-As-You-Go’s daily prayer practice.

What do all these things have in common? They each touch on big, massive, shudder-when-you-think-about-it Major Life Goals.

• Getting your schedule under control and making sure you get what’s most important to you accomplished.
• Creating an uncluttered, nurturing, non-chaotic home environment for your family.
• Managing your neurotic emotions and living consciously and gratefully in the present.
• Protecting and enriching your lifelong romantic partnership.
• Developing a rich, reflective inner spiritual life centered in the presence of God.

Whoa.  Big stuff, there, right?  It makes my head hurt just thinking about any one of them, much less all of them.  But the thing is, I want all of them.

Except each of these different systems, different programs or frameworks, focus on the small stuff. They don’t focus on the elephant you’ve got to devour.  They focus on the next bite.  What’s my Next Action?  How much clutter can I clear in a 15 minute burst of activity?  What needs doing, despite what I’m feeling?   What is the most effective thing I can do each day to demonstrate love to my spouse?  What’s happened in the last 24 hours, and where do I feel God’s presence or absence?

These are manageable things. I can think about each of these questions without feeling a headache or a vague sense of panic and overwhelm.  I can attack any (and maybe all) of those questions in the course of a single day, with all the energy and enthusiasm I have available for that day.

Ultimately, it comes down to practices. A “practice” is something we do because we’re not perfect–but we’d like to be better.   Usually, it’s something we have to do daily, or at most weekly, because if we don’t, we get “out of practice.”  We lose what we’ve learned, to an extent.   But the nice thing is, most practices are like riding a bike–we may get rusty, but if we mastered it once, we can generally pick it up again.

With a little more practice.

img courtesy torli

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Me: I’m not going to murder you.

Hubby: What?

Me: I said, I’m not going to kill you.

Hubby: Oh. Good. Because I was concerned…

Me: I thought you might be. So I figured I would just tell you, I’m definitely not killing you. But if you think of anybody who would be good to murder, let me know, will ya?

Hubby: Sure, babe. No problem.

We were, of course, talking about the murder mystery I’m outlining and preparing to start in draft this month. Generally speaking, I draw my fictional characters from real people I know, and to be honest, in that sense I’ve murdered my husband once or twice before. He seems to be relatively okay with it, but then again, he’s a pretty laid back guy.

Well, I’m off to figure out who to.. off, basically. Have a nice day!

img courtesy spekulator on sxc

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Like most things, which choice you make depends on many factors. Here are some to consider:

Client: Is the client nervous about the project in general? If so, it may be smart to at least start out with the higher level of control that comes from a private site.

Content: What is the topical focus of the community? If it’s tech support around a product or software, then an open community allows your external gurus, the customers who are experts in the use of your product, to really shine. However, it your content is going to be focused on a sensitive topic, a closed community may actually result in more participation, as users feel safer to share their thoughts.

Control: How much control do you need over the activity that takes place on your community? What is the general maturity level of your users? Can they generally be trusted to police themselves as a community, or will you need active moderation? Are there legal issues to consider that require a higher level of control?

Consumers: What is the technographic profile of your users? Are they savvy enough to jump through the UI hoops that can be created by a closed community?

Commerce: Is this going to be a paid-access community? If so, is the entire site going to be “behind the wall” or will you have some areas accessible to the public to give prospective subscribers an idea of what they’ll see if they sign up?

Thinking through these issues is an important early step when you are planning on launching a community site.

image courtesy Fyffe on SXC

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