Yesterday and today, back at my own drafting table. I am familiarizing myself with a previous tinkerer’s unfinished prototype, with the goal of making a working model. What is missing are the scribbled notes and earlier drawings that would tell me the story of why particular decisions were made…
Multi-modal journey into the head office this morning. Along the way, I listened to a discussion about how things went sideways in the early 2010’s with algorithm-driven social media feeds. I agreed fully with this notion, and regret what it may have done - permanently - to those born afterwards.
Testing out a micro.blog plugin. I’ve had this banger stuck in my head for days, now.
Yesterday’s various news items fostered in me a sense of existential dread. To combat the sensations of helplessness, I accomplished much before breakfast this morning. Language studies and a plan for the day, all before that sacred first cup of coffee. It is better to do things than sit in fear.
We finished filling the first 20-yard dumpster yesterday. 10 years of living in a place means not having to think about what is truly important to preserve. We have only a matter of months to prepare for our next adventure, forcing us to appraise all of this physical stuff with a more critical eye.
Yesterday we took apart the collapsing remains of the garden walls. A tangle of rotting boards and wire fencing. The neighboring townsfolk are not upset to see them go.
Concert last night; a famous chanteuse from the old city. Nostalgia for a time half-remembered. Afterwards, we sat around the kitchen, drinks in hand - thinking about the future.
This showed up on Hacker News today; pretty amazing read on the technical construction of social engineering attacks: www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blo…
This morning I wondered about living in a reality distortion field that was so strong, I could not see any possibility beyond what my curated army of yes-men reflected back to me. And lashing out like a scared animal when the walls of that distortion were perturbed in any way. What a horrible life.
There was a certain gloominess in the workshop today. The afternoon ice cream helped lighten the mood, and I left determined to make a brighter evening for my ensemble.
Putting on my top hat and monocle to head into the office today. It’s a space that is new-ish to my compatriot tinkerers and yet it is also quite old. A tiny, modern workshop built within the colossal ribcage of a fallen giant.
Evening situation: improving.
(rye manhattan on the rocks, like god intended)
I’ve been re-reading an email I sent yesterday. It’s one of those situations where I know I responded in the right way, but I still feel uneasy about it. In a relationship that has subsisted on me nodding along to their bullshit, I just drew the line on just how much bullshit I’ll passively absorb.
Needed a place to clear my head that was relatively anonymous. Too much shit going on in the world.
Regarding Social Media - Don't Split the Difference
Tech Transfers
Refocusing Creative Energy
Last Thursday, my regular D&D group of 25 years gathered on Zoom and I ran the last session of a long-running campaign. It was a relatively rare situation of us wrapping up a full start-to-finish campaign, and it was particularly notable for two reasons. First off, it is the last campaign that I will ever run in the bespoke game setting that I started building over 20 years ago. Second off, it was my last regular game session of any sort with that gaming group for at least six months. I’m taking an extended leave from running table-top RPGs and significantly limiting my participation in table-top RPGs until Autumn.
The bespoke setting. If you ever played a campaign in the setting that I cooked up, you’d recognize particular NPC names that appeared again and again. Time within the setting marched on between each adventure, and by the time of the most recent campaign, all but a few of those NPCs had passed away. That’s been one of the most interesting aspects of the setting for me - thinking about the legacies of people and events gone by; legacies that span hundreds, and in some cases, thousands of years.
But working within the framework of any story setting has inherent limitations. If I ever run another tabletop RPG, I want to start fresh. Tell a new story. So with gratitude I surrender Ymir, Idvalexi, Brother Helix, Black Molly Kithkani, Captain Braddock, the Lightwing, and all of Serkemir and the Five Realms to the void. Zola Shadowland, last of the Hell’s Footmen, has a reprieve until the end of the campaign where I play her as a PC - her origin story. Then she will join the others in the mists.
The extended hiatus. With the exception of the very infrequent campaign in which Zola Shadowland abides, I am taking a break from table-top RPGs completely. This decision has been driven by two main factors. The lesser factor is Zoom fatigue. I spend a lot of my working hours on Zoom, and weekly evening Zoom sessions were very difficult for me. I found it particularly challenging as a player of RPGs rather than the DM, because my focus was likely to wander often. The greater factor in this was how DJing got me reconsidering where and how I want to spend my creative energy.
Running a bespoke D&D campaign takes a fair amount of time and creativity. By tapping into an established setting, I reduced some of the work but not much. By making extensive use of D&D’s online tools, I reduced a fair amount of the bookkeeping. But what remained to be done was the raw creative work of telling a story, and that energy comes from the same place that all of my writing comes from. It has always been a tradeoff - run games, or write stories. This year I want to write stories and see where I can go with them.
There’s a side benefit as well. Thursday nights are apparently a big night for the local electronic music scene in Boston, and I want to see what kind of connections I can make there. Even though writing and DJing don’t require the same sort of energy from me, taking an extended break from my deeply established D&D hobby gives me more time and creative energy for both of those other pursuits. I’m not expecting to become an overnight success in either, but I am excited to see what I can do with the opportunity.
After Decades, a Waking Dream
December 2022
Goodbye, Dad
My father passed away yesterday. I’m still very numb about the whole thing, still processing, but I didn’t want this moment to go by without some writing. Going through old articles from a previous version of this blog, I found something I wrote about my dad on the occasion of his retirement from performing surgeries in 2008. I’m reposting it here for posterity. Rest in peace, Dad,
It’s Who You Are
[Originally published on May 6th, 2008]
Last Friday, my dad performed the last surgery of a career that has spanned over thirty years. By my conservative guess, based on a minimum of two scheduled surgeries per week plus countless emergency room calls, his total career count would have to be somewhere in the vicinity of 5000 operations. For the obvious reason that I have no place in an operating room, I never saw his work first hand, but I have looked over his shoulder at the never-ending x-rays of anonymous reconstructed knees, hips and hands. To me, they were bones and screws, plates and stitches. To him, they were his craft, his passion, his profound responsibility.
It is hard to understand, as a software engineer, what it means to be a surgeon. Most of the engineers I know weren’t required to pour their souls into their studies in order to make it. We may have pulled the odd all-nighter, but none of us had to endure multi-year residencies with 72-hour work shifts. We rarely (if ever) have to make life-and-death decisions, much less in a split-second.
So demanding is the training to become a surgeon that for those who achieve it, being a surgeon is truly who they are. Not too many software engineers are software engineers the way that surgeons are surgeons. This makes it all the more difficult to say that it is time to stop, because what are you if you are not toiling under the responsibility that your patients have entrusted you with? What are you if you are not working with the scalpel and the volumes of experience that you have amassed?
I believe that when you retire from surgical practice, you are yet a surgeon. My dad was born a surgeon and some day he will die a surgeon. He is and has been many other things–a dad to me and my sister first and foremost–but the fire that burns in his eyes was lit for the day when he earned the right and the awesome responsibilities of surgical practice and it will never be extinguished. For the rest of his life, memories of the sleepless nights and hardest cases will stay with him along with the faces of the thousands of people who put their trust in him and were better for it.
Today, on his birthday, his office staff gave him a huge, handmade quilt; each panel depicted a milestone from his entire medical career. A week from Friday, my dad is being honored as Surgeon of the Year by the Connecticut Orthopedic Society. After all of that, he’ll be back at his office practice and continuing his work as an independent medical examiner. Some day I imagine my dad might even decide to retire completely, but a part of his mind and his heart never will.
In my heart of hearts, one my dad’s grandchildren (Linnea, Solomon, or any of the ones to follow) will discover that like their grandpa, they were born a surgeon. I certainly won’t know what to do with them, but my dad will. He’ll give them a piece of that fire to carry on through the long, hard hours, the many years of school, and the most difficult split-second decisions.
And if all of this was no indication–I am incredibly proud to have a dad who has accomplished so much and who has helped so many people.