The Only Way to Win Is Not to Play the Game
06:43 Monday, 11 April 2022
Current Wx: Temp: 50.68°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 83% Wind: 0mph
Words: 1064
This is not the post I was anticipating when I thought about writing it some time ago, before we left for Las Vegas.
It's also not the post I would write if I was the kind of blogger I'd like to be. That post would be, thorough, or something.
Instead, you're going to get this and I hope it's useful. A tiny contribution to the net vector sum of making a difference.
Probably not, but non-attachment to results and all that.
Before we left for Las Vegas, I was thinking a lot about meeting my old classmates and worrying about the whole left/right thing. I'd been thinking about how we lose sight of each other as human beings because of this national political partisanship that is so far removed from our day-to-day lives, and it's making us all crazy.
I'd told Mitzi I was thinking of leaving Twitter because it was just so toxic, and I was contributing to it and it was making me unhappy. But, I'm also self-aware enough to know I've become somewhat habituated toward Twitter, so I know that's going to be difficult. It's also a source of serendipitous discovery too, as we'll see.
Anyway, I'd finished reading The German War, and I'd started reading Savage Continent. I've put that aside, and I'm reading Roosevelt at War now. Needed a break from despair. Suffice to say that the Germans suffered massively at the end of WW II. Many of the same horrors they visited on others were visited on them. From what I was reading, which is by no means exhaustive I know, there was no real collective sense of, "Well, we deserved this." Instead, the German people saw themselves as victims of the war, every bit as much as anyone else in it.
If you project that onto today, you can look at what people on the right are doing (and they can look at people on the left), and you can kind of see disaster and ruin may follow and you expect that there would be some recognition of responsibility and subsequent regret or remorse. But there won't be. There will just be disaster and ruin and everyone feeling like a victim and some "others" will be responsible.
So this effort to kind of convince people to change, to prevent disaster or to save their immortal souls, is pointless. That's not what's going to happen.
Because that's not what's going on.
We're trapped in a zero-sum game that we've built. And it's more complicated than that.
Anyway, I was thinking about leaving Twitter. Trying to figure out how to see people on the right as just people, not these caricatures we've manufactured from a few whackos who seem to garner all the headlines. I kept thinking that we needed to move past zero-sum thinking and so War Games came to mind, hence, the only way to win is not to play the game, which isn't the exact quote, but is the idea.
While we were out west, we were walking past a jewelry shop in Scottsdale. Mitzi noticed a photo in the window with the proprietor and someone she didn't recognize. She asked me, "Who's this actor?" I'd already walked by, so I turned around and looked at the photo and it wasn't an actor.
"That's Bruce Springsteen!"
So I walked in and saw the proprietor and asked, "What did Bruce buy?"
So, a long conversation ensued and I ended up buying a number of pieces. The artist's husband was there as well, and they were a perfectly charming couple. At one point, Mitzi was showing her some pieces she had in her purse and one was a necklace she had bought from a local (Ponte Vedra) artist, and she mentioned it was for a fund-raiser, "For the blue wave."
For the briefest of instances, I saw a cloud pass across the couple's faces. It was just, I don't know, a flicker. But I knew, these were not Democrats, or liberals, or progressives or whatever. But they remained charming and gracious and they do lovely work and we concluded our business and parted on good terms, I think Mitzi was none the wiser.
The husband had asked me to write a review on Google, and I said I would. So I googled around and found out, yes, these people were on the right, fairly vigorously. And it just kind of added to my unhappiness with the whole left/right, zero-sum bullshit. I wrote them an excellent review, because they were charming hosts and do very nice work.
None of us gets to pick our parents. Likewise, none of us got to choose the culture we were born in, the language we speak, the dominant paradigms that define our social dynamics, the dominant one in ours being zero-sum thinking.
Well, Twitter and serendipity. Bear with me.
I follow a number of Twitter accounts that seem to focus a good deal on "tools for thought," for lack of a better term. Thinking is important, it's hard to do, we're not very good at it and so any "tools" that might facilitate it are interesting to me.
One of those accounts is for a site called The Compendium Cards, which may or may not be inspired by Oblique Strategies. On its Twitter profile, there's a static image of this card, and I clicked on it one day, just out of, I don't know, curiosity.
Well, that started a deep dive, that's ongoing. I'm running out of time and I want to get this posted. Look for Dave Snowden on YouTube. He's really smart and has some brilliant ideas. He's also a little hard to take sometimes. He talks fast, often there are about a dozen ideas he says are "critically important," but doesn't elaborate on them. He's Welsh, so sometimes he's hard to understand. But I think it's very worthwhile, and possibly incredibly important. He's also a consultant and often selling himself, so bear that in mind as well.
What we're living in is a complex system. It's impossible to establish "cause and effect." What we're observing are patterns developing, "strange attractors."
I'm out of time. I'll be back. But we don't have to feed energy into the same patterns.
The only way to win is not to play the game.
✍️ Reply by emailThought This Might Be Something
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I think the Pfizer shot hit me a bit harder than usual. I don't recall ever having any kind of reaction to the Pfizer, while the Moderna always left me hurting the next day. I didn't feel as bad yesterday as I do with the Moderna, but I was running at about three-quarter power. I felt better this morning, but my walk this morning, which usually leaves me feeling somewhat energized, has me feeling otherwise today.
Anyway, I saw this on my walk this morning. Because I was focused more on walking than photography, I just grabbed this and pressed on. It caught my attention at first because I thought the light looked interesting. But after getting it on the screen, I can see it was the arches that were arresting. And if I had taken my time and worked a bit more on composing the shot, it might have been a little more compelling. Not to be too "precious" about my photography. I'm just a guy who likes to take pictures.
Arches within arches in alternating planes is pretty interesting. I think I could have adjusted my position a bit to get better curves where the edges kind of align. Maybe I'll try again and take my time.
Yesterday wasn't totally wasted. I managed to figure out I had the wrong connection adapter on the cable from the Nebo 100W panel. Same polarity, happily, but a little off in size. I used the EB3A to charge my 13" M1 MBP and then used the panel to charge the EB3A. I didn't stay for the whole thing, and clouds were rolling in and out, but I did see it outputting 85W when I got the right adapter connected.
I noticed that it wasn't charging the EB3A all the time, and that touching the cable caused it to recognize the cable. I went back to my pile of adapters and found one that looked about the same and measured them both with my little plastic micrometer. Sure enough, the one I was using was a little small. Swapped it out with the correct one and we were off to the races.
✍️ Reply by emailWrong Picture
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Welp, I don't know how that happened. I suspect I wasn't paying attention to which photo was selected in Photos when I ran the script.
The tree frog was on the wall when I got home, and I intended to post it anyway, so I'd edited it and it was probably still selected.
Anyway, I'll leave it the way it is.
✍️ Reply by emailI'm Still Waiting to Hear From the Nobel Committee
09:22 Thursday, 11 April 2024
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Words: 10
Irony is the fifth fundamental force of the universe, Jack.
✍️ Reply by emailWe're All Preppers Now
06:44 Friday, 11 April 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 60.71°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 85% Wind: 11.5mph
Words: 95
Some of us just don't know it yet.
Anyway, cool article in Wired about Forth as a post-apocalyptic programming language. The link in the article that supposedly points to his web page, instead redirects to a forum in French. The actual link is this one.
(I signed up for the forum. I can read some French, and the translate function in Safari seems pretty decent. It makes for some glitches in the UI, but it mostly works. And maybe I'll brush up on my French. The forum seems to be about resilience and prep'ing.)
✍️ Reply by emailDowny Woodpecker
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We took a little walk yesterday morning and I brought along the venerable Olympus OM-D E-M5, with the 75-300mm zoom mounted, hoping to see a bird or two.
We were nearly home, without seeing a bird that would sit still long enough for a shot, when I heard a woodpecker nearby. It took me a couple of minutes to finally locate it, somewhat shaded as it was beneath the limb it was working.
So it wasn't all in vain.
We visited with our Florida friends who are building a cabin near Penn Yan. There's been some significant progress since our last visit, but it's still very much a work in progress. But the visit had a salutary effect on my mental health as we learned, perhaps not for the first time, that their floor plan is nearly identical to the one we're working on. I was waking up in the middle of the night worrying about whether or not everything we'd planned would work in that footprint, and being able to be in a space nearly identical in size (our ceiling will be a little lower at the peak, but higher at the walls) gave me a great deal of confidence that it will all work.
Our contractor should be here in a little while to go over the latest draft with us, and we have some specific changes we want to go over and verify their feasibility. Then we'll all meet with the designer on Monday afternoon and give her our feedback. I think we should be very close to having a workable blueprint when we receive her next draft.
It was warm yesterday, but breezy as a cold front blew through. It's cooler today, and partly cloudy, but nothing to really complain about.
Life, in this little corner of the world at least, is good.
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