I believe it was roughly around this time of the year, several hundred years ago, third or fourth grade to be imprecise, that I declared in no uncertain terms that new years resolutions were stupid, and I would not be doing them.
If you’ve met me, that anecdote probably doesn’t seem very surprising. Yes, I was always like this. No, I won’t elaborate.
The reason I bring it up is that I’m about to talk about what to many people would in fact sound like a new year’s resolution, but is prompted approximately zero percent by the new year and entirely by the trip to Disney World staring me down from approximately two weeks in the future which I am clearly, woefully, physically unprepared for. No doubt I’ll still have an amazing time, but I can tell before I even catch my flight that some things are going to need to change.
Currently I weigh somewhere between “can walk up a flight of stairs without stopping” and “sir you won’t be able to ride this ride today.” I don’t always need a seat belt extender when I fly, but sometimes I do. I’ve weighed more, I’ve weighed less, but as I get older it’s becoming more of an issue in more ways, and something clearly has to be done. As a close friend once said, “you can be old, or you can be fat.” He was speaking from a position of authority and wisdom.
Like most fat people, I’ve already tried everything. Everything. Whatever you’re thinking, I’ve tried it. From “eat less, move more” to Keto, to GLP-1 agonists. Some things worked for a while, then stopped working. Some things never worked. Nothing worked indefinitely. The things that worked the best required persistent, ongoing, considerable discipline. I suspect any system that will succeed for me will have that feature, and the challenge will be convincing everyone to arrange my life around it. You can only get away with being so weird if you want to succeed by normal definitions of success, and I’m not Steve Jobs enough for abnormal definitions of success.
So this post is somewhat of a manifesto. It is, in part, an attempt to document the things I am going to attempt to start doing because I think they’ll help. It is also, in part, to justify the weirdness I will need to introduce into my life and the lives of others to improve my likelihood of success. It is, if nothing else, an attempt to be legible.
Part 1 - Food
“The real importance of the ‘never’ list is that you have to make a commitment that there are some things in your life that you’re going to give up and you’re never going to have again. And there’s not a diet that I know of that ever said, ‘You know what? You’re going to say goodbye to some things forever.’ I actually think that’s important because it’s a symbolic life change that says ‘I’m turning a corner.’ It’s a statement of ‘I’m making a permanent change.’ That’s important from both a psychological and nutritional standpoint.”
- Alton Brown
In 2010’s “Live and Let Diet” Alton Brown, host and creator of Good Eats, introduced what he called the “System of Four Lists” – effectively, a contract with himself that helped Brown build and maintain a 50lb weight loss. Each list was designed to either encourage good food choices, or discourage bad ones.
The first list was comprised of things he decided he must eat every day:
Leafy greens
Nuts
Carrots
Green tea
Whole grains
Fruits
As I understand it, the purpose of focusing on things he must have rather than things he couldn’t have, was to flood the playing field with good food. To leave less room for things that didn’t support his desired health outcomes. Instead of focusing on restriction as the primary goal, to focus on nutrition to the exclusion of problematic foods.
The second list are things he needed to eat at least three times a week:
Yogurt
Broccoli / Cauliflower
Sweet potato
Avocado
Oily fish
Tofu
Restriction enters the picture in his third list, the things he can only have once a week. Effectively, the treats:
Red meat
White starch
Desserts
Alcohol
In the original version of Live and Let Diet that aired, white starch was “pasta,” but in articles published later online it appears that he broadened it. My guess is by white starch what he really means is everything I think of as “sugar.” I have a notoriously broad definition of sugar, which extends pretty much all the way to all purpose flour. Any refined carbohydrate. So all breads are sugar, but a baked potato is not. Maybe he intended to include baked potatoes in his white starch category, I don’t know. I think my problem probably isn’t the number of baked potatoes I eat.
Finally, the “never” list. The things he had to give up for good:
Soda
Processed meals
Canned soups
“Diet” anything
Fast food
That seems clearly and objectively correct to me. There goes my chances of getting a Taco Icosahedron sponsorship, but I think that’s probably a risk I’m willing to take.
Let me say that I really like this approach. I like the idea of filling up on healthy “must haves” to edge out less healthy alternatives. I like the idea of allowing a little fun as a once a week treat. I even like the idea of saying “never” to the things we all know are bad. There’s power in never. Never reduces the option space, it removes an entire class of negotiation from the table. “No” is the most powerful word in the English language, and a complete sentence.
My smart move is probably to take this, exactly as written, and try it for a month before I make any adjustments. And I think that’s what I’m going to aim to do. Just for the sake of completeness though, here are the adjustments I’m considering:
Carrots are fine, but I’m not a huge fan and I just can’t think of how I’d manage to fit them in every day without getting sick of them.
I’m not a huge tea drinker, green or otherwise, but I’m game to try. I don’t like hot beverages, but I think tea might be my best opportunity for replacing soda.
That’s it. Those are the changes I think I’d want to make. But, let’s give it an honest try first.
… After I get back from Disney. Because it’s only a couple weeks away, because the food at Disney is part of the appeal, and because it provides a break point to clear out my kitchen and refresh anew.
Part 2 - Activity
In October’s State of the Apps CGP Grey talked about Whoop and the extent to which the data it provided was a “game changer” for his health journey. I bought one immediately. Well. Rented. Their business model is to give you the device on pain of subscription. I’ve been wearing it for over a month now, and its data collection is pretty impressive.
With a month of basically “normal” baseline data, it has a good sense of how healthy I am (or am not,) and suggests some reasonable goals:
More steps
Better sleep
Exercise a couple times a week
Avoid added sugar
Drink water
Which, really, seems like very milquetoast advice. What’s important is that it can mostly track those automatically, and suggest realistic goals based on how I’m actually doing. Next week, for example, I’m going to aim for 6600+ steps per day, a sleep consistency of 70%+, any exercise at least two days, no added sugar at least five days, and meeting my hydration goal at least five days. Then at the end of the week I’ll review, adjust as necessary, and try again. Unlike the food plan, this starts immediately. Although I can’t promise I’ll avoid added sugar at Disney. Because Dole Whip.
All of these systems, together, I’m calling my Health Operating System. Like any other OS, I’m sure they’ll need patching and updates from time to time, but I’m broadcasting it wide so that everyone who has to deal with me knows what’s what. These are the things I’m choosing to prioritize, and the rules I’m willing to be inconvenient to maintain. Apologies in advance.
Every December my partner and I make the drive down to the Warhammer Citadel in Grapevine, TX to play our end-of-year game. If you’re a fan of Warhammer but have never been to the Citadel, imagine a Games Workshop or Warhammer store that’s also a coffee shop. It’s the closest thing we have in North America to Warhammer World, but it’s closer to a normal Warhammer store than that statement might imply.
Still, as the North American headquarters for Games Workshop, it has the benefit of being fully stocked with even the rare and unusual games, lots of well-painted minis on display, and probably 20 open tables in the back. It’s worth a trip if you’re in town, but not a trip to town if that makes sense. But I digress.
At the start of 2024 we determined to play a full 2000 point game, my Tyranids vs his Death Guard. Then my year exploded. Suddenly it was September and I didn’t have a single painted model to show for it. What I did have, however, was almost all the Necrons I’d need for a Boarding Action. So we pivoted, and rather than try to rush 100+ unpainted models, I finished the roughly ~11 for our new goal.
The Necrons had been a previous year’s army of the year, so I have a decent set of them in various states of completion, and we were big fans of Boarding Actions which came out around the transition from 9th to 10th edition Warhammer, so this was a delightful return to form.
So, how did it go?
Before the Battle
In the current edition of Warhammer you determine who goes first by rolling a six-sided die (d6,) and whoever rolls higher goes first. That person also picks who is the “attacker” and who is the “defender.” The attacker and defender have different deployment zones, places where they can put their minis on the table at the start of the game, and the defender has to put their minis down first. It’s useful to be able to go second in the deployment phase, because where your opponent puts their minis tells you something about their strategy and can allow you to make last-minute strategic decisions about how to respond.
I won the roll-off, which meant that I would get to go first, and I chose to be the attacker, which meant that I got to deploy second.
We each held one unit in reserve to be deployed through strategic shenanigans later. He had a unit of Poxwalkers that he could deep strike (place anywhere on the table that was at least 9" away from one of my models,) through the usage of a limited resource called Command Points. I had a unit of Ophydian Destroyers that have deep strike as a natural ability.
A few more units were held in reserve to come in through the normal deployment mechanism, because Boarding Actions allows a limited number of units to be in the deployment zones each round.
Round 1
During my turn I advanced my unit of Flayed Ones, one unit of Warriors and my Royal Warden towards the central objective. The Royal Warden was my Warlord, which I think is sort of an unusual choice. He’s basically a slightly more powerful Warrior, and in the regular 40K rules he gives an attached unit of Warriors the ability to run away and shoot in the same turn. In Boarding Actions he shouldn’t be able to do that, but as a house rule we decided that he could because it’s flavorful, and we think in the spirit of what the rules intended.
In the Northwest corner I moved my unit of Scarabs to claim the objective. We wouldn’t figure out until round three that they had no objective control score, which meant they couldn’t actually claim that objective for me. One of my lessons learned!
Finally, I moved my unit of Triarch Praetorians to capture the objective in the Southwest corner.
On his turn Ash moved his unit of Chaos Spawn to claim the Northeast objective, then advanced his Poxwalkers and Typhus to open a hatchway into the southern corridor. This was his first major tactical mistake, as he forgot entirely to attempt to claim the Southeastern objective this round.
He repeated that strategy in the north with another unit of Poxwalkers and his Tallyman.
Round 2
Seeing that Ash intended to make use of Hatchways to get into the Northern and Southern hallways, I redirected units in both of those directions. To the North I ran my Flayed Ones into his unit of Poxwalkers. It was an immediate and decisive victory for the Flayed Ones, who eradicated the entire unit in one combat while taking no wounds.
I deployed a unit of Lychguard to the South to block another unit of Poxwalkers who were attempting to head for the Southwest objective. This was strategically one of Ash’s better trades. The Lychguard have a relatively small number of incredibly strong attacks. Overall they were probably the strongest units either of us had brought, and in a perfect world I would have run them directly into his warlord, Typhus. Because their attacks were so strong, any Poxwalker they hit was guaranteed to melt, but because they had so few attacks they could only take out a few each round.
Seeing his Chaos Spawn coming for the central objective, I deployed my Ophydian Destroyers via Deep Strike directly on to the central objective to both claim and protect it. It was clear to me that my relatively slow moving warriors weren’t going to get there in time, and if he claimed it I’d have trouble shifting him off.
During Ash’s turn he ran the Chaos Spawn directly into my Ophydians, dealing two wounds which wasn’t quite enough to take one down. In the trade, my Ophydians did six wounds back, fully 3/4 of the damage his unit could sustain, and removing one of the two Chaos Spawn models.
Using the stratagem “The Dead Rise” allowed him to deep strike his final unit of Poxwalkers into the far Northwest corner, aiming them for my poor solitary unit of Scarabs. However, they were unable to move on their first turn on the board.
A unit of cultists in each of the Northeast and Southeast corners claim both objectives for him, and spend the next term “securing” the objectives, which would allow them to remain under his control as the units continued to move away. I forgot this was something units could do, and that specifically only my Warriors could do it. I had built my list assuming I’d need to keep a unit on each objective I wanted to hold, which is why the Scarabs continued to sit in the Northwest corner. Since part of his strategy was to try to claim one of my back field objectives, this was probably the right idea regardless.
Round 3
In the Southwest I advance one of my units of Warriors towards the objective, freeing up my Praetorians to advance to the center of the board. I knew that Typhus was headed that direction, and that they had a decent melee profile, so I wanted all of my best bruisers ready to hold the contest for the central objective.
To the North I had my Flayed Ones open the hatchway towards the Northwest objective, positioning them to rescue my Scarabs on the following turn.
On Ash’s turn he managed to start making progress against a few of my units. One of his cultists got a lucky shot in the shooting phase and did the one wound needed to finish off one of my Ophydians. Poxwalkers continued to trade with my Lychguard in the south, taking one of them out as well. I also lost a Scarab to his risen Poxwalkers in the Northeast.
He sent Typhus directly into my unit of Warriors, hoping to take them out in a single round. Unfortunately, he only managed to kill two.
Round 4
If you’re not familiar with the Necrons, they’re basically ancient space-faring robotic Egyptians. Basically. And they have a couple interesting gimmicks, but probably the one they’re most well-known for is the ability to reanimate in the middle of combat. So sometimes you think you’ve killed them, and then they stand right back up, stick their thumb to their nose, and blow a raspberry. And by blow a raspberry I mean they shoot you dead with plasma weapons.
So that’s what I did.
Now would be a good time to thank the dice, who were exceptionally kind to me this day. More than half of the models that Ash had managed to kill stood back up, including both the Ophydian and Lychguard from the previous round. This was not a good outcome for him. It was a great outcome for me.
In my movement phase I carefully arranged as many units as possible to be able to shoot at Typhus. The mission we were playing scored an extra 10 victory points for murdering the enemy Warlord. I got close to putting a wound on him a couple of times, and then my own Warlord, the Royal Warden actually managed to hit with six wounds. Exactly enough to kill Typhus. Both of Ash’s saving throws failed, which should have killed Typhus, but he burned what remained of his precious command points to roll again and saved on the second attempt.
What the Royal Warden couldn’t do, the Ophydian Destroyers certainly could, and in the fighting phase they marched right in and turned Typhus into a fine plague-flavored sashimi.
In the Northwest, my Flayed Ones came to the rescue of my Scarabs, and eradicated the Poxwalkers that were harassing them.
At this point, with almost all of his Poxwalkers defeated, his Warlord dead, and me in control of more than half the board with strong units he would be unlikely to defeat, Ash conceded.
I won 55 to 30.
My Learnings
Scarabs can’t claim objectives. They probably would have been most useful running ahead and opening a door for me. I have a bad habit of forgetting that the hatchways in Boarding Actions can open.
Lychguard are strong bruisers, but without many attacks do their best work against a single beefy target. I really wanted to get them stuck in against Typhus, but Ash did the right thing gumming them up with Poxwalkers.
Praetors didn’t get much of a chance to shine, and looking at their profile now I would probably be smart to trade them out for something with a more clearly defined role in the battle.
Ash’s Learnings
He intended to use the cultists to “sticky things and then die,” and the Poxwalkers were meant to gum me up. In practice, the cultists mostly never arrived to the battle. Probably they should have come out first and ranged ahead, so that the Poxwalkers would have had an easier time getting into position.
Typhus needs to be used more tactically, he’s not invincible. It came as a surprise when I killed him basically twice.
Final Thoughts
This was the only game of Warhammer we played in 2024, which is a real shame. We both love it. It’s arguably part of how we met. I like the structure of having a game at the end of the year to work towards, because if nothing else we know that one game will happen.
Next year we’re focusing on Necromunda as our game of choice, which has much smaller armies (called gangs) than even Boarding Actions. I hope that by having a smaller painting commitment we’ll be able to get into games sooner in the year, and our annual game next December will be the capstone of a campaign rather than the only game we play.
In closing, here is every one of his models my Necrons managed to take off the board. The real gift was the Poxwalkers we murdered along the way.
The society I happen to have been born into is based on consumption. It tells me that my worth is measured in my economic contributions. That I will be judged by the clothes I wear, the car I drive, the establishments I frequent.
“The tactical result of an engagement forms the base for new strategic decisions because victory or defeat in a battle changes the situation to such a degree that no human acumen is able to see beyond the first battle.”
Or,
“No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.”
-Helmuth von Moltke the Elder
Nearing the end of the year, I’m starting to think about next year’s theme. But before I get into that, I think it’s worth reviewing how this year’s theme went.
TL;DR – poorly.
Looking back on how I defined my theme for the year, I think the idea was solid, but I lacked clarity on what exactly I meant to do differently. One big mistake is that, outside of the start of the year, I mostly never thought about it again. It didn’t serve as a “north star” like so many yearly themes do. Whereas the Year of Time (2023,) kept popping up everywhere I looked, the Year of Scales of Arpeggios mostly just happened.
In the blog post linked above, I set out three specific plans I intended to engage in. If you haven’t clicked through, they were:
Wake up before work, use that time productively.
Build a system for meal planning.
Learn to play disc golf.
And dear reader, I did approximately none of them.
That’s not quite entirely fair, I actually did get really good at waking up earlier. But I don’t really use the time productively. I think the end result is that I’m more “awake” when work starts, and that has some positive benefits, but never not once did I ever get my treadmill time in before the day started. Planning the day continues to be an elusive challenge. Executing the plan even more so.
It feels hardly worth even mentioning the other two, beyond saying that I didn’t even start to try. I forgot I meant to. The year got away from me and now here we are, on the precipice of December, and I don’t think I’m planning to start any of that in the remaining four weeks.
We can’t win them all, and I didn’t win this one. On to bigger and better things!
You might surmise that this is a political post. And it sort of is, but also it isn’t. Because winter has always been coming. And most likely, winter will always be coming. Winter might be Trump, it might be climate change, it might be an asteroid that strikes the Pacific ocean and obliterates all life as we know it. We don’t know when winter will come, nor what form it will take, but winter is coming.
Some people will read that and assume that I am being defeatist. That clearly, we must all give up in the face of insurmountable odds. And no, read what I said because it doesn’t include anything about giving up. Despite it all, I’m not a nihilist.
That winter is coming is an indisputable fact of our universe, and the answer to winter is to chop wood, preserve food, hunker down, and tell stories. Prepare for winter; to be able to weather it, because you do not control which way the wind will blow. You never did, and you never will. Winter can and will show up on its own schedule, in its own way, and there is nothing to be done about it except to prepare.
Our ancestors built communities by huddling together around the fire, and though the mode may have changed the method remains. Many hands make light work, and there remains much work to be done. There always will, because the universe does not owe us peace. The universe does not owe us anything. Winter is coming, and the only chance we have to stand against it is together.
With any luck, and no small amount of fortune, we will get to plant trees under whose shade we will never sit. It is not for us to rest, because winter is coming. But we might hope that others may some day wonder at what winter ever was.
Wargaming as a hobby is incredibly cloistered, a series of rituals performed by robed adherents, and the systems broadly share so many concepts that you often draft on one to learn another. This means that onboarding someone into our mystery is often an afterthought - the process starts by reading thirty some-odd pages of scripture, but the real questions you’ll grapple with are the same as the fresh acolyte of any religion. They will all be within interactions the “rules” only suggest. It’s not that the map isn’t the territory - it’s that the map generally describes a world which cannot possibly exist, and the work is in harmonizing that with the real world. This is a form of labor I delight in! But there might be hard limits on how many people want to collaboratively embroider a secular religion in their leisure time.
I would describe myself as “cautiously optimistic” about generative AI. LLMs are clearly capable of doing some useful things. Anyone who tries to argue otherwise at this point probably sounds a lot like they’re trying to argue the sky isn’t blue or the moon isn’t cheese.
For a little background, I first heard about GPT-2 back when it came out, a couple of years before ChatGPT hit the world stage, and some of the smartest nerds I know were marveling at the fact that you could get it to play chess competently. This was a surprising result, because LLMs use statistical techniques against words to predict outputs given an input. It shouldn’t know what “chess” is, and it shouldn’t be competent at the game.
Early ChatGPT didn’t really impress me that much, and it routinely got stuff wrong. My best example of this would violate confidentiality, so consider that I’m not necessarily trying to convince you that old ChatGPT sucked. I think that should be obvious. Mostly I’m mentioning it to explain why I didn’t even bother to start trying to use it or its competitors until much later.
Once Google announced Bard, I joined that bandwagon and made a few slight attempts to get it to do something useful. It mostly couldn’t, which also shouldn’t be surprising. An example of this was asking it to plan a Hawaiian vacation for me. I figured planning a vacation was the kind of thing that GenAI could probably handle, there should be lots of examples of vacations that people enjoyed. It really, really wanted me to go see the Pearl Harbor memorial. (I did not.)
Okay so that’s all fine and good. Jump to today. I use ChatGPT at work, and Claude at home, and for my use cases, I think Claude is a lot better, but I wanted to talk a little bit about what I’m actually using them for. What do I think they’re good at?
ChatGPT has proven itself quite adept at taking my stream of consciousness and making something other people could understand from it. If I start typing out the details of an email I would like to send, the important points, the audience, the tone, it will generate an email that’s perfectly cromulent. Same with a Slack message. But also same with a Jira ticket. If I know basically what needs to happen and the order it needs to happen in, then Jira saves me the trouble of spending time formatting it into a proper set of acceptance criteria.
Claude, with its Artifacts feature, has helped me develop and then fill out templates for data that I want to live inside my knowledge management system. I asked Claude for a template for a System of Systems document, and together we worked to refine it to have the detail level I wanted. Then I tossed it my list of systems, and it did a decent job of a first pass to fill it out.
The recurring theme is that I’ve found GenAI saves me from typing but not from thinking. Best case scenario it will prompt me with some questions that I might not have considered, but the important connection-making and organizational work is still happening in my brain. Given that, even as an unstructured stream of consciousness, the LLM can then enforce an order and produce an output that might be useful for someone else trying to understand what I thought. I don’t really expect this to change, and once the hype cycle properly dies down I think we’ll discover it’s roughly the limit of what an LLM can do. It’ll get better at doing it, but it can’t really have an “original” thought.
My question is how much money would you pay for the functionality I’ve just described? Right now both ChatGPT and Claude have generous free tiers, but that’s because their investors are expecting them to eat the world at some point, and, once eaten, for GenAI to have become so essential that people won’t be able to remember how not to use it. They’re building their captive audience today, and eventually that bill is going to come due.
I suspect the true cost of this service is a lot more than I’d be willing to pay to avoid typing an email, but time will tell. Maybe we’ll find a way to make “good enough” LLMs operate affordably. We’re still in the “a computer takes up an entire room and only universities have them” phase of this technology, and right now I have five different computers on my desk all of which are more capable than a mainframe was in 1982.
I’m also concerned about the environmental impact, in the sense that we burn a truly fantastic amount of electricity to provide this service. But I think that’s more general than LLMs. We spend a truly fantastic amount of electricity to do lots of things, and are generally incapable as a society of building real solutions to that problem.
Finally, I’m concerned that OpenAI, Anthropic, and every other GenAI company out there had to basically steal all of the world’s knowledge to build this thing. I mention this, because I think it’s worth mentioning. Copyright infringement is apparently okay when Microsoft does it, but if the consumer pirates a copy of Windows now suddenly they care? I am not compelled by arguments about how hard it would be to solve this problem, nor how much it would cost. If we wanted to, we would. But I definitely think it’s fair to consider this in your rubric for how seriously to respect the rights of corporations in turn.
For now I continue to stand by my policy of no GenAI content on this blog. It would defeat entirely the purpose. I’m not trying to impress anyone. I’m barely even trying to convince anyone. These are my thoughts, filtered through my own artistic sense of the right words to use to convey them. 90% of the value is that I took the time to express them, and 10% is whatever value other people might derive from consuming them. But it would be a tactical error to continue to avoid GenAI indefinitely. If you’re not engaging with it currently I’d strongly recommend thinking about where it might be able to help you; the answer is almost certainly not “nowhere.”
I have owned several iPads, and the role of the iPad in my life has changed over the years. With today’s announcement of the new iPad mini, I think it’s time to reevaluate which iPad(s) I need, and potentially start the trade-in process.
Question #1: What do I actually use my iPad for today?
I have an iPad mini. I bought it around the time my kindle kicked the bucket, and my intention was to use it mainly as a reading device. In my mind I thought it’d take it with me on appointments, but in practice I don’t have many of those. It has come with me on every flight since I’ve owned it, and it does a lot of heavy lifting as the main thing I do to keep myself busy while traveling. In that context, I mostly read blog posts through Readwise Reader.
There’s a lot to like about Reader, even though it’s a beta product, but their offline reading experience falls a bit short: images aren’t cached. That might not matter to some people, but ends up being pretty important in the kinds of blog posts I have a tendency to save for later reading.
Because it was intended to be a reading device, I got the 64GB version, which is not enough space to store movies or TV shows for offline watching. Sometimes, especially in hotel rooms, that’d be a nice feature to have. I don’t subscribe to any streaming services, so I need the files to be available on my iPad if I want to watch them.
Finally, it’s a small use case, but the Citadel Colour app is only available on mobile, so despite the fact that I have an iMac on my painting desk, I need an iPad or similar for looking up paint recipes.
Question #2: What do I think I might use my iPad for in the future?
Last weekend I purchased a Kobo Sage for eBooks. I really liked my Kindle, but I no longer shop with Amazon and do not intend to buy a new one. The iPad, it turns out, provides too many distractions and so I rarely read books on it. The Kobo probably won’t arrive for at least another week, but once it does, I intend for it to live in my (not quite yet built) reading nook. It may not come on flights, I haven’t decided.
It’s worth noting that the Kobo solves for a use case I intended the iPad to solve, but for which the iPad ended up being poorly suited: books. There’s nothing wrong with the device, this is entirely a limitation of my attention. Given all the things an iPad can do, I get easily distracted and end up not reading long-form books. I think having a dedicated device that serves this role and has no distractions is key to getting myself to read more. It worked, in fits and spurts, with the Kindle. So the Kobo will do that now.
However, the Kobo doesn’t solve for everything. It doesn’t solve for “read it later” and it doesn’t solve for graphics-heavy formatted PDFs, such as TTRPGs I back on Kickstarter.
Again, I’m thinking out loud here so bear with me.
I’m starting to develop the following rubric:
Text-focused books designed to be read for enjoyment, entertainment, or education will live on the Kobo.
Graphics-focused books will live on the iPad.
To be clear, the iPad really does do these things equally well. It’s more about the mental partitioning. I can’t have one device that does both of these things because my squishy brain must be cajoled into doing things that I enjoy doing if the activation energy of doing them is greater than zero.
Question #3: Which iPad?
The million dollar question. Or thousand dollar. Probably.
Really I think there’s two contenders. The 13" iPad Air and the new iPad Mini. For all intents and purposes they are functionally identical except for size.
I do like the size of the iPad Mini I have. It’s easy to carry around. It moves around the house quite a lot. It’s perfect for Reader, and acceptable for TV/Movies. I haven’t tried referencing a TTRPG rulebook on it, and I will before I commit to a decision, but that’s the one thing that I think the larger iPad is likely to excel at.
If, like me, you think “well why not just keep the current iPad Mini” then let me introduce one more variable. As I mentioned earlier, Readwise Reader doesn’t work great in offline mode. So I’m seriously considering getting the cellular-enabled model, which solves for lack of connectivity everywhere except airplanes, and which lets me solve another unrelated problem: kicking the tires on a new wireless provider in a way that doesn’t require committing an existing device.
So now I’m stuck in the worst possible place: compelling arguments between two options and no clear rubric to pick one or the other. The larger iPad seems like it’d be better at looking at PDFs, the smaller iPad seems like it’d be better for read-it-later blog articles. The smaller iPad is great for travel, and travel is the main thing I use my iPad for. The price difference between the two options doesn’t really matter, but it’s too expensive to get both and call it good.
From the journals of St. Rev. Dr. McPunch, Dweller, Vault 76
“Reclamation day” my entire ass. The vault has everything we need, and I’ve spent most of my life in it! Everyone else was in a hurry to get out and see the world. I’ll tell you what you’ll see: a fat lot of nothing. How could there be anything to see? Twenty years isn’t nearly enough time to clear the rads. But I’m running out of food, and I’m going to have to go out there eventually. Might as well be on my terms.
Of course once you go outside, the door closes behind you. Nothing to it but to do it I guess.
Couple of girls standing near the vault entrance. “A real dweller, gosh!” I’m as shocked as they were. There’s still people out here? Guess there’s some sort of rumor going ‘round about treasure, and some people think it’s the vault. Hate to break it to you, nothing in there. I bet it shut down the instant the last dweller (that’s me, hi,) left. But there’s people, and not just people from the vault. That’s got to be something, right?
Found the remnants of a farm not far down the hill, and a group of people calling themselves the Responders. They traded some basic supplies for a little help. I don’t mind playing a bit of gopher for some chems and clean water. The bad news? I guess there’s a cult? That worships the Mothman?! I ran some supplies for the Responders up the hill to another group calling themselves the Brotherhood. Bunch of tightwads, but caps is caps.
Never thought I’d see it, but someone left a Power Armor frame down at the farm. Just hanging out, free for the grabbing. It’s been stripped for parts, so nothing more than a frame and a bit of juice to keep it moving. I wonder if I can find the missing parts?
There was a call for help out of the South, something about a robot? I’ll tell you, it was the most people I’ve seen in one place since Reclamation Day. Mostly vault dwellers like myself, several with fully-functional sets of Power Armor. And me with my Little Slugger covered in razor blades. Oh well. I’m not really sure that I was much help, but there was definitely a robot. Wearing a sheep? It was confusing. But I got some more caps and chems for my trouble.
Overseer left a trail to follow, which has taken me to a little town called Flatwoods. Looks like it used to be a base of some kind for the Responders. I guess I’m formally a Volunteer now? At least that’s what the computer’s saying. There’s basically nobody left to confirm it, just one other random lady and her dog. Doesn’t seem like she knows much about it either. I did some tests, cooked a burger, and stole anything not nailed down to the floor. It looks like they called everyone back to a place called Morgantown’s airport. I’ll have to go check that out at some point.
[…] AI is here. It’s going to “win” for many definitions of win, and some definitions of lose. But that doesn’t mean we need to abandon our crafts to it. The Luddites “lost” for most definitions of lose, but people still make things at home that could come from factories. […]
_February 2025 Update: I’ve replaced my 100% Human Generated policy with a Collaborative AI policy, available here: thewizardly.com/ai-collab…
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.
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.
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.
The Nature of Things (Burmese Classical Poems)
Inscribed on
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.
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.
