Professional computer toucher, amateur wizard, full-time soup enthusiast
WAG vs WUG
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I’m not a traditionally “goal-motivated” person. For certain values of goal, motivated, and person. I have a formative memory of telling my third grade teacher that I would not be setting any new years resolutions because the idea is quite ridiculous, thank you.
I continue to agree with past-me about that.
“Goals” are sort of like a report card: some people are super motivated by getting good grades for some reason. If this is you, stop it. Grades are a scam. Do as little as you can to pass, and spend as much of your time as possible being curious about the world around you. Go outside. Lick a bug. Everything worth doing is as far from a classroom as you are allowed to get.
I digress.
Nothing about having a goal helps you achieve a goal. The goal doesn’t define the process that leads to the goal’s success. The goal doesn’t punish you for failure. The goal is Gary Busey standing over your bed breathing slightly too loud while you sleep. Unsettling, perhaps, but it’s not kicking your ass and telling you to achieve your destiny.
You’re defined by what you do, not by what you say you’ll do. Set a goal to have beautiful teeth in a decade and then stop brushing your teeth. Clearly the operative lever here, the essential fulcrum, is the tooth brushing habit.
Best case scenario, you’ve set out to do something you were already going to do, and you did it. Most likely case scenario you failed to achieve the goal, were a failure, should pour salt on yourself, shrivel up, and die.
Yes, I am a perfectionist, why do you ask?
I can’t speak to how anyone else conceives of goals. I suspect not like I do. Given the above, can you blame me for not finding them motivating? A “goal,” as described, is an opportunity to demonstrate my limitless capacity to fail at my own ambitions. Why would I even start down that path?
Except, apparently, I have always set what a normal, rational person would call goals. If you’ve known me long enough you’ve probably heard me say I want to be the CEO of the company. Quite possibly with an almost feverish level of intensity.
Listen, I know I’m not going to be the CEO. I mean maybe a CEO. Eventually. But not at my current day job.
This is what I call a Wildly Unachievable Goal. The point isn’t to ever do the thing. It’s to pick a direction, burn the boats, set out across the American Southwest, and see how close I get. Because every step of the way is valuable. I’ll learn, I’ll grow. I’ll end up closer to it than I ever might have imagined.
I think that for a WUG to work, you have to take it at face value. You have to believe in it with your heart and spleen. If at any point you acknowledge that it’s not really your intention, the magic breaks. It’s the productivity equivalent of a placebo.
Something new I’m trying out are Wildly Achievable Goals. WAGs. This is, I think, much closer to what a normal person would call a “goal.” It’s a thing I want to do, or have, or be, that through a reasonable series of steps, could happen.
A WAG might be “write a book.” It might be “launch an app on the App Store.” They’re things that normal human people do, but maybe you’ve never done.
The point of a WAG is that at the end of it, you have the thing you set out to do. No matter how audacious it is, you have reason to believe you could do it. No matter how long it takes, you think you could get it done.
A WUG is something you know you’ll never do, but you’re going to run full-chested at it anyway, because the point isn’t to get there, it’s to land among the stars.
Another evening of memes with the wizards. Not saying any of them are particularly good, but we had fun. If intentional living sounds like your jam, take a peek.
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What is a curse if not a dark gift?
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Makin' memes with the wizards.
The Crossroads Between Need and Desire
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The fundamental question: whether to prioritize security or fulfillment – to “run for office” or “build a rocket”.
A Personal Interest Rubric
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Have you ever lost something and then spent the next ten years trying to find it?
I have. It’s an essay about the fall of the Roman Empire. Did the average citizen know the empire had fallen?
No. It took them about 200 years to figure out, but you’re just going to have to trust me because all the kings horses and all the king’s men haven’t been able to find that paper again.
All of this is backstory
Back in 2020 I got way into the idea of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) and went about setting up my first “PKM Stack,” or set of tools for solving the problem: how do I stop losing all the interesting things I read.
The first version of this stack used Instapaper as my read-it-later, IFTTT, Dropbox, and Obsidian. The workflow sucked. But the basic idea was I’d read something, if it had any highlights those would get put in a markdown file in Dropbox by IFTTT, and then I’d manually drag it over to Obsidian eventually.
When AI first started taking off Instapaper used it as an opportunity to raise their rates, and not having been CRAZY happy with that solution, and not seeing any value in the then-state of AI, I used it as a chance to rethink, and ended up hopping to Readwise Reader.
Instapaper to Reader
When I migrated from Instapaper to Reader it was, by necessity, an imperfect migration. Instapaper’s output format included a link to the original document, the parts I had highlighted, but not the document text. Reader had to go out and fetch the document bodies again, and in a handful of cases failed. Either because Reader couldn’t parse it, or because the document was gone.
I also had the habit of archiving everything in the hope I would be able to find it later if I needed. This comes from deep trauma: I’m still looking for a paper I read a decade ago about whether the average imperial citizen knew the Roman Empire had fallen.
The result is a large backlog of low-value things that I had read, and saved in case, that I was unlikely to ever look at again. Or find any value in if I did.
Reader to the Future
Reader is fine for, well, reading, but it’s got usability gaps for making notes and long-term storage. Especially since my primary modality for using it is on an iPad mini on a flight somewhere. Most of my life runs out of Obsidian, why not this?
After thinking about it I decided that I want every document that I “archive” in Reader to go through an enrichment pipeline that summarizes it, extracts any highlights, extracts any key ideas or topics, and puts a markdown file in the right part of my Obsidian vault with all that information and a link back to the Reader copy, so that I can reference it if needed.
To make it maximally useful, I needed to do this for everything in the archive, and to do that I needed to get rid of all the low-value documents hanging around in there.
How to Build A Rubric And Learn to Love the Atomic Bomb
Going through the entire archive was going to require a system that could look at everything and reliably decide what I should or shouldn’t keep. To do that, I needed to be able to describe what I would want to keep. I needed an interest rubric.
Have you ever tried to describe yourself? Like really describe yourself? Maybe this is easier for other people but man I struggled. I came up with I think about four core interests, but I knew that wasn’t accurate.
My next attempt was to open a conversation with Claude, explain to it what I was trying to do, and ask it to interview me. This was... Medium successful? It ended up being a much better place to start from but was not in and of itself nearly comprehensive. Again it continued to rely on the things I could think of to prompt it with.
Finally I thought, okay. Well. I’ve got this backlog of things I’ve read. I know it’s got some stuff I want to get rid of, but it’s also filled with lots of stuff I’d want to keep. Can I use that as the basis for a rubric?
Bingo.
The next problem was purely technical. Over 700 documents, many running into the tens of thousands of words. There was going to be no way to put them all into Claude’s context at once. I thought about it and figured “good enough” might be “good enough” at scale: I had Claude write a series of Python scripts that would randomly sample about half of the documents and post them to an OpenAI batch job with the goal of summarizing and extracting key insights.
I’m not certain if this was the absolute final version of the prompt, but it looked a lot like this:
Your task is to analyze this document and create a comprehensive summary that would allow someone to understand its core value without reading the full text.
Content:
{doc[‘extracted_content’][:15000]} # Truncate very long content
Please provide:
A concise but information-dense summary (2-3 paragraphs) that captures the key ideas, arguments, and context of the document.
3-5 key insights or takeaways from the document that represent its most valuable content.
A brief assessment of why this content might be valuable to someone with interests in rationality, economics, science fiction, fantasy, and tabletop role-playing games. If the content seems unrelated to these areas, explain what type of person might find it valuable instead.
Format your response as structured JSON with the following keys:
“summary”, “key_insights” (as an array), and “value_assessment”.
I think of “summarize a bunch of text” as something Large Language Models (LLMs, such as Claude or ChatGPT) are good at. Perfect use case.
My next step was to take the first Markdown file and the basis of my rubric from the interviews, and attach them to a conversation with Claude Sonnet 3.7 with Extended Thinking. I typed out like four paragraphs of stream-of-consciousness about what I was trying to do and asked it, in so many words: “based on all these summaries, what interests do you think I have that you don’t see on the rubric?”
Thus began a long dialogue. It would propose, based on what it saw, what it thought I liked. I would correct, confirm, cajole, and provide insight. Why yes, I am deeply interested in Philosophy. Actually no I’m not that interested in international finance, that one article happened to be really interesting.
Claude:
Governance and Legal Systems: Your reading suggests deep interest in specific governance mechanisms and legal frameworks beyond general institutional analysis. How central is this comparative approach to governance in your thinking?
Me:
I think I'm interested in how the world works, and how it could be made to work better. How do we build a better world, or at least minimize the chances of a worse world. I don't think I'm specifically interested in governance and legal systems outside of that context.
Claude:
There's a recurring pattern of interest in Philosophical Frameworks for analyzing complex issues. Would you consider this a hidden interest, or do you see it as simply an aspect of Rationality?
Me:
I am definitely interested in philosophy and philosophical frameworks. If I didn't need to "work for a living," I would strongly consider going back to school for a PhD in Philosophy. I think all of life's interesting questions are in the world of philosophy, and that it's a shame there's no way to make money doing it.
At the end, I’d ask it to spit out an updated version of the rubric, which I would take to a new conversation with Claude, the next markdown file, and repeat the process. After the second round I asked it to provide me with a prompt that captured everything I was trying to do, which I used for all subsequent iterations of the conversation.
The output of all these rounds was a several-kilobyte markdown file which accurately captures some, but not all, of my various interests. Not all my interests are captured in the things I read, and a random sampling was always bound to miss something. Nevertheless it’s good for what it got!
If you think it’d be interesting to see the final result (either to see what we built, or to get a better sense of who I am as a person,) I’ll attach a lightly edited version at the end.
Actually Doing the Thing, for Exceptionally Large Values of Thing
Originally I was going to take my rubric and repurpose those scripts to have ChatGPT do the review, but I ran into a technical issue and had to pivot to Anthropic for this part. The ChatGPT batch API is convinced that I have batches in progress, even when I don’t and I can’t submit any more.
Anthropic ended up working out well because their API will let you set a “system” prompt that is distinct from the “user” prompt. The entire rubric and guidance on the return format went into the system prompt, and the user prompt ended up being the document data.
The first run, everything scored too high. Every document was a keeper, even ones I knew I didn’t want to keep.
I adjusted the rubric slightly, and it got a little better.
Finally, I added a point deduction metric for certain topics I knew I didn’t like, and that hit the sweet spot. The final run resulted in a markdown file reviewing everything in my Reader backlog that didn’t have highlights, and suggested around 83 deletions.
I manually reviewed all suggested deletions, and agreed with all but one of them, which revealed an obvious gap in the rubric. Success! The “keeps” were lightly spot-checked. I don’t need it to be absolutely right about them, because the worst case there is that a future step of this project costs me a little extra money by doing enrichment on a document that has nothing of value to give. I’m not that worried about it.
Conclusion
So what I did I learn? I learned a lot about how batch jobs to OpenAI and Anthropic work. I learned a medium amount about my own interests. I feel like if I had any need to do it I could write an extremely good dating profile now. “Enjoys long walks in the forest and applied epistemology.” I learned a bit more about how to wrangle the best results out of the current state of LLMs.
My next steps are to take everything I learned and built and begin working on the enrichment pipeline, which I think will look pretty similar in a lot of ways to start. Because I first need to deal with my archive, batch jobs are the most cost effective option. Eventually I’m imagining an AWS Step Function. All of which is better than Ghostreader. Most of which is better than nothing.
Did this help me find my Roman Empire? Well, no. As far as I can tell that’s well and truly gone. But I think it’s improving the process by which I never let the Empire fall again.
Personal Interest Rubric
About the Reader
This rubric is designed for a person with the following traits and preferences:
Values truth-seeking and building accurate models of reality
Appreciates both emotional resonance and intellectual substance
Prefers context before details when learning new topics
Enjoys conversational writing styles that "write like they talk"
Has strong aversion to marketing/sales approaches
Prefers content that's potentially actionable
Values concise, self-contained ideas that can stand alone when highlighted
Approaches topics with "breadth first, depth second" methodology
Trusts sources vouched for by existing trusted connections
Tends toward analytical and systems-based thinking approaches
Shows particular interest in understanding complex interactions and patterns
Values both theoretical frameworks and practical applications
Appreciates insights that help navigate social dynamics and human behavior
Drawn to understanding structural and systemic aspects of topics rather than isolated facts
Core Interests
Fiction: Science fiction (especially space opera and dystopian settings), fantasy
Notable influences: Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land," Tolkien, Clarke, Warhammer 40K, Babylon 5
Values complex storytelling with deep worldbuilding
Appreciates speculative settings that explore social, technological, or philosophical concepts
Institutional Systems & Societal Structures: Understanding how large-scale human systems function, fail, and evolve
Focus on institutional failure modes and resilience patterns across domains
Interest in societal collapse, adaptation, and transition points
Historical Patterns: How civilizations rise, decline, and transform over time
Examples: Empire lifecycles, institutional decay, adaptation to crises
Values comparative analyses across different historical contexts
System Design & Incentives: How rules and incentives shape organizational outcomes
Myopic Health / Lifestyle Optimization: -20 points
Narrow bio-hacks or supplement regimes unsupported by broader cognitive or systems framing
Isolated health trends without integration into holistic frameworks
Academic or Career Status Talk: -20 points
Tenure politics, citation games, or prestige jockeying with no extractable institutional insight
Professional gossip lacking broader principles about institutional dynamics
Policy or Regulation Critiques in a Vacuum: -20 points
Singling out one law (e.g., Jones Act) without drawing generalizable regulatory lessons
Narrow policy analysis without broader principles or patterns
Scoring Methodology
This rubric uses a point-based system with both positive criteria and penalties:
Calculate Positive Points: First, add all points from the Core Criteria (0-70 possible) and Bonus Criteria (0-30 possible) sections based on the document's strengths.
Apply Penalties: Next, subtract any applicable penalty points from the Topics to Avoid (-75 points per topic) or Content to Approach with Caution (-15 to -25 points per category) sections.
Determine Final Score: The resulting total represents the document's final score, which should be evaluated against the Final Score Interpretation scale.
Decision Rule: Documents scoring below 50 points after all calculations should be discarded, regardless of their initial positive score.
Final Score Interpretation
90‑100: Exceptionally interesting – drop everything to read and deeply engage
75‑89: Highly interesting – worth dedicated time and attention
50‑59: Moderately interesting – skim for valuable sections
Discard threshold (below 50 points)
Topics to Track
This section captures nascent topics that have appeared in my reading but haven't yet accumulated enough evidence to warrant promotion to core interests. Items here have typically appeared in 1-2 documents that resonated with me but don't yet demonstrate consistent engagement across multiple sources.
I track these topics to identify patterns in my evolving interests. When I notice multiple high-quality pieces related to the same tracked topic over time, this signals a potential new core interest emerging. This approach helps me recognize genuine shifts in my intellectual focus rather than temporary curiosities.
Each topic below represents a potential direction for future exploration that has shown some initial promise. They remain in this "waiting room" until sufficient evidence accumulates to justify promotion to a core interest.
Cognitive Optimization & Attention – techniques and states (from memory systems to contemplative practice) that enhance mental performance or regulate focus.
Leadership & Creative Practice – skill-building for high-leverage roles and sustainable creative careers that hasn’t yet folded into the Core “Creative Process & Productivity” interest.
Tech-Futures Ethics & Governance – long-term thinking and moral analysis around emerging technologies, genetic selection, and far-future scenarios.
AI Dynamics – surprising or little-understood emergent behaviors in AI systems that sit adjacent to, but aren’t yet central within, the AI Core Interest.
Infrastructure Resilience & Security – systemic approaches to keeping physical and digital infrastructure robust against failure or attack.
Public Systems & Policy Design – complex-systems views on public-health policy, regulation, and institutional architecture (distinct from day-to-day partisan politics).
Culture, Language & Society – anthropological lenses on technology plus linguistic and cognitive diversity research that reveal how culture shapes thought.
Open Web & Digital Commons – governance, sustainability, and advocacy for shared digital resources and open platforms.
Game Facilitation – psychology and techniques for running engaging tabletop or live-action games; supports (but isn’t yet promoted into) the Role-Playing Games Core Interest.
RPG Mechanics Innovation - Novel approaches to traditional tabletop systems that solve common gameplay issues or create new player experiences.
Somewhere around five years ago I briefly entertained the idea that I was very seriously going to attempt to be an author. During that time I approached this the way I approach everything: with my whole entire ass.
Why half-ass anything when you can whole-ass one thing?
Which meant that, among other things, I read a lot of books on how to do writing good. Also, I tried to practice doing writing good.
The following are two bits of flash fiction that I wrote for practice.
Long Night of the Soul
Kazrin felt the thrum of his dirigible’s turbines through the wheel as he strained to guide his ship against strong chronomantic headwinds. Three days out from port, four more to the capital city, and nowhere to stop in between.
A symphony of lights erupted from the console in front of him. “Not again.” The thrum got weaker as the ship listed helplessly further to the port side. He slapped a heavy gloved hand against the wall while bellowing some of his juiciest curses. For a brief moment the turbine rumbled back to life, but quickly died taking the rest of the engines with it.
More choice words as the pilot flailed behind his seat looking for something, anything. He grasped at the jungle of cables full of various fluids and gasses. One of the tubes moved as he knew it shouldn’t. Kazrin grasped, wriggled, and finally slammed it back into place. The turbines roared back to life.
Only four more days to go. A warm meal. A warm bed. There’d be plenty of time once his work was done. For now, he was satisfied to be heading in the right direction.
The Underthing
Cold aethermantic resin dripped from the tunnel ceiling on to Alex’s head as he traced his finger over the brass pipe schematic. Ruined parts were strewn around him, not a single one had fit. “Lazy horking engineers never updating documentation,” he cursed out loud. “Kim valve” the useless flow-chart indicated, “model 703.”
Alex pressed his last 703 into the indicated ports, connections snapping into place with a satisfying click. Several pressure dials started to rise in an encouraging manner indicating positive resin flow. A great gout of fluid burst through the middle of the device, gauges falling back to their zero readings and covered him in even more of the viscous goo. Great, now he was out of Kim valves and he smelled like a cheeseburger went dancing on a hot summer day.
He pulled out the ruptured 703 and tossed it on the growing pile, then examined his parts bag critically. No more 703s, but a rusty Alice 417 and a Stanley 286. Out of better options to try he jammed the 417 into one side and the 286 in the other, then pressed the two parts together. They didn’t quite fit, but a few wraps of luminescent green fibertape and maybe? Almost? The pressure gauges ticked up and the tape held.
The sound of resin flowing was music to Alex’s ears. Fifteen years in the tunnels and it never stopped sounding sweet. He gathered up his tools and set off, there would be many more leaks to fix before the day was done.
The Wizard's Workbench Friday, April 4 2025
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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.
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.
What began as a fear of undue influence transformed into a realization that ideas are meant to be shared, not hoarded—execution is what truly matters in the end.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
