Tag: Frameworks

San Francisco: Birthstones & Fentanyl Folds

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“His birthstone is the second most expensive behind the diamond and the sapphire: the emerald.” – overheard in San Francisco’s Mission District

I didn’t realize that diamond-sapphire stones existed. I can see why that’d be expensive.

You’d think the hardest part is combining the stones. The actual hardest part? The diamond.

–

Walking through the Mission District, I’m struck by the homeless people and the drugs. I used to live in this city – within a one-minute walk of what I referred to as “San Francisco Public Library and Homeless Shelter” and “Bill Graham Civic Auditorium and Homeless Awning” (because homeless people would huddle underneath) – and still I’m surprised. I’m mostly surprised by how everywhere they are. I must’ve walked by 20 people in three blocks.

I moved to NYC recently. I left San Francisco when the people playing $1k buy-in poker were talking about tech moguls the way that I imagine people in L.A. talk about the Kardashians. The city appeared to me no longer filled with the original innovators (nerds who love tech), nor the assemblers (executives to organize the nerds), but the suckers? The moochers? The spectating hangers-on?

I didn’t remember SF’s pervasive decrepitude. I had heard SF homelessness became less ubiquitous after the Grants Pass Supreme Court case. If this is less ubiquitous, it doesn’t feel like it. (Turns out there are 4% fewer homeless people but 85% fewer homeless tents. Somehow these people have become more homeless.)

Living in SF just out of college, I watched someone inject themselves in broad daylight on Market Street. I watched someone else defecate into a bucket outside my office. I knew someone who strolled to work daily shirtless.

I remember when San Francisco outlawed nudity. It felt to me like a cultural loss. Lewd behavior was already illegal, so the ban only targeted nudity. But what’s the problem with someone being naked?

Today, I feel sad at the hunched-over druggies, wobbling in their fentanyl folds. I wish they had somewhere else to go.

Santa Cruz?

Joyful job offers

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(Written a month ago. Published only after their negotiations ended with a successful and satisfied signing.)

Today I helped someone with a job offer negotiation. I awoke this morning thinking about the elements I’d include. I wrote them down. Then I asked Claude for tips. It shifted the sequencing slightly and reframed two pieces of content. Performing skillfully in this negotiation could be worth 10% in annual pay. That’s huge! A few thoughts:

  1. Most people dislike negotiations, so they end them early. If one more back-and-forth is worth $5k in annual pay, isn’t it worth doing the additional back-and-forth? What’s your hourly work rate? Even at $200/hr, that $5k pay bump is worth 25 hours of work. There’s no way the single additional back and forth is bad.
  2. Ignore everything that isn’t a number. Sure, their internal process matters: when you hear facts about how that works, file them away. But most of the conversation is just bullshit fluff. Ignore their attempts to move you emotionally: numbers and actual contractual terms are the only relevant part.
  3. Use both logos and pathos. Just because the only thing that matters from them is the numbers doesn’t mean the only thing that matters from you is numbers. If you can move a number through fluff, that’s valuable fluff!
  4. Walk through the pathways. It’s like a chess move: follow each action down to the end of its pathway as far as you can see. (“If I do X, they might do A, B, or C. If they do A… If they do B… If they do C…”). You won’t know all the details. That’s okay. You can ballpark them. (“If I accept the offer as-is, we have a deal. If I ask for infinity dollars, they’ll either tell me no or rescind the offer. But in the middle, where do I think their lines are?”)
  5. Be positive, affable, and friendly. Everyone wants to work with someone friendly.
  6. Signal flexibility on things that don’t matter. If you’re proposing a $150k salary, offer to take it as $140k salary plus a $10k guaranteed annual bonus if it’s easier for their books. (This is an actual scenario I’ve run into: in some organizations, bonuses come from a different pool from salaries, and you don’t care where it comes from.)

Three additional rules:

  1. Know what you want.
  2. Get what you want.
  3. (Therefore, generally) ask for what you want.

Sidewalk Self-Sacrifice

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“If you’re walking on a sidewalk with a man, and you’re standing here [the left side, beside the cars], and he’s standing here [on the right side, farthest from the cars], get rid of him. Because he cares more about himself than he cares about you.” —a Reno mother teaching her Reno daughter.

This may come as a surprise to my readers, but I mostly agree with the mother. Not on the substance of the matter, nor on the mode of teaching, nor on the values being instilled. But on the fact that you should pass down to your children values that you believe to be important, and apparently this one is important to the mother.

The main thing I find missing from the mother’s description: learning. If the guy is unaware that this particular specific brand of physical comfort is significant to you, have you considered calling it out? I, for one, have learned that some women whom I like to date enjoy when I put my hands over their ears like little makeshift earmuffs whenever an ambulance drives by. I have also learned that some other women dislike this. I do *not* believe that it is an innate, values-correlated thing. I think it’s a choice that I can do, and that I could sufficiently increase my doing-of-this or not-doing-of-this to satisfy either the woman who likes it or the woman who does not.

The number of guys who are taught that sort of physical protection these days is low. The frequency with which a guy *starts out* protecting the woman that way is also low. Often, it builds over time. This mother is going to teach her daughter to select only high-machismo, high-protector men. That may be too much. The right level of protector is more likely to be someone who is decent-protector but still needs to learn the ways that you want or need protection.

It’s shit like this that is pushing back dating and marriage and slowing down natalism.

Apparently, I don’t agree with the mother.

Partner thinks my analysis of this whole experience is wrong. Partner thinks this mother-daughter dynamic is more of a teaching-one’s-daughter-to-pick-a-partner-who-is-a-member-of-a-specific-ingroup than it is teaching one’s daughter a specific set of values to find in a mate. She may be right.

She also mixes up her rights and her lefts.

If so, I *certainly* don’t agree with the mother.

Your analysis?

Fun experiences from underground poker

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An assortment of actual happenings from tonight’s poker game:

  • One guy deals the flop in the middle, then the turn on one side and the river on the other side. If you don’t remember the sequence of cards, you’re sure not going to be able to derive them.
  • We have chip denominations 50, 100, 500, 1000, and 5000. The only blind that uses a 50 is the first one: blinds start 50/100, then go 100/200, 200/400, 300/600, etc. We therefore have one denomination of chip for exactly one blind level! That’s comedy!
  • All-in AKs vs AQo preflop. Board runs out 86648 and we chop 😦
  • Ran AK into 99 on Q94A6. Lost 20k. Down to 6100 on a 20k starting stack. Next hand shipped A5o, called by QQ, spiked an A and we have a serviceable stack
  • Tables combine and we draw the ace for first dealer. We’ll take it!

After I bust in tenth place in the tournament (preflop 33 vs 8Q vs AJ, flop QJ4), I suggested a cash game to the other eliminated player. The host suggests we play 50cent / 1dollar blinds. She asks how much we want to buy in for: ten bucks? Twenty? I say “I’ll do fifty”. The other guy does too.

We set the blinds at $1/$2. They don’t organize the blinds in the generally accepted way, but it’s consistent so I accept it. Twice, the dealer (our host) deals the flop before giving us hole cards. She’s clearly very high. On one of these occasions, we just continue from the flop. The other player and I laugh very much. At the end of twenty minutes, I have all the chips. On our last hand, he doesn’t look at his cards til the turn. I flop two pair. He turns a pair of kings. We put in all our money. I win.

Down $60 in the tournament; up $50 in the cash game.

Walking Manhattan from Top to Tip

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I walked today from the top of manhattan to the tip of manhattan. From 225th st to South Ferry, a total of 13.7 miles. A few lessons:

  1. Breaks are bad.
    1. Don’t sit down. Sitting makes your legs more tired than continuing.
    2. Breaks kill your psychological momentum. Our team completed our 13.7mile task in 8 hours. Many people circumnavigate the island (32 miles) in 12 hours.
  2. Company matters.
    1. Our crew chatted, joked, and sang. The good vibe helps the miles melt. We started with four people, but an additional 6 joined us for various segments. Their novel energy kickstarted our enthusiasm.
  3. Travel light.
    1. Of our party of four, two carried only the clothes on our back and the items in our pockets. One had a small backpack. One had a large backpack. At least three quarters of the large backpack (by volume) went unused. This person may be the least athletic of our crew, so overpacked due to fears of being unprepared. Ironically, their fear of being unprepared made their backpack the heaviest.
  4. Choose your path wisely.
    1. We walked down broadway the entire way. A perfectly pleasant path. For my next trek, I’ll walk along the water: more beautiful scenery, and less chaos of other people.
  5. Keep your eyes open.
    1. At the end of the journey, when a man bikes by balancing a car tire on his head, make sure you see him and smile.

The Surgeon Paradox, a.k.a. Don’t Choose The Owner

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If two people perform at the same level in a work function and one of them fits the archetype, the other is generally better at the actual work. This heuristic is called the surgeon paradox.

Similarly, if someone is the owner of the weightlifting gym and they run some of the intro-to-barbell classes while another coach runs the other classes, the non-owner coach is likely better. This fact comes form the question, “How did they get there?” If that question offers a reason they don’t have to be good at their job – nepotism, eg – then they’re the wrong person.

On Tuesday, I took part one of an intro-to-barbell class. We learned squat and overhead press. The instructor was a dedicated weightlifter named Christian who had been teaching for 10 years.

Today, I took part two of the class. The gym’s owner led this class, and he spent more time socializing than I would like. When we started 10 minutes late, he promised that he would push longer. Then, he ended 5 minutes early and pitched the gym: they offered open gym and classes, didn’t I know?

I first learned this heuristic when backpacking around Asia. Thailand offered (at that time) 90-minute massages for $6. The worst massages, I quickly learned, were given by attractive young women. The best massages came from older women or men, presumably because the clientele (overwhelmingly young men) would often choose the young women for reasons other than the massage quality. (I’m talking about normal thai massages: get your mind out of the gutter.)

Sometimes the owner is the most knowledgable or most helpful. They commonly have the most skin in the game (eg because the business is their reputation on the line). When incentives are aligned and you want to be sold something, they might be your best fit.

On the other hand, they probably invested time and attention in an area that’s not “be the best lifting coach”.

When I send Partner, I’ll send her to go on sequential Tuesdays so she doesn’t have to experience the owner. We already have a gym membership. We aren’t looking to fill out new membership forms; we just want someone to critique our lifting form.

The Pleasant Walkthrough

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Wednesday at 4pm is my favorite part of the week. My contractor, designer, and carpenter meet me at the apartment. We walk through the building, pointing out errors and making new decisions. We confirm what’s happened over the last week, and I agree to pay them. This structure is fun. A few key points:

  1. I enjoy paying them. I pay for work immediately after it’s performed. They invoice me with clear line items. This structure means I enjoy paying them. I look at a new wall on the invoice, verify it against the real, in-vivo new wall, and pleasingly transfer them their money. I don’t hound them for work; I confirm that the work has been performed.
  2. I create clear sources of truth. I’ve only signed a few documents. Those documents control. I like this structure. It avoids the standard sort of mistake: someone operating from the wrong set of plans.
  3. I indicate mistakes, quickly. With a subcontractor structure, minor mistakes will inevitably happen. They clearly have these mistakes built into their timeline.
  4. I don’t sweat the small stuff. One time, I walked into the apartment to find my designer working with the A/C on and the window open. Yes, someone should correct him. But the cost to me in goodwill for flagging it would be way too much.
  5. Bring food. When Partner is around, she bakes cookies or brownies. When she’s away, I bring dried mango. Today, my contractor brought some mango too. Sharing food creates friendship.

Today, I gushed about the apartment. I often do this, saying things like “What a beautiful space! This is stunning”. I mean it. I love the work that they’re doing and the team I’ve hired. After I mentioned this, my carpenter said, “Your friend said the same thing.”

“My friend?” I replied.

“Yes, the one you sent by with his girlfriend. The one with no hair. He said you used to work together. He came here, then he went to 1F. He also loved the exposed beams.”

I thought for a moment, then I said, “I don’t know that person. I bet he just wanted to see the apartment!”

We laughed, and my lead contractor said, “That’s New York for ya”.

Complicated and Boring: Baldur’s Gate 3

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I like accessible games. “A minute to learn” isn’t necessary, but it helps. A well-written rulebook is sufficient. During COVID, I read the whole of the Gloomhaven rulebook — all ~95 pages. Beautifully written, well-structured, clear and clean. Loved it. I liked the rulebook more than the game.

I like elegant mechanics. Does the game test my skills, causing me to grow? Does the challenge progressively meet my level?

I spent four hours trying the alleged best RPG of all time. Released in 2023, Baldur’s Gate 3 is a computer-based license of Dungeons & Dragons, 5th Edition.

I’ve played Dungeons & Dragons around five times. Loved it every time. This game had everything I dislike about D&D, and nothing I like.

I like D&D’s innovation. Inventiveness. Possibility. What do you want to do? Do it! See what happens! Every action you take can be turned into a set of probabilities based on your skills and the outcome of those probabilities determine your success. When I say every action, I mean *every* action. This dame walks into your office searching for her disappeared husband, and you want to punch her in the nose? Be my guest! You smash her nose. She calls the police. Now that’s your story.

A good dungeon master (game leader) will accept everything thrown at them. They will guide you to where they need you without you feeling overly led. (They didn’t build this miniature map of the crime scene for nothing!) They will take you on a journey of mutual exploration and creation, giving you a mental experience that is at once novel and personal, but also timeless and compelling.

Baldur’s Gate 3 has dice. It has quests. It has storylines. It offers a mirage of the freedom that I enjoy. But when I get bored of the relatively-linear optionality and tried to steal from the merchant, it showed me a cutscene with a line of dialogue that I shouldn’t — and worse, can’t! — do that. When I pushed one of the townsfolk off of a high ledge, only half of that area rally around to attack me, and when I killed them I couldn’t even loot their bodies! How are the other half just watching, waiting to have the exact same normal-scripted dialogue conversations with me after I’ve massacred their village? I’m willing to accept the consequences — could I please have a little realism? If not, just cop out the way other games do, and don’t let me kill the people. But you can’t have it both ways: you can’t offer freedom without providing reasonable responses.

Creativity comes from constraints. The constraints of Baldur’s Gate 3 are at once too vast (the list of spells on your early-game characters number like 20, each with its own hyper-specific details), and too narrow (I can kill this townsfolk but I can loot their body).

I’ve never understood why people like D&D combat. It’s always been my least-favorite part of the game. Puzzle-solving and situation-navigating prompts creativity. It requires thinking and strategizing. Compared to that open set of possibilities, the combat feels like a funnel. Quite possibly I’ve never played with a dungeon master of sufficient skill to craft a fight that pushes at the edge of my ability, but I think it’s even more likely I just don’t get any joy from imagining chopping off a goblin’s head with a sword. I’m as much a fan of violence as anyone (if you’ve never shot a gun, you should really visit a shooting rage!), but imagined conceptual violence doesn’t do it for me. I don’t feel grand from the mental image of a theoretical-me stabbing someone. It doesn’t require enough skill to be satisfying.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is neither accessible nor elegant. I wonder if the people who love it are those who have already steeped themselves in D&D, and therefore this language is familiar to them. After four hours, I’m just not impressed. The storytelling, combat, and strategy: none excite me. None feels like it’s at the edge of my knowledge, expanding my understanding. It’s closer to a series of empty hours.

I felt this way after 45 minutes playing, when I completed the intro tutorial. I pushed through, since the game is so allegedly excellent. I am now giving up. I don’t think I’m missing anything.

I do have a number of long plane rides ahead of me. I might open it back up to see if it clicks. I wonder what stops me from enjoying this game that has a 96/100 on metacritic, designating it a “must-play” with “universal acclaim”. If you have any guesses, let me know.

On Creeping

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Walking along the beach in Palermo, Italy, I spotted a couple sucking face. Not merely kissing nor making out: they were devouring each other. I had never seen two people so intensely impassioned, let alone in public for all to see. Dumbfounded, I paused my walk, fascinated. How had I been living my life so passionless? What is it about Italians that this is an acceptable cultural behavior? Where do I get some? 

After around thirty seconds, I grew self-conscious. What if they look over and see me staring? I don’t want to disturb them or prompt them to stop something they’re so clearly enjoying, but they have selected a very public place… 

A set of hip-height bushes lay between me and the couple. I thought, “I could crouch behind these bushes and keep watching”. Then I laughed because I had just derived how someone becomes a peeping tom. 

I didn’t hide behind the bushes. I continued my walk, filing this experience away in my memory as an archetype of passion and an understanding of how slight escalations can rapidly grow out of hand. 

—

Tonight, my ex is hosting a comedy show. I have always liked their art. I want to attend their show. 

I have no ill feelings toward them. Our relationship ended amicably. Since then, they have increased the amount of animosity expressed toward me. Still, I want to attend their show. 

Tonight, at the show, I don’t want to disturb them. If I could attend invisibly, I would. But the venue is probably small – 20 seats or so. What if I attend in a hat and an N95 mask? I’ll sit in the back. Maybe they won’t see me. 

I discovered this show’s existence because a friend was watching TikTok. A voice came on that I recognized. “That’s my ex!” I said. I watched a few of their YouTube videos, found their newsletter, and signed up. I didn’t want to make it awkward, however, so I signed up using a pen name. Then today, when buying the ticket, I used the same pen name.

I’m now walking to my ex’s comedy show, where I’ll sit in the back, alone, wearing a false name and a mask. 

Somehow, every step seemed reasonable. 

— 

At the show: 

They’re literally arms-length away from me. Talking over me to the person beside me. This is exhilarating. 

They pass out pens and paper before the show. The paper has a prompt. It’s about social anxiety. What’s a social interaction that you would handle differently? 

How apt. 

— 

Games played: 

While taking a shower this evening, my two-year-old nephew summoned me. 

Our games began with the red alligator. I used it to bite different items in the bath. He laughed. 

The game escalated, somehow, to him holding a plastic shovel in his mouth while I held a plastic rake in my mouth. He dropped his, prompting me to drop mine. He laughs. We repeat. 

He then handed me the alligator, wanting me to drop it from my mouth instead. We execute. He laughs. 

One time, after I dropped it, the alligator landed just in front of his body. He laughed hard enough that he peed a little. 

This led to our final game of bath time: him trying to put the alligator in my mouth while I refused. 

Next time, I’ll tell him why the game has changed. That way he can learn! 

—

Meta: 

I feel disheartened. Speaking into the void with minimal feedback that my near-daily Substack is appreciated or enjoyed makes me sad. Do you enjoy this? Read it daily? Once in a while? What do you like about it? What do you want more? Comment on it or reply to this email. I’m not trawling for engagement; I’m seeking connection. 

Sometimes, magic happens

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Today’s game was “promptly check your emails and respond to the journalist quickly”. 

Partner does not usually check her email quickly… or at all. 

She once set her email to only notify her about new emails twice per day, and “do[esn’t] know how that got turned off”. 

Today, a journalist from the BBC emailed her. They wanted an interview, fast. The email arrived at ~11am, the segment planned to broadcast at 3pm. 

Partner lucked into an opportunity to be an internationally-recognized BBC-level expert. 

She already was, just now your average Joe knows. Or at least your average man on the Clapham omnibus.