Tag: Writing

French Security: Worse Than Nothing

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Whatever they’re trying to do, they’re failing.

French security sucks. It’s worse than nothing. At least nothing wouldn’t delay tourists.

I approach the metal detector. I hand the officer my backpack. I walk through the detector. He hands me my backpack. Sounds like a normal security process. Except he never looked inside my bag.

Same thing yesterday at the Paris catacombs: at the end, a man seated at a desk with a sign saying open your bags so we can ensure you’re not stealing bones. But he doesn’t open your bags. He doesn’t even wave you on. He just plays on his phone.

Three months ago at a Parisian rugby match: the security officers pat down every entrant. Partner stayed in my line. The officer gestured her to a line with a female agent. Partner walked past him. He let her go.

At Orly Airport, you must navigate through all of the stanchions in sequence, even if the line is 0 people. An extra 60 meters of walking per person. One white-haired woman ducked under the rope. The officers yelled at her. She said, “I’m old, it’s hard to walk!” They demanded she go back.

The Louvre was heisted last October. Has nothing changed? Do none of the workers know the point of their jobs? Do none of them believe in their work? Are they too snoozy from the fondue lunch? (Author’s note: fondue is Swiss. But it does make me snoozy.)

What game is this?

The goal of the game is to win. I say that a lot. Sometimes too much. The goal of the game is to win; you win by doing X. But it’s pretty fundamental: if you’re not trying to win, what are you doing?

Sometimes the goal is different. Sometimes it’s to not-lose. Sometimes it’s to survive. Sometimes it’s to tie. But this security bullshit? Whatever it is, it’s not achieving it.

Even some contrived goal, like “create a specific form of job stability for a certain number of people in France without disrupting the general French living and working systems”, couldn’t you do that better? And that’s already super contrived.

The best rebuttal: fake security still deters. Which is fair. True. Like the faux eyes on the wings of a moth, the mere existence of security may prevent me from attempting to sneak a gun into the [insert grand French monument].

But fake security works when it appears real. If the moth has a sign saying “These are just mock eyes; I’m actually a helpless moth, teehee”, that bug is getting nommed. And today, at the Palais de Justice, a guard waves visitors through a body scanner. The alarm went off on the visitor behind me. The guard ignored it, clicked “Ok,” and waved the woman through. You can’t advertise the fakeness! Bluffing is one thing! This is bluffing while turning your cards face up!

Even I get it!

I don’t like security. I’m fully anti-TSA. Considering the rate of deaths by terrorist attack vs the rate of deaths by automobile crashes, I’m even pro-shrug-it-off re 9/11.

But even I understand the point of security. I get why we have it. I just think it’s dumb.

This version of security is the worst version! Not only does it have no impact; it also wastes people’s time! What the hell are you doing, France?!

Do you want to get invaded by the Germans for the fourth time in 160 years? Because you’re sure acting like it!

The Walk Becomes a Sprint

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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.

I’m Now a Pirate

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To guard your blind side, see it coming. You can’t. That’s the trouble.

At the Saturday market, the fruit vendor asked what happened to my eye. Surgery yesterday, I said. Then: “I’m now a pirate.”

He laughed. He handed us a banana and a peach for free, then offered a pair of melons for 5 euros. I said no. He said 3 euros. I said no. He said the French version of “come on.” I thanked him and said no. (I have one working eye, not one working braincell.) 

He totaled it up. Partner counted out the change. (We play a game when we’re about to leave a country. It’s called spend all the fiddly little coins. Yesterday I paid my rent in cents.) He held out his hand. I dropped the coins three inches closer than where his palm actually was. He tutted. “It’s new,” I said, about the eye.

Depth perception. One of the main benefits of binocular vision.

The costs since have been small and physical and easy to laugh at. I have to put medicated drops in the bad eye 3 times a day, and I can’t see well enough out of it to aim, so the eye can’t guide the drops that fix the eye. Tonight Paris Saint-Germain won, and Étampes spilled into the street to celebrate, and I caught about half of it. Partner walks on my left now so I can see her. I poked myself in the eye briefly when blowing my nose. None of it bothers me for more than a few seconds. The eye will heal in a week or two. I agreed to this difficulty. 

At the bakery, Partner said, “He’s staring at you. You should say some pirate things.” Or that’s what she told me later. She talks fast, and I don’t always catch her, so in the moment I missed it and bought my bread. 

Outside, she said, “How come you didn’t make pirate noises for the little boy? He’d have loved that.”

“Little boy?”

She laughed. “He was on your right side.”

That’s the blind one.

The drops, the coins, the half a celebration, the side she walks on now: Unlike things on my right side, I saw those coming. The boy, I didn’t see at all. A kid was standing right there, wanting a gift I was eager to share, and he’d picked the single spot where I’ve got nothing. I only know because Partner saw it and told me. 

Guess I’ll need a parrot for that shoulder. 

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 !!!”

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!” 

“Yes, And” in The City.

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To find your people, yes-and. To yes-and, be the offer.

Humans sense intention.

In college, the art student I was dating saw scribbles on a whiteboard in my dorm room. They connected the lines into a picture. They saw the noise as marks of humanity. They recognized this humanity and added their own.

Improvisational theater dubs this move “yes, and.” When someone makes an offer (a line, an emotion, a mimed hat), you accept it (“yes”) and add (“and”). 

The game feels deeply respectful: honoring others’ contributions while adding your own. You can’t yes-and into a vacuum. Someone has to move first, even if only The First Mover. 

When you yes-and readily, the world yes-ands you back. 

Yesterday, the world yes-and-ed me four times.

Business Advice

Two people texted me yesterday asking for business advice. 

Partner’s friend asked about negotiating a role with a CEO I used to advise. He didn’t know I knew the CEO. He generically knew me as a CEO whisperer and good at creatively evaluating contracts.

Another friend asked for advice negotiating his boyfriend’s equity compensation package. I shot back 13 points of commentary. He replied: “Julian, babe, wow!!!! Thank you SO much for this!!!”

My initial offer in these exchanges was a reputation built over years. My friends’ yes-es were recognizing the mark. Their and-s were the specific questions.

Small World

My former college roommate brought a friend to play cards til midnight. When the new guy mentioned he was a debater, I ballparked his age and asked if he had known my brother-in-law.

He said: “Oh yeah, he was a legend. Is he still very stoic?”

My offer: hosting an invented cooperative poker game.

His “yes”: joining. His “and”: sharing about himself.

My “yes”: piecing together the traits. My “and”: asking the precise follow-up.

His “yes”: acknowledgement. His “and”: mentioning my brother-in-law’s reputation.

We snapped a selfie to send to brother-in-law. After this connection, our poker-game riffing increased. 

On the Train

A woman in her mid-fifties boarded the 6 train at 42nd Street Grand Central. She commented on my fun hat and asked what I was reading. 

My initial offer: being legible, plus an emotional openness to interaction that I learned at clown school.

Shortly after studying in France, I noticed myriad people wanting to interact with me. Turns out: you can teach charisma.

The exchange:

“It’s called The Grasshopper.”

“Is it about grasshoppers?”

“It’s about philosophy of games.”

“Are you a philosophy major?”

“I was a philosophy major.”

“Do you still work in philosophy?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

She smiled. “What do you write about?”

“I run a publication where I write about games, and I ghostwrite for tech people.”

“I’ve been looking for a ghostwriter.”

We exchanged information. We’re scheduled to talk Monday.

My offer: the book and the hat. Her “yes”: the engagement. Her “and”: the question chain.

Our conversation yes-and-ed back and forth.

Independently, Marketing discovered this move: make deliberate choices that legibly convey the desired information.

Yes-and has the same rule.

“No, But…” 

Partner and I visited a bathroom showroom.

For our two bathtubs, the “bathroom expert” recommended a 15.5″ deep bathtub for the larger space. We had told him we wanted that one to be maximally deep. (I found a 17.5″ deep bathtub after five minutes of searching. In a brand he represents.)

His response rejected our initial offer.

I told him we were unlikely to support his other recommendation either. We had asked for a bathtub. His recommendation was only 8” deep. (Partner’s comment to me, after the fact: “That’s not a bathtub. That’s a sink.”)

The salesman: “But it’s good for washing children.”

He didn’t ask why we disliked the depth. He didn’t interrogate enough to understand our preferences.

This was a “but.”

When someone “no”s or “but”s you, you question if they’re values-aligned.

This “no” will prompt me to check all his other work.

New York

New York is a city of infinite possibilities.

My rate of random encounters has skyrocketed over the last 4 months.

  • Met new friends at an alumni gathering. We’ve since played board games four times.
  • Met a ghostwriting client at a tech-incubator brunch.

The hard part has always been noticing the games. Yesterday I noticed four.

Moving to New York was a “yes.” When I’m living in alignment with my preferences, the city hollers back “yes” every day.

And its millions of people add a booming “AND!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

People can sense agency. The more you enact change on the world, the more you attract people to you. 

You yes-and the world; the world becomes more yes-and-able for you. 

Take it from a better clown than me: Life has been created for you to enjoy, but you won’t enjoy it unless you pay for it with some good, hard work. 

Score is the Thief of Commerce

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“To win, score the most. To score the most, stop keeping score.”

Last week, after three days in my metaphorical writing cave, I hollered to Partner, “I know I haven’t been doing dishes. I owe you.” I caught it immediately: “Actually, I think keeping score is bad practice. I take it back.” She laughed and continued on with her day.

I like scores. Keeping score is a clear and straightforward way to understand and compare performance. But sometimes, keeping score can be actively harmful.

Macro scoring enables comparison between multiple options. Micro-scoring corrodes as it leads you to optimize the wrong things. As my family motto goes (it’s intentionally too long for comedic effect), “Before you hyper-optimize a process, be sure you’re optimizing for what you actually want and not a correlate.”

The Bad (Reflexive Scoring)

Should I owe Partner dishes? I was heads-down on work because I spent the previous three weeks coordinating medical appointments for Partner and renovation work for our apartment.

As Middle East history teaches: if you dig back far enough, you can find huge grievances on all sides. Without touching on rightness or wrongness (as I do not have a sufficiently long stick with which to touch), this process does not seem to form stability. And stability is something I would like in my partnership.

Simply: if Partner feels I’m not doing dishes enough, she will say so. If I feel I’m not washing dishes enough, I should wash more dishes.

Score-keeping as a way of digging yourself out of a hole will often lead to resentment of the scorekeeping mechanism (or participants, which is even worse).

The Good (Reflective Scoring)

I once heard a successful startup founder describe his romantic check-ins. He and his wife divide his work into four categories: money earner, father, lover, friend. Rating each on a 1–10 scale, so long as his overall score achieves more than 25 points, he passes. For this partnership, this calculation may solve a real problem: it recognizes a person’s contributions despite changes over time.

This scoring process is a feedback instrument, driven by deliberate weighing of details — not a reflex prompted by momentary discomfort.

The Bridge (Incentive Alignment)

Hourly work misaligns incentives. This structure causes less efficiency and innovation: working faster costs the worker money!

I realized this structure with my $16/hr marketing internship after my sophomore year of college. I automated all my work, and all the other interns’ work. My superior said, “Sit tight and read.” I arrived to work early and left late because they paid me hourly. I was always there to do work if they wanted to give me work. (Now, I would take a slightly different tack: raising this lack-of-work to my boss’s boss. But at the time, I thought arriving early and staying late to maximize my dollars was the standard way to play the game.)

Even if your boss is your best friend, the hourly contract puts you in opposition. The score isn’t a personality conflict; it’s a contract feature. No amount of scorekeeping can account for misalignment.

The Ugly (Anti-Commerce)

Some work should be 90%–10%. In my partnership, Partner captains cooking 90% of the time; I captain travel logistics and social plans 90% of the time. I’m sufficiently capable to create edible food. Partner is sufficiently capable to book flights and schedule with friends. We simply enjoy it less (and are less skilled).

Micro tit-for-tat prevents specializing and trading, which is the fundamental lesson of commerce. So long as we both share the common knowledge that we’re both helping the team, the score is anti-helpful.

When partners are aligned on what they’re moving toward, the allocation can skew without it mattering. Some weeks she does more; some weeks I do. The “oxygen mask before helping others” frame applies: feeding yourself, whether literal food or via nurturing work, isn’t a withdrawal from the partnership — it’s a contribution to it, because your effectiveness is shared.

The reflex inside an aligned partnership imports structural-scoring logic into a relationship that thrives on more flexibility than scoring provides.

The score is the thief of commerce.

The Reckoning (Trust)

Would you rather employ someone values-aligned and unskilled, or skilled but misaligned? For piecework, I think skilled but misaligned. For a teammate, values-aligned. (That said, I am historically incompetent at working with unskilled people.) But I guess that’s still better than someone who will sabotage, even if they do it unknowingly.

Alignment produces trust. A scorecard substitutes for trust, poorly.

Last night, Partner asked me to do the dishes.

There’s a Fine, Fine Line Between Campy & Bad

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Bad + heightened + self-aware = camp. Bad + heightened – self-aware = bad.

Can you discern between campy acting and bad acting?

On Thursday, I watched a play. Half the actors performed camp; the other half were unskilled. Camp is the mimicry and affectionate mockery of bad. There’s a fine, fine line between them: to the untrained observer, camp could appear as bad.

Thus, the performers must train the observers.

What’s in a Play?

A skilled actor who cannot entertain is not a skilled actor. However, in this situation, I do not think the actors are entirely to blame. An actor in an uncurated environment can only do so much.

The director is responsible for show cohesion, just as a coach is responsible for team cohesion. (A football player can reasonably say, “I played my role perfectly; today’s loss is not my fault.”)

Thursday’s show presented individuals but lacked a bigger picture. Every actor played according to their ability. Some of those abilities were poor. The director failed to account for this gap. Again, I think this is a coaching issue. Plenty of highschool sports teams have bench warmers and waterboys. Plenty of highschool plays contain “tree #1”. (And New York City theater likely has far more people auditioning than available roles.)

Just as a comedian must wink at the audience lest we think him a liar, this play needed a wink. The play was a small-theater (but professional) production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, a musical containing archetypes — archetypes that, as over-the-top portrayals, may not be authentic. Inauthentic acting done well may be camp. Done poorly? Amateurish.

When the actors first entered the stage, playing mock-audience members, one could have said, “This is going to be campy.” A director’s note in the printed programs could have said, “We lean into the camp.” Instead, the performances fell into the uncanny valley.

A Holistic Hole

A basketball coach must do more than ensure each teammate performs their role. They must ensure the team gets the ball into the basket. Otherwise, you end up with beautiful acrobatics but complete strategic failure.

Or, in this case, a play that audiences did not want to watch.

In Favor of Race-Ism

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Not that kind; the playful kind. 

Two days ago, Partner asked, “Are most games races?” 

As a lover of games and bad puns, I present to you: 

RACE-IAL DYNAMICS: a taxonomy of games if we assume all games are races.

Why Touch Upon Race? 

Race is a touchy subject. Why perform this taxonomy at all? 

Story structures come from games. Flirting often mimics tag. Political jabs often mimic “I’m not touching you”. 

Separating the races allows us a clearer vocabulary about the different race mechanics found in a game. 

If you’re playing game A, which has race dynamic Alpha, would the game be better with race dynamic Beta? 

What’s in a Race? 

A “race” is approximately a competition involving time. Common words/constructions include: 

  • “First to X” 
  • “Most Y in [time]” 

RACE-ISM is the categorization of games by their races. (People who subscribe to 

this categorization are therefore RACE-IST.) 

Segregating the Races

Some races are pure: reach the victory condition before the opponent. Most games contain some amount of RACE MIXING (the incorporation of different race-like components, which tends to create stronger games, as we’ll get into later). Let us attempt for a moment to see the races in their purest forms. 

Who’s Racing, How & When? 

  • SIMULTANEOUS RACE
    • “I race while you race” 
  • SEQUENTIAL RACE
    • “I race, then you race” 
  • ASYMMETRIC RACES
    • “Can I X before you Y?”
  • ANTIPARALLEL RACE
    • “You want to go in one direction; I want to go in the other” (e.g. tug of war). 

Race Physiognomy 

  • RACE-RACE
    • “First to X”. 
  • SLOW RACE
    • “Who gets there last?”
  • SCORE RACE
    • “Most points wins” or, for golf “least points wins”
  • QUALITY RACE
    • “Best X within [time]”, where X is about quality traits, not numerical (e.g. the Great British Bake-off or gymnastics.) 
  • ENDURANCE RACE (or SURVIVAL RACE)
    • “Who quits last?”

Race Ends

The word “end” can mean either culmination (“the end of my work shift”) or goal (“you are working to what end?”). As this piece contains copious puns, I shall employ the word to mean both. 

  • RACE CULMINATIONS
    • TIME-ENDED RACES
      • A clock concludes the race 
    • PLAY-ENDED RACES
      • A player action concludes the race
  • RACE OBJECTIVES can be
    • the SAME
      • (“first to touch the tree”)
    • DIFFERENT INSTANCES OF THE SAME
      • (“first to checkmate the opponent’s king”)
    • DIFFERENT
      • (“can I tag this runner before they get to the base?”)
    • SUBJECTIVE
      • (“most satisfying to X person”)
    • OBJECTIVE
      • (“Highest measurable count of X”) 

Race Mixing

Most people only watch footraces at the Olympics once every four years, which implies we find them less interesting than other sports. Football, for example, contains:

  • An antiparallel asymmetric race
    • (offense vs defense) 
  • with mini asymmetric antiparallel races
    • (cornerbacks guarding wide receivers; offensive line protecting the quarterback while the defensive line attempts to pressure and/or tackle the quarterback), 
  • with multiple race ends and sub-ends
    • (the game itself concludes after the clock runs out of time (time-ended race), but the clock can pause due to various in-game mechanics)
    • (the number of downs is a play-ended race, influenceable by both teams) 

Football’s different races require different skills: speed, strength, and hand-eye coordination of course, but also time management, rapid-fire decisionmaking, and balance of risk-taking. Since games parallel the skills we use in the rest of our lives, the simple ones tend to be less generally valuable, just as the ability to perform one simple task (picking up a pencil) is less valuable than performing a more complex task (writing a biography). 

Inferior Races 

There are no inferior races. RACE-IAL PREFERENCE is a matter of taste. 

For example, my favorite type of race happens in cooking: One person speeds to finish the rice before another person can toast the marshmallow, all before the oven is pre-heated. As an added benefit, at the end we enjoy a tasty race krispie treat.