Contrariwise the Wizardly

Did I go to a book store in the gayborhood? Yes.
Did they have a Dune tarot deck? Yes.
Am I now in possession of a Dune tarot deck?

A lady never kwisatz and tells.

I’ve never been particularly interested in conforming to society’s expectations.

I learned to fake it, for the benefit of fitting in.

Now, with the benefit of some duly earned confidence, society is welcome to fit in Deez Nuts.

The thinnest naturally occurring material is Free Hotel Breakfast Bacon.

Much could be learned by studying the processes that lead to such delicate structures.

It’s an interesting conundrum. The person I actually am trying to build the person I’d like to be, using the constraints of my known behaviors to try to push on the rudder of the behaviors I’d like to change.

For reasons that defy explanation I’ve been watching a lot of Disney channel this week.

They happen to be running a Zombies marathon.

The cartoon is weirdly compelling. I may become the world’s foremost adult expert on the Zombies mythos.

There’s a giant grasshopper and its name is Mr Paddlesticks.

A Brief History of my Readwise Enrichment Pipeline

I read a lot. Like. A lot a lot.

And most of it is through an app called Readwise Reader. (Not an affiliate link. Possibly not even a recommendation. More on that maybe later?)

Without getting too deep down the rabbit hole, I think it’s the best currently available solution to the me-shaped set of problems, but I don’t find it delightful and I would abandon them the instant a better app came along.

That said, a better app hasn’t come along, doesn’t appear to be on the horizon, and the Reader app has been slowly getting better at my specific use cases for a couple years now. So it’s probably where I’m going to be for the foreseeable future.

I’m going to hand wave a lot of complexity about how I actually use Readwise because it’s not the point of the present conversation. The important thing to know is that eventually, through dark and internecine processes, some subset of documents come to their final rest in my Readwise archive.

I was going to do a header thing based on Genesis but I think I’ve already done that at least twice but you know what? It’s my blog. Ain’t nobody gonna tell me to stop making bible jokes. So anyway…

First, there was Step Functions, and it was… Okay?

Wait.

fuck.

Is this going to make any sense if I don’t explain what it was I was even trying to do when I built the thing?

Okay. So for realsie reals. First, there was the “what was I even trying to do, actually?”

My first Read it Later app was Instapaper. And it was also fine. In some ways it was better. And I was glad to pay like, what, $20/yr? Then they decided to more than double the price to add nebulous “AI Features” at a time when I was not yet sold on the value of AI as a thing I would pay double for.

(Side note, I still won’t pay double for it. This may be hubris but I suspect I am better at building AI features than you, for any company whose main thing isn’t building AI features. Just give me an API or at least a way to bring my own keys and stop trying to charge me double for things I didn’t ask to buy.)

So, incensed, I migrated to Readwise Reader. Who also had AI features. Which were legitimately awful at the time. (Sorry Readwise folks. It’s true. And I emailed you about it. And your features got better, which I appreciate. And you let me bring my own key, which I also appreciate. So thank you.)

And the important thing about that is the way Instapaper worked was everything I read ended up in my Instapaper archive, which meant at least a few years of backlogged “I looked at this, it was interesting,” was sitting in there. Would I ever look at any of it again? Turns out, benefit of hindsight, no. I wouldn’t. But all of that baggage came along when I exported Instapaper into Readwise.

How on earth was I going to separate the signal from the noise?

So I built an Enrichment Pipeline

The basic idea was simple. Take the archived file, get ChatGPT to generate a summary of it. Use the summaries to determine what I wanted to keep. Because ain’t no way I was ever going to re-read all 500+ documents to do that myself. (narrator: this is foreshadowing.)

I explained a lot of this here.

V1 ran on AWS Step Functions, output markdown to S3, which I used rclone to move into my Obsidian vault. And it was fine, except that I did a horrible job of ever actually looking at any of those markdown files. Not never. But not as often as I intended.

Turns out I had a lot of other mountains to move before I would be in a space (emotionally, mentally, physically,) that would let me start to get value from them.

And then I got there. And then I realized. Dumping all that into my Obsidian vault wasn’t actually the play. But I needed to do that, and work with them to understand my real needs, my real constraints. So it was a valuable learning experience.

This is a recurring theme, and a methodology I stand by. Stop worrying about building the right thing. If it’s not obvious what that is, build anything, and the right thing will eventually make itself known.

A brief aside on Digital Sovereignty

I ain’t want Google to own all my data. There. I said it. Or Apple. Or Amazon. Or any of them what thinks they built the future.

They didn’t build it. Kids with beards in computer labs built it, and then FAANG stole it and Google sits on a throne of lies which would be awesome if they were still don’t be evil about it.

So you know what? I’m taking all my data and I’m GOING HOME. You want to play tetherball? You get your own pole Sergei. You can’t come over and watch cartoons and eat pop tarts with me anymore. And also my dad could beat up your dad. At math.

And that’s why I don’t want to play in Amazon’s back yard

Which meant I needed to get my enrichment pipeline off Step Functions.

It was fine. It basically worked. But I wanted it to live on my own infrastructure.

Which Begat V2, n8n + git

I migrated my python + lambda + step function monstrosity to n8n, which has a perfectly cromulent self-hosted version. Except what I don’t have, even though I know I could, is a self-hosted equivalent to S3. I was going to need to rethink the rclone part. How would I get the enriched files from n8n to my computer?

Well. You know what else I’m self hosting? Forgejo!

So I set up a repo for my Readwise enrichment, figured out how to get Forgejo to commit the newly-enriched files to a branch and open a pull request for me to review.

And it worked great for about four days before I noticed that sometimes, for reasons I still don’t understand, Readwise will consider a document “recently updated” and trigger a re-enrichment. And that in so doing, I created a bunch of difficult-to-reconcile changes to files I was potentially actively changing in Obsidian.

However, because the universe has a sense of irony, I had a long weekend precipitated by a canceled work trip, which meant lots of unplanned time to rethink the entire thing. From scratch.

Which Begat V3, n8n + Readwise API

Remember that part where I said the Readwise Reader product has slowly gotten better? One of the ways it got better in the last six months is they have webhooks now. I didn’t need to pull their API nightly to look for newly-archive documents, I could respond to them nearly immediately.

You know what else they have? A native Obsidian plugin. That’ll just do the export directly. And is pretty good, actually, assuming that the data you want to enrich actually lives in Readwise. Which it didn’t. Until now.

You see the thing I had originally started doing with my unexpectedly free long weekend was finally working with some of those files that the V2 pipeline was creating. Putting my own thoughts and ideas in them.

As I was doing that, I developed a sense of what parts of the enrichment were actually useful. And it turns out, if I tilt my head slightly to the side and squint, I could cram that data back directly into the Reader data model.

When a document hits my archive, that triggers a webhook which causes my self-hosted n8n to pick it up and ship it to OpenAI to extract the key points. I find this super useful. A bulleted list of 3-5 main points is useful in a document that might take an hour to read.

It would be strictly better if I generated that list myself, but since I’m usually reading on an iPad mini in situations where it wouldn’t make sense to have a keyboard, the UI/UX on typing that list sucks, actually, and AI is good at this kind of summarization. So I let ChatGPT take a first stab at it.

I cram that back in the “document note” that every Reader document gets, and which I’ve otherwise never used. Again, because the typing experience on the iPad sucks. Seriously. Great reading device. Do not ask me to input data. No. Shan’t.

Then, if the document has highlights (and most of them do), I send each individual highlight back to OpenAI to generate a single one or two-word tag based just on the highlight. No additional document context. I attach that tag to the document, because the Readwise Reader API won’t let me attach it to the highlight. I suspect I could through the Readwise API, but it appears that the Readwise API uses a different ID to reference highlights than the Reader API (at least based on documentation) and I think it’d be difficult to bridge that gap, so I don’t.

Hey. Readwise team. You know what would be cool? If the IDs are meant to be the same between the two APIs, document that somewhere. If they’re different, give me an API that will let me turn one into the other. Thx.

The other thing I do is generate a “summary” of each article, but that’s actually something Reader’s built-in AI will do, as long as you give it an OpenAI key. So I do, and it does a good job.

Now, all I have to do is export the summary, document note, and tags via the Readwise Obsidian plugin, and I get my enriched data with arguably fewer moving parts. And it works great.

Except…

Okay so it’s a webhook now. Which means it’s event driven. Which means the whole process only runs when… I… Archive… Oh no.

So that’s the other thing I’ve been doing all weekend. According to my time tracking, I spent at least 6 hours yesterday alone. Going through each and every document in my Reader archive and CULLING.

Remember the not re-reading all 500 documents? Y’all, I’ve culled so hard.

To be fair, that process mostly isn’t re-reading the entire document. But in many cases it’s at least opening and reading the first / last few paragraphs to remind myself what the document was about.

Fortunately, lots of stuff could just go. At least several tens of documents about COVID that are no longer extremely relevant. Stuff from early AI that’s now been proven or disproven. Interests I’ve moved on from. Let’s say of the 500, probably about 75-100 were easy first-round deletes.

The rest?

Open the document. Does it have highlights? Do I find those relevant and interesting? Send it back to the archive.

Do I remember what it’s about? Does it seem interesting? Maybe send it back for a re-read.

Delete it if there’s any question. My to-be-read is long, and I trust that things will find me again if I need them.

I’ve got about a third of the original documents left to go, and a decent system in place. The enrichment pipeline has been working great, and the exports are now landing in my Obsidian vault in a format that I really like, with data I find useful.

Not bad for a couple extra unplanned weekend days, huh?

Sister Mary Corita Kent

source

POSSUM: Post Own Site, Syndicate Using MUD

I Shouldn’t Start a MUD

Full disclosure for those who know me well. I’ll sometimes start with a provocative statement and all the reasons I know I shouldn’t do something only to arrive at: “but YOLO here we go anyway!”

This time, I think, that’s not the destination. This isn’t me secretly explaining why I’m going to start a MUD in the Year of our Holy Gashapon, 2026. Probably. Maybe. Almost certainly.

But First, I Digress

I like people. Here we must start before all else, because otherwise it might start to sound like I’m a misanthrope. I really truly do like people. I like chatting with my friends. I enjoy whiling away the hours in pleasant company.

The computer programs available to do that on the modern internet? They do not spark joy. Unjoyful™. Joyn’t™.

What I’m left with is a bit of a problem. I want to be able to communicate with the diaspora of friendshapes I’ve made over my many decades on the Information Superhighway™, but the tools at my disposal leave much to be desired.

A Brief Litany On The Topic of Instant Messengers

If, like me, you are old enough to remember the invention of the wheel, you may remember that once upon a time the wild grasslands were cavorted-upon by beasts known as Instant Messengers. AIM. YIM. MSN. ICQ. While there were slight differences, they all shared the feature that you had to log on. Being available to chat was a decision. An action. If the app was open it was an invitation.

What happened if the app wasn’t open? Nothing. You didn’t get to talk to that person. You waited for them to be available. When they logged on no messages would be waiting. Each session was a fresh exploration of the social strata.

It was beautiful, and it was perfect, and we killed it.

How To Contact Friends These Days in 10 Steps (with pictures)

Currently there are four different messengers where I maintain a presence, which is exactly three more than I’d ideally like.

• Signal: the upstart. My most security-conscious friends are here. Often in addition to at least one other place. This is the place I’ve tried to center, and the platform I’m most likely to respond on.
• Telegram: this one is sticky. I like almost nothing about it, but at least one social community is centered here and it provides a gravity.
• Discord: the worst. I cannot imagine the creature that looks at Discord’s UI/UX and thinks, “yes, good.” But at least one other social community is centered here. Worse, it’s one of the main discoverability engines for other communities important to me.
• SMS: the barren wasteland of spam messages, family, professional services, and MFA codes from services that won’t let me use TOTP as the lord God™ intended.

Oh yeah, also there’s email (feel free to say hi!)

If I’m on my computer looking to Be Social™ that means I need to have three, maybe four, maybe five different apps open.

Gentle reader, I don’t have that much attention to spare on a good day. Which means, in practice, Signal is open most of the time and I check in on the others a few times a week. And that sort of works, except that as anyone who knows me on Discord or Telegram knows, it’s like being friends with a ghost.

Occasionally I show up to rattle the chains and make your clocks run backwards, but mostly I’m quiet.

Except, wait, that kind of sounds like… Isn’t that basically what I was describing as the Golden Age of Instant Messengers™?

The Revolution of Rising Expectations

Yes. Yes it is. Except for one key difference. Unlike AIM or MSN or YIM or ICQ, on Telegram and Discord people can message you while you are offline. Uncouth! Heathens! Anathema!

Being offline on old-school Instant Messengers was Normal and Expected and when you opened one it was a Fresh Palette™ of Opportunity™.

Being offline on Telegram or Discord doesn’t stop the messages from arriving. Which means there’s a Weight™. A Burden™™. Opening either app is inviting yourself to a dinner where the meal is already in progress and may in fact be Half Digested™.

Collectively we’ve created this cultural expectation that everyone will always be available. Nobody is ever permitted to fully disconnect, and to attempt to do so is to abdicate participation in the Zeitgeist™.

Okay Old Man But What Can We Do About It?

We can make a MUD about it.

Wait, Didn’t You Say You Weren’t Going To Do That?

I did. And I’m not. But I thought about it.

As many people know, I learned to program by hacking on MUDs. Circle. Diku. They’re the pasture to which my soul yearns ever to return.

Here’s my ridiculous idea. I would build a MUD. A place I actually want to inhabit online. I would make it available to any and all, those friends who could be convinced to give it a try. I’d make a web interface, so that it was as easy to use as possible.

And key, I would build a series of connectors from the MUD’s mail system to the other places where friends live.

On Telegram? Send a message to a bot.
On Discord? Send a message to a bot.
On IRC? Send a message to a bot.

Gentle reader we could build it better. Stronger. We have the technology.

Except every minute I spend working on this ridiculous project is time not spent on other, more Ridiculouser™ projects. Some of which are deeply important to me and my planned future.

So I think this idea needs to be allowed to wither on the vine. Right idea(?), wrong time. Probably. Maybe. We’ll see.

So That’s It Then? You’re Just Going To Leave It Like That?

For now? Probably. Yes. But this is a space where my mind tends to return and wander. I’ve also considered setting up an IRC server with many of the same goals in mind. I just don’t think I could convince most of my friends to use it.

But IRC is clearly undergoing a small resurgence thanks to modern easy-to-host servers and reliable web-based clients. I’ve seen more than two communities spring up in the last few months centered on a small ecosystem of self-hosted social media, IRC, and / or forums.

The counterculture is rediscovering the internet we mistakenly left behind and finding it Good™. I think eventually I’ll figure something out that works here. And with any luck I’ll convince my friends to make the Jump™.

If the singularity comes, may it find us doing well.
If the apocalypse comes, may it find us doing well.
If the end times are nigh, may they find us doing well.

Come what may, may we do well.

2025 Year in Review

With apologies to Robb Knight, from whomst I stole the format.

General

Continuing and, indeed, accelerating the trend of the previous year, 2025 was marked by a significant amount of travel. Short trips, long trips. At times it felt like I was gone more than I was home, although the statistics don’t bear that out.

My blog is read almost exclusively by the friends who I directly link to it (thank you!) although it looks like one sentence on each place in Europe that I’ve been broke containment, for an extremely small definition of “broke containment.”

Writing

Speaking of my blog, I wrote a total of 55 posts on The Wizardly, and 7 on The Game Mage, which is more than I would have guessed before I looked. Yes, I’m counting quote-posts and unhinged one-liners. Knowing me is accepting the risk that at some point I might try to convince you that moths are butterflies of the night and that consciousness is a soup.

Also, and I mean this quite literally. Everything is a sandwich.

Travel

I took 9 trips complex enough to warrant tracking in Tripsy, which implies usually at least a hotel room was involved. Three were for work, two were to Disney World, one each to PAX Unplugged and Europe. This was the first year in a decade where PAX West happened and I wasn’t there, which I had big feelings about at the time, but change is good and life moves on.

It’s interesting to me that I only tracked 9 trips, because I think I would have estimated more. It felt like I was always traveling, though I suspect a lot of that can be accounted for by weekend trips within driving distance. I went to a lot of estate sales, which doesn’t feel like it should count, but does eat up an entire Saturday with my propensity for turning it into an excuse to visit several other stores on my way.

Media

TV

Top of mind because the series finale was less than a week ago, Stranger Things takes my top spot for the year. It’s a good show, Bront. If you’re at all nostalgic for the 80s, and haven’t seen it, you should.

The only other shows I remember watching this year were Severance, Silo, and Good Eats. Technically my fiancé and I have also been watching That 70s Show at dinner, but at roughly one or two episodes a week it’s taken all year and we’re still not through.

I’ve instituted a new policy of not watching any episodes of a show until the show has completed its finale with good reviews. This is a complicated way of having an excuse to not watch anything, because I’m not a TV person, but I’ve found over the years that if I tell people “I don’t like watching TV” they look at me like I’ve just insulted their grandmother’s gravy recipe, but if I say “I have a complicated and somewhat unreasonable rule for what TV I can watch that basically results in not watching any TV” they smile and nod and say something vaguely like “that’s interesting.”

I think because it reads more like I’m a weirdo and not like I’m making a value judgment about the amount of TV they (presumably) watch.

Movies

Pretty sure I only saw two movies in the theater last year, which is two more than my goal of zero. Companion, and The Matrix in Extended Reality.

Companion was fine. The Matrix I probably should have done a blog post about, because it was pretty cool.

It took me many years to realize that the reason I don’t like going to the movie theater is that the movies are, almost to a fault, too loud, and I do not like going loud places.

Sometimes people will try to make the case for the movie theater as an experience that a person might enjoy, and what that tells me is that we are very different people. I can think of almost nothing I would enjoy less.

Games

I’m still playing World of Warcraft weekly on Wednesdays with my old guild master, even though we’re not even the same faction anymore. Years of improvements to WoW’s cross-faction play mean that I can be Horde and he can be Alliance and it almost never matters, which is a huge improvement. Say what you will about lore, an MMO lives or dies by my ability to have fun with my friends.

WoW aside, the only other game I put a significant amount of time into was Dune Awakening, which I posted about over on The Game Mage. 150 hours, and I still don’t think I recommend it.

My lack of progress on video games came down to Dune Awakening sucking up a vast number of available hours, and getting real serious about how I spend my leisure time in ways that look a lot less like leisure. I shipped more projects than I ever have before in my life, thanks in large part to AI automating the boring parts. Which necessitated getting way more serious about intentional leisure heading into the new year.

Music

According to Apple Music my top artists of 2025 were:

• The Weeknd
• The Dear Hunter
• Marianas Trench
• Daft Punk
• Ferry Corsten
• Coheed and Cambria
• Above & Beyond
• Christopher Tin
• New Kids on the Block
• Taylor Swift

Over the next two years my goal is to be completely off all streaming services, and Apple Music is the last bastion. I’ve started collecting physical CDs again, originally planning to listen to them in that format, but I’ve come to realize that being able to cast them to various devices is too useful. So over the last few weeks I’ve used a spare iMac to rip all my physical media to FLAC.

It’s been fun digging through the music bins at Half Price Books, and I recently ordered the Stranger Things soundtracks from Bull Moose with the intention of making some period-appropriate MiniDiscs to listen to when I travel.

Books

For all that I don’t watch TV or movies, I do still manage to get quite a bit read. Not as many books as some people I know, more than many others, and countless blogs, essays, and papers that I don’t track in any way that would generate statistics.

I try to keep my bookshelf as accurate and up to date as I can, limited only by books that aren’t in the database that I’m too lazy to add.

The broad trend of my reading for the year can be described as two very different themes.

• Theme #1 – Trashy omegaverse shifter smut.
• Theme #2 – Mid-century office worker praxis.

If that doesn’t fully describe my tastes I don’t know what would.

Projects

The first third of the year was given over to WizardHQ, a project that took up significant time but mostly didn’t work out. I’ve started drafting a postmortem about that, but the TL;DR is that I eventually realized it would need a level of time investment that I couldn’t provide while also continuing on with other projects, so I’ve let it quietly fade. I still stand by everything I was trying to do there, and I think it was a good idea. But it needs a continual investment of energy that I don’t think I can provide.

The second third of the year was given over to LimeTools, an experiment in letting Claude Code build a SaaS, which I used to run Line Entertainment stuff at PAX Unplugged. It worked amazingly well! And Claude Code has only gotten more capable since I built it. I’m not entirely sure what the next step for this project is. Even under ideal circumstances it’s never going to pay for itself. I have other ideas for things to try as a Line Entertainer. But it’s cool, so I might keep it around for another year and see what happens.

The third third of the year was half me traveling so much that I didn’t do any projects, and half starting to lay the foundation for next year’s projects. I’ve been learning Godot, something I probably should be talking more about over on The Game Mage. I completed simple clones of both Flappy Bird and Angry Birds as part of a Udemy training course on 2D game design, and hope to finish the overall course in the first third of 2026.

Miscellanea

• I started to crochet again, especially on meetings where I need to focus and keep my hands busy. My goal is to complete one (1) gift-worthy blanket in 2026.
• I’ve gotten out of Lorcana. It was cool, and I enjoyed my time with it, but it became the dominant consumer of my dedicated hobby time to the exclusion of all else, and is probably the main reason I didn’t hit any of my Warhammer goals.
• I’m not entirely out of MTG, but I’ve strictly curtailed it to the cultivation of a limited number of sets in a limited number of ways, and anticipate time spent on MTG driving towards zero by roughly the second third of 2026.

My body is a temple to a dark and ancient god.

Older than thought, its wisdom carved in my genes by a thousand and a thousand ancestors. It predates me, it will postdate me. It demands worship through cravings, through exhaustion, through pain.

To sate its dark hungers I must move, I must rest. I must feed, I must fast. It craves the stillness of clear water and green things from the earth.

I am high priest of a cult of one. The god calls to me through the crack of my bones, “thou shalt live forever, or die trying.”

Hobbit Meal 2025

During last year’s Hobbit Meal (which, apparently, I didn’t post about,) I ended up serving way too much bread. Don’t get me wrong. I like bread. But by the third or fourth meal of the day, it was too much. This year I’ve cut it down just to the biscuits in the biscuits + gravy, plus the stuffing which is technically bread but I think mostly doesn’t count.

Without further ado, here’s the plan.

0700 Breakfast

• Egg Muffins w/ bell pepper: make ahead. In fact, I need to go start these after dinner tonight.

0900 Second Breakfast

• Butter-garlic-thyme mushrooms.

1100 Elevenses

• Biscuits + gravy. Real sausage gravy made the hard way.

1300 Luncheon

• Charcuterie. The meats come from the better local grocery store, and the cheeses from Trader Joe’s.

1500 Afternoon Tea

• Deviled eggs. Maybe. My plan was to outsource this, but I forgot to confirm the place is even open tomorrow, and I don’t know that I want to encourage businesses to be open on holidays. I might have enough eggs to take a crack at doing this myself, but good deviled eggs aren’t a recipe I’ve cracked yet.

1800 Dinner

• Sous vide turkey breast medallions.
• Cornbread stuffing.
• Crispy roasted potatoes.
• Salad or something probably. A leaf.

2100 Supper

• Dessert.
• Leftovers.

It’s a lot of food, but believe it or not, it’s less than last year. I learned real quick that I needed to scale back how much I made of everything because even though my eyes often outpace my stomach, seven “small” meals is still a lot of food.

Eventually I’d like to throw open the doors to Hobbit Meal as something of a “friendsgiving,” but none of my friends who live near me are looking for a place to go on Thanksgiving, which is probably for the best all things considered.

Big ideas require a big piece of paper. Sorry, I don’t make the rules.

— The person who did, in fact, make this rule.

Not everything has to be immediate or predictable. Defend slowness when it serves a purpose, silence when it speaks and difference when evocative. Beauty is not just a means of escape; it is, above all, an invocation.

— Pope Leo XIV

“Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons, ‘twas our right
(used or misused). The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which we’re made.”

― J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy Stories

“We like imperfection in others, but expect perfection in ourselves.”

— Sarah Renae Clark

Ash: “Put that away.”

Me: “What?”

Ash: “Your whimsy.”

I Spend Too Much Money on Magic For Someone Who Doesn’t Play Magic

If I had to guess I last played Magic: The Gathering in 2005. I went to a card shop (a type of place I spent approximately no time, even then,) to hang out with a friend who was hopelessly addicted to the stuff, and played a pickup game with one of the local card sharks. It went poorly, and I swore off the habit for good.

Except every once in a while it manages to get its claws back into me. Like a belligerent crab with a gambling addiction. “Just another pack,” it burbles in crabspeak.

Last year Duskmourn came out with my heart squarely in its targeting reticule. Analog horror where the house is also a moth? Say less, sis.

The only problem? I knew I wouldn’t actually get back into playing. Look; maybe some people can pretend like they’ve got infinite time. I have the strictly opposite problem. I am, if anything, too aware of how little time I have. It’s not possible to do everything I want to do in a day, and every additional thing has to be at the expense of something else I’ve already decided is a priority.

But that’s okay. Lots of people buy books they’ll never read, movies they’ll never watch. Buying games you’ll never play is most of Steam’s business model. What if I just collected some Magic cards? As a treat?

This is basically, more or less, how I got into collecting set binders. Not for every set, but just for the ones that were both obtainable and thematically interesting to me. I decided not to go back and try to collect stuff that was no longer in print, because that’s a potentially infinite fractal and also risks getting quite expensive.

A smarter person would have done this by just buying singles. It’s by far the cheapest way to go about it. Being the contrarian I am, I decided to go the route of mostly buying packs. Why? Honestly, because they’re kind of fun to open. I’m largely immune to the siren call of gambling. The casino holds no power over me. But cracking a fresh pack of trading card product? That’s a high like no other.

One of the biggest reasons cracking packs isn’t the cost-effective way to collect a set is that you end up with a ton of duplicates. Depending on how many boosters I buy, it’s not impossible to get 10 or 20 of some cards, where I arguably only need one for the binder.

What to do with the rest?

Originally, I’d take all of my extra cards and try to trade them in for credit, then use that credit to fill in gaps where I hadn’t lucked into a card. This… Works? But you lose a lot of value in the process. If a card is worth $10 on resale it might be worth $0.50 in trade. Sure, I probably could try to sell them myself, but what hobby am I giving up to do that? Exactly.

I sold all my valuable extras for Duskmourn, but never repeated the process for Edge of Eternities. I’ve got a huge card box filled to the brim with cards that I mostly don’t need, because I don’t actually play the game. What to do?

The last piece fell into place recently in the form of a medium-popularity (but growing) format for Magic: cube.

The extremely TL;DR of cube is this: pretend that the only cards that exist are one person’s curated best-of list. That’s it. That’s the gimmick.

Cube is mostly presented as a draft format. Some friends get together and open “booster packs” from that curated setlist and build decks on the fly then play each other. I’m not really a fan of draft, but I can see the appeal. Also you get the fun of opening packs for cards you already own, which is definitely something I can get behind.

So I started thinking, what if I built a cube out of each of the sets I’ve decided to collect? That way, in some hypothetical future, if I ever do have the time to play, I can play a version of Magic that’s effectively “pinned” to the release of the sets I find most thematically interesting. I definitely wasn’t playing Magic when Duskmourn came out, but that’s an experience I can recreate at any time thanks to cube.

That became last weekend’s project. We culled my entire remaining Duskmourn collection into basically two categories. I have the collection binder, which has one of every card that came out. It’s basically an art book of Magic cards, and it’s a lot of fun to flip through. Then, I’ve got a box filled with actual playable cards, according to the basic rubric of 1 for each rare, two for each uncommon, and four for each common.

Later this year I plan to pick up some support products designed to hold reconstructed “booster packs” for the cube format so that I can properly store the Duskmourn cube, and this weekend I’m planning to go through the same process for Edge of Eternities.

All of the rest of my cards were donated to my fiancé, who operates a card shop and can sell them as inventory.

Now I’ve got the best of both worlds. I have my collection binder, and I have a frozen-in-time cube that would let me play the game, as it existed at the time, if I ever find the time to do it.

Have the audacity. Believe that you can. Do the thing.

It feels like we’ve developed some kind of histamine reaction to imagination. We are afraid that people will “catch” a bad idea. Well, stupid people are always gonna think dumb things and do dumb shit. That’s their whole thing. The solution can’t be to make artists dumb too.

— (CW)TB

Minimum Wage

I’m going to start living on minimum wage. Sort of. Not really. It’s complicated.

Some types of sophistication won’t make you enjoy the object more, they’ll make you enjoy it less. For example, wine snobs don’t enjoy wine twice as much as you, they’re more keenly aware of how most wine isn’t good enough. Avoid sophistication that diminishes your enjoyment.

— Conor Barnes

In the beginning God created a budget

There’s basically two parts to a budget. There’s the part where you track things, and the part where you use it to make decisions. I’m decent at the first part. Awful at the second.

I’ve been using YNAB since it was desktop software. It does an incredible job of tracking how I spend my money and assigning it to categories. Categories that I have, nominally, assigned my income to. What it can’t do is tell me to stop spending money when I’ve overspent a category. Which is fair, because I can’t tell me to do that either.

Broadly, in practice, I spend my money on vibes. I know roughly how much I can get away with spending, and I’ve got systems in place to cover when I overspend, so I’m never at any real risk of the bills not getting paid, but it’s not a great way to achieve my longer-term goals.

Now the budget was formless and empty

I’m old enough to have worked jobs where my paychecks were actual checks, delivered to the building, by hand, that I had to take to a bank to deposit.

Dinosaurs and Margaret Thatcher roamed the earth. Mosquitos the size of Volkswagens. Etc.

But for at least the last decade or so I’ve worked for companies with direct deposit, and where there’s direct deposit there’s usually a way to split that deposit between multiple accounts. I’ve used that ability to functionally “hide” money from myself. Probably a solid third of my paycheck skips my checking account each month, diverted to various savings and investment accounts.

This is the mechanism that supports my tendency to overspend. While I know there’s always money in the rhetorical banana stand, I don’t always know how much and I don’t think of it as “available to spend.” A few times a year, I end up raiding one or more of those other accounts to cover. And that’s broadly what I think of as “the system working.”

As a consequence, I’ve never missed rent. Literally or rhetorically.

And God said “let there be income”

It turns out I’m actually pretty good at living within the limits of what I think I have. I know how much money is in my checking account at any given time, and that creates a rubric for what size of purchase I can make without needing to check the balance. Mostly it’s fine. Sometimes I overshoot, but then I’ve got savings to cover.

I call this the “zone of indiscriminate spending.” How much money can you spend without needing to think about it? Maybe it’s a couple bucks. If you’re fortunate, maybe it’s a couple hundred.

Right now this zone is much larger than I’d like it to be. I’d like to be operating like $10 is no big deal, but $100 requires scrutiny. In practice I operate at about one order of magnitude above that.

And God said “let there be spending”

So I’m going to start living on minimum wage. Sort of. Kind of. Not really?

I’m going to put myself on an allowance roughly equivalent to minimum wage.

It’s a more extreme version of the technique that’s always worked: hiding money from myself.

The key here is to reduce my intuitive sense of what’s available to spend without actually putting myself in danger of bills not getting paid.

I call this a “load-bearing lie.” We all know it’s not true. I know it’s not true. But maintaining the fiction is important to achieving my desired outcome: I need to behave in all ways as if the money is not available to spend in order not to spend it.

And God said “let me separate the good spending from the bad”

How do I do this in practice? Too many bank accounts.

My income from any and all sources will flow into a clearinghouse account, implemented as a money market account at my main bank. Their money market accounts have the same APR as a high-yield savings account, so money sitting in that account earns as much interest as money I’ve sent to savings.

However, money market accounts have withdrawal limits, so the next step is routing “spendable” money out of the clearinghouse in as few transactions as possible. Each of the following will happen on the last day of the month, to set up the next month’s spending.

• Transaction 1: my allowance to my personal spending account.
• Transaction 2: my contribution to the family’s fixed expenses to our shared spending account.
• Transaction 3: payment of any reimbursable work expenses to a dedicated credit card.
• Transaction 4: transfer to savings.
• Transaction 5: transfer to brokerage.

Notably, this is exactly half of the “allowed” number of money market transactions in a month. That gives me breathing room to transfer again if something goes wrong. The whole point of this system is to automate as much as possible and avoid the need to do so, but I have the flexibility if I need it.

And God said “okay maybe don’t spend that much”

Okay, so what is my allowance? I thought about this for quite a while and decided to pin it somewhat arbitrarily to Maine’s minimum wage.

Why Maine? Because I’m planning to move there in the next few years. Why minimum wage? Because it’s a psychologically useful framing. People find a way to make minimum wage work.

The problem I’ve set for myself is actually much easier than truly living on minimum wage, since the family’s fixed expenses don’t need to come out of that pool of money, but thinking of myself as trying to live at or below the minimum wage line provides a point of reference and an identity designed to guide me away from overconsumption and overspending.

And God said “let the Bills be with the Bills”

As you’ve probably already noticed, the devil is in the details. When I talk about not needing to pay for the family’s fixed expenses from this pool of money, that potentially leaves a lot of room to keep spending money the way I always have, except now with more steps.

What counts as fixed? What counts as discretionary?

In practice, it comes down to how the thing is paid.

I run almost all of my finances through credit cards, paying them off in full each month, and harvesting those sweet rewards points to help defer the costs of travel. Because I can’t have my credit cards pay their balance in full split from multiple checking accounts, each card effectively becomes a boundary.

Bills like the mortgage, insurance, card payment, and utilities don’t generally accept credit cards for payment. They autopay through ACH transfers.

All of the ACH transfers will go through the family account. All of the credit cards will get paid through my personal account.

If I swipe a card, it’s discretionary. If it autopays, it’s fixed.

God saw all that he had made, and it was very good

I’ve spent a lot of words on what I’m planning to do, but not what I’m trying to achieve by doing it. I think because that part’s clear to me but somewhat harder to capture in words.

One reason is to fight back against lifestyle inflation. It’s so easy to spend money that I have on things that do not, ultimately, serve my long-term goals. And, once spent, it’s frequently hard to unspend. Sometimes in ways that accrue over time, such as additional subscriptions.

Another reason is to avoid developing sophistication that diminishes my enjoyment. If we “can’t afford” the fancier soap, are we really any worse off? What about those nicer bed sheets? That name-brand food product?

Eventually I’d like to reintroduce a significant gap between what I earn and my lifestyle, such that if my material circumstances changed I would not be worse off. This feels like, amongst many other things, good future-proofing.

At the end of the day $2500 per month is actually quite a lot for pure discretionary spending. People I respect immensely fit their entire life into that or not much more. It feels like a realistic and worthwhile goal, even as I acknowledge the ways in which I’m on “easy mode” in comparison.

Orienting Toward Wizard

Some of the concepts and terminology I’m about to use, as well as the title of the blog post, were lifted directly from here.

Having said that, I think I’m going to end up at a very different final destination than the original poster. So, credit where credit is due, but don’t feel compelled to read the original to understand my point.

King Power

King Power is money. I think the original article would try to lump in other things, like status, but one of my foundational operational primitives is that all of those things are fungible with money.

It’s technically possible in some communities to have status without having money, but those communities do not themselves have status in the wider culture. You’re welcome to feel about that all kinds of ways, and we may even agree, but it’s not germane to my point.

King Power is your ability to exert your will on other people, to achieve an outcome. This is most likely because you can pay them to do the task. (Originally, I was going to use another example here, such as being CEO, but that’s basically just paying them to do the task. See what I mean about it being fungible with money?)

Modern, industrialized, Western society teaches us that King Power is Good. You are virtuous and should be rewarded for seeking it. Gather money. Gather power. Become the CEO. Start a company. Own the local car wash.

What is best in life?

To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women!

— Conan the Barbarian (1982)

Wizard Power

In contrast, Wizard Power is your ability to exert your will on the world. All those things the King is paying for? That’s other people exerting their Wizard Power.

Fixing your own car? Wizard Power. Sewing your own clothes? Wizard Power. Growing your own food? Wizard Power.

When a king exerts King Power, they’re constrained to the world of options that have been made available for purchase. They can have anything on the menu. We are told that this is good.

When a wizard exerts Wizard Power, they’re constrained to the world of what’s possible. They can have anything which could be put on the menu. That we are not told this is good is a lie perpetrated against us by those with King Power.

Why?

Because the more effort and energy you spend on acquiring King Power, the less effort and energy you spend on acquiring Wizard Power. Each person has only so much energy, so much time, and though you can do anything, you cannot do everything.

Is This a Manifesto?

I mean. Inasmuch as basically everything I write is sort of a manifesto. What is a manifesto if not a dark essay?

Let’s call it a primer. It’s going to make a lot of future things make a lot more sense if I can refer to King Power and Wizard Power without having to define the terms.

I suspect you know where I’m going with this, and you’re very likely right, but the devil is infamously in the details.

⁠⁠I have removed his place, his seat, and his tomb.

I have destroyed his soul, his spirit, his body, his shade, his magic, his seed, his egg, his bones, and his hair.⁠⁠

Though thou shalt not exist, thou shalt suffer.

— The Book of Overthrowing Apep (~400 BCE)

One sentence on each place in Europe that I’ve been, in order of preference.

🇳🇴 Oslo, Norway

Perfection.

🇳🇴 Kristiansand, Norway

Feels like walking through a storybook about mice that run a bookstore.

🇩🇪 Berlin, Germany

I will spend the rest of my life angry that nowhere in the US has public transit this good.

🇱🇹 Klaipeda, Lithuania

Purchased a book of soviet propaganda art from a woman who spoke almost no English, 10/10, no notes.

🇱🇹 Riga, Latvia

Feels like walking through a storybook about mice that run a bookstore, but in the Middle Ages.

🇪🇪 Tallinn, Estonia

Estonia has perfected the McDonalds French Fry, no I will not be taking questions.

🇩🇰 Aarhus, Denmark

I remember almost nothing about Aarhus but at least it isn’t Copenhagen.

🇩🇰 Copenhagen, Denmark

The exact moment I realized that I never want to live in a city again for the rest of my life.

🇫🇮 Helsinki, Finland

Deserves more of a chance than I was able to give it.

🇸🇪 Stockholm, Sweden

I would go back another time, but their predatory taxi cab situation does a lot to sour the experience.

🇩🇪 Hamburg, Germany

“At least it’s not Poland” feels unnecessarily cheeky, but I’m really struggling to come up with anything else.

🇵🇱 Gdynia, Poland

The only place I went that I could not be convinced to go back to.