One of the many things that everyone struggled with at DirtFish was looking where you were supposed to go. It’s really surprisingly difficult. On the track, you look at corner entry, then the apex, then the exit. At least at the level I’m at, you’re generally looking at the next thing you’re concerned about. So when you’re looking for your braking point, it’s in front of you. The apex? In front of you. Maybe a little to one side, as the car is turning. Sometimes dramatically so, but because it’s the track, and because cars can only rotate so fast, you look… more or less in front of you. Corner exit? Same thing. You know where you’re headed, you let the car glide out to the outside, and you’re looking forward to the next corner.

Compare that with the pendulum turn. Prior to getting to the corner, you’re looking at everything. Where am I going? Where is the corner apex? How wide is the road where I need to turn? It doesn’t seem like that much more stuff, but if you’re going left, you’re looking for the apex and exit of the corner to your left, but also the edge of the track to the right. Because you’re approaching the corner on the inside (on the left for a left turn), and since you’re going to turn right, first, and boy, you don’t want to drive off the road. So as your car starts to turn right, you naturally look right. I mean, who doesn’t watch where the car is going. You, that’s who.

Instead, you look left as you steer right. You feel the car start to turn, and once it’s “weighted up” on the left wheels (since it’s turning right and slowing), you steer hard to the left, and let go of the brake. Yeah, you’re steering in a direction you’re not looking, and as the car starts to turn you let go of the brake.

The car’s weight is totally upset, the load shifts from the compressed left, essentially hops over the center line of the car, and slams down on the right, suddenly loading the front right tire (which is turned left), and the car dramatically turns to the left. When the car is in the direction you want it to go, you give it a ton of gas, it squats, unloading the steering wheels, and shoots out of the corner in the direction you’re pointing.

It’s a really disconcerting experience. But as you improve, you realize that the edge of the track on the right isn’t going anywhere. So if I look at it as I approach, great – I don’t need to look at it again. By looking left, I let my body unconsciously give it the right amount of steering input, and I can focus on the things I was struggling with – brake pressure and a more “sturdy” application of throttle.

But since the whole of the DirtFish course for me was a pendulum, I kept “looking right”. I kept second guessing how much brake. How much throttle. The whole course was set up safely – if I “failed”, I wouldn’t hurt anything. But the combination of ingrained “smoothness” on the pedals kept coming back. And I kept falling back on this instinct – looking right – when I needed to look left.

Even in the last runs of the 3rd day, I was second-guessing brake application. Repeatedly, my instructor would say, “You had the right pressure on the first application, but then backed off!” I looked right.

But one of the really genius bits of the DirtFish curriculum is that they teach you a handful of tools. How to turn in a variety of conditions, in a few different styles. How to correct it if you’re too tight. Too far out. They drill that into you in the “exercises”. Then you start driving the short courses – the Boneyard or the Link, which force you to use these tools in applications, not isolation.

I still struggled with these. I’d hit a lovely turn correctly, and then my brain would back off, and I’d smoothly enter the next corner and slide wide.

Then I’d look back at the mistake I’d just made (look right) and get lost.

It didn’t happen to me, but one funny technique that the instructors had was that some of them would point where you should look – in the pendulum turn, they’d point to the left – right in front of your face, blocking your view completely if you were looking to the right. That is, you were approaching a corner at full speed, and they would put their hand in front of your eyes, pointing to where you should be looking. Completely blocking your view.

On day 3, one of the things they did forced me to entirely turn off my brain. It was the first time it all clicked.

The defining arc of my time at Dirtfish was the Pendulum.

The one skill I picked up almost instantly and intuitively was the “Pendulum turn”, or the “Scandiavian Flick”. I got it right the first time I tried it, and could do it repeatedly. Not perfectly, of course, but to within a pretty recognizable and repeatable margin.

The problem was that for not pendulum turns, my skills developed… like a pendulum.

Trying to learn to apply the solid brake pressure you needed to get the car to turn and then wait for it to turn – I’d think really hard about it, and get to a point where I’d be able to do it. I’d get up in my head trying to analyze what was working, what wasn’t, etc. and often “get lost” trying to figure it out. In the end, it was pretty simple.

When I was conscious about it, I’d realize that I needed deliberate brake pressure – when braking on gravel, out of 10, I’d need to go from 0 immediately to 6 if I wanted the car to turn. If I rolled on, track-style – 0/1/2/3/4/5/6, by the time it got to 6, the car would be settled, and wouldn’t turn. I’d also sometimes apply the right pressure, but then chicken out. So what I needed was 0>6. What I’d either do is 0123456, or 0>6>4. If I did either of the latter, the car doesn’t turn. But I’ve trained myself to do the former. And that if I did 0>6, that was wrong and I should back out of it, thus 0>6>4.

So. I’d consciously work my way to 0>6. And I’d get it. The car would turn. It’d be awesome. I’d do it a few times, and the session would end. And the next time, I’d subconsciously try to rely on my subconscious. Because hey, we learned a thing! Now we can just apply it! But the thing stored in my subconscious was 0123456.

Because of that, the quality of my sessions was almost always “exert a ton of mental effort to learn a thing, learn it, execute it alright, then come back to try again and have an absolutely terrible time.” This was mentally brutal. It’d shatter my confidence, it’d get me all up into my head, I’d spend so much time trying to figure out what I’d done wrong, because it felt like I was doing things the same (I wasn’t), and it wasn’t until the coach could figure out what I was doing and give me conscious instruction, and then I could get un-discombobulated, and start to properly execute this totally counter-intuitive feeling thing that the performance would come back.

This was much more difficult than it sounds, because you’re trying to judge correct brake pressure, correct steering input, timing of when to lift, steer, brake, and then transition back to the gas all while traveling in an unfamiliar car at full tilt (because if you’re not going full tilt, you’re not generating enough momentum/energy to make it work at all). So for me, by the end, I found my two bad habits were “too smooth/gentle on inputs”, and “often steering/braking too late”, but it took two full days to figure out that those were the issues among the whole sea of variables we were drowning in.

In retrospect, there are two issues. In the moment, there were infinite possibilities no answers, and what felt like a constant surge in progress then a discombobulating, confidence-shattering backslide for what appeared to be no discernible reason.

It was really interesting to me, because like I’d said in the other post, the other track guy not only had a similar issue, but as we talked about it, and a similar confidence response. We’d both swing wildly from “Holy shit that was amazing!” to “What the fuck am I doing why is none of this working?” Sessions would vary from fantastic to abhorrent (at least for me, from my perspective), and my confidence would swing dramatically from right to left. One of the harder things was seeing the non-track folks with less seat time start from the same place (WTF is this lift-turn-brake stuff?) and then grow linearly, while the two of us swung back and forth from good to bad and wonder if we were going to ever make any kind of repeatable progress.

The thing I needed to do, and was finally able to in the end, was to look – not where the car was headed, but where it needed to go.

A few years ago, a friend of mine went to Dirtfish, a rally driving school in Snoqualmie, WA. They raved about it. Then they went again. And again. Then another friend went, for the half-day course, and he raved about it, too. You can probably see from the photo above where this is going.

For my birthday this year, Ei-Nyung got me a gift certificate to go. Kevin and I had been talking for a while about going to the 3-day AWD course, but I kept waffling – it’d be time away, it was expensive, scheduling it when we were both free was never ideal, etc. A few other friends had expressed going as well, but Kevin & I had gotten the closest to making it work, and so we both pulled the trigger, knowing it’d never be perfect. That ended up being a theme of the week, but in a positive way. More on that later.

But here’s the spoiler: I loved it. I don’t think I’m exaggerating to say it’s the most fun I’ve ever had. And it’s $$$$ – no question – one of the things they do is to show you where that money goes in parts & tires & wheels & all the people who make this happen, because it’s not some huge-margin thing. It’s expensive because it’s expensive. So it’s not gonna be accessible to everyone. But if you’re interested, and if you can swing it, I cannot recommend it highly enough. I cannot tell you how blown away I was by how much we learned, how quickly our skills developed, and how what seemed impossible on day 1 was hilarious on day 3.

You Must Unlearn What You Have Learned

I’ve been to a handful of track days at a handful of tracks. I’m not gonna pretend to be some experienced and talented driver – I’m not. But I’m alright. And I’ve spent those trackdays practicing smooth inputs – rolling on and off the brakes, applying throttle smoothly. Steering smoothly. You practice so that your inputs don’t “upset the car”, so that all the tires have maximum grip for the specific thing they’re doing at the time you’re asking the car to do it. I’ve spent a few years working on this, and trying to make it automatic.

This is a huge problem.

On tarmac, you want to brake in a straight line, when you have all your grip dedicated to slowing the car. You then turn in, and want to use as much of the grip as possible to steer (though you’ll roll off the brakes while steering most of the time – as steering consumes grip, you basically hand over the grip you were using to brake). Then you use as much grip as possible to accelerate out of the corner. Lift off the throttle, brake hard, decrease brake pressure, steer.

One of the first things they teach you at Dirtfish is that this doesn’t work at all on gravel.

You lift off the throttle (smoothly, so as not to upset the car). Apply brakes hard to slow. Car pitches forward. Weight goes over the front wheels to provide maximum traction & slow the car. Roll off the brakes & steer. As you do this, the car “settles”, which pulls the weight off the front wheels and rebalances it, but it means now that your steering wheels don’t have enough grip to get the car to turn, and you slide right through the corner.

Instead, you lift off the gas decisively, which shifts the car’s weight forward. Then you turn the wheel, long before you’ve reached the corner. Because at first, nothing really happens. I think this is because as you turn the wheel, the sides of the tires dig into the gravel, and that takes a moment with the car weighted forward. But it’s a terrifying moment. You’ve gone into a corner full tilt, lifted off the gas, not used the brake, then turned. And the car is still going straight.

So the last part is to wait.

You wait for the tires to bite enough that the car then starts to rotate. If you’re used to driving on tarmac, where with a fairly stiff suspension a car will respond instantly this is an incredibly disconcerting feeling. But then it happens – a fraction of a second later, the car rotates. And it will, for some corners, complete its entire rotation without any additional input. You then hit the gas once the car is headed in the right direction. You can do this before unwinding the steering, because by hitting the gas, you transfer all the weight to the rear tires, so the car takes off in the direction it’s facing regardless of the direction you’re steering. Again, unsettling.

But “unsettling” is actually the point. Where on the track, you want a car to be stable – to slowly load a tire and unload it so that you don’t “shock” the tire into instability – the difference between someone gently pushing against your shoulder and someone shoving you – on gravel, because you don’t have reliable traction, you’re constantly shoving the car around to maximize the potential grip for the specific tires you need to “work”. Its constantly unstable, because you need the car’s weight to dramatically move around much faster.

The gravel surface is kind of a damper. It takes all these shock inputs and slows them down. If you did it on a track, there’s no damper, the shock input breaks traction, and you go sliding off. With gravel, without the shock input, you don’t get enough weight transfer to make your inputs effective, and you go sliding off.

This is such a mindfuck when you’ve practiced tarmac driving that it required constant, conscious effort to not fuck it up. And any time my attention wandered for whatever reason – often because I’d done something right and thought I could repeat it with less focus – this bit me in the ass.

The other track guy in the class had the same problem, so it was nice to know I wasn’t alone.

But so the biggest struggle of the entire thing wasn’t that I needed to learn a new skill. It was that I had to unlearn what I’d learned, and then literally learn to do the exact opposite. It wasn’t going from 0 to 100. It was going from -100 to 100.

(Continued in next post)

Recently spent a few days customizing my old track day helmet. Got a trip to DirtFish coming up, and figured it’d be nicer to use my own helmet if possible. And that the old decoration I had on it, which was mostly plastidip and electrical tape, was falling apart. So I basically stripped the whole thing, and did this style of doodling I used to do a lot in high school w/ sharpie. This is a WIP picture, but in the end, I sprayed it with matte clearcoat. It turned out way better than I would have expected. The other side is blue, and it’s got a half-Japanese half-Finnish vibe going on for, you know, reasons.

Other than that, most of my time has been rehabbing an injured shoulder. It’s been since the beginning of March, but finally things are starting to turn a corner. I’d been lax about doing a particular type of lateral raise because it was excruciating, but the PT clarified that the pain wasn’t causing any kind of damage, and until I worked my way up from a very light weight and pushed through some level of pain, I’d be stuck. So the last week, I’ve been diligent about doing even this particularly miserable exercise, and it has made the difference. Hopefully back to being able to swim & wingfoil soon. The weather’s been great, and it’s been torture to not be able to go make use of it.

The end of the school year’s rapidly approaching, which is pretty weird. Feels like only yesterday the kids started their new schools. Now it already feels old hat. Lots of testing going on, and J’s gonna take a geometry course over the summer to try to get to Algebra 2 next year, which will be an interesting challenge. I hope it’s a.) challenging and b.) he enjoys it. I think both of the kids have had a bit too easy of a time at school, so it’ll be interesting to see if we can get him in a place where he feels like he needs to work, but that it’s not crushing.

Still chugging along learning guitar. Still mostly terrible, but definitely getting to a point where I can play things that would have taken me a *lot* longer to pick up. It’s been a satisfying experience, and nice to get back to an analog instrument instead of just bleeps and blorps.

I’ve also been seeing a trainer sporadically – sometimes 2x/wk sometimes 1x – he’s mostly helping with mobility and shoulder stuff, but we’ve finally gotten to a point where I’m doing some stuff that’s *hard* rather than just stuff that is geared towards stability. It’s still comically low levels of weight/exertion compared to what I’m used to re: “working hard”, but I’ve gotta start somewhere and not jump into crazy shit. Also started riding my bike more – not just the eBike, but the regular analog bike bike. It’s strange, because after the eBike, it’s almost more of a mindset change – it’s less “go fast”, and more like “advantaged walking”. Which goes to show how long it’s been since I’ve done it. But it’s good. Weather’s been great, and it’s a way to get some effort, enjoying the outdoors, and not trashing a busted shoulder.

If you talk with me long enough, you’ll start to realize that I’m like a weird robot with only one directive. I can talk about it in different ways – the one-sentence pitch, your “Coke is Refreshing” resume thesis – but the underlying directive is always the same. Make your idea smaller. Smaller than you think. No, even smaller than that. Make it simpler. Way simpler. So simple that you don’t have to think *at all* to understand it.

There’s nuance in this, and it can be very difficult to do. Making something as simple and small as possible requires deeply understanding what you’re *actually trying to do* and *who you’re trying to do it for*, and for blue-ocean problems, those are never actually particularly clear at first.

But whether it’s games or startups, companies aren’t formed by people with small dreams. They’re started by ambitious risk-takers who have grandiose visions for how they’re going to change the world. And so sometimes hearing the message, “smaller, simpler” – in whatever form – lands like a lead balloon.

Thing is, “smaller, simpler” is how you take those first steps toward your grand vision. They’re not replacing the grand vision.

Sometimes new tech enables you to develop in new ways. Big ways. They let you take huge swings at complex things in new ways. Unreal let novice game devs have the power of huge studios. AI lets individual creators make things faster than ever before. But the problem isn’t in the tools, the problem is in the people.

People using a new thing for the first time – they’re still the same. They learn best in small, clear, well-defined steps. They rely on direct, well-timed, *overwhelming* feedback. Give a new user complexity and depth immediately, and they will be lost, often forever.

So smaller. Simpler. Build small things. Ask small questions. Introduce simple concepts, and make them so clear that users can’t not understand them. Sometimes make them a little unusual and wonky, because wonky is really sticky. (Think N*Sync’s “It’s gotta be MAY” – why is that an earworm, when “It’s gotta be ME” wouldn’t be?)

It can sound unambitious. But no one is born running. The best way to learn to run fast?

Sit up.

Start small. Start simple.

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.