“We like imperfection in others, but expect perfection in ourselves.”
Ash: “Put that away.”
Me: “What?”
Ash: “Your whimsy.”
I Spend Too Much Money on Magic For Someone Who Doesn’t Play Magic
If I had to guess I last played Magic: The Gathering in 2005. I went to a card shop (a type of place I spent approximately no time, even then,) to hang out with a friend who was hopelessly addicted to the stuff, and played a pickup game with one of the local card sharks. It went poorly, and I swore off the habit for good.
Except every once in a while it manages to get its claws back into me. Like a belligerent crab with a gambling addiction. “Just another pack,” it burbles in crabspeak.
Last year Duskmourn came out with my heart squarely in its targeting reticule. Analog horror where the house is also a moth? Say less, sis.
The only problem? I knew I wouldn’t actually get back into playing. Look; maybe some people can pretend like they’ve got infinite time. I have the strictly opposite problem. I am, if anything, too aware of how little time I have. It’s not possible to do everything I want to do in a day, and every additional thing has to be at the expense of something else I’ve already decided is a priority.
But that’s okay. Lots of people buy books they’ll never read, movies they’ll never watch. Buying games you’ll never play is most of Steam’s business model. What if I just collected some Magic cards? As a treat?
This is basically, more or less, how I got into collecting set binders. Not for every set, but just for the ones that were both obtainable and thematically interesting to me. I decided not to go back and try to collect stuff that was no longer in print, because that’s a potentially infinite fractal and also risks getting quite expensive.
A smarter person would have done this by just buying singles. It’s by far the cheapest way to go about it. Being the contrarian I am, I decided to go the route of mostly buying packs. Why? Honestly, because they’re kind of fun to open. I’m largely immune to the siren call of gambling. The casino holds no power over me. But cracking a fresh pack of trading card product? That’s a high like no other.
One of the biggest reasons cracking packs isn’t the cost-effective way to collect a set is that you end up with a ton of duplicates. Depending on how many boosters I buy, it’s not impossible to get 10 or 20 of some cards, where I arguably only need one for the binder.
What to do with the rest?
Originally, I’d take all of my extra cards and try to trade them in for credit, then use that credit to fill in gaps where I hadn’t lucked into a card. This… Works? But you lose a lot of value in the process. If a card is worth $10 on resale it might be worth $0.50 in trade. Sure, I probably could try to sell them myself, but what hobby am I giving up to do that? Exactly.
I sold all my valuable extras for Duskmourn, but never repeated the process for Edge of Eternities. I’ve got a huge card box filled to the brim with cards that I mostly don’t need, because I don’t actually play the game. What to do?
The last piece fell into place recently in the form of a medium-popularity (but growing) format for Magic: cube.
The extremely TL;DR of cube is this: pretend that the only cards that exist are one person’s curated best-of list. That’s it. That’s the gimmick.
Cube is mostly presented as a draft format. Some friends get together and open “booster packs” from that curated setlist and build decks on the fly then play each other. I’m not really a fan of draft, but I can see the appeal. Also you get the fun of opening packs for cards you already own, which is definitely something I can get behind.
So I started thinking, what if I built a cube out of each of the sets I’ve decided to collect? That way, in some hypothetical future, if I ever do have the time to play, I can play a version of Magic that’s effectively “pinned” to the release of the sets I find most thematically interesting. I definitely wasn’t playing Magic when Duskmourn came out, but that’s an experience I can recreate at any time thanks to cube.
That became last weekend’s project. We culled my entire remaining Duskmourn collection into basically two categories. I have the collection binder, which has one of every card that came out. It’s basically an art book of Magic cards, and it’s a lot of fun to flip through. Then, I’ve got a box filled with actual playable cards, according to the basic rubric of 1 for each rare, two for each uncommon, and four for each common.
Later this year I plan to pick up some support products designed to hold reconstructed “booster packs” for the cube format so that I can properly store the Duskmourn cube, and this weekend I’m planning to go through the same process for Edge of Eternities.
All of the rest of my cards were donated to my fiancé, who operates a card shop and can sell them as inventory.
Now I’ve got the best of both worlds. I have my collection binder, and I have a frozen-in-time cube that would let me play the game, as it existed at the time, if I ever find the time to do it.
Have the audacity. Believe that you can. Do the thing.
It feels like we’ve developed some kind of histamine reaction to imagination. We are afraid that people will “catch” a bad idea. Well, stupid people are always gonna think dumb things and do dumb shit. That’s their whole thing. The solution can’t be to make artists dumb too.
— (CW)TB
Minimum Wage
I’m going to start living on minimum wage. Sort of. Not really. It’s complicated.
Some types of sophistication won’t make you enjoy the object more, they’ll make you enjoy it less. For example, wine snobs don’t enjoy wine twice as much as you, they’re more keenly aware of how most wine isn’t good enough. Avoid sophistication that diminishes your enjoyment.
In the beginning God created a budget
There’s basically two parts to a budget. There’s the part where you track things, and the part where you use it to make decisions. I’m decent at the first part. Awful at the second.
I’ve been using YNAB since it was desktop software. It does an incredible job of tracking how I spend my money and assigning it to categories. Categories that I have, nominally, assigned my income to. What it can’t do is tell me to stop spending money when I’ve overspent a category. Which is fair, because I can’t tell me to do that either.
Broadly, in practice, I spend my money on vibes. I know roughly how much I can get away with spending, and I’ve got systems in place to cover when I overspend, so I’m never at any real risk of the bills not getting paid, but it’s not a great way to achieve my longer-term goals.
Now the budget was formless and empty
I’m old enough to have worked jobs where my paychecks were actual checks, delivered to the building, by hand, that I had to take to a bank to deposit.
Dinosaurs and Margaret Thatcher roamed the earth. Mosquitos the size of Volkswagens. Etc.
But for at least the last decade or so I’ve worked for companies with direct deposit, and where there’s direct deposit there’s usually a way to split that deposit between multiple accounts. I’ve used that ability to functionally “hide” money from myself. Probably a solid third of my paycheck skips my checking account each month, diverted to various savings and investment accounts.
This is the mechanism that supports my tendency to overspend. While I know there’s always money in the rhetorical banana stand, I don’t always know how much and I don’t think of it as “available to spend.” A few times a year, I end up raiding one or more of those other accounts to cover. And that’s broadly what I think of as “the system working.”
As a consequence, I’ve never missed rent. Literally or rhetorically.
And God said “let there be income”
It turns out I’m actually pretty good at living within the limits of what I think I have. I know how much money is in my checking account at any given time, and that creates a rubric for what size of purchase I can make without needing to check the balance. Mostly it’s fine. Sometimes I overshoot, but then I’ve got savings to cover.
I call this the “zone of indiscriminate spending.” How much money can you spend without needing to think about it? Maybe it’s a couple bucks. If you’re fortunate, maybe it’s a couple hundred.
Right now this zone is much larger than I’d like it to be. I’d like to be operating like $10 is no big deal, but $100 requires scrutiny. In practice I operate at about one order of magnitude above that.
And God said “let there be spending”
So I’m going to start living on minimum wage. Sort of. Kind of. Not really?
I’m going to put myself on an allowance roughly equivalent to minimum wage.
It’s a more extreme version of the technique that’s always worked: hiding money from myself.
The key here is to reduce my intuitive sense of what’s available to spend without actually putting myself in danger of bills not getting paid.
I call this a “load-bearing lie.” We all know it’s not true. I know it’s not true. But maintaining the fiction is important to achieving my desired outcome: I need to behave in all ways as if the money is not available to spend in order not to spend it.
And God said “let me separate the good spending from the bad”
How do I do this in practice? Too many bank accounts.
My income from any and all sources will flow into a clearinghouse account, implemented as a money market account at my main bank. Their money market accounts have the same APR as a high-yield savings account, so money sitting in that account earns as much interest as money I’ve sent to savings.
However, money market accounts have withdrawal limits, so the next step is routing “spendable” money out of the clearinghouse in as few transactions as possible. Each of the following will happen on the last day of the month, to set up the next month’s spending.
- Transaction 1: my allowance to my personal spending account.
- Transaction 2: my contribution to the family’s fixed expenses to our shared spending account.
- Transaction 3: payment of any reimbursable work expenses to a dedicated credit card.
- Transaction 4: transfer to savings.
- Transaction 5: transfer to brokerage.
Notably, this is exactly half of the “allowed” number of money market transactions in a month. That gives me breathing room to transfer again if something goes wrong. The whole point of this system is to automate as much as possible and avoid the need to do so, but I have the flexibility if I need it.
And God said “okay maybe don’t spend that much”
Okay, so what is my allowance? I thought about this for quite a while and decided to pin it somewhat arbitrarily to Maine’s minimum wage.
Why Maine? Because I’m planning to move there in the next few years. Why minimum wage? Because it’s a psychologically useful framing. People find a way to make minimum wage work.
The problem I’ve set for myself is actually much easier than truly living on minimum wage, since the family’s fixed expenses don’t need to come out of that pool of money, but thinking of myself as trying to live at or below the minimum wage line provides a point of reference and an identity designed to guide me away from overconsumption and overspending.
And God said “let the Bills be with the Bills”
As you’ve probably already noticed, the devil is in the details. When I talk about not needing to pay for the family’s fixed expenses from this pool of money, that potentially leaves a lot of room to keep spending money the way I always have, except now with more steps.
What counts as fixed? What counts as discretionary?
In practice, it comes down to how the thing is paid.
I run almost all of my finances through credit cards, paying them off in full each month, and harvesting those sweet rewards points to help defer the costs of travel. Because I can’t have my credit cards pay their balance in full split from multiple checking accounts, each card effectively becomes a boundary.
Bills like the mortgage, insurance, card payment, and utilities don’t generally accept credit cards for payment. They autopay through ACH transfers.
All of the ACH transfers will go through the family account. All of the credit cards will get paid through my personal account.
If I swipe a card, it’s discretionary. If it autopays, it’s fixed.
God saw all that he had made, and it was very good
I’ve spent a lot of words on what I’m planning to do, but not what I’m trying to achieve by doing it. I think because that part’s clear to me but somewhat harder to capture in words.
One reason is to fight back against lifestyle inflation. It’s so easy to spend money that I have on things that do not, ultimately, serve my long-term goals. And, once spent, it’s frequently hard to unspend. Sometimes in ways that accrue over time, such as additional subscriptions.
Another reason is to avoid developing sophistication that diminishes my enjoyment. If we “can’t afford” the fancier soap, are we really any worse off? What about those nicer bed sheets? That name-brand food product?
Eventually I’d like to reintroduce a significant gap between what I earn and my lifestyle, such that if my material circumstances changed I would not be worse off. This feels like, amongst many other things, good future-proofing.
At the end of the day $2500 per month is actually quite a lot for pure discretionary spending. People I respect immensely fit their entire life into that or not much more. It feels like a realistic and worthwhile goal, even as I acknowledge the ways in which I’m on “easy mode” in comparison.
Orienting Toward Wizard
Some of the concepts and terminology I’m about to use, as well as the title of the blog post, were lifted directly from here.
Having said that, I think I’m going to end up at a very different final destination than the original poster. So, credit where credit is due, but don’t feel compelled to read the original to understand my point.
King Power
King Power is money. I think the original article would try to lump in other things, like status, but one of my foundational operational primitives is that all of those things are fungible with money.
It’s technically possible in some communities to have status without having money, but those communities do not themselves have status in the wider culture. You’re welcome to feel about that all kinds of ways, and we may even agree, but it’s not germane to my point.
King Power is your ability to exert your will on other people, to achieve an outcome. This is most likely because you can pay them to do the task. (Originally, I was going to use another example here, such as being CEO, but that’s basically just paying them to do the task. See what I mean about it being fungible with money?)
Modern, industrialized, Western society teaches us that King Power is Good. You are virtuous and should be rewarded for seeking it. Gather money. Gather power. Become the CEO. Start a company. Own the local car wash.
What is best in life?
To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women!
— Conan the Barbarian (1982)
Wizard Power
In contrast, Wizard Power is your ability to exert your will on the world. All those things the King is paying for? That’s other people exerting their Wizard Power.
Fixing your own car? Wizard Power. Sewing your own clothes? Wizard Power. Growing your own food? Wizard Power.
When a king exerts King Power, they’re constrained to the world of options that have been made available for purchase. They can have anything on the menu. We are told that this is good.
When a wizard exerts Wizard Power, they’re constrained to the world of what’s possible. They can have anything which could be put on the menu. That we are not told this is good is a lie perpetrated against us by those with King Power.
Why?
Because the more effort and energy you spend on acquiring King Power, the less effort and energy you spend on acquiring Wizard Power. Each person has only so much energy, so much time, and though you can do anything, you cannot do everything.
Is This a Manifesto?
I mean. Inasmuch as basically everything I write is sort of a manifesto. What is a manifesto if not a dark essay?
Let’s call it a primer. It’s going to make a lot of future things make a lot more sense if I can refer to King Power and Wizard Power without having to define the terms.
I suspect you know where I’m going with this, and you’re very likely right, but the devil is infamously in the details.
I have removed his place, his seat, and his tomb.
I have destroyed his soul, his spirit, his body, his shade, his magic, his seed, his egg, his bones, and his hair.
Though thou shalt not exist, thou shalt suffer.
— The Book of Overthrowing Apep (~400 BCE)
One sentence on each place in Europe that I’ve been, in order of preference.
🇳🇴 Oslo, Norway
Perfection.
🇳🇴 Kristiansand, Norway
Feels like walking through a storybook about mice that run a bookstore.
🇩🇪 Berlin, Germany
I will spend the rest of my life angry that nowhere in the US has public transit this good.
🇱🇹 Klaipeda, Lithuania
Purchased a book of soviet propaganda art from a woman who spoke almost no English, 10/10, no notes.
🇱🇹 Riga, Latvia
Feels like walking through a storybook about mice that run a bookstore, but in the Middle Ages.
🇪🇪 Tallinn, Estonia
Estonia has perfected the McDonalds French Fry, no I will not be taking questions.
🇩🇰 Aarhus, Denmark
I remember almost nothing about Aarhus but at least it isn’t Copenhagen.
🇩🇰 Copenhagen, Denmark
The exact moment I realized that I never want to live in a city again for the rest of my life.
🇫🇮 Helsinki, Finland
Deserves more of a chance than I was able to give it.
🇸🇪 Stockholm, Sweden
I would go back another time, but their predatory taxi cab situation does a lot to sour the experience.
🇩🇪 Hamburg, Germany
“At least it’s not Poland” feels unnecessarily cheeky, but I’m really struggling to come up with anything else.
🇵🇱 Gdynia, Poland
The only place I went that I could not be convinced to go back to.
Stockholm, Sweden
Tallinn, Estonia
Riga, Latvia
Klaipeda, Lithuania
Berlin, Germany
Hamburg, Germany
Neuengamme Concentration Camp
Copenhagen, Denmark
Aarhus, Denmark
“Hamlet? Is that a sandwich?”
— Ash
Kristiansand, Norway
Oslo
Oslo is, without a doubt, my favorite country in all of Europe. It manages to feel expansive without feeling big. Cozy but not confined. The people were, without exception, warm, kind, and welcoming in a way that many other European countries were not.
It’s the kind of place I’d like to imagine I could aspire to live in, and perhaps some day be worthy of.
Downtown Oslo
Vigelund Sculpture Park
My frustration around products that include AI isn’t the AI itself, it’s that I’m already paying for Claude and I’m not interested in paying for seven more copies of Branded Claude. Stop trying to sell me things I already have.
Not gonna lie, when I find someone who’s weirder than me in the ways I want to be weird I get a little jealous but like in a crush-y way? Like let’s be friends, but also enemies. Frenemies. I will make you soup and steal your soul and you will fill my house with spiders and we’ll be besties.
My seasonal theme is more thoughtful use of less space.
Operating at the very top of the game, for any value of game, necessitates a single-minded devotion to the exclusion of all other interests or hobbies.
The reason most of the people who are the best at something love doing it is because it’s to the exclusion of all else.
“What is soup, but a potion for the soul?”
— Ash