I’ve been a fan of Formula 1 for the majority of my life at this point – since reading about the Senna/Prost days in high school study hall to catching back up with it after a few years off in 2009, when I started watching again because J couldn’t sleep, and I’d catch random races in the middle of the night while rocking him (and then K) back to sleep.

The overarching thing about the last decade of F1 is somewhat unfortunate. The rules have been bad.

Just straight up bad.

The problem is that the way things were going, teams were spending so much that there was no sense of any kind of level playing field. Ferrari would run new engines for every session, test constantly at their private track, etc. and it led to a period of both Ferrari dominance, and small teams falling by the wayside, unable to compete. It’s more complex than that, sure, but not a lot more.

So the way that F1’s decided to fix that is to be more restrictive. More restrictive rules. Less testing. Cost cap. Engine freezes. The unintended consequence of all of this have been significant periods of stagnation and dominance. Why was Hamilton able to get a huge collection of WDCs? Because Mercedes had a really powerful engine advantage, and no one else could catch up. Why has Verstappen collected a bunch of WDCs? Because Newey nailed the ground effect era rules, and no one could catch up. Get a rule change right, and there’s so much that goes into building an integrated car around those rules that with no testing & limited cost and engine freezes, there’s no way to build a better car, and once a team has a lead, they run away with it.

On top of that, as teams optimize their designs around the new rules, the intended effects of the new rules fall by the wayside. Ground effect was supposed to help cars follow more closely. Now? They still generate enough turbulent air because clever folks got around the rear wing rules, and cars can’t follow closely anymore.

Point being, all the cost restrictions and restrictive rules mean that cars are boring, races are boring, and worse, they’re essentially static for years. Gone are the days when a backmarker team could come up with an insane concept and achieve some success.

So here’s my proposal:

• Teams are given a fixed budget of $100M for a season.
• Spec monocoque – same for all teams
• Spec engine – yeah, I know this is a bummer, but unless you can develop engines throughout the season, the only thing having different engines does is entrench advantages. So the base engine is a spec design.
• Maximum team size of 150 people across all disciplines
• No wind tunnels, only computational fluid dynamics (CFD)
• Car must fit in a box of X size, which is used to ship the cars from race to race

Okay, so those are the basics. Other than that, the idea is that you can do whatever you want. Engine manufacturers can be involved to modify the spec engines, but they all start from the same place, and have to work within the budget. If an engine manufacturer gets involved, for instance, they devote an employee to the project, which counts against the staff count, and any work the manufacturer does counts against the budget.

Spec monocoque ensures some level of minimum safety for drivers, and also controls certain hardpoints on the car, so everyone’s working with the same sort of basic LEGO connections to the monocoque.

At every race, two weeks before the race, a specific new rule is introduced for that track. These rules can include things like:

• No front wings
• No rear wings
• Grooved tires
• Minimum ride height of 5″
• Smooth underbody floors required

Stuff like that. Essentially, “Here’s a difficult problem to solve, make the car as driveable as you can.” And in some cases, you’ll end up with cars that are very difficult to drive. Unbalanced aero. Awful grip. Whatever. Drivers will have to… gasp… adapt. Those who can adapt the fastest will be extremely valuable. But they’ll still be restricted by the cost cap.

Every race, the cars will change. It’ll be like a new season reveal every race. But because the teams will be working with hugely restrictive budgets, they’re also going to have to be very cost-conscious. Teams will have to make compromises across the season to maximize total potential, not necessarily potential at a specific race.

Because of this, you won’t be able to optimize solutions. Building a car that works in Monaco on old-timey skinny tires, then going to Miami, but having to race with regular tires but no front or rear wings? Yeah, it’s a challenge. Some teams will get it very wrong and be many laps down. But every race will be exciting and weird, and as teams get better at this, you’ll see them coalesce around some basic performance benchmarks, but they’ll never be able to “solve the problem” the way they do with the current formula.

Chaos formula. Every race is exciting. Driver skill matters. It’s a constant engineering challenge. Every race is a new car reveal. Costs are kept under control by specifying the critical components, but otherwise, the rules are much less restrictive, leading to more interesting solutions. Teams can test as much as they want, as long as they can afford it.

I’d watch it.

Went to go see Bob Mould with Sean a few days ago, and we were musing on the way back to the car that we’d gone something like 48 years in the area, and had been to the Fillmore once, maybe twice, but then this year, have gone a lot. For me, we saw Social Distortion (J’s 1st concert) a few months ago, then the Linda Lindas (K’s first rock concert), then Bob Mould, and Sean & I will be going back for Camper van Beethoven in a month.

One thing I really love about the Fillmore is that they give you a poster at the end. I went to so many concerts when I was younger, and I can’t remember most of them at this point, so it’s really nice to have a physical artifact to pin the memories to.

I don’t think the sound quality there is particularly good, but it’s a small enough space that shows feel intimate, and a big enough crowd that when things get energetic, you feel it. I do remain surprised that getting in and out is limited by one steep staircase – I know they have a freight entrance for gear – but I do think in the case of a fire… hoo boy, that place is trouble.

Still! Making good memories with the family and friends.

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.