On SF Sketchfest - Day 61

Yesterday I got to attend two really cool event courtesy of SF Sketchfest, a yearly “conference” of sorts where people come and perform or speak about comedy. Living in SF sometimes has some awesome advantages, and one of them is access to people I never thought I’d meet or see in person. Yesterday was a case in point: in the afternoon, I went to a “Conversation with The Monkees”, which turned out to be Michael Nesmith and Mickey Dolenz, in person (!), in an intimate setting, just basically bullshitting about their lives, what it was like to be in the Monkees, what they’re up to now and how they feel about life and the music and movie industry. It was amazing; I’ve watched those guys so many times on TV, listened to their music, and there they were! The thing I took away the most was how lucky they felt and how happy they were to just be themselves, to have been in the Monkees, and what a goofy exercise this whole being alive thing is, which I think is an awesome way to look at things.

In the evening, I went to a 35th anniversary showing of the movie Clue, and a Q&A with John Landis - the director and writer - and two of the actresses, Colleen Camp (Yvette) and the woman who played the Singing Telegram Lady who it turns out is a famous LA punk musician and star of the Go-Gos. Anyway, it was awesome watching the movie on the big screen with an audience of folks who all love the movie, but the best part was listening to John, who was a charming and totally hilarious old British man with great memories and awesome comedic timing. Listening to him talk about meeting Michael Jackson and having him bring him pizza was the best, and what was even more awesome was seeing it with my brother.

So yeah, life is good sometimes, and living in the Bay Area can be worth it.

On Biking the Golden Gate - Day 60

Yesterday I rode over the Golden Gate Bridge with a friend. I’ve done that many times, but each time I do it’s still a pretty awesome experience. San Francisco has done a great job of making the bridge accessible to pedestrians and cyclists. Of course this is not entirely a coincidence nor charity; it’s one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world. I do t know if the tourists who were there yesterday knew how good they had it; the weather was clear and cloudless with a slightly chilly but actually quite reasonable temperature. I rode the bike I’d worked on in Ashland and everything worked great. I don’t really miss living in the Marina, but if I do miss one thing it’s riding up to and over the bridge right out my front door.

On Bike School Day 5 - Day 59

I would love to end with some plot twist, but there was no plot twist! Everything was awesome right up until the end. I teared up a little bit in the parking lot actually thinking about having to leave. It’s like a bike paradise, filled with cool people who are knowledgable and will take the time to slow down and impart that knowledge to you. Granted, it’s because you’re paying them, but you get the sense that if they could they would do it for free, and they certainly don’t make you feel like a “customer”. Anyway, we replaced the front fork on my bike. Rich had to actually hacksaw the headset off the bike; he said it was the first time he’d ever had to do that. PSA: if you ride on a trainer, make sure to put down a towel over the handlebars because your sweat goes right into that headset and salt water is incredibly corrosive. The level of gunk inside there was staggering. But now I have a fancy new carbon fork and super nice headset, and a bunch of great tools and of course a lot more knowledge and some new friends.

I need to get out more often. :)

On Bike School Day 3/4 - Day 58

I missed a day! Sorry to all my fan. ;). Anyway, I missed a day because it’s been really amazing and fun and also, unsurprisingly, overwhelming. I’m sitting in a British pub (of all things) trying to decompress after the last two days. I learned a ton about bikes; that is not surprising. What’s more surprising is that it’s been really nice chatting with all the people here. I went down to a local tool supplier and talked to them about giving the charity a wholesaler account. I talked to a veteran from Puerto Rico who arranges a bike trip to visit all the 9/11 memorials on 9/11 (they go the 600 miles from the Pentagon to New York City). I chatted with a guy who lives near Bend. I talked a lot to one of the staff members named Rich who took a promising career in Engineering and a Masters degree and ran off to join the circus, ending up in Oregon teaching bicycle repair. Super nice guy and clearly happy with his life, really enjoying teaching. He’s the one who hacksawed a part of my bike off.

I am really enjoying it up here. I need to do more things like this for myself. I’m tired, but it’s a good tired.

On Bike School Day 2 - Day 57

Day 2. I already talked yesterday about how learning makes me feel energized; today I realized that it also builds my self-esteem. There’s something very empowering about knowing how to do something and sharing that knowledge with other people. It makes you feel special; I suppose, in a way - at least in as much a way as anything else - it does make you special.

I don’t have as many specific, factual learnings available at the moment because, unfortunately, I left my little notebook back at school, but it was a great 11 hours of learning all about pedals, chainrings, chains and bottom brackets. Bottom brackets in particular was one of those topics that I was always a bit afraid of, but it turns out they are easy as pie. One thing I am really starting to take to heart is the importance of, and reliance on, tools. The bike industry - in a way that I imagine parallels the car industry - has so many manufacturer and job-specific tools. My bottom bracket, for example, which is made by Shimano, is trivial to remove, if you have the tool, and essentially impossible to remove if you don’t. If you wanted to have all the tools for all the bikes that exist, you’d have, well, you’d have a bike shop.

I spent the evening talking with this awesome guy, one of the instructors, named Rich who helped me with trying to figure out what, if anything, I should buy to help support Bike The US For MS this summer. Here’s a short list of his recommendations:

Bondhus hex key set
*Cone wrenches
Mariposa torque wrench 
*3 spoke wrenches
*Shimano TL-CN29 12-Speed Consumer-Grade Chain Tool
Cable cutter Shimano tl-ct12
Torx 10-30

There’s so much to learn! Yay bikes!

On Bike School Day 1 - Day 56

Today was day 1 of Bike Repair School, and - spoiler alert - I had a great time. This is something I’ve wanted to do for years, so to finally be here is very satisfying just to begin with. I think I would have even been OK with the school turning out to be a bit mediocre - but it’s anything but. In a way, it probably wouldn’t seem that impressive to somebody who wasn’t interested in the topic or didn’t know what to look for. But to me - who is neither of those - it is not even shy of amazing. I heard from the local hostel owner that people actually come from all over the world to go to school there, and I can understand why. I’ve never seen a more well-equipped bike repair facility; everything is immaculate, every tool is provided, and the place is spacious and immaculate. From the outside it doesn’t appear to be anything special but once you get inside it is clearly a custom built facility with one purpose in mind: to teach you how to repair a bicycle. Particularly impressive was the state-of-the-art digital whiteboard facility which let the teachers draw dynamically on top of custom notebooks filled with schematics and drawings on-the-fly. I’ve already learned a few things, not least of which include:

Learning things is incredibly fun and exhilarating. It restores my joy at being alive and my faith in humanity. I knew that already of course, but it just further cements how much I love school, and how much I love learning about something I’m passionate about.

I like fixing bikes. It triggers the same puzzle-solving joy that writing code does; figuring out how to use a tool to solve a mystery and get a job done.

Today we specifically worked on a couple of topics, some of which I knew some about and at least one topic I knew very little about: we worked on tires, tubes, and hubs, and we learned how to use a bike stand and some general repair tips. (We got a slow start because a portion of the morning was taken up with administrative stuff). Some useful individual tips I learned: you should use a bike stand by clamping it specifically to the seat post, You always want to start with a wrench that you know won’t fit inside (or around) and go up or down until you find the right one. Also Shimano parts don’t use Phillips screws, they use JIS, which looks similar but is actually totally different. You should shift to the smallest cog before removing a rear tire, you never want to touch a disc brake rotor, and you have to have the narrow end of a quick release spring towards the inside or they won’t go back on.

Of particular interest was taking apart a bike hub and repacking the bearings, which I had never done and didn’t know how to do. We also got a full lecture on how bike hub freewheels work, which I kinda sorta knew but really didn’t.

All in all, an amazing beginning!

On Unknowing - Day 55

Greetings from Ashland, Oregon where I just drove up to attend bike school at UBI. I’ll be here all week. But more about that tomorrow. Today I wanted to talk about the experience of driving up here with no speedometer. I recently took over my brother’s Chevy Cavalier, which is a beloved car with a lot of character but a marked lack of functioning equipment, most relevantly basically all the dials in the dashboard. So I drove up here - about 500 miles - with no idea how fast I was going. Of course, that’s not true; most of the time I had a pretty good idea based on the behavior of my fellow drivers and little cues, like whether I was passing the semis. Also, you wouldn’t know this until you don’t have a functioning speedometer, but those little roadside “You are going this fast” signs are remarkably useful. It turns out that - unsurprisingly - I underestimated my speed by about 5-10%. So I just took a little bit off what I thought I should drive and everything was fine.

But, spiritually, it was a really interesting experience. There’s something oddly freeing about not having any idea how fast you’re really going. I’m certainly not recommending that anybody try it on purpose, but given that I was stuck with it, I tried to really investigate for myself what it felt like. Usually I pay a lot of attention to my speed. I am basically a fifth grader at heart, which means I’m terrified of breaking rules. This is not to say I’m patient or dumb enough to drive the speed limit; I have a 10 mile rule, which has held me in good stead. But I always know how fast I’m going. Except suddenly I didn’t. The first hundred miles or so it really bothered me. But after a while, my brain just kinda unclenched. And except for a few specific moments the rest of the way up - like going downhill - I really stopped worrying about it.

The implications are obvious. All day we over-data ourselves. Likes, emails, step counts: we crave data about ourselves and other people. But how useful is it, really? Do we really need to know?

Maybe, just maybe, we don’t.

On Running Consistently 2 - Day 54

40 days later, I thought I would update with how the effort to run a 5K every day and get my time down is coming along. The short answer: it isn’t going as fast as it was before, but I’m the pace is still good; it’s still going quite well. I’ve been missing days here and there, for various reasons - mostly mental - but I’m still making progress. As of last time, I believe I was down to an 8:41 pace. I’m now at a 7:27 pace as of today. That’s a 23:11 5k. This is still nowhere near my personal best, but it’s definitely a nice serious drop. So it took 40 days to go down 1:14, that’s about 1.9 seconds/day. If I were to keep up this new pace I would get to 7:00 in about 15 days, and then 6:30 in about another 16 days, or roughly the end of January. I don’t know what my exact personal best is, but I know it’s above 6:00/mi, so if I got to that, I know I would have beat it. That would happen roughly around mid February - if I kept my current pace, but of course I won’t. I would anticipate being able to get there before my birthday in early April. My guess is Mid-March. One good thing: I’ve yet to fail once I start. That is, every time I got on the treadmill to run slightly faster, I did. The days you see with a flat line means I just missed that day. My sense is that I have another 0:30/mi to give without too much difficulty; it’s mostly a mental challenge to get on the treadmill. After that, I think the next 0:30/mi are going to be interesting. And then after that, it’s anybody’s guess. My guess is that my first “failure day” will happen somewhere in that 6:15-6:45 range. I’m committed to powering through the first failure or two, but I don’t want to turn this into a total grind or injure myself, so once I’m failing more than I’m succeeding, I’ll probably call it a day and back off. If I failed 2 days in a row or 3 days out of 5, I’d probably stop.

Somewhere in there, in order to keep making progress, I probably will have to alter other things: my sleep schedule, my diet, maybe even drop a few pounds. I’m willing to do some of that, although again, I don’t really want this to be a full frontal attack. The goal isn’t really to see what’s the best I could ever do; it’s more about being consistent and following through on a challenge.

On New Years - Day 53

It seems appropriate to spend at least one day of the blog’s time worth talking about New Years, and the idea of New Years Resolutions. You might expect me to be cynical about these, but you’d be wrong: I think it’s very human to want to have a traditional moment for reflecting on how we can be better people. We can’t think about that all the time or we go crazy from anxiety, but we also need to grow as people. So here are a few of mine:
- Working on getting my 5K time down; I’m at 7:30/mi now, I’d like to get to 6:00/mi.
- Building more meaningful relationships with other people
- Producing regular video content through the studio
- Going to bed by midnight every day
- Blog every day
- Doing 100 pushups at one time

There are more, but those are good examples! I’m honestly looking forward to 2020: I think it’s going to be a great year for my own personal development, and I can only sincerely hope that it’s a good year for the world in general as well!

On Forbes Island - Day 52

Last night for New Years Eve, courtesy of my friend Rachel, I got to do something pretty cool, which is revisit an old memory that I would’ve thought would be gone forever. A few years after I moved to San Francisco, I read somewhere - on one of those “10 things you should do in San Francisco” lists, I think - about a floating restaurant off the coast of Fisherman’s Wharf called Forbes Island. It sounded too good to be true: a floating houseboat that had been built by an eccentric old dude to get himself on Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous, complete with palm trees, a tiki bar, and a fainting room. But it turned out to be as awesome as advertised: after using it for a while he turned it into a fancy restaurant. You got there by taking a small boat launch out from the shore. It was totally uneccessary but Captain Forbes was, if nothing else, a master showman and he knew it made it seem special. I went there four or five times, but the best time was when I went with my family, and my Dad got to meet Captain Forbes on the boat, where he regaled my Dad with stories of meeting John Wayne. I’ve never seen my Dad so excited about another human being.

Anyway, recently he got older and there was a fire on the boat and, well, with one thing and another he closed the restaurant. That was about 2 or 3 years ago, and I assumed that, much like every other awesome thing in SF, I would never see it again. But fast forward to a few months back when I made friends with Rachel and I was talking to her about my experiences on Forbes Island…and she told me that her friend bought it! And she had actually been on it recently, helping fix it up! I was floored. Then she invited me to a New Years party there, and last night I went!

It’s really fun to have an unexpected surprise like that. And now, it looks like it may end up being part of my life again! They want to turn it into a combination event space/AirBnB style place. Unfortunately it’s way out there in Brentwood (because where else can you park a giant houseboat), and it’s still a bit of a mess, but they’re committed to fixing it up, and maybe someday I can go out and host a meditation retreat or something there.

Anyway, here’s to 2020: may it bring may more pleasant surprises.

On Cooking - Day 51

I used to go to McDonald’s almost every morning for breakfast. Now I cook at home. This morning, as sort of a goodbye to 2019 and a last sanity check, I went to McDonald’s for breakfast, just to see if I was missing something. I was not. Cooking at home has been cheaper, easier and made me feel more awake and aware of my life and surroundings. It forms a basis, a starting point for my morning, and I can organize my morning activities around it. I’d been told that this was the case by many people previously, but much like losing weight or quitting a bad habit, it’s something that apparently I needed to be ready for before I made the plunge. And yes, sometimes it’s annoying to have to do dishes and go to the grocery store all the time. But this morning when I went out to eat I noticed a few things: first, it takes a lot longer than I remembered. You have to get there, get into the restaurant, order, wait for your food, eat, and then get home. Second, it’s expensive, especially if you actually get what you want and not what’s on sale. But probably most importantly, I didn’t feel as good afterwards. It was a little bit irritating of a process, and of course the food itself isn’t as healthy and you always order way too much. So yeah, I’m over it.

It’s nice that, leading into the New Year, I feel like one of my resolutions is already being done!

On Specificity - Day 50

I’ve noticed something. People want to know what you’re all about. They want to understand you, like you would understand a novel or a movie. Recently, I started setting up a film studio, with a green screen. And I’ve been telling people about it, because it’s awesome and I’m proud of it. But one of the first questions everybody asks is, what are you going to film? And this is a sensible question. Were the roles reversed I’m sure I’d ask the same thing. It’s a logical, intelligent and thoughtful question. But I’m finding increasingly a sense of resistance to answering that question. It seems somehow less fun and less open and free. When I think about setting up the studio, the world feels full of possibilities. But when I start to try to get specific and answer those well-meaning questions, I find myself feeling trapped or anxious. It’s not that I don’t have any ideas about what I want to film. It’s that those ideas are kinda floppy, sorta hard to express, a bit open. And I kinda like it that way. As somebody who’s spent most of my life trying to be successful and meeting the expectations of others, it’s fun to just have a creative space to fool around in. Of course, at some point I will want to become specific about what I’m doing and what I’m trying to shoot, but at the moment it feels more like a kid with a bunch of toys. Maybe it’ll be Buzz Lightyear, maybe cops and robbers. Who knows.

So I’m listening to that voice, that says it’s not important to grow up right away all the time. That can come with time.

On Decaf - Day 49

As I was sitting this morning sipping my decaf coffee, I wondered to myself: what is decaf? I had heard vague rumors that decaf coffee still had a significant amount of caffeine in it. I had recollections of somebody telling me they washed the beans or something before grinding them - maybe that washed the caffeine off? I had switched to decaf a while back because I am quite sensitive to caffeine, and while I wanted a pick-me-up in the morning it was making me too headache-y and jittery. The taste is definitely different, more watery and a bit less earthy, but not unpleasant. So I was curious. And when I’m curious, I turn to wikipedia.

So, first things first: apparently, my recollections of vague rumors about the caffeine content of decaf coffee were totally wrong. It has very little caffeine. In the US it’s supposed to have 3% or less, although studies of coffee in the wild suggest more like 5-7%. Either way, my morning decaf coffee is not giving me any caffeine. Also, my vague notion that they washed the beans is wrong too. It’s a pretty nasty chemical process involving solvents, which used to be really bad stuff like benzene but is still sorta-bad stuff with names too long to pronounce. Scientists are working on a better method involving superheated carbon dioxide and other awesome things.

So: vague recollections are no match for data, learning is a good thing, and science is cool. And now I should probably mix in some regular coffee with my decaf if that’s what I really want. A good haul for a single morning!

On Thinking - Day 48

I was struggling with what to write about today, and then a topic just dumped itself in my lap when I went out to take a dip in the hot tub. Let me paint a picture for you: I have a hot tub at my apartment complex; it’s quite nice and right near my front door. I had noticed two women in there when I went in to put things away, and when I came back out to go in, there were two guys there as well. I didn’t get the sense that they were boyfriends, more like boyfriend-wanna-bes; clearly they knew the girls but they still felt uncomfortable around them. One of the women was sorta cute but the other was very attractive and these guys were on the make, for sure. The women were in the tub but the guys were too cool to get in. I jumped right in, of course, barely noticing this whole scene, and they paid zero attention to me. As I got in, though, the jets turned off. One of the two guys - sensing an opportunity - heroically went over to get the jets started again.

Now, as a quick aside, we have a silver button on the wall that starts the jets and then they turn off after about 15 minutes. It’s a simple system: you push the button, the jets turn on. If you push the button again, the jets turn off. That’s it. However, they do take a couple of seconds to ramp up, as anybody who’s interacted with a hot tub knows.

Now to the point of this story: as someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about people, and brains, and how brains work, and how humans think - and also as someone who has designed user interfaces - what happened next shouldn’t have surprised me, but it still did, and served as a reminder of who we really are deep down as a species. What ensued was about 5 minutes of the most hilarious, Monty-Python-esque absurdity, better than any SNL comedy sketch. First, of course, he pressed the button about 15 times, way too hard. That didn’t work. The girl said “just push it once”. He pushed it (once). The jets bubbled a little bit. He got impatient and pushed it again. Of course now they turned off. He waited. You could almost see the sweat beading on his brow as testosterone flooded his veins. His alpha male status was dripping away. He panicked. He pushed the button about 5 times. His friend came over and he shot him daggers with his eyes. Now, we were in full-on monkey-tribe mode. Nobody was thinking (except possibly me). I considered opening my mouth and saying something and thought better of it.

This seriously went on for about 3 or 4 minutes. Every thing was tried. At one point the other girl - not the one he was trying to impress - said “you have to hold it down for 20 seconds”. (Not true, by the way). He held it down for 20 seconds. I think this confused the system because they sorta half came on. He said “hey that worked”. The other guy said “nah, man, they don’t look right”. I honestly thought they might get in a fight. It was actually hard not to speak up and say something. Finally, sputtering, the jets decide - despite being abused - to fully kick in. Visibly relieved, the guy came back over to the tub. Problem solved.

Sometimes I - as all of us do - like to think that I am some kind of erudite thinking machine, capable of higher-order logic and the finest of mental gymnastics.

But honestly we should be surprised that any of us manage to turn on the hot tub.

On Zelda And Metroid - Day 46

Today’s post is going to be a little bit random and nerdy but I ran across something that is simply too good not to share. In watching one of my favorite events - Games Done Quick - I ran across a speedrun of a particularly interesting game - or rather, a weird and inspired frankensteinian hack of two games from my childhood mixed together. I’ll put a link down near the bottom, but they were playing the Super Nintendo version of Zelda: A Link To The Past - except then they walked into one of the caves and my mind was blown because suddenly there were playing Super Metroid. At first, I honestly didn’t get what was happening. The title said they were playing a “randomizer”. Randomizers are weird enough; they take the code of a well-known game, such as Zelda, and then they scramble up all the items and sometimes other things and dump it back onto a playable ROM, so basically you have the original game, except that everything is in a different place. Then they try and play those games as fast as possible. It’s actually really hard and fun to watch. But this was even more amazing - this was a “combo randomizer”. As hard as this is to believe, this is a herculean effort on the part of some hackers that takes two games - in this case the SNES versions of Zelda and Metroid - and creates an impossible combination hack which makes you play through both games, jumping back and forth between them by using certain entrances in either game as basically warps to the other game. It also strews the items from both games randomly between them - so you might pick up Zelda bombs in Metroid, or the Ice Beam in a Zelda dungeon.

It blew my mind, so I went and found the code and everything. Not only is this an amazing technical feat, but it’s actually really fun. I found out that somebody had done the same thing for the NES versions of the games - which is more my speed - and after a bit of tinkering - it wasn’t even that hard - I have it working on my NES! It’s mind blowing. It seriously is like a whole new world has opened up to me. The thought of combining two games like this never even honestly occurred to me. The best I could think of prior to this was the NES competition carts, where you play some Super Mario Bros and then a timer expires and it warps you to F-Zero and then Tetris. But this is like the two games completely intermeshed. It reminds me of the idea of Chessboxing, where you play speed chess intermixed with actual pugilism.

Honestly, it’s awesome.

https://z1m1.info/

On Boxing Day - Day 45

I was always vaguely aware of this idea of a Boxing Day, and I often used it ironically or humorously in different contexts, as a rhetorical device or figure of speech. But today I decided I would actually look up what the holiday meant. I’ll just point you to the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxing_Day. (Side note: Is Wikipedia the best thing the human race ever invented? I say yes).

Anyway, the thing that stuck out for me was the idea of rewarding people that you don’t know all that well. Christmas is all about (theoretically) bonding with and rewarding those you do know well, like close friends and family. But I like the idea of, after that’s done, giving gifts and rewards to people you interact with regularly but don’t actually know all that well. I don’t go there much anymore, but there’s this lady at the McDonalds who is always there. Same with the Subway I go to. And the lady at the front desk at my apartment complex. Folks like that, that we see all the time, and who are of course usually in some way paid to help us, but still do their jobs well with a smile on their face. I’d like to know more about some of them, what their stories are. I like the idea of giving them small gifts. I feel like I’m a bit late to the party this year, but I think next year I’m going to try it out.

On Christmas - Day 44

Merry Christmas! It seems appropriate to devote at least one day to enjoying the holiday on the blog, and wishing everyone out there a happy holiday, whatever the holidays may mean for you. I’ve decided that the present I’m going to give myself is focus and commitment to the things that matter to me for 2020 - I’ve talked about some of those already, and there’s more to come. Sort of an early New Years Resolution; a kind of Christmas Resolution tradition, I suppose! There’s so many things I want to explore and get involved with, and I’m lucky to have the time, money and space - not to mention safety - to do those things. I know that isn’t true for everyone, and for anybody who is having a difficult holiday season, I’m happy to help if you need it. The holidays are supposed to be fun and breed togetherness, but it’s almost a meme that sometimes they do the opposite, so if your brain is playing tricks on you, try taking a deep breath and then reach out to somebody. It can even be me, even if we don’t know each other well.

Anyway, may everyone have a very Merry Christmas!

On Studios - Day 43

Recently, I picked up a part time lease in my brother’s music studio. It’s an amazing space, right in the heart of San Francisco near Balboa Park, and out away from everything. Most people in there are musicians, but he offered to let me use the space to do my video work and video editing. So far, I’ve set up some video recording equipment and a very basic green screen. It’s a lot of work setting up a video studio, and a lot of trial and error! Today I went over and realized I was missing some screws for my curtain rod to hang the green screen cloth (thanks, IKEA. It would cost you about 5 cents to just throw a couple of screws in the package). But I’m excited. When this is all over, I’ll have a much, much more professional look and the ability to record professional content for my channel. I’m looking forward to what I will produce in 2020. One more step along the path!

On Dracula - Day 42

Today’s post is devoted to this awesome drawing/sketch a friend of mine made for me for Christmas. She presented it to me yesterday at her birthday party. (Side note: I’m glad my birthday isn’t at Christmas!). She was humble about it, said she didn’t spend that much time on it - which perhaps is true - but somehow the spontaneity of it really feels like it aided in capturing something about me. I told her that it looked a little like a conflicted version of Dracula, and she said that she wanted it to look like I had a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other. In my case, the conflict is not between good and evil; I’m pretty firmly on the side of good. It’s more of a conflict between happy, productive, liking-myself Adam and the…other guy. The brain fog, slightly depressed, down-on-myself Adam. So this image feels to me like it really captures that feeling. My goal, of course, is to be more the former and less the latter. And I do feel like, day by day, that is happening, though not always with the speed and consistency that I would prefer.

Here’s to 2020 being the year that Dracula finally hits the gym and loses that extra 10 pound. :)

On Dragons and Dungeons - Day 41

Last night I went to a friend’s house - more properly my brother’s friends’ house - and played Dungeons and Dragons. Now, I have an interesting history with D&D. You might think, based on my other interests, that I would be really into D&D - and you’d be both right and wrong. When I was a kid, Dungeons & Dragons was hot - but for some of the wrong reasons. Much like Marijuana, people were vaguely afraid of D&D. It didn’t seem WASP-approved or wholesome. My parents allowed me to buy the “basic set”, but they kept it high up on a shelf, where I couldn’t get at it, and they had a rule, which was I was only allowed to play if I played with them, which of course was very clever because it instantly made it super not cool. (And my parents - bless their hearts - don’t make very good Dungeon Masters). So despite the fact that I was into theater and into games, I didn’t play D&D until well into adulthood, and by that time, many of my friends that might have played D&D ended up playing basically the computer version: MMOs, most famously World of Warcraft. So I’ve probably only played D&D maybe 10 or 12 times in my life.

Still, I have a fascination with it, and particularly with a certain episode of D&D history; the famous 1983 “red box” release, which is the one I grew up with. It is, by any objective estimation, a fairly terrible set of rules for an actual game. Magic Users start out with 1 to 4 hit points and exactly one spell per gaming session which does basically diddly squat. Imagine sitting and role playing for an entire evening and you only get one moment to be even semi-heroic (and that moment might fizzle based on dice roles). Also if you get hit once you die; and in this world, when you’re dead, you’re pretty much just dead. Yeah, not a ton of fun.

Still, there was something magical (no pun intended) captured in those rules. Something fun. For one, they were simple - even an 8 year old kid could instantly understand. (This is one quibble I have with modern D&D; when we sat down last night we were each confronted with pre-made characters that each had approximately 50-100 different stats. My brother in particular was super confused, and rightly so.) And the focus was, therefore, on the story. It was made clear in the books that the DM - the Playwright, so to speak - should regard the rules as largely just a starting point. When the story was more fun a certain way, feel free to go that way. Don’t like the die rolls because they made a bad story? Ignore them, or change the rules. The story was paramount. And even though the stories were very basic: nearby is a cave, there are bad guys, they have treasure, go get ‘em tiger - it was fun. Basic, shooty-stabby-puzzle solvey fun.

Later, I happened across a different rule set called Hero Quest that I thought captured this zeitgeist even better; it was simpler and more focused. But I never forgot my love for that original red book.