Stratechery 2 days ago

Apple: You (Still) Don’t Understand the Vision Pro

Dear Apple, I was, given my interest in virtual and augmented reality, already primed to have a high degree of interest in the Vision Pro, but even so, I appreciate how you have gone out of your way to make sure I’m intrigued. You let me try the Vision Pro the day it was announced , and while I purchased my own the day it shipped (and had it flown over to Taiwan), you recently sent me a demo version of the M5 Vision Pro (it’s definitely snappier, although I don’t like the Dual Knit Band at all; the Solo Knit Band continues to fit my head best). However, the reason I truly know you are trying to win my heart is that not only did you finally show a live sporting event in the Vision Pro, and not only was it an NBA basketball game, but the game actually featured my Milwaukee Bucks! Sure, I had to jump through VPN hoops to watch the broadcast, which was only available in the Lakers home market, but who am I to complain about watching Giannis Antetokounmpo seal the game with a block and a steal on LeBron James in my M5 Vision Pro? And yet, complain I shall: you have — like almost every video you have produced for the Vision Pro — once again shown that you fundamentally do not understand the device you are selling. I’m incredibly disappointed, and cannot in good faith recommend any model of the Vision Pro to basketball fans (or anyone else for that matter). Apple, you are one of the grandfather’s of the tech industry at this point; it’s hard to believe that you are turning 50 this year! Still, you are much younger than TV generally, and sports on TV specifically. The first U.S. television broadcast of a sporting event was a Columbia-Princeton baseball game on May 17, 1939 on NBC; there was one camera accompanying the radio announcer. Three months later NBC televised the first Major League Baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and Cincinnati Reds; this time they used two cameras. All televised sports face a fundamental limitation when it comes to the fan experience: the viewer is experiencing something that is happening in real life 3D on a 2D screen; the solution NBC discovered from the very beginning was to not try and recreate the in-person experience, but to instead create something uniquely suited to this new medium. Two cameras became three, then four, then 147 — that’s how many cameras Fox used for last year’s Super Bowl broadcast . Of course many of those cameras were specialized: included in that number were 27 super slow motion cameras, 23 high resolution cameras, 16 robotic cameras, 10 wireless cameras, and two SkyCams. The job of stitching all of those cameras together into one coherent broadcast falls on the production team, housed in a specially equipped truck outside the stadium; that team coordinates with the broadcast booth to provide a seamless experience where every jump feels natural and pre-meditated, even though it’s happening in real time. It’s a great experience! And, of course, there is the pre-game, half-time, and post-game shows, which used an additional 64 cameras, including 12 wireless cameras, eight robotic cameras, seven augmented reality cameras, and a FlyCam. No broadcast is complete without something to fill the time when the game isn’t on. After all, as advanced as TV broadcasts may be, they still face the fundamental limitation that confronted NBC: how do you translate an in-person experience into something that is compelling for people on their couch looking at a 2D screen? When I first tried the Vision Pro the demo included a clip from an NBA game that was later cut from the demo that shipped with the device (which was the one available in Apple Stores); it jumped out at me at the time : What was much more compelling were a series of immersive video experiences that Apple did not show in the keynote. The most striking to me were, unsurprisingly, sports. There was one clip of an NBA basketball game that was incredibly realistic: the game clip was shot from the baseline, and as someone who has had the good fortune to sit courtside, it felt exactly the same, and, it must be said, much more immersive than similar experiences on the Quest. It turns out that one reason for the immersion is that Apple actually created its own cameras to capture the game using its new Apple Immersive Video Format. The company was fairly mum about how it planned to make those cameras and its format more widely available, but I am completely serious when I say that I would pay the NBA thousands of dollars to get a season pass to watch games captured in this way. Yes, that’s a crazy statement to make, but courtside seats cost that much or more, and that 10-second clip was shockingly close to the real thing. What is fascinating is that such a season pass should, in my estimation, look very different from a traditional TV broadcast, what with its multiple camera angles, announcers, scoreboard slug, etc. I wouldn’t want any of that: if I want to see the score, I can simply look up at the scoreboard as if I’m in the stadium; the sounds are provided by the crowd and PA announcer. To put it another way, the Apple Immersive Video Format, to a far greater extent than I thought possible, truly makes you feel like you are in a different place. The first thing that has been frustrating about the Vision Pro has been the overall absence of content; Apple, you produced a number of shows for launch, and then added nothing for months. The pace has picked up a bit, but that has revealed a second frustration: I think that your production stinks! One of the first pieces of sports content that you released was an MLS Season in Review immersive video in March 2024; I wrote in an Update : I have a lot to say about this video and, by extension, the Vision Pro specifically, and Apple generally. Let me work my way up, starting with the video: it’s terrible. The problem — one that was immediately apparent before I got into all of the pedantry below — is that while the format is immersive, the video is not immersive at all. This is the big problem: This is a screenshot of a stopwatch Mac app I downloaded because it supported keyboard shortcuts (and could thus use it while watching the immersive video). There are, in a five minute video, 54 distinct shots; that’s an average of one cut every six seconds! Moreover, there wasn’t that much gameplay: only 2 minutes and 32 seconds. Worse, some of the cuts happen in the same highlight — there was one play where there was a sideline view of the ball being passed up the field, and then it switched to a behind-the-goal view for the goal. I actually missed the goal the first time because I was so discombobulated that it took me a few seconds to even figure out where the ball was. In short, this video was created by a team that had zero understanding of the Vision Pro or why sports fans might be so excited about it. I never got the opportunity to feel like I was at one of these games, because the moment I started to feel the atmosphere or some amount of immersion there was another cut (and frankly, the cuts were so fast that I rarely if ever felt anything). This edit may have been perfect for a traditional 2D-video posted on YouTube; the entire point of immersive video on the Vision Pro, though, is that it is an entirely new kind of experience that requires an entirely new approach. I had the exact same response when you released a video of a Metallica concert last March : As for the concert itself, the video was indeed very cool. The opening shot following James Hetfield walking into the stadium was very compelling, and, well, it was immersive. And then you cut to another camera angle, and while that camera angle was also immersive, the video as a whole no longer was. What followed was a very enjoyable 30 minutes or so — I’ll probably watch it again — but it felt like a particularly neat documentary, not like I was at a concert. You had a monologue from each member of the band, you had shots of the crowd, you had three songs, all, as Apple proudly noted in their press release, shot with “14 Apple Immersive Video cameras using a mix of stabilized cameras, cable-suspended cameras, and remote-controlled camera dolly systems that moved around the stage.” That means the final product was edited together from those 14 cameras and the four interviews, which is to say it was a produced artifact of a live experience; at no point did I feel like I was at the concert. News flash: I didn’t watch the video again. I’m just not that interested in a TV-style documentary of Metallica. I added: We are nearly two years on from that introduction, and over a year beyond the actual launch of the Vision Pro, and there has yet to be an experience like I envisioned and thought was coming. What is frustrating is that the limiting factor is Apple itself: the company had 14 Apple Immersive Video cameras at this concert, but what I want is only one. I want an Apple Immersive Video camera planted in the audience, and the opportunity to experience the concert as if I were there, without an Apple editor deciding what I get to see and when. Needless to say, you probably already know why I thought Friday’s telecast was a big disappointment. I understand, Apple, why it’s not easy to record or even take a screenshot of a copyrighted game; please bear with me while I describe the experience using text. When I started the broadcast I had, surprise surprise, a studio show, specially tailored for the Apple Vision Pro. In other words, there was a dedicated camera, a dedicated presenter, a dedicated graphics team, etc. There was even a dedicated announcing team! This all sounds expensive and special, and I think it was a total waste. Here’s the thing that you don’t seem to get, Apple: the entire reason why the Vision Pro is compelling is because it is not a 2D screen in my living room; it’s an immersive experience I wear on my head. That means that all of the lessons of TV sports production are immaterial. In fact, it’s worse than that: insisting on all of the trappings of a traditional sports broadcast has two big problems: first, because it is costly, it means that less content is available than might be otherwise. And second, it makes the experience significantly worse . Jump ahead to game action. The best camera was this one on the scorer’s table: I have, as I noted, had the good fortune of sitting courtside at an NBA game, and this very much captured the experience. The biggest sensation you get by being close to the players is just how tall and fast and powerful they are, and you got that sensation with the Vision Pro; it was amazing. The problem, however, is that you would be sitting there watching Giannis or LeBron or Luka glide down the court, and suddenly you would be ripped out of the experience because the entirely unnecessary producer decided you should be looking through one of these baseline cameras under the hoop: These are also not bad seats! I’ve had the good fortune of sitting under the basket as well. These are the seats where you really get a sense of not just the power but also the physicality of an NBA game: I would gladly watch an entire game from here. But alas, I was only granted a few seconds, before the camera changed again. This was absolutely maddening — so maddening, that I am devoting a front page Article to a device no one but me cares about, in the desperate attempt to get someone at your company to listen. What makes the Vision Pro unique is the sense of presence: you really feel like you are wherever the Vision Pro takes you. In other words, when I’m wearing the Vision Pro, and the camera actually stays fixed — like, for example, when you set up a special fourth camera specifically for the Lakers Girls performance, which I think was the single longest continual shot in the entire broadcast — I get the sensation of sitting courtside at Crypto.com Arena, and it’s amazing. Suddenly $3,499 feels cheap! However, when I’m getting yanked around from camera to camera, the experience is flat out worse than just watching on TV. Just think about it: would it be enjoyable to be teleported from sideline to baseline to baseline and back again, completely at the whim of some producer, and often in the middle of the play, such that you have to get your bearings to even figure out what is going on? It would be physically uncomfortable — and that’s exactly what it was in the Vision Pro. What is so frustrating is that the right approach is so obvious that I wrote about it the day you announced this device: one camera, with no production. Just let me sit courtside and watch an NBA game. I don’t need a scoreboard, I can look up and see it. I don’t need a pre-game or post-game show, I can simply watch the players warm-up. I don’t need announcers, I’d rather listen to the crowd and the players on the court. You have made a device that, for this specific use case, is better than TV in every way, yet you insist on producing content for it like it is TV! Just stop! There will be more games this year; from your press release last October : Basketball fans will soon be able to experience NBA games like never before in Apple Immersive on Apple Vision Pro, with a selection of live Los Angeles Lakers matchups during the 2025-26 season, courtesy of Spectrum SportsNet. Viewers will feel the intensity of each game as if they were courtside, with perspectives impossible to capture in traditional broadcasts. The schedule of games will be revealed later this fall, with the first game streaming by early next year, available through the forthcoming Spectrum SportsNet app for Vision Pro. That schedule was announced last week , and there are six games total (including last Friday’s). Six! That’s it. I get it, though: producing these games is expensive: you need a dedicated studio host, a dedicated broadcast crew, multiple cameras, a dedicated production crew, and that costs money. Except you don’t need those things at all . All that you need to do, to not just create a good-enough experience but a superior experience, is simply set up the cameras and let me get from the Vision Pro what I can’t get from anything else: the feeling that I am actually there. And, I would add, you shouldn’t stop with the Lakers: there should be Vision Pro cameras at every NBA game, at every NFL game, at every NHL game, at every MLB game — they should be standard issue at every stadium in the world. There should be Vision Pro cameras at every concert hall and convention center. None of these cameras need a dedicated host or announcers or production crew, because the Vision Pro isn’t TV; it’s actual presence, and presence is all you need. $3,499 is a lot of money for physically uncomfortable TV; it’s an absolute bargain if it’s a way to experience any live experience in the world on demand. But, alas, you refuse. So nope, I still can’t recommend the Vision Pro, not because it’s heavy or expensive or has an external battery, but because you, Apple, have no idea what makes it special.

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Justin Duke 3 days ago

Levels of the Game

It seems fortuitous that my McPhee reading spree coincided with having watched Challengers . Like Challengers did sixty years after the fact, Levels of the Game uses tennis as an object of fascination in its own right—see also Infinite Jest and how much of that book, indeed all of DFW's worldview, was shaped by the relative weirdness of the tennis circuit compared to its team-based sport brethren. But even more than that, I'm interested in it as a canvas to explore systemic issues. Challengers touches on class nominally, but Guadagnino is at the end of the day much more interested in the love triangle that dominates the film, and in the idea of competition as a pure entity. McPhee has no problem dispensing with subtext and speaking plainly about the differences between his twin protagonists: one is white and comes from a solidly middle-class background; the other is black and comes from a solidly lower-class one. Side note: Arthur Ashe was born in Richmond, Virginia, and I live one block away from a boulevard named in his honor. You can credibly accuse Richmond of using Ashe as a bulwark against criticism, given how many of its other heroes are old white Confederates. But Ashe did in fact grow up here, and this book is not sparing in its description of how white Richmond rejected him. McPhee is not really interested in competition the way Guadagnino is; he describes Ashe and Graebner less like fierce competitors and more like two rival members of the same French New Wave. Part of this is truth—they were literal teammates playing in the Davis Cup together. That aspect of tennis, somewhat alien to me, is interesting in its own right. And while we know from the future that Ashe emerged as the superior and more exemplary player, McPhee is more interested in talking about form and style than raw prowess. This is a brief book—really just a snapshot of a single day—and as such it never outstays its welcome. By the last few passages, McPhee has perhaps run out of novel ways to describe a backhand. But it's a good read and a lot of fun. It speaks about style and grace and athletics, and it elevates the form of sport in such a way that sixty years after its original publication, it still feels not just prescient but modern.

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Lambda Land 6 days ago

Running

I guess I’m a runner now. I never liked running. I did swim team in high school and that was pretty much the only sport I enjoyed. During the pandemic I started running a little bit, but I didn’t know very much and when I moved to Salt Lake City to start my PhD I pretty much stopped running entirely because everywhere was so hilly. Last year I moved again and I saw that I had a nice, flat route I could take for running if I wanted to. I got some better shoes and started following the Couch to 5k training plan. I thought the first weeks would be too easy. I was wrong: every week turned out to be perfectly tuned to what I needed. I finished the training plan and just tried to get out on a run 2–3 times a week. I ran just shy of 200 miles last year! This is a big change for me health-wise. I was in a bad spot during the first few years of my PhD. I wanted to improve my cardiovascular health to improve longevity and cognitive function. I am really enjoying my runs now, and I feel energized and clearer-headed whenever I finish one. This is not something I thought I would ever say. Some things that made a big difference for me: Running is good. I enjoy getting out, and I enjoy seeing improvement both in my speed as well as in my alertness and mood post-run. I get a little grumpy on days that I don’t get to go for a run. Best kind of addiction I suppose.

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HeyDingus 2 weeks ago

2025 & 2026 Fitness Goals

I’m on a flight to Vegas for New Year’s with only about 30 minutes left before touchdown, so let’s quick recap a few fitness-related goals I set out to achieve in 2025. I have a friend who, a few years ago, set out to do 360,000 feet of elevation gain in a year. That seemed a big bite to chew, so I settled for 500 feet per day — or 182,500 feet in 2025. Well, I crushed it. I did a ton of hiking this year for work, plus a bunch of uphill ski touring last winter. They contributed to 319,914 feet of elevation gain tracked this year. I only counted ascents during workouts like hikes, skiing, and running, so my overall number with rock and ice climbing, and day-to-day life is likely much higher. Maybe I could have gone for 365,000 after all! (I love that the little tracker I built for my self tells me that I’m 275 days ahead of schedule on this goal. 😆 ) I aimed to run a total of 365 miles this year. One mile per day seemed pretty reasonable, but this goal was a real challenge. I love to run, but going through motions of getting ready and out the door are sometimes a challenge to push myself to do. And momentum plays a huge role. If I miss one run, I’m more likely to miss the next. Suddenly, I haven’t gone out in weeks and the mileage needed to catch up starts looking daunting. By the end of November I still needed to run over 100 miles — almost a full third of the total mileage for the year. I needed to decide if I was going to commit to it or not. Thanksgiving’s Turkey Trot was the clincher. I had a great time, and was all in. But it meant I needed to average four miles of running every day until the end of the year. I started putting in the miles, trying to go more than four miles any opportunity I got in an effort to get ahead. Six miles turned out to be my sweet spot, but I managed to eek in a few eight, 10, and even 13.1 (half-marathon) runs. Even so, getting runs in around the holidays and my work days that are often 10+ hours was a big challenge. I ran on treadmills (yuck), in the 0°F or colder temps, and when I was sick. But, in the end, I got it done. 114 miles over 17 run in December. Next year, I won’t leave it so late in the year. 😅 Though I’ve guided most of the Adirondack high peaks multiple times, there were still a few that I hadn’t yet summited. This had to be the year I got them done! I hiked the last of the 4,000+ foot tall peaks, Big Slide, on July 30th of this year. It was my 132nd high peak summit. Feels great to have that off my back! These number-based goals seem to do well to motivate me, especially when I can break them down to daily or weekly totals. With that I mind, I’m aiming for three 365-based objectives. I’m not setting an elevation goal because I think that just comes with my profession now, and I often have to defer to the mountains that my clients want to hike. But I’ll keep an eye on the total, and if I get close to 365,000 feet, you know I’ll be gunning for it! Mostly these goals are intended as motivation to continue to get outside and do what I love. The added bonus of getting to tick off a few more miles or pitches on the chart is sometimes just enough to get me off the couch. 2026, bring it on! HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts , shortcuts , wallpapers , scripts , or anything — please consider leaving a tip , checking out my store , or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated! I’m always happy to hear from you on social , or by good ol' email . A repeat of my 365 miles of running. (I’m going to think of it as seven miles a week this time. I know I can bust out six miles pretty easily at this point, so one of those and one more run a week would keep me on or ahead of schedule.) 365 miles of biking. (I didn’t hardly touch my bike this year, and I want to change that!) And 365 pitches of rock and ice climbing. (I haven’t even checked how many pitches I climbed this year… It could be a reasonable number, or might turn out to be a massive undertaking. We’ll see!)

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Chris Coyier 4 weeks ago

EMTBs in Bend

The decision is in from the Forest Service: Of the over 500 miles of singletrack maintained by COTA, about 320 miles of trails are in the Deschutes National Forest (DNF). As of December 2025, it is now allowed to use Class 1 pedal-assist e-bikes on 160 miles of those trails. Feels like this is on the right side of history. This just opens up the physical activity of mountain biking to more people (like me) and makes it more fun for others. Like how they stock lakes with fish… because it’s fun. This isn’t a fundamental shift to the trails, like allowing motorcycles on them would be. This is a more subtle, and welcome change. I don’t give a shit if I’m side-eyed on trails for riding my eMTB, but it’s nice to not be breaking the rules.

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Jason Fried 1 months ago

Quality: The Concept2 RowErg

The Concept2 RowErg is one of the highest quality products I've ever used. Had one for years now, feels like it'll last another 100. Simple construction, durable materials, low maintenance. Comically easy to assemble. Tips up for storage, leaving a tiny footprint. The PM5 display is simple B&W, no touchscreen, just a few easy-to-use-when-sweaty rubberized buttons. Just two D batteries that seem to last forever. No plugs, no charging, no cables needed. Roll it around on wheels, steady once flat. Perfectly grips the ground, no wobble, no rattle, no movement. The whole thing is just right. I've rarely encountered a product so well considered. They knew where to stop. To me, this is a pinnacle product. The model to build towards. No matter what you make, aim to make it as well as the Concept 2 RowErg. And all that for under $1000. One of the few products I've paid this much for that feels like a steal. No affiliation, just a fan. https://concept2.com/ergs/rowerg -Jason

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Alex White's Blog 2 months ago

Ten Pointless Facts About Me

A number of blogs I follow on RSS have posted this, so I figured why not! The challenge was started by David . Yes! Until I run out of the floss picks, which is right now. I feel bad about how wasteful floss picks are, but without them I never floss. Coffee, and way too much of it. Probably ~3 cups a day. I've tried to cut back by switching to tea after my first cup...but I'm not great at following this. Recently got a pair of running shoes with the desire to start running since it was getting too cold for cycling. Well, that didn't work out, but they are incredibly comfortable for walking! At home I switch to slippers (asian household). Hmm, probably anything with cherries. Love a cherry pie, or cherry fry pie! Waking up falls into one of two categories: My 3 year old barged into the bedroom and wants to play Tetris I have a 5am group ride, so I've gotta throw on my kit and get out the door Honestly, college was great, I'd love to go back to a time before a 9-5, so maybe 21? Second choice would be right now, pretty happy with my family and our life. Maybe 4-5 baseball caps that I'll wear when my hair gets too long and I don't want to dig out the dog clippers for a haircut. Then there's a countless number of winter beanies. I guess helmets count as well, so two of those. A picture of a bike wheel with a circuit board on it that makes light patterns as you ride. Someone in my group ride last night was showing it off. There was some superhero show on Netflix with a big group of young adults. I don't remember the title or anything else about it, but it was awful. I started coding when I was 12, so I pretty much always wanted to be in tech (I mean, beyond the fireman/astronaut phase). I think I also really wanted to run my own software business. Unfortunately never made that a reality. And that’s it, those are the Ten Pointless Facts About Me. Maybe you found it interesting and learned something about me? If you want to take part, here’s the questions in a copy/paste format to dump into your own blog post… My 3 year old barged into the bedroom and wants to play Tetris I have a 5am group ride, so I've gotta throw on my kit and get out the door

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fLaMEd fury 2 months ago

Golfing Weekend

What’s going on, Internet? A mate from back home came up for the weekend, staying Friday and Saturday nights. We were meant to be going to a gig on Friday, but it got postponed until May and I feel will most probably be cancelled. (Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, if you were wondering.) The plan was to play golf on Saturday, but we ended up squeezing in a round Friday afternoon as well as we had no gig to get ready for. Nine holes at Chamberlain Golf Course on Friday, then 18 holes at Waiheke Golf Club the next day. Turns out 18 is too much. I definitely prefer nine. Playing on a bigger course really showed how much I need to work on my driving. Some of those holes were 400 metres long. Friday night we grabbed dinner and beers at Saint Leonard’s Brewery. Enjoyed, as I’d been meaning to get down there since moving up here. After Saturday’s golfing effort we walked across the road to The Heke expecting to do the same, but there was a $30 cover charge for an event. We skipped it and wandered up the road to Alibi Brewers Lounge instead and enjoyed some damn good food and beer. Hey, thanks for reading this post in your feed reader! Want to chat? Reply by email or add me on XMPP , or send a webmention . Check out the posts archive on the website.

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Alex White's Blog 2 months ago

Saddles & Donuts

I'm an avid cyclist, have been for the past 2 years. I got into the sport as a way to get more active, to get me off the couch and away from the computer. At the start, I'd take my mountain bike leftover from college down the local bike path, and come home winded after 7 miles. Since then my obsession has evolved into multiple bikes, lycra and a whole lotta miles. One of my favorite parts of the sport is the community. People talk about how hard it is to make friends as you get older, and this is 100% true. Even close friends have become distant as our days are filled with work, daycare drop-offs, weekend activities to tire out the kid, etc. When I got in cycling, I didn't even realize the community aspect existed. About half a year into things, I joined my first group ride, and discovered the other half of the sport that I was missing. For those unfamiliar, a group ride in cycling is a lot more than a couple guys riding down a road together. There's organization, responsibility and coordination. A group will either organize into a single line, or (for larger groups) 2 columns of riders side-by-side. Those at the front will rotate to the back at a regular interval, ensuring everyone benefits from drafting (drafting behind another cyclist can net you 2-5 extra mph for the same effort). Members call out hazards and repeat the call across the line, for example "car back", "gravel right", "slowing/stopping" etc. Ride leaders ensure nobody gets dropped (in a no-drop ride) and help out when mechanical issues strike. It's really cool to see in motion! A few weeks ago we had a newcomer join one of my groups. It was his first group ride, so he wasn't familiar with the norms, signals, calls, etc. It really struck out to me how much disruption it caused (not his fault, everyone learns at some point). Our pacing was off and we nearly had a few accidents as the rider misunderstood signals. For example, a cyclist pulling (leading a column), taps their hip when they are ready to rotate to the back. This means they pull off to the side, slow down a bit and join the back. The next up rider typically has to increase speed to fill the gap and keep the group moving. This new rider was drafting behind the pull and must have mirrored that signal they saw, causing me to assume they were pulling off as well. I started to accelerate, only to find they were instead slowing down and not pulling off, nearly leading to a collision. At one point during the ride, a more seasoned rider spoke with the newbie, explaining some of the norms. One thing he said really stood out to me. He explained how each member of the group gains a sense of each other. We intuitively know how each other move, which helps to keep pace and prevent accidents. We know when another rider is having an off day, which let's us account for that and help out. Riding with a group not only establishes friendship as you share a donut during a cafe ride, or a beer after a grueling A-pace ride, you also gain a subconscious understanding and trust of each other. You know how to read signals just from the way someone is pedaling or moving on their saddle. You gain a trust that the rider behind won't run into you, or that they'll takeover when you've pulled beyond your capacity. You know that when you get a flat or pop a spoke, at least one person will stop with you to hold the light while you try to get back on the road.

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Sebastiano Tronto 2 months ago

The hike

The hike

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Preah's Website 3 months ago

Running Regularly, And Other Habits

A few months ago, I started exercising regularly. I mean, I've been "exercising regularly" on and off for years, to no one's surprise, but I have been actually consistently doing it for probably my longest streak yet now. Also to no one's surprise, this has improved by mental and physical health, made me feel more confident, and expelled anxious energy. Here's a timeline of exercising in my life thus far: As a teen, my brother and his wife had a membership to a really bougie gym . I went sometimes, skinny as a twig, and thought it was pretty fun. They had a sauna, climbing wall, pool, hot yoga, guided cycling, the works. Eventually it cost too much money for my brother to continue going, and I didn't even attend that much anyway after a while. Use parents' home gym to work out every other weekday. Helped to be at home, as I have agoraphobic-adjacent tendencies, especially related to driving. Eventually they dismantled their home gym to use the room for something else. I used the free app Caliber to track and plan workouts, which I still recommend for people new to working out who don't know where to start. Lower standards for exercising and do it solely in my bedroom. I found that if I saw exercising as something you need a bunch of equipment and a gym for, it actually kept me from exercising more. I kept one pair of dumbbells in my room as my only equipment, and started working out every weekday. I was also off-put by having to change clothes to work out every day, since I get all sweaty, so I simply didn't wear clothes. That's uh, not something you can do at the gym. This is also when I started using the app Hevy , which I still use to this day. You can find curated workout routines for free and track them easily, with little videos on how to do sets. Get membership at Planet Fitness, because my job at the time covered gym expenses. This showed me the power of gyms, and how much easier they make working out. Having an actual treadmill, weights, and cycling machinery was awesome, and I started running the most I ever had since high school P.E class. I didn't do much strength training because I was (am) socially anxious and scared of people nearby. This was ultimately the downside of having a gym, because I had to drive to it. It wasn't that far, I just really am that anxious about driving. Present day, I use my fiancé's parents' home gym because it's on the same property. It has everything I need: dumbbells, treadmill, air conditioning. This means I now work out 4 days a week for an hour, which has been fantastic. I'm still working on being able to run longer and faster, and lifting more than 30 lbs. I do about 30-40 minutes strength training, and 20-30 minutes running usually. When I'm really feeling unmotivated, sometimes I only run, or I do high-incline walking instead of running if my leg muscles are feeling sensitive. From the beginning, the point was very much just doing some exercise each day, no matter how small. A walk, 10 minutes at the gym, whatever, just go do it . I can't really say it has gotten much easier to exercise; I'm procrastinating going to work out this second, writing this post... Something that helps me go do something I am mentally resisting doing, such as working out, has been to-do lists. This doesn't work for everyone, but I've found that having an annoying notification on my phone, set to repeat every day, gets me to Do The Thing. The satisfaction of clearing that day's tasks is phenomenal as well. I use Todoist for this. The free plan is more than enough for me, personally, and I even have a shared to-do list I share with my fiancé. This includes a grocery list, upcoming plans with friends and family, and a whole shared project just for wedding planning. My routines include simple stuff for now, such as working out, reading scriptures for 30 minutes 1 , and attending catechumen class every Wednesday at 20:00. Having a to-do list for my habits has been immensely useful, especially sorting them by day of the week, and having individual Home/School/Work projects. Hopefully I'll keep exercising like I am, and maybe even more, with more motivation. Subscribe via email or RSS If you're curious, I use the Orthodox Study Bible , and am a catechumen of the Eastern Orthodox Christian Church currently, under the OCA jurisdiction. My religious journey/life is a whole thing that I'm not sure I'll post much about besides references, but feel free to email/Signal me about it if you're interested. ↩ As a teen, my brother and his wife had a membership to a really bougie gym . I went sometimes, skinny as a twig, and thought it was pretty fun. They had a sauna, climbing wall, pool, hot yoga, guided cycling, the works. Eventually it cost too much money for my brother to continue going, and I didn't even attend that much anyway after a while. Use parents' home gym to work out every other weekday. Helped to be at home, as I have agoraphobic-adjacent tendencies, especially related to driving. Eventually they dismantled their home gym to use the room for something else. I used the free app Caliber to track and plan workouts, which I still recommend for people new to working out who don't know where to start. Lower standards for exercising and do it solely in my bedroom. I found that if I saw exercising as something you need a bunch of equipment and a gym for, it actually kept me from exercising more. I kept one pair of dumbbells in my room as my only equipment, and started working out every weekday. I was also off-put by having to change clothes to work out every day, since I get all sweaty, so I simply didn't wear clothes. That's uh, not something you can do at the gym. This is also when I started using the app Hevy , which I still use to this day. You can find curated workout routines for free and track them easily, with little videos on how to do sets. Get membership at Planet Fitness, because my job at the time covered gym expenses. This showed me the power of gyms, and how much easier they make working out. Having an actual treadmill, weights, and cycling machinery was awesome, and I started running the most I ever had since high school P.E class. I didn't do much strength training because I was (am) socially anxious and scared of people nearby. This was ultimately the downside of having a gym, because I had to drive to it. It wasn't that far, I just really am that anxious about driving. Present day, I use my fiancé's parents' home gym because it's on the same property. It has everything I need: dumbbells, treadmill, air conditioning. This means I now work out 4 days a week for an hour, which has been fantastic. I'm still working on being able to run longer and faster, and lifting more than 30 lbs. I do about 30-40 minutes strength training, and 20-30 minutes running usually. When I'm really feeling unmotivated, sometimes I only run, or I do high-incline walking instead of running if my leg muscles are feeling sensitive. If you're curious, I use the Orthodox Study Bible , and am a catechumen of the Eastern Orthodox Christian Church currently, under the OCA jurisdiction. My religious journey/life is a whole thing that I'm not sure I'll post much about besides references, but feel free to email/Signal me about it if you're interested. ↩

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DYNOMIGHT 3 months ago

Shoes, Algernon, Pangea, and Sea Peoples

I fear we are in the waning days of the People Read Blog Posts About Random Well-Understood Topics Instead of Asking Their Automatons Era. So before I lose my chance, here is a blog post about some random well-understood topics. You probably know that people can now run marathons in just over 2 hours. But do you realize how insane that is? That’s an average speed of 21.1 km per hour, or 13.1 miles per hour. You can think of that as running a mile in 4:35 (world record: 3:45 ), except doing it 26.2 times in a row. Or, you can think of that as running 100 meters in 17.06 seconds (world record: 9.58 seconds ), except doing it 421.6 times in a row. I’d guess that only around half of the people reading this could run 100 meters in 17.06 seconds once . This crazy marathon running speed is mostly due to humans being well-adapted for running and generally tenacious. But some of it is due to new shoes with carbon-fiber plates that came out in the late 2010s. The theory behind these shoes is quite interesting. When you run, you mainly use four joints: If you haven’t heard of the last of these, they’re pronounced “ met -uh-tar-so-fuh- lan -jee-ul” or “MTP”. These are the joints inside your feet behind your big toes. Besides sounding made-up, they’re different from the other joints in a practical way: The other joints are all attached to large muscles and tendons that stretch out and return energy while running sort of like springs. These can apparently recover around 60% of the energy expended in each stride. (Kangaroos seemingly do even better .) But the MTP joints are only attached to small muscles and tendons, so the energy that goes into them is mostly lost. These new shoe designs have complex constructions of foam and plates that can do the same job as the MTP joints, but—unlike the MTP joints—store and return that energy to the runner. A recent meta-analysis estimated that this reduced total oxygen consumption by ~2.7% and marathon times by ∼2.18%. I wonder if these shoes are useful as a test case for the Algernon argument . In general, that argument is that there shouldn’t be any simple technology that would make humans dramatically smarter, since if there was, then evolution would have already found it. You can apply the same kind of argument to running: We have been optimized very hard by evolution to be good at running, so there shouldn’t be any “easy” technologies that would make us dramatically faster or more efficient. In the context of the shoes, I think that argument does… OK? The shoes definitely help. But carbon fiber plates are pretty hard to make, and the benefit is pretty modest. Maybe this is some evidence that Algernon isn’t a hard “wall”, but rather a steep slope. Or, perhaps thinking is just different from running. If you start running , you will get better at it, in a way that spills over into lots of other physical abilities. But there doesn’t seem to be any cognitive task that you can practice and make yourself better at other cognitive tasks. If you have some shoes that will make me 2.7% smarter, I’ll buy them. Pangea was a supercontinent that contained roughly all the land on Earth. At the beginning of the Jurassic 200 million years ago, it broke up and eventually formed the current continents. But isn’t the Earth 4.5 billion years old? Why would all the land stick together for 95% of that time and then suddenly break up? The accepted theory is that it didn’t. Instead, it’s believed that Earth cycles between super-continents and dispersed continents, and Pangea is merely the most recent super-continent. But why would there be such a cycle? We can break that down into two sub-questions. First, why would dispersed continents fuse together into a supercontinent? Well, you can think of the Earth as a big ball of rock, warmed half by primordial heat from when the planet formed and half by radioactive decay. Since the surface is exposed to space, it cools, resulting in solid chunks that sort of slide around on the warm magma in the upper mantle. Some of those chunks are denser than others, which causes them to sink into the mantle a bit and get covered with water. So when a “land chunk” crashes into a “water chunk”, the land chunk slides on top. But if two land chunks crash into each other, they tend to crumple together into mountains and stick to each other. You can see this by comparing this map of all the current plates: To this map of elevation: OK, but once a super-continent forms, why would it break apart? Well, compared to the ocean floor, land chunks are thicker and lighter. So they trap heat from inside the planet sort of like a blanket. With no cool ocean floor sliding back into the warm magma beneath, that magma keeps getting warmer and warmer. After tens of millions of years, it heats up so much that it stretches the land above and finally rips it apart. It’s expected that a new supercontinent “Pangea Ultima” will form in 250 million years. By that time, the sun will be putting out around 2.3% more energy, making things hotter. On top of that, it’s suspected that Pangea Ultima, for extremely complicated reasons , will greatly increase the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere, likely making the planet uninhabitable by mammals. So we’ve got that going for us. The Sea Peoples are a group of people from… somewhere… that appeared in the Eastern Mediterranean around 1200 BC and left a trail of destruction from modern Turkey down to modern Egypt. They are thought to be either a cause or symptom of the Late Bronze Age collapse . But did you know the Egyptians made carvings of the situation while they were under attack? Apparently the battle looked like this : In the inscription, Pharaoh Ramesses III reports: Those who reached my boundary, their seed is not; their hearts and their souls are finished forever and ever. As for those who had assembled before them on the sea, the full flame was their front before the harbor mouths, and a wall of metal upon the shore surrounded them. They were dragged, overturned, and laid low upon the beach; slain and made heaps from stern to bow of their galleys, while all their things were cast upon the water. Metatarsophalangeal

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Owen Lacey 4 months ago

When vibe-coding went wrong

Recently, I've been coding more in my spare time. It's becoming dangerously close to what you might describe as a hobby, and is one of those things where the more stupid side-projects I pick up the more ideas for stupid side projects I have. Github copilot has been both a blessing and a curse for this; it's enabled me to mess around with things absent-mindedly, chucking things together with barely any forethought. Without it, I'm confident I'd barely do any coding in my spare time. Do you just not enjoy coding? I love coding, but it's very "big brain", and after a day of braining I want to explore. Burnout is real, so if I wanted to keep doing this I needed to set myself some ground rules: If the answer to either of those ever became "no", play-time's over. Laptop shut. We go again another time. I'd been wanting to build on my FPL tool for ages (the first iteration of which I wrote about in my maiden blog post here ). To give a brief bit of background, I use Google OR Tools to pick a team that maximizes the points the players are predicted to score. I love this side-project because it combines my love of maths and football, and enjoy doing the odd tech talk on the subject and meeting fellow FPL nerds before/after. The problem is that the FPL API's expected points (XP) model performed poorly for me last season, stupid robots! I thought I'd give making my own models a go. Now, I'm not a data scientist by any stretch. In my tech talks I joke that I still think python is a species of snake, which gets one or two polite chuckles at best. There was absolutely no way I'd be able to learn how to develop my own machine learning models in my spare time, so I thought I'd try a bit of vibe-coding to see what I could come up with. Initial progress was amazing. I very quickly "vibed" (hate myself) with Claude models, maybe the excessive emojis gave me the seratonin hit that kept me going. Its hyper-positivity made me think I'd stumbled upon an absolute gold mine. In a single evening, I developed a high-performing suite of ML Models that could relatively accurately calculate a player's XP for a given gameweek. I used almost my entire copilot premium request quota for the month in a single weekend. Ground-rules 1 & 2 very much being respected so far. From the title of the post, you know that 💩's gonna hit the 🪭, and that's exactly what happened. Fast-forward to the present, and I've not touched this side project in months, and can't see myself picking it back up - though I'm tempted to start from scratch ("don't do it, Owen!"). Now, let it be known that I'm definitely pro-AI, so keep that in mind as I rip it to shreds for the remainder of the post. The aim of this post is to be a cautionary tale, and hopefully articulate some lessons learned. If I were to describe vibe-coding to someone who's never used it before, I'd say it was like pair-coding with a super-eager junior developer with an astronomical velocity. The only difference would be that its skillset far surpassed mine (especially in python) so it was like a senior developer's know-how with perhaps a less-experienced developer's, well, experience. I would tell it "the sky is pink" and it would respond with "You're absolutely right!"; it's tendency to challenge me was very small, which is dangerous when you haven't got a clue what you're doing. Over-correcting quickly became a massive issue for me; I would tell it I liked README files so I can use that documentation later. Before long it felt like I had more files than files in the repo, not exactly the time-saver I was looking for. It coded extremely defensively, and the code was littered with feature switches and fallbacks as if I were supporting thousands of users that required backwards-compatibility. As I fixed the issues, I found more and more hidden false-positives that I'd need to take note of to come back to later. As the code became more and more branched it became impossible to debug, and if it was hard for me you can assume it also became hard for the model. The worse things got, the more trigger-happy I got with the enter key. This quickly snowballed and my velocity plummeted. I heard copilot performs better if you're mean to it; this sadly wasn't the case for me. I'd gone from building multiple ML models in a single evening, to spending an entire weekend (well, when the two year old was in bed) trying to retrain the models based on what I thought would be a small change. Technical debt is real, copilot had made it so the entire lifespan of a project, life and death, could be condensed into a much smaller time period. At the very least this has been therapeutic for me, but how can I avoid stuff like this in future? I want to keep coding in my spare time, but ideally I'd have something to show for it. If I were to summarize my lessons learned, I'd probably say: I hope this hasn't dissuaded you. I've vibe-coded since with more success, and I'm sure I will do in future. The side-project in question is here . Take a look for yourself, warts and all - it's an absolute state. Let me know your vibe-coding pitfalls, I'd love to hear them! Am I enjoying myself? Am I making progress? Start small : get an MVP working end-to-end as fast as you possibly can. Maybe don't start with 6 pristine ML models all at once. Copilot tends to recommend waterfall-style approaches, so be wary of the plans it generates and ask yourself what's going to bring value earliest. Micro-manage : the less your hands are on the wheel, the harder it's going to get. It's very easy to just go "yeah yeah whatever" as you get less interested. I would sooner stop before I started spamming 'Continue' in future.

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Herman's blog 4 months ago

The ROI of exercise

I workout 4 days a week and I love it. It's the foundation of my morning routine, following spending 45 minutes drinking coffee on the couch and watching the sun come up with Emma. I've been doing this for a few years now and while I struggled (as everyone does) in the beginning, I can't imagine not exercising in the morning now. On the rare occasion that I do skip a workout, I feel it missing throughout the day as a lack of vitality and less mental clarity. Let's perform a thought experiment to work out the return on investment of exercise. For this let's first assume that exercise does nothing else but expand your lifespan (not extend; since it's not just adding frail years to the end but instead injects extra years in each stage of life). We can ignore the effects it has on strength, focus, feelings of accomplishment, and mental health for now. It's well understood that a good exercise routine is a mixture of strength, mobility, and cardio; and is performed at a decent intensity for 2-4 days a week for at least 45 minutes. This could be a combination of weight lifting, yoga, running, tennis, hiking, or whatever floats your boat. This totals about 3 hours a week, or 156 hours per year. If we extrapolate that over an adult lifetime, that's about 8,500 hours of exercise, or about a year of solid physical activity.

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neilzone 5 months ago

My third Airsoft game day and perhaps I am finally getting the hang of it

I played my third Airsoft game day today, at Red Alert, near Thatcham, again. It was great fun, and, for the first time, I felt that I might be getting the hang of Airsoft. Sure, it is just running around and shooting toy guns at each other, but the first couple of times, I really had no clue what was going on, or what to do. This time was a lot better. I did have to fight a bit with my safety glasses sweating up today, and I spent part of one of the games with less than ideal vision, but I was still reasonably effective. I resorted to a sort of headband, but over my forehead, and that worked pretty well. As it gets cooler, perhaps this will become less of a problem. I played more aggressively than before, in terms of running up and taking on the opposition. I did this whether I was attacking or defending, so more of the “front line” than hanging around at the back. I guess that I was less worried about being hit, and more keen to be involved. It doesn’t hurt too much, and I go back to respawn and start again. I think that not having to think quite so much about the mechanics of the rifle helped, as I could just get on and use it, and focus on other things. Getting used to the site layout is helpful. I also tried to make use of some of the things that I had been taught in the practice evenings, especially use of cover, which definitely helped. I spent some time being sneaky and taking the long way round to flank the enemy to attack from their rear, which was also fun, but it takes a long time to walk back to respawn, which (especially on a hot day, as today was) was a bit of a pain. But I got some sneaky kills in that way. I’m still getting used to the range of my rifle, which is a lot less than I had expected. I don’t think that it is a particularly bad rifle / range - it is not noticeably worse than other people’s similar rifles - but it is just less than I would have thought. I did pretty well with it, in terms of the number of kills, so I have no real complaints. I am not looking to spend much more money on a nascent hobby at the moment, but I could be tempted to upgrade the spring and see if that has a positive effect (within chrono limits for the site). The first two times, I played on semi-automatic the whole time (one BB per pull of the trigger). This time, I experimented with full auto, so BBs firing for as long as I keep the trigger depressed. I firing no more than three or four rounds at a time (short bursts), and that worked quite well. It did mean that I got through a lot more ammunition - about £10 worth, by my estimation. Some games, I got through three hicap magazines, and into a fourth. A sling has made a massive difference, in terms of comfort, and I’ve experimented with the attachment points. This has been a good additional purchase. I think I’d like to give pyrotechnics a go at some point. Smoke grenades, or perhaps a frag grenade. But that feels like an unnecessary distraction at the moment, and I should get better with my rifle first. Not terrible, but definitely room for improvement. I did quite a bit of running, and sprinting between cover, but by the end of the day, I was definitely feeling it.

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HeyDingus 5 months ago

Burning the Candle

Here I am, again, blogging past 11pm to try to keep up with my Blaugust goal. Although I am typically a night owl, this week I’ve been both night owl and early bird and it’s catching up with me. Tomorrow, I have to wake up at 4:30am (in just five and half hours — yikes!) to be at a local trailhead ready to start hiking at 6am. It’ll be a long day of hiking and climbing up the Trap Dike — a very distinctive slot and slab that rises from the lake a the bottom of the Mt. Colden to its summit — with I think about 12 miles round-trip with several thousand feet of elevation gain, guiding clients on a rope system up through the steep and exposed terrain. This is after a long day of personal climbing today, in which I was out from 10:30am until 9pm climbing at various crags in the area, culminating in a challenging route that I put up for ADK Climb Club . Which was after a big day of guiding climbing yesterday from 8:30am till 4pm, and then a 5+ mile trail run up a mountain after work for ADK Run Club . Which was after a big day on Monday of guiding climbing in the morning, and then doing personal climbing until after dark. Which was after a day of canoeing with my wife in which we checked out a route that spits us out into the lake near our house. And then on Friday I’ll have a big day of guiding a long hike (13 miles) up Gothics mountain with some clients that I took rock climbing on Monday. Which will be followed by three days of canoe camping with my wife over the weekend. Which will be followed by an afternoon of guiding rock climbing. Which will be followed by — hopefully! — a rest day. 😮‍💨 To be clear, this is in no way a complaint. I love doing all these activities. I feel so fortunate to live and work in a place with such access to my favorite outdoor activities, and a great community of friends (and clients) to share it all with. It’s just that I feel, sometimes, lately, a bit worn thin. I know I need to take more time to recover so that I can perform at my best. But. There’s so much that I want to do, and any day of good weather feels like a gift that I shouldn’t squander. These lyrics from Hamilton ’ s “ Non-Stop” come to mind: How do you write like you’re running out of time? Write day and night like you’re running out of time? Every day you fight like you’re running out of time Like you’re running out of time Are you running out of time? This is post #6/31 for Blaugust 2025 . HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts , shortcuts , wallpapers , scripts , or anything — please consider leaving a tip , checking out my store , or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated! I’m always happy to hear from you on social , or by good ol' email .

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Weakty 10 months ago

What's 10k in Vegas?

I can't say I love Las Vegas. But I'm here. And I will say it's nice to be outside in a t-shirt after weeks of snow and ice in Toronto. I'm here for a work retreat, but I also came a day early to participate in the Las Vegas half marathon/10k. I'll probably be doing the 10k today, even though I signed up for the half. I just didn't get the training I needed, and I also hurt my back last week. Doing a half marathon isn't maybe the smartest idea, especially before a work retreat.

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Andrey Petrov - Shazow 12 months ago

Conditioning

I think of conditioning as a long-term conversation between decentralized components. After breaking my foot, I’ve been working on conditioning all of the tiny ligaments to properly support movements and impacts I haven’t practiced in months. I can’t just say “hey foot, you’re not broken anymore, go back to normal.” I have to slowly and incrementally reinforce each change. Similar to learning a musical instrument by training our fingers to move a specific way, over and over – we’re telling all of the related “muscle memory” that this is an important motion we need to be good at. Like lifting weights, we’re telling the muscle “you’re going to continually exceed your capacity, so get bigger and stronger.” It’s not just a one-and-done: Conditioning takes time and repetition, because the channel is low-bandwidth and lossy, and the micro-changes required are many and sequential. When we train our dog to not be reactive about visitors (or to salivate when the bell rings), we can use positive reinforcement to rewire the brain with the help of oxytocin signals. Treats, “good dog”, or even hugs can all be forms of communicating that the precursor to some stressor is actually okay. Just like humans working with a therapist, we try to condition the sources of our anxieties to take on different frames (or acclimate to our fears). Similar to positive reinforcement with oxytocin, there is cortisol and dopamine and other hormones/neurotransmitters which communicate desirable/undesirable conditioning between different aspects of our minds and bodies. I really like the model that we’re not monoliths, but rather a bunch of disparate components who are stuck together. Our brain can’t simply tell our body to shed fat and build muscle, our tic disorder to chill out, our ligaments to support wider range of motion… but our brain can slowly and methodically facilitate these changes by communicating them through conditioning! What does this mean for society? If we break out of the monolith mindset of our bodies, we can also think of communities, corporations, nations, species as “mega organisms” who suffer from inefficient/indirect communication. We may condition our societies towards democratic practices or into accepting authoritarian rule. To justice or inequity. It can happen slowly through reinforcement, or it can snap like a bone breaking from ever-increasing pressure. Those suffering may ache like a festering infection, but we can acclimate (or amputate). What’s the difference between Jeff Bezos and a rando who woke up with a hundred billion dollars? Bezos has preconditioned infrastructure to achieve his endeavours. He can take on logistics, media, space exploration, investment, and who knows what else. What can rando do without spending months/years “conditioning” their assets to support their endeavours? Just think of how long it would take to even hire a sizeable team of good people! This is conditioning. In many ways, the peripersonal space of powerful individuals expands far beyond their wealth. It extends to that which they have conditioned to advance their pursuits. I want us to condition ourselves out of thinking like monoliths. How do we do that? We should condition ourselves to think in terms of conditioning, rather than quick drastic swings that bring injury after injury. (“We need to be good at lifting heavy weights, so we should lift the heavy weights immediately.”) We can set ambitious goals that are beyond the ability of a single component, or even a single person or nation, and we need to figure out how to communicate them properly to all participants–repeatedly, consistently! All participants need to practice them, repeatedly and consistently! Let’s not ignore our pains, but take time to listen and understand where the pain is really coming from and why, and how to address it. But most importantly: Recognize when we’re being conditioned into something we don’t want to be.

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Playtank 1 years ago

Combat as Sport

This post is a continuation on a previous combat design post . Sport can be used as a layer on top of your gunplay or melee. Perhaps as added fairness (a sense of “good balancing”) or as a focus on competition. It can also be the whole purpose of your project. A competitive game needs to have a space for players to git gud and to compare their results to that of other players. Or to be the first to figure out winning strategies that can give them an edge. If you want to tell me I’m wrong or contact me for other reasons, do so in comments or to [email protected] . Now let’s dive into competition and how you can approach designing a “sport.” When designing anything, I find it helpful to first set up the terminology. This doesn’t have to be the exactly right words that other people use, necessarily. They’re here to help with the game design, not to become some type of definition. Chess is an incredible game design. It’s symmetrical, it has no random elements, and each pawn has its own clearly defined rules. Rook moves this way, bishop moves that way, grid has 8×8 individual square spaces, etc. This is what makes its game design deterministic . Doing a specific move under certain circumstances will always yield the same resulting game state. Because of this, pitting two players against each other is a test of skill. Who can predict what the opponent will do, make the most compelling opening move, or think the farthest ahead. It becomes a contest of ability. “In order to improve your game,” said legendary Cuban chess master José Capablanca , “you must study the endgame before everything else. For whereas the endings can be studied and mastered by themselves, the middle game and opening must be studied in relation to the end game.” Chess is a great example of a game that must be studied and practiced. Because of its determinism (no random or otherwise unknown elements), yet deeply complex state-space, it’s often considered a hard game to be good at, and if you’re not good you will simply not win. Poker, another highly competitive game, adds elements of player uncertainty and randomisation and is therefore not deterministic. The card combinations that form your playable hands are all known and their relative values are also known, but because players hide their cards from each other in their respective hands, and because of the luck of the draw, you can’t be entirely certain what another player is up to. They may be bluffing with their all-in, or they may indeed have a royal straight flush to give them confidence. As the game continues, more of the 52 cards from the deck will be revealed and you will have more “state” to consider, but you can’t be completely certain unless you already personally have the highest possible hand. This uncertainty and randomisation adds an additional layer to the competition. It doesn’t make poker a better game than chess, but it alters the required skillset. It’s not enough to master each hand, you must also play the bluffing game and start considering the myriad options based on limited information and mathematical probabilities. Chess and poker are incredibly mature games compared to most video games. They’ve been played for hundreds of years and countless kinks have been ironed out. Alternative ways of playing have come up that deal with common speed bumps and other issues. Video games, on the other hand, are released in the 100s every day, and because of this, some of them will come with unintended exploits. I’m personally not a very competitive player. I often play competitive games anyway to study them, but I very rarely win and pretty much never come up with any winning strategies. In 30-some years as a gamer, there’s just been the one exception: Battlefleet Gothic Armada . While playing the beta before launch, I realized that the Imperial ships with their heavily reinforced prows were almost immune to damage coming from the front. So I equipped some ships with weapons that didn’t require them to turn (many other weapons fire broadsides in the game), instructed them at the game’s start to only face forwards and to stay far away and fire these weapons near max range. They would sometimes move slowly towards their targets and then use a ramming action to deal the killing blow, but only against enemies that were already accelerating towards me. At first, I didn’t lose a single match with this setup! My ships took little to no damage and were able to destroy enemy ships consistently. For various reasons, I never really kept playing the game after launch, but this still serves as a decent example of exploitation. In game theory, a dominant strategy is a strategy that will always win, and that most players will eventually gravitate towards. It’s not clear whether my prow-forward approach was ultimately such a strategy, but consider it an example. The opposite of a dominant strategy is a dominated strategy , which is any strategy that is always inferior and that players will quickly abandon for other strategies. No one in a competitive first-person shooter would stick to only the knife, for example, unless there’s such a massive skill disparity that it can be done for laughs. It can be fine to have these strategies in a game, as long as you include them consciously and provide ways to mitigate them. Going for a knockout can be considered a dominant strategy in boxing, since it ends the match before the last round, but though it gives an edge to fighters that can consistently hit very hard it’s never guaranteed that they will end every match on a knockout, and hitting hard all the time may be more exhausting than playing a longer boxing game. If you are terrible at chess, you are terrible at chess. There’s no way to sugar-coat it. Other players are simply better than you. It’s the same if you play StarCraft and can’t peak out at the actions per minute (APM) of the pro players, that may span 180-1,000 APM. When games reach this level of competition, many players will bounce off. Psychologically, the knowledge that you are inferior and that there’s nothing you can do about it isn’t all that motivating. Some players will find motivation in this space anyway and push on. But another way to get around it is to let players blame the game. In competitive Magic: The Gathering , a common setup is to determine a winner by playing a best of three. This way, fewer players will feel that they lost because of a bad hand or lucky/unlucky draw. If they do end up losing anyway, they can still blame a bad hand or unlucky draw, however. If they had only played one more match , they may think. This is similar to the “just one more time” mentality that can come up when you play a fast-paced fighting game, or other high-paced game. Your opponent was just lucky; you will get them next time. It wasn’t your fault, it was chance, luck, poor balancing, the sun in your eye, etc. This is a good thing to have in a game design if you don’t want to cater it exclusively to potential hardcore players. It prevents beginners from bouncing off the game if they get to have a good run now and then, even without the skills the game would normally require. In the words of game designer and former competitive Street Fighter player David Sirlin, “Any decent competitive game needs to allow you to counter the opponent if you know what he will do. What happens, though, when your enemy knows that you know what he will do? He needs a way to counter you. He’s said to be on another level than you, or another ‘yomi layer.'” Yomi (読み, and not 黄泉; the latter is the underworld) means ‘reading’ in the sense that you can read your opponent. In Sirlin’s book, Playing to Win , he describes Yomi layers as levels of knowledge. You know what your opponent will do (layer 1), but they also know that you know (layer 2), and you know that they know that you know (layer 3). Each layer requires the game design to provide a counter action so that players can act on the information they have (or think they have). “[T]here need only be support up to yomi layer 3,” continues Sirlin, “as yomi layer 4 loops back around to layer 0.” Thinking in terms of yomi layers can help more areas than competition, however. If you look at a game enemy design in terms of yomi layers, you can design encounters that challenge players in more ways than the straightforward features they use and you can allow the player to feel clever about it along the way. The blue shell in the Mario Kart series has always been a bit contentious. It’s a knockout feature that specifically targets the leading kart and has ruined countless one-sided runs. According to interviews, the reason it was added was to keep races interesting up until the end, since it would often become a foregone conclusion who would finish first before its introduction. Especially in groups with high skill disparity, such as adults playing agaoinst young kids. When we talk about it in game design, it’s usually as a balancing factor against runaway victory. If a player is so much better than everyone else, it’s just not as much fun anymore, and the blue shell puts a spin on that situation that can make it more interesting for everyone to finish a race. One part of competitive gaming, as in real-life sports, is that competitors are directly incentivised to search for some kind of edge. Such an edge can be completely against the rules and disqualify the competitor who does them if they are caught doing it. Then we don’t call it a strategy anymore. We call it cheating . For professional sports, cheating and various forms of doping are illegal and enforcement of rules is continuous. Whole organizations are dedicated to assuring fairness. The bicycle race Tour de France, for example, has had instances of cyclists using electrical motors to give them a slight boost when cycling uphill. Muscle stimulants, growth hormones, anabolic steroids: professional sports have a long history of cheating. In esports, the expression “edoping” refers to manipulations of hardware and/or software that provide an invisible edge to a competitor. Things like aim bots or code that reveals client-side information a player is not supposed to have. Similarly, many exploits may be either patched out of a game or become part of a rule set dictating professional competitions. Take this lesson with you, if you want to make something competitive: players will cheat . Some because they want to win over other players, and others because they simply want to beat the system to prove that they can. A scrub is someone who “adamantly believes that their ‘house rules’ should apply to everyone to promote their view of ‘fair play.'” They are players who are quick to call foul or to call the way other players play boring or against the grain of a game. David Sirlin writes in his book that, “[a] common call of the scrub is to cry that the kind of play in which one tries to win at all costs is ‘boring’ or ‘not fun.'” But if you really want to win, you can’t have this type of “scrub mentality.” You need to play to your strengths and use every avenue of success that the game may provide. As a game designer, you must similarly be aware what the rules you introduce will lead to. In some competitive martial arts, for example, obstructing an opponent’s breathing by covering their mouth (called “smothering”) is legal according to the rules set out for the competition. Some will argue that it’s unethical, unfair, or makes for a dirtier sport: they would be the “scrubs.” Others make use of it where it fits, regardless of the scrub’s convictions. The key element of any sport is how to win . But before we can know how to win we need to know what we are doing. This is where you can make use of the same verbs and systemic rules as you would when designing a systemic game . Many sports revolve around activities that are easy to do but require a lot of practice to master. Kicking a ball isn’t all that hard in itself, but kicking it with accuracy and the right amount of force requires a lot of practice. This indicates that we want an activity with an analogue possibility space : it’s not enough with “success” or “failure.” Sometimes, as with game design, sports designers have been lazy and added a stopwatch on top of an activity to create this space. Sure, you can finish the race, but can you also do it in the shortest time? At other times, the analogue space is created by points scoring. It can be directly related to an activity in the game, such as kicking a soccer ball into a goal, or it can be indirect, such as the Technical Panel set out by the ISU Judging System used for figure skating. The use of an impartial judge or panel of judges is a common way to measure competitors against each other in individual sports. Another solution is to include a sudden death alternative. An occasion within the rules of the sport that immediately ends the competition and awards victory to the person who triggered the sudden death or their opponent. Most sports use the term “sudden death” specifically for match tiebreakers, but death can be sudden under other circumstances as well. Say, a knockout, or a racer’s car getting wrecked. There are also various forms of “no contest” conditions where a competition may end. If someone in a boxing match cannot defend themselves properly, for example. Some sports may also allow a competitor to voluntarily yield to their competition. Ragequitting fits in with this as well, since gamers can always decide to simply turn their game off. Team sports require group coordination and communication in ways that individual sports don’t. Whether you want teams or individuals compete affects a lot of things about your sport design. The combat reference here is the duel, which is fought one against one; the skirmish, which is smaller groups against each other; the battle, which pits whole armies against each other; and finally a whole war. Online gaming has generated its own blend of team and solo sport: coopetition. It’s cooperative, because you are completing objectives together and won’t be successful if you don’t. But it’s also competitive, because each of you will want to get the points and rewards individually. This becomes very clear in games inspired by Left 4 Dead and other games designed around LAN dynamics. Because the dynamic changes drastically when players are playing “alone together” and cannot simply lean over and yell for their friend to help them out. Throughout history, particularly in combat sports of different kinds, symmetry hasn’t always been relevant. Gladiators pitted against wild animals, or one with a trident and net pitted against another with a sword and shield, has been a recurring phenomenon. Usually either because someone has wanted to prove their ability under special circumstances, or because the competitors had no say in the matter to begin with. Conceptually, it’s a lot easier to design something for symmetrical opponents that are all expected to do the same things during a competition. Symmetry means that all sides of a competition are following the same rules. This is what generates the many layers of matchmaking regulation that sports may have. Weight classes, for example. Some sports require costly equipment, creating a high barrier of entry. Though some can afford to field their own race cars in scrappy “ folkrace ” competitions, for example, motor sports like NASCAR and Formula 1 are prohibitively expensive. The rules in place for such sports mean that it’s reserved for competitors with large financial backing. You may wonder how this ties into game design at all, much less combat. But it’s enough to think about games with items and character builds to see some parallells. In one particular Destiny raid, if you couldn’t show everyone that you packed an Ice Breaker and/or Gjallarhorn , you could be kicked out . What equipment your sports design will require depends on many things, of course, but it can be well worth thinking about. From the quirky golden snitch of quidditch (probably set up to poke fun at real-world sports) to things like the lacrosse stick basket handle, the equipment used to perform a sport can both dictate how it’s played and serve as excellent icons representing the whole activity. Though many sports may claim to be individual, they still allow competitors a crew to help them with all manner of things. This is of course similar to any form of stable, camp, or club, where the sum of the parts will affect how good your training is. But some sports allow this during a competition as well. Someone to patch you up between boxing rounds, or to check your tire pressure during pit stop. Maybe you can even look at the remote operator in Robot Wars as crew , and the robot itself as the competitor . Since we can’t really trust competitors to judge each other fairly or even to concede victory in cases where it’s a bit unclear who won, we may need a third party. Someone to call no context, to say when a goal scored or not, and to make sure we end our match on time. In digital games, computers can usually carry this burden, but in sports we use referees. If you want someone to be the referee, you need to figure out what they know and what they do. Which powers they have. In the eras of game design post , the idea of an umpire was discussed. But an umpire or a Dungeon Master is usually present to make the game world fair and not to adjudicate competitive results. Before you launch your design, you should consider how you want people to talk about the activities involved. Many sports have their own vernacular that tie the activities to what is happening in the sport. Inning, yardline, takedown; in digital games, deathmatch, kill, headshot, loot, powerup, zerg rush. Some of these expressions you can’t really invent. They’ll come naturally from how players interact with and talk about your game while playing or strategising. But it’s a great exercise to try to simplify terms, mash them together, and consider all the different strategies that players may use and how they’ll describe them. Even to invent a silly expression and then use it to make sure that you remember the concept it represents. Related to this is also the narrative of the game. Even if soccer is simply people chasing a ball across a field (if you are cynical about it) the story is one of a fight team against team where the winner takes all. The teams represent cities or clubs, and they are serving their fans; fighting for their fans. Not to mention that each player on each team may have their own fans and life struggles hyping up the competition. The words you use and the story you tell should be easy say and unique to your game. It should also be relatable. Sports have the advantage here, since it’s much easier to identify with kicking a ball against a garage door just like your childhood hero did, than it is to imagine yourself shooting zerg on a distant planet. This post took me a long time to research and write. Part of that is that balancing is a form of authorship . Just as with a linear story, if you want a balanced competitive experience, you must use a heavy hand to make it so. Often against the grain of your community, who will be enjoying the exploits they find and quickly get used to the dominant strategies presented. They will therefore loudly voice their dissent when you change the things they have been exploiting. Ultimately, though games like The Finals are trying, competitive games and a high degree of dynamics is very tricky to combine. The tools we use to balance our games are not very conducive of the right side of the master scale . This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, however. Systems at a gameplay level, where they can be balanced against each other, can still be very useful. Just be prepared to iterate a lot before the play experience is tuned right. Add time . Pushing for the shortest time has the added benefit of providing better entertainment for spectators. Add score . Define an activity that scores, then award victory to the competitor with the highest score at the end of a game. Add points . Award points based on an impartial panel and the ability of competitors to match specified expectations. Add limits . A competitor can only use a limited number of attempts or resources (such as the number of arrows for a bow) and must perform as well as possible within those limits. Add ladders . An additional way to generate results is to have more than one competition to determine the full outcome. This can be an elimination-style tournament where only one out of a roster of competitors will claim the prize, for example. Sudden death. Rather than using time, or in addition to time, add a condition where the game ends in immediate victory for a competitor. Yielding . Allow a competitor to voluntarily call out their own defeat. Either so an only opponent wins or to drop out of a larger competition.

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Phil Eaton 1 years ago

Picking up volleyball in NYC with Goodrec and New York Urban

I was so intimidated to go at first, but it is in fact easy and fun to start playing beginner volleyball in New York. The people are so friendly and welcoming that it has been easy to keep playing consistently every week since I started for the first time this August. It's been a great workout and a great way to make friends! The two platforms I've used to find volleyball games are Goodrec and New York Urban . While these platforms may also offer classes and leagues, I mostly use them to play "pickup" games. Pickup games are where you show up and join (or get assigned to) a team to play for an hour or two. Easy to go on your own or with friends. I'm not an expert! My only hope with this post is that maybe it makes trying out volleyball in New York feel a little less intimidating for you! With Goodrec you have to use their mobile app. Beginner tier is called "social" on Goodrec. So browse available games until you find one at the level you want to play. You enroll in (buy a place in) sessions individually. Sessions are between 90-120 minutes long. They ask you not to arrive more than 10 minutes early at the gym. When you arrive you tell the gym managers (usually in a desk up front somewhere) you're there for Goodrec and the tier (in case the gym has multiple level games going on at the same time). Then you wait until the Goodrec "host" arrives and they will organize everyone into teams. Goodrec hosts are players who volunteer to organize the games. They'll explain the rules of the game (makes Goodrec very good for beginners) and otherwise help you out. Always say thank you to your host! With New York Urban, pickup sessions are called "open play" . There is no mobile app, you just use the website to purchase a spot in a session. The sessions are longer and cheaper than Goodrec. But there is no host; players self-organize. The options are more limited too. You play at one of four high schools on either a Friday night or on Sunday. And session slots tend to sell out much more quickly than with Goodrec. You can also check out Big City Volleyball but I haven't used it yet. I haven't ever done Volo but I think I've heard it described as "beer league". That even some of the beginner tier sessions with Goodrec and New York Urban are more competitive. But also, Volo is built around leagues so you have to get the timing right. Goodrec's and New York Urban's pickup games make it easy to get started playing any time of year. It was super awkward to go at first! I went by myself. I didn't know what I was doing. I couldn't remember, and didn't know, many rules. I didn't have court shoes or knee pads. But the Goodrec host system is particularly great for bringing beginners in and making them feel welcome. You have a great time even if you're terrible. The first game I went to, I tried to hang out afterward to meet people. But people either came with their SO or with their friends or by themselves so they all just left immediately or hung out in their group. So you can't just go once and expect to make friends immediately. But if you keep going at the same place and time regularly week over week, you'll see familiar faces. Maybe half the people I play with each week are regulars. If you're friendly you'll start making friends with these people and eventually start going out to bars with them after the games. Even if you find yourself embarrassingly bad at first, just keep going! I'm 29, 6'1, 190lbs and from observation the past 5 months, age, height, and weight have a very indirect relation to playing ability. Most of the people who play are self-taught, especially at the lower tiers I've played at. But some people played for the school team in high school or college. These people are fun to play with and you can learn a lot from them. Most people who are self-taught seem to watch YouTube videos like Coach Donny , helpful for learning how to serve, set, block, etc. Or they take "clinics" (classes) with Goodrec or other platforms. (I have no idea about these, I've never done them before.) At first I played 2 hours a week and I was completely exhausted after the session. Over time it got easier so I started playing 2-3 sessions a week (6-9-ish hours). With practice and consistency (after about 3-4 months), I started playing Intermediate tier with Goodrec and New York Urban. And I don't think I'll play Beginner/Social at all anymore. I still primarily play for fun and for the workout and to meet people. But it's also fun to get better! I played with one person much better than myself in an Intermediate session one time and he mentioned he will probably stop playing Intermediate and only play High Intermediate. He mentioned you get better when you keep pushing yourself to play with better and better players. Good advice! I wrote a little post on picking up volleyball in new york. It's fun, and a great workout, and you meet interesting people! https://t.co/jEWHbRWF6C pic.twitter.com/ipuIUB1ZnM

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