|
|
|
|
Maybe I'm strategic?
|
|
|
|
I have two notes to self for this newsletter as I sit down to get started. Original emphasis included:
|
- write about chess
- Zombie Newsletter army of dead fails
Let's start with chess. When I was young, my grandfather had a pool. I had a lot of step cousins who were loud and annoying, and the pool wasn't that big. My dad and his dad would play chess in the shade, and they taught me how to play too. I was six or seven. My father had given my grandfather a marble chess board from Spain. Half the pieces were British and made of bronze, the other were the "Moors" and made of silver. Theme == the Crusades. When my grandfather died, he left the chess set for me.
|
In 2005, I beat a self-proclaimed Chess Master on a giant board in Switzerland. My theory is that he was not really a chess master because I don't think I'm all that great at chess. I tried to play with a friend using Chess with Friends, but I missed the haptic nature of physical chess. I struggled with the truncated concentration required for digital-wait-for-someone-to-move chess.
|
What's the point? Chess trains your ability to think strategically (among other things), and I believe my early love of chess has helped me see the future in complex projects and within complex communities.
|
Sit down with me for a couple hours and concentrate on an epic battle between Queens.
|
|
Maybe I'm undead?
|
|
|
the cover to my book, which btw I'm making into an audio book
|
|
For those not in the know, I wrote a book called Maybe Zombies, which may or may not have zombies in it. On the weekend, I watched a new zombie movie on Netflix – Army of the Dead – and I need to rant about it. Spoiler alert?
|
Army of the Dead has a great premise – a zombie outbreak in the Nevada desert led humans to capture and lock up all the zombies in the city of Las Vegas. They walled it off and abandoned the city. Then, some months later, some folks get the idea to rob a casino in the city.
|
Super simple (and objectively great) premise. Heist movie with zombies! But then of course whoever wrote that crap just *had* to "improve". Listen, zombies are awesome without ascribing human characteristics to them. Slow, stupid and undead, a proper zombie is slow, stupid and undead. For no reason whatsoever, the writers of Army of the Dead decided it was a good idea to have some thinking, feeling zombies.
|
I love zombie stories, and I don't care if it's out of fashion. It's fascinating to consider a lifeless life and a destructive hunger that can easily be destroyed (baseball bat plus head equals equals zombie dead). We humans have destructive hunger too, but we can think. We are not aimlessly destructive, for the most part. Yes, we've destroyed all kinds of things, but there was some perceived benefit to doing so. Zombies are aimless in their destruction. They often destroy themselves just by shambling into a meat grinder. Their aimless destruction is why there's no moral quandary involved with their killing. That is, until the zombies are thinking and feeling.
|
|
Maybe I need help?
|
|
|
|
"The first step to intelligent tinkering is to save all the pieces" Aldo Leopold
|
|
|
I am saving all the pieces, but I don't know what I'm going to use them for.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
