Odds & Ends
~ a spectrum of old scribbles ~
TL;DR — I have stacks of weird ideas at home. Here are a few from the late 2000's! Technology advanced beyond their application, in some cases — though a version of them may still be salvageable. The Ideas: “Bunny Suit” for cosplay and parkour, “Yellow Line” for safer intersections, “Larpenfilmum” for creative feedback from viewers to content creators, “Task Mob” for the pain-points of professional services at home and work.
The Bunny Suit
I watched in horror as cosplay Centaurs clomped and wobbled in their now-ubiquitous Horse-Shoes. Similarly, the Wolf-Feet were being dragged along the ground like a wounded animal. I felt that icky tug of my Engineer Heart: “There is definitely a better way to design those!” So, I made the Bunny Suit! Here:
Your feet have a nearly-rigid shoe-sole; think ‘carbon-fiber crowbar’ — you need this to transfer forces well. Same for rods beneath Velcro-straps along your thighs. These transfer forces from your strong upper-legs down into the TIP of your TOE. All you need are stiff cables attached from the front-side of the shoe to the front-tip of the thigh-bar, and another set of cables on the backside, attaching the heel of the shoe to the set-back sides of those thigh-bars. Together, they form a zig-zag like those little trash-gripper arms that kids use to play with.
Now, when you use your upper thigh muscles to straighten your leg at the knee, that pulls the BACK cables tight, extending your TOE. And in reverse, when you use the underside of your thigh to bend your knee, those FRONT cables are tightened, pulling your toe UP. Your thighs power your toes.
As a result, you can apply your full leg-strength for the entirety of a longer jump, longer duration in contact with the ground at higher Newtons of force! You jump HIGHER. And in reverse: you can LAND safely, absorbing the shock, from a taller DROP. This is Parkour Special-Ops Kit.
Next, we follow that same principle up along the body:
“Pulling a cable along a core muscle-group will then pull a peripheral muscle-group in the orientation that is most common for a wide variety of motions.”
Wear a hardened ‘bucket’ of Second Pelvis around your hips and groin, to attach cables from the thigh-bars into your pelvic muscle-groups. Then, another set of cables attach to the Second Pelvis, traveling up the front and back of the torso on left and right sides towards a Yoke over the shoulders. All these cables can be protected by a Gambeson, Chain, or Plate Armor.
The LAST set of cables extend from their Yoke-attachment-points to the forearm-bars. Front and back cables transfer shoulder and pectoral muscle-groups into the bend-and-sweep of your forearm.
What does all this look like, together?
You naturally follow the limb-motions of a Butterfly Stroke, when you swim. Your arms and legs are wired alternating, for natural walking, jogging, climbing, and swinging from alternative branches. That pattern of motions is also used when throwing javelins and drawing bows. And, when you bend your knees into a squat, then your arms extend to grasp whatever is at your feet; by straightening-up your thighs and core naturally power your forearms through a dead-lift!
I’d wear that.
The Yellow Line
The idea was simple. Paint a yellow line across the road, at the distance behind an intersection necessary for signaling to drivers: “If you are behind this yellow line when the light turns yellow, then you would HAVE to speed, to make the light. Don’t. And, if you are ahead-of this yellow line when the light turns yellow, then you do NOT have to speed — you’ll make the light.”
This wouldn’t deter folks who already enjoy running lights; instead, it puts everyone ELSE at ease, knowing that they do NOT have to speed, because they are already past the line. And, if someone does speed through a red light, then video can imply that they had *knowledge* of being behind the line.
Just a stripe of paint!
Larpenfilmum
This one could still work. I wanted the viewers of niche, home-brew stories to have a painless way to tell their fandom’s creators: “Hey! I had this idea for a plot-twist in your next episode…” and “Wouldn’t it be funny if so-and-so character said this to…” and “I had a dream with details about this one character’s backstory that just seemed so real, so human, I felt like it has to exist!”
There is a problem: How do the Content Creators filter-through ALL the comments and messages, to FIND those juicy ideas generated by their adoring fans? And, worse — how do the viewers leave those messages, WITHOUT the plot-twist being revealed to everyone who read that thread in the comments?!? Larpenfilmum is the answer.
Each viewer, in order to leave a comment on a video hosted on Larpenfilmum.org, must FIRST look at two randomly-selected comments. They are evaluating the pair, Better/Worse, along many criteria separately — “innovative? surprising? funny? appropriate to the characters? insightful?…” Let people suggest and try new ones, A/B-testing style!
Those comments can ONLY be seen through this pair-test. Each particular comment will only be observed by a few dozen commenters, before it has been sorted-and-filtered! It remains a SECRET to the rest of the audience. And now, those sorted-and-filtered comments are bundled into a Summary for the Content Creators. That is the soul, the Fundamental Principle of Larpenfilmum. Creators can now surprise their audience… with audience-generated content! ❤
Task Mob
I was pitching this for a couple years here in the Bay, before a website appeared: TaskRabbit. Crap. They were basically Craigslist, and they sucked all the oxygen out of the name I’d chosen for a nuanced and distinct app: Task Mob.
The Pain-Point Scenario: Your fridge is making a weird noise. You call the repair company. They schedule a time to come by. They arrive. They THEN listen to the fridge — with luck, it is still making that noise at the TIME they show. They diagnose the problem, and now they must travel to a hardware store to get a part… An hour later, they BEGIN fixing your fridge!
Instead, in 2007, I watched the explosion of the iPhone — video! High-Res Video?! I said specifically: “Video-chat with someone on-call for that purpose, immediately. That gives a permanent record of the event, and you can handle payments and schedule, etc. all in one place. You show them the manufacturer’s sticker with your phone, to give them the product’s ID number and everything else. They arrive with the part, and immediately get to work.” That isn’t only better for the customer — it also saved the repair-guy time! Those repair teams can handle more business per day, and their service can bill at a slightly higher rate due to convenience. That multiplies profit-margins.
I supposed that Task Mob could handle most professional services — even preliminary Doctor-assessments, to tell you if you really do need to go to ER. Financial Planner? They could at least make sure you were going to BRING all of the right documents, before you get to their office!
Key to making such a system work (as opposed to Craigslist, back in 2007) would be a ‘tree’ of Mentors for each Accredited Professional. Each Mentor accredits folks beneath them. When one of those new kids screws-up, the homeowner takes photos and posts a review. That review gets checked by some Mentors (chosen at random) and a bad job gets demotion-points. Those demotion-points count towards that new kid’s rating… AND, a smaller demotion is transferred onto the new kids’ MENTOR… and that Mentor’s Mentor! This ensures that “If someone is accrediting idiots, then that bad-faith Mentor will cause demotion-points to hit their OWN Mentor, who will then call-in a review. Potentially, they could lose their accrediting.” It’s a simple protocol which aligns incentives and puts skin-in-the-game, to ensure high-quality and knowledgeable professionals on a liquid, painless app.
Instead, we got the Gig Economy.
