Leaders

People write about leaders
how to become one
what it takes to be one.
They focus on what to do
what to say
how to act.
They don't talk about why.
Why people lead -
why people follow.
Love.
Love is why people lead.
Love is why people follow.
Having someone tell you,
'this is the way to go'
'this is how we'll do it'
and then having that someone *be* there
when it goes right -
and when it goes wrong.
Having that someone say,
'hide behind me,
I will shelter you
beneath my wings.
If there are prices to be paid
I will pay them.
For you.
Because I believe in you.
Because you are worthy.'
There is no greater love
than a man lay down his life for another.
And for the receivers of that love,
who amongst us will not follow
such a giver?
Courage, conviction, vision,
these virtues are named, time and again.
But what upholds them
makes them possible
is love.
To be a leader
is to love.

No, I don't know where this came from. It sorta fell out while I was thinking about management, mentoring, and all that stuff. Also I blame Teshness as quoted in a previous post about work and love as an oblique factor!

Gamasutra - Features - World of Warcraft and Life After Cataclysm

"One of the primary reasons I stopped playing was that I felt like so much of what made raiding interesting and fun was that elite end of the game where you have access to content that only a few people every get to see," Doug Thomas, Associate Professor at USC and co-author of A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, said. "Systematically, I felt what Blizzard has done is taken their high-end game content and made it increasingly accessible to larger group of players."

"Even if you couldn't get the high-end Epics, you could get something that was pretty much equivalent through token systems. That kind of thing kind of eroded one of the core dynamics about what was fun about the game for me."

via gamasutra.com

Translation: There are always more people who would rather wave their peens in other people's faces, rather than get better at using those peens privately.

Thus, if you remove the option to have the rarest, biggest, purplest pixellated peen, those peeners would then rather quit than continue.

...what do you mean the sex is the fun part?

Social media wankery at its finest (or maybe I just don't get social media)

via give-a-shit.org

Though cute in concept and execution, I can't help but wonder what the point of this site is.

Just to get FB posts/likes and Tweets? How does that help anyone?

Mebbe I just don't grok social media at all, because it all seems awfully pointless to me.

Don't get me wrong - if my KPI is to get more social shit like Tweets and FB posts/likes, I will quite happily orchestrate it (or attempt to) by gaming the system - as gamers love to do. But at the end of the day, I don't see the point (well KPIs aside).

These 'give a shits' aren't even bound to any charities or donations that I can tell. It's not as if you have to donate at least 10 cents before you can be said to give a shit about something.

It just looks like yet another social media wankfest.

I mean, if they at least bound it to donations of time (volunteerism) or easier (money), however small... then sure, there's a point.

But right now, this site exemplarises the 'Yay! Click this and feel like you did something when you did nothing' mentality.

For my daily fix of that, I'd rather play a rat pellet MMO, thanks.

Annoying Book: Fables and Distances by John Haines

From my rants to two poor souls this morning...

<rant>

I r readink annoyink book.

Which I think I weel nawt feeneesh. -_-

Ok, so in an earlier chapter (some supposedly world-classfamouswhatever poet named John Haines is the author), he quotes ANOTHER poet, saying (very wisely I might add), that poets have to remember that poetry isn't written only for poets.

And then in the next chapter, he goes into how poetry should be written not for celebrity etc, but for almost religious reasons… and that 'those for whom poetry is more than a career choice will understand what I mean'.

Hi, wtf happened to 'poetry isn't written just for poets'?

Or is it that obviously, only poets could understand that poetry shouldn't ONLY be commercial, but should ideally have some deeper meaning and reason to it, whether social, political, or something else altogether, and that it should be founded in personal conviction?

-_-

And so I think I will drop this book off tonight. His writing is charmless and his content is annoying.

He comes across as the kind of person who likes to bludgeon others with poetry to show his leetness, rather than sharing to spread the shinies.

</rant>