Nerd Notes, September

My dearest Nerds,

I’m squeaking in under the wire getting this out to you just as September slips away. Please know, it’s not because I’ve had nothing to say but rather because I’ve had too much. So many things running around inside my head, so much going on. Get ready for a bit of a brain dump (that’s what you’re here for, right?)…

Kicking off Play’s The Thing and establishing that this isn’t quite so centered on Pokemon anymore was part of a broader recognition for me that the nature of my work has really evolved. I am hesitant to say what I’m about to say, but I’m still going to say it: my work has become essentially creative. What I spend my time on is creating - whether that’s writing this newsletter, building AI tools, designing learning programs, crafting experiences, or making games. It has also become the core of my paid work. For a while when I first started the studio, I was a lot more of a strategist and coach…but that has become less than 10% of my work these days. This was all part of a pretty deliberate effort that I can trace back like 5 or 6 years because of the miracle of keeping a digital journal with a great time capsule feature that surfaces my old posts. Funny bit of trivia: I started Routine Chaos the newsletter (2019) before I started Routine Chaos the design studio (2021) because my day job at the time had become more about managing creative processes (and, often, managing complicated stakeholders) than it was about actually creating anything myself…and I could feel that slowly driving me the wrong kind of crazy. But now that has all flipped, and I do very little process management anymore.

But it took me a while - as in, until the last couple months - to recognize that the logic of how I work and the structures I had created for myself were still mostly the ones that I had put in place when I was managing, and I needed better structures in place for creating. One of the sharpest contrasts I could see was that managing processes was something that lent itself more toward predictable and steady approaches; it didn’t have the kind of energy and focus spikes that I find comes with creative work. When I’m creating, I’ll have some days when everything flows and I sustain focus for an incredible amount of time…and those are inevitably followed by days when the output slows to a trickle, and sometimes that’s because I’m doing a lot of background processing, but sometimes it’s also because I’m in a recharge & recovery mode. But when I evaluate those low output days from the perspective and approach of the manager, I get really self critical. It’s a thought pattern I’m trying to break.

The biggest changes in practice that I’ve made have been instituting a creative warmup to kickoff my deep focus work, and doing some consolidation of learning in order to create some distance from the work when I need it. My creative warmups have been really helpful - at the beginning of any deep focus block, I put 15 minutes on the timer and then I do one of 3 things:

• I sketch
• I build something with legos
• I design geometric patterns in my sketchbook or using tangrams

It’s all tactile work that gets me started without using a screen and that has no direct relationship to the actual work I’m doing. It orients my mind toward creative work, and it gives me a space in which to be exploratory and see what emerges.

It has also required different tools. For a long time I had gone exclusively digital, but I’ve returned to carrying a physical sketch book, pens, and colored pencils.

In fact…

Let’s talk about moving toward digital minimalism

Want to hear something crazy? For nearly 12 years I carried the same size & shape of a phone. To wit:

• 2013 - The iPhone 5s, which I believe was the second series that had the flat edges and the last one before they started moving towards larger screens.
• 2016 - the iPhone SE. I hung onto my 5s for as long as I could, and in 2016 Apple reintroduced the same form factor in the iPhone SE right as Sarah needed to upgrade because her 5c (a far inferior phone to the 5s) was getting long in the tooth. So we picked up the SE for her, but then a year later when my own 5s started to get a bit laggy I had no interest in the new iPhones, so I took Sarah’s SE and she got one of the new models.
• 2019 - did I accidentally get in a pool with my phone in my pocket? Maybe. My SE still worked, technically, but it would do things like just randomly power off…its days were numbered. There was no new flat edged, small iPhone…and then I made a discovery that still gives me little goosebumps when I remember it: the original SE was still for sale at the Dubai Duty Free, and I happened to be flying through Dubai. I grabbed my second SE on my layover for $250…amazing.
• 2020 - Apple introduced the 12 Mini! I snapped one up. Same size, same shape, no home button so I got a bit more screen.
• 2024 - When the battery started to degrade after 3 years, instead of a new phone I got a new battery. But I could tell my days were numbered - there hadn’t been a new mini since the iPhone 13, and there didn’t seem to be any signs that a new one was coming. In fact, just the opposite. Here’s the thing: if you ever meet anyone who had one of the iPhone Minis, the odds are good that you’ve met someone who loved their iPhone Mini…the problem is, there just weren’t that many of us. Apparently people want bigger phones with bigger screens and bigger batteries. Fair enough, I guess.
• 2025 - It was time to call a spade a spade: one of my camera lenses couldn’t focus anymore. I could see some software lags. My phone was on its last legs. I had to get a new phone, and there was no Dubai miracle waiting for me. I probably could have found a refurbed 13 Mini, but I’m interested in the possibilities of running AI models locally on device…so I actually wanted to max out my GPU and RAM. I broke down and got the new iPhone 17 Pro. When it arrived, I left it sitting in its box unopened for several hours; I wasn’t ready to let go of the phone that I had been using for nearly 5 years. For the most part, it still worked! It still did like 85% of what I needed from it at an acceptable quality level. That’s remarkable. I didn’t make peace with the transition until Tommy broke the news that they had cracked the screen on their own phone, so I was able to hand down my old 12 mini to them (and they were thrilled).

Guys - I miss my small phone. I can’t handle putting the new phone in my pocket. It’s so huge. But, actually, there has been some freedom in that…because I don’t want to put it in my pocket, I don’t. That means I often leave the house to run errands without my phone. But it also means that there are times when I need to have my phone with me, and I decided to get a smaller bag that I can throw my phone in along with my sketchbook & writing implements, and my ereader and be on my way without carrying my laptop. That’s been nice.

On a related note, I also just got rid of my dual boiler espresso machine. I think I felt about it similarly to how I feel about my new phone: I didn’t love it, but I appreciated its utility and capabilities…it’s just that, like with the phones, it was overshadowed by a smaller, more constrained espresso machine that I legitimately love using. It walked out the door, and I immediately felt a sense of lightness.

My new setup achieves something that I find a disproportionate amount of pleasure in: it lets me make espresso without anything motorized - all it needs is heat for water and my own physical motion to grind the beans (ok, yes, I do still have an electric grinder - but that’s for filter coffee where my hand grinder is too small to grind enough to make a 2 person pourover). No motor, no circuit board or electronic chip. Everything is plastic or metal. Delightful.

A play-related B side

A few weeks ago, my older 2 kids were watching the finals of the World GeoGuessr Championships, and I got sucked into it. If you’re not familiar with the game, here’s the gist of it:

• 2 competitors are shown a StreetView image from somewhere in the world. I think there’s a fixed set of images that these can be drawn from, it’s not like they could just get served anything on Google Maps, but the fixed set is also pretty huge.
• The competitors have a minute to pinpoint on a world map where they think the image is from…but once 1 player locks in, the other player only has 15 seconds.
• The players then receive points based on how far from the actual location they were, with a bonus for the player who was closest that is proportional to how much closer they were than their opponent (so if you’re both really close = small bonus, if you were significantly closer = big bonus).

The most recent Play’s The Thing is about the culture that emerges around particular games, with a big focus on Chess and Go - games that have been around for centuries and have pretty well defined cultures that have changed in very different ways in response to the application of machine learning to their games.

The thing I find most fascinating about GeoGuessr is that it’s a game that comes out of the age of machine learning and is also a game that a machine learning algorithm would absolutely dominate. It’s a game where the game is humans doing an entirely trivial thing that machines could already kick our asses at when the game came out, yet it still has a pretty significant global following. And I would argue that’s not because of the game but because of the way that the game created a culture. I’m not deep enough into it to have any particular insight on what that culture is, but you can see it, right?

I think it's fair to expect that you're going to get a lot of thoughts about culture & play this season - both the culture of games as well as the way that forms of play are reflective of and shaping of the larger culture that they're a part of...I have this idea I'm working out that will probably land here, but maybe it'll find its way into the larger newsletter that leaderboards are a feature of a lack of shared values so we resort to the easiest thing to quantify.

Other things currently running around in my head that might show up here:

• Comparing basketball eras, but comparing cultures
• Games within the game in Tour de Franc (not everyone is trying to wear the yellow jersey)
• Personal best culture

Like I said at the top, there's too much I want to get into right now.

Until next time.