Author: helava

A Few Books

A few books I’ve been reading:

Eric Nehrlich’s You Have a Choice – I’ve been reading this since years before he started writing it, in his various blog posts, newsletters, and talking with him in person. We’ve been friends since my college days, and over the last 20 years, he’s grown tremendously, in every way, as a person. Professionally, personally – but the biggest thing is that he took concrete steps to create the life he wanted, and the biggest, hardest thing he had to do (IMO) was realize he could define his own direction. In his book, he talks about that process, and he’s helped dozens (hundreds?) of people take similar steps. The book isn’t just refined because he’s done it himself. It’s because he’s also taken these lessons and already applied them to the people he coaches. So the book is great. But it’s worth putting in there that *he* is also great. His ideas are deeply explored and considered, are based on a wealth and breadth of experience, and his desire to help other people is genuine. If you’re finding yourself “succeeding”, but still kinda miserable or frazzled, this is *the* book for you.

Wagner James Au’s Making a Metavese That Matters – for all the garbage hype around Meta’s foray in the metaverse (and the absurd investor FOMO whiplash freakout and faceplant), this is a book written by someone that *cares* deeply about the metaverse, and has for longer than most of the people claiming to be “metaverse experts” have been aware of its existence. His writing is personal, and interesting and even if you’ve been metaverse-aware since Snow Crash and Second Life, this is a more definitive chronicle of its development than I’ve seen anywhere else. Like Eric’s book above, what drew me to this was its authenticity and depth. In a field that’s full of snake-oil salesmen, this is a book with real knowledge and wisdom.

Kim Nordstrom’s dn UMOP dn – Oh, wait. it’s Up Down Up. I met Kim through Paul Tozour (whose book The Four Swords is worth a read if you’re interested in diving into what seems like a satirical exaggeration/parody of the game industry’s worst tendencies, but to someone who’s seen it all, reads more like an account of any random Tuesday) a while back, and I had a chance to read an early copy of the book. Been going through the print version as well, and it’s a great read. He interviews a *gazillion* folks who’ve built & led successful (and not successful) game companies, and consolidates their collective experience into a book that I wish was mandatory reading for folks starting game studios. It’s obviously not a formula for success, but the point of it is all these interviews land on a number of recurring points, and seeing the echoes of the same sounds in all the stories begins to show you the shape of what it’s like to run a successful team. Having been through that wringer, it’s a book I wish I had before I’d started out, and I hope it’ll save new founders from a lot of pain.

The Obvious Solutions

In sixth grade, I watched a show on PBS about MIT’s 2.007 robot competition, and I knew that was what I was going to try do in college.

I wanted the challenge of solving some problem, building a machine to do it, and compete using both my wits and my engineering skill. And in 1997, I got to take the class and live out a childhood dream.

I love building things with my hands. I don’t do it as often as I’d like these days, but I find that that’s when I feel like my mind and body are fully engaged. Part of the challenge is figuring out the rules – what to build, and then executing in real time during the competition.

The year I took the class, the design of the competition… was terrible.

The goal was to get balls into your bin. They fell from a “waterfall” mechanism that triggered a few moments after the competition. There was a ramp from the starting position near the waterfall and your bin down to a central arena where the balls would land.

The problem with the rules is that there was one very clear, very obvious solution. An arm that would extend and redirect the balls directly into your bin was the clear answer, and the winner would simply be the person who built the fastest, most robust arm that couldn’t be deflected out of position.

That was it. The best strategy by far required zero human interaction – in fact, human interaction would make it *worse*. If you wanted to build the most robust arm, that’d take all your material and space. You’d build the strongest, fastest arm you could, and hope that you could beat everyone else to the punch. If someone built a stronger, faster arm, you were screwed, but here’s the thing – if you built *literally anything else* you were even more screwed.

I didn’t build an arm.

I decided that even though the rules had a clear solution, this isn’t what I wanted out of the competition. I wanted to build an RC robot that relied on my control, that gave me options and flexibility, where I could construct a strategy on the fly and do interesting things. So I built a little bulldozer thing with skids and wheels that could Hoover up balls into a front cage, dump them into a hopper in the back, and then the hopper could extend up from the central arena and dump balls into the bin. I could theoretically use the extending hopper to also block anyone else from dumping balls into the bin. It was really maneuverable and quite fast. I practiced any strategy I could think of over and over again.

But I knew that if I went up against even a marginally competent extending arm, I’d lose.

I don’t have strong memories of the competition or its results. I think the winner in the end was an extending arm. As for me, despite hours and hours of practice, the thing that undid me in the end was a small screw protruded from the bottom of the machine, and in what felt like one-in-a-zillion odds, when I turned off the ramp into the central arena one round, that screw caught on the ramp and “beached” the machine.

I was proud of that machine, though. Aside from the protruding screw, a mistake that was easily fixable with iteration, it was a fairly robust, well-built, flexible machine. It did what I’d hoped it would do, and I got to play the competition the way I wanted to.

And I think that there are really strong parallels to my professional career.

When I look at mobile gaming, there are lots of people who “build the arm”. They look at the current winning strategy, and think they can build the best arm.

I *hate* building arms. I’ve never done it. I’ve never believed that the next hit looks exactly like an iteration of the last hit. I’ve never wanted to work on solved problems. My focus has always been on making things that are flexible, and “broad” re: strategic options, and have attempted to wield that breadth in interesting ways.

And it’s weird – until this afternoon, I never realized *how* strong the parallel was between my experience with 2.007 and the rest of my career.

But I think that “strategic weirdness” is why I love working with a broad range of multidisciplinary people. It’s why I love working on new things. It’s why I hate the kind of “iterate until optimal” business model of highly derivative games.

Back at a job long ago, we made a bingo game, under some amount of pressure from the company that’d acquired our team. The obvious thing they wanted us to do was ape the leading bingo game, and they’d market it aggressively and hope to do something. I kept kicking the can down the road, until one day we figured out how to do something interesting with powerups in bingo, where teams could collectively bring powerups to the game, and trigger them in fun, synergistic ways.

It was a system that created a huge potential for interesting gameplay, because it wasn’t just about *your* powerups and what they’d do for your cards, it was what you could do for the *other* players on your team. It made bingo a wild cooperative team game, and the results were delightful.

The game didn’t succeed in the end. I believe it still could have, given the “possibility space” of the system we’d created. The company basically said, “Welp, dislodging players from (whatever game was winning the bingo category at the time) is too expensive.” And while I think we’d have gotten to a point where we’d have a better game and those costs would have come down, they decided to pull the plug (there’s a lot I’d say here about judgment and necessary courage, but…)

But to me, the point is that fighting the winning bingo game with a clone of the winning bingo game was a sure fire recipe for disaster. It’d have been trying to “build a better arm” when the arm you’re fighting has 100x your budget, 100x your size & weight, and is *already deployed*.

We didn’t have an option to build a better arm. We could only build something new. And I think there are some situations and companies that are foundationally only about “building arms”. They’re not for me, and never will be.

Work is many things, and depending on circumstance, you can’t always think this way. What I have is a luxury. But work, to me, is about the joy of creation, and building things with other people. The most joy comes not from building arms, but from building new weird shit with strategic breadth and the possibility of wielding that breadth in shocking and interesting ways.

And it’s weird that I’d already known that back in 1997 when building a robot for a class.

 

Hiring Fields You Don’t Understand

How do you go about hiring a game development team, if you have no experience with #gamedev?

I’ve seen MANY companies over the years, be scammed – sometimes out of *millions* of dollars, because they hired a development team that promised things that they weren’t equipped to deliver. And it’s not just game developers – on one project years ago, before I’d joined the team, they hired a team of “experienced Hollywood writers” to write the script for the game.

The work they turned in nine months later was a failure in so many different ways, it’s almost hard to know where to begin. The writing was awful, juvenile crap. It wasn’t suitable for the targeted rating of the game. It was full of racism, homophobia, and otherwise wildly inappropriate content. But it was also completely unsuitable for a game where the player-character *is the player* and doesn’t have a prescribed personality.

We had to scramble to rewrite as much as we could in the six months we had left. I ended up redoing three characters *from scratch* in that time, writing *all* their dialogue while ALSO implementing the script into game logic. It was bananas, and if we didn’t have a team of dedicated, excellent developers fixing the problems, that game would never have shipped.

But other projects? I’ve seen “devs for hire” claim experience they simply don’t have. They’d say one thing that was technically true-ish, but where the text implied something that was explicitly untrue.

And it sucks to see companies invest their valuable time and resources into a team that’s essentially scamming them.

But how do you keep that from happening, when you’re trying to hire for a discipline you *don’t understand*?

I think the best way to think of it is “How do you buy a house?” Sure, there are some folks who will buy a place with no inspection and no contingencies, and hope for the best. Some get lucky, some get very, very screwed.

But most people who have a finite amount of money and care about risk get inspections. And they have contingencies. So if you’re looking to hire a dev studio, you have to find someone with knowledge to vet that team.

I don’t know of anyone who provides that service.

But on a project a while back, I had questions about the dev team – the project wasn’t working, and the claims they were making were raising the rest of the team’s suspicions. So I did a deep dive just into their website and their LinkedIn profiles. At first blush, things looked okayish. A sort of B-grade team with experience.

As I looked closer, though, cracks started to appear. Yes, they worked on that game & have a credit on it, but as part of the IT staff. And yet that person is the “Creative Director” here. Is that fatal? No – not by any means. But as I went further, it turned out everyone’s titles and experience were … illusions. And once I realized this, it became clear what the right questions to ask were, and the whole house of cards came falling down…

Why didn’t the project work? Why were the dev team’s answers to the rest of the company’s questions so evasive? Why did things they said with certainty and confidence make no sense?

That ability to say things definitively had snowed the inexperienced entrepreneurs who’d hired them. They used a bunch of fripperous bullshit jargon to make arguments from authority to justify their awful decision-making, but those arguments fell apart the moment they encountered someone (me) with actual experience.

So, I guess my point is this, and when I started writing this post, I had no idea where it was going:

If you want a “house inspection” when you’re hiring a dev team, hire me to do it. It’ll cost you a thousand bucks, and I’ll spend a day looking into the team’s experience and bona fides. I’ve had 20 years in games, led and built multiple successful teams, and while my background is primarily in game design, I’ve worked with every stripe of game developer at every scale out there.

I’ll tell you whether the team is what they say they are, what experience they *actually* have to back it up, whether what they’re proposing makes sense, and whether you should actually work with them, or find other teams to interview.

The worst thing about this: I was thinking of two specific situations, and only later realized that two OTHER specific situations could be described exactly this way, but were even worse, I’d just blocked them from my mind at the time.

This happens a LOT. Seriously, if you need someone to validate a dev, I have even more experience than I think at finding bullshit artists, apparently.

Preordered a Vision Pro

I preordered a Vision Pro. Mostly because as a potential developer, I’m always curious about new platforms and their potential. “But what about the Quest 3, which does almost everything Apple’s talking about?” The answer to that is actually pretty simple: I don’t want the Quest 3. And it has very little to do with the technology.

I don’t want the Quest 3, because fundamentally, I don’t trust Meta. I don’t trust Mark Zuckerberg. Do I think he’s a terrible guy? No – I know folks who know him, and I believe he’s sincere and well-intentioned. But I don’t trust his judgment on matters of data and privacy, and a real XR headset is a privacy nightmare.

I know folks who worked on the privacy side of the Quest. They were incredibly smart folks, who thought hard and deeply about the subject. But I also never trusted the end product, because *fundamentally* I don’t trust Meta and I never will. And I know that whatever those smart, caring folks did, it wasn’t *their* judgment that made the final decisions. It was Zuckerberg, it was the $.

It doesn’t matter what they say, because what they’ve *already done* with Facebook tells me everything I need to know. And because of that, nothing they say will ever carry any weight.

As things like XR and AI and the general total pervasiveness of phones & IOT and what have you gets … more, the thing I want out of a company is to believe in their efforts around privacy and trust. I know Apple is not a saintly company by any stretch (I’m with Epic re: store & monopoly, for instance) – but when it comes to trust and safety, it’s no contest. I’d easily pay significantly more for an Apple product than a Meta one, solely around how I perceive they will treat the data that’s necessary for deep interactions with this kind of product.

I know that for a lot of people, price beats everything, but I think more and more, how much companies can be trusted with data will become more critical, and right now, Apple’s sort of the only game in town.

Layoffs & Frustration

Sorry to hear about layoffs at Riot Games. I’ve known a few folks who’ve worked there over the years, and it’s always been a bit of a mystifying place, to me. Super frustrating to hear that the cuts are super deep, and that the folks in charge are basically taking no personal responsibility, but I guess that’s one of those things that I’ve always found mystifying about Riot. Some parts of it produce incredible things (I loved Arcane), and some things seem toxic AF. The consistent bit is that the leadership never actually takes what I’d consider “actual responsibility”.

But hey, game industry, am I right? Kotick made that his whole career and won a glorious and lasting victory for himself at the expense of everyone else, so others taking that playbook and running with it shouldn’t be surprising. Disappointing, sure, but hey, what the fuck do I know?

(Here comes the turn!)

What I *do* know is that if you’ve been impacted by this, and you’re looking for another job, you might need help with your resume. You’ve worked on huge, impactful products that helped define the industry, and everyone undersells their experience and impact. I wrote this doc, and it will be helpful if it’s been a while since you’ve polished up your resume.

While this seems like it’s a turn into cynical self-promotion, here’s the other turn – https://lnkd.in/gddfND3x It’s totally free. If you read through this and want personal help, reach out – send me a draft resume & provided you’ve ALREADY read the entire doc, I’ll help you for $0. (If you haven’t read the doc, it’s $1k/hr.)

So yeah – sorry that the never ending onslaught of layoffs keeps never ending. Maybe it’s about time we take a deeper look at how collective organization might give workers some actual leverage in this industry that relies *entirely* on the creative hard work and value that the workers provide.

Boy! This is a post that isn’t likely to go over well. 😛 I’m just disappointed that the rich keep getting richer by fucking the folks doing the work and saying that they’re somehow taking “responsibility” because gosh, laying people off sure “feels bad” like that’s equivalent to stripping 500+ people of their livelihood.

So yeah. If you need help with your resume, I’m here for you. If you need help talking through deciding to start up your own company to do things differently and BETTER, hit me up, I can help with that, too.

The ONLY good thing about the last two years is that this is the environment of desperation and chaos that creates the next big thing, and I hope whoever figures it out takes the opportunity to create something better than this garbage structure we have now.

I wanna put my previous post in a bit of context. When I started in the game industry, I worked 60-80 hour weeks, slept in the office, got paid for shit. I was called into the office on weekends when I’d busted my ass all week getting my stuff done, just so that managers could have “butts in seats” to show off to the execs who were wandering around the office on a Saturday for some reason.

This was all bullshit.

It was a stupid, awful way to run a team & a business, and when I had the opportunity to run things, I swore I would do things differently. At Self Aware, we made a *billion-dollar game* and crunched ABSOLUTELY NEVER. And that’s not an accident. That’s a series of choices. We had to have some artists stay late *one night*. It’s literally the only blemish on that record while I ran the studio. It was a couple of hours, they knocked it out of the park, and the Art Manager and I talked about it afterwards, relieved and proud of the team, but I made it clear that this was a failure on our parts, and we needed to do better in the future.

These kinds of layoffs are the consequence of choices. They’re a failure on the part of leadership. And yet, leadership *keeps getting off scot-free*. Worse, Wall Street *incentivizes* this mercenary bloodletting and *rewards* it with money for the people holding the axe. Leaders make a choice. They’re making record profits, they choose to cut to keep the stock price up, they cut to keep their exorbitant compensation. They say, “Oh, I feel so bad,” but they *chose* to do these things.

Wall Street won’t hold them responsible. And workers, for the most part, can’t, either. If they’re hiring, in an environment like this, they’ll find people willing to fill those roles.

So the cycle continues.

But people are going to come out of this and create new teams with an animating purpose. What was “crunch” for me will be “layoffs” for them. They’ll do whatever is necessary to run their teams in a way that values the team, and puts their needs *ahead* of the share price, and *ahead* of their personal comp. And those changes will create better studio cultures, and people will be excited and happy to be invested in that company, and the results will be *better*. Just like our results were better. We crushed the competition – Zynga – at a time when they had gobs of money and hundreds of people crunching nonstop to try to hang on to their lead.

They failed. We won.

In the future, look for the teams that are built to make positive change. Someone’s going to get it right and eat the dinosaurs’ lunch.

Too Much is Too Much

I have too many interests.

I want to spend time:

  • Making a game
  • Simracing
  • Making music
  • Spending time with the kids
  • Boardgaming
  • Videogaming
  • Reading comic books & Sci-Fi
  • Wingfoiling
  • Biking
  • Paddleboarding
  • Archerying
  • Drawing
  • Playing old games I never got around to on what are now “retro” platforms
  • Cooking
  • Organizing and fixing stuff up around the house
  • Making pottery
  • Swimming
  • Writing (Resume stuff, novel, leadership/game design book)
  • Blacksmithing
  • Learning arbitrary new stuff
  • Getting in better shape

I mean, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. And I know that everyone’s got a huge variety of hobbies. And one thing that’s different, is that more than most people, I have time.

I don’t take that for granted at all. But what it causes is this kind of persistent analysis paralysis and inability to focus on one thing and go deep to the degree that’s necessary for me to improve at anything. And sometimes, worse, that analysis paralysis prevents me from doing ANY of these things out of a weird kind of FOMO that I might pick something and then have an opportunity to do something better.

And I think that served me alright when the kids were small, or time was more scarce. But now, I have a bit of time where I could “go deep”, and find myself constantly pulled in different directions. There’s another bad impulse, which is, “I’ll do this when I have it all set up “right”.” Which sometimes is “the right gear”, which is almost always the incorrect impulse. Do the thing, get better to the point where you’re limited by the gear, then change the gear. But “new gear” feels like progress, and it often serves as a proxy for real progress. This is bad, and I’ve come to be better at recognizing it in myself.

But in any case, the thing is, it’s too much. That whole list of shit above? No one could be great at all that stuff. No one could even be competent at most of that stuff simultaneously. It’s just too much. Getting good at any two or three of those things would be the work of a lifetime.

I love getting “competent” at things, though, and I like that I’ve had the opportunity to dabble in a LOT of things, and become … not “fluent”, but maybe “conversant” in a ton of weird shit. But I would like to get better at a few things – probably making music (though narrowing it down between guitar and generalized music production is hard), and getting in better shape are the two things that I’d like to focus on the most that aren’t “explicitly spend time with friends and family”.

Maybe that’s just the goal in 2024. To figure out how to put the rest of things *aside* for a year, and just focus on those two things.

2023

Definitely a mixed year. My aunt passed away. My dad had a bone infection that needed surgery, and is likely going to need to move into an assisted living facility in 2024 due to his cognitive decline, and my mom getting older & being less physically able to take care of him full-time, plus the six years of accumulated stress. We had a life-changing trip to Korea & Japan. We went to both Maui (Spring Break) and Oahu (Winter Break). The kids are great. We had some touch-up work done on the house. Most of the day to day stuff was great. We got to see friends, play games, have a lot of great food. J&K are growing up quickly. 2023 felt like an “Oh, shit – time is going FAST” year, as both kids grew up a lot this year, I think.

J’s been making some really impressive games. K’s reading ALL the manga with a kind of rabid aggression I didn’t expect. Both are finding their social circles and spending more time with friends.

For 2024, my resolutions are pretty simple, and mostly a recap of 2023’s, which I largely failed at:

* More exercise, less junk eating. Goal weight is again <210.
* Make something start to finish. This will likely be a VR ARPG (think Diablo-lite) that takes place around the player. Not a first-person game, but more of a Moss-like “diorama” experience. I’ve been less and less interested in 1st person VR, TBH.
* Do a revision of the resume book and actually try to sell it. This will be a more or less complete rewrite but with a solid example and a kind of work-flow that the reader can follow along with. Same basic ideas & content, but largely different structure.
* Be helpful in a way that I find enjoyable. I’ve found I’m not a huge fan of 1:1 mentoring for individuals. Doesn’t feel impactful enough. But through Christy, we had some chances this year to talk to groups of entrepreneurs about our experience, and both of those events were really satisfying. I also had a chance to connect with some early entrepreneurs, and some of that has been genuinely rewarding as well. So, more of that, and less 1:1 stuff. Try to submit to some speaking engagements re: team culture & product dev stuff.

So yeah. 2024. More conscious engagement, less “do the default”. More exercise, more winging, more focused projects. But I don’t expect it to be *radically* different – just challenging some things I “feel into” in 2023, that ended up being habits I don’t want to continue.

QA Is Important

Over many years in game development, I’ve seen QA get treated like trash and expected to be grateful just to be a part of game development. Parties hosted for “devs” where QA was excluded. Catered lunch for everyone *except* QA. Companies where QA was *literally not allowed through the front door*.

I’ve also seen QA departments that are hot garbage, staffed by folks who were barely “professional”, who generated unintelligible bugs, or who wanted to be game designers and didn’t understand what the job entailed.

BOTH are symptoms of leadership that doesn’t value QA, and both are faults caused by that *leadership*, not by the QA department.

Way back in the day on the Sims, there was a phenomenal QA dept that worked tightly with engineers & designers, that knew the product and the players inside and out. When Maxis was acquired by EA, that whole team was fired, and replaced by people they hired at a *literal sausage party*. Like, “here, have free sausages & apply for QA positions”.

The bugs we got went from being helpful feedback that closed the loop on development to useless trash, and the supposed “cost savings” was totally burned on the extra time everyone in the development pipeline needed to spend to get the QA team back up to some minimum level of competence.

QA is a critical part of the development team. Hire high-quality QA people and treat them well, and you will:

1.) Save money EVERYWHERE in the development pipe
2.) Create a much, much better product
3.) Make your engineers’ & designers’ lives a lot easier.

Bring QA into your development process early, reviewing designers’ output, because they will break design *documents* just as thoroughly as they’ll break code. It’ll be 100x cheaper AND your designers will start to think like QA folks, which will make them *better designers*.

This is a no-brainer, folks. There’s no downside. All you need to do is not be elitist ding-dongs.

Interview Questions

As we go into the new year after a disastrous year for game industry workers (but not games, or game industry execs!), a reminder:

Your and your company’s values aren’t what you say. They’re not even what you do much of the time. They’re only genuinely tested when living up to your values costs you something.

So when folks come to interview at your company and ask, “How did you handle the pandemic?” Or “Tell me about that round of layoffs you did, and did your compensation change as a result?” Or “You previously said “Work remotely forever,” but then “recalled” employees into the office. Tell me about how you made those decisions?”

Those are questions that are asking about your values that matter.

And to folks searching for employment, I know it’s a hard time to ask tough questions, but *no* “theoretical” questions about values will ever be useful to you. The only questions that will illuminate anything interesting about a company are questions about what they *actually did* in difficult situations that are real. And frankly, going into the interview, you should probably already know the answers. You’re asking because you want to make sure that the folks you’re interviewing with are honest, and capable of telling you the truth.

To the execs & folks in positions of power: If you’re laying off folks, and then out of the other side of your mouth calling your employees “family”, I implore you to reconsider. Doing this is abusive, and exploits employees’ enthusiasm and/or naïveté for your explicit benefit. It is manipulative and exploitative. Don’t do it.

Be Specific

Hey, folks who are looking for jobs: Be specific.

If you say “I’m a recently laid-off Creative Director…” and you expect that folks will be interested based on your title… you could do better. Your job here is to hook peoples’ interest (and if you’re a Creative Director who’s not doing that in a post like this you’re not showing off your talent like you should).

What is it that people are looking for? What is it that YOU provide that others do not? For me, for instance, I can say, “Co-founder, Creative Director, Team Lead”, and it says something about me, sort of.

But if I specify that I have an established track record of building really effective multi-disciplinary, highly collaborative teams, that shows a kind of specificity. If you’re not building a multi-disciplinary collaborative team, great – I’m not for you. But if you *are*, you’re a lot more likely to ping me than you would if I just said, “team lead”.

But I can get more specific. I also work best in very early-stage teams, because a lot of my process is about building things and learning super-fast, which maximizes potential for success on projects where folks are building something genuinely new. Again, if you’re a huge company working on some iterative thing, great – I’m not the guy for you.

It’s a trade off – telling people your strengths means you aren’t going to be aligned with everyone. And that is a luxury in some cases. Sometimes you need to be everything to everyone, because you need a job – any job. But I’d also suggest that right now, it’s more important to stand out than it is to be “in the running” for a lot of roles.

So be specific. Tell people what your unique strengths are. How your experience and worldview have shaped who you are and what you do better than anyone else. Your job is to capture peoples’ attention and make them NEED to hire you. It’s not enough to say, “I’m a person who’s available.”

This is something most people are really not used to. If you’re struggling with this, I can help. No charge. DM me (with a copy of your resume and a blurb you’ve written for yourself) if you’re looking for a hand with this, and I’ll be happy to spend an hour with you working on it.