Adjusting the sliders

 One thing I feel I am getting more comfortable with in life is the idea of balance. I have a personality that runs to extremes and that often wants to make really definite decisions that have a clear directive behind them. But that pattern usually sets me up for failure, and somehow that failure feeds the cycle so I feel I have to make an even more definite and extremely forceful decision about how to be... ad nauseum...

 So basically I have kind of gradually gotten somewhat more comfortable with the idea that a lot of things in my life are not bad. In fact they are good. But, my tendency is to take them too far and then over-react to that fact and want to go to extremes.

So, I think there are just various dimensions of my life. Which is a good thing. So I feel I am starting to get a more definite handle on the fact that like a lot of things in life are more like sliders than they are like toggle switches. So one example is buying games stuff. Che Webster over on roleplay rescue blog had a post (that I can't seem to find right now) talking about this with respect to playing vs buying rpg books. Buying games stuff is good. It is a definite action that can support both publishers and games stores. And it is fun to collect. But there is definitely a sense in my own life where sometimes the buying stuff takes over and actual reading the books or playing the games or whatever takes the back burner. So, a lot of times when I realize that, I have this desire to over react and say I will never spend another penny on games until I have absolutely gotten max value out of each and every item I own. So, I think that never works and just sort of causes me to establish these rigid parameters that I inevitably fail at following. So the solution is just to adjust the slider instead. Not to beat myself up for spending money but also recognizing that there is a pattern of overspending. So just to try to nudge the slider back into the direction of other kinds of activities...  

Another aspect that I need to work on is the time alone vs time with others slider. I am an introvert. So I enjoy spending time alone. But there is also a sense in which I use that as a justification for not doing things that would be both pleasurable and good for me. That is because they would be outside of my comfort zone. So the solution is not to force myself to go to every single club and activity regardless of how I feel. But at the same time pushing out from my comfort zone is a must because there is a definite sense that when I allow it to the general pull of my personality is to slide into just staying home endlessly and letting my world get really small. So, I just feel this is tricky because it is hard to identify sometimes when the choice is avoidance and when it is self-care.

My new life back in US seems to have a lot of these sorts of issues kind of cropping up. And now that I am on my own, I am having to make decisions about this stuff on my own. So, I think there are some things coming about like "trusting myself" and like "being gentle with myself". It is necessary to recognize that I have very limited experience living on my own so I am bound to go a little overboard in some directions and need to correct course. The trick is to not beat myself up but rather to just recognize when an adjustment is needed and then to just do my best to do it without all the extremes of setting rigid rules for myself and stuff like that. 

The President of the Nerds

Well, I can safely say I met the president of the nerds! On Tuesday I went to Golden Keep Games a local game shop and met two cool people. One was the clerk at the shop who was quite nice and helpful and the other was the president of a local non-profit called Nerd Louisville. The objective of this non-profit is to promote gaming. So it was a very nice experience. I was a little hesitant to make the trip there because it was about an hour long trip by bus and I thought the shop might be disappointing. But overall it was a great experience and I really got to talk to these two people for good long while because it was early afternoon on a weekday and we were the only ones in the shop. Mostly Nelson and Tom were trading stories but we also talked about Austin, Texas where Nelson has spent some time. I got to ask some questions. Unfortunately the Delta Green game I was interested in has been discontinued but I got introduced to the Nerd Louisville website through a card. They run an event called slur your roll which is a set of roleplaying sessions that take place on the second and fourth sundays of each month. They take place at a bar but hopefully there will be no problem with just ordering a coke. The price of a ticket is $8 which seems reasonable although it could add up if I decide I like playing there. So I signed up for a session playing the game Mothership on the 26th. Overall it was a big success in terms of getting connected with the community.

Brief Review: Seven Games

 Recently, I checked out the book Seven Games by Oliver Roeder from the library and read it. In some ways I don't have a lot to say about it so this will be a brief review. Overall I liked the book. As its name suggests it is composed of seven chapters about seven different games. The writing is a mix of stuff. Some of it is about the history of the games, some of it is personal anecdotes, some of it is quotes from interviews with people involved in those games. Roeder is a journalist by trade and the chapters definitely read like magazine pieces. They are mostly pitched at a level to explain things to people who may not be familiar with the games or at least the more serious competitive levels of the games. The main emphasis of most of the chapters though is on the development of strong computer programs that can play the games. I did enjoy reading the book although there wasn't a whole lot that was new to me. I am also more interested in the culture of the games rather than the development of computer programs. I will say that it was interesting to read that bridge is so far is one of the games that doesn't have a strong computer program but Roeder definitely implied that this has a lot to do with bridge being a dying game in the sense of young people aren't picking it up. So overall I would recommend reading this if you like fairly light reading about the advent of strong programs in a variety of games. Roeder definitely seems to be knowledgeable and a real gamer himself.

Go club

 Well, I arrived back in the US about a week and half ago. Things have been a bit bumpy getting re-established but not altogether bad. But the good news is that Louisville has a go club and I got to visit yesterday. It is pretty small. There were just 5 of us. Michael who is the leader of the club is a good bit stronger than me. We played twice, the first time on four stones and I resigned, the second on six stones and I won by about 40 points.

The other three players are good bit weaker. Michael said I could give them 9 stones. I played one game on 9 stones with Tommy. He played well but I was able to kill a group and he resigned.

Overall everyone seemed quite nice and the coffee shop is a pleasant environment. There were also a couple of chess players playing but that was unconnected with the go club. But I did get to chat with them a bit and told them about playing at the St. Louis chess club.

I think that is something I missed while I was in Taiwan. In Bloomington there was also a small club but in a way that was even smaller. There were really just two regular members Don and Paul. They had been playing each other every Friday night for years. I played with them a good bit and there were other people that would come sometimes. But it was pleasant. Obviously go (wei qi) is much bigger in Taiwan, and people were friendly but at the same time there was just a cultural gap. Also a lot of the people that play at clubs like that are quite a bit stronger than me. So basically it was really nice to be at a club where I felt like I could chat with people a bit more easily. It was also really nice be able to do some teaching. Tommy seemed to understand some stuff about the game but he seemed to avoid ko fights... so I was able to walk him through the process of his first real ko fight and that was really cool. It felt good that I was able to pass on some skills. People here obviously also knew about Hikaru no Go and we were able to talk about that as well. So it just felt like a nice pleasant place to play.

On the home front I finished playing through the supplemental games in Invincible, so I can chalk that up as a 100%. I started in on the games of Shuei by Fairbairn. I have still been watching some Nick Button videos and have been continuing my daily games. The Chess Dojo open classical tournament ended on a whimper rather than a bang because the week I actually came to the US obviously wasn't good and I agreed an unplayed draw with my oppo. The next week it looked like I would be able to play the last game of the tourney but my oppo cancelled at the last moment. So, oh well. I will continue to explore the gaming scene here in Louisville and will try to report on it as I go.

Update 17

 Been kind of quiet on the blog front. Part of that has been some major upheaval in my personal life and part of it has been some uncertainty about what direction I am going in or what I would like to write about.

The biggest news is that I am returning to the US. Hopefully this will mean more in person events for the big three of chess, go, and magic, but also for other types of games. I am also interested in pursuing some kind of career in the games industry. One line is to do a masters with C Thi Nguyen at the University of Utah in the philosophy of games. I have a BA in philosophy and he seems to be doing a style of philosophy of games that I can relate to. I was aware of him before and had a copy of his previous book but my wife passed me a link to a podcast where he was the guest talking about his new book. Here it is! I really like a lot of the things he had to say. I really have no idea how realistic an idea it is to get admitted there for that purpose but it is something I want to investigate.

Following the intuition about chess being important I rejoined the dojo and got into an open classical tournament. This is a tournament where you arrange to meet your opponent at a specific time online and play a slow game. I won my first game but have been on a losing streak since then. Did a couple of reviews for games I had played but then kind of got lazy. I made significant progress rereading Chernev’s Logical Chess but other than that haven’t been doing a whole lot of work on my chess.

Still playing over go games trying to finish the supplemental games in Invincible but the pace has definitely been much slacker than it was a few months ago. 

Still playing my daily games of chess and go and have avoided timeouts.

My interest in Magic has been picking up again after a lull. Mostly this has expressed itself in terms of watching Nick Button videos on youtube. Nick plays best of three pioneer which is a format that I feel pretty drawn to now that I have been playing Magic long enough that a lot of my cards have rotated out of standard. But I did try brewing up a mono-blue tempo deck based on a standard deck I had played before and liked but the experiment didn’t work out all that well. Other than that this weekend I played a pre-release event at Growlife. I wasn’t super interested in this set but I kind of just wanted to play one more event there before leaving Taiwan. We played in a new space that the owner has rented a couple of blocks away from the main store. It was quite nice. I had a good conversation with someone who has been a significant part of my experience of Magic here who is also moving back to the US soon. But in terms of the gameplay, time management was a big issue. When I first started playing these sealed prereleases I tended to try to read more of my cards and really try to settle on some kind of strategy. However this often resulted in me rushing to finish my deck at the end of the time limit and sometimes delaying the start of the first match. The result is that I have overcorrected and I finished building my deck this time well before the time limit was up but this was because I didn’t put much thought into it. I looked at the rares I had pulled. Decided I liked the blue and geen ones the best, so I just jammed all the creatures I had in those colors and picked a few spells to round out the deck and just said ok. The result was that I went 1-2. And I feel like the victory was kind of lucky because it was against a really good player and he kind of had trouble with his draws and I got lucky with some of mine. Don’t get me wrong, it felt great to beat him, but I am not reading too much into it. Against the other two players my deck looked quite weak. But I guess that is one thing I am kind of hoping about moving back to the US. It seems the people playing these events in Taiwan are pretty good. Part of me is hoping that when I play in the US there will be more of a range of player skill levels so I am not always at the bottom.

Politics and Games

 One of things that I like about games is that they are a refuge from politics. I think in general people should try to get along and put aside their differences to play. This seems like an important practice. So I hesitate to bring politics into this blog. Generally I think it is wrong for Iranians to say that they musn’t play Israelis. But it gets more difficult at times. I know that Duda (a very strong Polish grandmaster) refused to shake hands before a game with a Russian chess player who was very vocal in his support of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. So it can be difficult to separate politics and sport when things get very heated.

On the other hand, I am an American living in Taiwan. So I don’t really have a lot of avenues to express political opinions or to try to take action. This blog obviously doesn’t have a large readership at all but I have made some attempts to publicize it in various places and that has brought in more people. Facebook seems like a giant morass that feels impossible to engage with.

So, I guess I just use this as my soapbox so to speak and say that I think the situation in the US is wildly out of control and Trump is wildly out of control and ICE is wildly out of control. It’s really hard to imagine that things could get this bad. I have family in Minneapolis and definitely worry about the situation there. I also grew up in a pretty multi-cultural college town and was close with a lot of people who were immigrants.

Basically, I knew Trump 2.0 would be bad (see my post after the election) but the way things have played out really seems unbelievable. (There is definitely part of me that thinks it is not real). It’s just really amazing that the whole system of checks and balances could fail so totally.

Part of me sometimes thinks I should leave my family and return home and join protesters on the streets. But I am not sure I have the mental fortitude to put myself in that position. So for right now I will have to be satisfied with saying something here.

I would just like to urge people to try to be careful and try to stay safe but at the same time to do their best to resist tyranny in their own country as much as possible.

Update 16

 Well, I seem to have let a lot of time slip by… been thinking about a lot of stuff… also doing some gaming…

For awhile the main game was go. I have read or reread a bunch of go books over the last few months. I finished “Get Strong at the Opening”, “The 1971 Honinbo Tournament”, then I reread “Final Summit” and “9-Dan Showdown”, then I read “Five Star Kita Fumiko”, and “Ogawa Doteki: Go Prodigy”. All of these I ready by playing over the moves on my physical board as I read the commentary. My next go book is that I decided I wanted to finish “Invincible” to the 100% degree mark. I have already played over all the commented games that make up the bulk of the book but there are a bunch of uncommented or very lightly commented games in the book also and I want to play over those. I did start “Get Strong at Joseki 1” but kind of stalled with it. I guess my main complaint is just that the positions seem very random and there doesn’t seem to be that much of a chance of me figuring out the correct answers. So, I have kind of shelved it although maybe I will go back to it. I also started on Robert Jasiek’s book “Joseki 1” I have actually skimmed through the whole book but I am trying to go back and reread more carefully now.

I have also continued to play my daily games on two go servers. I would like to say I was taking them super seriously but for the most part it has been fairly casual. I do feel I am learning though.

On the video game front I have kind of let Baldur’s Gate 3 slide. I was pretty into it but for some reason put it down and haven’t picked it back up again. I have been playing a good amount of Age of Wonders 4 though. This is a strategy game, similar in basic concept to the Civilization games but with many things that are different. I have been enjoying this game. I also have watched some Potato McWhiskey youtube vids about the game. He is primarily a Civilization creator but has gotten kind of hooked on Age of Wonders 4 and made some videos about it a couple of years back. They have really helped me get a handle on the complexity of the game. There is still a lot of stuff that I gloss over when playing but I am definitely making progress and improving with each playthrough.

Other than that I have kind of been getting interested in gettting back into chess. This was a result of some deep reflection where I realized that in a lot of ways even though I had been away from it a lot in the last few years that chess is still pretty much my number one game. It is the game I have really invested the most time, money, and effort into. I have really gone to a lot more effort to play chess seriously than any other game. So anyways. I started some daily games again on Game Knot and just joined a slow time control tournament organized through the Chess Dojo club. It’s online but is the best I can do for slow time control chess vs other real humans. I would like to get back to playing OTB but most of the OTB tournaments in Taiwan are rapid time controls.

As far as Magic goes I haven’t really played in a while but would like to get back to it. In some way I really see chess, go, and magic as the big three of games for me. These are the games I like the best and feel the most interest in and have the most desire to take seriously. There was a prerelease last weekend but although I was interested I decided to skip it for a variety of reasons. I guess one big issue is just the whole Universes Beyond thing. This is a developement that took place in which Magic’s parent company after decades of exploring its own lore decided to start licensing other IPs and making whole sets of cards themed on other IPs. It started with some Warhammer 40K commander decks or the Lord of the Rings set but it was just a huge hit money-wise so the company has just totally gone hogwild with it and now there are more Universes beyond sets than actual Magic the Gathering lore sets. In some ways I guess I am part of the problem because I did buy the Warhammer 40K commander decks and the Doctor Who commander decks. But in my opinion they have just gone way overboard with it and I feel I am losing interest in the game because it. That said there are a lot of things I still really like about magic and I definitely see myself playing more. I have stockpiled some resources on Arena so I can play there whenever I want but have in some ways like I mentioned I have been in a period of deep reflection and while I realized I really do value Magic I am trying to be cautious right now and not overextend.

Something else that I have been thinking about is the mental game. What I mean by this is the psychology of playing. I feel like there are two main issues here. One is somehow managing the competitive fire. I think competitive fire is really essential if you want to take games seriously but it can be really challenging to keep that fire at a good level. In some ways it is easy for me to kind of let it slow down and go out. Sometimes I just take a kind of long view of the game but then my desire to win gets too attenuated and I lose motivation. But on the other hand, if you let it get too high then you will take losses too seriously and basically will burn out. So, somehow this competitive fire needs to be managed and that is something I am not super good at. On the flip side is something that came up in some writing I was doing about leaving my ego and insecurities at the door. This is tough thing. In many ways I am able to do this but then somehow they will come back in. Basically I think it is necessary to leave that stuff at the door and be relaxed but attentive when you play. This is a tricky mentality to get into. Obviously this is really important for being able to play and have fun. However, in some ways it is a bit opposed to the competitive fire thing. So it is really tricky to navigate this dichotomy successfully. I feel like sometimes I am too good at leaving the ego and insecurities at the door and what happens is that I start to play like it doesn’t matter… and I make dumb mistakes because I am not taking it seriously enough. I also don’t want to actively work on my game when I am in those places. So, it is necessary to have a balance but I am unsure how exactly to find that balance.

I have also been thinking some more about philosophy and games. One idea I had was to analyze games from the point of view of Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms. I am unsure if I will ever get to this but it seemed like an interesting thread to follow up on.

Another thread that came up just today is going back to this idea of being the King of Value. This is a playing style of knowing the value of the pieces and moves you are making. I feel like it is much more multi-dimensional than just being an attacker or a control player or territorial or whatever style. I also feel like it really works as a life strategy also to focus on trying to get value out of your own experience and knowledge and basically the things I have invested in in life.