my journey to one million dollars pt. 7
oh no, he's coming for our hope
status update
I’m blasting my way into 2025, skipping most of the month of January with a vengeance. Sorry, I’ve been visualizing money like you wouldn’t believe. I mean great big dollar signs, honeybaby, humungo big boy giant $$$ spraying out every—single—orifice.
It’ll be the year of the great dollary-doo over here! Make it rain! Stocks! Bonds! Bitcoins! Dog coins! Cat coins! The rich are gonna get richer, and so am I, by god
i’m against hope
Let’s talk about that person in your life. You know which one. The one who’s trying to stay positive. The one who did “dry January”, or made “resolutions”, or bravely pretends that everything is fine and good and happy and chill. They’re chanting mantras, they’re starting each day with affirmations. We’ve all got them, I know several. Savor the good times while you have them. New year, new You, better You, shinier You. A You that is disconnected from the You of the past, fuck that guy. We’re interested in the You of the future!
Is it hope or is it cope? I think it’s the kind of hope that kills you. Especially that squeaky clean corporate hope. The kind of hope that tells you that you’re one sentence away, one paragraph, one premium subscription away from enlightenment. Maybe this one will be different!
Ever thought about how central luck is to a system of oppression? Those who have it, those who don’t? Interesting, yes, how the quest for hopeful self-actualization is married to another one of the most circulated feelings in our culture—schadenfreude, damage-joy? For the privileged, the temporarily safe, there is a feeling of relief, of comfort, when you see something bad happening to someone else. An entire village wiped from the map by a hurricane? Phew, glad I don’t live there! Whole city on fire? Man, I’m glad I live in Portland.
Not me, never me!
The trope you’ve probably heard is that America is a country of temporarily frustrated millionaires, a country where everyone just waiting for their big break, when they can leave it all behind. A destiny waits for you. Enter as many sweepstakes as you possibly can, you might just win one! Maybe it’ll be the one to take you away—away—away—from all of *gestures expansively*—this.
But the this that we’re all seeking escape from, what is it? A great emptiness of spirit? A vacuum of meaning? A world so filled with suffering, banal evil, and avoidable catastrophe that it would comical if it wasn’t the masquerade that we all inhabit?
Yes, that.
I often get accused of being a bit dour, a bit depressing, that all these little rants I do are just nihilist off-gassing, but I do not think that. In fact, I believe myself to be the opposite of a “nothing matters” guy. What is distressing about the lucksters, the escapesters, the it-could-be-worse-ers, is that they in fact are the true nihilists. The truth of the matter is that if one of us is unlucky, we all are.
Here we go, broken skipping record: We are inextricably tied to one another, and if you think the heil-hitlering billionaires are safe, think again. The survival we’ve bought with our little jobs to support our little families is bought with blood, just like their is.
The historical tide does not float all boats, and stupidity and waste have an endpoint. The foundational acceptance that the one goal we should have in life is to amass enough wealth to be comfortable and thus be freed from the abattoir of society—to me, that is a true horror. It is the acceptance that nothing matters, nothing means anything, that the world ends with you. It cheapens everything.
I think that to disdain luck, to turn away from it, to abandon hope that things will be good and fine and just for you in the future, that is to face a world with meaning. Sure, that meaning might be too immense to bear, something that if shouldered, might crush you, but perhaps it won’t crush you alone.
I’m entering a new era. 2024 was a year of tantrums, of being upset. 2025 is the year of giving up on giving up.
today in history
Who needs history when you’ve got THE PRESENT. Next time, I’ll see if there’s history I can get into. Until then, normalize saying to people “Get out of the way, you’re slower than a day without bread!”
management vs. leadership, game edition
Board games are trash culture, as I’ve previously established, meaning that they’re designed to be consumed and then thrown away. Or at least, this is their purpose as a product. As an art form, of course, they are something else entirely. But if you think about the sheer volume of product that has been created and subsequently forgotten over the years, the thesis makes more sense. The collector market for games is incredibly unstable because it costs like a dollar to produce a game in China, and things that are out of print are one reprint away from making the old unprinted stuff completely valueless. Nusfjord, Die Macher, Arkwright, Tigris & Euphrates, Caylus, Winsome Games, 1849, and about a billion other games—all of these have fetched extraordinary prices on a collector market at some point, only to be completely devalued when the license holder decides it’s time for another run at making a small profit.
I think because of the ease of reprinting and production, games are almost like comic books, where the true market is memory and nostalgia. Manipulating and playing on what people view as scarce or rare is an effective marketing strategy.
This is my explanation for why the “management euro” exists. There’s a term for it, JASE (just another standard euro) within hobbyist circles. These games, too many of them to count, usually revolve around a central gimmick mechanic, and you manipulate that central gimmick to collect resources, maybe create some things that help you get resources more efficiently, then spend those resources for points.
It’s catnip, and I realize that it’s a huge generalization, but many games follow this pattern. Mainly because it is a good one. This is what I’d call management. Management is about examining the potential of the stuff you have and maximally applying it for the best outcome. In many games, your ability to optimize decides your win. The person who wastes the least wins the most.
Most games like this are brutish puzzles, and I like a fair number of them. Depending on the gimmick, I’ll enjoy this sort of thing. Take Newton, a game that appeared briefly and then disappeared. Newton features a gimmick where you play cards in a line, each card becoming more powerful if cards like it have appeared previously in your line. You can get new cards, and the game has various things you want to spend money on to make your card line more powerful. As much as I enjoy it, Newton is a deterministic puzzle, where there is a correct path given the initial flop, and players’ ability to follow that path determines if they win or not.
Leadership games, a new term I’m making up here (call the genius writer guy hall of fame), do not do this. Games of leadership require you to wrestle the winning conditions for everyone into place before you can actually win. You must first create a theory of conflict, and a theory of the future, and you must then enforce that theory.
The best example of this in recent memory is Horseless Carriage. It’s a creation of Splotter Spellen, a Dutch design duo who have one of the larger cult followings in board games. Each of their games often features a wild mechanism of some kind that forces a new perspective on game design. Their games are held in high esteem by other critics and players that I respect. HC did not receive as warm a reception, which is dumb. Everyone should know about this game.
There are of course people (idiots) who believe that games are nothing but mechanics. But people (smart, handsome ones like ourselves) know that games are not simply assemblages of behaviors, just as a painting is not only brush strokes. This is not to downplay the importance of engineering, but to highlight that a device without an ethos will be forgotten.
Horseless Carriage is a leadership game. Everyone is a car manufacturer, and your job is to create demand for something that both does not yet exist AND is of unkown composition. The game is complex, so it will be hard to summarize, but players are responsible for meeting demand on a chart to gain points—however, this demand is created by the cars that players make (in a portion of the game that is played in real time). If one player wants to use safety parts or speed parts, making moves in that direction causes demand for those parts to appear in the market over time, affecting every player. The decisions about what direction to take your imaginary company’s research in are made in a methodical manner that prioritizes turn order control shenanigans, but when you build, you’re attempting to prove that your technology choices can do what you claim they ought to be able to do.
It is a game where groupthink is incredibly powerful, and, when not kept in check, results in scenarios where players get into internecine-part-warfare and end up losing to a player who arbitrarily picks something different. However, when you apply your vision of what you think a game could be to a game like Horseless Carriage, it rewards you and everyone else along for the ride with heady success or soul-crushing failure. Now that’s a game.
Also, your board ends up looking like this in the FIRST round.
Until next time.