I might be the only person you know who doesn’t shop on Amazon.

That’s not to say I never did. I had prime, many years ago. I even had a couple of those little IoT buttons that could automatically order products inside a cabinet cupboard. I think I used one to order breath mints once.

Of all the things they have done and still do, there’s only one consumer level service from Amazon that I miss: my kindle.

Amazon got the experience of using the kindle extremely right. The page turn is fast and satisfying, the distractions are few, books load quickly. Except for the fact that Amazon makes it, it’s the perfect device. So of course the baby must go out the window with the bathwater. It wouldn’t be acceptable to say “I don’t shop on Amazon… Except for this one way in which I do.”

In case it’s not abundantly clear, I take disproportionate amounts of psychic damage from small inconveniences. Maybe Steve Jobs and I would have gotten along, because even the most trivial of ways in which a product can get something wrong will absolutely ruin it for me. Which is why I’ve never quite found my stride using an iPad mini to replace my kindle. Oh it’s a fine device. I’d probably even recommend it. But I don’t use it to read very many books, for about seventeen smallish reasons.

All of which is to say I think it might be time to reevaluate the eReader ecosystem.

By which I mean I already did that. Because there’s really only a handful of players, the kindle is still dominant, and they all suck in one way or another.

But I think there’s a path forward with Kobo. It appears to have the best support for sideloaded books, and for a variety of reasons that’s the way I need to be able to get my books on to a device. It also has the best support for getting my highlights back off through the stack of services I prefer using.

Unfortunately, they’ve spent a lot of effort on their new pen ecosystem which looks cool but doesn’t really seem to have a good export story. It doesn’t help me to be able to “draw” on a digital book if that drawing is trapped forever on the kobo’s screen. Sorry, Rakuten, this ain’t that.

All other things being equal I’d rather have a device that does one thing extremely well, and then carry as many such devices as needed. Almost nobody builds those devices anymore, there’s no path to hockey stick unicorn trajectory golden parachute baked brie on rye simply being the best at solving a real problem these days. Also it needs AI. Sprinkle some AI on it. Bitches love AI.

Which means, realistically, a device that’s competent at the thing I care about, and then does a bunch of other stuff I don’t. It’s fine to have features I won’t use, as long as they don’t impact the experience. They usually do, because product managers literally can’t help themselves. But we all fall far from the grace of dogs. I, too, have sinned. Etc.

Is this a long-winded way of saying that I’m probably going to buy myself an eReader at some point this year? Probably. Will I still buy a new iPad mini if they announce them? Probably also yes. And carry both every time I catch a flight somewhere. But I think that’s probably a worthy trade, in the hope that by specializing my use case for each they’re marginally better at what I need them to do than the current mini is at half-doing both.

I spent most of last night talking with a dear friend about community and connection in the current age of the Internet.

We met, what feels like a hundred years ago, on IRC. I’ve sat here, staring at that line, for several minutes, because I’m not sure what I want to say about IRC. It was the perfect chat network for me, an environment where I thrived, and I miss it.

The astute may say something to the effect of “but IRC’s still there!” Yeah. In the same way that Twitter’s still there. Technically. If you have no respect for yourself. Technology has a way of clinging to a horrifying half-life long after the point where any reasonable person has left. IRC’s still out there, but I think it’s safe to say that it’s inhabited almost exclusively by people who are pointedly refusing to accept that times change. Even though I, myself, think that the technologies that replaced it are generally worse, they’re still where the people are, and the people are the part that matters.

Making new friends as an adult is hard, in part, because time is precious. I am very rarely in situations where connection happens automatically. Think of primary school. It’s easy to make friends when you’re young and in school because you’re trapped in the same place with a group of people for long periods, going through the shared experience. Basically the only place that happens to an adult is work, and while it’s possible to make friends at work it’s not always the best place to do so. Depends an awful lot on where you work and what you do.

Social clubs once would have filled this niche, and probably still do for many. The elks, eagles, and most venerable moose are all different versions of an excuse for adults to hang out together. If you live somewhere with an active social club, my sense is that opportunity still exists. At least if TikTok is to be believed. TikTok would also like me to be very aware that Freemasonry exists. Thanks, TikTok. ThikTok.

One of the problems with a social club, assuming you could find one nearby, is that they frequently require you to be in a specific place at a specific time. I don’t know about you, but all of my weeknight evenings are already spoken for, with a long list of things I wish I had time for already jostling to find a spare moment to infest my day. I would need to radically reorient my life to make an evening free to go spend it with the IOOF. Maybe that’s still worth doing, at some point, but it’s a hard sell!

The internet, at its best, enables a sort of asynchronicity in communication. I can send you a message now, and you can reply to it later, and we can have a long, slow conversation that doesn’t require either of us to be bound to a specific place or time. Email did this, before the spammers made it unsafe to share your email. Forums did it, back before Google trained us out of surfing the web. In theory this is great, because I can make it fit whatever my schedule happens to be, and does not require large contiguous blocks of time like a social club.

Being a part of the IndieWeb is a little subversive, in a way. It’s staking a flag on the claim that the internet should be free. And a little bit weird. It’s a thing that we all build together, separately, in our own way. And sometimes it’s a little bit lonely. Being off the beaten path means fewer feet find their way to your digital garden. For better or worse. It’s IRC, sort of, in the sense that we’re all participating in the process of refusing to be part of the blessed path. It’s also a community, if you want it to be. And there’s connection, if you look for it. Certainly better than what’s left of the festering corpse of Twitter.

It’s not quite a social club, but it’s a start.

A few months ago I looked back at my first 30 days of tracking 100% of my time. Now I have about a quarter’s worth of data, and some patterns have emerged.

Looking at the data by project:

• Physiological Needs - 35%
• Online Entertainment - 22%
• Work - 19%
• Hobbies - 12%
• Other - 12%

I think this is broadly in line with what I saw 30 days in. Physiological needs is mostly dominated by sleep, but includes some other “maintenance of the human body” type tasks that need to happen daily, and which slowly add up over time. The key takeaway for me is that, on average, the care and maintenance of my meat chariot is more than a third of my day. And that’s not even particularly good care. That’s darn near the bare minimum. It frustrates me how much time it takes to care for myself, and it’s a number I wish that I could drive lower but know in my heart actually needs to be higher.

The other takeaway is that, at least in the quarter where I was measuring, I spent a lot more time on the various sub-categories of “Online Entertainment” (mostly video games,) than I would have otherwise estimated. I do enjoy video games, I just didn’t think I spent that much time on them.

It’s possible to get a little bit deeper into where exactly that time went, when I look at the description I used to track it. In some cases the description always matches up with the category. Work is always work. In other cases, this is where it becomes possible to disentangle things.

• Sleep - 34%
• Work - 19%
• Computing - 7%
• Travel - 7%
• Fallout 76 - 6%
• WoW - 4%
• Cooking - 3%
• Game - 3%
• Good Eats - 3%
• Errands - 2%

I removed a couple of categories for personal reasons, so you may notice that doesn’t quite add up to 100%. It is, however, the highlights.

Notice that sleep, at 34%, is only 1% shy of the entire physiological needs category. Travel only made it up to 7% because I booked an entire convention under the category. It seemed like the closest and most applicable way to track that time, but for convenience I tracked the whole event that way including time spent eating, sleeping, etc.

This leads me to two actionable conclusions.

1. I probably spend a smidge more time gaming than I would ideally want to. As much as I enjoy this, it’s the thing eating the most time from other hobbies.
2. All of my mental time budgets that assume I spend 1/3rd of my time “sleeping” fail to account for the rest of the time that it takes to maintain a human body.

My next step, I think, is to retool the categories I’m using to better reflect how I want to spend my day. “Online entertainment” lumps together too many things that I can only usefully split back out by the description on the time record.

Some of the categories I think it might be useful to track include:

1. Multiplayer Games
2. Singleplayer Games
3. Content Creation
4. Content Consumption
5. Cooking (Hobby)
6. Cooking (Sustenance)

I don’t think I’m getting a lot of actionable information out of tracking sleep, although it’s useful for the habit of tracking everything else. Pretty sure there’s a few other categories I never tracked that I’m likely to trash entirely, but it’s good to try the system recommended by others before you start making changes.

Saving $20 on airport food by spending $30 at Buc-Ee’s.

I’d like to talk a bit about my favorite Massively Multiplayer Online PvP Game: eBay

On the off chance you’re not familiar, eBay is an auction platform. People post the trash they would like to sell, and other people post bids of how much they’d be willing to pay for that trash.

It’s important to note, gentle reader, that it is always trash. Occasionally it is trash which happens to be quite valuable. It is nevertheless trash.

But that’s okay, I’m a purveyor of fine trash and trash accessories. This is my native habitat.

Within the eBay ecosystem it’s somewhat customary to start an auction at $0.99, with the expectation that nothing actually sells for that much. It’s either worthless and nobody bids, or it’s quickly bid up to somewhere between what you could sell it for at a garage sale and what it’s probably actually worth.

On the buyer side, eBay asks a relatively simple question. “What is the most amount of dollarsmoney you would pay for this trash object?”

I cannot stress this enough, dear reader. The answer to “how many dollarydoos would you pay for this knicknack,” there is only one acceptable answer. Lies.

You see, under the hood eBay does something really quite clever. Let’s say that a Trashthing is currently listed at a bid of $5. I perceive the Trashthing and decide that the most I would pay for it is $80. I would like to spend less than that, but I would be willing to go up to $80. If I were to tell this to eBay, magically eBay would manage bids for me. It would start with $6, which beats the person who had bid $5, and now the Trashthing is listed at $6. Assuming nobody else comes along, I will pay $6 and receive my Trashthing.

But let us say that someone else comes along and decides they would like to pay $20 for the Trashthing. They don’t know that I’ve already told eBay I’m willing to pay $80, so they enter their $20 bid and like magic the price jumps to $21, and they’re notified they’ve lost. It is at this point, having already told eBay that they were willing to spend $20 and no more, that they walk away content in the knowledge that someone else was willing to pay more for the Trashthing than they were.

Except no they don’t. Do you know what they do? They extend their foul touchers to their mouse and their keyboard and they bid again. Again, dear reader. They put in a new maximum price of $30 or, if they are feeling particularly nasty, $35. And they lose again, because that’s still less than my $80.

$45? No. Fine. They walk away, dejected. Except if they had just said $45 from the start, they could have avoided the hassle. The outcome for everyone is identical. They don’t get the Trashthing because I’m willing to pay more, I still pay $46, slightly more than the next closest bidder, and the seller receives the local maximum price for their Trashthing.

There’s something deeply human about this process, because it happens every time. We renegotiate “the most we’d be willing to pay” based on the amount other people have said they’re willing to pay.

This is asymmetric information warfare at its most visceral. You do not know how much I value the thing, but you will find out repeatedly I value it more than you. And if I value it so highly, well, shouldn’t you? And why shouldn’t you have the Trashthing? It would look so very prim next to your collection of Whozits and Whatsits Galore. Thingamabobs? You’ve got twenty. But who cares, no big deal. You want more.

And that’s when things get meta. You know that I know this, but do I know that you know this? So what if, instead of the most I’d be willing to pay, I put half? Then I can find out where the set point is. Maybe I’m now the winner, maybe I’m not. In either case I have new information. And if you come along and nickel-and-dime me out of the winning position, I have no incentive to fight you. All I’ll do is drive the price up early. I have the signal I needed. At which point the winning strategy is always, always, to wait until as close to auction close as practical to swoop in with my true highest bid, in the hopes that you will be too busy in the real world to notice, and will have done something very similar, resulting in a “maximum bid” below your true bid.

Then, in approximately six hours, I discover if I’ve won yet another MiniDisc player.

The way I make sense of the world is to talk about it, at length, with anyone who’ll listen. Which frequently means the people closest to me are stuck listening to me as I work out any complicated long-poll decision making process.

A couple weeks ago I had an idea. The problem with a new idea is that if I do too much due diligence, I’ll lose enthusiasm for it. Sometimes, I think, it’s important to just carry forward and see what happens. On the flip side, sometimes I end up doing a bunch of work only to find out that the idea won’t work out, for reasons that would have been obvious from the start if I had done some investigation.

This new idea lives somewhere in the uncomfortable middle. The reason I wanted to do it, it turns out, is no longer valid. But the idea itself has taken root in my mind with a life of its own.

You might notice I’m being cagey. What is the idea? I can’t say, because as soon as I explain what the idea was I’ll lose enthusiasm for it. Being able to tell people about the thing I want to build removes all of the urgency around building it so that I can show them. So, I’m sorry if it makes this post a bit harder or more frustrating to read.

So I’ve got this idea to build a thing, and the reasons I originally wanted to build it are kaput. But maybe I should still build it anyway? That’s the process I’m currently working through (by which I mean my friends and family are suffering through.) Fortunately, I think I can distill it down into one big pro and one big con.

PRO - I think this thing could be the chewy nougaty center around which an interesting community develops. The thing itself may not be viable for any of its original intended purposes, but I love building communities.

CON - This will, like everything, suffer the opportunity cost of all the other things I’m not doing instead. Of which there are many, because I have too many hobbies.

There’s a core risk / reward decision to be made here. I could choose to spend that time doing many other things, some of which would be a lot more materially productive. But I will note, and it has been noted to me, that I have never been as visibly “excited” to be working on a project in the entire time my partner has known me. There’s a certain magic about this kind of thing, and anything that brings the magic and vibrancy this idea has brought probably ought not to be ignored.

So, sorry for the vagueness. With luck, someday, I’ll be able to talk more concretely about it. Either because it exists, or because I have decided it never will.

And just like that, blog template v2.0! I’ve made several updates, here are the highlights.

Headers

One of the things I’ve struggled with in the past is which header to use where. Usually I just sort of wing it. H1 for the top level heading or post title, and then progressively more nesting as I get deeper into the topic. Sometimes other people use them in a very different way, and many stock templates are opinionated about this, even if they don’t realize it.

The way I’ve set it up, H1, H2, and H3 are functionally identical, but getting progressively smaller. H4, H5, H6 duplicate them, except they have an underline. This makes it easy for me (through markdown) to decide whether or not I want an underline, and to know approximately what size header will get used in any given circumstance.

Header 1

Header 2

Header 3

Header 4

Header 5

Header 6

Colors

Basically nothing in nature is pure white or pure black, and I think that technology should take the hint. I don’t like websites with white backgrounds or white text. But you can’t beat white on black for contrast, which is a useful accessibility shortcut. When I deployed template v1.0 I tried to set a subtle tan text color based, in a very roundabout way, on the UI for Heroes of Might and Magic 3. It sort of worked, but against the default background color of the underlying CSS I had coopted it didn’t have enough contrast.

That background color was, for various reasons, actually a tiled image. (It still is.) In order to change it I had to dust off my decrepit Affinity Publisher license key and figure out just enough of its user interface to touch up some pixels. The end result is a deep gray background that I find really pleasing, and which additionally has a much starker contrast against the font color that’s easier to read.

Fonts

Speaking of fonts. The previous template used Press Start 2P for its retro aesthetic.

As cool as that font is, it’s kind of hard to read; sometimes subtly so. Some of my test readers swear there was no problem with it at all. I noticed my own eyes glazing over text and struggling to focus. I’ve swapped it out for Montserrat instead, which is considerably easier to read as a body text. Press Start 2P still exists in the headers and buttons. Places where it works and, I think, looks amazing.

Mobile

I make no specific attempt to make any of my websites work on mobile. Part of that is being an opinionated old nerd who is yelling at the cloud and these kids that want to do their computation on the horror portal. Part of that is not really wanting to develop the expertise. I’m cursed to be opinionated about how my blog looks, but not really interested in developing the skills necessary to be a good graphic designer.

That being said, I know enough to make a flex grid work. Especially one developed by people smarter and more talented than me. So I switched over to PureCSS for their grids. I still maintain no specific promises about my blog working on any given device or browser, but the likelihood that it will has increased.

Photos

Since I’m using a flex grid now, I was able to create a Hugo shortcode that allows me to wrap images in a flex tag, thoughtfully provided by PureCSS, which means that they now also respond to the width of the display. I think they look much better, and I went back and updated all of my previous photos to use it.

Progress Bars

Speaking of shortcodes, I wrote one that lets me display progress bars!

40% progress, in red:

78% progress, in blue:

32% progress, in green:

I hope to make use of these in reference to various projects, but not least of which including the Great TTRPG Review which I keep foreshadowing.

The Rest

There are several other changes, large and small, mostly quality of life and readability-related. I’ll gloss entirely over the technical changes that aren’t visible anywhere, but which were necessary to make possible my own success. Know that there were many.

I welcome comments and feedback by whatever mechanisms you have to contact me.

You’re welcome to tell me if it doesn’t work in your browser or mobile device of choice, but understand that I may not do anything with that information. There’s a very good chance I don’t know how to fix it for you without breaking it for someone else. All of my testing was done with Firefox, the only browser I’d currently recommend if you happened to ask.

I updated the main body font for my blog. It’s kind of a kludgy hack, but I think it’s a lot more readable. I’m working on a v2.0 of the theme to roll up a bunch of other fixes, but it was important to me to achieve readability before I worry about the vibe.

Often a man suffers destruction
In order that another man
Might enjoy well-being.
Such is the nature of things!

A courtier’s satisfaction.
In enjoying kingly confidences
In golden palaces
And a King’ s own good fortune
Are merely bubbles
On the surface of a vast ocean
Momentary and evanescent.

If dictated by commiseration
I were to be released
And freed from execution
I would not escape Death.
Inseparable am I from Karma
All sentient beings
Being subject to dissolution.

Respectfully I salute His Majesty.
Should I again meet my Lord the King
In one of my future rebirths
In the cycle of Samsara
Begrudging him nothing
I would lovingly forgive him.
Impermanent is my body of blood.

-Anantasuriya

As translated in Burmese Classical Poems

Establishing a baseline for reviewing things can be difficult.

Culturally, it seems like most Americans operate on a rating system that reflects the way that American schools grade. Start with a perfect score, then subtract points for failure.

No complaints about that book you got on Amazon? Five stars. Nothing wrong with your meal at the local Taco Palace? Five stars.

Noticed the bathroom wasn’t as clean as you’d expect at the Shop-o-Rama? Deduct one, maybe two. Now it’s a three star experience.

This inflates scores up towards “perfect.” Anything that essentially passes the bar without complaints is as good as it can get. There’s no room to differentiate the top end.

I’m strongly of the opinion that average experiences deserve an average rating. If you read a book and it was basically fine, no real complaints, but nothing stands out as exceptional? That should get a 50%. On the rare occasions that I see people doing this, it results in a lot of… Well. Let’s call it “feedback.” So many people are accustomed to a perfect score being baseline from which complaints are subtracted that giving something that’s essentially okay a 50% is likely to result in outrage from people that would agree with you that it’s basically fine. The problem isn’t that they think it’s better than you do, it’s that they think that mediocrity deserves a 90%+ score.

Again, it seems to me this is primarily an American thing.

Maybe it’s because I see absolutely no value in maintaining the status quo where it doesn’t make any sense to me, I’ve never used this style of rating. Usually that means I need to publish a rubric.

For example, here’s my rubric for recipes:

1 star: not good as-is, could be redeemed. Research and try again.

2 star: one person liked this, but not both.

3 star: we both liked this and would like to have it again.

4 star: very good, should make once per month.

5 star: the very best, should make every week.

Three stars is a perfectly fine recipe that we both liked. There’s literally nothing wrong with it.

Okay, but, so… Why?

I’m in the process of setting up RPGGeek as the place to track my project of reviewing all these RPG books. They inherited a 10-star rating system from BoardGameGeek. I think it’s awful, that’s far too many stars, but the communities on that site have done a surprisingly good job of fighting back against rating inflation. The absolutely highest-rated board game has achieved an average rating of 8.60 with almost 50k votes.

But still, I disagree a bit with their published rubric. It’s better than most, but I think still trends towards assuming that something basically okay should have a score of 6.

For RPG items, they publish this:

10 - Outstanding. Rules and concepts well presented and a near perfect fit to your play style. Excellent writing. Excellent Editing. Highly consistent throughout. You would highly recommend this book/product.

9 - Excellent. Same as 10 but lacking in one or more of the elements (writing style, editing, consistency).

8 - Very Good. Rules and concepts are a good fit to your play style with some reservations. Solid writing. Solid Editing. Highly consistent throughout.

7 - Good. Same as 8 but lacking in one of the elements (writing style, editing, consistency).

6 - Above Average. Rules and concepts are a reasonable fit to your play style but there are significant sections which you would change or not use in actual play. Solid writing. Solid Editing. Highly consistent throughout.

5 - Average. Same as 6 but lacking in one of the elements (writing style, editing, consistency).

4 - Below Average. Rules and concepts are not a great fit to your play style and there are significant sections which you would change or not use in actual play. You would cherry pick a few ideas from such a book and discard the rest. Solid writing. Solid Editing. Highly consistent throughout.

3 - Well Below Average. Same as 4 but lacking in one of the elements (writing style, editing, consistency).

2 - Poor. Rules and concepts are not likely to mesh at all with your play style and there are precious few things you can cull from this book to use in your actual play. Solid writing. Solid Editing. Highly consistent throughout.

1 - Horrible. Same as 2 but lacking in one of the elements (writing style, editing, consistency).

It’s more thought than I see most sites giving the problem, but I want to propose an alternative.

5 - Average. You would play this game. There is nothing particularly good nor bad about it. It’s fine.

Okay, what moves us up the scale from a 5? I can think of three areas of analysis: mythos, production, mechanics.

Mythos - How interesting is the game’s world? How evocative is the writing? Am I excited about the stories it wants to tell?

Production - How well-produced is the book? Art, writing, graphic design. How do the materials feel? Is this an object of beauty?

Mechanics - How playable is the game? Does it provide systems that are fun to engage with? How portable are those systems?

So let’s pin a perfect 10 in our scale.

10 - Outstanding. The world is vibrant and interesting, the stories are evocative. The item is finely produced and would be worthy of display. It is an art object in and of itself. The mechanics are interesting, clearly presented, and weave together to support the stories of the mythos.

And with that, I think we can pin a 1.

1 - Horrible. This item has no redeeming qualities. The stories are not interesting, the world lacks color and flavor. The item itself is utilitarian and otherwise poorly produced. You would not want people to see it on your bookshelf. The mechanics offer nothing new or interesting. Best case scenario it’s a retread of something other games have done better.

This scale lends itself really well to a four star system, where a book with none of these things would be a 1, and if it had all three it’d be a perfect four. But I don’t get to set the system on RPGGeek. One option is to map my system on to theirs. My four-star would be their 10-star, and then down by 3 for each intermediary. 10, 7, 4, and jump to 1 in the worst case. This has benefits and weaknesses. The best argument against it is that it loses granularity. What if there’s one really good system, but the rest is trash? What if the cover is truly beautiful, but the pages inside phoned it in?

I can smooth out my system by taking my three axis ratings and giving each a half-step version that differentiates between “they did this one thing really well” and “the whole system knocks it out of the park.”

So then I created a spreadsheet…

It turns out there’s an “easy” solution to this problem. If by easy you mean “Contrariwise is a crazy person who is totally unreasonable.”

Say it with me. (Or don’t.) “Weighted averages.”

Imagine my three categories above: mythos, production, and mechanics. I can grade each of those on a scale from 1-5 where:

5 - It knocked it out of the park in this category, the whole item is a delight throughout.

4 - The item mostly succeeded, with a small number of critiques.

3 - It’s fine.

2 - There’s one or two redeemable qualities or systems, but mostly this ain’t it chief.

1 - Nope. No thanks.

If I rate each category on that scale, 1-5, then I can calculate the average of all of those rankings and arrive at a percentage. 5/5 in all three gets you a ten. 3/5 in all three gets you a five. (Really I’d need 2.5 to do that, but it can be fudged in the formula.) 1/5 in all three… You get the picture.

So I think that’s what I’m going to plan to do. For now. I might revisit this after I’ve tried it a few times. I might be missing things that end up being important. But it’s a starting point, and I’ve explained my reasoning so that if anyone ever wonders why I gave THAT BELOVED CLASSIC a “5” there’s some chance of defending why. I mean. There’s no accounting for taste.

I have a new blog theme! It’s entirely possible you’re witnessing it right now, with your very own eye-holes. If not, you might want to click through and give it a taste.

I’ll be moving in roughly 3-4 years. I know what city, but not which suburb or neighborhood. What are some things I could be doing right now to establish a social circle in what will become my new home?

• I need to figure out somewhere to keep my cookbooks.
• I need to figure out where to track my project to read and review RPG books.
• I need to catch up on my back issues of White Dwarf.
• I need to catch up on my back issues of comic books.
• I need to catch up on reading in general.
• I need to get a dev environment set up on my personal Mac.
• I need to find time to paint my Warhammer minis.
• I need to finish up the project I started to move from PARA to Johnny Decimal.
• I need to finish up the project I started around “use strategic thinking to plan your life.”
• I need to clean my desk.
  • Which implies I need to find somewhere for these tiny lego plants.
  • And these stickers.
  • And get the new version of the BookArc.
• I need to start walking for exercise again.
• I need to find somewhere to put Rivendell.
  • And then build it.
  • Also the Sanderson Sister’s cottage.
  • Also look into the lego lighting stuff. It looked cool.
• I need to write a bunch of period-appropriate albums to MiniDiscs.
• I need to read this illustrated Maleus Malificarum I borrowed from a friend before I see them again.

I need to have fewer things I need.

“Is this a problem you have to solve, or can the world solve it for you later?”

— Adam Savage

I’m not “traditionally” goal motivated. What do I mean by that? I mean if I tried to set a goal for a year from now that looked something like this: “in one year I want to have written a book,” that would not, on its own, result in any of the behaviors that lead to a book being written.

At the end of the year there would be no book, and also I would not feel bad. I do not experience any intrinsic desire to accomplish those kinds of goals, whether they’re set by me or for me, and I do not feel any sense of loss, guilt, or shame for it.

So what does motivate me? Checking boxes on a todo list. Concrete accomplishment. A list of tasks to do, and the doing of them. It scratches something primal in my brain.

Put me in a video game where I can do anything I want but which provides no structure or list of tasks, and I’ll be bored in less than fifteen minutes. (Sorry Morrowind and Oblivion, this is why we never got along.) But, ah, Skyrim! The first Elder Scrolls game to reliably produce a quest log that would direct me towards the interesting places? I sank easily a hundred hours into Skyrim.

So why mention it? I have a “problem” I’m trying to “solve” and I think without this context it wouldn’t make any sense at all why I see it as a problem, or why I feel like the solution needs to work in certain ways.

I have a truly fantastic collection of old TTRPG source books. Originally I started collecting the first edition of Exalted because it lives rent-free in my head and I had, at one point, owned almost all of them but sold them off at a time where I desperately needed the money. I could talk at length about Exalted and I probably should at some point, but for various reasons it was an also-ran in the early-2000s RPG zeitgeist. You’re forgiven if you’ve never heard of it, most people haven’t.

At one point a few years back I was trying to figure out what my “next thing” would be. I was successful and comfortable in a stagnant job with no growth opportunities and less challenge. At that time I thought one of the options could be to write my own TTRPG supplements, or to become a creator in that space. I thought maybe one opportunity would be to take all these old RPGs that mostly nobody remembers and try to resurface their best ideas.

Which brings me to my “problem.”

It would be really, really cool to read these books. I used to read TTRPG handbooks like they were novels when I was a teenager with a potato computer and dial-up internet and very little else to do but read. Now I’m a busy adult with many important things to do and it’s hard to find the time even for the things I know I love.

Given what I said at the top of the post, I think the likelihood that I actually do that improves a lot if I turn it into a list of tasks. A todo. Which, yes, I could probably do in Omnifocus where I keep all of my other structural tasks. But I think “read an entire 300 page book” is probably too large of an ask for the kinds of things I usually keep in my routine todo list. I still use something that looks an awful lot like a version of Getting Things Done. I strive to decompose big tasks into lots of little tasks so that it’s easier to build momentum. I guess that’d be possible with a book, but I think odds are I’d spend more time managing that system than reading.

The answer to this that I’ve imagined is to create the “task” structure for this project on my blog. To have a list of the books I need to read, broken down by system, always visible in a side bar. Books that haven’t been read shouldn’t be links, books that have been read should link to the blog post about them, where I would like to review their content, provide interesting context, and ideally surface whatever the best ideas of that book were.

And, if at all possible, I would like to avoid tedious hand maintenance of that list. Ideally I would be able to mark the posts somehow to link them to their record in the “todo” list, and then have the rest “just work.”

If this sounds familiar, it’s because I stole this idea from someone smarter than me. Like pretty much all of my best ideas. Sadly, I don’t remember the name of the blog that did this, but I have a very clear picture in my mind of the format it used. List of links on the right. Every book for every TTRPG system they had, some linked to the review page and others just placeholders for the books yet to be reviewed. Probably they were doing the hard part by hand, because I think a sane person probably would.

Here are the options I’ve currently thought of:

1. Do it by hand.
2. Use a category.
3. Use a blogroll or similar plugin.
4. Use a datasource.
5. Create a second, related blog and put it there.

I’m unhappy with all of them. Why?

Do it by hand: mainly, I’ll forget. But also it’s tedious. Also this is the year of our Opry 2024, and it seems like something that software should be able to solve for me.

Use a category: I think this would work well for publishing, but I lose the ability to have a list of unpublished posts. There’s no good way to placeholder out what remains to be done.

Use a blogroll: also seems to lose the ability to have a list of unpublished posts. Most of the plugins that are designed to do this really want to link to pages that exist.

Use a datasource: actually seems to get the closest to what I think I’d want, but requires me to hand-maintain a CSV or JSON file which is only marginally better than doing it as HTML directly in the template.

Create a second blog: is, first and foremost, probably too much work. I’ve got some experience with hugo, and two previous blogs that used it. There’s a reason I now gladly pay for micro.blog instead. If I upgraded my plan, I could get a second micro.blog, but I think that then has all the same technical limitations AND now I’ve bifurcated my online presence, defeating the purpose of trying to centralize on thewizardly.com in the first place.

So what do I do? At the moment, get stalled in analysis paralysis. But I think the play might be to do it by hand just to get started. If I limit the scope to just one TTRPG system (say, for example, Exalted,) then it’s not actually that much to maintain. And once I get something up and visible and people can see what it is I’m trying to do, I might be able to get someone who knows hugo/micro.blog better than I to suggest an even better way to achieve the result.

Plus, then I’m actually doing the thing I want to do: reading and posting about these books. Not tinkering with a website that I would mostly prefer not to spend a lot of time tinkering with.

My curse is being incredibly picky about UI and UX but not being very good at implementing either.

In competitive video games you should expect a 50% win rate. About half the time the other team will be better than you, half the time they won’t. You’re operating at the razor’s edge of your skill level. Today I realized that’s likely true in every other part of life as well.

I wish there were a way on micro.blog to write different kinds of posts. I forget the terminology but I’ve used hugo in the past to have a few distinct category of records. I want to do something like that for EG media reviews.

I really hated the Libre 2 continuous glucose monitor (CGM.) A friend asked for some detail about why, which lead me down a long-winded story about the last five years of my health journey. About halfway through I thought “this should be a blog post.” So…

EVERYTHING

Like my mother before me, I’m a type 2 diabetic. I have tried just about every common intervention known to humankind. If it exists, and a doctor knows how to prescribe it, I’ve probably taken it.

The most successful intervention I ever discovered was a combination of intermittent fasting, long fasts, and “not really keto but sort of basically keto.” I had an 8-hour daily eating window, occasional fasts that ranged all the way up to a week, and cutting the added sugar from just about everything but not going wholesale anti-carb.

I lost a truly fantastic amount of weight, was able to stop all my diabetes-related medications, and was generally the healthiest I’ve been as an adult.

Despite hitting my lowest adult weight and the general level of my success, I was not at a weight my doctor considered ideal, and so he encouraged me to try semaglutide. I’m not here to throw him under a bus, I think I have a pretty good doctor and he’s been thoughtful and supportive all along. However, the promise of not having to work quite so hard to maintain this house of cards lead my entire non-pharmaceutical intervention strategy to crumble. And I mean, really crumble. Roman empire level of collapse.

Semaglutide didn’t work for me. I mean it did, sort of technically, but not in the way one would want it to. I gained weight the entire time I was on it, but slower than I would have if I were left to my own devices. It had an effect, just not enough of one. Slowly, over the course of about a year, I regained all of the weight I lost. A new job during the time period and its associated stresses couldn’t have helped.

EVERYWHERE

Around December of this year we decided to try switching me from semaglutide to tirzepatide. I know lots of people who’ve had truly amazing results on tirzepatide. My insurance company did what insurance companies do. They couldn’t outright deny the prior-authorization. I fully qualify by their own standards. So they wrapped me up in so much paperwork trying to prove it that I decided fasting would be easier. Congratulations American healthcare system, you won.

Late March I decided to try a new fasting protocol that I had encountered called rolling fasts. Roughly 90 hours of fasting followed by a “re-feed” meal, followed by a new fast. This actually works great for me, for many reasons, and I think I probably won’t go into all of them.

Shortly after I started I had some concerning symptoms that I will spare you the details of. It was enough to be concerned maybe the fasting wasn’t safe. A couple months of fits and starts and diagnosis, we figured out it was unrelated and the problem passed. Ever since, I’ve been happily maintaining a rolling fast without significant issue.

One of the things I like about rolling fasts is that I only eat once every four days, and that means I’m rarely needing to figure out dinner at the last minute, which leads to making much better decisions about what to eat. And I’m not saying perfectly healthy by any stretch of the imagination. But I am saying that I never run out to Taco Bell right after work because I forgot to buy groceries and accidentally falling mouth-first into a pile of spicy potato tacos.

I get a few days to really figure out what I’m craving, and then whatever it is I get to go have it. Honestly? It’s the healthiest emotional relationship with food I’ve ever had.

ALL AT ONCE

Yesterday was my mid-year blood draw, and the results for my blood sugar aren’t exactly grim, but they’re not where I’d want them to be. This has prompted some introspection. The main problem as I currently see it is that I don’t have a good and reliable way to monitor my blood sugar during the fast and re-feed. And that’s how we get to the topic of CGMs.

I don’t mind a finger poke, but I think that method is highly susceptible to the games one can play with when they choose to check. Before a meal, fully fasted? Great! Perfect numbers! An hour after the only meal I’ll have that week? High! But for how long? Who knows! My sense of blood sugar is that one of the things that really matters is how long it takes to come back down to a normal level after eating, and that’s the kind of data one really only gets through a CGM. It matters a bit how high it spikes, but I’m mostly not eating cake for dinner. What really matters is if I’m spending the first two days of a four day fast just waiting for my blood sugar to come back down to a fasted state.

So I think I need to get back on a CGM, which I plan to talk to my doctor about at our next appointment. But I’d like to try some of the other options that aren’t the Libre 2, which as I mentioned, I hate. Loathe. Despise entirely. Some searching indicates the Libre 3 might not have any of the key problems that frustrated me, and the Dexcom Stelo is supposed to be coming sometime this summer.

The important thing from my perspective is to find a source of reliable data from which to act. I can’t diagnose the machine if none of the sensors are working.

I’ve spent the last several weeks using Toggl to track 100% of my time, and the results have been interesting.

Reasoning

On a flight to who knows where I read Use Strategic Thinking to Create the Life You Want and thought it had some interesting ideas to try, one of which was to rate certain areas of my life on a matrix of how important it was to me and how much time I spent on it.

There are some areas of my life that I don’t think I spend enough time on, but my intuitive sense is that my time is mostly well-managed given that I only have 24 hours a day to work with. It seemed like an interesting experiment to try tracking 100% of my time for a while to see how well it lined up with my subjective experience.

Methodology

In the article they talk about “Strategic Life Units” (SLU) as the sixteen key areas where people spend their time. I set up a new Toggl workspace following that outline with six “Strategic Life Areas” (Relationships, Body Mind Spirit, Community, Profession, Interests, and Personal Care,) as clients assigned to the SLUs as projects.

My list of SLUs (plus, where applicable, examples):

• Mental Health
• Physical Health - Exercise, but also going to the doctor.
• Spiritual Health
• Community - Local clubs, civic engagement. If elections were going on, I’d put them here.
• Society - Volunteering, activism.
• Hobbies
• Offline Entertainment - Going to a show or movie. Reading a book. Non-interactive entertainment. Touching grass.
• Online Entertainment - Video games, streaming, general-purpose computing.
• Daily Life - Errands, groceries.
• Physiological Needs - Sleep, care of the meat chariot in which my brain resides.
• Education
• Finances
• Work
• Family
• Friendship
• Significant Other

Where an activity could plausibly fit under two categories, I tried to pick the category where it fit “best” and then be consistent about it. For example, a meal which I ate alone would fall under “Physiological Needs,” but a meal eaten with friends would fall under “Friendship.”

Results

Aggregated over the last four weeks the majority of my time falls into one of four categories. The big winners, in order:

• 40% Physiological Needs
• 27% Online Entertainment
• 17% Work
• 6% Hobbies

The remaining 10% is split between a few different things, with Significant Other and Daily Life leading the pack at around 3.7% each.

So how do I feel about that?

Physiological Needs feels about right, since I used it to track (among other things) the time I was sleeping. And I sleep a lot. I always have. Being well rested is a super power and the older I get the more certain I am that time spent sleeping is time well spent.

But I was shocked to see how much time I spend on Online Entertainment. Now, granted, this might be a particularly unusual period. Two different four-day weekends fell during this period. Even still, looking at an average work day, it’s the most likely thing to fill in the majority of the time between work and sleep.

Work seems basically fine, again considering the number of PTO days that fell in the sample period.

Hobbies is… Abysmal. Of that 6%, the majority was actually time spent cooking. Now I happen to think, for me, it’s fair and accurate to count cooking time as hobby time. I absolutely love to do it. And the only reason there wasn’t more of it is that I fast more days of the week than not. On days where I was planning to eat, cooking usually accounted for at least a few hours. It’s time well spent. But all of my other hobbies (of which, honestly, there are too many,) are generally languishing.

Next Steps

I would like to see Online Entertainment come down. The four biggest sources contributing to Online Entertainment during this time were:

• “Game” - Basically playing some game. This does make sense given the Steam Sale, and might be unusually high given my PTO.
• “Computing” - My catch-all category for time spent “farting around” on a computer. This could be social chatting, it could be reading RSS.
• “WoW” - Specifically playing World of Warcraft.
• “Good Eats” - Rewatching the TV show Good Eats, which I enjoy especially mid-fast when all I want to do is plan my next meal.

I enjoy gaming, and I think it could rightly be tracked as hobby instead, so I think I’m going to monitor it for another few weeks and see if it stays as high as it has. Not yet concerned.

“Computing” is, generally speaking, not time well spent. There’s some important stuff that gets lumped in there mostly because I forget to update Toggl, but I think driving that down is a worthy goal.

World of Warcraft is, at this point, more of a social opportunity than a game. There was an event running during part of the sample period that I think lead to more than the usual amount of playing, so I do want to keep an eye on that, but also there’s a new expansion due towards the end of the summer that would drive this back up. The important thing to me is to not spend “idle time” in WoW, and I almost never do that.

Good Eats and the watching of streaming in general is not awful, and I suspect less than what would be considered “average,” but I would prefer to spend at least some of that time working on hobbies instead. No concrete plans there, but something to keep in mind.

What do I want to see more of? Friendship, Significant Other, and Hobbies.

In an average month I see friends in the real world approximately once. I don’t know many people who live near me, because I moved to the middle of nowhere during the pandemic. I do like living here, but I wish I had more social connections that didn’t require a flight. I’ve also slowly become awful at maintaining my digital friendships, and I likely need to do something about that.

My SO and I live together, and do a lot together, and I think that’s mostly getting lumped into other categories out of convenience. It’d be nice to be more intentional about that.

Entire swathes of my hobbies have been ignored for truly worrying amounts of time. I haven’t run a TTRPG campaign in going on three years now, and the last time I worked on my Warhammer armies was probably March.

Summary

Tracking 100% of my time for a few weeks was really eye-opening. I “waste” more time than I would have guessed, and it seems like I should be able to come up with some systems to help me be better about that. But there are also places where I’m right on track, and if nothing else it’s nice to know where those are.

Banh Mi Burgers

Important Note #1 - This is a draft recipe. I made it somewhat improvisationally, so the amounts are in many cases a rough guess. Please don’t consider this a bulletproof tested recipe.

Important Note #2 - I tend to think of most larger recipes as a series of smaller recipes that get assembled, so this is presented in that way.

Important Note #3 - I almost never add salt and pepper to taste to recipes as an instruction. Assume that you should taste things, decide if you think they’re salty enough, and then add more if needed.

Mushroom Paté

Ingredients

• 1/2 lb shiitake mushrooms, chopped
• 1/2 lb oyster mushrooms, chopped
• 1/2 yellow onion, chopped
• 1/4 cup chicken stock
• 3 thyme leaves, diced
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 2 tsp maggi seasoning

Method

• Place the mushrooms and onion in a food processor and process to a fine mince, stopping to scrape the sides of the bowl as needed.
• Heat the olive oil over medium high and add the contents of the food processor. Cook on medium to medium high, stirring occasionally, until mushrooms have released their liquid and dried again.
• Use a small amount of chicken stock to do a final deglaze of the pan, then reduce to au sec.
• Add the maggi, stir, turn the heat off, then add the thyme leaves and allow the residual heat to soften them.

Allow the paté to cool, then store in the refrigerator until needed.

Banh Mi Sauce

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup mayonnaise
• 1 tbsp hoisin sauce
• 2 tsp sriracha

Method

• Mix all ingredients thoroughly and store, covered, in the fridge.

Not-Really-Pickled Carrot + Radish

I made this using store-bought pre-shredded carrot sticks, because I’m lazy, and a Korean radish, because I wanted to see what would happen.

Ingredients

• 1/2 c carrot sticks
• 1/2 c grated daikon radish
• 1 tbsp seasoned rice wine vinegar

Method

• Combine all ingredients and store, covered, in the fridge.

Banh Mi Burger

Ingredients

• 1lb 80/20 ground beef
• 1 tsp light soy sauce
• 1 tsp dark soy sauce
• 1 tsp fish sauce
• 1/4 tsp chinese five spice powder

Method

• Mix all of the ingredients together, then separate the beef into four oval patties.
• Grill or fry the patties via your method of choice. I grilled them on a pellet grill at 450 for 9 minutes per side.

Final Assembly

I made these with two mini baguettes cut in half down the middle because I live in the middle of nowhere and that was the closest thing I could get to the traditional sandwich roll. I think in the future I’ll make these on brioche buns just for practicality. The sandwiches wouldn’t close.

If you can get the french sandwich rolls, do that, and scoop out a bit of the soft part of the bread to create room for the fillings.

Ingredients

• 4 french sandwich rolls
• 1/2 english cucumber, sliced thin
• Cilantro, to taste

Method

• Liberally apply the Banh Mi Sauce to both sides of each roll.
• Apply a thin layer of the Mushroom Paté to the bottom half of the roll.
• Apply a thin layer of sliced cucumber to the bottom half of the roll.
• Place the Banh Mi Burger on top of the paté layer.
• Top the burger with the “not-really-pickled” vegetables and cilantro to your taste.

In no particular order, an update on various interests and hobbies.

Clocks

The mantle clock is running strong, but about five minutes fast per day. It uses a balance wheel, which is a particularly fragile and difficult-to-adjust mechanism, so I haven’t taken it down and tried to fix that yet.

The grandfather clock is out for repairs with a professional. Again. He thinks he’s found the source of the problem, and intends to publish a youtube video about it. I think it’s probably a good (or bad) sign when someone has to post a video about a new and interesting way that a clock can break. (It was magnets.)

MiniDisc

Since he was here to collect all the parts of the grandfather clock, I asked the clock guy (who also does radio repairs,) if he wanted to take a swing at one of my MiniDisc players. It was sold as non-functional with the description of “makes a whooshing noise.” I bought it because it came with what turned out to be a true goldmine of discs recorded “by a Los Angeles DJ.” The player was in beautiful physical condition, and it’s now repaired and working after a swap of the digital to analog converter.

Oh, and I bought a copy of Pure Moods on CD to convert over to MD, because it feels somehow cosmically right. Also the way this particular album looms in the psyche of people who were kids in the 90s. Young me would probably be ecstatic that we finally had a copy.

TTRPGs

I think I’ve lost one of my Earthdawn books somewhere in the house. I’ve done a thorough-enough search to think that maybe I never actually had it, but there’s some anecdata to suggest that I did. Unrelated to that, I was able to find a copy of Prelude to War at a local(-ish) used book store, leaving only four books missing from my 1e Earthdawn collection.

At the same time I also picked up The Complete Sha’ir’s Handbook, which is wizard archetypes for the old D&D setting of Al-Qadim. It’s in pristine condition and was a pretty penny in the bookstore’s rare book room. I usually prefer to buy play copies, because Toys Are Meant to be Played With, but sometimes with these old TTRPG books it’s either buy the perfect copy at collector’s prices or accept I won’t own it. Even play copies are rare. These old D&D settings are interesting to me, and the books are often very “of their time” in an almost charmingly unaware way. Nobody who wrote this book had ever heard the word appropriation, and it usually shows.

The hardbound copy of Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast finally arrived. It went directly on a shelf, because I don’t currently have the capacity to do anything with it, but I remember being charmed by the concept and thinking it might be light enough to convince some local friends to pick up casually without having to resort to digital play. With all due apologies to people who can only ever get their gaming group together on Discord, it’s not the same.

World of Warcraft

WoW Remix: Mists of Pandaria is probably the best and smartest thing Blizzard has done since Wrath of the Lich King. No I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic. It’s that good. I think part of why it’s that good is that it’s meant to be a limited duration event, which means that it can be fun in a way which is not also trying to prolong my subscription past its natural lifespan. It’s not trying to sell me any DLC.

It’s a reminder that somewhere in the shambling husk of Blizzard Activision is the beating heart of the company that made Warcraft 3 and Diablo 2. That, if they weren’t in the throes of a dark insanity known as shareholder primacy, they might actually be capable of doing the one thing anyone actually wants them to do: making a good game.

I hope they keep this format and go on to do it for other expansions. I’d be especially glad to see it of Shadowlands, the one expansion I never got around to playing.

I had the great fortune to spend the last week or so sailing along Alaska’s inside passage on the NCL Jewel. Being the kind of person that I am, I gave myself a side-quest on day one: eat at and review each of the on-board dining options. I mostly succeeded, with two notable exceptions. It turns out a reservation at the Teppanyaki restaurant is incredibly difficult to score, and I simply ran out of time for the steakhouse.

But First, the Rubric

Taking inspiration from Michelin stars, I decided to categorize each dining option with the Contrariwise Boat Emoji System. Boatmoji if you will.

• 0 (Zero) boats - Anything I wouldn’t expressly recommend. Runs the gamut from terrible to basically fine. Might be perfectly cromulent, but doesn’t stand out.
• 1 (One) boats 🛳️ - Worth a visit. If it requires a reservation, consider making one.
• 2 (Two) boats 🛳️🛳️ - Plan around it. Get at least one reservation, at any day or time you can, and schedule other things to accommodate.
• 3 (Three) boats 🛳️🛳️🛳️ - Vacation highlight. Take a cruise specifically to go to this restaurant.

The Restaurants

O’Sheehans

• Rating: 0 boats
• Style: Casual
• Cuisine: Bar food

Generally speaking, O’Sheehans had both the worst food and worst service of the trip. It’s the kind of place you go to kill 1.5 hours waiting on the smallest plate of nachos you’ve seen in your life. As everywhere on the boat, the staff were both patient and kind. I think the delays were frequently because the O’Sheehans kitchen is also providing room service, and so no matter how busy (or not) the restaurant appeared to be, I suspect there were at least double as many tickets accounted for by room service requests.

The nominal benefit of O’Sheehans is that it’s open 24 hours, has no dress code, and no reservations. But I think I’d recommend the buffet categorically over O’Sheehans at any time when the buffet is open and operating.

Speaking of…

Garden Cafe (The Buffet)

• Rating: 0 boats
• Style: Buffet
• Cuisine: Rotating

Buffet (noun): the opportunity to eat as much as you would like of food that would not be acceptable at any other time.

Jokes aside, I actually rather liked the buffet, and I think it’s the “set point” for all other on-ship dining. O’Sheehans falls slightly below, most other things are equal are slightly above. The buffet is fine. It never really excelled, but it was reliable. It always made for a quick breakfast or lunch, but I never made it for dinner generally preferring to work on my quest to eat at every other option. I think the buffet is never the wrong option, especially if you’re in a hurry or don’t want to wait to be seated.

Le Bistro

• Rating: 🛳️ (1 Boat)
• Style: Fine Dining
• Cuisine: French

Le Bistro is the one place on the ship that had a dress code, and despite a few ruffled feathers about whether or not my collared sweater qualified (it did,) I had a mostly pleasant experience. I think that other options on the boat win for atmosphere, but the food here never disappointed. I can strongly recommend both the escargot and the french onion soup. There are other restaurants on the ship that will claim to have french onion, but none of them will be as good as what Le Bistro serves.

What really stole the show for me was the dessert at Le Bistro, a strawberries and cream fraisier with pistachio topping. I would rank it as “dangerously good” and worth the price of admission alone.

Chin Chin

• Rating: 🛳️ (1 Boat)
• Style: Casual
• Cuisine: Chinese

We had to wait an hour to sit at Chin Chin, and I can see why. I ordered the kung pao chicken and I’m somewhat at a loss for how to describe it. Spicy teriyaki chicken? Clearly non-traditional, none of the flavors that I expected, and yet somehow still incredible. Maybe they went with that name due to familiarity, maybe they just don’t know how to make kung pao and lucked into something that works? I won’t fault them for the non-traditional take, because it so clearly worked and was clearly at least inspired by kung pao with a spice that both built and lingered. A friend had many compliments about their chicken fried rice, and several people got calamari that was lightly fried but not chewy, the hallmark of well-prepared squid.

The highlight of my dinner at Chin Chin was actually a cross-order which deserves its own section…

Sushi (by way of Chin Chin)

• Rating: 🛳️🛳️ (2 Boats)
• Style: Counter seating
• Cuisine: Sushi

It’s possible to book directly into the sushi restaurant, but it can also be ordered from Chin Chin, which is what I did in order to save time. I can’t overstate how good it was; at $11 for two pieces of nigiri, it had better have been. But I want to be clear, the sushi on board the NCL Jewel is among the best I’ve ever had.

La Cucina

• Rating: 0 boats
• Style: Casual
• Cuisine: Italian

The vibe, as they say, was immaculate. Better than Le Bistro’s no doubt. But the food didn’t live up to the same expectation. It was fine, maybe even two points north of acceptable. But hard to recommend. If you like Olive Garden, you’ll like La Cucina. I think the gnocchi where my highlight, and probably the best gnocchi I had all week.

Azura / Tsar’s Palace

• Rating: 0 boats
• Style: Casual
• Cuisine: Rotating

Azura and the Tsar’s Palace are two sides of the same coin. Either or both could be referred to as “main dining,” with the only real difference between them being the ambiance and decor. I will note that we found the service in Tsar’s Palace to be slightly more reliable. Nominally the more casual option, Azura, reminded me of just about every “fast-casual” restaurant I’ve eaten at.

The food choices changed slightly throughout the week, but were generally the kind of thing you might find at Chili’s or Applebees, and about the same quality overall. Tsar’s palace offered the same menu, but with an interior designed to evoke old-style regal charm. For what it’s worth, the palace also had bathrooms inside the restaurant, a rare luxury on the Jewel.

Moderno Churrascaria

• Rating: 0 boats
• Style: Buffet
• Cuisine: Brazilian

In what I’m certain will be my most controversial opinion, Moderno was… Okay? I guess? I’m not convinced it was better than Garden Cafe, except that I paid $70 for it. Like other Brazilian Steakhouses the gimmick is mostly that people walk around and carve fresh hunks of animal directly on to your plate. I’m mostly of the opinion that those animal hunks were… Fine? I guess? Neither the quality nor flavor really stood out from among all the other animal hunks I had on the boat.

The salad bar portion of Moderno was marginally upscaled compared to Garden Cafe. They had manchego cheese, which I like, and the charcuterie was decent. It felt sort of like something I might have thrown together for some friends that I wanted to impress but like… Not too much? Basically what I’m trying to say is that it was okay, but left to my own devices I might spend my dining credits elsewhere.

Overall Impressions

Generally, I liked pretty much all of the food I had on the NCL Jewel. I don’t think any of it was “bad,” although much of it was “okay.” That doesn’t really surprise me, and I think there are other cruise lines that lean harder into the food as a draw. I appreciated that for the most part Norwegian doesn’t require specific dress codes or assigned seating, something I’ve heard other cruise lines still do. I’d cruise the NCL Jewel again without hesitation.

I’m doing what any reasonable person who has not eaten food for the last 48 hours would do and watching nothing but cooking videos.

Whether I live here for six months or six years, I’ve decided that I am not holding my house in escrow for the future owners. There are plenty of milquetoast plain white interior designs on the market, if they really care they’ll buy one of those. My walls shall have opinions.