A month or so ago, our friend Lindsi had some extra tickets to go see the Death Cab for Cutie/Postal Service concert. So we went. Up until the concert, I was fairly ambivalent about it. But it was great.

And throughout the concert, I was reminded of other shows I’ve been to. I saw Pearl Jam & Rollins Band at the Greek Theater in 1993. It might have been the last concert I went to at the Greek, though I feel fairly certain that I’m forgetting something. So it made me think about the various folks I’ve seen live. Radiohead, The Prodigy, Foo Fighters, Cake, Doomtree, Flobots, Bon Jovi, Rush, New Order, Green Day… I think maybe Tool, Helmet, Garbage? But I’m not sure. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that there are a LOT of bands that I may or may not have seen over the last 30 years, and I don’t remember.

But the show reminded me of what things were like before the pandemic, when I spent more time out in the world. I default to spending a lot of time at home, now. And it’s not that weird – I’ve never liked crowds in any context. Working in a coffee shop is like … not a thing I’ve ever had any desire to do. But engaging with things – going to things like Teamlab: Planets, or seeing artists I love performing live… there’s nothing like it.

I think it’s one of the reasons I’ve wanted to play board games more than videogames recently. Doing stuff with people – making new memories – I think that’s what life is for. It’s why the summer Korea-Japan trip was so good. Time spent not just with family, but with good friends doing new things… I want more of that, and every time I get it, I love it.

I went to GamesBeat NEXT – a conference about a lot of things I hate about games. AI, “Metaverse”, Blockchain… but there were good, meaningful, experience-based talks among a lot of bullshit. I met some new people. Reconnected with old friends. I almost didn’t go – too much work, too far, blah blah blah. But I’m glad I did. And I think it’s basically like that – home has a lot of inertia, but getting out into the world is what makes time worthwhile.

One of the things I struggle with is how much of a hobby is “gear” vs. how much of it is “persistence” and “make do”. This year, I bought a bigger wing for wingfoiling, and it was a transformative experience. I’d been using a 6m wing for two years, and struggling a lot to get up on foil. I always felt like there wasn’t enough power, but had assumed I was just doing things incorrectly because, you know, novice.

But at the beginning of the season, I talked to someone at MAC Kiteboard, which (like Sweetwater for music) has a pretty robust “sales engineer” program. So I talked to a guy, described my gear, the conditions, and where I was at, and he said unequivocally, “You need a bigger wing.” So I got an 8m wing. When I started, 8m wings didn’t exist. It’s only in the last year or so that they started making wings with additional structure to support a deeper chord length, allowing you to have more sqm surface without increasing the width of the wing, which, when it’s too wide, makes it impossible to keep the wingtips out of the water.The moment I got new gear, the whole sport changed. I was up on foil instantly.

I still struggle going goofy-foot, but regular stance, things are rock solid. I need to practice turns next season. But the gear made a tremendous difference, and while I couldn’t have chosen better when I started, I wish I’d gotten one of these wings the moment they released it.

I got a new laptop the other day. In part because the Intel Macbook was starting to struggle with regular web pages (!!??) like Boardgamearena.com – it’s still fine for more basic stuff, but it was starting to get unpleasant for things I actually use. One of the things I wanted to use, and did, but irregularly, was Ableton Live. I have a silly amount of music crap, but Ableton “brings it all together” – if you want to record stuff, Ableton’s the thing. The Deluge and OP-1 both can do that to an extent, but Ableton’s much, much, much easier to use.

But the laptop constantly maxed out on CPU, and when it does that, audio crackles, stutters, and pops. It’s awful to listen to. More than 2-3 tracks, a few effects, and that was all the laptop could handle. So I’d poke at Ableton, run into these CPU problems and give up after a bit.I spent the morning with Ableton on the new laptop, and it’s night and day. It’s not about “How do I minimize CPU usage?” which is not “Let’s make some music!“, and now it’s more, “Oh, I can experiment with music stuff and not worry about overhead.” It’s great.

Sometimes it’s best to struggle with what you have, but sometimes a step up in gear makes it all actually work in a way that it didn’t before.

AI is definitely coming to game development. While obviously, early uses of AI are for business clowns to try to fire all their artists and suck, there’s going to be an eventual stabilization of AI, where it’s utilized with curated training data sets to act as tools that empower developers, artists, and even non-developers to build game content fairly easily. This isn’t going to replace artists. The best art will be made *by artists*, but in order to be competitively *fast*, you’ll have to start utilizing AI tools to “fill in” the less important content, or speed up art production by automating tedious art-related-but-not-art tasks.

I have no doubt this will happen, and become commonplace over the course of the next five years. It’ll happen faster, but it’ll be ethically questionable for another few years, at least, and it’ll take some time to figure out how to draw boundaries that give these tools power, but also deal with protecting human work. It’ll be a weird few years, for sure.

I’m still convinced, however, that web3 is useless. Hearing folks at a conference today talk about how “Player ownership is inevitable!” and “Now is the best time to really dive into blockchain because the hype has disappeared!” It feels like a bunch of guys who found a tool that they really, really want to use, but still genuinely have no idea what it’s for or why any player would want it, but boy, it’s valuable, so just keep saying so as loud as you can and one day someone else will believe it, too! It’s bullshit.

“Player ownership” isn’t ever likely going to be tied to blockchain or NFTs. It’s never going to be interoperable. And listening to vets who’ve worked in early genuine “metaverse” iterations who sincerely believe that interoperability is a boondoggle, I’m more interested in their opinions about the validity of interoperability than I am in listening to the web3 bros, who are espousing some sort of utopia that they’re sure will materialize one day, even though it’s been technically possible since the beginning of gaming and yet no one’s ever, ever done it with any scale or success.

So yeah. AI yes. Web3 no. Development process, team structure and size, are all about to change pretty radically. I’m not sure for the better. It’ll make content creation easier, for sure. Which will undoubtedly reduce iteration time and help people make better games. But it’ll also make it much, much easier for there to be MORE games – so many that quality is really going to be the thing, not just “can you make a game”, but “can you make a game that stands out over the now-extreme level of trash noise.

It’s gonna be weird.

I loved making games. It’s a hugely creative endeavor, full of challenges. Wrangling a lot of peoples’ visions, managing a tremendous amount of complexity, trying to understand how players will receive what you’re building, and whether you’re building the right thing.

I was gifted a pass to GamesBeat Next by a friend, and have been thinking about whether to go or not. The timing is kind of a pain, and getting into SF is always a little bit annoying. But a lot of people I know will be there, and it might be fun to catch up with some of them if they have a few minutes to chat.

But look at this agenda:

Pacific Hall

• 10 AM | Build Beyond: The future of game development with cloud and generative AI

• 10:30 AM | Are You Ready for the EU’s Digital Markets Act?

• 11 AM | AI and gaming: Shaping the future of interactive experiencesReimagining beloved IP: how to get it right

• 11:30 AM | The right and wrong way to do blockchain games

• 12 PM | Building and operating a game with a symbiotic bridge between Web2 and Web3 gamers.

Landmark Library

• 10 AM | Keys to survival in Web3 Games

• 10:30 AM | Practical steps to making the metaverse

• 11 AM | The changing world of games by the numbers

• 11:30 AM | Navigating the challenges of AI in gaming

• 12 PM | Using AI to personalize games

There are a few potentially interesting tidbits. Detail on what the Digital Markets Act entails, but I could read up on that in 10 minutes and probably be just as informed. The changing world of games by the numbers is probably an interesting demographic breakdown of what modern gaming looks like that would have data I probably *don’t* have easy access to.

But everything else… who the fuck is giving talks about “The future of game development with cloud and generative AI”? Experts who’ve shipped content using those tools? No. Because no one’s *done that* yet. So it’s a bunch of people who have experimented with it, but built up no meaningful genuine experience. Which goes for *every fucking AI talk at this conference*. And the talks that aren’t AI? Metaverse and Web3.

Who gives a fuck.

I absolutely do not just not want to know about the Keys to survival in Web3 Games, I don’t want anyone in the goddamn industry to give a shit about it either.

But more, this is a conference whose content is essentially directed either at “business bros” who need to know about the “hot new buzzwords”, and fucking no one else.

Everything I love about games is people. It’s the vision for the art. It’s the complexity of interesting systems. It’s the elegance of paring down what a game is into something simple and expressive, or the complexity of systems interacting with one another. It’s an expression of feeling, emotions, or evoking them in players.

Everything I love about making games is people. It’s being surprised and delighted by concept art that is both exactly what I asked for and something magical I never would have imagined. It’s about working with engineers to find clever solutions to things that do 80% of the work in 5% of the time. It’s about trying to take this big, squishy, out-of-control monstrosity that only exists in our collective imaginations and do the difficult work of pulling it out of our heads and making it work in the real world.

AI is a tool. At best. Web3 is scammy bullshit that provides literally nothing of value, even in the best possible scenario. And it’s funny, because it feels like whoever approved all these talks thought, “Yeah, this conference is gonna be on the bleeding edge!” and in the year it took for it to all come together, it already seems hopelessly stupid.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the AI talks will be about finding ethical training sets for AI tools that empower artists and designers, and not just ways to suck the joy and fun out of gamedev and replace it with profit to enrich the Bobby Koticks of the world. But I doubt it. Maybe the web3 talks will be reflective sessions about how to not fall for baseless claims of “interoperability” and “ownership” without actually giving any consideration to how any of that shit would actually work, or why players would ever even care about it in the first place. But I doubt it.

I dunno. Maybe I’ll go to this, because there will be people there I respect and admire (100% guaranteed), and maybe some of the talks will not make me want to burn the whole industry down.

 

But I doubt it.

Arcane – This is one of the most surprising things I’ve seen recently. It’s based on League of Legends, a game I’ve never played, but I think it might be better if you don’t know the game, because you won’t know who’s “important” or “expendable” going in. There’s a lot about the show that’s great – the music is written for the show, to the show, and because of that, the non-soundtrack songs are exceptionally impactful. The animation is genuinely mind-blowing. It’s not “Spider-verse”, because it’s trying to do something quite different. But it’s one of the most beautiful shows I’ve seen. The quality of the animation, not just the art, is incredible. Facial animation, how specific shots are framed, etc. – every bit of detail is really well done. And the characters aren’t one-note, even if they seem that way at the start. Good characters are flawed – sometimes even kinda dumb. Bad characters have recognizable, often sympathetic motivations and depth. There aren’t clear good guys and bad guys, though there are definitely people with different moral alignments and tolerances.

It’s a show that wormed its way into my mind in a way that doesn’t happen very often. There are things about it that aren’t great – some of the political stuff is slow & frustrating, for instance. But a lot of stuff is really neat – it starts out fairly slow, intentionally. There’s a nice sense of worldbuilding and pacing, and when things take off, the change in pace feels different, because of the setup. But the structure of it – the basic themes that echo through the show again and again are really nicely done. I’d highly recommend it, and if you’re interested, please stick with it through the end of Ep. 3.

One Piece Live Action – For a completely un-adaptable, utterly insane original manga, the Live Action version of One Piece is surprisingly good. The cast does a great job, and some casting is just spot-on, particularly Zoro and Buggy. I’m still getting used to Luffy – Inaki Godoy’s accent is so divergent from my internal voice for Luffy that it’s taking a long time to get used to. This may be one big thing re: folks who’ve read the manga vs. folks who are coming to the show fresh.

They’ve made a lot of smart decisions about what to keep and what to cut in order to condense things into a manageable season. I’m not a huge fan of all the Garp/Koby content, and I’m finding Koby, while they *look* perfect, the constant, “Oh, oh!” kind of character, while consistent for Koby, is annoying at scale. Which is why they weren’t this critical in the OG. But it’s not Vicious in Cowboy Bebop bad (which was unwatchably, offensively, laughably awful).

But I dislike the writing and direction. The writing for almost everything that isn’t a direct adaptation from the original dialogue is flat, lifeless, and predictable. The direction and editing is slow and awkward, and their reliance on wide-angle low shots is, once you see it, comically overdone. I get that they’re trying to mimic certain shots from the manga, and those frames are often quite extreme. But as a show, there’s so much warping at the edges of the frames that it looks cheap. And for a show that was like a $100M project… it’s a decision that has a pretty big negative impact to me.

That said, it’s an impressive adaptation overall. And it’s such a huge step *up* from Bebop (again, offensively awful) that I’m hoping w/ S2, Tomorrow Studios can take another positive step forward. Better writing, better pacing, better framing. The set design is great. The cast is pretty darned good. The structural choices have been mostly good. Here’s hoping.

Red Team Blues – Cory Doctorow’s book about an old cybersecurity guy who finds a McGuffin that causes him some problems. It’s a fun, light read – mostly takes place in the Bay Area in places I’m largely familiar with, which was nice, and “in tech”, so that was another layer of familiarity. But not in the Silicon Valley way – in sort of an anti-SV way, which was more refreshing. I’d read a followup, and apparently there’s one coming.

Three Body Problem – I just started this, so it’s hard to say how much it’ll stick with me, but the opening chapter, even though it’s a translation from Chinese, has some of the most vivid imagery I’ve read. It’s haunting and beautiful and terrible, all at once.

Huh. It didn’t really occur to me until now, but I think what was Self Aware Games is now fully dead.

I mean, as a thing, Self Aware’s been dead for more than a decade at this point. But relatively recently, a bunch of artists got laid off, and while there’s one person who’s still there, but for all practical purposes, Self Aware Games is no more.

I’ve had fairly un-mixed feelings about its long slide into irrelevancy. I’d feel … nothing, if every remaining vestige of it disappeared. I loved a lot of the things we built, but Casino, which is the only thing that survived, was a means to an end, and was never intended to be an “end”. And yet.

I wish I’d done some things, in retrospect. When SA was at its apex, I had a chance to talk more about how we got there. Our methodology, our team’s culture, how we took on giants and beat them. Nearly a decade later, I’m only just starting to hear about people doing some of the things we did, and some of the things we put into our games – people are trying to do some of the stuff we did, and they’re not even close.

But all those things are dead. They all died in service of Casino, killed by people who didn’t understand that the things we learned by building those games are why casino succeeded at all.

In 2012, right after we got acquired, if you go back and look at the charts, you’ll see that Casino peaked and then fell. Throughout 2013, it was on a steady decline. Why? Because by 2013, my co-founder and I were barely on speaking terms, and the easiest way to keep the company from turning into a daily slugfest was to let him run one part of the company, let me run one part, and create as much buffer between us as possible.

I let him run Casino, because I thought, a.) it’s $$$ (so there’ll be glory in it), and b.) it’s fairly straightforward, where Fleck was a game that needed a lot of work, and wasn’t succeeding on its own. But the trajectory of casino was … poor. Morale on the team was poor. And as a recently-acquired company, having our primary source of $ dry up would have been a great excuse for the acquiring company to step in and take control. I didn’t want that to happen.

So we consolidated both teams, and I took over running Casino with the technical folks from Fleck in charge. Co-founder got ousted to R&D land, which was honestly just a way of keeping him busy and away from everyone else, since most of his team hated working with him at that point.

We left Fleck with a small team of brilliant folks who could keep making some sort of progress, and everyone else went back to Casino. There’s a turning point in the game’s momentum a month or two after that happened. It was when we starting making new types of slot machines, and running more live events and promotions based on the things we’d learned in Fleck.

Fleck never made enough money to sustain itself in the end, but it’s one of the reasons Casino became a billion-dollar juggernaut. No one accounts for it this way except me, but Fleck is one of the most profitable development endeavors in iOS history, easily.

But so we turned it around. Fleck unfortunately ended up getting canned. We couldn’t make the numbers work, and the acquiring company demanded that Fleck “stand on its own.” Which was a misguided notion, again, driven by folks who couldn’t see the bigger picture.

So the old guard’s gone. All the people who knew those old stories have left. All the people who knew what Self Aware was when it was great have moved on. All the people who built everything good about that studio, who suffered through the hard times, who built the culture and the team, who revolutionized the development process, who changed the game re: live ops are gone. And most of them have been gone for years already.

I wish I’d been able to segment how I felt about SA in the end from some of the people. There was a lot of collateral damage in how my time at SA ended that ruined my relationships with a lot of those folks. I felt betrayed by everyone that stayed. I couldn’t have realistically expected them to leave, but knowing that they saw what happened to me and they chose to stay… I couldn’t reconcile people doing that, and being my friends, for the vast majority of the folks involved. I know most of ’em are decent folks, and a lot of people don’t mind working for the fucking devil, but that’s a lesson I’d have to learn again, at least.

But there’s something to the last folks leaving that is maybe still notable.

We started this thing at the beginning of 2009. I often come back to thinking about how I feel about the whole experience. For a while, I’d have erased it in a heartbeat – good and bad – without a second thought. Now? Probably still the same. There’s some part of me that doesn’t think about “revisionist history” anymore, because anything that would change the arc of my life away from the kids I have now, I’d reject instantly. Whatever misery and pain led to those kids, I’ll endure. But absent that… yeah, I’d still erase it all without a second thought.

And now it’s dead.

Years ago, I was in the midst of some personal difficulties. A friend of mine heard about it, and drove over to my house. Texted me that he was outside, and was available to talk. I said “no,” I wasn’t in a good place to talk. They said something to the effect of, “Well, I’m just gonna sit here ’til you come out.” I went out a few minutes later, we drove to a nearby beach, and talked for a few hours. It was the turning point in that series of events, and one of the most memorable moments of my life.

It was that moment that taught me what it meant to be a great friend. Ever since then, I’ve tried to live up to that example for the rest of my friends. And while it’s never entirely clear whether you’re doing things right, I’ve never, ever, ever, regretted showing up.

Yeah, it’s effort. Yeah, it’d be way easier to let them sort it out, and let’s be honest, they’ll probably be fine in the end.

But what are friends for? Are they for shooting the shit casually when you’re bored? Are they so that you’re not alone when you go to things like sporting events? Meh. You can do that kind of stuff with anyone.

Friends – the close ones – are the support system that keeps you alive when you’re overwhelmed. When you’re on the receiving end of that support, it’s because you need it, and you need folks who’ve known you forever to help guide you through trauma. When you have the chance to be on the giving end of that support, jump in with both feet, and seize the opportunity to do one of the greatest things you can do for someone you care about.

Show up when they need you.

One of the surprising things of the last few months is that I’ve had reason to think about what a new job for me would look like. And there’s a lot.

I mean, I’m privileged as fuck to be able to even consider some of these questions. But I do get to consider them, and so instead of blindly doing the “default”, I’ve gotta think about what the best, most sustainable, most fulfilling version of work looks like for me.

Full time? I don’t know. I think probably if I was working 9-2:45, that’s about the right amount. Which means about 30 hours a week. Work when the kids are in school, and when they’re home, they’re priority #1.

Remote? Sort of. This is probably the biggest open question, because there’s two things I know for sure:

1. I never want to work full-time in an office or commute ever again. Period.
2. The thing I miss about work is the people, and the kinds of interactions and idea-acceleration and spontaneous nonsense that comes from being in the same place at the same time.

So while I really worry that it’s trivial to end up with the “worst of both worlds”, I think something like working co-located a few times a month for those in the area, and ensuring that about once a quarter we’re in the same place at the same time makes some amount of sense. And it’s probably an evolving thing. Early on, at the very beginning, more face time, but as we coalesce on the details of what we’re building and how, more independence. But even when we’re in the same place at the same time, temporal flexibility is required, and the ability to go deal with family stuff is #1. How to manage that? I still don’t really know.

There’s also questions of how much I’d be “in charge”. I expect that if we were to do a thing, I’d mostly be focused on high-level stuff. Team structure/culture, game direction, focus, process. But the details of what we’d be building would not generally be my focus most of the time. I think that makes a “not full-time” schedule more compatible with my actual job.

Will something actually happen? I have no idea. I think the opportunity to think about this, and potentially make something really cool with people again is alluring. But yeah – the world’s changed since the last time I had a job. Much of what I know about work is different, and learning to adapt to all the new bits and pieces, and wielding the old experience that still works… it’ll be an interesting challenge to navigate.

Most of the studio leads I’ve seen fail over the years failed because they couldn’t adapt. It’s not that they weren’t smart. It’s not that they lacked experience. It’s that the world changed, and they couldn’t see that the things that brought them success before wouldn’t bring them success again. For me, as a team lead (and also in my personal life as a parent) – missing this transition is one of my biggest fears.

We’ll see what happens, I guess.

One of the goals for this “school year” (yeah, the kids go back to school tomorrow!) is to start writing more on my blog, rather than on LinkedIn or anywhere else that’s owned by some giant corporation. Between Twitter’s catastrophic self-inflicted implosion or Facebook’s constant privacy and ethics woes, it’s clear that even though these platforms help focus an audience and provide nice means of feedback, I want the things I make to live on a platform that I own, and not have it attract eyeballs or create value for someone else.

That’s a big theme of the last few years. Over and over again, I’ve busted my ass to make other people rich, and I’ve managed to make them very, very rich. Far richer than I’ve made myself, by many orders of magnitude. I’m really fucking good at it, and I’m not going to do it for other people from here on out, even if the consequence of that is not doing it at all.

But in any case, the point is that I’ll be writing more here, or on some more focused public-facing locale that discusses specific topics. Probably resumes, game design, and leadership. I don’t know if all three would be in the same place, but who knows.

One thing that’s been bugging me for a long time, though, is how many “old school” gamers I know who have embraced the modern business of mobile games. Pay-to-win, the never ending crush of timers and FOMO, blah blah blah. In some ways, it is what it is, and you can accept it and internalize it, or you can be someone shouting at a tidal wave. I get it. But the thing for me is that while I do think that mobile games are here to stay, I don’t have to like it, and I don’t have to spend my time making them.

In 2009, we pioneered a lot of F2P stuff with Self Aware Games. Am I proud of that? Kinda? I mean, we had to survive, and to survive, we had to try a lot of things we’d never done before. We weren’t the first to offer chips in a casino game for real money, but we pushed the boundaries in a lot of ways – some interesting, some effective, some that likely established some precedents that made the world a worse place.

For me, F2P was interesting, because it enabled live games-as-a-service, where you’re making $, which allows you to keep spending on keeping that game interesting. And creating that feedback loop, where we build stuff, we observe the players, see what’s working, and respond was always really interesting and satisfying. And for a while circa 2009-2016, which was when I stopped working on mobile games, the fact of the matter was that premium priced games were literally impossible to base a business on. Piracy rates were astronomical, and the price people expected to pay for thousands of hours of work was $1 and not a penny more.

So F2P grew out of the circumstance. And the live-ops side of things is super interesting. Still is. I think it’s one of the places where there’s still a lot of fertile ground, but so much of gaming is driven by F2P and VC backing that the push for growth-uber-alles-all-the-time leads you down some weird roads, and makes a lot of games inevitably feel more like pain that fun.

For me, there has to be a future in games as a business. Where you acquire users, and those users are “profitable” from day one. And you grow at a sustainable rate, because you’re growing only when your player base supports (or demands!) growth. Not because your VC needs you to be a $1B company in 24 months or bust. Not because the founders all wanna be part of startupland and the pseudo-“celebrity” that goes along with it. Not because you’re so steeped in the F2P pressure-oriented psychologically manipulative FOMO sea that you can’t see any other way.

I don’t know what that is (yet), but there’s something there. Maybe it’s Apple Arcade. Maybe it’s a chance to reset the business side of things as Vision Pro’s marketplace gets established. I don’t know. But I know that the F2P grind isn’t for me. Not as a player, not as a developer.

I was reading One Piece the other night, and was on Book 89, and it said for the next book, “Coming in 2019”, and I thought, “That doesn’t seem so long ago, but it’s been four years.” And there’s something in my brain where my kids are still 6 and 9, not 10 & 13. We still don’t frequently go to restaurants. We see fewer people. Life is different, and I don’t know that it’ll go back to what I’d considered “previous normal” any time soon, if ever.

And obviously, a lot of people have decided their time worrying about COVID is over. But it’s not. My friend just got it. My mom got it recently. We had to go to great lengths to make sure my dad didn’t get it.

Despite all the precautions, Ei-Nyung, K and I all got it anyway. J didn’t, which is great. But we’d had all the available vaccinations, and our experiences with it were relatively mild. I don’t see it as, “We took these precautions and this happened anyway, what a waste,” – instead, it’s “We took all these precautions, which let us get it late, which meant we got vaccinated and because of that, our symptoms were mild.

Some of my friends weren’t so lucky, got it early, and are still struggling with severe long-COVID symptoms. I have no idea what the long-term health impacts are, and some of K’s classmates have had it more than three times (and because of that, perhaps, are unwilling to take any precautions, I guess).

The reason we took so many precautions was that we didn’t know what the impact would be. Or rather, we could see what the impact would be, and we hoped that delaying or avoiding getting infected as long as possible would pay off long-term. We managed to (to date) avoid exposing my dad, for instance – that was worth it. All the shit – the masks, the distance from friends, the change in our behavior – it’s for us, sure, but for me (and I assume Ei-Nyung), it was for J & K more than anything else.

And it’s weird – their lives from 6 & 9 to 10 & 13 have been really different than my life at that age. They didn’t get to spend a ton of time with friends from school, since we couldn’t pod up with anyone. I think their long-term social relationships will be fine – they both have friends they like – but it feels like … I dunno. It’s just different.

I don’t regret the choices we made. I’d make them basically all the same if we had to do it all over again.

But the time? The impact – it’s weird. there’s definitely a strange gap in our history. I hope the kids will look back at that time and understand that we were doing our best to keep them safe, and happy, and healthy. More, I think we actually did that. The impact wasn’t nothing. I believe it was worth it.