Went away for a few days with friends, and brought along two games I’ve had for a while now but never played. Ethnos was front-of-mind because it’s had kind of a shit-show year. Folks had lots of positive things to say about the OG version of Ethnos, but it seemed like the art & presentation was universally disliked. Folks were constantly clamoring for Ethnos v2, and so while I’d bought v1, I wasn’t super motivated to play it, expecting disappointment.

I loved it.

It turns out the art is fairly standard “LOTR-alike”, but there’s nothing wrong with it. The cards are quite legible, the colors are clear, the pieces quickly illustrate the control over the various regions, which is their main purpose. The only issue I have with the production of the game is that the insert is hot fucking garbage, and spills everything everywhere if you don’t keep the box horizontal.

As for the game? It looks like some sort of fantasy wargame, and I suppose you could say it’s like that, but abstracted. What it is mostly is a really fast set-collection game where you’re building up a hand of the same type of unit, or units dedicated to the same region. One unit “leads” your party, and you use their particular power (specific to their type) in some advantageous way. There are 12 types of units, and any game uses a random selection of 6 of them.

You build up control over areas, and that’s how you score, but you also score based on the size of the “bands” of units you play. Bigger bands = more points. Control over territory = more points. That’s basically it.

The game it reminds me of most is Ticket to Ride. You’re looking for matching sets to accomplish a task, then you do the task. At some point you draw cards that have been shuffled into the deck to end the game, and when you draw the third dragon, the game instantly ends, which adds a lot of tension to the mix. The last twist is that whenever you play a band of units, any other cards you don’t use in your hand go into a face-up market, and aside from an initial spread of face-up units, that’s the only way you can pick units you know, instead of just top-decking.

It’s fast – a game is <30 minutes, but there’s a lot of fun decision-making, a lot of variety, and it seemed like a lot of different ways to win. The art was a total non-issue.

The funny thing is that both the “revamp” of Ethnos, Archeos Society, was received poorly, because it exchanged the “control areas of a map” mechanic for a “progress along a track” mechanic, and people think it’s a change for the worse. Then, within 6 months of that, they released a new version of Ethnos with all-new art – “fixing” the main problem of the OG game. No changes to the rules. But the weird thing is that while the art is more colorful, it’s as cliche now to use anthropomorphic animals as it was to use high fantasy, the mechanics of the game are much less legible, the map is less clear, the icons are less clear, and the mapping of powers to “races” was much more intuitive in the original metaphor. So it’s wild. I’m glad to have the OG version, because it really sounds like both of the new ones messed it up.

Definitely an enjoyable game, and I think it’ll go into regular rotation in our house. The kids picked it up quickly and had a lot of fun.

We also busted out Twilight Inscription, thinking we’d play the short tutorial game, but ended up playing the whole thing. Really enjoyable, complicated roll & write. I’d been intimidated by it, because I’m not particularly familiar with the game it’s inspired by (Twilight Imperium), and it’s significantly more involved than any other roll & write I’ve played. Asymmetric races, an “event deck”, six dice of two types, relics, four boards you mark up, a ton of icons…

It’s a lot.

And yet, it’s also surprisingly simple, once you grok the basics. Each turn once you get what each board does is quick, but there’s enough stuff to do that it’s satisfying. It also felt like there are many valid ways to win, and understanding synergies and making the most of what you’ve got in the moment is… well, that’s how you win all games. 😀

Max went hard on industry, and smashed it. I’d ended up investing a lot in warfare, since my race’s special powers had some warfare-based stuff, but I ended up over-investing in it by quite a bit, and I think if I’d spent two fewer turns on warfare, and more in Expansion or Industry I’d have done a lot better. The kids held their own pretty darned well for a first stab at not only this kind of game, but the “most” of this kind of game.

It was also a lot of fun. About an hour and a half, which is crazy for a roll & write, but also, complex enough that it felt like a “complete game”, and not a watered-down or simplified version of something good.

Both games were really fun – while Ethnos will probably make it into regular rotation, I think Twilight Inscription will likely be a fairly “occasion” game, just because it’s longer, and more “brain-burny” for sure. I could see giving the solo mode a shot, for sure.

Okay, it’s obviously not a class struggle for me, but this post is gonna just be a random collection of recent images w/ some exposition, and it felt like the episode of the Simpsons “Scenes From the Class Struggle in Springfield”. Won’t be as memorable, though.

I’ve been playing Disc Golf periodically with my friend Sean down at the Oyster Bay Disc Golf course. It’s a nice way to spend a few hours. I’m terrible at it, and my right shoulder issues don’t let me throw the traditional way, so I have to “forehand” every throw. But the last time we went out, I’d achieved some measure of consistency, which is what I’d been struggling with every time we’d gone before. It’s a nice way to spend a few hours walking around with a friend, gives you time to shoot the shit, but also something to do and feel like you’re getting better at.

Better still, once you’ve got the discs and something to carry them around in (you can do slightly more upscale than Sean’s plastic bag), it’s free. Can’t think of too many other things you can do these days that are pleasurable and free. 😛

Also ended up doing a couple things to the BMW. I upgraded the infotainment system last year for wireless Carplay, which – holy cow – totally modernized the experience of that car. This time it was smaller things – replacing the worn-out trunk struts, swapping out the chrome trimmed grills for black, and then sanding down the headlights and refreshing them to get the yellowing out. Huge impact on how the car looks. It’s nice to have the time to do some of these things myself.

A few days ago, the rear passenger window fell into the door frame. $800 to repair at the local trusted shop (whose work is incredibly detail-oriented and good), but I balked a little at the price. It’s a $60 part, and after looking at some YouTube tutorials, I’m pretty sure I can do it myself. Taped up the window for a few days, the part will arrive Tuesday. We’ll see if I can do it without breaking the window. 😀

Friends took us to Rintaro, in SF – turns out it was started by a half-Japanese guy. We had a really delicious meal there. Memorable enough that I picked up the cookbook, and made the recipe for Buta no Kakuni, along with some Furoshiki Daikon, which was the *best* daikon I’ve ever made. The greens are just blanched in a sesame shabu-shabu sauce. The whole thing took a good amount of time and effort, but the results were excellent.

Turns out mitering the edges of daikon before simmering leads to a much more pleasant texture.

After something close to five years, Max, Ei-Nyung and I finished Gloomhaven. These are all hte characters we’d used (along with some WIP Battletech minis in the back). A really genuinely fantastic game of astonishing scope. There were a lot of scenarios we won or lost by the absolute skin of our teeth – and how they balanced these scenarios with the breadth of characters available and the diversity of the mechanics… I don’t know how they did it this well.

The narrative was eh, but the mechanics of the game were really stellar, and I think we’ll likely eventually play Jaws of the Lion with the kids at some point (the four minis from JotL are in the back there).

Lots of board gaming so far this year. Ticket to Ride Europe is always fun, and the game with the kids is the Dead Cells boardgame, which is a weirdly surprising adaptation of a roguelike action videogame. The adaptation is clever. Recently also played Beyond the Sun, which remains one of my favorite games, Slay the Spire, another fantastic videogame adaptation, Foundations of Metropolis, a fun competitive city-building game, two-player versions of King of Tokyo, Splendor, and Res Arcana (all decent, I think Splendor is the best of the three), and a few games of Heat on BGA, which is my favorite racing game (with Cubitos a close, but very different, second).

A few games I want to try this year:

• Arcs
• Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy
• Nemesis: Lockdown
• Ticket to Ride: Legacy

I modified my Gamecube with a Flippydrive. Basically acts as an Optical Disc Emulator, and run games off of an SD card. Just makes it easier to play stuff on it, since getting discs out is a pain. It’s also such a clever piece of hardware I felt like I had to get it. Totally reversible, almost tool-free installation – just a few screws and a ribbon cable. It’s brilliant, and works great. Apparently you can rip discs directly to storage, though I haven’t been able to get that to work yet (and haven’t tried all that hard). Really really neat piece of hardware.

Last, I finally upgraded my wingfoiling foil. I started out with a Slingshot Infinity 84, then got a bigger front wing, the Infinity 99. Over the course of the last year, almost every time I was on the beach, someone would say something like, “You’re still using THAT piece of shit?” In good spirits, of course, but the point was that this was an old foil, and technology has gotten much better, and I should upgrade. Ended up reaching out to the folks at MAC Kiteboarding for a recommendation (they recommended the wing that finally made the sport “click” for me), and so I picked up a Code Foil 1530s. I’ve been out on it twice, and it’s a different experience. MUCH faster than the Slingshot, and stable, but in a different way. I still don’t really understand how it’s different, just that it is quite different.

I ate it on Sunday, and landed on the wing in a way that tweaked my shoulder – it’s been quite painful all week, but slowly seems to be recovering. I really, really enjoy winging, and it’s one of the few exercise-y activities I can do for hours and enjoy it the whole time (even if I’m cursing underwater at the top of my lungs in frustration at times). The last bit of the Ship of Theseus is my board, but I don’t have any real reason to switch it out at this point – it’s stable enough, it’d cost $$$$ to get something meaningfully lighter, and the only real downside is that it’s too big to travel with, but I’m not traveling anywhere to go winging (yet) anyway. Maybe one day an inflatable or a hard travel board of some kind, but that’d be a long way off.

So yeah – just random shit. Board games, mentoring startups, hanging out with the kids, going to some shows (more this year than in any year before for me – we recently saw Social Distortion, Josh Johnson, The Four Tops and the Temptations, and will be seeing the Linda Lindas, the SF Symphony playing some videogame music, Hwasa, and Trevor Noah). Good times. The state of the country suuuuuucks (is that a reference to Gundam: Gquuuuux?), but personally, things are pretty good. Aside from shoulder issues, in good health, the family’s doing as well as can be, kids are good, parents are alright, Ei-Nyung is good.

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.