GRIZZLY PEAR

written snapshots

Category: Notes

  • Deep Questions Podcast, Cal Newport, 2020-present

    I’ve been a big fan of Cal Newport ever since my initial introduction to him via CGP Grey and CJ Chilvers.

    The first book I read was So Good They Can’t Ignore You. I was completely smitten by his “career capital” model. He argues that constantly refining and honing the your skills is a better route than “following your passion” for getting the things you want out of a good job (autonomy, flexibility, pay, etc).

    I quickly followed up with his more recent books Deep Work and Digital Minimalism. I quite agree with his concerns about constant distractions in our modern hyper connected age. It’s one thing for children to flit about from one thing to another all day, but damn, we be grown ups.

    This podcast cements a trend that I noticed a couple weeks ago. I’m now listening to younger folks. I’m pretty sure Jordan Harbinger and Hank Green are both a year younger than me and Cal Newport mentioned he’s only 37, so he’s three or four years younger than I am.

    Being in your early forties is an interesting place. I’m still the young guy in my office and most principals at the firms who work for me are also a bit older. However I also have developed a cadre with younger professionals that I’ve come to know over the past few years.

    Just the other day, I called one of my former interns for some advice about walking jobsites. The dude is sharp and works hard, so I respect his opinion, especially since he’s completed construction administration on a couple large projects, something I’ve never done.

    This an interesting place. The torch hasn’t yet been handed to me, and I’m already handing it off to the next generation.

    I believe they call this middle age.

    But hey, enough about me. This podcast is a nice weekly question and answer show that discusses technology, work, and the deep life (without going woo woo).

    It’s only a few episodes in, so Cal is still finding his grounding, but it’s a very promising podcast and I hope he sticks around for a while, even though I’m a little bit jealous of his hard earned success.

  • Mottainai, Carl Chudyk, 2015

    Carl Chudyk is a minor deity in game design. I absolutely love his chaotic, tactical games.

    However, my wife doesn’t like games with lots of words, and the kids are still too young for such insanity. So that has left me to play against myself in this time of fatherhood and COVID-19.

    I first started playing his games against myself with his second classic Innovation, but a couple weeks into quarantine I received my copy of Mottainai and I’ve played it about fifty hands. Over the past few months, I’ve played it it slightly more often than Innovation, partly because Mottainai new to me, and partly because of its easy setup and quick play.

    In my solo games, I play the rules as written, dealing out two hands and just dueling each other. I tried a 3 handed game once, but that was too much chaos for my single brain to handle. (Along with Innovation, this solo-play method also works well for Chudyk’s Impulse.)

    After these plays, I feel like I’m finally starting to grok Mottainai and accept the game on its own terms. And I think the most important word is “quickness”. This game is similar to Race for the Galaxy. At first it seems like this game is all about building up a powerful engine, but it is actually about ending the damn game as fast as possible in your favor. It also has a bit of a Donald X Vaccarino (Dominion, Nefarious) feel to it – set your strategy in the first few turns and push that selected strategy as hard as possible. If you try to branch out you’ll be a muddling mess of mediocrity.

    In my initial games, grabbing monks as helpers was a dominant strategy. However, I would attribute it to “groupthink”, especially since I have a natural tendency to prefer strategies that revolve around “slow and steady, engine building”. After my first twenty plays, I learned to effectively implement the quick-build strategy to end the game by constructing five works. However, I still need to thoroughly explore a sales strategy, which I suspect will be quite powerful, but will take some practice to master, especially since multi-step processes don’t align well with in my personal playing tendencies.

    To be honest, “strategy” is seems overwrought for this game. For a game this short, even the grandest strategy is really just a tactic. With the swingyness of the cards, it really is a tactical game made up of even smaller choices. You can afford a couple half hearted feints, but if you try any more than that, you’re toast.

    One key in playing this game well is to be be thoughtful before playing a Task, just pulling a Prayer is often the best choice. It seems paradoxical in a game this short that “passing” may be regularly be the better move, however, it is the only action you can take without sharing it with your opponent, grabbing you a card without feeding their engine. In other games such a dynamic might be a design flaw, but Chudyk has been designing for a while and it is genius.

    I should mention that the first couple times I tried Mottainai were an utter disaster. This game is obviously a descendent of Chudyk’s first classic Glory to Rome, but to appreciate Mottainai you need to completely erase its father out of your mind. The even though the mechanics are similar, the dynamics are so different you will be unable to grok Mottainai as long as you have Glory to Rome bouncing around the back of your head.

    Even though Mottainai is noticeably shorter, the more apt experiential comparison is to Innovation. Like Innovation, several opportunities for nifty cardplay will spring up in front of you during the course of the game that will give you an undue advantage. However, when such an opportunity arises in Mottainai, it is critical that you take that advantage and immediately end the game in your favor.

    Even though Mottainai is a short game, it is much too complex to be called a filler. For something that can be played in 7 minutes this is a meaty little card game which has not yet gotten stale after fifty plays (or more than a hundred since I’ve always been my own oppopnent).

    Not that my faith has ever waivered, but I am happy to attest that my devotion to Carl Chudyk has been renewed afresh. I strongly recommend this game, which is available with free shipping on the publisher’s website.

  • Hear the Wind Sing, Haruki Murakami, 1979

    This book was published the year I was born.

    I have an odd thing with numbers, so I suspect this is played a part in starting this new project to read through Murakami’s ouvre.

    Like any other freshman work, you see both the talent and a lack of polish. This contrast is particularly highlighted when you compare it against the silky smooth introduction written in 2014, thirty five years into his career.

    The book is quirky novella, where the protagonist does stuff and ends up more or less where he was, except he isn’t exactly the same. Which vaguely aligns with my memory of the other Murakami novels that I read a decade ago.

    While reading the book, I got the sensation I may have read it before. I know that I downloaded a PDF of an english translation during my first Murakami kick, but I generally hate reading books online. I remember borrowing it from the library a couple years ago – though I don’t actually remember reading the book.

    Then again, I can’t tell you anything about his other novels that I’ve read, aside from the covers of the five novels we transported from Houston to Las Vegas.

    Hell, it’s only been a week since I finished this novel and I honestly can’t tell you what is the plot of this one either.

    But goddamn. His writing, even as a freshman.

    It had been a long time since I felt the fragrance of summer: the scent of the ocean, a distant train whistle, the touch of a girl’s skin, the lemony perfume of her hair, the evening wind, faint glimmers of hope, summer dreams.

    But none of these were the way they once had been; they were all somehow off, as if copied with tracing paper that kept slipping out of place.

    p. 89

  • Jordan Harbinger Show, 2018-present

    This show has been in my overast feed for so long I can’t remember how I first came across the podcast.

    I bet I heard an interview on some other podcast, enjoyed the interviewee, searched for that person in Overcast, and came across this show. I suspect this happened a few times, because the name, show cover, and his 6-minute networking course was already familiar to me when I came across Jordan as an interviewee on another podcast. 

    To be perfectly honest, I listened to that episode as an “audition” for both podcasts. In this world of podcast overload, this was a perfect chance to delete two shows from my feed.

    Before listening to the interview, I had a hazy notion that Jordan was yet another of those brash-hustle-network-productivity podcast bros, so I was not primed to dig his personality.  However, I pleasantly surprised by his demeanor and his mental approach.

    So I followed that interview with one of his Feedback Friday episodes, and I was totally hooked. These episodes have unique questions and Jordan’s responses are excellent. Hopefully my enjoyment isn’t just an exercise in confirmation bias, but I find myself wishing that was as sharp as he is.

    When a podcast does occasional q&a sessions, the questions tend to be generic inquiries of the host’s philosophy, which can get a bit dull since it rehashes the content of the “normal” episodes. However, a weekly q&a show creates a dynamic where you start to get personal, specific questions. By showing up every week, Jordan challenges the listeners with a wide variety conundrums to ponder.

    It’s really good mental exercise to think about how you would handle such strange situations. During my career, whenever I’ve had a problem that needed help from my supervisors, I often extended the conversation to discuss “what if” scenarios about more extreme versions of the situation. This has turned out to be good preparation, both for the possibility for the the current issue going sideways, as well as training my instincts for dealing with a seperate future incident. Such mental “gameplanning” has served me well, and listening to Jordan and his co-hosts address all kinds of unique personal issues has been a similar exercise.

    Don’t get me wrong, his long form interviews are also quite good, but I don’t know of any other podcasts that pair their great interviews with a regular q&a show. Like many things in life, a big part of being special comes from showing up consistently.

    For what it’s worth, I’ve also signed up for Jordan’s 6-minute networking program which is totally free, and so far it hasn’t led to a string of shills for paid classes.  I’m totally cool with regular paid advertising in my podcasts, I just get wary of shows that are constantly selling a menagerie of costly programs owned by the host. As far as I can tell, Jordan is clean. Don’t worry about it, just do it.

    Yeah count me in as a fan.

  • Henri Matisse Cut-outs, text by Gilles Neret, published by Taschen, 1994

    I took an art criticism class in my first semester in college that introduced me to John Berger and Matisse’s Woman with a Hat. I don’t remember anything from my essay, aside spending a considerable amount of time at the gallery at the SF MOMA and noticing the color imperfections on different reproductions of this image.

    Those afternoons at the gallery are among the few warm memories of a tumultuous year.

    As for this little book, I vaguely recollect picking it up in Houston, without actually reading it. So about almost-quarter century after my introduction to Matisse, I finally read something about the man.

    The book is fine, maybe a little small, but a succinct overview of the final period in his life. The writing is straightforward, but not simplistic. Now that I live in Vegas, the home of zero institutions of high art, I can’t be picky about reproduction colors, but I’ll attest that the printing is bright and vibrant.

    It was a strange experience to read the last chapter of an artist’s life with no knowledge of him outside of staring at a single piece that he painted at the start of his career.

    If I were to pursue it further, I’d need to pick up a good biography (which I most likely won’t do), but I almost certainly will purchase his own monograph Jazz which collected many of his cutouts.

    I generally prefer artist monographs over publisher collections, since those books are usually a journey, not merely a collection of highlights.

    However, highlights are famous for a reason, and I will be ever grateful for this little collection because it showed me this melancholy masterpiece. The Sorrow of the King.

  • Taking Things Seriously, Joshua Glenn & Carol Hayes, 2007

    This book is a cute collection of 75 nano-nonfictions. Little windows into the lives of the contributors, revealing a larger window in to the authors’ realities.

    I have a standard critique of NPR radio programming that gets overless precious, and many essays comes close to crossing the line, but the photographs ground the collection.

    Whatever the text may emote, the image of a “thing” to keeps the pairings from falling into pure sentimentality.

    It’s a fun quick read, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to find it.

    I have a note in the front cover that I got it from Half Price books on 28 November 2008. So I suspect this was pick up on one of the two Black Friday’s where I ended up winning a $200 gift cards from that store.

    Was it worth lugging around between two cities and four houses over twelve years before finally getting read while in exile in the midst of a pandemic?

    Doubtful, but it does got a nice backstory.

  • Anthropocene Reviewed, John Green, 2018-present

    I stumbled across this podcast via this excellent animation of his review of the Lascaux Caves.

    The concept of the podcast is very neat. Every month he writes two short essays about life in the human world and rates them on a five star rating. He slips in a well written commercial between the essay (not the usual canned stuff, these are actually worth listening) and ends with one random fact that didn’t fit in one of the main essays, along with a small audio bonus.

    It is a joyful little podcast. The two subjects allow for delightful juxtapositions, with a smattering of trivial knowledge keeps the podcast light even when it veers into some heavy territory.

    Like all NPR offerings, it comes very close to being unbearably precious, but he’s managed to avoid crossing that line in the episodes I’ve heard so far.

    I would say this is one of my favorite podcast finds of the year. I give it four and a half stars.

  • What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, a memoir, Haruki Murakami, 2007

    I heard about this book on an interview of Brian Koppelman on the Tim Ferris podcast. Brian recommended this book highly, and it makes sense given other books that he recommends. This memoir is the non-melodramatic version of the War of Art, which makes it a far superior book.

    There is very little about writing in this book, but when Murakami talks about writing, it pops. Especially when he takes a couple pages in the middle of the book to discuss the three key ingredients to making it as a novelist – talent, focus, and endurance.

    That passage alone is worth the cost of the book if one is an aspiring writer.

    I’m not an aspiring writer, but I am an occasional blogger and a slob who has always known the need to get off the couch and start exercising.

    He doesn’t glamorize running either.

    Running is both the subject and the metaphor.

    Put one foot in front of the other. Again and again.

    He doesn’t claim any particular epiphanies during his runs. He just enjoys the solitude of running. But that is quite comforting as well.

    As I’ve broken forty, I’ve become a better at getting bored. During this quarantine, I’ve started talking walks on a regular basis. Just a mile or two sprinkled with the occasional 10k.

    It’s nice to exercise without expectation, not waiting for the runner’s high or some special insight. Just log a few more miles, one foot in front of another.

    Coda:
    As pedestrian as this book may be, it has resulted in three key decisions. Few books can claim such an impact on my life, even if it only lasts a short duration.

    1. I’ve decided to read the entirety of Murakami’s english-translated ouvre. His writing is so forcefully delicate, personal and piercing, that I need to read it all. I had considered this exercise years ago, but his books had not yet been widely translated. They are now, and I have no excuse.
    2. I’m quitting self help books. I’ve known for the longest time they are the junk food of non-fiction prose – quick easy reads that makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something but invariably leave you empty after a few days. Just as John Maxwell quit reading for pleasure to focus on his study of leadership, I am going to quit work related reading so I can focus on life.
    3. I think I will refocus this blog with a new tag line “thoughts on my consumption”. My excursion into daily blogging last year was an interesting practice, but without a center the experiment felt rootless. “Write every day” may be a rule that works for many people, but I found myself being starved of input, since I was spending all my free solitude keeping up with the next blog post. “Write about any book that I’ve read” may result in a better balance between input and output. It doesn’t require constant output, but it doesn’t allow the blog to lie fallow for extended periods. Plus, it also addresses my great fear of becoming merely a passive consumer. We’ll see where this goes!

  • Count Zero, William Gibson, 1986

    I revisited Count Zero, the second of Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, for maybe the fourth or fifth time since I first read it in college.

    It’s odd to think that I’m further from my initial reading of the book than my first reading of the book was from its publication date. I guess that’s life, it keeps moving forward, but some artifacts keep staying along for the ride, and Count Zero is one of them.

    This book is the tightest, cleanest, and meanest of the trilogy. Almost a novella compared to its older and younger siblings. That’s why I love it. It feels effortless. It’s a story that says plety but doesn’t try to tell you anything.

    It seems odd that I still enjoy such a simple rip roaring genre yarn as a middle aged adult comfortably ensconced in the desert with a prototypical family of four. But then again, I’m not any more sophisticated than my collegiate self, just more willing to embrace the same old dopeyness.

    Certainly nostalgia plays a big part. The heavy, physical tech brings warm memories from computer class elementary school, descriptions of cyberspace resonating with flashy MTV logos, even as the direct neural connections of jacking-in seeming so gauche in this wireless age.

    As I walk around my Vegas suburb thinking of the book I just reread, it seems the real world has ended up closer to the gleaming spotless clones of Star Wars prequels, but during this time of pandemic, it feeling that the decrepit barbarism of Gibson’s Sprawl is just around the corner.

  • 100% Wheat Berries

    Over the past few months, I’ve been experimenting with a “wet-grind” method that my wife suggested one morning. I soak wheat berries for about 8-12 hours at 160% hydration. Then I just blenderize the heck out of them in the vitamix.

    I’ve had consistently good results with for 50% berry and 50% flour breads (basically 80% hydration dough), though I have had decent attempts all the way to 75% wheat berry loaves (admittedly it took a few tries to figure out how to fold such wet dough!).

    The other day I found some chia seeds in the fridge. In the past, I’ve noticed they soak up an incredible amount of water (at least 4x their weight) so I thought I’d go all wheat berries this time:

    200g Berries soaked in
    320g water for about half a day. After blending, mix in
    100g starter (100% hydrated)
    With the starter, this is a 148% hydration dough.
    40g chia seeds, soaking up an +/- equivalent of 160g water, resulting in an equivalent to about 72% hydration – an almost dryish loaf!
    4g salt, don’t forget your salt.

    And yeah it worked out really well, the oven spring wasn’t amazing (I don’t think I proofed long enough) but this was most likely the best tasting loaf so far this year.

    Plus, with flour being so rare at this time, I think I’ll be doing this 100% wet wheat berry grind method for a while coming up.

    Have fun!