6/9 – We left at midnight between Wed/Thurs. arrived at 4am Friday, but couldn’t check in until after 2:30. We wandered around our hotel’s neighborhood for a while, and saw some neat stuff. A small park with some outdoor exercise gear (heavily in use by 6am), and a restaurant that was serving sit-down meals that was absolutely packed.

We ended up at a place called Cafe Onion, which had a neat variety of interesting pastries from traditional croissants to very un-traditional stuff. Their signature thing was a large bready canele-looking thing that was covered in a mound of powdered sugar. Delicious, and weirdly less sweet than I’d expected.

The place was PACKED by 7:30am – but weirdly, mostly with Japanese tourists? It’s probably in some K-drama that’s popular in Japan or something. But it was bizarre. Everyone in there was Japanese or white-ish.

We went to a palace and toured around, which was rad.

The palaces’ paintwork was super interesting, and there was SO much of it. Maintenance must be a nightmare. There were also some neat details – roof “trim” that showed what seemed to be clear evolution from a dragon to a Korean – the way those t-shirts show cavemen evolving into people, then into computer nerds. We took an English-speaking tour of the palace’s garden, which was long, exhausting, but gorgeous and super interesting. You’ll see in a later post the difference between Japanese and Korean “palaces”, but the Korean one was very chill and serene.

We parked our big stuff in a locker, but I didn’t sufficiently empty out my backpack, and carried around way too much rando shit. I ended up very, very wiped out. But we finally checked in, and then collapsed in a heap.

6/10 – At N Seoul Tower waiting for some sort of music/martial arts performance to start with Ei-Nyung’s high school friend, who lives in Seoul.

N Seoul Tower was super fun. The martial arts performance was super fun. Mostly katas, but then at the end they chopped a bunch of reed bundles with swords and polearms. The traditional Korean drumming was … very confusing. I kept trying to figure out what time they were playing in, and could not make it work.

I asked Ei-Nyung’s friend after the performance, because she used to play those kinds of drums, and she said that Korean traditionally drumming is always in a triangle. But it wasn’t 3/4, I think – there were parts that were in 4/4, parts that were in something else, constant tempo changes (which they all adjusted to immediately). It was really neat. But disorienting. And as with most “Traditional” drum performances, there’s a point where you’re like, “Oh, yeah – this is the rhythm section that gets you motivated to go kill your enemies.” It was great.

We wandered around the neighborhood a bit – ended up at this PIKNIK place to have breakfast. There are a LOT LOT LOT of cafes in Seoul. Like, in this neighborhood, we passed at least 50, while walking.

N Seoul tower had two things, aside from the usual ridiculous views that you’d expect from an observation tower.

1.) They had an array of massage chairs that were AMAZING. Legs, arms, back, neck, head. Huge pressure from little air bladders and textured fabric. Fantastic. 10 minutes for 1000 won ($1). Incredible. After all the walking, it was a godsend. We both assumed we’d get a massage in every single massage chair we passed for the rest of our time in Seoul, and technically, we did. We just didn’t see any more after this.

2.) The men’s room was the greatest bathroom I’d ever seen. The stalls were whatever. But the urinals were essentially right up against the viewing window without anything surrounding them. It was like you were peeing directly out of the tower onto the city from the sky. Brilliant.

Then we ended up in Gwangjang market, which was… not. This is probably the low point in the trip for me (…which isn’t that low! But it’s also the only time I got actually upset from frustration & exhaustion and crowds and hunger).

We also met up with Hannah, who you can see in the photo. But yeah – Gwangjang sucked. Too many stalls all serving basically the same things. Nowhere to sit. Too many people. No way to tell what’s good or bad or why or how, because everything is super overwhelming and crowded. Are these bindaeduk good? Or are the ones that look exactly the same, prepared in exactly the same way, in the stall right next to this one better? I have no idea. I have no idea how anyone could tell other than trying it. So combine a weird sense of analysis paralysis with HUGE CROWDS AND TIGHT SPACES AND NOWHERE TO SIT AND NEVER STOP AND WHERE ARE THE KIDS AND IT’S REALLY HOT and yeah – it wasn’t for me. At all.

6/11 –

I think this might have been the best sign we saw in Korea. You have to zoom in and look at the pictures of how not to use the escalator.

We went to a place for breakfast called Bonjuk. It was really close (and my legs and feet have just been trashed from a lot of walking over the last two days). I’m not normally a huge fan of jook – it’s just … kinda there. And this is a chain. So even though I’d suggested it, it was more “Hey, here’s a pretty Korean-y breakfast, we should do it,” than “I am very excited about how this is going to be.”

It was GREAT.

It was bulgogi with a lot of garlic, and “Shepherd’s Purse”, which I’d assumed was gonna be some seafood that was euphemistically named or something, but it was just an herb – the green stuff in the porridge.

The rice was porridge-y, but not obliterated. It was like having properly al-dente pasta, where the rice had structure and bite, but was still rich. The meat was salty and very garlicky, in a way that really worked well with the porridge without being overwhelming, but cancelling out the “boringness” of rice porridge.

The kids had a beef & seaweed version, which is like miyukgook, a soup that Ei-Nyung makes that is delicious. And she got a chicken & ginseng version, which was also very distinctly different and delicious.

Yeah, I was super impressed.

Then we went to a VERY INSTAGRAMMY little mall, and I got a shirt. We also went to a tiny cafe & got drinks. There’s strawberry milk everywhere, and some areas where there are like five independent cafes on every block. It’s bonkers. Ended up also getting a traditional-ish Korean dessert, which is a bit of what looks like corn syrup (traditionally honey) that’s then coated in corn starch and hand-stretched a bunch of times until you get like 2^14 little tiny strands of sugar, and then they wrap (filling) in a layer of the cottony sugar stuff. It was a whole rehearsed sales pitch for tourists, but ti was still a VERY GOOD sales pitch, and I was gonna get it anyway the moment we walked over to the stand, so I didn’t feel like I was coerced into something. 😀

Ends up looking like a lot of little cocoons – usually filled with nuts, but since Jin’s allergic to walnuts, we got them with smashed Oreos & chocolate. They were GREAT on the spot, but definitely worse as time went on. Did not age well. Apparently they’re called “Dragon’s Beard”.
6/12 – Breakfast this morning was a vanilla latte and this, which is “sujebi”.

It’s an anchovy-broth soup with vegetables and torn dough pieces. Really good, and like yesterday’s porridge, something I enjoyed quite a bit more than I thought I would.

And a little variety of fried chicken from last night. We went to a food truck gathering at the Han riverside over by Gangnam, which was clearly the rich part of town. Obvious from say, Lamborghini Urus sighting, and a bunch of people riding very expensive bikes on the bike paths. The chicken was alright. Soy garlic, yangnyam (spicy and sweet, this is when done well, my favorite fried chicken), and a bunch of fried chicken skin, which was GREAT, except that it was coated in honey butter sugar, which was way too much, and made it kinda blah overall. But it was really nice to sit outside riverside on the grass. As crowded as Gwangjang was, while this was a well-attended collection of food trucks, the crowds were somehow not overwhelming.

Self-explanatory. Over in Hongdae, where we went yesterday, which is like “fancy, hip, $$$ Telegraph Ave” for the Bay Area folks.

There used to be a “One Piece Cafe” in Seoul, which had a full-size replica (or at least something akin to it) of the Thousand Sunny, but unfortunately, that closed permanently a while back. They moved some of the stuff to a new place in Hongdae called “Play One Piece”, which is a merch shop.

Sadly, it wasn’t all that well stocked – or was stocked with later stuff in the storyline, which didn’t resonate as much with me. A lot of what they sold were figures, some of which were neat, but also bulky – we’re not gonna carry stuff like that around for 2.5 more weeks.  So that was a bummer, but it was still a neat place to go check out.

Kids and I went to the CoEx convention center/mall to meet up with @eingy. It was comically huge. Went to the aquarium, which was surprisingly decent.

The CoEx “library”. Apparently a real library. We also went to the CoEx aquarium, which was surprisingly decent. I’ve never seen an aquarium with meerkats and beavers, though. Pretty weird.

I also got a watch at CoEx. Weird to get a Japanese-themed watch in a Korean mall, but I’d never seen this Dragon Ball watch before, and this is very much an “If you know you know” kind of thing. Super, super obvious to any Dragon Ball fans (ran into one much later in the trip at the Kirby Cafe who commented on it positively), but if you don’t know, it’s just a weird kinda loud watch. 😀

Also, about half the taxi drivers in Seoul are out of their fucking minds. And yet seem to not have their cars utterly destroyed, so… yeah. But between a guy persistently doing 40% faster than the speed limit, someone who only binarily modulated the gas, and a dude who (successfully) basically pushed a bus out of the way in a lane they were already in… taxis were an ADVENTURE. They’d either be staid and normal or completely insane.

I would love a guided architecture tour of Seoul. It’s full of neat buildings. Ei-Nyung’s friend was talking yesterday about how there have been politicians who have pushed for big splashy “event “ architecture, and how it created a lot of tension with residents who wanted more spent on services.

…while I agree that money would be well spent on those in need, there’s no question that Seoul is an internationally top-tier city as a result, and if the focus was solely on pragmatism without a bit of showy nonsense, the city would be measurably worse. I dunno. It’s a weird balance. You spend on some flash, it attracts international attention & investment, the pool of money you have to spend grows. Does it ever actually get spent on those in need? Do they spend more as a result? I have no idea.

Quality art.

I’m surprised at the number of unmasked folks in Korea. I’d expected more. Seems like maybe 30% indoors, 10% in crowded outdoor spaces? We ended up getting caricatures drawn at a place that had a very distinctive style. Turned out alright. I think she captured Jin really well, but Kuno’s not super recognizable to me.

You know the phishing e-mails you get that are full of bizarre spelling errors? Part of the purpose of those is to weed out the people who aren’t going to fall for the scam.

When someone talks to you about web3 games and uses the phrase “interoperability”, I want you to think of that as the exact same thing.

It’s something that sounds good on the surface, but if you know anything about game development, it falls apart immediately. Web3 “interoperability”, where you can take an NFT from one game and use it in another? No one’s going to do that. There’s no financial incentive to do so. It’s fundamentally not how games are built. And not just traditionally – even if someone fully embraced web3, there’s no incentive to ever make something that takes an NFT that someone bought elsewhere and create content for it in your own game.

So when someone says, “Yeah, man – you can buy this magic sword NFT, and when you get bored of Game X, you can take it to Game Y where it’ll be a super valuable house! How awesome is that?” what you should hear is, “I either know absolutely nothing about how games are made, or I think you’re stupid (or ignorant) and am trying to sucker you.”

They are literally the same thing.

Read through Bob Iger’s book, “The Ride of a Lifetime” and really enjoyed it. He’s a good storyteller, and a lot of his “leadership lessons” are things I want to have confirmed by someone of his stature, so … yeah, I liked it a lot.

One thing that struck me, though, is that Iger fairly deftly understood how streaming and other tech was going to disrupt Disney’s distribution channels. I don’t think he’s going to be CEO of Disney really long enough to ride the whole next wave, but I think whoever succeeds him will have to have a really good understanding of how much tech is about to change content creation.

I think we’re many years off from machine-written scripts – but what I think AI can do is essentially “Rapid prototype” entire movies, where you can stuff a script into it, and get some basic performances/visuals out quickly – like, faster, more detailed, moving storyboards. It won’t replicate the hand of a director, or the nuances of human actors (at least not yet), but I’d be very surprised if a lot of preproduction steps of films validate scripts and ideas by quickly turning them into like… “quick renders” of scripts that are largely done by machine.

And then you’d have a director essentially work with some folks to “tune” that quick render so it more closely matches their vision, and you’d invest time in specific sequences to flesh them out in more detail. But I expect you’ll get to a point where you can have a pretty phenomenal pre-vis of your movie by just using off the shelf tools.

Maybe the way tech will be disrupting content creation will be totally different. But that seems like a plausible path forward to me, and I think, again, that the best uses of tech/AI will be those that are *driven* by artists, and refined by artists.

Avoiding the incoming crush of story spoilers due to the TV show was the impetus for me to finally get through The Last of Us after 3 attempts. I’ve bought and played every version of the game that’s been released, and this is the first time I’ve finished it.

What a ride. What a game.

The first time I tried playing it was in 2013, right after my second son was born, and that opening was absolutely crushing. It’s so good, but it also sets the emotional stakes *so high* that as a new parent, I couldn’t bear it. Once you get to the clickers, the stress level was through the roof as well, and tired, constantly running on empty, and then essentially having my professional life turned upside down at the same time… I put it aside for years, and didn’t pick it up again until the PS4 version, which I got well after its release.

And that opening. Hit just as hard. Stress level just as high. Made it further over the course of the next few years – about 1/3 of the way in, but then put it aside again. It was an extraordinary experience, but so tense that between parenting, my dad’s accident, startup life, I just couldn’t add any more stress to the equation, even fun stress, without breaking.

So it wasn’t until this time around that I finally got through the whole thing. And I’m glad I was able to do it without any major spoilers. Turns out some things I’d thought I’d heard re: spoilers weren’t what happened, so that was a bit of weird subversion.

But yeah. Also weirdly prescient re: pandemic life and peoples’ responses to it. I’ve never seen more fleshed out characters than in TLOU in any videogame. Even stuff like Mass Effect, which spends a lot more time with the characters. TLOU’s linear story allows for a lot more control and detail, and it makes for really rich, interesting, layered characters that have the depth to evolve while still being … true to themselves.

What a ride. What a game.

When I think of “what’s next”, the genuine answer is, “I don’t know.”

I think AR will be world-changing the moment someone figures out how to do a socially-acceptable AR thing. I’d thought Apple was poised to do it, but it sounds like maybe it’s not coming any time soon. The Reality Pro rumors are interesting, and I’d certainly buy one, but it’s not the AR nuclear bomb going off. Not yet.

I feel pretty safe in saying it’s not “web3/blockchain”. I’ve spent months thinking about it, and find it so utterly uncompelling and pointless that I’m genuinely confused about what I’m missing. But everyone I’ve asked for help understanding has basically said some variation of the same things, which are all nonsensical to me. (To be clear, this is me being diplomatic. I understand why a company would get in on it, as investment money is there for the taking, but I haven’t heard a web3/blockchain gaming proposal that has *any* utility to the actual player.)

I do think, though, that the answer to “what’s next” is somewhere in the sea of people who just got laid off. Whether it’s some team within Meta that was pushing hard for something creative that didn’t fit the plan, or some folks in Google that was doing something strange, or a frustrated Hololens engineer… it’s probably not even anyone I expect, working on anything I can conceive of. But it’s out there. Bubbling away.

In 2008, when I got laid off from the company I worked for, the opportunity was there, and I saw it. But I wouldn’t have *taken* the chance if I’d still had my job. It was getting laid off that enabled me to co-found Self Aware Games.

I took the shot because I had nothing to lose, and the financial and social security to do it, along with the ticking clock of my first son’s impending arrival, which meant we knew how much time we had to make it work or it’d be over.

I imagine there are a lot of people out there who don’t want to put their fate into some huge corporation’s hands again. Folks whose severance gives them a bit of padding, and their specialized knowledge about cutting-edge stuff gives them a window into the future that few people have.

I’m super excited to see what comes out of it, and I know it’ll be something none of us expected.

There’s a bunch of studies about pain that show that the intensity of your recollection of how painful something was isn’t about the maximum pain you felt, it’s about the *last* pain you felt. A surgical procedure that goes on longer, with *higher* maximum pain, is recalled as though it was less painful if a superfluous low-pain thing is added to the end of it.

I’m hearing a lot about folks who were let go from companies after long tenures in terrible ways. Cut off from their communities without a chance to say goodbye or get closure or grieve with friends and teammates.

So add on that low-pain thing at the end. Find the people you want to say goodbye to and say goodbye. Organize a last lunch, or a small get-together. Reminisce and grieve and cry and laugh and whatever. Make that your last memory.

My last three jobs have ended in ways that were painful, and I was never able to get any kind of proper closure. You may want to walk away and never see your team or be in that environment again after having been treated poorly, but you have a choice how to end things for yourself. A little bit of effort to put a nice bow on it, and a great side effect is that your long-term perception of how badly things “actually” ended will be significantly reduced.

I picked up a book by Read Only Memory – a beautiful retrospective on the Dreamcast – and it’s a delightful trip down memory lane. The DC remains one of my favorite consoles, and it’s the only “classic” console that I regularly play.

Not only that, but some of my very best friends to this day were from my time working on Seaman, and from a DC-focused online message board from the era.

From that perspective, the Dreamcast has had a surprisingly significant impact on my entire life, and earned a meaningful place in my heart.

I’m definitely interested in the Vision Pro. And I say that as someone who’s been a VR enthusiast since the Oculus DK2 and someone who spent a few years making a VR product for healthcare, but *not* a fan of Meta and their “leadership” in the space. It’s been great that they put a tremendous amount of money into trying to build out a VR ecosystem, and a lot of absolutely brilliant people have worked under Meta’s umbrella. But Zuckerberg’s obsession with “social” as a driver for *VR* is about as big a mistake as I’ve ever seen at that scale.

I’d love to have seen someone with that kind of $ work on VR as a great “transportative”, isolating experience, which is what VR does extraordinarily well.

While Vision Pro’s price is obviously limiting, it’s clear that this is a “top-down” approach that I think is likely to work. And it’s likely to work because VP offers a competent, usable AR *work* device, where the Quest Pro/2 have been limited by their screen resolution and comfort, and their general … “social-first” approach.

It feels to me like Apple’s approach has been a focus on AR. But instead of getting sucked in to the massive problems that Hololens and Magic Leap and nReal have had trying to make waveguide-based “overlay” tech work, they’ve instead cranked up the resolution and fidelity of pass-through tech… which seems like the correct option to me given the fatal problems of the current crop of AR headsets.

I do *not* think Vision Pro is the thing that will make AR/VR take off like a rocket. There’s a technology limitation that will keep this a niche device for a few generations, IMO, around either “true” AR, or some sort of trickery that lets passthrough-style VR appear invisible. When that happens, AR will instantly become a gajillion-dollar industry faster than anything else, ever. This isn’t that.

But VP is a *huge* step in the right direction if it works as advertised, which, given Apple’s history I presume it will. Which will baffle folks looking at specs and $, and wondering why not Meta Quest Pro?

But the last bit of this puzzle is trust. XR requires a huge amount of environmental and personal data. I *do not want* Meta to have that data about me, because I know it’ll be abused at every opportunity. While all big companies are highly incentivized to utilize that data as much as possible, Apple’s shown a commitment to data privacy that’s well beyond anything their competitors are even willing to talk about.

And this means that once there’s a viable alternative to Meta, I’m going to drop Meta’s products like a hot rock and never look back. And that means as a developer, working on VP is a prospect I’m unlikely to pass up.

You may see parallels with the modern political landscape, but it’s just as relevant at work.

You can’t beat an effective con(person) by playing fair.

One of the most common questions I get from people who are “stuck” in their career is “when should I leave my job?” and my answer is usually “when you can’t see a way forward.”

And one of the things that people run into sometimes is that they end up in a situation where you’re at odds with someone who’s essentially a charismatic con(person) who’s excellent at managing up. I’ve encountered this multiple times in my career, and the conclusion I’ve come to is that there’s simply no way to win.

You can fight a mediocre con(person) by realizing that part of your job is not just being right, but helping your stakeholders understand that by not just logical but also emotional appeals, etc. etc. But the problem is that a great con(person) is better at doing this, because they can do everything you can, and aren’t constrained by things like integrity or honesty or facts or reality.

You can’t beat that. Don’t try.

I know that sucks to hear, and I’d love to have some sort of playbook to beat them, but I don’t. I’ve tried everything *I* know how, and have lost *every time*. So the advice I can give is just this: There are times in your career where you hit a brick wall. And you can beat your head against it for years and maybe make progress, but at extraordinary cost to you. You feel like you should be able to overcome any obstacle, fight through any bad situation.

But if you can’t see a way forward, it’s time to go. There are times when your progress at a place will come to a complete stop, and there’s simply nothing you can do about it. It sucks, but understanding that and finding a way out is much, much better than fighting an immovable force. And yeah – it sucks. Bad people win. Happens all the time. You need to prioritize what is best for *you*, and that’s often just accepting that if you’re fighting a con(person) and they’d good, and have their hooks in the stakeholders who you need… the way forward is out.

One of the things I’ve just been beating my head against with this writing project is how to elegantly tie a bunch of things together. Product design is about a lot of things – but a lot of it is centered around finding a “focus” – some clearly defined problem you’re trying to solve. That focus enables two critical things: testing and collaboration.

Testing, because if you know what you’re trying to build, you can ask people whether you’re making progress in the right direction or not. Most product development processes I’ve seen are vague enough that any result can be interpreted as a good result. Which is useless.

Focus also enables everyone to know what they’re supposed to be doing, which is *the* foundation of collaboration. It allows you to distribute authority to people with expertise, rather than keeping all the decision-making in your own head, which inevitably turns you into a bottleneck and a huge point of failure. After all, you’re not an expert on everything.

But then, distributing authority requires a lot of team culture issues to be front of mind. Psychological safety first among them. Ability to communicate clearly. To communicate *intent* in addition to tasks, so that everyone can help reinforce that what you’re doing is aligned with that focus.

It’s kind of a ouroboros in a Gordian knot – everything is interwoven, and trying to explain it in some sort of linear order breaks my head, because I can’t find a way to explain one thing without a bunch of prerequisites, and untangling the web of prerequisites… well, I haven’t found the right sword yet.

I think perhaps one way will be to separate things more, rather than trying to integrate them more. Focus, Team Culture, Leadership (thanks to Eric Nehrlich for reversing my initial order) each being different sections – sort of a progression from the outside in – starting with the customer & what they need, structuring your team in a way that maximizes the experience and strength of the team, and then what your responsibilities are to your team and why your leadership can have a massive impact on all of that jazz.

Which provides some structure to the process. I think even with those things “separated”, I’m going to have some tendrils that tie concepts together across sections (maybe an explicit “prerequisites” block where necessary, or maybe a Jason Shiga-style “choose your own adventure” path through things if you want to follow that concept down a bit deeper. I dunno.

But at least it provides a reasonable starting point.