Marty and I play a lot of Scrabble lately.

We use this little iPhone app that Tom Guarriello introduced me to, “Words with Friends”. It’s super cute, and you can keep five or six Scrabble games going on forever. (It occurs to me now that I’d better call them Words games, or Scrabble might get mad. Hmm. That’s annoying.)

Anyway, we’ve been playing these awesome Scrabble games using Words with Friends. And it occurred to me that there have got to be a lot of great Scrabble offshoots out there.

So why don’t we have this game somewhere: Phonetic Scrabble. If I have “sirs” on the board and “ease” in my tiles, I should be able to spell “sirsease” (surcease). Aside from the people who will be mad that I am contributing to childhood spelling mistakes, this would be a FUN game. All it would need is software that attributes sounds to letters in a certain order. I’m sure that exists somewhere! It wouldn’t be precise, and that would make it even more fun.

(Aside to Words with Friends people — if you add this game option to your iPhone app, I will enthusiastically beta test it for you!)

What other Scrabble offshoots can you think of? Let’s see if we can get the actual Scrabble company really mad. ;}

PS. I’m kidding. Sort of. I like you, Scrabble company. See: I think your game is good enough to be a household name, a common noun that I can use to apply to any game with similar attributes. That’s good for your brand, as far as I’m concerned.

Update: Haven’t found actual phonetic Scrabble yet, but did find someone speculating about IPA Scrabble. IPA is the International Phonetic Alphabet, and it’s what we used in music school to properly notate the way words needed to be pronounced in all kinds of languages. My IPA is pretty rusty, but I’d still be really interested in giving this a try. Of course, I’d need to be playing against folks with IPA experience. IPA Scrabble, anyone?

What happens if you have a community of people, an intentional tribe, that doesn’t necessarily sleep at night?

Maybe they’re free-running sleepers, or 28 Hour Day sleepers. Hell, maybe they’re polyphasic. I’m not talking about a controlled environment — I’m talking about an uncontrolled environment, at least in terms of affecting sleep patterns. Can the children grow up being watched by whomever is awake, learning to follow their natural rhythms without being forced to develop sleep patterns that match those of mainstream society (or whoever happens to be in proximity)? Sure, I imagine they’re likely to sleep when some other people are sleeping — but what if they don’t have to?

What would we discover about sleep when it doesn’t have to be attached to daylight or convention? Not where there’s too much or too little daylight, but where because of electricity and technology our patterns and activities are not restricted by it?

Of course, being human also means being an organism that has evolved in a particular combination of light and dark, is accustomed to a certain schedule… But that doesn’t mean that our natural sleep inclinations must follow that strictly, only that we know our patterns can be DISRUPTED by misuse of light and dark. So what does that mean for an intentional community like this?

It’s the kind of experiment I could dream of running, if I knew enough other people interested in sleep experiments — and I admit that going so far as to run the experiment in an environment with growing children is pretty hardcore. I think we’d all want to be pretty sure it wasn’t going to mess everyone up before we subjected our children to it from their moment of birth, you know?

Does this mean it’s an implausible experiment?

Probably not.

In fact, all it needs are the right people and the right circumstances. But it would probably have to happen by itself — not solely as a result of some science-minded explorer just wanting to know. Even if that explorer is me. ;}

Still, I’m pretty interested in communities that raise children (as opposed to isolated single family units, for instance). And I’m just mad for sleep experiments.

Why on earth is there no “ball pit” app for the iPhone? We searched and searched, but found nothing.

I guess we’ll just need to built a real one. But still… I’d pay money, app developers. I really think I would. Let’s think about this just for a moment, shall we?

This is all xkcd’s fault, of course.

What could a ball pit app do?

Okay, I know this is ridiculous. I don’t care. I’m going to explore the subject anyway.

You could drop items into the ball pit.

You could lose small animals in the ball pit, and click with your mouse to poke around to try to find them.

You could send smaller animals into the ball pit to be eaten by the previously mentioned animals, and hear sounds of crunching doom as they are devoured.

Completely different tack: There could be small entertaining children in the ball pit, and poking them could elicit different reactions (like in Pocket God).

You know, I think my initial impulse was flawed. We just need a ball pit version of Pocket God!

You could alter the color scheme of the ball pit.

Poking the middle of the ball pit could cause balls to fly out and hit the “camera” / “inside” of the screen, making little pocking noises. It would be like a bubble wrap app, but of course ball pits are far more entertaining than bubble wrap.

You could drop an explosive into the ball pit.

Or the whole app could be specifically about constructing your own physical ball pit — helping you to calculate the necessary purchases and pricing and space/placement logistics, how many people could be accommodated, and a suggested set of rules for your ball pit depending on how concerned you are about grossness. Once you’ve set your parameters and done your figuring, the app would visualize the resulting ball pit.

And then you could play with it!

Someone had better let me know if something like this exists — or is subsequently built. I’ve worked up a real itch. Is there a Chuck E. Cheese around here? I don’t imagine they’re open on Christmas…

Added later: Why can’t we have a ball pit app… but instead of filled with colored balls… it’s filled with… iPhones?? Would that not be awesomely… something? Tell me that wouldn’t be entertaining.

This morning while searching for something to listen to while I showered, I stumbled on a TED Talk by Martin Seligman, the author of a book called Learned Optimism that I’d been looking at fairly recently. I thought, hmm, why not? And I put it on. (There’s a sidenote here about the sheer glee it gives me to stream TED Talks from the internet through my iPhone without having to do anything more than download an itsy bitty app — but I’ll save that for later. It’s bound to last, so it’s not like it will be old news in a month or two.)

In this talk, Seligman is talking about three kinds of happiness and how they work in human beings: A pleasurable happiness, where you have good feelings and good things happen to you. A “flow” happiness, where you are engaged with your environment in a productive way. And a meaning happiness, where something you are doing or involved with has a higher meaning that drives you. I don’t know if he’s written a book that focuses more on the material in this talk, but man, it blew me away. It was all I could do to keep soaping up, because I kept forgetting that I was supposed to be getting done with my shower and back to all the other stuff I had to do today.

What this imprinted on me was something I’ve been noodling with for a long time; happiness is not necessarily made of leisure, and it doesn’t have to only be made of meaning — it can be made of engagement of self, something that I’ve always found intensely rewarding and enjoyable, and often wondered, in passing, if there was something wrong with me. Meaning is the most powerful part of any pursuit, and pleasure is pleasurable, but engagement is no can of beans — in fact, Seligman says that in terms of producing significant, lasting happiness, meaning is first and engagement is second. Pleasure produces happiness, but it just doesn’t hold a candle to the other two in terms of effect and results. This fascinates the hell out of me, as it ought to, since I get a lot of flack for not relaxing enough.

Not to say that I shouldn’t relax more — I should. We need balance. Our brains need recharge time. But still, interesting, right? My happiness is primarily in meaning and engagement, like he says, though engagement for me is the thrill of the chase — I sometimes think it’s more important to me than meaning, but of course that’s not true, since the only things that truly engage me are the ones that have great meaning to me. It’s just that the meaning is not always the most overt part of the equation.

Where’s your happiness at?

What I want is 24-hour turnaround, custom on-demand classical accompaniment — sent to my email as mp3s!

When I’m visiting my parents, it’s not convenient to call around to hire an accompanist to come to my house and play so that my grandmother can hear me sing. (Even worse would be having to get their old piano tuned — yow!) I want a site where I can go to find a real pianist with mad skills who can accept my music by email, record the accompaniment with some basic tempo input from me (preferably using a metronome for accuracy), and email the mp3s right back to me. I’d be thrilled to pay per song, with price tiers for difficulty. The pianist should be technologically savvy, brilliant with piano accompaniment, truly knowledgeable about pauses for breathing and traditional tempos versus accepted variations, friendly, warm, and reliable.

The pianist could even have a list of repertory and standard pricing per song for the stuff he or she already knows — and some information on how to estimate the cost for songs he or she doesn’t already know. If the song is already on a list, I can add a few to my cart, upload my music (to prove I own it, I suppose!), pay my tab, and know that in 24 hours I’ll have mp3s in my inbox that I can burn to CD.

Instant living room concert!

This, this should be doable. In fact, if you are a brilliant pianist and you want to enact this little business model, I’ll help you do it. And I’ll give you money, right now, to send me accompaniment tracks via email. Because that would be awesome.

Waiting for a good name for this one — feel free to suggest.

I want writers to go out and collect stories from people who are homeless — the invisible people, people who are struggling. Becky Blanton is SUCH a role model for this. But I want to take it one step further — I want the writers to write the stories, I want them to have a mechanism for publishing them, and half the income generated goes to the person who told the story.

So, picture this…

I’m a writer. I go downtown and I find people who are willing to tell me their stories. One man is willing to share his stories with me, so I go downtown several days in a row to talk to him and take notes — probably recording it, too.

I take the stories home and write them up and refine them. I go back downtown and share the final versions with my new friend, and I make changes if I need to.

Then I publish them — through a single company, maybe, that is producing a series of these kinds of stories. They’re published in such a way that most of the sales prices go straight to the authors. The writer gets half, and the person who told the story gets half. In cash, or in some kind of account, or something similar.

I’m still unclear on many parts of this, because I don’t understand how it works well enough yet. For instance, what’s the best way to pay people who have dropped through the cracks of the system? And would this work well enough to be useful at all to them? Could it be a fund, instead of regular payments, that builds until it’s enough money to really do something with (like pay for an apartment for six months)?

Could it be useful for anyone who is struggling and has a story to tell?

What if the place in question was a shelter, where each person staying at the shelter had an “account”, and the people in the shelter asked them to tell their stories in order to stay there, and the money generated from those stories was split between the person telling and the people running the place? And the money for the person telling could be put in a shelter account for them, and they could keep staying there until they had enough — like a job — to do something else.

It could be a large open source project, just a structure that anyone could apply and use. A guide for writers on how to do this, how to keep themselves safe, how to communicate well with people who are used to being / prefer to be invisible. How to be compassionate and understanding and friendly, how to avoid being ineffective or offensive. And how to help people tell their best stories!

I definitely need a lot of input on these ideas in order to refine them into something that makes a little more sense! Thoughts?

Additional Thought-Provoking Resources

Wow, serendipity — Becky’s post from today resonates with me along these same lines. My comment to her:

I would love to think up a system that gave these people — people who are sharp, talented, insightful, and can’t find a job for all of that — a sort of business liaison to the internet. Someone who could connect and manage for them, be guided by their stories and knowledge and understanding and create something that works for them online, where they can reach so many people with their particular personality and way of living. These people have so much more to teach now that they’ve experienced this lifestyle, and I can’t be the only one who wants badly that they share what they know.

I’m going to link to this post from the blueprint I posted this morning, since it seems like very similar territory and there is no doubt something being put together in my head — if I can just be patient enough to see where it goes!!

This blueprint is unfinished. Do you have suggestions or additional information? Leave a comment below or email me!

What do you need? What can you use some help with? And how can we find solutions to the things that are bugging the hell out of you? Leave a comment and let’s find out.

This thread will stay open for 24 hours — until about 7pm CT tomorrow longer than 24 hours, until sometime Wednesday sometime Wednesday night or Thursday in the future. [Edit: At 7pm Tuesday night everyone jumped into the pool, so it seems sensible to leave things running until those people have some useful information. Also, I came down with a bit of a sinus infection, so this gives me more time to help out!] [Edit: Oh, whatever. Getting sick means I have immunity from self-imposed deadlines. Or something. It's open season until I finish responding to comments!] This is slightly different than last time, and I’m hoping it will give me more opportunity to answer more questions and let us all do more brainstorming! Since I go to bed so damn early, it will certainly let y’all get a head start. ;}

Feel free to throw anything you’ve got at me: Problems, questions, confusions, ideas you need to generate, blueprint or make sense of. If you need help, comment and tell me what’s on your mind. If you realize you know the answer to something someone’s asked, by all means feel free to jump in. The more the merrier!

I’m tracking Free-For-Alls with #ideablueprint on Twitter, if you’d like to play too. Here are the links for TweetChat and TweetGrid. I’m starting to realize that #ideablueprint is freaking long for Twitter, so let me know if that’s driving you nuts and we’ll find something else. ;}

If you want, you can find out more about Idea Free-For-Alls and Friday Halfsies here.

Okay, that’s all taken care of. Get your idea hats on! ;}

Wow, bonkers — it’s been a month since I launched this crazy schtick. Such. Incredible. Fun.

As of right now, we have various updates on various pages including the Tablespoon Topper blueprint. (Totally on my shopping list.) Charlie also gave me a few extra items for my How to Count Glasses of Water post. (Would you believe the goofy titles on some of these? Except I swear I am really that interested in counting glasses of water! And my post proves it. See?)

Even better than all that, we had our first inaugural Idea Free-For-All in July and a ton of people came and asked a ton of wonderful questions! It was very exciting. You should go read and pick up a few ideas for yourself. (I promise we’ll do another one soon!)

Important administrative note: I’ve also gone and merged the posts RSS for this site and my think tank blog to make it easier for ya’ll to stalk me. (I don’t mind. I like it.) I’m quoting the post I made here:

I’ve hooked up this blog’s RSS feed with the RSS of That Idea Blueprint Girl so that everything flows through one inter-tube. The RSS chicklets on both sites have been updated to use that tube, hereby dubbed the Global Megan Feed. I’m not integrating the two sites (yet… ever?) but connecting the RSS feeds makes the most sense from every standpoint I’ve examined thus far.

In all likelihood the individual feeds will continue to exist in my FeedBurner account — but just in case, you might want to subscribe to the Global Megan Feed or its email counterpart to avoid confusion later on. (You’re probably perfectly safe staying subscribed to either individual feed as long as you like. If that’s what you want to do, would you email me? Knowing that folks specifically want these delivered separately will give me a good reason to make sure those feeds stick around, and certainly inform my RSS decisions henceforth.)

With a single posts feed, it will be a lot easier to track my complex dance of creation across the web. There’s a Global Megan Comments Feed, too, in case you’re interested.

Long story short, hook yourself up with the Global Megan Feed and Global Megan Comments Feed to get posts and / or comments from both sites if you haven’t already. It will be like peeking in my kitchen window and taking notes on the cereal I eat for breakfast. It will be mad fun.

Now if only I had a kitchen window.

Or ate cereal.

The Background

I was once a Daily Juice addict. They sell delicious green juices and at least one of their locations sells amazing raw meals, too. Their fare is priced appropriately (and equitably, as far as I’m concerned). I got over my addiction when I ran out of money. Life lessons, man.

The epidemic of restaurant-goers who don’t know what’s in their food is disturbing to me, and so — conversely — I was always very excited to be a customer of Daily Juice, because I knew they were taking care of me. I knew there was a lot of good fresh produce in the juice I bought from them. I felt that I was in good hands!

There’s one thing they could have done that would have excited me more, however, and been incredibly useful!

The Plan

If I were the proprietor of Daily Juice, I would buy a Polaroid camera.

I would keep the camera in the back, where food is prepared. I would clear a special picture-taking area of counter space and make sure it stayed appealing and pretty. There would be a cutting board, a knife, some cool/funny/pretty stuff hanging on the wall. It would be casual but very nice-looking.

I would update the order-filling process thusly: Before produce gets juiced for the customer, it’s piled in the picture-taking area so that all the ingredients are visible. And I’d snap a Polaroid of the pile just before tossing it all into the juicer.

When the customer picks up their juice at the counter, there’s a Polaroid sitting there with it. The Polaroid shows them everything that went into that little cup of juice, and the customer can then get seriously excited about all the great vitamins and minerals they’re sipping this afternoon! If that customer is me, well… the bigger the pile, the happier I am drinking the juice! Since juicing produce naturally lends itself to huge piles of greens turning into normal-sized cups of juice, this should work great.

Potential Adaptations

This can be adapted in so many ways! Customers buying a “loaf” of raw “bread” made of nuts and seeds can get a Polaroid of the ingredients that went into their loaf. Order-fillers could stick a post-it onto the backs of the Polaroids that includes a list of ingredients and measurements. (I doubt there’s much harm in sharing recipes with customers. They’re fully capable of making this food themselves. They’re paying the restaurant to do it for them so they don’t have to!) This list should include something cute at the end, like “three tablespoons LOVE!” You get the idea.

This blueprint is unfinished. Do you have suggestions or additional information? Leave a comment below or email me!

Welcome to the honest-to-goodness inaugural Idea Free-For-All!

This thread will stay open all day. I’ll hang out and make myself useful, so feel free to throw anything you’ve got at me: Problems, questions, confusions, ideas you need to generate, blueprint or make sense of. I’ll be here even if it’s quiet (it is, after all, the first one ever) so if you need help, comment and tell me what’s on your mind.

I’m tracking Free-For-Alls with #ideablueprint on Twitter, if you’d like to play too. (I’m a fan of TweetChat and TweetGrid for those purposes, personally — live updates and easy to use.)

If you want to know a little bit about why I’m bothering to do this, here’s the post I wrote yesterday. You can also find out more about Idea Free-For-Alls and Friday Halfsies here.

What do you say, guys? Let’s come up with some great ideas!

PS. Yes, you are completely welcome to help answer other people’s questions! I will always weigh in, but I say the more the merrier — we’ll come up with a better array of options that way.

Holy crap, people! You’re awesome!

I am so impressed, not just with all the great questions and down-to-earth honesty that came through in this thread, but with all the people who jumped in to help answer other commenter’s questions. Thank you so much, guys! Here’s a list of what we explored, so you can look on through:

* Bob Poole: Copyright and how to make a living as an artist without depending on it.
* KJ: Getting away from Fortune 500 businesses, but still using what she knows to help people.
* CAD Monkey: Building a business for up-and-coming artists while navigating foreclosure crappiness.
* Jennifere: How to build a business using existing skills and passions — gardening, child-care, crafts work, jewelry making and tons more.
* Tiara Shafiq: Getting an arts business rolling with zero funds, and what to do when it looks bleak!

Thank you to Bob Poole, KJ, CAD Monkey, Jennifere, Tiara Shafiq, John, Michael Vanderdonk, and Steven for hanging out and being so generous with questions and new ideas. You made my day way better than I ever expected. (Email me if you want me to add a link to your name — I will do so happily!)