It’s the last day of the Year of Time, and I think of it broadly as a success. I’ve cut my commitments to the bare minimum, and for the first time in forever have been making solid progress on self care and relaxation as a goal. Most nights, after work, there hasn’t been more work.
The Steam Deck has been life changing, being a system perfect for the playing of games and almost nothing else. My computers have always been full of too many non-gaming temptations to be effective gaming machines, even when they were very much built with that express purpose in mind.
Now I notice all the little places where previously robust systems have been allowed to atrophy. I don’t cook my own meals as often, I don’t get out for as many walks, books remain un-read, hobbies find themselves un-pursued. Foundations need to be relaid. It’s time to build again.
So what’s next?
Let’s say you were going to learn to play the piano this year. If you learn to play from a teacher, you’ll likely follow a fairly familiar pattern: learn the structure of the instrument, the names of the keys, the location of middle C. Then the structure of a chord, how certain keys played together relate to each other. You’d learn to play a few songs you hadn’t thought of since grade school.
And then you’d reach the point that breaks most people: you’d learn your scales and arpeggios.
You’d play the same series of notes over, and over, and over, moving up the scale, then down the scale, then up and down the scale, then up and down the next scale starting a single key higher. It would not sound like music. It would sound like the scene in every movie where the child is learning piano and the parent is out of their mind with the monotony of the same notes over and over and over.
And it’s awful, and you’d likely hate it. Most people do. But here’s the thing: it’s critically important. The repeated routine of the mundane is what gets you to excellence. All the while your fingers are repeating those same notes they’re building familiarity with how to move between the keys, what it feels like. Muscles and memory are strengthening together. You’re creating the conditions that will someday allow you to fly, but for today you must walk. And walk. And walk.
I’ve never met anyone that enjoys the process of playing scales and arpeggios, but the end result is Beethoven. Mozart. Chopin. Through the regular and routine practice of the basics, comes mastery.
The Year of Scales and Arpeggios
My theme for 2024 is to develop mastery of the mundane. To build the foundations and implement the systems that look like walking today, none of which are flashy or fun, that I believe will allow me to someday fly. It’s time to focus on the beautiful execution of the basic and the boring.
What does that look like in practice? Here’s a few of the things I’m thinking about currently.
Options require decisions, decisions create opportunity cost. Remove options everywhere I can. Build and follow routines for anything important.
If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing every day. 15 minutes a day adds up to a little more than 80 hours a year, or two standard American work weeks. I can get a lot done in 80 hours if I try.
The simple thing I can actually do reliably will always beat the complicated thing that works occasionally, or for limited duration.
And here’s a few of my tentative plans for the new year:
Wake up at least an hour before work starts, use 30 minutes of that time to walk on my treadmill while also doing daily planning. Stealing that idea almost entirely from CGP Grey, but it seems like a good one.
Systematize meal planning. I’d like to create a series of week-long “menus” that can be rotated, where what we need to buy and what we’re going to eat on any given night are already planned from the meals I know we like. The weekend is a great chance to experiment with new things, because I enjoy cooking, but I don’t really want to be trying new things on a busy weeknight.
Get real serious about the least serious sport. It’s time to really learn to play disc golf.
A couple days belated, but last week was primarily about the run-up to Christmas. My routine for the last several weeks has been to wrap up dinner then settle on the couch with my Steam Deck, play something, and have a movie on in the background. I think as a result I’ve seen more movies in December than the preceding decade.
In alphabetical order:
8-Bit Christmas (2021)
A Christmas Story (1983)
Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas (1977)
Frosty the Snowman (1969)
Groundhog Day (1993)
Home Alone (1990)
How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000)
Klaus (2019)
The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964)
The Santa Clause (1994)
Scrooged (1988)
Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984)
Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 (1987)
A Very Murray Christmas (2015)
White Christmas (1954)
I have thoughts about most of them, but I think I can summarize and say that the only one I for sure wouldn’t watch a second time is the original Silent Night, Deadly Night, and that’s because the first 30-45 minutes of Part 2 are a direct re-telling of the original. That was a fun back-to-back watch one night.
The other thing I noticed is that Rudolph has some interesting and unintended cultural commentary. It’s a film that I don’t think would get made today, and not just because it’s claymation. The premise that someone should be ostracized because of a small physical difference that has no bearing at all on their abilities basically doesn’t play in our society anymore, for good reason. That this was ever considered “acceptable,” I think, explains a lot about my parents’ generation. But I’ll always stan the island of misfit toys.
While watching all these movies I mostly played Dave the Diver, which I would give something in the neighborhood of 80%. It’s basically a series of minigames wrapped in a roguelike. Which are all words that generally would not recommend a game to me. However, there’s a lot of charm, the roguelike parts are mostly not awful and only punishing when you “lose,” which very quickly becomes easy to not do.
Most of the minigames are only forced on you once, and then become entirely optional for replay. And it’s impressive for the sheer breadth of how many different kinds of games they snuck in. In later stages it’s variously a Tomagatchi, a business simulator, a rhythm game, and a bullet hell. It’s like the developers tossed the entire kitchen sink at it, with enough fidelity that they all feel like honest representations of their genre. I didn’t exactly enjoy most of them, because they’re not genres I would have wanted to play, but I did enjoy the framing of them in the context of a silly little sushi game, and none of them went on so long or were so difficult that they roadblocked the rest of the experience. Probably the best $20 I’ve spent on Steam in 2023.
I quietly set the goal of spending no money for a week and almost managed to do it. There’s nearly enough food in the house that if I’m clever I don’t need to supplement much to make a week’s worth of meals. Even though we ended up making a few grocery runs, we avoided eating out so I’m still calling it a success.
Heading into 2024 I’m wondering how long I can extend the concept. A no-buy month? A no-buy year? I don’t think I could get much beyond a month without needing a proper grocery run, but how many other things could I get by without buying?
I started winding down my comics hobby, and I’m going to let the ones that I’m already technically in the middle of finish out their runs. It’ll probably the next six months for final issues to land. Probably another six months after that to catch up on the backlog.
Also made some progress on migrating to a new project management system for Warhammer. Since I have a bad habit of putting down half-finished work I need a way to remember what’s done on a model. YouTrack feels like 80% of Jira, but the right 80%. It’s almost suspiciously pleasant to use. I’ve got about 10% of the data entry done, enough to kick the tires and know it probably move the rest over the next couple of weeks.
An Opinionated Decision Matrix for Which TTRPG System to Use
Inscribed on
If your primary concern is getting people together at a table to play at all, pick D&D 5E. Everyone knows how to play it, it can be molded to meet the needs of any table, and there are countless off the shelf supplements already available to help a current or aspiring Dungeon Master.
The reality for many people is that it doesn’t matter which TTRPG system they use, because the struggle is going to be getting four or more adults together in a room for two or more hours in the first place. Under those conditions, the path of least resistance is the correct path, and that is almost always going to mean D&D 5E. There is nothing wrong with making this choice. It’s more important that you have fun with your friends engaging with a hobby you love than just about any other consideration.
If, on the other hand, your primary concern is literally anything else, then there is always going to be a better system to choose than D&D 5E. The reality is that it doesn’t matter how you choose to define “better” in this case, there’s going to be something that rises to the bar. The so-called “world’s most popular tabletop RPG” got there in the same way that Kleenex became the most well-known facial tissue. It is the lowest common denominator. Ubiquitous. Acceptable, though not aspirational. D&D is “good enough” most of the time. But if you have the time and the inclination, you can do better.
Someone out there has lovingly crafted a TTRPG system perfectly tailored to tell the kind of story you want to tell, and they want nothing more than for you to experience it and find joy. The only limit is the amount of time you can spend trying to find it and whether you can convince your friends to play it.
I would like to propose the term “corporate dozen” to refer to any time or situation where a company has reduced the standard and customary amount of something in order to increase profits.
EX: “Most boxed cake mixes now only make a corporate dozen cupcakes due to shrinkflation.”
Resisting the urge to wait until I know exactly what I want to say before saying anything.
Spent the day on the couch playing Dave the Diver which I did not like at first, but which I think gets better, and watching Christmas movies. It’s a rare treat to get to spend a weekend day doing basically nothing, by which I mean doing only what sounds nice in a relaxing manner.
Speaking of Christmas movies, I watched 8-Bit Christmas for the first time, and it ended up being deeply touching. I cried. I think the premise is maybe a 6/10, but the execution has a lot of heart. If it sounds even remotely like something you might enjoy, it has my stamp of recommendation.
With two weeks left in the Year of Time, I’ve got one last cut to make. It’s time to say goodbye to comic books. I’ve done a terrible job of keeping up with them since I picked the hobby back up in May 2022, and rather than let them slowly continue to pile up in the living room I’m going to wind it down so that I can focus more on my keystone hobby goals for 2024. This Tyranid army isn’t going to paint itself.
It’s pretty clear that I still have at least three major time-sink hobbies, and I estimate that I could probably keep up with maybe two of them. One of the following probably needs to go:
Warhammer 40K (unlikely)
TTRPGs (unlikely)
Lorcana (… possibly.)
Lorcana doesn’t take up that much time at the moment, because in practice I don’t actually play it. I’m collecting cards on the chance that a future version of me decides it’s more fun than the other options currently taking up that time. There exists a future version of me who wishes the current version of me were doing this, and until I’m certain I won’t become that person it’s cheap insurance. But I fully acknowledge I’m not actually doing anything with the cards at the moment.
Had an excellent conversation last night with Jerry Holkins from Penny Arcade about tyranid list building and strategy that has me reconsidering half my 10th edition list.
