My work

 I believe that there is some important sense in which despair, loneliness, emptiness, meaninglessness, or whatever is part of the human condition. I am an optimist in the sense that I believe humans can find answers to this problem. But I believe this problem is really tricky.

I think a lot of answers have been proposed for this problem. But I feel like the way this problem works is that you can take a lot of value out of other people's answers, and that is why books, movies, games etc have value, but at the same time the problem is tricky because there is no right universal answer, and even what works for a particular person on a given day often won't work on the next day, at least it won't work in quite the same way. I think this is the problem with organized religion and a lot of things that bill themselves as an answer. They might have been in some original sense, but it is all too easy for people to abuse these notions and their claims to being the one true answer and for people to fall into dogmatic obsessions.

So what I mean when I say that games are spiritual, or that they are art, is that I believe that games can be an authentic answer to this problem.

But there are some important caveats or like issues that come up. 

The first is the idea of distraction. Distraction is a negative reaction to this problem. It might work short term but that will only make the problem worse. So when games operate as distraction, they are worse than nothing because they just act as a papering over the problem which only makes it worse.

 So there is some important sense in which what is needed is someone who can talk about the difference between distraction and real answers to the problem.

 Another issue is that in some ways I don't really think games can be a pure answer to this problem in the sense of the only thing that works. What I mean is that games can be an authentic reaction to despair but that we also need other things in our lives like love, whether that be for family, or friends, or partners. I feel like it is dangerous to put all your eggs in one basket whatever that may be and that the real answers to this problem are like a network of related things like love in its various forms, different kinds of community, satisfying work, etc.

And in some ways I don't feel any answer can be given that is universally valid. What I mean by this is that there is no sense in which I am saying "everyone should be a gamer"... basically I feel like people have to find their own way and there is no such thing as a universal answer that works for everyone. Like I mentioned above, even what works for one person on Day A may not work on Day B so it can be tough to talk about this stuff.

 So what I am saying is that I think games can be deep and valuable in this important sense of being a reaction to the human condition in the same sense that like religion, philosophy, or art are. But there are also pitfalls.

So I guess what I am saying is that I feel like my calling is to talk about games in this deep sense of being a solution to despair rather than just being a distraction. But to talk about the pitfalls and the ways in which games or gaming can fail to live up to this notion.

So given all of this, why are games attractive to me... I have studied, science, literature, and philosophy. So why am I attracted to games most of all. And I think it has to do with the idea of fun. There is something really interesting to me about games being totally nonsensical in some ways but also that people care deeply about them. Although I have learned a lot from the different subjects I have studied, at some level I found a lot of them confusing and depressing. Part of me is really attracted to the idea of fun as the solution. I think I have a strong streak in me that takes things too seriously. And there is some feeling that games offer some corrective to that because in some sense they are the opposite of serious. That being said there is definitely part of me that is really attracted to "serious" games like chess or go. And in some ways, the path I have sketched out in the post is kind of a "serious" approach to games. But I think in some ways I would like to try to steer more towards the "fun" end of the spectrum. 

 

 

 

Video Game haul

 Well, like I mentioned, I have been busy with my new job. So that has been fairly demanding in that there has been a lot to learn and I have been having to do a significant amount of problem solving on a daily basis. It can also be physically demanding because although on 3rd shift I am allowed to sit, during day shifts we have to stand and standing for 8 hours is more taxing than I realized. There has also been some issues with sleep schedule stuff and having to be awake during the day for some stuff. So overall I feel like I have been working pretty hard these last few weeks. So I decided to splurge and buy a haul of video games even though there is no big sale going on Steam. (There is a big sale going on Epic but I have a strong preference for buying on steam). In my haul I bought one game that had just released which is also unusual for me (Forza 6). So overall I spent significantly more than I have in the past. But part of that is that I had to switch my store back to the US store and prices are higher in the US. (This is the reason they have a lot of restrictions on region switching.) So, all told ,I got planescape torment, Ghost of Tsushima, the alters, blue prince, forza 6, indiana jones and the great circle, anno 117 pax romana, atomfall, tainted grail: the fall of avalon, memoriapolis.

So a couple of those are more action oriented games, particularly Ghost and Indiana Jones. I have a strong tendency to lean toward cerebral games. But sometimes I feel that I really like action games. I played all three of the most recent Tomb Raider games and enjoyed them. And sometimes I feel like cerebral video games feel like a bit of a paradox because in some ways with a lot these strategy games that I am attracted to I just feel really mixed about investing the time to actually learn how to play properly and stuff.  That being said, playing Ghost of Tsushima has reminded me that I am not very good at these kind of action games where you have to have some actual physical skills like remembering how to do things under pressure and quick reflexes and stuff like that. I generally tend to play games on medium difficulty when I have a choice. A lot of times playing on easy feels silly and I am nowhere near good enough to play on hard. So I don't know. At my age I will probably never be a champion video game swordsman, but I definitely feel like I can improve if I put some effort in.

But that is kind of the trick. Finding games that I am willing to invest the effort in. For some reason I tend to feel like Go and Chess, and to some extent Magic are worth investing effort in. But a lot of times with video games I just feel I hit the limit a lot sooner of questioning "why am I doing this?" or "I don't really want to be bothered" instead of just plowing ahead. 

 But anyways... I also bought a cool blue controller to play the action games with. So we will just have to see. I was reading one of my gaming notebooks from earlier this year or the end of last year and it was saying my priority would be go but I would like video games to be the option to take a break from that. Hard to say. I have a fairly large collection of video games but I haven't really sunk all that much time into actually playing those games. Only time will tell if that changes or if I continue to collect without playing much. 

Update 19

Been pretty busy with my new job working night audit at a hotel. So I haven't been making it to go club lately and not doing a whole lot gaming-wise. I have plowed my way through most of the Shuei book. I finished his games. There are just a few supplementary games at the back that were by other players that he commented. I have also been reading the Janice Kim Learn to Play Go series. This is a series that is for beginners and lower rated players. I bought the second book a long time ago (like 2004 or so). But just recently decided to complete my collection. So I read the first book which is really basic but there was one item that I did learn from it which was that in capturing races you are supposed to fill the opponent's outside liberties first because when you fill shared liberties you are decreasing your own so you will lose the race if the opponent fills your outside liberties with their moves. I probably had heard this rule of thumb before but it struck me as a fresh piece of knowledge that I hadn't internalized yet. So then I reread the second volume which was nice. Then the third volume was a bit more interesting. And the fourth volume is definitely teaching me some stuff even though none of it is really stuff I hadn't heard before. So I have a positive impression of these books because I feel they are gentle and easy to read but contain quality knowledge at the same time. So, I mentioned in a previous post about a guy named Jackie that goes to the club that is a fair bit weaker than me. He is not an absolute beginner or anything though. So like I said, I am learning things from this series so I thought I would lend him these books. Actually, the fourth volume arrived damaged and when I asked Amazon for a refund they said that I didn't actually need to return the book. Jackie is really into recycling and getting full value out of stuff so I thought he would appreciate being gifted this damaged one (still totally readable just kind of bent and scuffed). But I thought the fourth one was slightly advanced for him so l lent him the first three as well. So, I feel happy about that. The king of value personality I have talked about before is happy that I am getting more value out of these volumes by sharing them with someone for whom they might have more impact. I did mention to my boss at work that would like to have Sunday afternoon off and it looks like that will be the case starting in June. So other than that there hasn't been a whole lot going on gaming-wise. I have felt some interest in video games again but haven't really done much of anything about it. I would like to post more often here on the blog. I mentioned to someone the other day that I thought maybe 10 posts a month would be a good target. But it just feels tough to do that. And I don't want to post just for the sake of posting. I want my posts to be good content. So we will just have to see.

Go Club 5/3/26

So I managed to make it to the go club again and had a really good time. There weren't a lot of people this time. Just four of us and Chuck only hung out for one game with Jackie. I played a number of games with Michael, the club organizer. So actually it was a really interesting experience. First off, just as we were starting the first game he was mentioning to the other two guys that he was kind of sick of playing star point (the 4-4 point) josekis which is what you have to do when playing with handicap stones. I happened to mention then that I mostly play komoku (the 3-4 point) in my even games. So then he eagerly suggested that we play even but he would spot me forty points (usually handicap stones are valued at about 10 points each.) He claimed that going first was worth roughly five or so points (which I guess is right if you believe in komi). So that was about correct for a five stone handicap. So anyways we played that way. I am kind of unsure what happened but I might have resigned. Then he had another interesting suggestion, which was to play even but the handicap would be that I could play two moves in a row on three separate occasions during the game. I agreed to try it but it felt a bit too much like cheating so I kind of ignored it in the first stage. But then I did try it in order to break into an area he sealed off. Which I think was a good decision. But then I think I used the next two on some small potatoes captures and end up allowing him to reseal the area I had broken into. So then I can't remember whether we played one or two more. But somehow the topic of playing too fast came up. So Michael got out the clock and said that I had to spend at least 10 seconds per move. He tried to hold himself to the same rule. The result was that I played dramatically better and the score was quite close in an even game. What I mean is that it was quite close before any handicap points were added. So he said that I played much better when I slowed down. And so that felt really good.

So some other interesting things were that I got to mention my favorite go author John Fairbairn and recommend his books to Michael. Also the games where Michael and I played even featured some pretty interesting josekis. So he wanted to play the Taisha, which is really old and is known as the joseki of a thousand variations. So I actually got some use out of a joseki that has appeared pretty often in the Shuei book. There is some discussion of whether this joseki is actually a bit suboptimal for my side, but like I say, it was getting a lot of play among pros during Shuei's time so it can't be that bad. Anyways, it is a way of avoiding the deep complications of the mainlines of the Taisha. So then he also started off on the Avalanche joseki which is another ultra complicated joseki although this one dates from the 20th century. Again, I played a bailout line that might be slightly suboptimal but which is definitely not terrible. Michael expressed some disappointment. But I said I don't like to memorize those variations but he said he doesn't either, he just likes to read it out (calculate) as best he can. So then I guess I kind of got the spirit because I played the high two space pincer to the high approach move which is an invitation to the Magic Sword of Muramasa which is another 20th century hair raising calculation fest. I think he actually didn't play the key move so we played some kind of other variation. Anyways, it was interesting. 

So basically I am kind of warming up to this Michael guy pretty well, he seems to be a good combination of friendly and strong that is motivating me to want to play more and try to catch up with him. It is interesting to discuss some of this stuff with him.

But then I had another interesting experience in that Jackie and I were leaving at the same time and we were going in the same direction so we walked together. Then he suggested that we have dinner together. He is a really interesting guy. He is into deep ecology and thinking about the total energy that goes into producing things from the very start of the process to the end of the lifetime and disposal of the item. He is really passionate about things like cycling and public transportation. He really has the courage of his convictions because he has really been in two major devastating accidents while cycling. Ironically one was with a bus that basically did major damage to his left arm. And the other he actually showed me traffic cam footage of where he just gets totally blasted from behind by a car and goes flying. But regardless he still rides his bike and is still an advocate for public transportation. I find it interesting though because he was railing against the bike lanes the most recent mayor has installed saying they are terribly designed and very poorly maintained. But I guess he has been really active in local politics and has participated in guidance meetings for the mayor about transportation. He also said that he ran for mayor once. So we actually sat and chatted for quite awhile before I decided to head home. So overall I feel it was a real success.

I guess the only slightly negative thing is that I am feeling a bit torn in some ways. Part of me is really grooving on go after this last session and in some ways I am wanting to kind of double down on it and like really focus on it. But I did sign up for another roleplaying session at Kaiju next weekend that would mean no go club or only a bit and then rushing over to Kaiju. The ticket is only 8 so it is not like a terrible waste if I decide not to go. (No refunds). But I just feel mixed because in some ways I was also really grooving on some of the roleplaying ideas and games lately. So part of me feels like it is good to maintain some diversity and try to avoid burnout. But there is always this impulse in me that really wants to focus obsessively on one thing. And I really do feel positive about the go club. One further issue is just that I do feel kind of weird about the roleplaying being at a bar. So just kind of mixed. Another dimension is that reading that weird stories anthology has gotten me kind of hipped on writing and like part of me thinks I would like to make writing my main focus. But that obviously pulls in a different direction. So anyways, I guess the reality is that I am not in a position where I really have to make some final choice that sets my course in stone for all time, but that is another feelings I am always tempted by.

Mothership at Kaiju

 Last night I went to the roleplaying session at Kaiju. I have to admit it has been quite awhile since I was in a bar, so that was a bit weird. The games were in a large back room. Overall it was a fun experience. I was able to chat with a variety of people.

The Mothership game is an indie roleplaying game centered around horror in space. I had never heard about it before but, as sometimes happens, a few days after signing up, I came across a reference to the creator on a blog I read sometimes. (Grognardia) 

So, basically in the center of the table were some pregen character sheets kind of strewn about. What this means is that the game master or the scenario writer had made up the characters before hand. This is because character creation even in fairly lightweight games can take a while particularly if people have trouble making up their mind about stuff. I didn't really think about it much. I just grabbed a sheet without looking at it and decided it was me. 

As you can see my guy is a brawn over brains security guy. This suited me in a way because despite having spent a lot of time reading roleplaying books, I actually have very little experience playing with other people. So, I figured this character would be easy to play. However as it turned out there was very little roleplaying in the sense of like acting out characters. Mostly we were engaged in pragmatic problem solving sort of gaming.

So the scenario is that you are on a deep space mission hauling freight and there is mysterious package on board that we are under strict instructions not to open. We awake from cryosleep to find various mysterious and horrible circumstance and have to deal with things.

There were five players and the GM (the sixth player didn't show). Basically this is a one-shot... meaning there is no continuity with previous sessions which is what is appropriate for the set up here. So, there was a guy with absolutely no experience of roleplaying who was a coworker of the GM. He did fine and was a productive part of the group but he felt a bit frustrated because he was having some really bad rolls with the dice on an android character that is supposed to be close to impervious to certain kinds of dangers. The next guy played the doctor on board. This guy was older than me and had a lot of experience playing role playing games. He said he had been playing since 7th grade. He participated but seemed to be taking a bit of a back seat role kind of letting the rest of us lead the way. Then there were two guys who came together. They played teamsters which as you would expect are space truckers who are responsible for the blue collar work aboard a space vessel. The guy immediately to my left kind of ended up being the leader of the group. He was the guy who was somewhat intense about wanting solve problems and like come up with plans. He seemed ok in that he wasn't trying to manage the other players or anything like that although he did offer suggestions. But like I say he did seem kind of intense and a bit anxious to "win" the scenario. He also made some suggestions to the GM about times that we would need to make a stress roll and stuff like that. But he also seemed to be fairly cool and didn't seem to want to argue or nitpick or anything like that. He seemed willing to roll with how the GM was handling things. There was however one issue where his character died and he was supposed to play another character. He seemed fine with this and was ready to roll with it. But then a little while later after we had already started to explore this branch... he remembered that his dead character had an ability that would allow him a second roll on the thing that had caused his death... he kind of posed this to the GM and the GM kind of let it slide and said he could take the extra roll and so the guy's character actually lived. I think the GM let it happen because we were all first time Mothership players, playing pregen characters, and so actually the GM kind of should have caught that re-roll ability. This player was the only one at the end who expressed some dissatisfaction with the way things had gone but it didn't really come across as blaming anybody including the GM. It was more like he was a bit dissatisfied with the writing of the scenario and there had been some issues with navigating the map which was a bit confusing. But like I say he didn't seem to really want to blame but kind of to talk about it in a constructive way. Then his partner or buddy (I couldn't tell) was the last player. He was on the quiet side especially compared to his friend but he definitely did participate and made some decisions and took some actions. For my part I did participate and did make some decisions and take actions. At one point I argued I should be given one of the limited stim packs to overcome cryo sleep sickness because I was the only one with combat training and a gun. I said, that's not a threat. It means I need to be in top condition to deal with threats. The doctor concurred and gave me one. Other than that, in the confrontation at the end I was able to use my combat skills so subdue the enemy.

The GM was interesting. He seemed to have plenty of experience in that kind of role but struggled a little bit with this session. He seemed to be harder on himself at the end than any of the players were but it had been noticeable that he was uncertain about some things. He attributed this to the fact that he had never run that particular scenario before.

Overall, I had a good time and am glad I went. There were a few issues in that noise was a bit of an issue because the metal chairs on the concrete floors made a lot of noise and there were four games going on in the same room. I also felt the leader player and the GM sometimes spoke too quietly but my hearing is also not 100%.

At the end of the day it is kind of hard to tell how we did on the "win/lose" side of things. We did succeed in some things but we failed to unravel the mystery of the package. But Mothership is supposed to be a tough game and you are not expected to succeed on all the objectives. The GM also went a bit easy on us. 

So, I definitely want to go back and last night at home I signed up for the next session. In that one I will be playing a D&D game. 

 

Update 18

 Well, feel it is time for a general gaming update. The last two posts were more general sorts of musings. So I want to write something a bit more directly gaming related.

I have been to the go club three times now. I seem to have fallen naturally into an every other week pattern. This last Sunday I met someone who had been at IUB shortly before I had. I am a bit unclear if our time there overlapped or not. At that time there were two go clubs. One met in the student union on Friday nights. That club was essentially these two old guys Don and Paul who played each other every week and discussed local politics plus whoever else showed up. Unfortunately, I guess the guy I met this last Sunday had a bit of a negative experience with them in that he felt they were unwilling to play him. So he started another club just down the street at the Asian Culture Center. I remember that at one time I was going to that club because I have memories of hanging out with the Korean guy who manned the desk there. But I don't remember much about that club. I do have distinct memories of a small tournament at that club. I believe it was a knockout and there were about 10 people or so. I seem to remember that I got a bit lucky because the two strongest players got paired in an early round so I ended up playing the winner in the final so I was able to get second place. Most of my memories of go in Bloomington though have to do with the Friday night club. I certainly didn't feel that Don and Paul were unwilling to play me although they definitely felt that the main item of business was playing each other I guess. Anyways, it was an interesting stroll down memory lane. Anyways, this fellow gave me four stones and whipped me. So I guess that is a happy thing because I am in the middle of the ladder at this club so there are stronger players to aim for and weaker players to help. I also played a couple of games with Jackie and I feel I might have been a bit hard on him. He wanted to play even the first time so we did but he resigned. And then we played on four stones and again he resigned because I was way ahead. I know it can be tough to be on the receiving end of that. I tried to find some teaching moments to give him some knowledge but unsure how helpful I was. Hopefully we can play more.

 I have continued to play over pro games. I can't remember whether I posted about this or not but I finished playing over all the supplemental games in Invincible and have made some good progress going through the John Fairbairn book about the games of Shuei. I have enjoyed it as usual with his books. It is still this thing that in some ways playing over these games is comforting for me and can help to settle my nerves or make me feel better. But basically I am playing over them fairly rapidly although stopping to read the comments. So sometimes I feel a bit blah about it in the sense that it is not really deep study. I am for the most part not calculating variations or really considering alternate moves. I suppose you could say this is lazy but I just feel in some ways I would likely just get bogged down if I tried to analyze the games. And like I said, I do it partly as a comfort thing. That being said, I have read in several different places that playing over pro games without analyzing, just playing over the games fairly quickly, is good for your go. I do feel I have internalized some things from this practice. So at the end of the day it suits me to do it this way so I will continue.

Other than that I haven't really been taking go too seriously. I have been doing a few problems in a couple of apps on my phone but that has been kind of a mixed bag. I have been solving some but also sometimes just guessing which I feel strongly is the wrong way to approach problems. I feel that is the problem with doing problems on the computer or phone. The temptation is much stronger to just click and see what happens. When doing problems in a book, I find it much easier to be disciplined. But books also have issues. One is the question of where the answers are placed. Because in some of my books they are placed on the back side of the page with the problem but the paper is too thin so the answer shows through. This has been a major problem with a series of books by Lee Chang Ho (or at least with his name and picture on them). The problems are great problems and there are a lot of them. But the books are just too inconvenient to use because of this issue. For other books sometimes the answers are printed all together at the back of the book, but then it is inconvenient to look at the answers particularly because you want to avoid seeing the answers to other problems. So that can require negotiation. And even if the paper is thick enough for the answers to be on the next page, if you do nine problems per page it is still necessary to somehow record your answers to prevent forgetting whether you actually got the right answer or not and there is not really a convenient way to do that for go problems.

On the role-playing front, the Nerd Louisville session is tomorrow night. So I am looking forward to that. On my own, I have been exploring the original Delta Green book as well as Call of Cthulu 7th edition. I also got a copy of the Basic Roleplaying system because of my interest in universal systems like GURPS. I decided to dip my toe into having Claude (the AI program) run a solo Delta Green adventure for me. I was able to use the Call of Cthulu book to make a character but right now it just exists in the chat with Claude. I intend to fill out a character sheet that I printed off the other day and then I will try to take a photo and post that. I was really resistant to using AI for solo play but somehow I guess I just kind of came around on it. I can't really point to a major shift in my beliefs or anything. I guess I just wanted to see how well it could do it.

Other than that I haven't really been doing a whole lot on the games front. I have been reading an anthology of short stories called "The Weird" edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. I am liking that a lot and I consider it background material for some of the role-playing stuff so it is "games-adjacent". But other than that not much. I brought a chess board and some chess books with me (most of my stuff is being shipped from Taiwan and won't arrive for awhile yet) and I have done some research about local chess clubs but for some reason haven't felt motivated to really pursue that. I also have kind of blown off Magic. I had planned to go to the Secrets of Strixhaven prerelease but I just didn't really feel like it when it was the day of. I have watched some Nick Button videos but haven't been playing either online or in person. I also brought my steam deck with me but just haven't really felt motivated to play video games, although sometimes I wish I had my desktop PC set up so I could play Age of Wonders 4. I did buy a book at Surface Noise detailing many different solitaire games played with regular playing cards but I have yet to actually try any of them.

So, overall gaming is continuing but for the most part it seems to be more of a simmer than a roiling boil. 

Creating Good or Value

 Today I got kind of excited about the idea of getting competitive about creating Good or Value. I was thinking about how in life it is really pretty open about how you create Good or Value and everybody does it in different ways. But I was also thinking that there are some principles. So I was sort of interested in some principles for this generalized notion of value. One thing I have kind of thought about a fair bit is that it seems like Good or Value comes about through coherence. What I mean is that you create Good or Value by making choices that add up. That goes for writing a novel or poem or whatever as well as in games where you create value in your position by making choices with your moves. But of course it also goes in life where we make value by making coherent choices over the course of time.

Then I was thinking that in a lot of ways the notion of value ultimately has to do with other people. At the end of the day, the notion of value I had was generating happiness for other people. That could be in a variety of ways. For some people it is just in terms of in the world immediately around them with the people that they encounter on a daily basis. For other people they generate value for other people by creating or performing. Unfortunately, there are people who create a great deal of value for people they don't know through art or performances or activities at a high level but who create a lot of suffering for the people around them in their daily lives. Even if you imagine yourself as a servant of a higher power, that work is done in the context of generating value for other people...

However, as an introvert, I feel there is a lot of value in maintaining my inner world in a healthy and harmonious way. But I kind of realize that at the end of the day, the real measure of that is how my practice of maintaining my inner organization benefits others in my interactions with them.

 But then I came back to the idea of competition. My whole life I have been attracted to competition and excellence, even though I have never really excelled at any of the competitive activities that I have engaged in. So part of me would really like to combine the idea of competition with the idea of generating value. But in some ways there seems to be a bit of a contradiction because competition easily slides into egoism and selfishness. So the trick is to somehow find a way of channeling competition into good for other people. One of the things I have thought about along these lines is the notion that by offering people good competition you encourage them to improve themselves. So in the sense that by being good yourself, you present a challenge to others to improve themselves.

But it seems to me there is some way that you can compete to create value, in the sense of like a subtle competition to generate happiness in the people around you. But I want to be clear that what I have in mind is different from people pleasing or pandering. And that is why it is subtle. The idea is not to curry favor with people but through your interaction with them to generate true good. To influence them for the good. Not in a manipulative way but in the sense of trying to generate true happiness for them. Sometimes this could involve resisting them somehow or rather resisting their negative impulses.

Then somehow I took a left turn and started to think about the idea of subtlety. That somehow there is something valuable about subtlety. But I always feel kind of conflicted about that because sometimes subtlety seems kind of exclusionary. But there seems to be something at some level where subtlety is beneficial in a way. But that is something I need to think about more

But then I was combining that with the idea of resistance and the idea of resistance was to value capture in many ways. Value capture is the notion that you try to measure and quantify value in a way that ultimately destroys true value and substitutes the measurement. This idea is from C. Thi Nguyen. So somehow the idea is to resist this value capture process.

And that brought me back to something I have been thinking a lot about lately and that is the notion of the weird. I mean this is in sort of like the whole Weird Tales kind of horror sort of mentality but also in the whole "Keep Austin Weird" kind of mentality. That somehow weirdness is a way of resisting value capture. And like how weirdness has both a horror dimension and like a beauty dimension.

So, for me in some ways I would like this blog to be a way of creating value for other people. Value that somehow comes out of my own inner weirdness.