Author: Julian

Welcome to New York

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A buddy had a Medical Issue. He hadn’t spent a night away from home for the last 6 months. I told him he should visit. I asked what he needs. He described to me a Minor Medical Necessity that he needs every day – something akin to using a needle to draw blood. He’s squeamish around blood, so a family member helps him. We hopped on video while his family member performed the task. 

I’m not super squeamish, so I gave the thumbs-up. Less than 24 hours later, he arrived to my guest room. 

Today at 1pm, we went to a play. At 4:10pm, we left the play. At 4:30pm, we arrived at a friend’s birthday party. At 8pm, I left the party. My friend stayed behind. The time is now 11pm. I assume he’s still there. He hasn’t socialized outside of his family in a long time. He’s a severe night owl. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s out until 2 or 3am. 

His family member texted me, asking how the Minor Medical Necessity went. We haven’t done it yet. I didn’t expect him to stay out so late. Perhaps we’ll perform it when he returns at 3am. Or perhaps this “every day” will be a 36-hour stretch between two performings. It’s an odd situation where I’m responsible for doing it, but I don’t feel responsible for making it happen. (I’ve shared this perspective with him. He must habeas the corpus. If he’s out til 9am, I’m not going to see him til the morning.) 

I made for this guy a nice evening. I had a nice time at the birthday party. My friend enjoyed it even more than me. 

He just called me. He’s not coming back for a while. He’s befriended a few people. He wants to have them over for board games. I asked about the Minor Medical Necessity. He says it’s fine: we can do it in the morning. 

I’m not a doctor, and this wasn’t laughter, but I think ‘tis a helpful dose of medicine. 

The next morning I awoke to this message: 

Games Played: 

  • After listening to yesterdays npr story, one reader sent in the town of Show Low, AZ. 

UNLICENSED CONTRACTOR

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Two days ago, a Department of Buildings inspector taped a notice beside the elevator in my building. 

*Gasp* 

When I checked the complaint number online, my heart sank. It read, in all caps: “UNLICENSED CONTRACTOR : WORKING WITHOUT PERMIT”. 

Crap. My deal with my contractor requires him to verify all his subcontractors’ licenses. Did he miss one? Will we get a stop-work order? This could add months. 

Wait a tick. Someone reported it on July 21. I wasn’t even doing any work then. I only received my permits in early August. 

Hold up: the complaint only says my building address, not my specific unit. 

My phone number is also on the permit taped to my front door. If they had an issue, wouldn’t they have called? 

I phoned the Department of Buildings. Their answering machine sent me to their email. I emailed them. Turns out it’s a different unit on my floor. 

Well that’s nice! 

Games played: 

  • For an amusing political anecdote, check out this one-minute-long NPR story, starting at 4:10. It’s rare that an American politician can confidently say, “The people might like me only as much as they like my opponent. But god clearly has a strong preference”.
    • Having played many card games, I can only imagine there has been at least one scenario in which a politician drawing cards to win political office argues: “But we both drew 3s. That means we draw again!” while the other politician argues about suit order. On more than one occasion, I have had to explain to a fellow poker player that no, there is no suit order in hand comparison. No one plays with the rules like politicians! 

Finding the fun

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Yesterday something clicked. The renovation will be fine. I need to chill out. Remain detail-oriented and semi-obsessed. But chill the fuck out. 

Today, I met with my contractor. We spent a while admiring the space. I told him he’s doing a great job. I meant it. The project is moving forward at its expected speed. The quality is excellent. The team is calling out potential improvements. We’re ~3 weeks in, and we’re slightly ahead of schedule, without cutting corners. Not bad. 

I’m afraid of problems. Perhaps rightfully so. Problems are bad. I’ll figure it out. Freaking out doesn’t help. 

Tomorrow, I call the Department of Buildings inspector. I buy a vanity or two. I adjust the lighting plan. I inspect the roof. All worth doing. All positive. 

In every life we have some trouble, but when you worry you make it double. 

There is fun – calm fun – underneath everything. Stressed? Accept it. Excited? Accept it. Tired? Accept it. 

I’ve found the fun. 

Professional doubles tennis is broken

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And the solutions are making it worse.

Wednesday night at the US Open, the mixed doubles semifinals started warming up at 7pm; each match lasted around 1hr20min, so with breaks between the matches we finished around 11:45pm. Two semifinals and a final in a single evening. Muchová and Menšík took it 6-3, 1-6, 10-6.

That compression is the entire point of the new format. People don’t like doubles tennis as much. Instead of making it better, they’re trying to make less of it. I think there are better moves. 

Tennis is a subdivided game. 4 points win a game, 6 games win a set, 2 (or 3) sets win a match. Why the subdivisions? Why win by two?

Because tennis crushes your soul. You spend ten minutes crunching point after point toward winning a game, only for all that work to be valueless when you lose that game. The same applies to sets: I don’t care how much work you put into the set, 1-6 or 5-7 both count as the same loss.

The subdivisions create the drama. They also create enthusiasm. Game points matter more than normal points. Set points matter even more. Deuce returns the game to an active stall: two jousters on idling motorcycles rich sparking with potential energy. Advantage is better still: one player a point from victory, the other a point from losing everything they just built.

The attempts to “improve” the game make it shorter and worse. Doubles removed advantage. 40-40 is still called “deuce”, but it’s now next point wins, rather than win by two. This change isn’t new:  the ATP has run no-ad doubles since 2006, which means the ratchet has been turning for twenty years. I’m writing now because it’s accelerating. 

This year, the US Open shortened the set too. In the mixed doubles championship, every match except the final is first to 4 games instead of first to 6. And they’ve replaced the third set entirely (final included): instead of playing games, it’s a “match tiebreak”, first to ten points.

That’s how you fit the semifinals and the final into one night.

The problem? Less-engaging games. If you have a bad game, the solution is not making it shorter. This is the classic mistake a promoter makes when they note “people have short attention spans these days”.

Don’t make it shorter. Make it better. Tennis lives on the drama. The excitement. The possibility. The heartbreak. Don’t give me less of that. Give me more.

Look elsewhere

Tennis has multiple levels: a match consists of sets which contain games which contain points. The US Open is making alterations at the set level. That’s the wrong level. The problem isn’t that doubles points come in sixes instead of fours. The problem is the points.

Only around ⅛ of doubles points are engaging (e.g. involving an impressive show of athleticism, or great strategy/tactics, or a large swing in likelihood of who wins the point). Compare that to ~⅓ in singles. And in singles between strong competitors, even when one player serves ace after ace, the mental game makes up for the disappointing physical game. Doubles has no such cover.

So make the point more interesting.

To do that, restrict the ability to hit winners. The first time a point goes hard-serve → barely-successful-return → smash, it’s cool. By the third time, it’s repetitive. By the thirtieth, you’re on your phone. (People actually left the tournament audience between the semifinals and the finals!) 

How to limit winners? Mandate that the ball’s second bounce be within some designated line arena. The game goes from pound-pound-pound to much more finesse.

It’s also a change tennis players could easily adjust to. You’re not moving the lines (they have years of muscle memory hitting exactly those places) and you’re not adding new restrictions on which shots are legal (eg pickleball’s no-volley zone). You’re limiting the players’ targeting and power, which is already in their wheelhouse. Tennis doesn’t become a fundamentally different sport: you just basically make one version of killshot illegal. 

(A worse idea, for contrast: scrap the finish line entirely and make every game win-by-two from zero. Every point matters. You don’t get the comebacks from 0-40, but you give every point more potential energy. I don’t think this is a good idea. But I think it’s still better than simply making the match shorter.)

The US Open has pumped money into the mixed doubles championship and restructured the seeding to encourage big names to play it. It worked, for two nights. But none of it makes the game better. I like watching tennis. Yet after viewing the mixed doubles at this tournament, I have no interest in watching Serena WIlliams and Carlos Alcaraz play mixed doubles just as I have no interest in watching them do laundry. Even if someone were drawn once by the famous names, they’d be unlikely to return due to the unenjoyable structure. Pumping money into a bad structure is like adding fuel to an unstable fire: you create a flash in the pan. 

You improve the game long-term by actually improving the game. Stop experimenting at the meta-structure and actually make the points fun.

Weird Al, Live

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If enough people tell you to write parody songs, you probably should. Evidence: 

  1. My biggest success in clown school came from doing an imitation of a Japanese song in front of the class. 
  2. Shortly after graduating college, I was singing an invented song about chastity that I had dubbed “Shine bright like a hymen” (to the tune of Rhianna’s song Diamons). My then-roommate said I could have a career as a Weird Al-esque song parodist. 
  3. Today, in the bathroom at the Weird Al concert, a neighbor sink-washer said to me, ““I like the ‘fit. You look like Gen Z weird al. Weird Cal. If Weird Al parodied the songs of his generation, you parody the songs of Gen Z. You get the idea.” 

—

Further musings: 

Two months ahead of time, Weird Al tickets cost $150 each. 

Same day, 13th row center seats cost $75. Plus a $27, one-hour train from Harlem. 

Willie Nelson and Neil Young are coming in a month. My father and I like going to shows together. Maybe we’ll come to this one. 

There’s something very satisfying about the fact that the artists I enjoy now sell excellent seats for $75, and that $75 is now an achievable expense. 

I get older; they get older; our lives improve. 

The Stress of Managing as a Clown

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I’ve… never managed people before. 

We set a deadline. Each week we check in. The work continues. I’ve yet to see problems. 

On Thursday, my project manager said they would pull the electrical and plumbing permit either that day or Friday or Monday. Today is Monday. They haven’t pulled the permit. Should I be concerned?
Today, I asked my project manager what they’re aiming to complete by Thursday. He said demo would finish today. I looked around and mostly believe him. (But, like, what about the current bathtub?). He says the next step is framing the walls. 

How do you know when the work is on schedule? Probably by looking at a schedule. I wonder if they have a schedule. If I can see a copy of that schedule. If I can follow it. He does have a waterfall plot. I should grab it. 

Otherwise, I’m just trusting their word every week. And that doesn’t work super well for me. It stresses me out. And I’m already stressed. I don’t need 14 more weeks of stress. 

I imagine when they send me the updated scope, it can come with a specific timeline. (Or if it does not, I can ask for one.) Then, each week at our weekly in-person check-in, there’s a process of “What did we do last week? Where are we? What will we do next week?” 

I tend to execute poorly those sorts of same thing every week. But Partner might do them well! 

Bad-with-possibility is still bad

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This post requires knowledge of the game Starcraft: Brood War. For those unfamiliar, skip to the bottom for an AI-assisted translation. 

Even if you’ve studied the deepest recesses of a bad strategic pathway, it’s still a bad strategic pathway. 

In season 10 of the Starcraft Broodwar ASL tournament, Protoss player Bisu cannon-rushed his Zerg opponent, Shine. The Zerg had fast-expanded despite the mineral structure in the natural expansion making cannon rushes incredibly difficult to block and Bisu being literally the person who invented the forge fast-expand (so he’s almost definitely going to have a forge!). 

After the cannon rush kills Shine’s expansion, Shine switches into lurker drops, where he sneaks two lurkers into the mineral lines of Bisu’s main base’s before Bisu has detection. 

Bisu micros for a hectic ~4 minutes, but holds this counter and wins.

The kicker: maybe Shine intended this all to happen. He’s the sort of player who finds a weird timing and takes his opponent down this unusual pathway. The sort of player who would “bait” Bisu into attempting a cannon rush so he could catch Bisu off-guard with the lurker drop. 

But even in that case, Shine would have had to throw away 300 minerals, his first set of zerglings, and a small handful of drones. Not worth it! 

Don’t get yourself into a bad position because there’s a chance you can win it. Get yourself into weird positions because they’re actually superior. 

—

AI-assisted translation: 

Two players face off. One of them, Bisu, is the most famous practitioner of a particular safe, standard opening — an opening that involves building a defensive structure early. Everyone knows this about him. It’s his signature move.

His opponent, Shine, chooses to expand his economy early anyway, on a map where that expansion is unusually hard to defend against exactly the kind of aggression Bisu’s signature structure enables. It’s like dropping your guard in a duel against the man who invented the thrust that goes exactly there.

Bisu does the obvious thing. He attacks the expansion and kills it. Shine loses the investment, the units he’d built to protect it, and part of his workforce.

So Shine pivots. He sneaks two units into the heart of Bisu’s home base — units that Bisu, at that moment, literally cannot see, because he hasn’t built the thing that lets him see them. For about four minutes, Bisu is fighting blind against something that can kill his entire economy. He survives it by hand, one frantic decision at a time. Then he wins.

Here’s the interesting part: Shine may have wanted all of this. He’s known for finding strange timings, for dragging opponents onto unfamiliar ground. It’s completely plausible that the undefended expansion was bait — that the whole point was to make Bisu commit to the attack so that the counterattack would land on an unprepared base.

And even if that’s true: the bait cost him a large chunk of his economy, his first defensive units, and several workers. He engineered a situation where he had to play nearly perfectly, against one of the best players alive, just to get back to even.

A trap that costs more than it catches is not a trap. It’s a loss with a story attached.

Don’t take a bad position because you can imagine winning from it. Take a weird position because it’s actually better.

Sing, Talk, Play

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Walking down 113th st in Harlem, a man jumps out at Partner and says, “Boo!” 
Partner responds by singing “It’s a hard knock life!” in his face. (The song they were playing on their boombox.)
He laughs. 

At the gym, I asked the lifter in front of me: “Can I use the 70s for a set?” He said sure. I returned the 70s. I saw his jacket. “Did you go to Yale SOM?” He says no, but he was admitted and chose Columbia instead. 
We talked for the next 20 minutes. We exchanged phone numbers, then I did my last two sets and met Partner in the lobby. He walked out shortly after that. The three of us went to an Ethiopian restaurant together. Everyone is a stranger until they’re a friend. 

This afternoon, I taught a couple friends how to play a card game (tichu). It took two hands for them to get the rules, and the strategy would take even longer. I wanted them to learn the strategy faster, so we did an open hand: I walked through the logic in different spots. They would have learned much of this strategy eventually, but I’d rather they learn faster, and they’d rather start on level two. 

All-Gender Urinals

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At the theater yesterday, I entered the door that said, “All-gender restroom: urinals” to find three urinals and a toilet, all open-air. The closest urinal was occupied by a man peeing. The farthest urinal was inaccessible due to a trashcan in front of it. I approached the second urinal. 

A woman followed in behind me. She looked at me, the other guy peeing, and the toilet. She turned to leave, then stopped herself. She sat down on the toilet, lowered her underwear (she was wearing a dress), and began to pee. The other man finished his business, washed his hands, and left. A man opened the door, saw her, said, “Oh, sorry!” and left. The peeing woman said something to him along the lines of, “No, it’s fine! Feel free to come in” 

I finished my business and washed my hands. She commented to me, “I was going to leave, but then I thought, ‘If it’s okay for you guys to do it, it should be fine for me, too.’” 

Just one of many reasons I plan on marrying her. 

Meh-ntalist

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In freshman year of highschool, my theater teacher told me: “There are no magicians. There are only actors pretending to be magicians.” 

Tonight we saw neither. 

Suhani Shah bills herself as “the world’s most subscribed mentalist. I have no way of disproving that claim. 

What I can disprove: 

  1. Around ~30 minutes into the show, she wrote a number on a whiteboard, attempting to match the number that had been written while she was blindfolded. She failed. The audience did not clap. She commented on the audience not clapping. I told her “It’s wrong.” (I was on stage at the time as an audience participant.) 
  2. Around 3 minutes later, she told me and the other on-stage participant to select one of us to draw on the board, and tell her who it was. We neglected to tell her. She incorrectly guessed it was me. 
  3. There was another part where she had someone say a number that was on their mind. The reveal was to be EITHER that she had written the number both on the white board AND on a piece of paper already on stage, OR that she was wrong on the whiteboard as a dramatic intensity-heightener, and then MAGICALLY CORRECT with the paper on the stage. I can’t tell which, because 1) the numbers didn’t match, and 2) she didn’t play off the note-being-correct in a way that was obvious or compelling. 
  4. At ~the 75th minute, she performed an actually-shocking trick that I have no idea how she did. (She received random three-to-five-digit numbers from the audience, which combined with an audience member’s “random” button presses of additional numbers summed to the first 6 numbers on a twenty dollar bill and a pre-written scroll.)
    1. Okay, I actually just figured out one way she could do it: have the “calculator” app not actually be a true calculator, but be a program which only looks like a calculator but actually inputs the desired digits at the audience member’s presses. 

Today was her first day performing in New York. On ~3 occasions, she found herself a bit bowled over by audience members being very forward. For an audience-participation show, New Yorker culture is, I would suspect, quite specific. We move fast. Give us an inch and we’ll take it immediately. Say to the audience, “We need someone with a handkerchief. Raise your hand if you have one. One of you, join me onstage.” and someone will arrive immediately. 

She also mocked the audience participants more than I’m familiar with. This may be a cultural difference, but it rubbed me a bit the wrong way. (Partner didn’t notice or care.)

If you’re a mentalist, your job is to seem like you’re doing magic. Part of that success comes from playing off your mistakes well. 

Tonight was opening night. In two weeks, I hope she’s more successful.