🤿🐠 New depths and new pieces ♟
🇮🇩 An update from Indonesia on new hobbies and projects
Greetings from Indonesia. Soon we’ll be on our way to Singapore and Malaysia. Today, a short essay and an introduction to a new comic.
Charlie Warzel’s recent edition of his Galaxy Brain newsletter (here, Atlantic paywall after intro) is about his slow, satisfying progress in learning the guitar. I experienced something similar with the piano earlier in the pandemic, but it’s been a little while since I’ve tried to learn a new analog skill completely from scratch.
Now, free from the obligations of home and work, I find myself taking on two new mostly offline hobbies, one primarily physical and one mainly mental.
Sea horse takes sand castle
Alli and I recently completed a PADI Open Water scuba diving course on Nusa Lembongan, a small island off Bali. To be sure, there is a mental component, but I found the experience of learning to dive to mostly be about getting used to new, unusual sensations. Thirty feet down, with the goggles blocking off your peripheral vision, it kind of feels like a video game played in virtual reality.
To extend the metaphor a bit, diving is a game with great haptic feedback and phenomenal graphics, except that the red channel is kind of on the fritz. Unusually, the controls are a bit unintuitive, and motion is mostly in torso positioning, kicking power, and buoyancy through breathing. Also, you can’t, or shouldn’t, interact with anything. It’s an open world (depending on how strongly the current is pulling you, sometimes it’s more of a platformer) and the length of the level is determined by air use and nitrogen levels. Still, it’s a bit unlike anything else, and since we’re near so many amazing opportunities to dive, we’re planning to do a lot more of it this year in Asia.
Also, we’ve been playing chess. I guess I had been curious about it since that show we all watched, and then after hearing the hosts of Blank Check talk about Kubrick playing chess, I looked for an app to teach me how to play. To my delight, Alli downloaded it too.
Some of our friends have been wondering, what could we possibly still have to say to each other at dinner after six weeks of travel? You’d be surprised. But now sometimes we play chess.
Something I really like about chess is that it can be a metaphor for nearly anything with strategy involved: long term planning, reactivity, resource management, etc. It is so hard, and games can take so long.1 But like Charlie with guitar, I can see incremental progress, both in terms of things like holding on to my queen longer, and also reducing the number of “blunders” in my post-match report. I wouldn’t say I’m “good” at chess, but I’m enjoying it.
I’ve noticed how meditative, calming, and methodical the processes of learning chess and diving have been. And like Warzel, these mostly2 analog hobbies speak to the virtues of “calm technology” which I’ve written about before. Here’s Warzel:
I worry that, once again, I sound a million years old, or like I’m advocating for a return to a wholly analog world. I’m not! I am still a total sucker for the conveniences of a ubiquitous-computing world, and I love my information on demand and watching new cultures and subcultures explode out of new apps and tools. But I’m also deeply resentful of the ways that an attention economy has put pressure on everyone to build and design for interruptive experiences over calming ones. I’ve long told people that I am exhausted by the internet (shorthand for what is basically our information ecosystem), but I think what I’m really exhausted by is feeling like I don’t have control over what I’m attending to.
I agree. And it helps that I’ve basically been off Twitter since I left.
A new comic newsletter
As I’ve mentioned before, I have been working on a fictional comic of indeterminate length called FREE RIDER and I’m ready to start sharing it.
In plotting out the comic, which is about teleportation, I’m leaning on my previous work as a journalist covering urban transportation and infrastructure, as well as my current travels through Asia. The story is my tribute to revolutionary spirit of the early-internet, as seen in “Halt and Catch Fire,” as well as classic, all-ages adventure comics like Tintin or Carl Barks’ Donald Duck.
In the prologue, ROAM, a boot-strapping startup, is trying to put the pieces together to successfully and safely teleport a human for the very first time. With competitors at their heels, can the scrappy team perfect the tech, become the industry standard, and preserve their vision of a public utility that could stop climate change in its tracks?
The comic will be distributed by email newsletter, one section at a time. If you’re already subscribed to the Josh Kramer Newsletter (this thing you’re reading right now) you will now also periodically get FREE RIDER unless you opt out. It’s a bit of an experiment that’s still very much being written and drawn, and if people like it, I’ll keep drawing it!
I’m going to start sending out the prologue next week, in short emails a few days apart so you can remember what’s happening. Thanks in advance for giving this a try.
–Josh
Side tangent: when people want to say someone is being strategic, especially in politics, they often say that person is playing 3D or 4D chess. I kind of get what they mean with 3D… what they’re doing is so complicated that it involves another axis of play. But I’ve always understood the fourth dimension as time, which is already a significant part of chess, so 4D chess has never made any sense to me, except that it seems like one more than 3D.
Even though chess is on my phone, I don’t really think of it as a digital thing. We need wifi to play against each other, but I often play against the computer without using the internet on the chess app.