Writing is Thinking
Hello, again. When you think back on the experiences that made you into you, have you wondered about how true your memories of those experiences are? I think about that constantly, especially given that memory is far more malleable than most folks realize. I’ll get back to that in a moment, plus some thoughts on bagged salad, what to do in Las Vegas if you hate the Strip, an incredible baseball novel, my favorite analogy for LLM AIs, and more.
I Made Something
As noted previously, I’ve written a novel, but after much querying, I have no takers. Sure, I’d hoped multiple agents would express interest and the book would inspire a bidding war from publishers, but oh well. That said, after much consideration, I’ve decided to self-publish and take the opportunity to learn about that world. I’ve laid it out and designed a cover and everything. Once I’m set to start promoting it in earnest, I’ll probably post more information here, first.
Last month, I described it as: “A photographer hired to work a remote destination wedding discovers her ex is in the wedding party, bringing to a head an emotional journey decades in the making. It’s romcom-adjacent, a ‘beach read’ that’s a little more than breezy entertainment…”
Though not the central thrust, memory and how we remember things is a running theme through the story. For example, my main character, Tara, deals with stressful experiences while working at a wedding, and so calls her father. In the midst of that conversation, she remembers moments from her childhood that shaped her reactions in the present. But also, by the end, I hope it’s clear to the reader that all of the memories are constantly under construction, just like the characters’ present — or the story that they’re reading.
…And Now I’m Making Something Else
I enjoyed writing that book so much that I’ve started writing another novel. This one is a pretty far cry from the last one — it’s kind of near-future sci-fi, and is told in first person by a man — but I’m going much harder on ideas about memory and what it means to share and accept given interpretations of the past.
And Another Thing I’m Making!
I’m also developing a podcast idea, though I’ll need interview subjects. Are you, or someone you know, a good person to talk to about movies? (It’s more specific than that, but that’s the start…) If so, get in touch!
What You’ve All Been Waiting For: Bagged Salad Discourse
A sure sign I’m barrelling into middle age is that I’ve committed to eating (low-sodium) soup and salad every day for lunch. Usually, it’s lentil soup, but I’ve been rotating between three different versions of bagged salad: a southwest with spiced ranch and tortilla chips, an avocado ranch with cheese and hard corn kernels, and, my favorite, an Everything salad that includes bagel croutons with a packet of everything seasoning and a dilled-up ranch.
My family gets good deals on a particular brand of salads at our regular grocery store, so each weekend we buy a week’s supply. One upshot of all this is that I’ve become closely attuned to the vagaries of this brand’s mass-produced bagged salads, and in particular the Everything salads. For example, the bags of that variety will include two packets of seasoning more often than you might think — perhaps one in 10. But also, there’s a pretty surprising — to me — variance in the amount of salad included in a given bag. Each morning, I open a bag and pour the greens into a reusable bowl that’s just the right size to put the unopened dressing-and-seasoning packet on top before covering. More often than receiving a second seasoning packet, I have noticed either an especially generous portion or a severe lack of greens.
It’s not enough to put me off the brand, but I do think about it a lot. Only, I also can’t be bothered to do a full-fledged investigation into the salad levels. A small part of me wants to quantify what’s happening with a cooking scale and see if I’m actually getting disparate amounts of greens from my bagged salads, but a much larger part of me shuts that down in recognition that it’s far too much effort for nebulous payoff. Sometimes you get a little more, sometimes you get a little less. Best to accept it and keep it moving.
What to Do in Las Vegas When You Don’t Like Las Vegas
After Christmas, my family went to Las Vegas, the first time either my spouse or I had ever been. Going in, I knew I wasn’t going to do much gambling, if at all, and we planned to spend plenty of time doing things other than gawking at fantastical artifice, but I looked forward to at least enjoying some spectacle. I was unprepared for how much I would despise the Strip.
One of the best things I can say is it felt like the best resorts induced about 80% the wonder of Disneyland, only with cigarette-filled basement labyrinths. We didn’t go in the Sphere, but it looked pretty cool from the outside, and I hear the internal screens are amazing, but stuff like the Venetian’s “canals” were shockingly flimsy, and maybe I’m just a San Francisco elitist but I have zero interest in visiting Las Vegas and paying through the nose to eat at Maggiano’s.
We did have a fantastic meal on the Strip when we had dinner at José Andrés’s restaurant in the Sahara, Bazaar Meat. My rack of lamb was revelatory, and my daughter is still talking about the “Philly cheesesteak” appetizer she had that was basically the world’s greatest mini Hot Pocket. Though it’s closing soon, supposedly it will relocate to a different resort in Las Vegas. The next-best things we ate during our trip were probably the arepas and empanadas from Viva Las Arepas, bagels from Siegel’s Bagelmania, then the sandwiches and salads from Prendi, a cafe in the Sahara.
As for shows, seeing the Jabbawockeez was well worth it, especially given the Young One is getting into hip hop dance, and we loved the actual magic/mentalist show put on by The Conjurors, though their digs at the Orleans Hotel and Casino was disappointing.
I recognize I might be giving the impression the trip was a bummer, and it most certainly was not, saved by the side trips we took. We spent a full day road-tripping to Zion National Park, and though we didn’t do any extensive hikes, it was breathtaking at every turn, from the canyon overlook to the farthest reaches of the scenic drive. We also spent several hours at Red Rock Canyon, just west of the city, and if you are able I strongly recommend doing the Calico Tanks hike there, which ends with a scramble up some rocks to a spectacular view of the Las Vegas Valley, with the city in the distance below. Finally, we also went to Hoover Dam and took the basic tour. Though the introductory video was stuffed with a bunch of propaganda (read “Where the Water Goes”!), the dam is undeniably an incredible feat of engineering and human accomplishment, and the drive there is wildly scenic on its own.
Ultimately, I have zero desire to return to the Strip, and I don’t need to go back to Las Vegas, especially if it would require me to go in the summer, but I would happily use it as a base for visiting other places I haven’t yet been, such as Bryce Canyon.
Three Book Recommendations
I finished three novels this past month, and though I enjoyed one of them much more than the others all of them are well worth your time and I recommend giving them a shot.
The first one was “Housekeeping” by Marilynne Robinson and the second was “James” by Percival Everett. I encourage you to check out the Goodreads pages and the many multiple reviews and thinkpieces about them, and all I’ll add is that “Housekeeping” was incredibly difficult to read because of the subject matter while “James” is extremely on the nose in the first third and then utterly brilliant once it shifts out of “teaching how to read this text” mode.
The third book was “The Celebrant” by Eric Rolfe Greenberg, a wondrous story about baseball at the turn of the 20th century in New York City, the Jewish immigrant experience in the city, and athletic idol worship as applied to Christy Mathewson. Among the many things Greenberg writes so well in the book, perhaps the best is the feeling of following a baseball team on a daily basis, especially as the season winds down and each game takes on greater import. The rhythms of fandom and the swings of emotion as Mathewson and the New York Giants battle for pennants pulse off the pages. Anyone can appreciate “The Celebrant”, but if you’re a baseball fan, I think you have to read it.
Writing is Thinking
Recently, I came up with what I think is a pretty good analogy for large language model “artificial intelligence”. Previously, I’d been happy to point to the so-called Octopus Test as a way to explain the shallowness and ultimate danger of relying on such LLM AIs. But I think my formulation is more accessible and just as apt. Here we go:
LLM AI is the marble races. It is imitating a thing that has intelligence, emotion, and thought by presenting an output that we associate with intelligence, emotion, and thought, but just as the marbles being pulled by gravity down a track have no agency, so too does the LLM AI present sentences and paragraphs that have the veneer of insight and knowledge even though it’s merely trying to give you text that will satisfy you, not actually provide you insight.
Using an LLM AI to “write something” is just like dropping some marbles down a track to “experience racing”. A race is not a race if there is no skill involved; the producers of Jelle’s Marble Run understand that their job is to fill in the gaps enough to encourage viewers to keep creating their own head canon and entertain themselves by applying agency to the marbles.
All that’s to say you have not written something if you prompt an LLM AI. Writing is not an end product but a process in which a writer works out and organizes their thinking in order to put information on a page. Using an LLM AI sidesteps the organizing and thinking process entirely.
Again: writing is thinking. Using an LLM AI means no one is thinking.
Restaurants Sell Food
You know Bluesky is growing up when someone gets an entire cohort of posters arguing for a day or two about a dumb position they stake out on a relatively trivial topic that is extremely tempting to ascribe to an entire generation. The recent one that’s stuck in my head is all the “discourse” about the costs of buying groceries and preparing one’s own food versus ordering takeout or delivery. I’m not going to sit here and give you a galactic brain take like ordering delivery is actually cheaper because the time I would’ve spent shopping and cooking is more valuable to me as scrolling and posting time, but I will note that not enough people seem to understand that — super simplified! — running a restaurant is buying food, laboring to prepare it, and selling it to customers for more than the cost of the food and the labor. Restaurants may buy in bulk, reducing the cost of the food below what you might pay at a grocery store, but it's not gonna make up for the labor in your bill so that it costs less money to you, the customer, than buying groceries and cooking, yourself.
Another Thing That Could Kill Big-Time College Sports
Recently, I attended a girls high school basketball game in one of California’s most competitive leagues. One player was bombing away from three throughout the game; she shot something like 7-12 from distance, held her own on defense, and was probably the most important player on the floor for her team, helping them win by about 10 points. It turns out she is her varsity team’s only frosh, so I was not surprised to find out she already has garnered a lot of interest from colleges. What did surprise me (though I should not have been surprised) is that she already has at least one Div. I offer, which she received before she decided where to go to high school and was based mostly on her play with a club team.
It clarified something I’ve been thinking for a while: Soon, if it hasn’t happened already, there will be a star college basketball player who never played for an interscholastic sports team because the club experience has overtaken interscholastic sports as the primary driver of young athletes’ development. I know it has happened in soccer, and Brandon Nimmo is a prominent baseball player who was a known prospect despite never playing for his high school — albeit because Wyoming high schools do not have teams — and I’m pretty certain it’s going to be a much more common thing.
That’s because, as in the case of the girl I mentioned at the start of this item, athletes and their families still consider playing high school basketball to have significant value, but if players are getting Div. I offers based on their play for club teams, they will have less and less motivation to actually play in high school. I’m no prep sports expert, but I know a little, and it’s wild how many young athletes today take it for granted that in order to play competitive high school sports, they must also play for a club team during the off season, and how much of their development is centered on the relationship with their club coaches, who may also be their school coaches.
Basketball, baseball, soccer, lacrosse, volleyball, track, tennis — team and individual sports alike have largely been taken over by the club system, and so it’s only a matter of time before athletes’ families determine that playing for high school teams represents more risk than upside. And, to bring it full circle, if amateur sports more or less sever from academic institutions at the prep level, that makes it even more incongruous for colleges to maintain the facade they're anything other than minor pro leagues.
For what it’s worth, the one sport where I sense this dynamic is definitely not happening is football, because the economics of club sport football simply don’t make sense. Yes, there are position trainers, but it costs a lot of money to equip and run a team, and it’s not safe to play more than one season of tackle football per year. So, unless someone decided to eschew the other sports’ path of developing club systems that, at first, complemented interscholastic teams before overtaking them for primacy and instead set out to compete against interscholastic football with a club system — which, again, would be incredibly expensive and require a huge chunk of the athletes in a given area to collectively decide it’s in their interest to pay for football teams themselves rather than play for teams subsidized by entire communities — I think high school football is here to stay.
Back on My NCAA 14 Video Game Bullshit
In 2020, with tons of time on my hands, I got back into NCAA 14 and played a bunch of Road to Glory mode, ultimately creating a quarterback I named Bam Bewton and controlling him to a true frosh season in which he was about as close as you can get to a unanimous Heisman winner and cruised to a national championship. That was the last time I’d played any significant amount of video game football, and honestly, I was a little worried that if I returned to it I would get too deep and lose hundreds of hours of my life to the game, as I did with NBA 2K9 back in 2009 and then, also in 2020, College Hoops 2K8.
But I could only hold out so long, I suppose, and recently I busted out NCAA 14 for the Xbox 360, starting a new Dynasty in which I took over UConn and have been playing entirely in Coach Mode. For those unaware, this means that I do all the recruiting and scheduling, et cetera, outside of actual games, and in the games I call plays but the players are the ones who run them and I do not control anything on the field after the snap. In many ways, it’s a much more satisfying way to play (it’s how I played College Hoops 2K8) because when I control a player, on offense or defense, I get to apply my skill and intelligence in a way that makes the player far better than his video game self. Also, I have to think and strategize a lot more carefully than I did when I controlled the quarterback and a defensive end, taking into account everyone’s strengths and weaknesses instead of trusting that I, personally, could cover them up with my play.
I started out by realigning teams into, roughly, their 2023 conferences, which was key for the important rules changes I am implementing for each subsequent year. Starting in the game’s second season, I made Idaho and Old Dominion independents. The 10 conference champions in the first season, plus the top six non-champion teams in the BCS rankings, were placed into the SEC, which is now a Champions League. For future seasons, the 10 conference champions go into the Champions League, plus any non-champions that finish in the top six of the BCS. The bottom teams in the Champions League get relegated to the other conferences and assigned at random.
About those other conferences… at the end of the first season, after determining the Champions League teams, I assigned the remaining 108 teams at random to the nine conferences, which each have 12 teams and the same scheduling and championship game rules. This means Iowa is in the same conference as Clemson, but also the randomizing process yielded some pretty wild coincidences, like Stanford and Cal ending up in the same division. In any event, I’m looking forward to seeing how everything shakes out.
And UConn? As an independent in the first season, I coached my guys to an undefeated season, and my starting halfback eked out the Heisman with a huge final couple of games (which also meant he did not win the Maxwell or Doak Walker awards). We didn’t make the championship game because neither the coaches nor the media polls would put us higher than third, but it was a great season, and I’m looking forward to building upon it with some better linemen. We’ll also see how we do in the Champions League.
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Thanks for reading, you crazy kids. Let’s do this again, sometime.
(Photo: "calico Tanks" by daBinsi. Used under CC-BY-2.0 license.)