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.