So, my only resolution this year is to lose weight. And mostly, that’ll be by eating less. OMAD when possible, with exceptions for social lunches. So far, it’s going alright. A bit of snacking, but less snacking than before, and a lot less eating after the kids are asleep, which I think has been a really big culprit in both poor sleep AND weight.

Since the foot stuff seems to be understood, I’ve been walking a bit, both IRL and on the treadmill, and today ran errands on the bike. Will be ramping up activity, and it seems like Ei-Nyung and I will be hiring a trainer to come every so often – possibly weekly, possibly more. We’ll see. I like the guy I’ve been seeing for my shoulder, but I think having someone show up at our house will be really helpful.

Otherwise, been noodling on music stuff, both practicing guitar (playing Woodkid’s Guns for Hire, from Arcane), and making stuff with various electronic devices. Nothing significant, and nothing intensive so far – but just getting hands on them and playing around for familiarity’s sake. One thing that I found interesting – I got the Dirtywave M8 Tracker a while back – it’s a very bizarre piece of gear. Basically a Game Boy, but with a spreadsheet you use for making music. The thing that’s interesting about it is that absolutely none of it looks like an instrument of any kind – so much so that any familiar patterns you might fall into are impossible, because the device just doesn’t work like anything else.

I’ve found it’s weirdly effective at taking loops and encouraging you to make variations to chain together. Every sequencer does this to some degree, but because of how the M8 is structured, and because so much of the process is copy-paste-oriented (not just making music, but organizing and structuring everything) that it’s really easy and intuitive (once you get into the inscrutable UI) to build up songs from variations of patterns. I have a long, long way to go to make something even marginally interesting, but it’s a weird quirk of the hardware that this is so easy.

We’re planning another Korea-Japan trip – this time it looks like it’ll be Japan-Korea, likely spending time out there with friends from here again, possibly multiple groups of them if things work out. I think traveling with friends may be one of my favorite things. It’s often a bit nerve-wracking beforehand – what if things go wrong? – but once it’s all underway, it’s always been a blast.

One goal I have for this trip would be to pick up a Japan-exclusive guitar of some kind. There’s FGN, which seems potentially interesting, and there are some limited Japan-only Fender guitars that could be interesting as well. It’ll be something weird to poke at, to see if there’s something worthwhile. But otherwise, for me the only real other goal is to see the authentic inside of a castle. I think Himeji castle may not be in the cards this trip, but there are undoubtedly things like it closer to Tokyo.

I dunno if I have any other particular plans for 2025. I think the other thing that I want to do is spend way, way, way less time watching random shit on YouTube. It’s useful sometimes, but very easy to fall down the rabbit hole, and like a lot of social media, once I look around and realize how much time it’s eaten, it’s a very unsatisfying way to spend my time. So more time playing & making music, more time being active, more time playing long-form games & reading novels. More time writing stuff. More time with friends, more time playing board games IRL.

I don’t know what my future holds re: mentoring. Like I’ve said before, 1:1 mentoring hasn’t been fulfilling for me. And because I’m not charging for it, the cost of scheduling that time hasn’t had a good ROI for me. I really like it when I can talk to groups. So maybe I’ll try to find/do more of that this year. But I think my stab at 1:1 mentoring is probably over, unless there’s a really significant reason to keep doing it.

Oh, speaking of board games –

• Ark Nova: Fantastic game about building a zoo. Very much like Terraforming Mars in many ways, but feels more cohesive. A long game, but it’s never felt long.
• Slay the Spire: A great adaptation of the videogame. We haven’t played this enough yet, and I think it’ll take a little time to wrap our heads around the ways that it’s different, but it’s a shockingly good adaptation.
• Compile: Very much like Critters at War or Air, Land, and Sea – mechanically almost identical. But the cards are a great tactile experience and gorgeous, and the variety of groups of cards makes this Sushi Go Party to the other games’ Sushi Go. More variety, more synergies.
• Ticket to Ride: Europe 15th Anniversary Edition: Played this with friends this weekend, and TTR’s always a fun time.

One thing that’s been interesting is that now that the kids are up to play some more complicated stuff, my desire to purchase more games has almost vanished. There’s a few that I see and think, “Oh, this is specifically interesting,” and so I’ll get it, but that general sense of “Oh, this looks neat!” doesn’t lead to a purchase anymore, because we have a huge backlog of stuff that we’re now actually making our way through, which is really great. I think maybe we’ll try TIME Stories as a next kind of “family game”, or maybe we’ll take another swing at Descent: Journeys in the Dark. Some friends have started D&D campaigns with their kids, and I’d like to do that, but honestly, the thought of DMing makes me quite nervous. But maybe.

I think there’s a few videogames I wanted to get to in 2024 and mostly failed – but for me, I’d like to finish The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 – in both cases, I think I’m going to have to restart from scratch. Other than that, a PC upgrade has made F1 24, WRC 24, and Assetto Corsa come alive again, and I’m enjoying those a LOT. Even with the PC upgrade, it’s still way cheaper (and safer) than track days, and scratches maybe 85% of the itch.

Mid-October, I’d started going to PT for my shoulder, which was on the upswing. I’d been swimming, winging over the summer, and then doing some resistance training.

Then one day, I got some fairly severe Achilles tendon pain. Then that pain over the course of a few days migrated to the top of my foot. Then it became absolutely unbearable pressure inside the foot. Went to the doc. Got X-rays. Went to the ER. Got an ultrasound. More X-Rays. Ruled out life-threatening things, but no info on what it could be. Tons of painkillers. Pain became bearable, but still present. A week later, it surged. Went back to the doc. Referred for an MRI. Appointment for that took a month. Just got the MRI. No actual word on what it could be, still. Referred to a foot specialist. Appointment Wednesday. Current status: pain is bearable, but significant and constant.

Diagnoses have included potential clot (ruled out), potential fracture (ruled out), potential ligament damage (waiting on MRI), gout (initially plausible, but continuing symptoms have made that less likely), stress compensating for bad knee (maybe, but probably not the source of the absolutely unbearable pain from that one day).

It sucks, not knowing.

Not knowing what it was. What I could do differently. If it’s going to come back.

Hopefully the foot specialist will be able to get to the bottom of it, but having it take 2 months to get to this point is not great. Not really a shining beacon of the healthcare system, and particularly given the murder of the UHC CEO, I’m in a more understanding mindset, let’s say. Not that my dad’s plight over the last decade hadn’t already made me fairly sympathetic.

We’ve been playing through Clank: Legacy S1 (now there’s an S2 coming, so that’s cool). It’s fantastic. We’re one game away from the end, and it’s been a really fun evolution of an excellent base game. Totally perfect candidate for a legacy system, since it’s a deck-builder, and expanding the deck-building options is a natural way to do Legacy stuff. We’d previously played through the two narrative expansions of Space Base as a family (Shy Pluto and Terra Proxima) and both of those were fun, too. Not sure what we’ll do next. We got the Slay the Spire game, which is fun, and it has some mild progression elements. Both kids have been playing the videogame a lot and enjoying it. We played one run so far, and while it’s different, it’s a pretty excellent adaptation, with the addition of cooperative elements. Lots to like.

Swimming in the bay has gone from being fun & good exercise to torturously cold. So I think maybe Sean & I will end up in the pool more often than the bay for the next 3-4 months. Been poking more at music, too. Reorged the downstairs music setup to be more specifically focused on Ableton, with the only two things being the Push and the Elektron Syntakt on the table. It’s good – feels more focused. Upstairs, I have a bunch of grooveboxes hooked up to an amp, and being able to quickly program a bass & beat and then play along on guitar or bass has been fun, and good practice. Been taking guitar lessons since the beginning of the year, and have learned a lot. Still pretty terrible, but terrible in a way that’s “Yeah, I’m learning guitar” rather than just aimlessly noodling around and making no actual progress.

Saw Green Day in concert in Sept, which was great, and it’s kicked off a desire to see more shows live. J came to his first concert with Ei-Nyung, Sean and me – Hoa, who was supposed to come, had an obligation that popped up. So his first concert was Social Distortion at the Fillmore, which is pretty wild. In March, all four of us will be going to the Linda Lindas, also at the Fillmore, which’ll be K’s first show. Then Sean & I will be going to see Camper van Beethoven in April, and we’ll also be seeing comedian Josh Johnson in Feb. Feels like a significant evolution from our COVID isolation, and it’s nice to get out & see live performances. I think Ei-Nyung and I are also gonna go see The Temptations & the Four Tops or something in Feb?

Overall, it’s been a weird year. A lot of time spent doing stuff for my parents – it’s not a huge time commitment, but it’s like being on call. A certain amount of attention is constantly devoted to it, and that part of it is exhausting. There’s no ability to disconnect. My dad’s living in an assisted living facility, but he’s home with my mom most days. Should theoretically be easier for her, but a certain stubbornness means she’ll never really be able to let some of that stress go. Hopefully it’s a better experience in total, but who can say. His memory is almost totally shot, so while it’s nice to see him, and in the moment he’s cogent, it doesn’t stick, and feels like things are just stuck in an awful limbo. But you make the best of what you’ve got, I guess.

Kids are great – doing great things. Both animating a lot. K’s joined some clubs and groups – AAPI afterschool club for him starts this week, and he’s doing animation after school and a Restorative Justice group during school. J’s been doing a 2-day/wk after school animation program, and making a fun choose-your-own-adventure game from scratch for his CS class. It’s *delightful*. Both kids are incredibly creative and charming, and I’m constantly surprised by what they make. It’s great. K’s almost as tall as J now, despite being 3.5 yrs younger, and their feet are the same size. J’s lanky and tall, but mostly normal-sized. Seeing K with his friends is the only real reminder I have at times that he’s still quite a lot younger, and *isn’t* basically J’s peer. Seeing them together is confusing because of the size. I know that being tall can be mixed up for being mature/advanced, and the good thing is I think K can keep up with expectations. But it’s pretty wild.

Anyway. I think that’s about it. Mostly a strange year. A little directionless. If I look back at last year’s resolutions, I failed them all, I think. But it was a really good year in most respects regardless. Some meaningful change, lots of progress, some … if not direction, understanding, for the future. Time spend with great friends (a lot more with Max this year, which has been great), and seeing a lot of friends making progress in various positive directions has been really nice.

Yeah! Onward.

• The constant noise of Trump/Musk/Miller/Bannon et al. on my life, and the MAGAts are like, “this is OUR country GTFO!” will be unbearable and inescapable. Not as bad in California, but online, it’s going to be an unending nightmare.
• Musk has already declared cost-cutting to the point of hardship is his goal, in order to Twitterize the Federal government and make it “more efficient”. Of course, while the government isn’t particularly efficient, like the trust & safety team at Twitter, a lot of those things exist because the government can’t do its job correctly without them. So what gets cut? I’m assuming a lot of social services. Medicare, ACA, etc. but also a lot of oversight agencies like the EPA, and anything that has any administrative power over things business doesn’t like. I’m assuming that the point of Musk’s hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars he invested in this job is that it’ll pay out to him in the tens of billions because SpaceX can just dump waste wherever without any regard to nature, health, etc.
• RFK Jr. in charge of the FDA is an actual nightmare. He’s already said that folks responsible for “repressing” things like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as treatments for COVID had better “pack their bags”. His goal is to utterly gut the FDA. Well, that’s gonna mean all kinds of bad shit re: food safety, drug safety, health policy, etc. – and not just for the next four years. Just like Trump’s first term gutted the civil service to the point where it’s not even close to being rebuilt, destroying the FDA will take another generation+ to rebuild, if we ever get the chance to rebuild it.
• Anything Lina Kahn has been doing will be reversed, and the FTC will likely be destroyed. Anti-anti-monopoly folks win big. Zuckerberg, Google, etc. – expect that consumer hostility is the way of the future. Invisible fees everywhere, impossible-to-cancel shit, tracking software in everything. The opposite of the GDPR in every way. America’s only protections will be international governments that can exert enough pressure on US companies, but US citizens will have no protections from our own government.
• All DEI-related things will be functionally outlawed. Whether practically-speaking or actually-speaking, things that are designed to try to right the wrongs of the past will all be scuttled, because there are no wrongs of the past.
• Education, federally, will echo the worst parts of what’s happened in Florida over the last decade. Textbooks mentioning slavery? Nope. Sexual education/health? Nope. Evolution? I doubt it. I’d be very surprised if we don’t see someone who’s explicitly declared themselves to be a Christian Nationalist in charge of education curriculum by EOY 2025.

Then there’s a whole host of other things.

• Do I have any faith in future elections? Zero. Literally zero.
• Police reform? NOoooooope.
• Any enforcement of white collar crime? Nope.
• Stock buybacks and other manipulations through the roof without any counterpressures.
• Incarceration of black/brown people for whatever reason.
• The “mass deportation” thing, which cannot possibly be done fairly or carefully at scale and speed, will instead by “mass incarceration”, and the time between “incarceration” and “deportation” will be irrelevant once they’ve imprisoned all the minorities they don’t like. Which is anyone who’s not a Christian Nationalist.

I don’t have anything original to say about how the election went today. But I feel quite broken today. I don’t want to “resist” or “fight” or any of that shit. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of living in a country where I absolutely despise half the people in it. I’m sick of feeling like my freedom and future is in the hands of the absolute worst imaginable people. We – my family and I – will need to figure out what a way forward looks like for us. But I don’t expect that we’ll have another fair & free election in my lifetime in the US, and so “turning this thing around” in 2028 isn’t a realistic option, IMO. What does it mean? I genuinely don’t know. But the word of the day isn’t hope. Or freedom. It’s despair.

Tonight, the kids are going to go trick-or-treating with their friends, without us. It’ll be the first time that they’re both going out on their own. The last few years we’ve hung out with some parents while the kids have done loops around the block, but this is the first year they’re going out fully on their own. Which likely means that barring some weirdness, the last time we’ll ever go trick-or-treating with them has already happened.

It’s a melancholy thought. In some ways, it’s like, “Ah, that part of my job as their parent is done,” and in other ways, I didn’t want it to be over yet. And I’ve been reading Nemesis Games – the 5th book in the Expanse, and one line really hit me hard.

”Things change, and they don’t change back.”

The kids sitting on my lap, smiling and laughing while they chomp down hard on my finger, crushing it between their toothless gums. The kids creating their own animations, publishing them on Scratch – developing their skills, building little followings and social circles around their creative work, honing an identity that is uniquely theirs.

My youth, running and jumping and biking and being generally indestructible, able to take on any physical challenge anyone put in front of me. Then landing wrong during a soccer game and utterly destroying my knee and never taking even walking for granted again.

Sitting on the couch with Mobi draped across my lap, or hearing his nails click-clacking on the floor as he walked around in the middle of the night. Sitting in the vet office, holding his head as he closed his eyes for the last time. The silent nights that followed.

Sitting around a table with my work team, psyched about some new thing that we’re building, how people are responding to it, laughing and joking about some thing that only we, collectively, know. Realizing that most of those people won’t ever even really know why I left, how I left, and that their silence in that wake was a deafening roar I couldn’t stop hearing for a decade.

My dad’s accident.

2016.

I realize it’s silly. “Things change” is just one of those things people say all the time. But every time they change, I want the new steady-state to be all the things that things used to be and more. And that’s not how it is. Things change, and they don’t change back. Sometimes they’re better. Sometimes not. But they never are what they were.

It’s up to me to turn that change into something new, and figure out how to move forward with it. And I think the simple idea, “they don’t change back” is weirdly new to me. It rattled me when I read it, because it wasn’t how I thought about change. There was always a hope that things would return to what they were. And they won’t. They’ll be something else.

I’ve always hoped I’d be able to accept the changes in the kids as they grow. That I’d be able to accept their growing independence, and trust their judgment, and give them the freedom to make their own mistakes, while still hopefully imparting some experience and (ideally) wisdom that will set them on the right path. That I’d be able to see them one day as adults, instead of how my parents see me, which has never been as a fully self-sufficient, independent person.

Things change, and they don’t change back.

That doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

We’ve been playing a bunch of Space Base. We worked our way through the Shy Pluto expansion, which is a narrative campaign that unlocks a bunch of stuff that changes the game, and we’re now on our way through Terra Proxima, which is the second, similar expansion. It’s neat – there’s enough complexity to keep the game interesting over many sessions, yet it doesn’t garble up the strategy so completely that you don’t feel like you’re ever getting better.

Sessions are short enough that even if you never really “take off” with your engine, that’s alright – there’ll be another game, and this one will be over soon. It’s been really enjoyable – the kids have pulled off some pretty epic rounds – J’s won most of the games, but K’s pulled off some pretty wild moves (including a dominant win yesterday by completely taking over one of the new mechanics) as well, and so each game’s been competitive and fun.

The expansions are just about the right length – six to eight sessions for a box, which ends up being about two weeks, roughly, for us.

While Ei-Nyung was traveling, we also played a few days of Earthborne Rangers. I think we had enough trouble really wrapping our head around the rules that the first few sessions were a bit of a struggle, and so we didn’t end up making a ton of actual progress. I think it’s got huge potential, and I am excited to try it again, but I think it’s something J will tolerate, but K’s been a little bored by. Still, I want to get a better sense of the narrative – the world is interesting, and I think the difficulty with the mechanics comes from the way they’re designed to accommodate a pretty broad set of events. So I want to see some of those events – we already did some pretty weird stuff, like diving into an underwater bubble-laboratory, where we got a quest to explore a bunch of arcology ruins. So yeah – I want to see more, but I think it will have a little inertia to overcome.

My guess is after Space Base, we’ll give Clank: Legacy a shot.

Ok, despite the title of this post, I’m not actually gonna say what the specific book I’m talking about is. Why? Because it’s not the worst book in the universe. It’s a book about generally the right kinds of things, with its heart in the right place, written by someone who’s authentically representing their experience/culture/etc. They’re better-equipped to write about this as a subject than I am, and I believe that for someone who’s going through what this book covers, it’s likely that a reader will find it a positive, uplifting experience.

It’s a YA book that we’re reading to the kids (yeah, we still read to them almost every night, which is getting maybe a little weird now that they’re 11/14, but they still don’t mind, so we’re not gonna stop). It’s about a young gay kid transferring schools, and needing to navigate adjusting to a new environment and a fairly aggressive bully. There’s a single magical element thrown into the mix – almost a literal deus ex machina, and … yeah – that’s about it.

There’s a lot I don’t like about this book. Everyone the main character encounters has a convenient identity that’s perfectly suited for the plot in the moment. It’s not that almost every character is non-binary, gay, or what have you – I have zero problems with that – it’s a story about a gay kid, the people he’s going to find to hang out with are almost certainly going to frequently also be gay or NB or whatever. But it’s that everyone’s identity has a purpose in the story. It feels like their identity is in service of the main character’s story. Sure, in most stories side characters are supporting the main story. But in this case, it feels like a paint-by-numbers “pick the stereotype, show how this stereotype’s problems illuminate the main character’s story,” and that’s it for the character.

None of the characters feel driven by any internal motivation. They don’t behave in reasonable or believable ways. The evil hall monitor is cartoonishly, absurdly evil. The bully is over-the-top absurd, and gets away with things in public that would simply never fly because there is no situation where this stuff could happen and an adult wouldn’t intervene. And I know that when I was a teenager, things felt unjust, and they felt ridiculous, and the administrators felt evil, but there’s a huge difference between writing a character that seems evil from someone’s perspective, and actually making them do things that are unquestionably, comically, over-the-top ludicrous and still getting away with it scot-free. It makes the story ludicrous.

More, the main character’s internal responses to these things make no sense. An analog would be something like: Bully dumps paint on the main character in full view of everyone in the school. Victim is sad because no one will believe him that this happened. And again, I’d get it if it was written in a way that felt like “Situation happened, emotional response to situation is outsized-but-believable.” Instead, in this book, the main character’s reactions, and the fact that everyone else responds in the way they do just feels … absurd. And it’s weird criticizing that because I think you could then argue that it’s written “how it feels”, and as an adult I no longer remember what it feels like to be a teenager who’s being bullied. Maybe? I don’t know. I feel like I fucking remember what it was like.

But the thing that bugs me more than this is that there’s actual violence in the book. And then there’s language. And yes, language can be harmful. And yes, language can leave a lasting impression. But in this book, they refer to language without ever actually using it, and that unsaid language goes off like an atom bomb. Multiple times.

Someone who’s acted as a friend to someone over a significant period of time, accidentally uses a term and thoughtlessly causes offense. They are literally supernaturally teleported away because the magic thing is protecting the victim in this offense, and the main characters wonder if this unforgivable offense may ever be rectified. And look – yes, I remember what it’s like to be called slurs. I was called them as a kid. In college, even.

But if a friend inadvertently uses an offensive word, the idea that they’ve done something potentially irredeemably harmful is so fucking stupid that I find it incredibly hard to digest. There’s no consideration that “Hey, here’s a term you didn’t consider was hurtful, please don’t use it again.” It was immediately, “Fuck, I don’t know if I can trust them! I can’t believe they think this way,” when again, they’ve been acting as a friend and doing things considerate friends do for the entire duration of the book to that point, and are a marginalized identity themselves. The idea that they wouldn’t understand the impact of language, or that they made a mistake, or again, were somehow irredeemable at this point is absurd.

And in the book, the offender apologizes, says they’ll do better, and that apology is accepted. Great.

I used to really hate Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood. Here’s a show that does a lot right – but every single time Daniel Tiger was faced with any kind of obstacle, his response was to completely crumble in the face of it. His parents would then teach him some sing-songy parable that he’d use to then overcome some repeated instance of this difficulty, and he would. Other parents I know appreciated that, and would use those parables IRL with their kids. But the thing I couldn’t get over was that Daniel, the character, constantly modeled a kind of total lack of resilience or ability to even diagnose a situation by himself that he was a completely helpless character who was totally overwhelmed by literally everything.

In this book, later, the main character is called a slur by his bully. This is a character that’s been out, and comfortable being out, for quite some time. The slur is never named. And in a YA book, that’s sort of sensible? Since I think if you wrote f****t in a YA book about a gay kid there’d be a huge uproar. But again, he’s called this, the slur is never named, and again, it goes off like an atom bomb. And it’s a slur that’s used in anger, by a bully, specifically as an attack. But again, the main character utterly crumples instantly. There’s no pushback by anyone else in the book. There’s no argument from the main character. A word is used, and it utterly destroys this kid. More, the word is like Voldemort. Not even named in the book.

It’s such a weird experience – it’s like the spectre of language destroys him, with the book unwilling to even name the slur. And yeah – maybe that’s because at this point the word is unprintable. And maybe my response is colored by the fact that you really can’t call me anything similar. Even racist taunts were never exactly right, since any anti-Asian slur… well, it only covers half of me. Or being called a f*****t because I lived at a gay frat in college, or went to a party in a dress – those things never really hit me the way they might if they were attacking my actual identity. I don’t know. But it’s really weird reading a book to the kids that is like, “An awful bully, who has no redeeming qualities in the context of this book, used an anti-gay slur – which we won’t name in any way – but it’s so awful and so deeply impactful, and coming from this person who’s been tormenting the main character in myriad ways, daily, for months… this is the atom bomb that nukes their self-confidence?

I don’t believe it. And the character’s response isn’t even illuminating. It’s unclear what the word even means to them. “Is this who I am? Is this what I am? Who could love me if I’m what they say I am?” is kind of their response, but it’s never explained in any way what that actually means to the character. Which means particularly reading it to the kids, I have no idea what they’re supposed to take away from this.

But it’s also weird – it’s the idea that language has this power to knife your soul directly. And that it’s the language, not the context. A reaction to the bully? Yes. To his actions? Yes. To his language as a part of his actions? Yes. But the way the book presents it is that the bully has done everything in his power, for months, to antagonize the character – physically chasing them, assaulting them, wielding their power against him in a huge variety of ways. For months. And then uses a word, and the character then suddenly goes into a complete and total crisis, questioning their self-worth (this could have been believable to me if there was any explanation for how), and all of their friendships (this less so), and there’s not even a moment’s thought that “Hey, a shitty person said a really shitty thing, but he’s been so consistently and irredeemably shitty that this is just another thing.”

This is where I think there’s some chance “I’m not the audience” is a real thing. Maybe so. But it’s really frustrating to read.

In any case, we’re not done with the book, but I said to the kids, “If it turns out this bully’s been antagonizing the gay kid the whole time because they themselves are gay, and in the end they’re redeemed because of their identity I’m throwing this book in the trash.” We’re a few chapters from the end, and I think the chances of this are >90%. One of his sidekicks has already gone through this arc, and were immediately accepted once they revealed they were a bully because they were themselves bullied. Ok, whatever – all the terrible shit you did is no problem, I guess.

Again, I don’t want to name the book, because I think this book probably is for someone, and it’s definitely not for me. But I think my problems with it aren’t just that I’m not the target audience. I hate how much power is given to language with no pushback from anyone, and that slurs are somehow exponentially worse than the physical violence and oppression and torture that this kid’s already gone through for months. But that’s really just one element in a whole litany of things I hate about this book. Bleh. Sorry for making you read this shit, it didn’t go anywhere or lead to any kind of actual insight.. 😀

Over the last four-and-a-half years, I’ve had the privilege and pleasure to be a stay-at-home dad. The pandemic was a big part of that decision, but obviously not the only thing. As the kids have grown, though, they “need” me less and less. Which is great.

But it also means that I find myself wondering what I should be doing more and more. I’ve periodically enjoyed consulting and mentoring folks, but I find most startups that come my way arrive far too late – out of money and time having believed they didn’t need any help with game design or product development, because this stuff was easy, right? That’s not everyone – but it is most folks. And I’ve started turning them all down, because it’s simply not worth my time to spend a huge amount of time and effort to find a path forward only to hear that literally no change is possible.

With mentorship, it’s fun, but it’s slow. Mentoring one-on-one shatters my time in a way that’s difficult to justify. Having great folks to help is satisfying moment-to-moment, but it comes at a cost which makes no sense to me. And doing it for free means that help often ends up being taken for granted or ignored. While I’d love to say the positives outweigh the negatives, unfortunately in reality they don’t – a few bad apples crushes my will to invest my time this way.

Looking at getting back into making games – the simple conclusion I’ve come to is that I’m not a solo developer. My favorite bits of working in games have always been collaborative ones – whether I’m acting in a leadership capacity and facilitating those magic moments, or whether I’m neck deep in the work, and helping folks build crazy new things. But remote work … I’ve never enjoyed it – even a little. And yet, I want to retain flexibility and commutes are bullshit. No, I don’t know how to reconcile those things.

And more, the game industry is a bloodbath right now. The level of home-run-certainty I’d need to invest my time into making something that I think could even stand a hope of finding an audience… it’s just not there. Not on PC, not on console, not on mobile, not in VR. Every market is saturated.

I also don’t want to work on something at this point that doesn’t serve some sort of greater purpose. Building a VR system for post-stroke rehab was immensely satisfying, and wielding the power of games to create things that supercharge health, or learning, or *something* – I don’t think I have any desire to do things “just for fun” anymore. But all those avenues come with their own huge challenges – and they’re ones I’m not just unequipped for, they’re challenges I don’t want to engage with. I don’t want to figure out how to sell a game to learning institutions or school districts. I don’t want to deal with health regulatory processes and legal stuff.

Yeah, that’s the voice of absurd levels of privilege talking. I know.

But it leaves me in a weird state. The last two things I built that became successful? I made a lot of other people very, very rich. Some of those people I retain respect for – I don’t mind having contributed to their success. Others, I really, really don’t. I will not put myself in that situation again. Which means anything I build in the future, I will own and control. And there’s no compromising on that. It doesn’t mean I’d be the only person to own it – it just means that I will never be in a situation where my success can be wrested from me and handed over to someone else again.

But where does that leave me? I don’t know. I don’t think it’s games. I have one weird idea for a puzzle game that isn’t even a set of mechanics – it’s a feeling – and another itch to revive the best game I’ve ever worked on. I can’t do either of them on my own, and also can’t imagine either ever being successful enough to justify their own existence other than, “they’re fun!” But financially both are almost certainly dead ends – there’s no “business” there. And to be honest, I’d want to make something self-sustaining as a first priority. Doing something fun and constantly scrambling against insolvency was no fun the time I tried it. 🙁

I don’t know what this all means. Just that it’s a mess. There’s an itch there. The time exists. What to do with it is the question, and I don’t have any answers.

I just got back from a trip to Finland, which was fantastic. While a lot of the stuff there was wonderful, I think the thing that blew my mind the most was the Helsinki Library, the Oodi. https://lnkd.in/gduyS_XG

It’s not just a library that’s full of books, though it is. It is a physical embodiment of a set of ideals. At Oodi, you can borrow books. You can book individual workspaces. Conference rooms. Music studios, completely with instruments, including a complete DJ setup and fully mic’ed drum set, and a collection of top-shelf guitars & basses. Rooms with the latest videogame consoles and games. A boardgame collection bigger than my own (and if you know me, that’s … significant). 3D printers. An eSports team room with high-end gaming PCs. Laser cutters. Sewing machines. Sports balls. PCs with ultra-high-end graphics tablets. Lots of them.

And there are people there to help you learn how to use the gear, to solve problems, to help you if you can’t operate certain things. I saw a severely physically disabled person working with a staff member to sew something.

Everything was in use by people of all ages. Students studying together. Middle-aged folks making crafts together. Kids playing Switch Sports Resort and Minecraft. Someone practicing singing in the music studio. We joked that they should have a kitchen. They do.

All of this, paid for by taxes. Available to you for nothing. Which means you don’t have to be rich to have access to a music studio, or a maker space, or even a game console. Think of what this enables. You have a situation where anyone can make something, and the barriers to it aren’t about money.

It’s incredible. But why am I writing about it here?

The thing that blew my mind about this was that it was inconceivable to me until I saw it. I have to be clearer – the thing that blew my mind wasn’t that it was inconceivable. The thing that blew my mind was that it was inconceivable *to me*.

I live in one of the richest, most prosperous nations on the planet, steeped in among the most *possible* privilege any individual could have. Our country – this bastion of progress – not only can we not provide opportunities like this and build monuments to ideals of this scale… for many of us in the US, something like this is so far removed from *how* we’re conditioned to think that it’s literally impossible to imagine. It seems like a fever dream.

And this is high up on the hierarchy of needs, right? We can’t even house our citizens or care for their health in any kind of equitable way. We should be tackling that before getting people this kind of utopian access to possibility… right? But Finland’s *already done those things*.

Crime rate is low. Education is world-leading. Their prison & criminal justice system actually resembles something like *justice* instead of just beating down the already-marginalized. And I sat there wondering, “How?”

And it reminded me of Teamlab: Planets.

Teamlab: Planets was an art exhibition I saw in Tokyo. It was one of the most mind-breakingly beautiful things I’ve ever seen. One thing, in particular, was a room full of orchids, all on articulated lines that could be raised and lowered – a line every foot, maybe, in every direction – in a room with mirrored walls and floor and ceiling. You were instructed to crawl in, and the flowers would raise up to give you space, then lie back down and then just … hang out for a while. The flowers would undulate, and it was like you were immersed in an infinite void of flowers.

One kid, a foreign tourist, reached up and pulled off one of the flowers.

And it was instantly clear that this is why an exhibit like this *couldn’t* work in the US. In less than a day, the exhibit would be destroyed. Because too many folks think, “*I* can take one of these,” and not enough people thing, “If *I* take one of these, the exhibit will no longer work for *us*.”

There are some good things about this American idea of individualism. It leads to a kind of freedom of expression that is difficult to find in other places, for instance. But things like Teamlab, and the Oodi, are reminders that there is a power in *us* that is not present in *I*.

When I think of the things I wanted out of work culture, out of the teams I worked to build, it was always a sense of “us” – that when we worked together, when we appreciated our differences in perspective and our unique strengths, we could go farther and build greater things than any of us could on our own. It was why I rejected the auteur theory, even though I love movies like Blade Runner that are deeply auteur-driven projects.

But I could not conceive of how to do this on a national scale, and to have a society that values this kind of togetherness, a willingness to sacrifice and pay to give that opportunity to everyone. And it bothers me, a lot, that I couldn’t even imagine it until I saw it and walked around in its embodiment.

I don’t believe billionaires should be possible. I don’t even believe 100 millionaires should be possible, because by the time you amass more money than you can reasonably spend in a lifetime, you owe it to the *team* that helped you get to where you are to pay it back. Through taxes. Not optional. And that’s not the government “stealing your money”, it’s the way *we* work together as a team to create a better society, and work together toward a brighter future.

Finland, I am impressed.

We arrived in Helsinki in the evening – though it definitely doesn’t look it. The sun would set around 11pm, and it’d still be moderately light out at 12:30am. We stayed at the Hilton Kalastajatorppa, which I’d booked because as far as I remembered, it was where we stayed when my grandfather took my cousin and me to Finland when we were kids.

I was, however, really confused after we sat down, because the restaurant wasn’t at all like I remembered. You know, from 35 years ago. But it made me wonder if I’d made a horrible mistake, and wasted a bunch of $ to stay at the wrong place. I had a very distinct memory for the restaurant space, and that we’d sat on the 2nd floor of a round room, looking out over the ground floor & listening to a band do a sound check every night because my grandfather liked to eat on the earlier side.

Fortunately, a.) the food was really genuinely incredible, and b.) the restaurant space I remember is now their conference space, and we were able to run in and take a few pictures.

I think I harbored a lot of fear around this trip – that we wouldn’t know what to do, or that it’d be … stressful in some way. It’s not. Almost everyone speaks perfect English, has been quite friendly, and the weather has been absolutely beautiful. Our room looks out over the bay, and it’s just a gorgeous, soothing view all the time.

The first day we were here we did a walking tour of the city that Ei-Nyung had booked, and the guide (Emek at Ataman Tours) was friendly, really interesting, very informative, and put the city into so much context that it was just a total pleasure to spend the day walking around hearing about the city’s history and landmarks. Highly, highly recommended.

The tour ended at Oodi, the Helsinki library, which I’ll write more about later, but is maybe the single most impressive thing I’ve seen in a long time – not because of the space, or the building, but because of what it means about the country’s priorities, and how brilliant it is that Finland has created a monument to its ideals.

After that, we ate lunch at the open air market by the port – had some meatballs & a reindeer hot dog, then we took a boat “canal” tour – there is apparently one canal – the rest of the tour was a ride around the archipelago around Helsinki. We got a good view of Suomenlinnen, a once-Swedish fort on the islands just off the coast of the city.

Picked up what looked like some mutant blueberries (turns out they’re “Honeyberries”, and while they look like blueberries, they have a really distinctly different (and delicious) flavor. I don’t really know how to describe it. I wouldn’t say “honey”, I’d just say they were brighter than normal blueberries.

We ended up having dinner at a place a short walk from the hotel called Drunch – the kids had a decent pizza, and I had the absolute worst döner I’ve ever had anywhere – it may be one of the single worst meals I’ve had, ever. The meat was microwaved to the point where it was crunchy and hard, and had no discernible flavor other than “meat-ish”. Genuinely, genuinely terrible. Ei-Nyung didn’t hate it as much as I did, but for me, it was shockingly awful, and barely “food”.

The next day, we walked over to Seurasaari, which is an island nearby where they’d brought a bunch of different buildings from the history of Finland, made them part of an open-air museum, and staffed them with period-dressed people who could answer questions. Sort of like in the US when they have these exhibits of “Here’s what it was like to live during the Gold Rush” and stuff like that. I also got a lemon-licorice ice cream, so there’s that. It was no Tiger Tail, but not too bad.

We ended the day at a cafe a little north of the hotel on the water, where we had some excellent food (shrimp skägen toast & a korvapusti (the traditional Finnish cardamom-cinnamon roll)), and hung out on their patio. 9pm, sun out, tons of people just hanging out talking, playing games, watching the birds. It was … I dunno – the perfect vibe? There’s something really social/communal about the way people spend time here that speaks to me in ways that don’t feel familiar.

And come on with that sunset. Ridiculous.

The next day, we went to the fort – Suomenlinna – and walked around. It was weirdly like walking around some of the old bunkers around the Bay Area that were built for WWII, but these were a LOT older. The kids have been having a lot of fun experimenting with making weird photos with the iPhone’s panorama mode.

We got food at the food hall by the port – had another bowl of salmon soup (not as good as at Meritorppa, but possibly because we got there too late and the most popular place had sold out) and some weirdly huge egg rolls (also sort of meh). But we also found some tippaleipä, which was apparently my uncle’s favorite treat. Like a funnel cake, but with the texture of Pocky. Good stuff.

The fish here is ridiculously good.

The next day, we met up with our old friend and ex-coworker Cody & his wife for a pastry and coffee at Regatta, which was this great little very distinctive cafe on the water. Walked through a park with a big sculpture honoring the composer Sibelius, tried (and failed) to get sushi, ended up getting some Syrian food and a boba, hung out, talked for hours walking through Helsinki, and ended the day at the library again. The day was gorgeous, the company was great, the food was great, and everything about it screamed “Yeah, this place is alright.”

I know Finland gets cold and dark. I know it has the same kinds of issues as a lot of monocultures. But things like the library, where stuff is built with great care for the public good, the pervasive drive for social welfare and to provide for each other, the work-life culture, politics that (at least relatively for us) works for the betterment of the people (at least strives to), general safety, extraordinary public education, pervasive public transit… I mean, it’s a compelling place.

Before this trip, I’d been here once, 35 years ago with my grandfather. I was young then, and I retained some really positive memories about the trip, but not that many about the place and the culture. I don’t know what the kids will leave Finland with, but I hope it’s with a sense that a country can have ideals like safety and education and healthcare and a love of nature and do big audacious things and not be consumed by cynicism.

I think the thing I’ve taken away from this place, and from our trip to Japan & Korea last year, is that there are some things that are possible because you believe in society, and not individuals. And I love parts of America and its individualism, and I dislike parts of Japan’s pressure to conform. But I wish America behaved more like a team working toward a unified goal, and less like a bunch of people who believe their own personal freedoms trump our betterment as a whole. I dunno what to do with that feeling. I want my kids to understand that things could be better. If I believe that they could be better, I should try to make it that way. But what do I do if I don’t? I don’t know.