I wanted to try something new this week and give an end-of-week status report. No idea if this is something I’ll keep doing, but the best way to figure out if it’s useful (to me or anyone else) is to give it a try.

The majority of this week has been spent working on the website for WizardHQ, a project that all my friends know about, but if you don’t know me personally this is the first time you’re hearing about it. I don’t intend to try to advertise it at this exact moment, please excuse me being vague for now. More to come on that in the next few weeks, but for right now it’s eating up a considerable amount of time.

Last week I crawled the TTRPG thought space and that gave me the idea that maybe I could build a small search engine to do this. “Small” is doing a lot of lifting there. But I think it might be a useful community service to crawl the TTRPG blogosphere and make that easy for people to search. It’s a win-win. Discoverability for small creators, ease of finding for players and GMs.

I spent time during one of my lunch breaks and got the bones of a crawler written. None of the “crawl more links” parts, but I can point it at a single page and get all the needfuls from it. Tested against my own blog, not sure how much further it’d need to go to work against other sites.

Not sure if that project will go further, I’ve been dithering. I think to do anything with it implies setting aside one or two of my other TTRPG projects, which didn’t get any progress this week because WizardHQ exploded all over my original plan.

Current active project list:

1. WizardHQ
2. Kill Team - Hierotek Circle
3. The search engine?
4. LimeTools¹
5. Project Ashenreach²
6. The ORB³
7. Potential blog theme updates
8. Move to [REDACTED]⁴

We’re a couple days over one quarter of the way into the year, so I sat down and worked on a template for planning around my yearly theme.

Part of a yearly theme is not to plan too hard. There’s a reason it’s not a yearly goal or, so help me, new years resolution. But I thought having some sort of light framework for checkin and intention setting would be useful, so that’s what I’m working towards.

Here’s what I’ve got.

1. What Does This Theme Mean to Me Right Now?

• Right now, today, I'm focusing on "do we have enough" in the sense of food to carry us through the uncertain times ahead. Even if shortages are not a concern, I think prices are likely to skyrocket, and the more I can insulate us from that the better off we'll be.
• When I originally wrote this theme I was thinking about "enough" in the sense of things I often had too much of. I have too many things to do. I eat too much. I spend too much money. I buy too many things.
• I think "enough" can be seen from both sides, or a right-sizing of things. Neither too little nor too much, broadly, across all categories in my life.

2. What Am I Exploring with This Theme?

• How do I know that I have enough?
• How do I add a circuit-breaker to that part of me that gets excited and jumps at opportunities to consider whether I already have enough?
• How do I release things when I have too much?

3. What Does “more aligned” Vs. “less aligned” Look Like?

More aligned with the theme:

• Depth over breadth.
• Saying no.
• Thoughtful consumption.

Less aligned with the theme:

• Buying things just to have.
• Trying to do everything.
• Avoiding hard trade-offs.

4. How Might This Theme Show up in Different Areas of Life?

Work

• Delegating more, actioning less.
• Having energy and focus to spare.

Relationships

• More, deeper connections with highly-aligned people.

Health

• "Eat not to dullness and drink not to elevation." - Benjamin Franklin
• Enough rest. More than I think I need. Rest before it becomes obvious I needed to.
• Build sustainable systems.

Time

• Live by the schedule so that free time can be truly free.
• Waste no time. Leisure is a valid activity, and should be engaged with by design.
• Anything that wants to pay me for my time, or worse, that I pay for with my time, should be considered anathema.

Environment

• Bring nothing home that has no place to live.
• Find the things which no longer spark joy and let them go.

5. Integration Reminders

• What would enough look like this week?
• Where am I doing enough to move my goals forward?
• Where am I doing too much in unhelpful ways?
• What could I let go?

It’s funny. The genesis of my gigantic TTRPG collection (almost certainly 500+ distinct books) was an old newsletter I used to write. I won’t link to it. It’s super defunct.

But I thought, a hundred years ago, that there was a place in the world for someone to dig through these old games and find the best of their old ideas. Dust them off. Set them out on the table and see if anyone liked them.

Which is of course a brilliant idea that people smarter than me have been doing for more than 20 years now. Oh well!

And for better or worse, my life took a different turn and that’s not what ended up happening. But over time, as the collection has grown, I continue to think that I might really enjoy making a TTRPG of my own.

Knowing full well there’s basically no money in it. Certainly less than I make doing redacted for redacted. Call it a passion project. A sickness. A warped twisting of a dark mind filled to the brim with moths and soup.

But long before it would ever make sense to sit down and do that thing, I would need to find my community. A thought that, somehow, never occurred to me to try to do. Until like a couple weeks ago.

And so it begins...

I was, until about two weeks ago, following a grand total of maybe four TTRPG-related blogs. Come to think of it I’m not even sure when that started.

Tonight, I fixed that. My project for the evening has been to trace the hidden veins of the TTRPG thought space, find all the blogs I wasn’t reading, and add them to my reader.

My process was simple. Starting at the blog that’s been reliably the most interesting I would spiral out, following link after link, adding whatever caught my attention. Whether it was a single post to Readwise, or the entire feed.

Dear reader, I now have 113 unread articles in my feed. It was none on Monday. Oh the hubris of one week ago me thinking I might not have anything to read on my next flight.

I should probably be surprised, or ashamed, or surpshramed at how little I’d engaged with the TTRPG community. There’s no excuse for it. For something I claim to care so much about, I had invested so little. Except for the literal investment. In money. Of buying 500+ TTRPG books.

But as they say, it’s really the friends we made along the way.

... And I had made none.

It’s always difficult to introspect the self, and figure out why past-me did or didn’t do anything. I hardly know what now-me is doing and future-me is a radioactive orb of soup and malice.

But I think the main reason I was living on an island was a secret fear that I might... I dunno. Read something and then be influenced by it? It’s ridiculous on the face of it. That’s literally the reason I bought all the RPG books.

You see if I don’t know what all the cool kids with their hip new Motherships and Triangle Agencies are doing, then how could I ever be guilty of copying them? I couldn’t. Infallible logic. Your move Aliens.

This is of course insane.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about plagiarism, it’s that the first step is to plagiarize something. I’m not the kind of person who would copy someone else’s work and then try to pass it off as my own. (Well. Okay. I did do that once, in first grade. I “borrowed” someone else’s addition worksheet, because I hated math, erased their name, and put my own. Yes this is a true story. But I promise I don’t do that anymore.)

Two people can independently have the same idea, or be inspired by the same thing, and maybe end up in the same neighborhood as each other, and that’s okay. Some people might try to claim one copied the other and those people are Wrong and should be put in Time Jail where they will be sat on by the Universe for all of Eternity or until they Feel Bad.

Basically, this is not a thing I should be worrying about. If someone wants to make the legal claim I plagiarized them, then it’s time for lawyers to have a Polite Conversation about it. Until then, I’m not spending my time worrying what some rando on the internet thinks about the provenance of the art I’m trying to make.

Okay so then what?

Arguably, I should post more of my ideas on the internet. Part of that is because it’d be proof I had them first, but that’s a silly reason to do anything. Don’t spend your life fighting the argument against some future internet nerd with a Bad Opinion. Mainly because ideas are worthless and you should give them away for free anyway.

Execution is the part that matters.

Our society puts so-called “Idea Men” up on a pillar because it’s tactically useful to have a class of person who thinks their Next Big Idea is finally going to make them rich, while ignoring all the social and structural reasons it won’t. Ideas don’t make people rich. Working 16 hour days and a small $2million loan from your parents make people rich. The idea was secondary.

The problem isn’t that I don’t want to do that. It’s that writing a TTRPG, or a setting for a TTRPG, is about the fifth thing down my project list. No. Really.

• That wizard community thing I keep hinting at.
• A SaaS app for exactly ten people that I cherish.
• This thing I’m calling the ORB which I am envisioning would sort of be like a digital museum exhibit for all of my classic TTRPGs and their ephemera.
• A SaaS app that might actually have a paying audience.
• Project Ashenreach. The codename for my TTRPG setting.

See? Fifth.

If you’re curious, I’m tracking 30 distinct projects in my project management system. A perfectly normal and well-adjusted number of projects for an adult human to have.

Until then I’m following 23 distinct TTRPG-related blogs. I’m sure that number will thin over time. But it’s the start of actually trying to be present and aware. Of weaving myself into the fabric of a community that is ostensibly important to me.

Someday, probably not soon, I’ll try to reach out to some of them and say hello. Make friends. With the other people crazy enough to do what I too also want to do. Someday.

If you know who this is, we should be friends.

Or enemies.

Or frenemies.

Me: “You’re Darmok, I’m Jalad, and together we are at Tanagra.”

Ash: “What? Oh, Star Wars.”

What’s up with me? Oh, just inventing a governance structure for a community of wizards. You?

The first question: “is he spiders?” There is no second question.

My thoughts on working with AI have evolved a lot over the last year or so that I’ve been actively using them.

I’ve gone from “this is an interesting toy, but it doesn’t seem very useful” to “wow, people are using this all the time and it gets important things wrong” to “actually if you’re smart about how you use it this can do some really useful things” to “I’m using this more and more every day, it seems unlikely that’s going to change.”

Now I can see more and more of the places where not using AI, at least a little, is hurting me. Or at least slowing me down. In some cases that’s fine. I’m typing this by hand right now, and I know Claude could probably do it in about 7 seconds from a bulleted list of the points I want to make. The end result might even be better, in the sense that Claude is generally better at making easy-to-read content than I am.

I type like I speak, and I speak like a college professor. That’s not meant to be a good thing. But it is what it is and it’s who I am.

All that being said, I think I need to revisit my “100% Human Generated” policy. It’s still true, at least as of the time I’m writing this, but I think I’m missing out on an opportunity to at least collaborate with the machine. The sentiment that went into that policy is still absolutely core to my position: this blog is a craft to be honed, not a task to be automated.

I gave a version of these thoughts to Claude, and asked it to help me craft a new policy. Over several rounds of iteration, fixing parts I didn’t like and mulling over suggestions I hadn’t considered, we arrived at something that I think represents a better way to handle the challenges I’m facing.

Human-Led, Collaborative Content Policy

This blog remains fundamentally human-driven. All topics, ideas, and creative direction come from my own artistic sensibility and experiences. I sometimes collaborate with AI language models in my creative process, similar to working with a thoughtful writing partner who helps me refine and articulate my ideas.

When and How I Collaborate with AI:

• Refinement and focus: Sometimes I share my rough thoughts with an AI to help extract key ideas or sharpen my message
• Editorial dialogue: AI might help me restructure or clarify my existing ideas
• Creative exploration: Occasionally, through conversation with AI, we develop phrasings or explanations that effectively capture what I wanted to express

What Remains Purely Human:

• All topic choices and creative direction
• The initial ideas and perspectives being expressed
• The decision of what to publish and when
• The overall voice and style of the blog

Transparency: When I collaborate with AI on a post in any substantial way, I'll acknowledge that collaboration and specify which AI I worked with. I believe in being honest about the role AI plays in my creative process while maintaining my commitment to human creativity and authentic expression.

As mentioned previously, I worked on Claude with that. Claude Sonnet 3.5 to be precise, although I think in general I’m not going to specify exact versions. That gets into the weeds, and is also somewhat meaningless with how the frontier labs routinely update their models in meaningful ways without updating the name.

I’m curious to see what people think about this new policy. I’m open to feedback before formally enacting it. Am I making some kind of huge tactical error by letting AI into my workflow? Are there things I should be drawing a line on that I’m neglecting entirely?

Let me know.

“What a week, huh?”

“Lemon, it’s Wednesday.”

— 30 Rock, S4E2 “Into the Crevasse”

Without exception, the smartest people I know are all in agreement that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is on the way in the next three years. That could mean a lot of things. Good things. Bad things. I think it’s reasonable to assume nobody can predict what the world will look like beyond that horizon.

Kurzweil’s Singularity is finally near.

Let me be clear: the Singularity is the moment beyond which we cannot imagine the future, because it is entirely different from the world we have always known. Dear gentle reader, I think that point is not more than a year or two from now.

But I’m not here to talk about AI or AGI or the Singularity, because that’s one way in which I think people are right to be worried. There’s the part where technocratic oligarchs have bought what remains of the American government, citizens are being deported to Guantanamo Bay, and airplanes are falling out of the sky.

The bad news keeps rolling in, and I think it’s reasonable to expect that it gets worse from here.

There will never come a point where the red tribe will wake up and realize “oh no, this isn’t what I voted for.” This is what they voted for.

I know you desperately yearn for a “leopards ate my face” style realization of the atrocities they’ve caused. Will continue to cause. Are actively rejoicing in causing. That is not coming, and I need you to stop investing energy in waiting for it. There is work to be done.

If you’ll permit me a crumb of silliness in this tryin’ time, I’d like to present a framework that may help you figure out how you can help when everything feels hopeless, when it feels like the world is crumbling.

Please select from one of the following four class options:

Blanche: Charming, debonair, slutty. First in line to shank a bitch out back the Waffle House at 3 AM if they even glance at one of her homies.

Sophia: Wise, sardonic, unstoppable. A force of nature in the Greek God sort of way. Could correct Peter Jackson on what it sounds like when you stab someone in the lung.

Dorothy: Intelligent, charismatic, truth to power. Plans on plans on plans. Why do physical violence when emotional violence works as good at half the price?

Rose: St Olaf Stories as a finesse weapon. Emotional support friend. Can a cheesecake be a familiar? Have some cheesecake. I SAID HAVE SOME CHEESECAKE.

Look. I know it’s hard. But you need to figure out what you can do to help. Even if that’s taking care of yourself today so that you’re here to fight tomorrow.

It’s deeply unfair that we are called upon to fight this battle. Nevertheless, you are called. Nevertheless, you must fight.

Nevertheless, you must persist.

Chat, are the vibes cooked?

Ash: “what’s the cutest mammal?”

Me: “are moths a mammal?”

By age 400 you should have:

• defeated at least one plant.
• three orbs, at least one of which is cursed.
• read half of the 100 Greatest Tomes list.
• five mortal enemies, two blood pledges, and one kingdom in your thrall.

As far as I can tell this is Alton Brown’s journey:

• “No pasta.” Live and Let Diet, Good Eats S13:E13
• “No white foods.” To the media at some point? I can’t find a direct reference, but AB mentions having said it in later episodes.
• “No white foods but Cauliflower’s good actually.” The Caul of the Flower, Good Eats S14:E21
• “No white starch.” Various web sources, approximately 2015.

Given that, I think he probably does intend to include most starchy potatoes, although I’d guess the problem has more to do with the way most potatoes are served and not the potato itself.

As we head out of 2024, these are the apps I’m using.

• (Computing) Bookmarks: Raindrop
• (Computing) Browser: Firefox
• (Computing) Calendar: Apple Calendar
• (Computing) Chat: Beeper (Discord + Signal)
• (Computing) Cloud Storage: iCloud Drive
• (Computing) Passwords: 1Password
• (Computing) Photo Management: Apple Photos
• (eMail) Mail Client: Apple Mail
• (eMail) Mail Server: Fastmail
• (Entertainment) Media Player: Infuse Pro
• (Entertainment) Music: Apple Music, Radio Paradise, a growing collection of physical media
• (Entertainment) Podcasts: Pocket Casts
• (Finance) Budgeting: YNAB
• (Health) Body Tracking: Whoop
• (Health) Meal Planning: Plan To Eat
• (Health) Workout Tracking: Gentler Streak
• (Reading) Book Tracking: Hardcover
• (Reading) eBook Management: Calibre
• (Reading) eReader: Kobo Sage
• (Reading) Read It Later: Readwise Reader
• (Reading) RSS: The Old Reader + NetNewsWire
• (Social) Contacts: Apple Contacts
• (Travel) Flight Tracking: Flighty
• (Travel) Trip Planning: Tripsy
• (Writing) Blogging: Micro.blog
• (Writing) Word Processing: VS Code (need a real answer here, considering iA Writer)
• News: N/A
• Notetaking: Apple Notes
• PKM: Obsidian
• Presentations: N/A
• Project Tracking: YouTrack
• Shopping Lists: Obsidian
• Spreadsheets: Apple Numbers (with monumental effort)
• Todo: Omnifocus

I believe it was roughly around this time of the year, several hundred years ago, third or fourth grade to be imprecise, that I declared in no uncertain terms that new years resolutions were stupid, and I would not be doing them.

If you’ve met me, that anecdote probably doesn’t seem very surprising. Yes, I was always like this. No, I won’t elaborate.

The reason I bring it up is that I’m about to talk about what to many people would in fact sound like a new year’s resolution, but is prompted approximately zero percent by the new year and entirely by the trip to Disney World staring me down from approximately two weeks in the future which I am clearly, woefully, physically unprepared for. No doubt I’ll still have an amazing time, but I can tell before I even catch my flight that some things are going to need to change.

Currently I weigh somewhere between “can walk up a flight of stairs without stopping” and “sir you won’t be able to ride this ride today.” I don’t always need a seat belt extender when I fly, but sometimes I do. I’ve weighed more, I’ve weighed less, but as I get older it’s becoming more of an issue in more ways, and something clearly has to be done. As a close friend once said, “you can be old, or you can be fat.” He was speaking from a position of authority and wisdom.

Like most fat people, I’ve already tried everything. Everything. Whatever you’re thinking, I’ve tried it. From “eat less, move more” to Keto, to GLP-1 agonists. Some things worked for a while, then stopped working. Some things never worked. Nothing worked indefinitely. The things that worked the best required persistent, ongoing, considerable discipline. I suspect any system that will succeed for me will have that feature, and the challenge will be convincing everyone to arrange my life around it. You can only get away with being so weird if you want to succeed by normal definitions of success, and I’m not Steve Jobs enough for abnormal definitions of success.

So this post is somewhat of a manifesto. It is, in part, an attempt to document the things I am going to attempt to start doing because I think they’ll help. It is also, in part, to justify the weirdness I will need to introduce into my life and the lives of others to improve my likelihood of success. It is, if nothing else, an attempt to be legible.

Part 1 - Food

“The real importance of the ‘never’ list is that you have to make a commitment that there are some things in your life that you’re going to give up and you’re never going to have again. And there’s not a diet that I know of that ever said, ‘You know what? You’re going to say goodbye to some things forever.’ I actually think that’s important because it’s a symbolic life change that says ‘I’m turning a corner.’ It’s a statement of ‘I’m making a permanent change.’ That’s important from both a psychological and nutritional standpoint.”

- Alton Brown

In 2010’s “Live and Let Diet” Alton Brown, host and creator of Good Eats, introduced what he called the “System of Four Lists” – effectively, a contract with himself that helped Brown build and maintain a 50lb weight loss. Each list was designed to either encourage good food choices, or discourage bad ones.

The first list was comprised of things he decided he must eat every day:

• Leafy greens
• Nuts
• Carrots
• Green tea
• Whole grains
• Fruits

As I understand it, the purpose of focusing on things he must have rather than things he couldn’t have, was to flood the playing field with good food. To leave less room for things that didn’t support his desired health outcomes. Instead of focusing on restriction as the primary goal, to focus on nutrition to the exclusion of problematic foods.

The second list are things he needed to eat at least three times a week:

• Yogurt
• Broccoli / Cauliflower
• Sweet potato
• Avocado
• Oily fish
• Tofu

Restriction enters the picture in his third list, the things he can only have once a week. Effectively, the treats:

• Red meat
• White starch
• Desserts
• Alcohol

In the original version of Live and Let Diet that aired, white starch was “pasta,” but in articles published later online it appears that he broadened it. My guess is by white starch what he really means is everything I think of as “sugar.” I have a notoriously broad definition of sugar, which extends pretty much all the way to all purpose flour. Any refined carbohydrate. So all breads are sugar, but a baked potato is not. Maybe he intended to include baked potatoes in his white starch category, I don’t know. I think my problem probably isn’t the number of baked potatoes I eat.

Finally, the “never” list. The things he had to give up for good:

• Soda
• Processed meals
• Canned soups
• “Diet” anything
• Fast food

That seems clearly and objectively correct to me. There goes my chances of getting a Taco Icosahedron sponsorship, but I think that’s probably a risk I’m willing to take.

Let me say that I really like this approach. I like the idea of filling up on healthy “must haves” to edge out less healthy alternatives. I like the idea of allowing a little fun as a once a week treat. I even like the idea of saying “never” to the things we all know are bad. There’s power in never. Never reduces the option space, it removes an entire class of negotiation from the table. “No” is the most powerful word in the English language, and a complete sentence.

My smart move is probably to take this, exactly as written, and try it for a month before I make any adjustments. And I think that’s what I’m going to aim to do. Just for the sake of completeness though, here are the adjustments I’m considering:

• Carrots are fine, but I’m not a huge fan and I just can’t think of how I’d manage to fit them in every day without getting sick of them.
• I’m not a huge tea drinker, green or otherwise, but I’m game to try. I don’t like hot beverages, but I think tea might be my best opportunity for replacing soda.

That’s it. Those are the changes I think I’d want to make. But, let’s give it an honest try first.

… After I get back from Disney. Because it’s only a couple weeks away, because the food at Disney is part of the appeal, and because it provides a break point to clear out my kitchen and refresh anew.

Part 2 - Activity

In October’s State of the Apps CGP Grey talked about Whoop and the extent to which the data it provided was a “game changer” for his health journey. I bought one immediately. Well. Rented. Their business model is to give you the device on pain of subscription. I’ve been wearing it for over a month now, and its data collection is pretty impressive.

With a month of basically “normal” baseline data, it has a good sense of how healthy I am (or am not,) and suggests some reasonable goals:

• More steps
• Better sleep
• Exercise a couple times a week
• Avoid added sugar
• Drink water

Which, really, seems like very milquetoast advice. What’s important is that it can mostly track those automatically, and suggest realistic goals based on how I’m actually doing. Next week, for example, I’m going to aim for 6600+ steps per day, a sleep consistency of 70%+, any exercise at least two days, no added sugar at least five days, and meeting my hydration goal at least five days. Then at the end of the week I’ll review, adjust as necessary, and try again. Unlike the food plan, this starts immediately. Although I can’t promise I’ll avoid added sugar at Disney. Because Dole Whip.

All of these systems, together, I’m calling my Health Operating System. Like any other OS, I’m sure they’ll need patching and updates from time to time, but I’m broadcasting it wide so that everyone who has to deal with me knows what’s what. These are the things I’m choosing to prioritize, and the rules I’m willing to be inconvenient to maintain. Apologies in advance.

Every December my partner and I make the drive down to the Warhammer Citadel in Grapevine, TX to play our end-of-year game. If you’re a fan of Warhammer but have never been to the Citadel, imagine a Games Workshop or Warhammer store that’s also a coffee shop. It’s the closest thing we have in North America to Warhammer World, but it’s closer to a normal Warhammer store than that statement might imply.

Still, as the North American headquarters for Games Workshop, it has the benefit of being fully stocked with even the rare and unusual games, lots of well-painted minis on display, and probably 20 open tables in the back. It’s worth a trip if you’re in town, but not a trip to town if that makes sense. But I digress.

At the start of 2024 we determined to play a full 2000 point game, my Tyranids vs his Death Guard. Then my year exploded. Suddenly it was September and I didn’t have a single painted model to show for it. What I did have, however, was almost all the Necrons I’d need for a Boarding Action. So we pivoted, and rather than try to rush 100+ unpainted models, I finished the roughly ~11 for our new goal.

The Necrons had been a previous year’s army of the year, so I have a decent set of them in various states of completion, and we were big fans of Boarding Actions which came out around the transition from 9th to 10th edition Warhammer, so this was a delightful return to form.

So, how did it go?

Before the Battle

In the current edition of Warhammer you determine who goes first by rolling a six-sided die (d6,) and whoever rolls higher goes first. That person also picks who is the “attacker” and who is the “defender.” The attacker and defender have different deployment zones, places where they can put their minis on the table at the start of the game, and the defender has to put their minis down first. It’s useful to be able to go second in the deployment phase, because where your opponent puts their minis tells you something about their strategy and can allow you to make last-minute strategic decisions about how to respond.

I won the roll-off, which meant that I would get to go first, and I chose to be the attacker, which meant that I got to deploy second.

We each held one unit in reserve to be deployed through strategic shenanigans later. He had a unit of Poxwalkers that he could deep strike (place anywhere on the table that was at least 9" away from one of my models,) through the usage of a limited resource called Command Points. I had a unit of Ophydian Destroyers that have deep strike as a natural ability.

A few more units were held in reserve to come in through the normal deployment mechanism, because Boarding Actions allows a limited number of units to be in the deployment zones each round.

Round 1

During my turn I advanced my unit of Flayed Ones, one unit of Warriors and my Royal Warden towards the central objective. The Royal Warden was my Warlord, which I think is sort of an unusual choice. He’s basically a slightly more powerful Warrior, and in the regular 40K rules he gives an attached unit of Warriors the ability to run away and shoot in the same turn. In Boarding Actions he shouldn’t be able to do that, but as a house rule we decided that he could because it’s flavorful, and we think in the spirit of what the rules intended.

In the Northwest corner I moved my unit of Scarabs to claim the objective. We wouldn’t figure out until round three that they had no objective control score, which meant they couldn’t actually claim that objective for me. One of my lessons learned!

Finally, I moved my unit of Triarch Praetorians to capture the objective in the Southwest corner.

On his turn Ash moved his unit of Chaos Spawn to claim the Northeast objective, then advanced his Poxwalkers and Typhus to open a hatchway into the southern corridor. This was his first major tactical mistake, as he forgot entirely to attempt to claim the Southeastern objective this round.

He repeated that strategy in the north with another unit of Poxwalkers and his Tallyman.

Round 2

Seeing that Ash intended to make use of Hatchways to get into the Northern and Southern hallways, I redirected units in both of those directions. To the North I ran my Flayed Ones into his unit of Poxwalkers. It was an immediate and decisive victory for the Flayed Ones, who eradicated the entire unit in one combat while taking no wounds.

I deployed a unit of Lychguard to the South to block another unit of Poxwalkers who were attempting to head for the Southwest objective. This was strategically one of Ash’s better trades. The Lychguard have a relatively small number of incredibly strong attacks. Overall they were probably the strongest units either of us had brought, and in a perfect world I would have run them directly into his warlord, Typhus. Because their attacks were so strong, any Poxwalker they hit was guaranteed to melt, but because they had so few attacks they could only take out a few each round.

Seeing his Chaos Spawn coming for the central objective, I deployed my Ophydian Destroyers via Deep Strike directly on to the central objective to both claim and protect it. It was clear to me that my relatively slow moving warriors weren’t going to get there in time, and if he claimed it I’d have trouble shifting him off.

During Ash’s turn he ran the Chaos Spawn directly into my Ophydians, dealing two wounds which wasn’t quite enough to take one down. In the trade, my Ophydians did six wounds back, fully 3/4 of the damage his unit could sustain, and removing one of the two Chaos Spawn models.

Using the stratagem “The Dead Rise” allowed him to deep strike his final unit of Poxwalkers into the far Northwest corner, aiming them for my poor solitary unit of Scarabs. However, they were unable to move on their first turn on the board.

A unit of cultists in each of the Northeast and Southeast corners claim both objectives for him, and spend the next term “securing” the objectives, which would allow them to remain under his control as the units continued to move away. I forgot this was something units could do, and that specifically only my Warriors could do it. I had built my list assuming I’d need to keep a unit on each objective I wanted to hold, which is why the Scarabs continued to sit in the Northwest corner. Since part of his strategy was to try to claim one of my back field objectives, this was probably the right idea regardless.

Round 3

In the Southwest I advance one of my units of Warriors towards the objective, freeing up my Praetorians to advance to the center of the board. I knew that Typhus was headed that direction, and that they had a decent melee profile, so I wanted all of my best bruisers ready to hold the contest for the central objective.

To the North I had my Flayed Ones open the hatchway towards the Northwest objective, positioning them to rescue my Scarabs on the following turn.

On Ash’s turn he managed to start making progress against a few of my units. One of his cultists got a lucky shot in the shooting phase and did the one wound needed to finish off one of my Ophydians. Poxwalkers continued to trade with my Lychguard in the south, taking one of them out as well. I also lost a Scarab to his risen Poxwalkers in the Northeast.

He sent Typhus directly into my unit of Warriors, hoping to take them out in a single round. Unfortunately, he only managed to kill two.

Round 4

If you’re not familiar with the Necrons, they’re basically ancient space-faring robotic Egyptians. Basically. And they have a couple interesting gimmicks, but probably the one they’re most well-known for is the ability to reanimate in the middle of combat. So sometimes you think you’ve killed them, and then they stand right back up, stick their thumb to their nose, and blow a raspberry. And by blow a raspberry I mean they shoot you dead with plasma weapons.

So that’s what I did.

Now would be a good time to thank the dice, who were exceptionally kind to me this day. More than half of the models that Ash had managed to kill stood back up, including both the Ophydian and Lychguard from the previous round. This was not a good outcome for him. It was a great outcome for me.

In my movement phase I carefully arranged as many units as possible to be able to shoot at Typhus. The mission we were playing scored an extra 10 victory points for murdering the enemy Warlord. I got close to putting a wound on him a couple of times, and then my own Warlord, the Royal Warden actually managed to hit with six wounds. Exactly enough to kill Typhus. Both of Ash’s saving throws failed, which should have killed Typhus, but he burned what remained of his precious command points to roll again and saved on the second attempt.

What the Royal Warden couldn’t do, the Ophydian Destroyers certainly could, and in the fighting phase they marched right in and turned Typhus into a fine plague-flavored sashimi.

In the Northwest, my Flayed Ones came to the rescue of my Scarabs, and eradicated the Poxwalkers that were harassing them.

At this point, with almost all of his Poxwalkers defeated, his Warlord dead, and me in control of more than half the board with strong units he would be unlikely to defeat, Ash conceded.

I won 55 to 30.

My Learnings

• Scarabs can’t claim objectives. They probably would have been most useful running ahead and opening a door for me. I have a bad habit of forgetting that the hatchways in Boarding Actions can open.
• Lychguard are strong bruisers, but without many attacks do their best work against a single beefy target. I really wanted to get them stuck in against Typhus, but Ash did the right thing gumming them up with Poxwalkers.
• Praetors didn’t get much of a chance to shine, and looking at their profile now I would probably be smart to trade them out for something with a more clearly defined role in the battle.

Ash’s Learnings

• He intended to use the cultists to “sticky things and then die,” and the Poxwalkers were meant to gum me up. In practice, the cultists mostly never arrived to the battle. Probably they should have come out first and ranged ahead, so that the Poxwalkers would have had an easier time getting into position.
• Typhus needs to be used more tactically, he’s not invincible. It came as a surprise when I killed him basically twice.

Final Thoughts

This was the only game of Warhammer we played in 2024, which is a real shame. We both love it. It’s arguably part of how we met. I like the structure of having a game at the end of the year to work towards, because if nothing else we know that one game will happen.

Next year we’re focusing on Necromunda as our game of choice, which has much smaller armies (called gangs) than even Boarding Actions. I hope that by having a smaller painting commitment we’ll be able to get into games sooner in the year, and our annual game next December will be the capstone of a campaign rather than the only game we play.

In closing, here is every one of his models my Necrons managed to take off the board. The real gift was the Poxwalkers we murdered along the way.

What is outer space if not a soup?

Gondor calls for soup.

The society I happen to have been born into is based on consumption. It tells me that my worth is measured in my economic contributions. That I will be judged by the clothes I wear, the car I drive, the establishments I frequent.

I’ve had enough. Generally. Broadly. And also, in some cases, specifically. In just about every way it makes sense to measure, I’ve had enough.

I reject the premise. I rebuke thee. I cast thee out.

The Year of Enough

So begins the Year of Enough, my next yearly theme. The astute may have noticed that it’s technically still 2024, and that’s true, but immaterial. Yearly themes need not align perfectly to arbitrary notions of time. What’s important is that they are useful to the person undertaking them. Consider it another way I abjectly refuse to adhere to the role society would like me to play. This year, my year starts on December 1, 2024.

Anything worth starting is worth starting now. Not tomorrow. Not next year. Now. As the poet Yoda once said, “do, or do not.”

Mechanically what does “Year of Enough” mean? At its core, it means no unplanned spending. Of money. Of time. Of effort. Of energy. I have enough. Enough material goods. Enough things to do. Enough recommendations. Enough.

The best yearly themes are conceptually simple, but deep. Enough lands right in that sweet spot. It applies to almost every category I could mention. Whatever it is I almost certainly have enough of it. In many cases I have too much. It works as a response to every exhortation. Enough.

What does this look like in practice? In many ways like a “buy nothing” year, with some notable exceptions. Travel and time spent with friends remain important to me, and I’ll continue to prioritize those. I’m not cancelling any of my planned trips. Some of those trips are to new and novel places, and may require me to buy some things to be appropriately prepared, and any necessary purchases along those lines are pre-approved.

There’s also some furniture for the house that I will need as the remodel completes, and that list has been specifically defined. A new chair. Accessories for an existing chair. The needfuls to complete the lounge, the hobby room, and the master bedroom.

Along those lines, replacing anything that breaks, home repairs, and consumables are all valid expenditures. I’m not trying to live an ascetic life. Well. At least not yet. Maybe someday I’ll go full-on recluse, but not today. “Enough” means no more of the things I’m already sated on. It doesn’t mean suffering through obvious deficiencies.

This means that, among other things, I am no longer accepting recommendations. For shows to watch, movies to see, music to listen to. One category already bursting at the seams of enough is “things to do.” I will try to return the favor as best I can. Nobody I know is really suffering a surfeit of free time, and it would be rude to inundate them with my own recommendations while politely declining theirs. Know that if you ask, I have them in ready supply, but you will need to ask. This is as much for your own benefit as it is mine.

Something I failed to do last year was define success.

At the end of the Year of Enough, I think success would look like:

• Every room in the house is clean, organized, and there are no unsorted “piles” of things in need of a place to live.
• There is enough time in the day to do work I enjoy doing, to care for my meat chariot, and to pursue an interest or hobby.
• Nothing I consider important is languishing. This might need its own blog post to properly develop, but the idea is that I should not be able to look around and find some interest or hobby that I haven’t engaged with, that I shouldn’t feel like I’m not taking care of myself or others.

There will never be enough time to do everything, but there should be enough time to do the important things.

“The tactical result of an engagement forms the base for new strategic decisions because victory or defeat in a battle changes the situation to such a degree that no human acumen is able to see beyond the first battle.”

Or,

“No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.”

-Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

Nearing the end of the year, I’m starting to think about next year’s theme. But before I get into that, I think it’s worth reviewing how this year’s theme went.

TL;DR – poorly.

Looking back on how I defined my theme for the year, I think the idea was solid, but I lacked clarity on what exactly I meant to do differently. One big mistake is that, outside of the start of the year, I mostly never thought about it again. It didn’t serve as a “north star” like so many yearly themes do. Whereas the Year of Time (2023,) kept popping up everywhere I looked, the Year of Scales of Arpeggios mostly just happened.

In the blog post linked above, I set out three specific plans I intended to engage in. If you haven’t clicked through, they were:

• Wake up before work, use that time productively.
• Build a system for meal planning.
• Learn to play disc golf.

And dear reader, I did approximately none of them.

That’s not quite entirely fair, I actually did get really good at waking up earlier. But I don’t really use the time productively. I think the end result is that I’m more “awake” when work starts, and that has some positive benefits, but never not once did I ever get my treadmill time in before the day started. Planning the day continues to be an elusive challenge. Executing the plan even more so.

It feels hardly worth even mentioning the other two, beyond saying that I didn’t even start to try. I forgot I meant to. The year got away from me and now here we are, on the precipice of December, and I don’t think I’m planning to start any of that in the remaining four weeks.

We can’t win them all, and I didn’t win this one. On to bigger and better things!

You might surmise that this is a political post. And it sort of is, but also it isn’t. Because winter has always been coming. And most likely, winter will always be coming. Winter might be Trump, it might be climate change, it might be an asteroid that strikes the Pacific ocean and obliterates all life as we know it. We don’t know when winter will come, nor what form it will take, but winter is coming.

Some people will read that and assume that I am being defeatist. That clearly, we must all give up in the face of insurmountable odds. And no, read what I said because it doesn’t include anything about giving up. Despite it all, I’m not a nihilist.

That winter is coming is an indisputable fact of our universe, and the answer to winter is to chop wood, preserve food, hunker down, and tell stories. Prepare for winter; to be able to weather it, because you do not control which way the wind will blow. You never did, and you never will. Winter can and will show up on its own schedule, in its own way, and there is nothing to be done about it except to prepare.

Our ancestors built communities by huddling together around the fire, and though the mode may have changed the method remains. Many hands make light work, and there remains much work to be done. There always will, because the universe does not owe us peace. The universe does not owe us anything. Winter is coming, and the only chance we have to stand against it is together.

With any luck, and no small amount of fortune, we will get to plant trees under whose shade we will never sit. It is not for us to rest, because winter is coming. But we might hope that others may some day wonder at what winter ever was.

Wargaming as a hobby is incredibly cloistered, a series of rituals performed by robed adherents, and the systems broadly share so many concepts that you often draft on one to learn another. This means that onboarding someone into our mystery is often an afterthought - the process starts by reading thirty some-odd pages of scripture, but the real questions you’ll grapple with are the same as the fresh acolyte of any religion. They will all be within interactions the “rules” only suggest. It’s not that the map isn’t the territory - it’s that the map generally describes a world which cannot possibly exist, and the work is in harmonizing that with the real world. This is a form of labor I delight in! But there might be hard limits on how many people want to collaboratively embroider a secular religion in their leisure time.

— Jerry Holkins, The Heloc Heresy

I would describe myself as “cautiously optimistic” about generative AI. LLMs are clearly capable of doing some useful things. Anyone who tries to argue otherwise at this point probably sounds a lot like they’re trying to argue the sky isn’t blue or the moon isn’t cheese.

For a little background, I first heard about GPT-2 back when it came out, a couple of years before ChatGPT hit the world stage, and some of the smartest nerds I know were marveling at the fact that you could get it to play chess competently. This was a surprising result, because LLMs use statistical techniques against words to predict outputs given an input. It shouldn’t know what “chess” is, and it shouldn’t be competent at the game.

Early ChatGPT didn’t really impress me that much, and it routinely got stuff wrong. My best example of this would violate confidentiality, so consider that I’m not necessarily trying to convince you that old ChatGPT sucked. I think that should be obvious. Mostly I’m mentioning it to explain why I didn’t even bother to start trying to use it or its competitors until much later.

Once Google announced Bard, I joined that bandwagon and made a few slight attempts to get it to do something useful. It mostly couldn’t, which also shouldn’t be surprising. An example of this was asking it to plan a Hawaiian vacation for me. I figured planning a vacation was the kind of thing that GenAI could probably handle, there should be lots of examples of vacations that people enjoyed. It really, really wanted me to go see the Pearl Harbor memorial. (I did not.)

Okay so that’s all fine and good. Jump to today. I use ChatGPT at work, and Claude at home, and for my use cases, I think Claude is a lot better, but I wanted to talk a little bit about what I’m actually using them for. What do I think they’re good at?

ChatGPT has proven itself quite adept at taking my stream of consciousness and making something other people could understand from it. If I start typing out the details of an email I would like to send, the important points, the audience, the tone, it will generate an email that’s perfectly cromulent. Same with a Slack message. But also same with a Jira ticket. If I know basically what needs to happen and the order it needs to happen in, then Jira saves me the trouble of spending time formatting it into a proper set of acceptance criteria.

Claude, with its Artifacts feature, has helped me develop and then fill out templates for data that I want to live inside my knowledge management system. I asked Claude for a template for a System of Systems document, and together we worked to refine it to have the detail level I wanted. Then I tossed it my list of systems, and it did a decent job of a first pass to fill it out.

The recurring theme is that I’ve found GenAI saves me from typing but not from thinking. Best case scenario it will prompt me with some questions that I might not have considered, but the important connection-making and organizational work is still happening in my brain. Given that, even as an unstructured stream of consciousness, the LLM can then enforce an order and produce an output that might be useful for someone else trying to understand what I thought. I don’t really expect this to change, and once the hype cycle properly dies down I think we’ll discover it’s roughly the limit of what an LLM can do. It’ll get better at doing it, but it can’t really have an “original” thought.

My question is how much money would you pay for the functionality I’ve just described? Right now both ChatGPT and Claude have generous free tiers, but that’s because their investors are expecting them to eat the world at some point, and, once eaten, for GenAI to have become so essential that people won’t be able to remember how not to use it. They’re building their captive audience today, and eventually that bill is going to come due.

I suspect the true cost of this service is a lot more than I’d be willing to pay to avoid typing an email, but time will tell. Maybe we’ll find a way to make “good enough” LLMs operate affordably. We’re still in the “a computer takes up an entire room and only universities have them” phase of this technology, and right now I have five different computers on my desk all of which are more capable than a mainframe was in 1982.

I’m also concerned about the environmental impact, in the sense that we burn a truly fantastic amount of electricity to provide this service. But I think that’s more general than LLMs. We spend a truly fantastic amount of electricity to do lots of things, and are generally incapable as a society of building real solutions to that problem.

Finally, I’m concerned that OpenAI, Anthropic, and every other GenAI company out there had to basically steal all of the world’s knowledge to build this thing. I mention this, because I think it’s worth mentioning. Copyright infringement is apparently okay when Microsoft does it, but if the consumer pirates a copy of Windows now suddenly they care? I am not compelled by arguments about how hard it would be to solve this problem, nor how much it would cost. If we wanted to, we would. But I definitely think it’s fair to consider this in your rubric for how seriously to respect the rights of corporations in turn.

For now I continue to stand by my policy of no GenAI content on this blog. It would defeat entirely the purpose. I’m not trying to impress anyone. I’m barely even trying to convince anyone. These are my thoughts, filtered through my own artistic sense of the right words to use to convey them. 90% of the value is that I took the time to express them, and 10% is whatever value other people might derive from consuming them. But it would be a tactical error to continue to avoid GenAI indefinitely. If you’re not engaging with it currently I’d strongly recommend thinking about where it might be able to help you; the answer is almost certainly not “nowhere.”

I have owned several iPads, and the role of the iPad in my life has changed over the years. With today’s announcement of the new iPad mini, I think it’s time to reevaluate which iPad(s) I need, and potentially start the trade-in process.

Question #1: What do I actually use my iPad for today?

I have an iPad mini. I bought it around the time my kindle kicked the bucket, and my intention was to use it mainly as a reading device. In my mind I thought it’d take it with me on appointments, but in practice I don’t have many of those. It has come with me on every flight since I’ve owned it, and it does a lot of heavy lifting as the main thing I do to keep myself busy while traveling. In that context, I mostly read blog posts through Readwise Reader.

There’s a lot to like about Reader, even though it’s a beta product, but their offline reading experience falls a bit short: images aren’t cached. That might not matter to some people, but ends up being pretty important in the kinds of blog posts I have a tendency to save for later reading.

Because it was intended to be a reading device, I got the 64GB version, which is not enough space to store movies or TV shows for offline watching. Sometimes, especially in hotel rooms, that’d be a nice feature to have. I don’t subscribe to any streaming services, so I need the files to be available on my iPad if I want to watch them.

Finally, it’s a small use case, but the Citadel Colour app is only available on mobile, so despite the fact that I have an iMac on my painting desk, I need an iPad or similar for looking up paint recipes.

Question #2: What do I think I might use my iPad for in the future?

Last weekend I purchased a Kobo Sage for eBooks. I really liked my Kindle, but I no longer shop with Amazon and do not intend to buy a new one. The iPad, it turns out, provides too many distractions and so I rarely read books on it. The Kobo probably won’t arrive for at least another week, but once it does, I intend for it to live in my (not quite yet built) reading nook. It may not come on flights, I haven’t decided.

It’s worth noting that the Kobo solves for a use case I intended the iPad to solve, but for which the iPad ended up being poorly suited: books. There’s nothing wrong with the device, this is entirely a limitation of my attention. Given all the things an iPad can do, I get easily distracted and end up not reading long-form books. I think having a dedicated device that serves this role and has no distractions is key to getting myself to read more. It worked, in fits and spurts, with the Kindle. So the Kobo will do that now.

However, the Kobo doesn’t solve for everything. It doesn’t solve for “read it later” and it doesn’t solve for graphics-heavy formatted PDFs, such as TTRPGs I back on Kickstarter.

Again, I’m thinking out loud here so bear with me.

I’m starting to develop the following rubric:

• Text-focused books designed to be read for enjoyment, entertainment, or education will live on the Kobo.
• Graphics-focused books will live on the iPad.

To be clear, the iPad really does do these things equally well. It’s more about the mental partitioning. I can’t have one device that does both of these things because my squishy brain must be cajoled into doing things that I enjoy doing if the activation energy of doing them is greater than zero.

Question #3: Which iPad?

The million dollar question. Or thousand dollar. Probably.

Really I think there’s two contenders. The 13" iPad Air and the new iPad Mini. For all intents and purposes they are functionally identical except for size.

I do like the size of the iPad Mini I have. It’s easy to carry around. It moves around the house quite a lot. It’s perfect for Reader, and acceptable for TV/Movies. I haven’t tried referencing a TTRPG rulebook on it, and I will before I commit to a decision, but that’s the one thing that I think the larger iPad is likely to excel at.

If, like me, you think “well why not just keep the current iPad Mini” then let me introduce one more variable. As I mentioned earlier, Readwise Reader doesn’t work great in offline mode. So I’m seriously considering getting the cellular-enabled model, which solves for lack of connectivity everywhere except airplanes, and which lets me solve another unrelated problem: kicking the tires on a new wireless provider in a way that doesn’t require committing an existing device.

So now I’m stuck in the worst possible place: compelling arguments between two options and no clear rubric to pick one or the other. The larger iPad seems like it’d be better at looking at PDFs, the smaller iPad seems like it’d be better for read-it-later blog articles. The smaller iPad is great for travel, and travel is the main thing I use my iPad for. The price difference between the two options doesn’t really matter, but it’s too expensive to get both and call it good.

What to do?