Active Recall!

Every time is a good time for a little bit of free writing. A little bit of rambling. I wonder if I could channel the setup that Bill Simmons had on Page Two where the captioned images are shown on the right and they related to the bullets on the left.

• I should know enough CSS to do this. I’m a professional gosh dang it.
• Let me just grab a random photo…
  

  

• Okay so here we go, I think that photo worked. I just needed to do a little bit of tinkering in MarsEdit to get this to work right. Now this should be to the left of the bullet? Let’s see… it worked!
• This, of course, took way longer than expected. So now I’m going to just drop this quote in here that I always think of at times like this—weeknights when I decide it might be a good idea to start tinkering with the site.

From Jessica Livingston’s interview with Joshua Schacter (founder of del.icio.us) in Founders at Work:

Livingston: When you were doing this in your spare time, did you ever say, “Ugh. This is too much work”?

Schachter: Not really. I was always very careful (not anymore, because the guys that I work with are better programmers) to structure the code—each chunk of code wasn’t larger than the screen—such that I could come in and look at it, figure out what I’m doing, do it, and be done for the day in 15 minutes. So if I could get one thing done a day, I was happy. A lot of stuff, if I could spend more time, I did, but as long as I could get one or two things done a week total, if I didn’t have time, I didn’t have time. So it moved pretty slowly. I worked on it for years.

I also updated the site archives page to just be a list of all posts, month by month. There’s something about seeing it that way that helps reinforce that something’s adding up, post by post. It’s also just easier to skim than the grid of thumbnails I used to have.

I do want to bring back that archive of card animations in some form.

Here’s something from Gerald Weinberg’s The Fieldstone Method:

If you’re preparing to make a fieldstone wall and you don’t have a stone yard handy, you’ll have to accumulate a pile of stones, one or two at a time. During this gathering phase, you’ll traipse about in the fields of your life with an eye peeled for stones that might go into some wall, some day, some where.

I try to remember the fieldstone method whenever I start questioning why I’m writing here at all. Maybe it’ll add up to something some day. (And maybe it won’t!)

I’m starting to think I should try to channel Bird by Bird a little more often, with a better defined end in mind that I’m getting to slowly.

Oh yeah, these are supposed to be ramblings. With recent links and all that.

• UFC 249: Fight Motion is a collection of slow motion clips summarizing my Saturday night. It seemed like such a circus leading up to the event. And so far it doesn’t seem like there’s much fallout from it. I can see how tempting it is to get into resulting—thinking it was a good idea to run the event because the event turned out to be one of the most exciting, unique cards in history.

Annie Duke describes (and pretty much the entire book is about) resulting in Thinking in Bets:

Pete Carroll was a victim of our tendency to equate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome. Poker players have a word for this: “resulting.” When I started playing poker, more experienced players warned me about the dangers of resulting, cautioning me to resist the temptation to change my strategy just because a few hands didn’t turn out well in the short run.

Oh yeah, those slow motion clips. I started reading Sam Sheridan’s The Fighter’s Mind again and it’s making me grateful to have somewhere to go to just pull up clips of fights mentioned in it. There’s so much video available right at our fingertips.

It looks like I’m just going to paste a hodgepodge of quotes as they come to mind. Here’s something from The Fighter’s Mind about Marcelo Garcia and practicing BJJ with people at lower belts (which is pretty much everyone when you’re at Marcelo’s level)

One thing Marcelo does do, when he rolls with blue belts or white belts, is try for perfection. “The reason I like to train with lower belts is to practice for myself, and look for the perfect positions, to get to places with more facility. To really try and make a perfect position.” Marcelo cherishes the notion of perfection. “I can really improve my holds, and practice new things. You can train exactly the position you want to train.”

I’ve been putting videos from Day9’s Let’s Learn Starcraft series on in the background here and there in the past couple weeks. He did a podcast series a decade ago and one of the episodes is called “Why you should play against worse players”. It reflects a point similar to what Marcelo says. You can reduce focus on some aspect you’re already good at and shift that focus to really cleaning up those execution mistakes here and there.

Practice one thing at a time.

What do MMA fighters and professional gamers have in common?

It seems similar to how rappers want to be ballers (I miss basketball) and ballers want to be rappers (let’s go with Can’t Stop The Reign here instead of 9 out of 10).

Plenty of fighters stream. Here’s Max Holloway in Warzone. Here’s Mark Hunt with an AWP a headhunter in the ring and de_dust2. (As always, I need to link to The Making Of: Dust 2 — one of my favorite articles ever.)

Last book quote for the night.

Mark Hunt really loves Counter-Strike. Enough to mention it as a distraction in his biography, Born to Fight.

When I first started playing there were many times I’d fire on an opposing player who hadn’t even seen me, and find myself dead. It felt like they were cheating. I know they weren’t, though, because eventually I got to that crazy, twitchy level of speed.

I figured out that I liked to play CS the way I liked to fight, choosing to equip myself with the AWP (Arctic Warfare Police) – the big heavy sniper rifle – and the slow-firing but high-calibre Desert Eagle pistol as my weapons. My CS game was all about the one shot that would take you out.

One shot king.