I wanted to wake up at about 9 AM today to go to camp and take pictures at the Lenape Klondike Derby but popped my head off of my pillow around 2:30 PM and realized I had pretty much wasted the day. I could have salvaged it by cleaning or planning a night out, or even working on second job stuff, but I had committed to the path of failure and I would follow through on it. Lunch was a hot dog, and after using my treadmill, I decided not to shave nor did I cut my hair as I had planned. I didn’t get the mail, I put off finishing a white paper and went to bed around 3 AM after playing video games and going food shopping. My only redeeming act was attempting to make fudge and that I will not know how that turned out until tomorrow. I eventually got to sleep by thinking that some sort of cosmic balance ruled and somewhere, some nerd just proved Goldbach’s Conjecture or made it to 3rd base.
Tag: failure
Skill Regression
The current set of tasks my technical team is doing could be relegated to second graders (assuming they had GMP certification) as it largely consists using the industrial analogs of masking tape, construction paper, paste, cling wrap and wax paper to make a product so one’d assume it’d be easy. Hell no. There’s something hypnotic about such simple materials that drive men and women with advanced degrees and experiencing fashioning turbine blades and heart valves to madness and every 20 minutes we managed to find a new way to cock up our current 4 step process. People got pieces stuck to themselves, applied the same step twice, put stuff on backwards, and in a particularly inspired moment never actually adhered the layers of the product together.
I requested that we contact my elementary school art teacher, Mr. Fell, to come in and give us a primer on the latest in felt, pipe cleaner, and glue stick technology before we start the next phase of the project.
5-Color Returns
I’d failed to run a 5-Color event for 3 months and snuck one in today. The time between announcement and event was about a week so I didn’t feel bad when 6 people canceled due to work and we had event participation of 6. The deck I had built for the day quite simply blew as it was a case of what I call reactionary differentiation in trying to build a new deck. I’d made a card choice, realize it made the deck closer to a deck I was trying to avoid building and would add the opposite. This process happened between 8 and 12 times resulting in an unwieldy deck that did nothing particularly well. I scraped through three matches winning two largely by non-core win conditions in the deck. I sucked.
I didn’t play much Magic over the summer. I didn’t play much Magic over the spring. I didn’t play much Magic over the Winter. I detect a trend.
The redeeming aspect of the event was going out to eat with Mike Noble where we coined a phenomenon for something I’ve been doing more and more often: conceptual name dropping. Looking over my recent media posts I’ve used phrases like Buridan’s Ass, Morton’s Fork, Hobson’s Choice, File Drawer Effect, Euthypro dilemma, and Russell’s Teapot a lot. I think there’s a power to having a name for a phenomenon such that I found I got more traction if I said someone was falling for the Perfect solution fallacy rather than saying “you’re making the good the enemy of the perfect”. I’m glad I have a slightly mocking name for this tendency.