Five Things: January 23, 2025
This is my bi-weekly “newsletter” delivered straight to your inbox with at least one guaranteed typo I’ll catch after hitting send! If email collectors’ items aren’t your thing, don’t hesitate to switch to the RSS feed. There are only five links (the others are easter eggs for hardcore tea sippers) and I promise they’re usually more interesting than just excuses for my own ranting!
NOTE: As January 2025 extends 2020’s streak as the longest year ever, I’m taking steps to prevent my online activities from devolving back into bad doomscrolling habits, relying on sources I trust to stay on top of current events. Mastodon and Bluesky both offer robust filtering options to keep keywords, people, and even entire websites out of your feeds, and I’m taking full advantage of them. I’m going to try to extend that approach to this newsletter, too, at least for the next few months, but we’ll have to see how that goes…
_ONE
We Don’t Need More Cynics. We Need More Builders. | Joan Westenberg
Cynicism is comfortable. It’s safe. It’s often even correct about specific problems. But it’s ultimately a dead end. The future belongs to those who combine critical thinking with creative building and skeptical analysis with hopeful action.
I used to proudly consider myself a cynic, until I realized I was more of a pragmatic optimist who also enjoyed dismantling bad ideas like demo days on home improvement shows. I don’t think there’s a socially acceptable label for that, but it did give me a reputation in some circles as someone who always says “No.” to new — often allegedly “bold” or “innovative” — ideas, although it’s almost always actually “No, but…” if there’s even a smidgen of merit to explore. Similar to learning systems thinking was an actual concept that aligned with how I tend to think about things, Westenberg introduced me to pragmatic meliorism, which suits me much better than cynic.
I will acknowledge the problems with bad ideas, while focusing on actual solutions for the challenges they claim they’re trying to solve. I will learn from the long history of charlatans to identify modern charlatans, but I won’t assume everyone is a charlatan upon first contact. I will maintain high standards for myself and others, while understanding incremental progress is often the only realistic way forward. I will combine skeptical analysis with constructive action but will never suffer fools gladly nor hesitate to call out utter stupidity or malfeasance.
That might not be quite what Westenberg is calling for here, but I’m an incremental work in progress!
__TWO
Once It Has Been Trained, Who Will Own My Digital Twin? | Todd A Carpenter
What makes someone valuable to a team is the skills they bring to the table. If this knowledge can be extracted, stored, and regenerated in novel ways in new situations, does one ever “leave” at the end of one’s employment? What rights does your former employer have to continue to “use” your agent after you quit or retire?
Reading this validated my concerns about companies adopting various AI tools without any due diligence, not so much because individual employers might have unscrupulous intentions — many do, although very few have the resources or skills to effectively act on them — but because the companies developing these tools absolutely believe they can replace human workers across every imaginable discipline and are desperate to prove it.
Carpenter notes academia as a legit area of concern (so many universities already claim ownership of faculty’s output and are now forcing them to adopt various AI tools to “assist” them in producing more), but it’s his own work that I find personally relevant because it’s similar to my own experience. I’m at an age and level of experience where my job prospects have significantly narrowed, and I’ve left jobs in the past where I was literally replaced by two people whose combined pay was more than mine.
Whenever I think about how much work I’ve done just over the past five years using Microsoft and Google’s various tools, plus Slack, my own blog and thousands of social posts (all of which has surely been scraped into various LLMs), I can easily believe some startup is already out there pitching AI marketers that are tuned for specific industries and roles based on LinkedIn profiles you provide as examples. The missing ingredient, of course, will be what makes me a discerning human being (my pragmatic meliorism, perhaps), and I guarantee at least a few of my former bosses would see that as an important value proposition!
___THREE
No one understands how playing cards work | Simone de Rochefort
We invented Jokers. The ones you take out of the deck.
I usually prefer text to videos, but the article doesn’t include de Rochefort’s best line, apparently a great ad lib that demonstrates how a good video (or audio) can enhance a nonfiction text. It’s not that this video has high production values (it doesn’t, really), but her personality shines through more than the glimpses you get in her article.
Both are a fascinating look at the history of cards through the lens of de Rochefort getting addicted to Solitaire, with the surprise revelation (to me, at least) that there several variants that could give Balatro a run for its addictively roguelike money, and she only covers those in the video.
____FOUR
Improv(e) for ADHD | Arp Laszlo
Improv also changed me for the better.
Back in the mid-90s, during my third try at college, I took an acting workshop on a lark, partly for the “easy” elective, and partly because I was in the last throes of my indie film phase with aspirations of making a movie, for which I’d written a pretty competent but grossly self-indulgent, “semi-autobiographical” script. I (correctly) believed I should know something about acting if I was going to direct actual actors, but I had reservations about my ability to fully give in to the experience because I was (and still am) an introvert.
The teacher ended up being Annette Cardona (Cha-Cha from the original Grease), and she came pretty damn close to achieving her goal of breaking down my walls. Similar to Laszlo’s experience with improv, it fundamentally changed me, building on the foundation laid by my experience in the Army, and paving the way for me to get into poetry slam, public speaking, and being as outspoken as I often am here and IRL.
Spoiler: Laszlo also credits a book, Alex Graudin’s Improve: How I Discovered Improv and Conquered Social Anxiety, which I immediately ordered and am looking forward to diving into soon.
PS: I took my daughter to see D&D: The Twenty-Sided Tavern a couple of weeks ago, prepared for a cringe (and expensive) disaster, but it was way more fun and entertaining than I expected, primarily thanks to a talented cast and smart stage production. Improv is hard, but they pulled off the dialogue and physicality, especially Madelyn Murphy as the Trickster, and Ify Nwadiwe as the Warrior who was really two halflings in a trench coat! The interactive bits were fun, too. Alas, our party failed their mission, which was an unexpected but enjoyable twist.
_____FIVE
‘It could be Marvel’ – Games Workshop and the big ambition of a miniatures business | Tom Richardson
Games Workshop boss Kevin Rountree told investors Space Marine II had created “excitement” for its miniatures, and that store staff had told him they’d seen more people coming into the company’s high street stores as a result. The power of TV and games to give fans more ways to engage with their favourite hobbies is something more companies are leaning into.
Ignore the lazy comparison to Marvel, but the more I explore the grim dark future of Warhammer 40k, the deeper I get sucked into it, and I cannot wait to see what Henry Cavill’s secret project is, even if it means giving Amazon money. (We all draw our lines somewhere, and they’re rarely completely straight ones.)
The biggest difference between Marvel and Warhammer 40k, of course, is the lack of individual characters everyone recognizes, even if they’re not fans. But 40k has vibes Marvel can’t touch, and in the right hands, there are so many interesting tales to be told that align with current events, like fascism, fundamentalism, misogyny, and xenophobia, to name just a few. It’s more likely they’ll go for mass appeal with a stylish sci-fi epic, which works for me, too, because we’re all going to need all the escapist entertainment we can get. If it has a subversive message to it, even better!
In the meantime, I’m enjoying reading Saints and Martyrs and, while watching an episode of Play On Tabletop pitting two of my favorite factions against each other, I discovered Warhammer Combat Cards, one of the best mobile games I’ve played yet. It’s similar to Marvel Snap but with way more strategic and tactical depth. It’s definitely a pay-to-play grinder so it almost surely has a ceiling I’ll hit soon, but I bought a Battle Pass for the current season and plan to enjoy the hell out of it until then.
Another step towards buying an actual miniature and learning to paint? Maybe… For the Emperor, of course! O_o
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