TrickJarrett.com

Sharing some news

In 2011, when I announced that I was joining Wizards, I did so via an article on GatheringMagic.com. The article was titled "Are You Watching Closely?" It was written following the three parts of every magic trick as described in Christopher Nolan's The Prestige.

The first section of the article was "The Pledge." In it, I gave some background about my time starting GatheringMagic.com (well, ManaNation.com originally, and now it is the backend to CoolStuffInc.com's content), how it had grown, and how proud I was of what it had grown into over just a few years, before I then announced that I was leaving it to join Wizards. 

Then, in the second part of the article, "The Turn," I gave more background on my new job, what it meant for me (moving from Orlando to Seattle, for one), and announced we were looking for someone to replace me running the GatheringMagic website. (A job that would eventually go to Adam Styborski.)

Finally, the article ended with me asking the reader to reread the introduction, having now read the article. But, when they scrolled back up the page, they found the first section replaced with "The Reveal," Nolan's third part of any trick. This section was my list of thanks to some of the people on the journey with ManaNation & GatheringMagic, which played a part in what led me to getting my dream job with Wizards.

That article and the simple gimmick remain one of my favorite pieces of content I've ever created, though the writing definitely could have been improved.

Well, no such trickery this time as you read this post. No flashy magic. Just this article.

What is the news? I'm starting a new adventure and am leaving Wizards. Tuesday, Nov. 11th, will be my last day as a Wizard. My first day with Wizards was Dec. 12th, 2011. This makes my time here exactly 13 years and 11 months, to the day.

Getting to be a Wizard has been a dream come true for me. I've played Magic for over 30 years and D&D nearly as long, though I didn't play a lot of 2nd edition AD&D. Getting to contribute to two games I deeply love was a fulfillment of a childhood dream.

The list of thank yous to everyone I've worked with on this journey is infinitely long and impossible for me to put together. It has been an amazing ride, and while I am sad it is coming to an end; I am excited for the start of something new!

Stay tuned for more news in the coming weeks!

On Titanium Rings

Back in 2010, when I was engaged, Katie and I bought my ring from Amazon. I found one I liked, a big wide ring that I felt would look good on my larger than average hands. Plus, it was cheap. Just $50. Win win. We got it laser engraved and on October 10th of that year, we slipped it on my finger. Where it has stayed every since.

A few years later, someone pointed out that there is a big problem with titanium rings.

If some injury should occur and my ring finger on my left hand begins to swell, EMTs and the hospital are going to be unable to cut my ring off. Titanium is too strong. What do they do? They have to amputate the finger.

As far as fingers go, I don't have any huge sentimental attachment to my left ring finger. Aside from the fact it carries this ring. Like, will my life be hugely altered if I lost that finger? Probably not. I can still type. I can still do everything I do. But, you know what? I kind of want to keep the finger regardless of that.

So, I've had this threat in my mind for a few years. Playing the the low low odds of that sort of event ever occurring. But, finally I decide it's time. So, last week, I got fed a Facebook ad for a company that does themed latex rings. Enso, is a ring company that offers Star Wars and other IP licensed latex rings in various colors and designs.

I wasn't interested in a Grogu ring, or a Disney princess ring (though they do have Lord of the Ring rings, which I'd be lying if I said I hadn't considered... but I decided against.) But they also had some simple plain ones. I found one which looked to be a simple beveled "cut" and decided to place the order. $28! For what is essentially a latex gasket? Okay, I'm getting old. But I ordered it.

It arrived yesterday and to my surprise, it slid on perfectly and was shockingly comfortable. I almost can't tell it is on my finger. When you wear a ring everyday for ten years, the feel of it becomes normal and not wearing it feels weird. That's the phase I'm in now with this new ring. It feels weirdly absent despite being on my finger.

The old ring is safely on top of my dresser for now. Though my plan is to put it on a leather string and keep it as a necklace. We just need to either find the leather we have, or go buy some more. Notably though, while on a string around my neck, it is not a threat to the existence of the ring finger on my left hand - which feels like the correct decision.

Goodbye Twitter, at least for now

I'm done with Twitter for a while. Not because of Musk taking over, but more that I want to make it harder to get lost scrolling on social media and return to creating and writing.

Revamping my Code Project Tracking

A few years ago, I set up simple project boards in my Notion. This allowed me to track issues with my various coding projects, and make reminders for improvements or new feature ideas.

This morning, after waking up abnormally early, I sat down and revamped how it works. Previously, they were a number of individual tables. It worked fine, but the biggest issue was when I created a new project I had to go and literally manually recreate the structure for each new project to track its own tickets. Again, not a huge issue since I add scant few projects. But, it annoyed me.

So, today, I redid the system to contain it all into a single larger table that I can then filter, or group, by project. I am also hoping this will allow me to do some smarter filtering and prioritization for coding.

US Aircraft Carrier on Its Way to Be Scrapped After Sale for a Cent

It's dumb, but it makes sense. If they didn't, the cost of the US government getting rid of the ship would be far more.

On a slightly more silly note, the name of the ship made me instantly remember my cat growing up. I named her Kitty Hawk. Even more fun, we adopted her from friends while at an air show. I was 4 or 5 years old when we got her.

Me: "On Chess"

A longform blogpost I made on my Wordpress blog, discussing the role chess played in my life and how my relationship with it has changed during the past year.

Today is an exciting day. It's the day I get a new work laptop. I don't think it is much of an upgrade, at least I know the RAM on the machine is equal to what I currently have, but I am always eager to move to a new PC. It lets me shed the various apps and bits which accumulate like barnacles, the longer you use a machine. The one I am using has a few issues that I am hoping the new one solves or improves. Fingers crossed.

Also, an excuse to get out of the house.

Time to start a new farm


From the Facebook Archives

2019:

I said it under Obama, I'll say it again under Trump. The fact our government is forced to shut down because they can't/won't negotiate a budget is unbelievable and sends me into a seething rage.

I would propose an amendment that said: When the US government shuts down due to budgets not being negotiated, every member of the House and Senate has to draw a stone out of a bag. Half of them randomly get replaced.

Unbelievable. Is there another government which purposefully shuts down as part of business?

I still feel the same way, I find it abhorrent that the government can be shut down because a budget deal isn't reached. Though a friend (who is much smarter than me) pointed out that the smaller party is more inclined to force the scenario I suggest in hopes of removing members of the bigger party and trying to win those seats.

I don't actually care about what scenario there is, my point was that there needs to be real consequences which actually motivates politicians to get their job done.

These last few months have reminded me of a short story idea I had, about a man who resisted government observation and privacy invasion by creating a dark web site dedicated to tools to resist it. From face masks, to apps, and everything in between. And that to do this, he had to continue to be observed, and live a life like someone completely unaware of these things.

Never wrote the story, maybe I'll give it another go one of these days.

Paying For News

Currently, I pay for a Washington Post digital subscription ($100/year) which I feel is well worth it. Before that I subscribed to the New York Times, eventually dropping them and making the switch to WaPo. I do miss the NYT subscription as I quickly burn through the free articles per month, but I have a hard time getting myself to spend the money on a subscription in addition to the Washington Post. NYT is a marvel technologically, I am constantly impressed by their platform. WaPo is close behind.

More locally, I've also considered subscribing to the Seattle Times but their subscription fee is just hard for me to buy into. Most interesting to me is that the Seattle times is its own mini-newspaper network, humorously in the two northern corners of the US: Seattle & Maine. But the fact it isn't part of the Chicago Tribune or some other mega paper network is a big push for my interest in supporting it so it can continue to operate on its own.

I think WaPo's subscription level is the sweet spot of where I'd be happy subscribing to more news sites. If NYT and Seattle Times both offered a subscription at the comparable cost, I would do both of them as well. Unfortunately, both are twice that cost.

I suspect that price point is largely derived from the anchor around the price of a physical copy of the paper. The NYT (and WaPo) saw a huge upswing in subscribers during Trump's presidency, I will be curious to see how that continues with the end of Trump's era in the Whitehouse.

Curious about others' willingness to pay for news, I started this twitter poll:

[{embed}]https://twitter.com/trickjarrett/status/1350915437622509568\[{/embed}]

Originally posted on my Facebook 6 years ago today, the day after we had adopted our beloved dane Elwood:

Alright, the full story of how Elwood joined our family. Buckle up.

For years I've badly wanted a big dog. Many of you have heard me say it, but my ideal is a dog which I can take for a walk, and from a distance he and I look normal sized!

For nearly the past year I've regularly (4+ times a week) checked petfinder.com, craigslist, and rescueme.org to look for a large breed puppy. Up until when we bought the house it was primarily to dream of having one. After then it was because we were ready to get one. There have been a few times where one has come up but we couldn't do it for various reasons. Money, work, it was already adopted, etc.

So on Thursday I spotted Elwood (previously named Bart) on Petfinder and I immediately flip the laptop around for Katie to see. And she agreed. He was beautiful and he was a Great Dane puppy. He checked all the boxes.

So I filled out the adoption application and sent it off.

Friday morning I hear back that they think our application looks good, and asked if we could come out to see Bart on Saturday. Well today I'm supposed to play at a game store and it wasn't feasible for us to make the trip around it. We talked about Sunday but she doesn't hold dogs, if someone else comes along then they would take Elwood (nee Bart) home.

So I get off work around 2 thanks to half-day Fridays and come home and wake Katie up from a nap, "Are you up for going on an adventure to see the puppy?" And, because my wife is amazing, she agrees. Around 3:30pm we roll out of Kent heading for Yakima.

As I've posted elsewhere, Elwood's previous life wasn't great. The woman seemed to think she was some sort of breeder but the truth is she was running a puppy mill and unwilling to realize the terrible environment she was putting her dogs through. So Rising Phoenix Mastiff Rescue was able to convince her to give up two Great Dane puppies.

We ended up meeting Trish from Rising Phoenix in a parking lot in Yakima, which is in central Washington. Roughly 2.5 hours away in good traffic, what ended up being a little over 3 hours due to traffic and spots of heavy fog.

We both immediately fell in love with Elwood. Since we were meeting in a cold parking lot I ended up basically zipping Elwood up into my hoodie and holding him while we talked and Katie was forced to fill out the paperwork. I definitely got the better end of that deal.

The entire car ride he was super relaxed. Elwood was asleep in Katie's lap as we began the trip back home. We were nearly back to I-90 when we were coasting down a hill and I realized that we had lost all acceleration from the gas pedal. It came up and it went straight to the floor. No resistance. No engine rev. No acknowledgement I was pressing the gas.

I pull off to the shoulder and put on our emergency flashers. The car has power, it can be turned on and off, the brakes work, but just no action off the accelerator.

At this point, I'm not actually freaking out, but I definitely am not happy. I feel bad for having taken Katie from our warm comfortable home and suddenly we're in the middle of nowhere and stuck on the side of the road.

Thankfully, we have AAA. So I call them and they contact a tow truck as well as notify Highway Patrol we're there. Moments after hanging up with them, the car suddenly loses power. Our emergency blinkers go off and even though we are safely on the shoulder, we may as well have been invisible.

So I take Katie's iPhone since it has the most battery and get out to stand behind our car and wave it so people will see something.

Thankfully not two minutes after I start doing this a Highway patrolman comes up behind us. AAA had notified them of our position and he had swung by to check on us.

I asked him to stay until the wrecker arrived to make sure people could see us. He was super nice and he was happy to do it until he got a call about a collision he had to answer. He dropped a flare for us before pulling away but in truth it was only about five minutes after that the two truck arrived.

And so we get the Element onto the bed of the truck, and load into the cab with Bernie, and off we go. He towed us all the way back to Renton, 114 miles. Thankfully our AAA covered the first 100. Sooooo worth it. We ended up paying, I think, $60 for the tow.

And Bernie was great. He has four dogs and was completely cool with us sitting in the cab with a (very passed out) dog in my lap. He and Katie chatted for most of the ride.

Up to this point, Elwood was unnamed. I knew Bart wasn't going to stick. And for a while Sirius was leading the race. I'm an unapologetic Harry Potter nerd. Also, Sirius is the dog star (which inspired JK for the character name.) And also I had visions of "Why so Sirius" jokes. But "Trick and Sirius" doesn't roll off your tongue. But then I envisioned shouting "ARE YOU SERIOUS!?" at FIFA or at a sporting match, and this poor dog thinking he was in trouble.

So in the tow truck I kept brainstorming and riffing on ideas. I was doing free word association when I landed on Elwood as a name. I do love Blues Brothers. And, it's a fairly unique name. And "Trick and Elwood" sounds pretty good. And, well, it stuck. Elwood!

Once we arrived in Renton, Scott had kindly agreed to give us a ride home so he showed up and is so far the only person who has met Elwood. But he'll tell you that the photos don't lie, Elwood's adorable.

An important postscript: Rising Phoenix Mastiff Rescue was apparently itself not a great organization. They were shut down a year or two later.

And lastly, a pic of me and Elwood when he was a puppy: