At the end of the 2021 F1 season I swore I’d never watch another race again. I didn’t stick to that, but we watched S4 of Drive to Survive, and I think it really didn’t do a good enough job capturing how astonishingly unjust the end to the season was, and how badly it destroyed the integrity of F1 as a sport. The fact that they never corrected the outcome means that we still talk about Verstappen as a (currently) 3-time World Champion, and Hamilton as a 7-time champion, and that’s simply not how it should be.

And I don’t mean that as a “Hrmph, my guy should have won!” I mean that as “The rules were plain as day, they weren’t followed, and the supposed resolution to the issue was so opaque that there’s never been any explanation or genuine resolution that repairs the integrity of F1 as a sport.” At all.

The only possible similar season in my lifetime was the first Senna-Prost collision, and Senna’s disqualification on a technicality. But in 2021, the total failure of F1’s race director and the entire response that followed… there’s been nothing like it.

And the lesson really remains that you can do everything right and still lose, and there is no “karmic balance”, there is no “justice”. The people who cheat, who pressure the ref, who push the boundaries well past the pale will often win, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

The only thing you can do is play the way you believe the game should be played. And if integrity is something you value, then you have to live up to that integrity and bear the consequences. And the consequences are that in the real world, people without integrity win a lot of shit they shouldn’t. And that you can complain about it, and nothing will change. You can be right, and nothing will change. All you can do is accept it, and continue to live up to your own ideals.

Because sometimes your ideals are worth more than a championship. Or they’re worth more than money. Or they’re worth more than pain.

It sucks, but that’s life.

One thing I haven’t written much about here is what board games we’ve been playing. But I’ve been recording every game I’ve played so far in 2024, which has been insightful. We started Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion with the kids, which was neat. We’ve played mainline Gloomhaven with our friend Max – probably our most-played board game of the last few years because we’ve had regular get-togethers to just crank through the campaign. I think we’re probably like 80% through the main campaign at this point?

It’s a great dungeon-crawler, and the card-based combat system is incredibly elegant. As a physical game, it’s too big, too complicated, and too unwieldy for me, but with the iPad app Gloomhaven Helper, it’s pretty great. Also works with JOTL, and JOTL is streamlined enough that it makes the whole experience pretty darned fast

We also played some Pitchcar, which is like Crokinole + Racing, and it’s probably the biggest hit with K, who so far says he likes “simpler” games more. It’s super fun, but the problem is that the kinds of tracks you can make from the included pieces in the base game are limited, but the expansions are impossible to get in the US. I’m gonna try laser-cutting some parts, but because the pieces are MDF + some sort of laminate, getting the thickness and texture right will be impossible. So I think I’m just gonna cut custom track parts, and use those instead of the included track parts – just replace the whole shebang. The big question is if the laser will cut deep enough grooves that the barriers will work. In any case, fun game – super accessible, fast, and building the tracks is as much fun as playing.

Last, I played Return to Dark Tower with Klay & Holly tonight, and that was a good time. I made a really bad decision one turn, and ended up dead due to an event that gave me a third corruption, but we fudged the turn (and a “make-up condition”) in order to keep things moving anyway, and got to the end of the scenario. If I’d not fought the random enemy on my turn, we would have achieved that result anyway. It was a good time. I’m curious to try out some of the expansion content, as the base game is fun, but in many ways feels a bit too much like Pandemic. It’s not that much like Pandemic, it just feels like the same kinds of pressures.

Other recent hits:

• Project: Elite – played with J earlier in the day. Turn-based alien invasion w/ real-time dice combat. It’s an odd duck, but the real time element actually works pretty well – it’s very simple, but frantic.
• Dorf Romantik – better than the video game it’s based on, which I like a lot. I’ve only played this solo, but I think that’s the best way to play it. A lovely little campaign, and a very charming, meditative, low-stakes game.
• Spirit Island – played with Max for the first time. It’s a nice cooperative puzzle that’s complicated enough that it’s legitimately cooperative in a way that relies on everyone to know what they can do and work together.

Yeah – played a LOT of board games over the last few years. Will probably write more about some favorites soonish.

Still noodling around with making noise. The most recent addition is an Elektron Syntakt. It’s weird – I have a bunch of fairly redundant stuff. The Deluge, Syntakt, JD-Xi, M8 Tracker, OP-Z and Push+Ableton are all broadly similar, functionality-wise. But they’re also all different. The Syntakt and Microfreak and OP-1 all overlap re: sound creation. It’s not like I have a set of “these are things that all do the one thing, and nothing overlaps” – and I think that’s fine.

For a long time I thought I had to optimize and justify all this stuff, but really, the justification is, “I like it, and it’s fun.” Different toys for different moments – sometimes the Roli Seaboard Blocks scratch an itch nothing else does. Or pulling out one of the POs or OPs and just messing around. The M8 is the greatest travel music scratchpad. The Push + Ableton can do basically *everything*, which no other single thing I have can quite replicate (though the Deluge is the closest).

Favorite gear? Sequencing-wise, no question it’s the Deluge. Sound-wise, the Syntakt packs a punch nothing else does, though the Microfreak comes close. The JD-Xi has some VERY punchy drums, and TBH, probably makes the TR-8 obsolete in my setup. And the TB-3.  But whatever. It’s fun. I enjoy it. It’s not “efficient”, it’s not “optimal” and it doesn’t “make sense”.

Fuck it! Who cares?!

Got a new bike for the first time in a long while. Decided to finally pull the trigger on an electric cargo bike, and got the Specialized Globe Haul ST with two front panniers and the passenger kit, which lets someone sit on the back. It’s great! I’ve been using my old Cannondale Super-V outfitted with a Superpedestrian Copenhagen wheel, but that’s been discontinued (so who knows about any support), and because everything is contained in the wheel, it’s both short on power and range.

While the Haul is still limited by “class 3 ebike” regulations (28mph pedal assist, 20mph throttle), the extra torque makes a HUGE difference going up hills.

I’ve been picking up and dropping off the kids at school, and getting to either school is trivial. I can make it take effort, I can make it take almost no effort. It’s great. So trading a car ride + no exercise for a bike ride + some exercise is a win. It’s also been weighing on me more that even though the Tesla doesn’t take any gas, it *does* take a lot of energy, since it’s a big heavy car, and an eBike is going to be monstrously more efficient. And in the week and some that I’ve had the bike, every time I’ve taken it out it’s replaced a car ride. So that’s been more than half of the excursions out of the house. It’s basically, “Am I going to be carrying something I absolutely cannot carry on the eBike? Then I’ll take the car.” So winging, picking up large foamboards for J’s presentation at school – stuff like that.

But yeah. Good stuff.

Been playing Halo Infinite and Fortnite almost exclusively these days – Halo’s gameplay is great, but holy cats the progression system sucks. They’ve made big improvements since launch, but it’s kind of unbelievable that their live ops team is moving this slowly. I can only imagine the announcement of a move to Unreal must be brought on by how outdated their internal engine must be, and how hard it is to keep pace with stuff like Fortnite.

Fortnite, on the other hand, has a genuinely amazing progression system, but the gameplay’s starting to get a little boring. I assume that’s one of the drives that Epic’s making for Unreal Engine for Fortnite – being able to take advantage of the player base and tech to build something different is pretty tempting, and knowing that they’re going to pay folks who make content… I’m looking into it.

Otherwise, mostly smaller games – Citizen Sleeper is excellent, Pizza Tower is insane. Picked up a handful of 3DS games before the eShop shut down – Metroid: Samus Returns (which feels surprisingly like Dread, though I shouldn’t be surprised – same dev), Phoenix Wright: Spirit of Justice (the only one we didn’t have AFAIK), the “other content” for Fire Emblem: Fates, and Mario & Luigi: Dream Team – a series I’ve always liked but never gotten particularly deep into.

The 3DS is an odd duck. The 3D is really quite good, and it makes games on the platform feel really unique. I probably wouldn’t have picked up rando games at the closing of most other shops, because remakes will eventually make most good games accessible again. But the 3DS… it’s so reliant on the hardware that once those games are gone, they’re never going to feel the same again.

So yeah. We’ve got a couple trips coming up that I’m super excited about. Heading back to Maui in a bit, and then this summer, finally going back to Korea & Japan for the first time in 20+ years. Been learning both Korean & refreshing Japanese via Duolingo, which is pretty damn good. Progress is slow, but it’ll be way better than nothing. 😀

How it’s taken me this long to finally watch Arrival I’ll never know. I’m a huge fan of Ted Chiang’s writing, and Denis Villeneuve’s work (Dune 1&2 + BR2049).

I thought the movie was brilliant. Took a really neat story, and for me, many of the decisions they made improved things. Not that they’re necessarily better than the OG, just that they’re better for the medium than a more literal translation of the book. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it. I don’t want to write much more just because I don’t want to spoil it – but man, the end (even though I recalled it from the story a while before the revelation) was just one of those things that sat with me for hours afterwards.

One of the things I find incredibly challenging as a parent is knowing how hard to “push” my kids. As the child of a fairly traditional “Asian Mom”, who was under immense pressure throughout my childhood to “excel”, I hated everything about it. I hated music, I hated most sports, I hated school. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-thirties when I realized that I didn’t hate all those things, I hated the pressure I felt, and the constant criticism and pummeling of my self-esteem that it all meant.

So with the kids, this is something I genuinely struggle with.

This morning, something came up, and I responded in a way that felt more like “my parents” and not “what I want to do”, and I struggled with that internally for a while, and then just talked to my older son specifically about *why* I responded the way I did, the specific pressure and difficulty of trying to walk this fine line of “push so that you butt up against your comfort zone and learn new things,” and “let you discover things that you love and build skill on your own”.

It was one of the first times that I’ve had this “meta” conversation about parenting with J – that it wasn’t the conversation about the actual thing, but the conversation about the pressure I felt as a parent and how difficult it was to navigate. And then we talked about what *he* wanted, and what his motivations were, and we reached a genuinely great conclusion.

And it reminded me of a time when our game, Fleck, was really struggling to stand on its own. At the time, I didn’t know whether to put on a brave face and power through it with positivity, or whether to have the frank discussion about the state of the game & the business side of things. The same kind of “meta” conversation about the game with the team.

I was shocked. People *wanted* that insight – they wanted to contribute at that level, and they responded incredibly well to an honest, open talk about vulnerability, the struggles we faced, etc. Everyone *knew* things weren’t peachy-keen, but I’d been told that the leader needs to be positive, help folks get through obstacles, etc.

I think the lesson I take from this is that in general, folks don’t mind the meta conversation. You don’t have to “play the game” and hope to get the right results with all the mechanics hidden away behind the scenes. If folks know how the machine works, you can all play the game together.

The Apple Vision Pro is a weird duck. As a piece of technology, it’s extraordinary – the pass through is great, the hand/pinch gesture sensitivity is great, the hardware feels nice and is (mostly) comfortable. The big thing for me is the forward-heaviness of it, which is almost instantly mitigated by just tucking the battery into the rear strap. I get that they wanted strap options, and that they want you to comfortably rest your head while using the headset, but a well-designed counterweight strap would make this a LOT more comfortable with almost no downside. I don’t get why Apple didn’t learn this lesson. It’s not weight that matters in a VR/AR headset – it’s where the center of balance is. If you put the weight directly over the neck, it can be much heavier, and still totally comfortable. The big problem is forward-heavy headsets exert pressure on your cheeks that eventually becomes intolerable. But I can hold that same weight easily on the top of my head for hours. So that’s weird.

 

I’m struggling a bit to figure out what this is for, to be honest. I’m trying it with a keyboard and trackpad to use as a general computing device (writing this post, even) – and for that, it’s nice. But with limited battery life, and as delicate as it is, it can’t compare with a laptop. As a home-use device, it’s also weird – at home there’s usually people around, and “shutting them out” with the headset feels awkward and isolating – even with the pass through. The eyes on the outside of the device are so utterly bizarre in practice I’m kind of baffled that they released it this way. Cutting the external display would have saved weight and allowed the device to be quite a bit thinner, and that definitely would have been a trade off I’d have made. Vs. how the eyes are *supposed* to look, maybe it’s better – but as it is currently, it’s almost zero value.

I think the biggest thing for me is this emphasizes how important robust object recognition and tracking is for a device like this. I need to be able to “attach” virtual objects to real objects and have them move in total lockstep. Apple tries to do this a bit with the Magic Keyboard and a little virtual widget they attach to it, and it’s neat to see the widget track the keyboard in space, but there’s a significant delay, and the object locking is quite … imprecise. That said, it’s a hell of a lot better than anything else trying to do the same thing I’ve seen.

There’s also some weirdness to VisionOS, and I’m sure this kind of thing will be improved as time goes on – but I find that I want apps to “snap to object/surface” by default. I don’t want random windows floating in midair most of the time – I want them to snap to cabinet doors, or wall surfaces, or to lock to my (physical) desk top. Being able to “pull” windows off of physical objects would be necessary, and being able to have them float in space is obviously a must – but by *default*, I want windows to snap to objects and be tied to physical things.

Still – the pass through makes “doing things” in the Vision Pro WAY more comfortable than in VR, or even with the Quest 2’s low-fi B&W pass through. I can look at my phone, or a clock, or see someone approach – and all those things make AVP feel way less isolating than any headset I’ve tried before. But there are a LOT of straightforward improvements that are almost certain to come, and the gen-3 version of this thing will be incredible. I’m still struggling to think of something to make for AVP – for the most part, my personal lack of understanding about how object-recognition might work on a platform like this hamstrings my understanding of what’s possible. I should probably dive into the SDK’s documentation or something. But the other big thing is, “How are users going to use this platform?” And that’s something I still don’t really have an answer for.

This is definitely an interesting platform. It’s incredible tech. It’s just that I can’t easily imagine when I would naturally put this thing on and dedicate time to be in AVP, vs. using a laptop or iPad, and having unfettered access to reality. I think it’s clear that that’s the end goal – that this pass through solution is a placeholder. But this is an interesting start, and it’s nice to see what feels like a significantly different take, with a very different focus, on AR/VR that’s not Meta. If that’s literally all the AVP accomplishes, it’ll still be worth it.

Some photos of a recent trip to Oahu.

I recently read that Laralyn McWilliams passed away. I only met her online – we had a small number of chats something on the order of a decade ago, and I’d loosely followed her on various channels since, and … dammit.

Go poke her profile page and check out her history. She was an absolute titan of the game industry, and among many other things that would define anyone’s career, she led the design of Full Spectrum Warrior, which was such a discombobulatingly novel take on something that looked like it should be a cliche that I’m still genuinely dazzled that they pulled it off.

But the thing I wish I could have expressed my gratitude toward her for was her kindness. The times we chatted, she’d reached out because she saw me going through a hard time. There was absolutely no reason she should have cared, but she did.

Every single thing I ever saw from her in the ensuing decade, whether it was about teaching or talking about game design, about her constant and unrelenting health challenges – the level of positivity and kindness and thoughtfulness she put into every exchange she ever had with *anyone I ever saw* was … It was astonishing. And it wasn’t some facade of perfection. You could see the struggle. And the optimism. And the bravery.

And dammit – it’s so cliche to talk about folks having health challenges as being brave. But facing down terrible odds, and wanting to continue to help others, to continue to create things, and in the face of everything, never giving in to nihilism and cynicism and self-absorption? If that’s not brave, I don’t know what bravery is.

She’s always going to be someone whose outlook and resilience and positivity I will strive to emulate. I’m gutted for her friends and family, and for the game industry as a whole.

RIP, and thank you.

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.