Tag: Frameworks

The Walk Becomes a Sprint

JulianLeave a comment

To inherit a game, serve the crowd its keepers forgot. To serve the crowd, cut the boring parts.

Four times, strangers have asked whether my hat is a Savannah Bananas reference. It isn’t. Now that I know what they are, I wish it were.

A month ago, Partner told me I’d like the Savannah Bananas. The recommendation sat on my to-do list (read: “email inbox”) until this morning, when I finally read up. I am hooked. At least on the concept. 

Two decades ago, my father told me he didn’t get the appeal of e-sports. I asked whether he got the appeal of regular sports. He did. So I asked: when you watch football on TV, how do you know those are real people? If they swapped every player for a digital avatar, how would you know? 

Professional sports is entertainment. The money comes from the people watching, not the people playing. Say that out loud, and a lot of baseball starts to look indefensible. (Partner thinks I should henceforth refer to old baseball as “indefensi-ball”. I like the joke, but fear readers would find it intolera-ball.) 

The Savannah Bananas play Banana Ball, which is baseball, except someone took the rulebook and asked, of every slow part, Who is this for? A walk is the most boring thing in the sport: four boring balls, a slow and boring trot to first, a predictable outcome, nothing to see. So Banana Ball has no walks. Ball four starts a sprint, where the batter runs as far around the bases as he can while every fielder but the pitcher handles the ball in turn. The dullest outcome in baseball became a footrace.

The rest rhymes. No mound visits. No stepping out of the box. A 2-hour clock, so the game can’t sprawl. Catch a foul ball in the stands and the batter is out, which turns the crowd into a tenth defender. One guy plays on stilts (Dakota Albritton). Another bats in a cape (Reese Alexiades). I’m surprised the players still go by their own names. 

The cape doesn’t help him play baseball better. It does help him play banana ball better.

Scoring changed too. Win an inning (i.e. score the most runs in it), and you get a point. One point per inning, like sets in tennis. My grandfather leaves every baseball game before the 9th “to beat the traffic.” He couldn’t pull that in banana ball, because in the final inning every run is its own point, leaving every banana ball game to a dramatic finish. He would stay.

One detail sold me. This scoring system means the home team has an obvious edge: batting last every inning, it only has to hit until its ahead by one run. (Baseball fans would notice this as a host of walk-off opportunities.) I noticed that and assumed it was a flaw. But they even invented a rule for it! It’s called the Equalizer Point. If the visiting team pulls off more trick plays than the home team by the 8th (a behind-the-back toss for an out, a backflip catch, popping the ball off your glove and into your bare hand for a catch), the visitors get a free point before the last inning. The home team’s structural advantage, paid back to the road team in degree of difficulty. Whoever built this spends their showers thinking about the same fairness questions a real league does. They just answer them in the currency of the show. Because this league is just as real as Major League Baseball. 

Even the charity is a pun: the team’s nonprofit, Bananas Foster, supports foster kids. It’s a real charity. And also a pun. It’s bits all the way down! 

You could file all of this under parody, and parody has a ceiling. It works only while you remember the original, so it can never outgrow the thing it mocks. But the Bananas aren’t mocking baseball. They kept the bones (a pitcher, a batter, a diamond, innings) and rebuilt the rest out of love. That is what an heir does.

Heirs don’t stay capped by the thing they came from. They inherit it. Rome spent the better part of 3 centuries feeding Christians to lions; then, in the year 380, the empire made Christianity its official religion, and the church went on to inherit Rome’s whole apparatus: its language, its hierarchy, its capital, even the old chief priest’s title, Pontifex Maximus, which the Pope still carries. The offshoot outlived the host.

Games run the same play on a faster clock. Cricket already did it. A Test match can last 5 days, and the purists love every hour, but a stripped-down, made-for-TV format called T20 showed up and became the sport’s commercial engine, the version with the crowds and the money. Later this week, I’m attending the Rugby 7s world championship. I’ve only been to one match of full rugby (15 per side) – never again! – but the 20-minute, seven-person format has made me a diehard fan. 

In 2023 Major League Baseball, the incumbent itself, gave itself a pitch clock. Games got 24 minutes shorter, attendance crossed 70 million for the first time since 2017, and ratings rose for the first time since 2012. Banana ball has had a game clock since 2020. (It started in 2018.) That is what the early innings of a succession look like.

The mechanism is always the same. A game gets, well, gamed to the point where it’s no fun anymore. It calcifies. It gets boring to watch, which is fatal, because the watching is what pays. Then someone arrives who treats fun as an engineering problem, and the crowd starts to drift his way, and the money follows the crowd. I’ve made this argument at the scale of a sandwich shop. The Bananas are making it at the scale of America’s Pastime.

You could call the Bananas a parasite. They feed on a host they need alive; half the jokes only work if you know the real game. (“What counts as a trick play?” requires a frame of reference.) Sure. But a parasite that devours its host and moves into the empty niche is just evolution running on schedule. We mammals also once lived in burrows, waiting out the dinosaurs. (As a PhD in biology, Partner does not support this analogy.) 

Give Banana Ball 30 years and it will have its own record book, its own purists, its own slow sacred stretches no one is allowed to touch, maybe even its own children’s rec and traveling teams, and some new weirdo will turn up to strip it for parts. Christianity inherited Rome, then spent centuries hardening into the thing Luther showed up to protest. Every heir becomes an incumbent. Every incumbent grows an heir.

None of this works unless there’s nothing sacred underneath, and there isn’t. No essence of baseball is being betrayed, because there is no essence of baseball, the same way (as I’ve argued before) there is no essence of golf. “Real baseball” is just the version that happened to harden before you were born. Strip it down, hand it back to the crowd, and the purists will call it desecration. It’s only the next version.

Catholics took 3 centuries to get from the lions to the leadership. Baseball is only up to the pitch clock. The new game is less competitive than the old one. It is also, at last, worth watching to the end. Even my grandfather would accept the traffic.

Will You Take Twenty Dollars?

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The goal of the game is to play. You play by paying the entrance fee. Everyone’s invited. 

Outside the original ruin bar in Budapest, the bouncer quoted me the price to skip the line: “Ten euros.” 

“Ten euros for two?” I offered. 

“Ten euros each,” he said. 

“Will you take twenty dollars for two?” 

“Of course,” he replied, in a voice so light and generous it could only belong to commerce. ($20 is about 15% less than 20€.)

He wasn’t being sloppy. He was filtering. Part of his job is revenue generation. The other part is selecting patrons who will spend more money inside. The 15% discount doesn’t matter; if we’re willing to play his game, he’s already won. 

My favorite cities have always been the commercial ones. Vegas when I was young, then recently New York and Amsterdam. They run on a meritocracy of cash, with a cosmopolitan, equalizing energy. Nobody cares who you are or where you came from: Your money is good here. 

Everyone in these cities is trying to screw you, at least a little, and often not subtly. New York: There’s a man in an official-looking vest selling tickets to the Staten Island Ferry, which is free. Vegas casinos install ugly carpets and no clocks so you keep your eyes on the slot machines and forget what time it is. The Dutch more or less invented economic colonialism. None of these are ethical, but there is a particular brand of honesty to them. There’s an honesty in a structure being explicitly hyper-optimized for a purpose. A traveler going to Las Vegas may affectionately refer to it as “Lost Wages”, and go anyway! 

Social games (status, position, politics) extract, too. They just don’t tell you the price. I’ll take the bouncer with a clear sense of haggle over a gatekeeper with an opaque shibboleth any day. He’s named his price. I haggled at it. He accepted. 

Commerce can be a brutal game. But it’s also fair, kind, and possible. I remember talking with a homeless New Yorker two blocks from Central Park in 2021. Israeli-born, formerly US military, he told me he loved homelessness in New York: the crowds, the parks, the safety, the free food everywhere. New York is a wonderful place to have nothing.  

So was Las Vegas: it was the first place I went when I moved into a van. You don’t need to gamble; you can people-watch, eat a meatball the size of your head for $10, or palm a $1 cocktail shrimp meant to lure you toward a table you’ll never sit at. Abundance runs downhill to those willing to travel for it. But you must be willing to travel. And you must accept that one day it will dry up. 

This new generation doesn’t gamble. Vegas, needing new revenue sources, raised its food prices. After my prior trip to Sin City disappointed, the last time I had the opportunity for a layover in Vegas, I went to Reno a day early instead. 

The bouncer’s “of course” was more than a discount. It felt like the loose money of my early twenties, the ZIRP years in the Bay Area, when a kid fresh out of college could get hired to write at $50 an hour because nobody was counting that closely yet. It felt like being let in.

Your money is good here. So is mine. The door is open if you’re willing to play.  

And perhaps the most beautiful part: Whenever some entity – a country or company or culture – makes rules excluding some people from playing, they’ll rapidly lose the commerce game that made them dominant in the first place. It’s self-correcting, a thing of beauty. 

Of course.

Cone-Eyes

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The goal of medicine should be optimal health. You can achieve optimal health through all sorts of pathways.

Tomorrow, they will slice into my eye (graphic representation). I’ve been eagerly awaiting this day for years.

Fifteen years ago, I learned I have keratoconus, a degenerative eye disease that prompted my sister to nickname me “cone-eyes.”

I first wore glasses at ~12, contacts at ~15. Hated both. The etiology is unclear: maybe the growth plates that jammed in my cheeks as a child; maybe eye-rubbing caused the mis-shape; maybe the mis-shape caused the eye-rubbing. By the end of one’s twenties, the cone generally stabilizes.

Most people avoid elective medical interventions. As my mother likes to say: “You only get one body.” That logic explains why most people stop at the first reasonable doctor, take the standard recommendation, and live with whatever they’ve been handed.

I know at least three ways to play this game better. You can hire the world’s best, every time (expensive, not always available). You can take what’s offered, set low expectations, and hope (cheap, sometimes works). Or you can attack the doctors until you find one who doesn’t buckle. 

I do the third.

For my eyes, one optometrist wanted me to harden my corneas. Standard of care. I declined for my case. Another doctor, in southwestern Spain, wanted to harden them and then install hard plastic lenses. Closer.

Now, in Paris, I’ve found the Center for Keratoconus and the Cornea. The practice literally says “keratoconus” in its name. This specific surgeon looks at eyes like mine all day, every day. 700 of these surgeries; 0 major complications. Of the ~2 million performed worldwide, the number who have gone blind doesn’t appear in the literature. I believe it’s either 0 or close to it.

The risks:

  • The lens rotates (a second procedure is then needed to re-seat it).
  • If my vision deteriorates, I will need to replace the lenses. (The lenses won’t cause this deterioration: it’s just a natural occurrence for some people as they age.) 
  • A punch to the eye becomes a much bigger problem.
  • Worse night vision.
  • Infection (very unlikely with proper care).

The benefits:

  • Perfect vision, no glasses.
  • Perfect peripheral vision. Today, to look at something off the edge of my vision, I turn my whole head. The edges of my glasses cap my field. After tomorrow, just my eyes move.
  • Better at sports.
  • A weirder benefit: I’m less anxious without glasses. Legally blind without them, but calmer. I don’t know why. After tomorrow, I won’t have to choose.

I already spend most of my life attempting not to be eye-gouged. After tomorrow, that preference intensifies. In exchange, the head-swivel stops.

Today, walking through the park, I removed my glasses and looked at them. Despite the humorous engraving on the side[1], I’ve never liked them. I hope tomorrow evening to jump up and down on them in glee.

I feel nervous. That’s why the surgeon gave me xanax. That, and he’ll be operating on my eyes while I’m still using them. 

Will it go well? We’ll see, I hope. 

[1] It reads “HURRR DURRR !!!”

Fishy Paprikash

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The dish is what the chef cooks. The meal is what the customer eats.

At 3pm this afternoon, I bit into a chicken paprikash. “This tastes fishy,” I said to Partner, and shifted to the other chicken thigh on the plate. 

Fifteen minutes later, Partner ate from the fishy thigh. “This tastes fishy,” she said. I agreed, and we continued on with our snack.

At the end of the meal, the waiter asked why we’d only eaten 2/3 of the portion. I said, “That piece tasted fishy.” 

The waiter took the plate back to the chef. Two minutes later, he returned. The chef had tasted the piece. The piece did not taste of fish. “The fish, you see, is kept in a sealed bag separate from the chicken.” 

Partner replied something like, “It tasted fishy to me.” I agreed. Partner clarified: we did not think it actually was fish, just that it tasted more like fish than chicken should. (I did not say anything. I thought it more helpful solution to let the guy spin his way to a result.)

The waiter left. He returned with a plate of pickled red onions. “We discovered what it is!” he said. “Three of us in the kitchen tasted and conferred. These may have been on it, so it might have tasted like fish.”

We tasted them. They tasted like pickled red onions. We said, “These taste like pickled red onions.” He insisted we smell them, then taste them. We smelled them, then tasted them. We said, “These taste like pickled red onions.” 

Neither of us had been terribly unhappy. One of the two chicken thighs tasted like fish. No biggie: there are plenty of chicken paprikash in the Budapest sea.

Later, as I reflect, I’m less irked by the fishy food than the denial. Whether or not the dish “contains” fish, our experience of it was fishy. Taste is an experience.

The waiter could have won. Studies show that dissatisfied customers whose experiences improve are actually happier than those who were never dissatisfied (the Service Recovery Paradox). How about honoring our experience? “I’m so sorry you experienced it as fishy. The chef tasted it and I tasted it and we couldn’t get to the bottom of it, but I hope you’ll give us another shot next time” beats denying the fishiness.

Throw in a free shot of palinka (super cheap Hungarian national alcohol that everybody’s grandfather makes), even better. Partner & I wouldn’t have drunk it (we’ve had enough palinka for three lifetimes), but that’s not the point.

We weren’t fishing for a discount or trying to catch some special treatment. But even if we are, he’s better off taking our bait. Floundering for an explanation only sinks the ship deeper. 

No amount of swimming upstream would change our reported experience, and a little humility would have been net-positive.

The chef tasted the food. We ate the meal.

St. Stephen’s Hand

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When is a hand not a Hand? 

St. Stephen’s Hand is definitely St. Stephen’s Hand and is probably not St. Stephen’s hand. 

  • St. Stephen: 11th-century king of Hungary. Real guy. Had a right hand. 
  • St. Stephen’s Basilica: big church in Budapest. Contents include marble, gold, and a mummified right hand. 
  • St. Stephen’s hand: the actual historical hand of St. Stephen, dead 15 August 1038. 
  • St. Stephen’s Hand: mummified hand. Made the rounds: Croatia, Austria, now Budapest. Encased in an ornate golden box. 

The Catholic Church venerates this mummified hand as St. Stephen’s Hand. And thanks to fancy modern technology, we could test whether it’s also St. Stephen’s hand. 

But does it matter? 

Facts vs Hand-y Symbols

Carbon dating could tell us whether the hand comes from the right decade. 

DNA testing could tell us at least whether the hand is from a male and likely if the ancestry is a probable match (and not, say, an Egyptian mummy).

I don’t buy that it matters. 

The Hand of St. Stephen comes from the same organization that brought you The Body of Christ. To a Catholic, the eucharist is both the literal body of Christ, and Catholics who consume it are not cannibals. 

To a non-Catholic, those don’t jibe. 

Where laypeople see logical inconsistencies, Catholics have hyper-specific explanations fit for each circumstance. 

Idolatry is prohibited in Catholicism, thanks to the original constitution (the Ten Commandments, starring Charlton Heston). 

Yet, the entire basilica is organized around a mummified hand under glass, a money slot next to it, and candles you can light for €1.

Catholics say praying in front of The Hand is not idolatry. Most Protestants and nearly all Jews disagree. But Catholics have a particular distinction for this sort of behavior: 

  • “Veneration” is the appropriate honoring of a holy symbol that points the worshipper toward God. 
  • “Worship” is the inappropriate honoring of the symbol itself as God. 

In Catholic doctrine, categorically different. From the outside, indistinguishable. 

If I can’t externally verify whether you’re worshipping or venerating, is it idolatry? 

What is the sound of one St. Stephen’s Hand clapping? 

The Castle

In 1896 Hungary built a mock castle out of wood and cardboard for its millennium celebration: Vajdahunyad Castle.  

The castle proved so popular that, from 1902-1908, Hungary rebuilt Vajdahunyad Castle out of stone. This building blends Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque elements spanning ten centuries of Hungarian architecture. It now houses the Hungarian Museum of Agriculture. 

Partner asks: is it a real castle? 

Across the river and on top of the hill, the Buda Castle has been destroyed and rebuilt multiple times over the last 750 years. The most recent incarnation follows severe damage in WWII, so it is newer than Vajdahunyad Castle, and it is in a modernist style, so it looks less “castle-y” than the Vajdahunyad Castle. 

The cardboard version was clearly not a “Real Castle”. What about now, after 100 years in stone? 

The Costs

Upon entering St. Stephen’s Basilica, one may light a candle for either 300 HUF or 1€. This conversion is the closest-to-accurate HUF-to-EUR I’ve encountered in Hungary. The Catholic Church does its math. 

Just outside the Basilica, one of the staff members instructs you to remove your hat. 

The Christian god, evidently, is offended if He cannot see the top of your head. The Jewish god, I hear, is offended if He can. Many people say this is the same god. 

I’m curious what happens if a Jew with a yarmulke walks in. 

A yarmulke is a hat. The instructions say “No hats”. 

Perhaps a yarmulke is a Hat that is not a hat. 

To enter the Basilica, one must pay 2700HUF (around $9), unless you’re a religious person (with certificate) or a pilgrim (with certificate). 

I wonder what price I could get for certificates sold at the door. 

If arrested, I would have to tell the police that my certificates are not fake; they are merely Certificates. 

Five Chicken Paprikash

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In only 2 days.

At the end of Budapest day 4, Partner & I have eaten 5 orders of chicken paprikash. We didn’t even have any until day 3. Tomorrow’s plan: more chicken paprikash.

Budapest is now my favorite food city. Good Budapest restaurants all hover between 4.5 and 5 stars. You might think the high ratings come from rating inflation. They do not. The food is actually that good.

I like good food. I want to experience local dishes. After only two days of exploring, I did not expect to start to exploit. 

Explore Phase

Friday lunch: goose “bacon” and shakshouka at a well-regarded local jewish eatery.

Friday dinner: beef tartare, goulash in a basement whose walls might date back to the 1800s.

Saturday lunch: duck pate with rabbit tenderloin, and monkfish at a Michelin-starred restaurant.

Saturday dinner: beef tartare in a stunning courtyard.

Sunday afternoon: beef tartare, along with our first chicken paprikash, at some basic, non-descript restaurant. 

Now I’m Hooked

Sunday dinner: 1 more beef tartare, and 1 more chicken paprikash. But we’re still hungry, and Partner wants cake that is mostly chocolate buttercream, so we head to a local cafe for dobos torte and another chicken paprikash. 

Monday lunch: beef tartare & chicken paprikash from a place recommended on reddit. 

Monday dinner (tonight): chicken paprikash and a disappointing goulash soup. 

Explore within the Exploit

Trying every chicken paprikash is an exploration. 

Partner and I fly to Paris on Thursday. That gives us 2 more full food days. 

We might have beef tartare and chicken paprikash at 6 more meals. We would love this. Imagine the variation within the form! The different specificity! The hyper-specific options! 

When the chicken was roasted separately, it lacks a depth of cohesive flavor (i.e. the chicken is separate from the sauce, not one with the sauce). When the sour cream sits atop the noodles, you must mix it in or perish. The “dumpling” variation is vast: each chicken paprikash comes with a “dumpling”, but they range from crêpe to cube to spaetzle. (And frankly I think it’s nonsense to refer to any of them as a dumpling anyway.) 

Deep exploitation is exploration, just on a finer grain. 

Partner is excited to learn to cook it, and what better way to make it well than to try all the variations and learn what you enjoy?

[Partner says, “I want your fanbase to comment other Hungarian food for us to try. They won’t.” Prove her wrong?]

Two Service Industries

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The waiter has two jobs. So does everyone in the service industry.

A waiter who doesn’t bring your food has failed. A waiter who brings your food but ruins your experience has also failed, just in a different way. We refer to both of these elements with the same word: “service”.

Two completely different failure modes, one job title. The waiter sells a result (correct order arrives, hot) and an experience (the welcome, the rhythm of the table, the small talk, the upsells that don’t feel pushy).

Most service jobs are like this. A masseuse sometimes sells a result (your glutes stop screaming) and sometimes sells an experience (60 minutes of affectionate touch from a fellow primate). A hotel sells a result (somewhere safe to sleep, proximity to the places you want to be, a gym, food without leaving the building) and an experience (the pleasantness of all of it).

The word “service” hides two different products. Once you notice this, every purchase decision gets easier, because you stop accidentally paying for the one you don’t want.

(People miscategorize their purchases all the time. Doctors, for instance, are in the service industry. Personally, I only value “bedside manner” insofar as it impacts my medical results, generally through team cohesion.) 

The Hotel Switch

This idea showed up today while I switched hotels in Budapest.

Hotel 1 was the Kimpton BEM. $340 per night. Sauna, gym, restaurant, bar, room service, a quick walk to the Danube. A small room. No refrigerator. Paid laundry. Beautiful experience, modest result.

Hotel 2 is an aparthotel. $61 per night. A one-bedroom apartment (separate bedroom and living room). A kitchen with stove, oven, microwave, dishes, refrigerator. A laundry machine. One block from the biggest ruin bar in Budapest.

For the same money, I’d take the aparthotel every time: twice the space, a real kitchen, a better location, an in-unit laundry machine. The Kimpton costs roughly 5.5x as much. At that price, you’re buying 1) The experience of being attended to, and 2) Reliability (of room, food, and experience: Kimpton is a reputable brand.

The Preference

I’m probably odd in that I almost always want the result.

I prefer my infrastructure solves specific needs. If it solves the need, the work is done; the pleasure of the experience is secondary to the solving of the problem.

The key exception: play. I don’t play golf to get the ball in the hole. I play golf to play golf. Play is the rare context where the experience IS the product, and I’m clear on that going in.

Perhaps some people see visiting a hotel as play. I see it as infrastructure. 

The Cost

The aparthotel model isn’t free. You have to learn it. Photos lie. Hosts ghost. There’s no front desk at this residence: if you fail their check-in process, their automated system won’t email you the login code.

The variance is real: I once caught a nasty cough from a booking.com stay due to mold on the walls.

The result-first approach trades reliability for upside on the days nothing goes wrong. Most days, nothing goes wrong. And my skill at spotting good residences has improved. But I improved… by making mistakes.

The Result

As I write this I’m on the couch in our new living room, and Partner is squishing my feet. My feet hurt because the Kimpton was a 45-minute walk from the lively downtown area (from which Partner and I walked back to the Kimpton at 2am last night).

I’m enjoying the experience of a feet-squish from someone I love. Still, I’d rather we jumped to the result where my feet stopped hurting.

Budapest: Scams and Porn

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How porn, scams, and power fantasies feed each other

[Day 2 in Budapest. Written from a downtown bar.] 

In Budapest, there’s a classic tourist scam. The kind of scam that’s so common you learn about it from Rick Steves. A beautiful woman approaches you on the street, flirts, suggests a drink at a bar she knows. You go. The menu has no prices. You order a round. The bill comes: $500 for two glasses of champagne. A very large man near the door makes clear: this is not negotiable.

The scam works because the mark doesn’t expect it. He thinks he’s lucky. 

And the reason he thinks he’s lucky traces back through Soviet history.  

Here’s the loop, roughly:

1. Post-communist economic disparity creates a visible gap between local women and Western tourists with money.

2. Sex tourism follows: Guys pay for sex.

3. Some of them film it. A whole genre emerges — the “meet a girl on the street in Eastern Europe” category. The premise: “this just happens! You walk around Prague or Budapest, and beautiful woman will come home with you.”[1] 

4. Enough men absorb this trope from porn as a realistic model of how Eastern Europe works. They arrive pre-loaded with the belief that beautiful women approach foreign men on the street.

5. Scam operators notice this. They don’t even need to be aware of the porn. They just notice this story works. A woman approaches, flirts, leads the guy to the scam bar. He doesn’t question it because it matches the script he’s already running.

The porn normalized the scenario. The scam monetized the same scenario from another direction.

I like comedy, so let’s look at this from a recursive, self-parody perspective: 

Once enough guys get scammed and tell the story online (forums, Reddit, travel warnings, the Rick Steves travel guide) the scam itself becomes a known thing. It enters the cultural awareness. And what does entertainment do with any known phenomenon?

It digests it back into fantasy.

My predicted next genre: porn where the guy gets taken to the clip joint, sees what’s happening, fights the bouncer, and the girl is so impressed she actually sleeps with him. The humiliation gets rewritten as a test. The mark becomes the hero. The audience gets to engage with the anxiety of being scammed abroad, but instead of worry it gets transmuted into a power fantasy.

Reality creates the fantasy. The fantasy creates the vulnerability. The vulnerability creates the scam. The scam gets folded back into the fantasy. Someday maybe people will want to be scammed by the beautiful woman as they’ve gotten off on it so many times. 

This structure isn’t unique to Budapest. Casting couch porn followed the same loop. The real casting couch was an open Hollywood secret (producers leveraging access for sex). Exploitative, coercive, career-ending for the women who refused. Then the genre emerged: the “audition” scenario, repackaged as the fantasy itself. The power imbalance turned from a social bug into the pornographic product.

The pattern repeats because it works. A real dynamic involving real exploitation gets turned into content, and fed back to an audience that is now one step further from seeing the thing clearly. Nobody plans the full loop. Each actor in the chain is just optimizing locally — the pornographer for clicks, the scammer for cash, the next pornographer for a fresher scenario. The loop runs itself.

The economic loop feels no different from the gentrification loop seen in Brooklyn, Berlin, and Budapest: down-trodden area → cheap real estate for bars or clubs → yuppies who want to be near artists → cafes → expensive real estate 

It’s an economic loop. You’re living inside thousands every day. Try not to get fucked by them. [1] Budapest actually produces a lot of porn, and this “meet a strange woman and bring her home” is a common genre, featuring the beautiful city architecture

Top-Secret Games: Airport Edition 

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Serious places make the silliest games

Airports pretend they’re fancier than bus stations. Some games to remind them of their silliness: 

Packing

  • Try “one–bagging”: no matter how long the trip, pack everything in a personal-item-sized backpack. Partner and I traveled through Europe for 4 months with one 20L backpack each. Benefits include: 
  1. Less to lug
  2. Recognize how little you actually need. 
  3. Save $50+ per budget airline flight (which charge for carry-ons). That $50 (or $75!) could go toward a new shirt or hat or socks or whatever-you-neglected-due-to-your-limited-space-and-probably-won’t-need-anyway. 

Checking in

  • Snap a picture of the airplane seatmap. This may come in handy. 

TSA Checkpoints

Which line?

Most people choose by line length. But length is often less important than throughput speed. At a fork, neither line is likely to be 25% longer. But one TSA agent often is 25% slower. 

Free Awkward Massage

When you’ve arrived to the airport with ample time to spare, tell the TSA agent, “I’d like to opt out of the body scanner”. 

They’ll summon an agent who aligns with their perception of your gender appearance (androgynous people: I have no idea). 

That person will blandly-and-with-dead-eyes presage the next two minutes of your future. Their articulation will be simultaneously formal (“I will first pat down your upper body, then your lower body…”) and ridiculous (“When I get to your sensitive areas, such as the waistband, I will use only the back of my hands”). 

The experience feels like a procedural drama crossed with a lazy streetwalker naming service prices. You know it’s pointless and dumb. They know it’s pointless and dumb. And now they’re obligated to touch you. 

For an added joy, leave something innocuous in your pocket: your passport or a few coins or a used dental flosser. 

While they’re performing this intimate massage, try not to laugh. 

Or guffaw at their pointlessness. 

Or lean on them while they’re bending over to pat you. 

On a societal level: there’s no winning. It isn’t a game. It’s a farce.

In the Lounge

0. Play credit card games to acquire lounge access. (These games are pre-preparation.) 

  1. Before leaving the lounge, choose between Future Fueling Level 1 (stuffing your backpack with canned drinks to go), and Future Fueling Level 2 (squirreling food into the ziplocs you brought). I play level 1; Partner Level 2. 

At the Gate

  1. If it’s your birthday, tell the counter check-in people it’s your birthday. (Most of their work is dealing with annoyed travelers, so they really love this refreshing opportunity!) 
  2. If it’s not your birthday, ponder the ethics of telling them it’s your honeymoon. (Decide against it as your partner doesn’t have a ring and you really don’t want them to ask, plus lying to win games is cheating.)
  3. Ask the gate agent whether the airplane is full. If it’s not, ask them if they could move you to better seats. Do not pay for the change: that’s how the terrorists win. 

When lining up for budget airlines with your Onebag®, do the following:

0. Have a bag that, if need be, is small enough to fit in the sizer if you put on all your layers and jam your pockets full. (The first step to winning is choosing a game you can win.) 

  1. Seek the person who is least interested in doing their job correctly. 
  2. Position your body to hide your bags. 
  3. Upon approaching the desk, ask them a question that distracts them without increasing their engagement, something like “Have you been to [destination city]? It’s my first time.” Be kind and friendly and light. You’ll know you’ve succeeded when their dead eyes shift energyless to the person behind you. 

Boarding the Plane

  1. If the plane has open seating, board earliest. See the “final note” (below) for methods to keep your neighboring seat empty. 
  2. Board last. If the agents ask, tell them it’s because “Boarding last is lucky!” And it is! The last person on the plane gets to see what seats are available before taking theirs.
    1. This approach enables the harnessing of what million milers call “poor man’s first class” (an open row).

Final Note 

  • Throughout this experience, if you ever want to repel someone’s attention (maybe your bag is slightly too big; maybe the plane is open-seating and you want the open seat beside you to remain), make a grotesque face and pick your nose. (Only pull this trick if you want to distract their attention and don’t have to interact with them. If the interaction is mandatory, this move can be dangerous.) Really get into it. Remind yourself, “No one expects a nose-picker to be strategic. Some people actually look like this or pick their nose like this. I wouldn’t want to interact with them, either!”