Tag: Frameworks

A Movable Cardgame

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The card game never ends; it merely changes location. 

For 8 hours today, we scattered cards around the table, sorted them, sequenced them, and strategized. For 8 hours, we battled: dragons played over phoenixes, bombs atop dragons, building ladders greater than our opponents’. 

When I moved to New York, I sought community. For 8 years prior, I lived on the road. The main cost: loneliness. The main sadness: that cost. 

I currently squat in my penultimate apartment. Camping, really: a mattress on the floor, few amenities. The one item I purchased: a foldable card table and chairs. 

Tomorrow, the game reconvenes at 10am. We will have 5 players, enabling one of us to duck out for a work call here and there. 

In 126 days, my apartment should be complete. I plan to live this same life then. Just with kids running around and an easier time to cook. 

As the card game paused for the night, one of our number asked another: “Why do you live in New Hampshire? When you live in New York, you wonder why anyone lives anywhere else.” 

The most compelling answer she heard: “No income tax.” 

Ah, but at what cost. 

Depression: more fun to ridicule than wallow 

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The Real Ivanov, currently on stage in the East Village, is presented as a meditation on depression. I think that’s a mistake. 

There are two ways to approach depression:

  • To look at it as a comic activity; to ridicule it. That was Chekov’s choice.
  • To wallow in it. That is this play’s choice.

Ivanov, in this version, is an empathetic figure. He is someone depressed and unable to shake this difficulty. But objectively, he is a scoundrel: he married a rich woman, then her family disowned her, and all she does is love him, yet he has fallen out of love with her. Is it related to his money problems? He says no. Yet when his wife dies of tuberculosis, immediately he marries the daughter of the richest people in town. The juxtaposition between what he says and what he does is notable. If a man leaves the side of his tuberculosis-ridden wife to prompt a new relationship with a wealthy young woman, is that not a deplorable act worthy of ridicule? Yet this production plays it straight. 

Many of the scenes make no sense when played as a drama: Ivanov (our protagonist) goes to the richest woman in town, to whom he owes money, and begs her for another week to pay. She rejects him. A few scenes later, her husband goes to Ivanov and begs him to pay this man’s wife because she is haranguing him about it. That’s already somewhat of a funny circumstance: a man begging not for payment but for his wife off his back. Now, the husband pulls out a thousand rubles to give to Ivanov to give to the man’s wife, on the condition that Ivanov not tell her it’s from him. What a funny thing to do! Now, on top of that, add the fact that our protagonist rejects the money! What a ridiculous scenario! It’s like watching a circle of Loony Toons chase each other. Yet that scene in this production, much like the rest of them, is played dramatically. 

Throughout this performance, I was the only person in the audience laughing, frequently laughing because the manner I have found to enjoy this play is by imagining I’m reading the script for it while the actors are talking. I’m enjoying the script itself (it’s very well-written) and laughing at the difference between what they are doing and the humor in the script itself. 

This performance is to Chekhov like American Chinese food is to Chinese food. It can be simple and pleasurable if that’s your taste, but it lacks a certain depth of character.

After the play, I explained to my viewing buddy that this play could either be performed as a comedy or as a tragedy, and I thought this tragic choice was lacking. He said, “Are you sure it could be a comedy?” I showed him the poster: their tagline says, “A comedy about despair”. He said, “That was definitely not a comedy.” 

Next time, please make the audience laugh at the depression, not at the production itself. 

C-

Funcle 2: the Re-Funcling

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When my sister birthed her first child, the world stopped. Oma and Opa booked a dozen cancellable flights in case of varying timings, then flew into town a week early. Partner & I waited around, there simply to be there in case we might maybe be needed. 

Today, my sister birthed her second child. This one was less of an event. Neither was particularly event-ful, but this one simply less. No one is staying up late to see the baby. Partner is on the other coast, returning here in a week. I’m sure I’ll swing by at some point tomorrow to see my new nibling, but nothing is planned and it’s all very chill. 

I wonder if primogeniture comes from that new-ness. From the fact that, for a first child, there is no competition. If grandparents were to be temporally equal, for instance, they should give the second child more attention than the first kid. The first kid had a few years of only-ness. A parent may love all their children equally for their whole lives. The first kid still got more love. 

It may equally come from implementation ease. Youngest kid is less predictable and less stable. It creates even more resource competition between siblings, and kids have enough of that as is. 

I’m excited to love my newborn nibling. Now that I know how to love a nibling, I’ll be more skilled in some ways (my nephew taught me). But I’ll also probably be a bit calcified to him (my nephew taught me how to be a funcle for him). Habits don’t die; they simply go underground. 

My job is to treat this kid as its own person. To show up and hold them and learn who they are. To learn who I am in their presence. To build our own relationship. 

I’m delighted to meet them. I’m excited to be their friend. 

Perhaps purpose is passion plus people 

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Today I introduced a friend who makes quantitative trading-teaching games to a friend who owns a chain of toy and game stores. 

We played a hidden role social deduction game for 3.5hrs. Then they discussed game theory late into the night. 

I pitched this buddy on moving to The City. In 2 days he’s met a handful of driven, interesting, intellectual people. He usually lives in a tiny town. He doesn’t get out much. It’s not healthy. 

I wonder if he’ll ever expand his possibilities and his capabilities. Or if he’ll collapse back into the short-term, brief-profit-seeking perspective he always has. 

—

The last few months I’ve focused on renovating an apartment. Hearing people discuss their passions and excitement is both energizing and deflating. I wonder where I’ll go after this renovation. A family, perhaps. Or an opening of activity into work… or both. 

I enjoy playing games. I enjoy bringing people together. I’ll keep playing games. Keep bringing people together. 

Into a dancer you have grown

From a seed somebody else has thrown

Go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own

And somewhere between the time you arrive and the time you go

May lie a reason you were alive, but you’ll never know

—

Games played

Just after midnight, as my buddy and I descended the steps into the subway station, a woman in a purple bathing suit followed. She muttered something about “Which way is this train going?” and “Who are you guys?” that we ignored. 

We paid our $3 to pass through the turnstile. She followed. 

We boarded the elevator toward the platform. The woman followed us. I tilted my head at my buddy. The woman lowered her top. 

Later, on the platform, my buddy commented: “She really must have thought we were good marks. Spent $3 and everything. And in the elevator, you see that?” 

I replied, “You know what that was?”

He said, “Advertising.” 

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. 

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.

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.